The Cost of Anger

We read the word of God from Matthew chapter 5, beginning at verse 20 and concluding with verse 26. For I say unto you that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old, Thou shalt not kill, and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of judgment. But I say unto you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of judgment, and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raketh, shall be in danger of the council. But whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hellfire.

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there remembereth that thy brother hath anything against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way. First be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou shalt be cast into prison.

Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out from there, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing. Paul says to us, Be angry, and sin not, let not the sun go down upon thy wrath. I'm told that here in the city of Chicago, one out of every thirty-five deaths is a murder.

Now the police tell us that most of these murders are what they call crimes of passion. Good friends are gambling and get angry at each other, and one of them pulls a knife or a gun. People are chatting together at a bar, and somebody gets a little bit upset, and anger leads to murder.

Our Lord Jesus, here in Matthew chapter five, beginning at verse twenty-one, connects anger with murder. But the Lord does not say that anger leads to murder, now that's true, it does. Our Lord does not say anger leads to murder, our Lord says anger is murder.

And he talks about the courts that the Jewish people used to have. In the little villages, they had a little village court that could try a person, and that court had the power of taking life. Of course, when the Jews were under the Roman government, they did not have the privilege of capital punishment, but in their Old Testament days, the local court in the village could take life, and if someone deserved to die, they could decapitate them.

If they referred the case to the higher court, to the Sanhedrin court, they also had the power of capital punishment, but they would stone a person, and if that person was truly a despicable criminal, they would take the dead body and throw it on the garbage heap outside the city of Jerusalem, where the worms were always eating, and where the fire never went out. It's a rather solemn picture that our Lord paints on this matter of anger. Our Lord is explaining God's moral law to us, that's the purpose of the Sermon on the Mount.

The Lord Jesus Christ, when he came to earth, found the word of God encrusted with tradition. The scribes and the Pharisees, in their attempt to preserve the law, had destroyed the law. They had added to it innumerable interpretations, innumerable applications, innumerable traditions, and the common people were just fed up with the whole thing.

The word of God is a seed, and that seed has to be planted to bring forth the life and the fruit. But the scribes and Pharisees, instead of planting the seed, preserved the seed and encrusted the seed, and so Jesus had to come with his hammer and his chisel and break away that crust and allow that life to come out. This is what he's doing.

He takes the law of murder. God had said, Thou shalt not murder, and the Pharisees took this to mean, Thou shalt not murder. But God meant far more than that.

They had not seen what God really wanted them to see, because all they could see was their legalistic religion, and proudly they could say, I am not like other men, I've never murdered anybody, I've never done these violent things, and Jesus comes along and he says, Let's take this little commandment, Thou shalt not murder, let's break away all of the crust that you've put on it, let's plant it down in the soil of our hearts, let's allow it to bear fruit. What does it really say? What it really says is this, there's something far deeper than just physical murder. To the scribes and the Pharisees, sin was an outward action.

To Jesus Christ, sin is an inward attitude. To the scribes and Pharisees, if you did not do certain things, you were clean. To the Lord Jesus Christ, there had to be the right attitude of heart.

That's why he began by saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. In other words, my friends, the Lord looks at us right now, and he's not impressed with our track record. He's not impressed with our not murdering people.

He's saying to us, Have you ever hated in your heart? Yes, Lord, we have. And the word that he uses here for hatred, for anger, is not the word for a sudden bursting of anger, violent temper. It's the word that meant a quiet, down deep inside, malice that boils and surges and poisons.

And so our Lord is warning us about the sin of anger. You see, we as evangelicals today, and I think I can use the word fundamentalist, we as fundamentalists today are proud of our track record. We aren't guilty of some of the outward, dirty things that other people are guilty of.

And we can be like the scribes and Pharisees, and we can stand and pray thusly with ourselves and say, Oh God, I thank you that we're not like other people. We believe the whole word of God, and we don't go around murdering, and we don't steal, and we pay our taxes, and all these things are good. Except that God looks down on our hearts and says, Just a minute, have you ever been guilty of anger? Is there any one of us who is harboring down inside malice, poison? And so he deals here with the subject of anger and tells us how to handle it in our lives.

Now some of the things I'm going to say this morning are going to surprise you, but I think our Lord wants us to learn how to handle anger in our lives. And to help us do this, he lays before us three basic considerations. First, the Lord Jesus says, Consider the fact of anger.

Anger is a fact of life you have to deal with. Do you realize that one of a baby's first emotions is anger? When a baby comes into this world, one of the first emotions you're going to see in a baby is anger. Have you ever seen little fists double up and little faces get red? Have you ever seen a baby explode? Anger is a fact of life.

It's there. The fact of the matter is, anger is something important to our lives. You see, anger of itself need not be sinful.

There is an anger that is not sinful. The fact of the matter is, the person who cannot get angry at sin has something wrong with him. Do you mean to tell me that people can pick up their newspapers and read of what is being done to children and not get angry? Angry, harsh, against sin.

Jesus was angry. I read in my Old Testament that God the Father gets angry. He's angry at sin.

I read that Jesus got angry. We just dedicated some children. You read in your New Testament that when they brought the children to Jesus and the disciples said, don't bother him with these children, he was indignant.

