Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 30, 2021 | Uncommon Sense - Angry at the World

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May 30, 2021 | Uncommon Sense - Angry at the World · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're doing well.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: My name's Connor.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're finishing up our series called Uncommon Sense this week.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to talk about something that I feel like all of us have encountered quite a bit over this past year.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Anger, maybe just a little bit.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: A man of wrath stirs up conflict, and one given to anger causes much transgression.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it was a year ago that we were in this well, not you, I was in this room preaching to an empty auditorium.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um I don't know.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: It there's something about seeing not only a room full of people that excites me, but also reminds me of the year that we have all had and have probably been affected, and maybe in more ways than one, experienced and delivered some level of anger.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm also reminded that this upcoming Wednesday is going to be the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race riot, where 35 blocks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greenwood or the Black Wall Street district were burned because of severe anger.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Over a hundred people were injured or killed in that.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And just this past Wednesday, if you were keeping up with the news, you saw that there was another mass shooting, this one in San Jose, California, where, including the killer, ten people were dead at the end of that day.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when they went to investigate this man's home, they saw that he had sort of these manifestos directed filled with seething anger at the people that he was working with.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I am just reminded over and over again in the world that we live in that it is filled with anger.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there's also a problem here because I don't think that we have got the best, most biblical response to anger, sort of in the Christian world.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: There is not only our own personal experience with anger, but also the way that I feel like our culture tells us that we're supposed to process anger, right?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you need to just go sprint five miles, or you need to write something in a journal and burn it with kerosene, or you're supposed to like just, I don't, take a sledgehammer to your semen out back and just wail on it.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: But there's not a great way that we're trying to process it.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Even venting, which is sort of the way that we justify angrily talking to our friends about somebody else, is not the best way to handle this.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore, our culture, right?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Our culture has no idea with what to do about the emotion of anger.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: They have confused passivity with peace, and we have confused vengeance with justice, and there's not a whole lot of room left in between.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of problems with that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, as I'm just heaping problems upon us, that's not my goal, but finally, there's a fact that our Christian culture struggles with how to handle anger.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We can look at the Old Testament, and throughout history, there have been problems that Christians have imposed upon the Old Testament for how angry they perceive God to be.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: They say, well, that doesn't look like the God of love in the New Testament.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: They must be different.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: They can't be the same.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: That God of anger can't be my God.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And even though we have grown up a lot in Christian culture and our ability to express our emotions in a healthy way, for some reason anger still sort of operates within this taboo area where we can feel more comfortable saying, I'm struggling with anxiety than I am struggling with anger right now.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, if you just approach the Bible looking for anger, you can be met with a bit of a mixed message.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ephesians 4, 26 through 32 says, Be angry and do not sin.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: What?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so you read this and you say, Okay, be angry.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some of your translations might say, in your anger, do not sin, but actually the best way to translate that is be angry.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Paul is saying, be angry and do not sin.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then just a few sentences later, he says, also, you should release all the anger that is within you and that is held up.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so you look at that and you're like, okay, I'm not sure I feel like I know much more about anger after walking through that passage.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's going to come up a couple more times because we're going to work through it.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: But what I want to show to you first is that the Bible is not afraid to say that God is angry, and we should not be afraid to look at that either.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, this is in Exodus 34, 6, when Moses asks the Lord to pass in front of him.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The Lord passes before him and proclaims, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is how God chooses to describe himself.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: We have I am who I am, and then God is describing himself in many ways, and one of them is as slow to anger.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: There are three things to take away from just this passage and the fact that God includes this in his own definition.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that anger in and of itself alone is not sinful.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, God would not be including this in sort of his list.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is not, I am slow to abuse.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: It is I am slow to anger.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Anger in and of itself is not sinful.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing we see is that there's a qualifier attached to it.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: That God is slow to anger.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: That is the trait, that is the adjective, if you will, that makes his anger honorable.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: God, who, again and again and again, if you know your Old Testament, is going to show his anger to the Israelites for their disobedience and show mercy.