Matthew 5:21-26 I wish Jesus hadn t said that, but I m really glad he did! Bible Passage (Matthew 5: 21-26): if you are angry... you will be liable to judgment; 21 You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, You shall not murder ; and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment. 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, You fool, you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. Message: There is a lot of anger in our society, and Jesus had something very important to say about anger. Let s take a look at the background of what he said first. Jesus talked about anger in his famous, Sermon on the Mount. This sermon was his hallmark message that positioned him as the new Moses. You will remember Moses who climbed a mountain and received the 10 Commandments from God. Then he came down the mountain intending to teach the people God s laws. But he found them engaged in all kinds of immoral acts, which set him off. In a rage he threw down the stone tablets and had to go back up the mountain, fast for another 40 days, and receive a new stone tablet with the Ten Commandments on it. Obviously the Ten Commandments were not intended to prevent anger. They were intended to show us God s righteousness. Jesus says six times, You have heard that it was said, but I say to you. It s important for us to know that Jesus was not correcting the Ten Commandments. He was correcting false understandings of the Ten Commandments. Jesus himself had said, I did not come to abolish the commandments, but to fulfill them. So when he says Anger is basically the same as murder, he s talking about the direction of your heart, rather than an eternal indictment for calling someone a fool. When a murderer is convicted in a court of law, there is a concrete sin that has been committed. It s the anger inside the murderer that caused the wicked act. So, anger describes the direction of the heart. Jesus is telling us to change directions before it s too late and we commit a sin. There are instances of anger in the Bible that God accepts, and many that He doesn t. For example Jesus was angry at the money changers in the Temple. They P a g e 1
angered him because God s house is a holy place, reserved for worshipping God. Jesus expressed anger because the moneychangers were acting in such a way that would require God to ultimately destroy them with His wrath if they continued using God s house for personal profit. In that situation Jesus anger was intended to bring about repentance so that God s ultimate judgement would be avoided. He said, my father s house shall be a house of prayer. Jesus had a keen sense of what is holy and how to show reverence to God with our lives. The first thing I glean from Jesus anger is that Jesus is justified when he expresses anger over issues of God s holiness. We, on the other hand, must be very careful about what motivates us to anger. Is it truly an affront to God s holiness or is it an affront to our pride, selfishness, or desire for control. The desire for control is so strong in us, that we may try to justify our anger with a reference to the truth, when we really only want to gain control. We re better to take ourselves out of the equation all together. If it s at all about me, then my anger is the kind of anger that does not bring about God s righteousness. When I think about anger, I m reminded first of all, of the testimony of Dr. Ben Carson, whom we ve all heard about. Actually I thought first about the last two weeks and all the anger expressed on news reports about what was happening in Washington, D.C. That anger is still too raw to talk about. Dr. Carson on the other hand has a testimony that can benefit us. He was a presidential hopeful, and was later appointed as a cabinet member in the current administration. Many young people look to Dr. Carson as a model of someone who worked hard and overcame a life of poverty, to rise to renown as one of the foremost brain surgeons in the world. He was motivated by his mother, an illiterate woman who suffered from depression, had a third grade education, and was divorced. She struggled, but successfully raised Dr. Carson and his brother to be productive and respectable, and able to break out of their lives of poverty and realize the rewards of hard work and determination. Dr. Carson recounted an incident when, as a youth, he became so angry he tried to kill another youth. He failed when his knife hit the belt buckle of the other boy. That event shook him, because He realized his own power to destroy human life. Dr. Carson was remarkably able to realize that his anger would eventually destroy him if he didn t do something about it. Oh, that more of us would realize the negative effects that our anger has upon our lives. Dr. Carson attributes the ability to conquer his bad temper and bursts of anger to two things: prayer and daily reading in the book of Proverbs; daily reading in the book of Proverbs. There s a lot of wisdom about anger and how to overcome it, in Proverbs. Dr. Carson s solution to his own anger was extremely successful, and it brings up my first observation of our text today. P a g e 2
I. Anger is curable when we look to God, and take ourselves out of the equation. In verse 23, Matthew is not referring to various levels of intensity, or different kinds of anger when he uses the words, angry, and Raca (insults), or labeling someone as a fool. He is simply repeating the matter in different forms to emphasize the ability of anger to direct the course of your life. This is, after all, the Sermon on the Mount, and it s a record of Jesus preaching. Piling up descriptions like these in a sermon, is a common way of emphasizing a point. Sometimes we re angry and we even surprise ourselves with the intensity of our own feelings and emotions. Taking a step back from the bold statement that anger is curable, we have to first realize it s a problem. Sometimes we don t even see our anger as something that God hates and will judge. We tend to think of our anger as justified, because we think we re right after all, and someone, or some other group, is wrong. But in the vast majority of cases, anger is not godly. James 1:19 20 19 You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for your anger does not produce God s righteousness. This is where I would like to begin when I sense anger in my heart, and maybe you too. Rather than trying to justify my anger, why not begin by searching my own heart and determine to seek ways to love the other person. There was a situation in the early church that John the Apostle addressed in one of his letters. You can find it in 3 John verses 9 11. Evidently someone by the name of Diotrephes liked to be first all the time. He didn t want to recognize the apostle s authority, and even spread false comments about John and his companions. The whole point for Diotrephes was to be first. He didn t want anybody above him. He even went so far as to expel people from the church who disagreed with him. Someone like Diotrephes hasn t taken themselves out of the equation. They haven t come to the point where their heart can truly allow someone else to lead or be in charge. Taking ourselves out of the equation means not getting angry at the behavior of other people. And the way we can do that is through prayer and patience. 3 John 9-11 (NRSV) says, 9 I have written something to the church; but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. 10 So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing in spreading false charges against us. And not content with those charges, he refuses to welcome the friends, and even prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church. In the book of Jonah there s the story of Jonah and the big fish. You remember, God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and tell them that because of their wickedness God P a g e 3