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that makes his anger honorable and something to emulate is his patience.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: The third thing to look here and see is that it's sandwiched in between, and I kind of had to cut it off, it does keep going on, but it's sandwiched here in between God being merciful and gracious and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Slow to anger is not the outlier.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, it is another one of the ways in which God is saying that he is showing his love to Moses here in this situation, and then also later on to the Israelites.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: He's saying, My patience in anger is something that I am giving to you as an act of love, that it is a good thing.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And over and over again in the Old Testament, at least eight more times, they reference this exact definition of God.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: That He is slow to anger.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Twice it is in reference to judgment.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they are saying, We have messed up so many times that the God who is slow to anger is pretty angry now.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's what's happening over here.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: But six times, those who we say are experiencing the brunt of the anger see God as one of mercy and his statement as one of faithfulness to the covenant.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: They say, Man, we worship a God who does get angry, but we understand why.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore, when we experience his anger, right, we understand that he is actually being merciful to us in his patience.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But once again, our culture, right, we don't like these definitions.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: We don't like these boxes.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: When God is merciful, he is being passive.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: He apparently doesn't care about what's going on.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when he is enacting judgment upon those in the camp of Israel, or later on when they are in the nation, and he allows them to be attacked for their unfaithfulness, we say, What is this?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: How can he act with such vengeance and cruelty towards them?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: We sort of capitulate and we move from one side to the other without an understanding of what healthy anger, moreover, godly anger, looks like.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's what we're shooting for this morning.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is we're trying to say, how can we learn from God?
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: How can we emulate this in our own life and find hopefully a healthy definition of what anger looks like?
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And even now, some of you are like, that sounds weird.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what a healthy definition of anger looks like.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here we go.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: There is something called righteous anger.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to give you three quick examples of it in the New Testament.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've got the most popular, Jesus flipping the tables in the temple.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is questioning the religious leaders, and the third is raising Lazarus from the dead.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, actually the first one is the only one where we don't hear in the two accounts that he is specifically angry.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: You would assume that by the fact that he is creating a court of whips and is driving people out and flipping over money changing tables, but it is the only one that does not say specifically that he's angry.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But for those of you who are not inclined to that story, what is going on is that Jesus goes into the temple, and there was, because the Israelites were instructed, the Jewish peoples, to uh go and sacrifice at the temple, there were some restrictions and things that they had to follow in order for that sacrifice to be appropriate.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those things was that they had to be able to, um, the coins that they offered at the temple could not have the face of somebody else on it.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Roman coins that they would have been using around Jesus' time needed to be exchanged for different kind of coinage.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so there were all of these sort of money changers around the temple who were profiting considerably off of the worship of the Lord.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And beyond that, there was more going on there about them providing animals for the sacrifice that was about to immediately take place.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus is angry.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: He says they've turned the temple into a den of thieves.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so he is angry at their greed.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so instead of looking at it, which is kind of how this account is used, it's like, look, Jesus got angry, so I can get angry.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, well, that's that's not really what we're saying here.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is Jesus got angry at the greed that he was seeing there.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And his response was justifiable.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: The second one, uh, so that first one you can read it in John 2.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: This next one is in Mark 3, and Jesus is in the synagogue, and there's a man who has a withered hand.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're in the synagogue, and on Sabbath, Jesus poses this question to those who were around him, uh, who were watching him like a hawk, basically, to see when and if and how many times he was going to break the law, and so that they could attack him and arrest him.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're watching him like a hawk, and he and he says to those who are watching, Is it better to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is it better to save a life or to kill?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: As he is standing in front of this man with this disfigured hand.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it says that they were silent.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: That makes Jesus angry.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: He is angry at their cruelty.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: He is angry at this fact that those they are so wrapped up in the rules and the law that they have forgotten mercy, that they have forgotten love.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this man who obviously needs Christ's help, they just say, Hey, can't you wait a day to help them out?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is angered righteously at their lack of love.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so in this second example, it says clearly in the text that Jesus was angry at them, but he was angry at their cruelty and their hardness of heart.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: The third one that I want to show you, and I think the most interesting, is actually when Lazarus is being raised from the dead, that account where Lazarus, Mary and Martha's brother, Jesus' friend, dies, and Jesus goes to them to bring him back from the dead.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a whole scene, right?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is in John 11.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole scene that takes place where Jesus, interestingly, at the beginning of the chapter, says that he's going to wait a few days to go there so that they might be able to witness this miracle.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: But as soon as he arrives on the scene, they're still in the process of mourning, and numerous times people come up to him and they say, Jesus, if you had only been here, Lazarus wouldn't have be, he wouldn't be dead.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you had come a few days earlier, like my brother would still be alive.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's a heavy accusation.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're reading through this, you like the fourth time it happens, you're like, you know what?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: If somebody kept saying that to me, that would make me pretty mad.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're just like, why weren't you here?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: He's dead because of you.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in your Bibles, if you're reading in John 11, you might see that it says that Jesus was deeply troubled in verses 33 and 38.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: But actually what that word means, and I think the reason it's translated that way, is because it makes us uncomfortable to hear that Jesus was angry when these people were coming up to him.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: In verse 38, it says that he was deeply troubled once more, or angry when he was coming up to the tomb.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And at first glance you might think, well, is it because they were accusing him of it being his fault that Lazarus had died?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesus, his emotion towards those around him is nothing but love.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, our favorite, like most memorable, easily memorized verse, Jesus wept, takes place in John 11.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's crying, he is mournful over his friend passing away.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And even though he knows the outcome, he is weeping with those who weep.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: But as he comes upon the tomb, it says that he gets angry.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why is he angry?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Jesus is angry at death.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: He is angry that this world that we live in is ravaged by the penalty of sin.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that no matter what we do, we cannot escape from this most sad and painful punishment.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: That Mary and Martha and Lazarus had to go through this, and Jesus knows that even though Lazarus is going to be raised from the dead, that in just a few more years Lazarus is going to die once again, because there is no solving the penalty of physical death except for Jesus and his resurrection.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so in all of these accounts, we see that God was angry, but he was righteously angry.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: What he was angry at was something that we should become angry at, which is sin and death.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Righteous anger is defined by the focus of our frustration.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at healthy anger, when we look at the kind of anger that God has, we're saying that it is defined by the focus of our frustration.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: That it is okay, that there is truly anger that exists where you are justified when you feel that emotion.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you are wondering if you are still struggling, it's like, how can I find righteous anger?
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: How can I know if I'm experiencing righteous anger?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you can ask yourself this question.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is God angry about this?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever you are angry about, that is your question.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Is God angry about this?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I will give you the list of things that God is angry about.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's angry about sin and he is angry about death.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: He is not angry that Target has run out of LaCroix, okay?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: He is not angry at the bank teller taking too long to give you money.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: He is not angry at your puppy deciding that your Birkin stock is its new chew toy.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: God is not getting angry at the new hire that doesn't know how to do paperwork, or the person you're driving behind who is driving at a turtle's pace and you weren't ready for them in your social calendar.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: God is not ready, or God is not angry about those kinds of things.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: God is angry about sin and death.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so we do have something that is righteous anger.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: But, and maybe my favorite verse from Proverbs pressing milk produces curds, pressing the nose produces blood, and pressing anger produces strife, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: You get cheese, blood, and pain.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: There is something, though, that we have to acknowledge in our lives, which is unrighteous anger.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: I struggle with it, maybe you struggle with it, but it is the anger that we hold on to, the thing that happens to us, where because I'm gonna say, most likely, because our life is not being ordered the way we want it to, not going the way that we planned, we experience anger at things besides and outside of the purview of sin and death.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Our unrighteous anger can also spring up.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as hopefully I'm I'm trying to show you a godly way to handle anger, you have to understand that there are a couple ways that you fall off the path.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: The first way is that we experience unrighteous anger.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that is the first one.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, it's a full stop at that point.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: When we examine our lives and look at the things which we are angry at, which God is not angry at, it should make us consider two important things.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: The first is an internal application, and the second is an external application.