was going to destroy them. But Jonah wouldn t go. He didn t want to call them to repentance because they were his enemies. They might actually repent and receive God s forgiveness. If that happened, they could continue to cause Jonah and Israel all kinds of problems. So Jonah had placed himself squarely in the equation and wasn t looking to God. Rather he was running away from God. Well, God got Jonah s attention by letting a large fish swallow him. Talk about stubbornness. I think Jonah takes the cake. And it gets worse. God delivered Jonah from the fish, told him to continue on to Nineveh and preach the message of repentance. Well this time that s what Jonah did, and behold, the people of Nineveh repented. God did not send destruction on them. There was hope for their future. But Jonah was angry because the Ninevites were his enemies and God had mercy on them. We see this in Jonah 4:4, Jonah 4:4 3 And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. 4 And the Lord said, Is it right for you to be angry? The question here is, can you think of anyone in your life that can be described as your enemy? If so, do you believe that God wants you to demonstrate abundant love to that person? In Jonah s situation, preaching a message of repentance to them demonstrated God s abundant love. It was their only hope for redemption, and it worked. God had mercy on Nineveh. Now, God had mercy in spite of Jonah s anger, but his plan was for that mercy to come through Jonah without any stubbornness, without resisting God in the process. Clearly Jonah s anger did not bring about God s righteousness, it got him swallowed by a fish. It pretty much goes without saying that most of us do not want to experience being swallowed by a big fish. We can avoid that if we take ourselves out of the equation, and love people unconditionally. When we remove anger from our lives certain predictable changes take place in us. These are coveted traits that many people long for, even plan for, but often fall short of. Could it be that residual anger hinders us from attaining these traits in our lives. The first is a life of self-control. Self control is implied in the Bible verses stated earlier James 1:19, 20. 19 You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20 for your anger does not produce God s righteousness. And then, A life of understanding will come; Prov. 14:29. 29 Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly. And finally, A life of fruit bearing will come; Col. 1:10, 11. 10 so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. P a g e 4
11 May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully So, Getting rid of anger is our desire, but where does Anger Come from? It comes through grievous words; Prov. 15:1. It comes through jealousy; Prov. 6:34. It comes through the old nature (flesh); Gal. 5:19,20. When does Anger begin? During a time of greed Ahab toward Naboth; 1 Kings 21:4. During a time of reproving Asa toward the prophet; 2 Chron. 16:10. During a time of arguing Elihu toward his three friends; Job 32:3. Let s conclude with mention of two people who confronted their own anger. One of them successfully overcame anger. The other did not. 1.CAIN: Anger Propelled By Pride 2.DAVID: Fear controlled his anger David, feared getting caught, and so had the husband of Bathsheba killed. Then the prophet Nathan confronted David with a parable that depicted the sin David had committed. 2 Samuel 12:5 7 says, 5 Then David s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; 6 he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity. 7 Nathan said to David, You are the man! David found forgiveness and healing. Cain didn t Are you a David or a Cain? Let s first recognize that we are angry when anger takes hold of us. You ve seen two people arguing, and one says, you re angry; and the other says, no I m not. And it goes around. Why not just accept the fact that you are angry and do something about it. Accept that while your anger may be justified, if you compare yourself with the person with whom you are angry, it certainly is not justified when you compare yourself with the mercy and forgiveness you have received from God. There s a fine line in how we treat other people. If we follow Jesus, there are many behaviors we must reject and turn away from. On the other hand, We must P a g e 5
never show contempt for another person who is made in the image of God. A.W. Tozer wrote that Contempt is an emotion possible only where there is great pride. The error in moral judgment that undervalues another person always springs out of the error that overvalues oneself. Anger can be a reflection of devaluing another person, and overvaluing ourselves. For that reason we must reconcile with those whom we have hurt and with those whom we have judged. We have to go to the other and make it right. Do that and there will be peace. Don t do that and a divide will open up. If there is anywhere in the world that people ought to be able to look and find love, it s the church. If they can t find love here, they ll settle for a fake copy somewhere else. But we have the word of God. Where else will they find that? To close today, please ask the Lord to speak to your heart right now. If he will make clear to you that you have anger. You ll be able to do something about it. If you have anger because someone has not met your expectations, reduce your expectations and get rid of the anger. If you have anger because you aren t in control of a situation, be willing to let someone else be in control, and see how you can demonstrate God s love for that person. If you are angry because you haven t admitted that you re angry, go ahead and admit it so that you can deal with it. If you have anger because you haven t yet been reconciled with another. Go to that person and seek to reconcile. Seek earnestly to be reconciled. When I first read about Jesus comments on anger, I wish Jesus hadn t said whoever is angry is liable to judgement, but now I m really glad he did. Aren t you? Take action on anger before it takes over you. Amen. P a g e 6