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: The internal application is that as we draw closer to Christ and desire to actually grow more angry at things which we should be righteously angry at, that we should also be examining the sin within our own lives, and there should be a level of righteous anger that is given to our own inward hearts.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: That as Jesus is angry about greed, he is angry about cruelty, that those areas of our life where we have failed to follow Christ are examined under this same sort of righteousness.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is the internal application.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: This external application is kind of one we've already talked about, but this idea that once more, as we're drawing closer to Christ, that we grow angry at the things that make God angry.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the things that don't make God angry, we allow to sort of slide off our back.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore, that there is a bit of a hierarchy established in what makes God angry.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: Here in a second, I'm going to talk with you about how we sort of express that anger.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: But know that there is absolutely a way that we are supposed to be examining ourselves through this and saying, Man, am I angry about the things that are making God angry?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when I press into my anger, am I causing any pain?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Proverbs also says, Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a quick temper exalts folly.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Notice slow to anger, right?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: That is our honorable, not sinful, loving way to express this emotion.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the writer of Proverbs here is saying that there is a counter to it.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: The one who is given over to a quick temper exalts foolishness.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: That there's a way, right, in which we express our anger that is not healthy.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Back to our verse at the very beginning, be angry and do not sin.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's take a second here to talk about this.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because, like I said, you could read this originally and say, that doesn't make any sense.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: How can you be angry and not sin?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Every time I've gotten angry, I've ended up in sin.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Paul is saying that there is a way that we can exist in this frame of righteous anger without giving ourselves over to sin.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it presents the next area of our path where we can sort of step off, which is that there is a way in which we should handle our righteous anger, and there's a way in which we should not.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I made a Flowchart, okay?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if a flowchart works for you.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hope it does.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: There is a thing that makes you angry.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so you say, am I righteously angry about this, or am I unrighteously angry about it?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: If I am righteously angry, what we're shooting for is righteous judgment.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is the thing that we find over and over in the Bible.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: God exhibiting righteous judgment for righteous anger upon the sins of Israel and the world.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, this is the same kind of thing that we see when God's wrath is being poured out in the book of Revelation, that he is exhibiting righteous judgment upon a world that has consistently rebelled against him.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is the same kind of righteous judgment that was placed upon Christ on the cross as the penalty, the punishment for our sins.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was a righteous judgment for righteous anger against the sin in the world.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: But there is also a way in which we can follow our culture's definition of anger and walk into passivity and unrighteous judgment.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: There was a very sad story that takes place in Genesis 34, where Jacob, right, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob has his, right, his twelve sons are the ones who become the nation of Israel, the different tribes.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he has other children as well.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: And at this point in Genesis, basically everybody who is named, you would recognize their name because they end up becoming a tribe or a nation or something like that.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: But Jacob has a daughter named Dinah.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And Dinah encounters a man named Shechem.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Shechem violates Dinah.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And as we read this account in Genesis 34, read about Shechem raping Dinah, there should be a righteous anger that stirs up within us.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing that we feel when we see that type of situation happening in our world today.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: We are angry at that sin.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so what you're expecting to happen, your expectation, is that Jacob, who is also known as Israel, is going to handle this with sort of a God-honoring framework.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is Shechem goes to Jacob and he says, I would like to marry Dinah.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: The parents get involved here, and Shechem's father comes along and he says, Hey, my son, listen, he is infatuated with Dinah.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: He really loves her.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: Name your price, and let's get them married.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a problem going on here that the nation of Israel, or soon to be nation of Israel, and the people that Shechem represents are not supposed to be hanging out together.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And Jacob, in his passivity, says, okay, they can get married, but under one condition that all the men in your town need to become circumcised.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's sort of his way of adopting this foreign culture into his own, as he says, you need to understand our rules, so your men need to become circumcised.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just stop for a second there and imagine how Dinah feels.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't have any say in this marriage.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: She is being sent off, and her father, her protector, or supposed to be protector, has said, yeah, the man who has violated her now can be her husband and for the price of circumcision.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's heavy.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's sad.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And for us, the way passivity plays itself out as we read that story, but also look at how our culture handles anger, how we often handle anger, is it plays itself out in apathy.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but when I I feel bad saying this, but when I heard about the mass shooting this past Wednesday, my first thought, another one?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was my first thought.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: 232 this year.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: That averages out to be about 10 per week.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you I I enjoy reading the news, staying up to date on things.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: I find it to be part of what I do as a thing of importance to stay up to date with what is going on in the world.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I find myself reacting with passivity and apathy towards things which I know anger the Lord.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't really matter.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not an excuse to say that I've seen it so much that I'm desensitized to it, because that's not a great answer.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is a failure in my own heart to respond with righteous anger towards the things in this world which God is angry at in a proper way.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: There is a, I'm gonna have to find it here because I'm a little deep in my notes, but a church father named John Chrysostom has this great quote.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: He says, He who is not angry whereas he has cause to be, sins.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'll read that one more time.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful language.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: He who is not angry whereas he has cause to be, sins.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's hard to think that part of the application for this morning is that you should get more angry at something in this world.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a directive given to us that we as Christians are supposed to be angry about the things that make God angry.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how we respond to that is not in passivity.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And if any of you are thinking, goodness, nobody has ever used passivity to describe me, just wait.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because there is also a way in which we can act and frankly overindulge our inner desire to be judge, jury, and executioner.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: We are Sylvester Stallone and Judge Dredd, right?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not the Carl Urban version.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, Genesis 34, the story plays on.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: The men of the town are all circumcised.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the brothers who were probably watching their father give away their sister in marriage are righteously angry.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're passing the test right here.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: They are angry about what their father has done.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: They are angry and wanting to protect Dinah, their sister.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: They have taken it upon themselves to be her protector, and all of those things are really good.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is they slip straight past righteous judgment, don't even consider passivity, and go into unrighteous judgment.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: While the town is uh laid up in pain due to their commitment, um Simeon and Levi go into the town and kill every single male in the city.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not just Shechem, not even just his father, though they're certainly included, but every male in the city.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then the rest of the brothers come in behind and they plunder the whole city.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: They take everything of value, all the gold, all the all the wealth, all the livestock, and they run away with it.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then they take all the women and children to be their captives.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see how you can sort of get diverted here?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can have righteous anger and not behave in a way that is positive.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can have righteous anger and fall to either the side of vengeance or passivity.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: It takes a lot of discernment to be able to figure out how we're supposed to handle these things.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if in the past year you have felt like because God is angry at something, it gives me the right to become a heat-seeking missile, we need to take a couple steps back.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because first and foremost, your job is to project to the world Christ.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if in the way you are handling your anger, you are not projecting Christ to the world, then you have made a mistake.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's alright.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've all done it, but it is time to repent of that.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have lost friends because of your inability to control your anger, know that that is something that you have to walk away from.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: C.S.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis is a fantastic writer, frequently mentioned here at TBC, and he has a great quote in Mere Christianity that I think helps us to understand this at a foundational level.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really within the purview of this sermon to be able to talk about all the ways in which we would have righteous judgment upon things, how we would have appropriate responses to anger.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, I just kind of want to leave you with some principles that hopefully you can administer to your own life and use your best judgment as you are trying to be one who is slow to anger, one who is showing love in the way that you process your righteous anger.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So C.S.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis says this in Mere Christianity.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: He says, When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon upon the sins of the day, nine times out of ten, the most obvious is obvious one is some sin against charity.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: I have sulked or snapped or sneered or snubbed or stormed.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected, I was caught off my guard.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: I had no time to collect myself.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: They would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: If there are rats in the cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the suddenness does not create the rats.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: It only prevents them from hiding.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way, the suddenness of the provocation does not make me an ill-tempered man.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: It only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: The rats are always there in the cellar, but if you go in shouting and noisily, they will have taken cover before you switch on the light.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: I know that I've got rats in my cellar.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not literally.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have a cellar at my home, but in my own soul, cellar of my soul, I've got rats there.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And when I get unrighteously angry, I have to recognize that almost every single time I want to blame it on the thing which has made me angry.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's because they did this.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's because they don't understand this.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's because they said this and hurt me in this way.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I blame it upon them, excuse myself and my heart from whatever interaction is going on there, and decide that I am completely fine.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can try and handle my anger the way our culture tells us to handle anger, by dismissing it and not walking through it properly, and then I can go on until the next thing unrighteously angers me.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: And out of love, I just want to say that I think there are some of us here that really need to take a grip on the way that we are handling our anger.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: We have never been given a license, unrighteous or righteous, to abuse or hurt those around us because they've made us angry.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so now we'll kind of go full circle here back to our verse in Ephesians.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully it makes a little bit more sense now.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't, then I've done a really bad job.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: But be angry and do not sin.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Be angry.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: You have permission, I'm giving it to you, to be angry about the things that make the Lord angry.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: And in those moments where you find yourself apathetic about how much sin has filled this world and how many things there are to be angry at, I give you permission to get angrier.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm also telling you that there's a way in which you are to process that anger.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul gives us just a little hint.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't involve bitterness, it shouldn't involve wrath.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: That the fighting and gossiping has no part.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Being vindictive and taking vengeance upon people is not a way that God processes his anger.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: So as a final question, hopefully to help.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's been the goal.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is God glorified in the way that I handle conflict?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's typically what anger is it's conflict.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: A conflict with yourself, a conflict with an idea, a conflict with somebody.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: Is God glorified in the way that I'm handling my conflict?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: As a final example, I would give to you the most obvious one, which is Jesus.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: That God's anger was perfectly displayed on the cross.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: That the cup that Jesus is talking about in the Garden of Gethsemane, that he is asking if it is possible that it may pass from him, is the cup of wrath that God is going to bring upon him for the sins of the entire world.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus knows that God's wrath is justified, that he is righteous in his anger, because he understands the sins of the world.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: Of all of us, of me, of all the past sins, of all the future sins, the ones that are coming tomorrow.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: That Jesus understands that there is a righteous anger for us rebelling against the God of the universe, and that what is required is punishment.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so Jesus, knowing that, knowing that the righteous judgment for the righteous anger is judgment and punishment that we deserve, he goes to the cross willingly.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in your walk with Christ, I pray that you would understand that anger is not something that you have to be afraid of.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But rather, anger is something that God intends for us to be able to use as a way to show our love of good and hatred of evil to the world around us.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: That when God says to Moses that he is slow to anger, it is not a sin, it is an act of love, and it is defined by the way he handles it.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: And as God is the perfect example, he is not on trial for being an angry God, but rather he is one that we should be emulating as the perfect example of how to handle this in a fallen world.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope that helps you at all.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because anger is something that we all struggle with, and until the day we die, there are going to be things that frustrate us.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I would love to pray for us.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as we do, I just want to be asking God, and that you would ask God to help you to work through anger in whatever way it is affecting you.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it is something that you are throwing out to the world.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe right now in your situation, anger is something that you are receiving from a lot of people, and that you would help God, you would ask God to help you process that in a way that honors Him.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for today.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: God, thank you that we can look to you as one who is righteous in judgment and righteous in anger.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I know that I fall off this path so often.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not angry enough at the things which anger you, Lord, and too often I don't act the way I should when something entices me.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, I'm not always the best example of righteous anger, and I pray that you would help me, Lord, and all of us, to walk more deeply in our relationship with you, Lord, and as we do to examine the sin within us and to examine the things which we are getting angry at, and to look ultimately then to your cross and see the mercy that is provided there.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: God, it is a hard thing to work through, it is a hard thing to handle, and I ask that by the power of your Spirit you would give us the power to do it, because it is so important that we show to the world that we are not angry Christians all the time, but we are ones who do love because we have been loved.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we thank you for this, and it's in Jesus' name that we pray.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great Sunday.