There was a righteous indignation. And our Lord said, you permit the children to come to me. When he went into the temple and saw the court of the Gentiles loaded with sheep and oxen and birds, when he saw the money changers making profits from religion, he became angry and he made a whip and he drove them out.

That's gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Our Lord knew what it was to be angry. He was in the synagogue preaching one day and there was a man there who had a withered hand, a paralyzed hand, and everybody watched Jesus to see whether or not he would heal that man on the Sabbath day.

They were more concerned about their rules of religion than they were healing and helping a man. And Jesus said to the man, stand up. And the man stood up.

Is it right or is it wrong to heal on the Sabbath day? And looking around, it says, being grieved for the hardening of their hearts. Our Lord became angry because here sat the doctors of the law, the religious leaders hardening their hearts and saying, if he heals that man, we'll arrest him and get rid of him. Jesus got angry.

Anger is the backbone of the moral man. Anger is the sinew of the soul. A person who cannot get angry at sin and unrighteousness and wrong has no backbone, has no courage.

Anger doesn't have to be sinful. In fact, Paul writes to us in Ephesians 4 and says, be angry, but sin not. Nehemiah got angry when Nehemiah discovered the dirty deals that his people were pulling in ripping each other off.

He became angry. Moses became angry when he saw the way the Egyptians were treating the Jews, his anger surged within him. There is a righteous anger.

You know, we Christians sometimes think that because we love and we're to show meekness and we're to show kindness that we're not to show anger. But there is such a thing as a righteous anger, and we need more of it today. I was sitting in a Sunday school class a few weeks back when we were away on vacation listening to a man teach a lesson on the imprecatory Psalms, those Psalms back in the Old Testament where it seems as though the writer has no Christian grace.

He's talking about God wrecking the cities. He's talking about the enemies, babies being dashed against the stones, some of the awful pictures of judgment. And they were discussing back and forth why such a thing would be in the Bible.

And after all the discussion was over, the teacher made a very astute statement. To me, it summed up the whole lesson. He said something like this, of course, in the Old Testament, they had not been given yet the full revelation of grace as we have in the New Testament, but it would do the church good today if they had some moral indignation against sin.

We have come to the place where we accept anything. Well, that's the way the city is. That's the way it's going.

Well, it's the end times. And perhaps it would be good if Christian people would stand on their two feet and straighten their backs and strengthen their backbones and say, we're not going to have these things going on. We become a group of sanctified sissies, anger.

Now, usually with most of us, however, anger is sinful. You know why? Our motive is wrong. When we get angry at sin, it motivates us to do that which is right.

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln took a raft trip down the Mississippi River, and he ended up down in New Orleans, and there he saw slavery firsthand. He saw them auctioning off a slave, and he said to his friend, if I ever have a chance, I will deal a death blow to that thing. And he did.

But with most of us, we get angry at people. We don't get angry at sin. We get angry at the wrong time, at the wrong thing, in the wrong way, to the wrong degree.

Husbands and wives get angry with each other, and instead of sitting down and settling the matter, it just surges and grows and poisons. Church members get angry at each other. And angry can become sinful, and that's what Jesus is talking about.

He's talking about sinful anger, not righteous indignation. He's talking about sinful anger, and he's saying to you and me, you've got to face the fact of it. Don't bury it.

If you bury anger, do you know what happens? It ruins you. There are multitudes of people in this world today whose lives are seething volcanoes. They are filled with violence and hatred.

They're angry at life and angry at the world and angry at people, and they're miserable. They've got headaches and backaches and stomach problems and ulcer problems and heart trouble. You can't bury it, and you can't just turn it loose.

You've got to learn how to control it. That's what our Lord's talking about. He says, consider first of all the fact of anger.

It's there. You've got to do something with it. You have a fallen nature, and because you have a fallen nature, that which is good can be perverted.

Hunger is a normal thing, but gluttony is sin. Sex is a normal thing, but fornication is sin. Anger is a normal thing.

It's a part of the makeup of our life. But sinful anger, violent anger, destructive anger, carnal anger, satanic anger, that's something else. Which leads to our second consideration.

Our Lord, to help me control and help you control this thing called anger, says to us, consider the foolishness of anger. Anger is a very foolish thing. In verses 22 and 23, the Lord tells us what happens to people who allow anger to control their lives.

Remember, He's not talking about losing your temper. He's talking about that seething, settled anger. He's talking about that nursing anger, that malice that's down inside.

I'll never talk to him again. After what she did to me, I'm through with her. There are families that can't get together for family affairs because people are angry with each other.

There are church members who walk in and out of different doors. They don't want to get next to each other because they're angry at each other. There are husbands and wives who are living on a volcano.

There's anger, quiet, seething anger, and one day it's going to blow up. These things don't happen overnight. That's why our Lord says, look, you've got to deal with this thing.

Now what happens to us when we start to cultivate anger and we don't deal with it? Well, number one, it makes you a destroyer instead of a builder. Anger destroys. You see, he starts here with feelings.

Whosoever is angry with his brother, then these feelings move into words. Whosoever shall say to his brother, you blockhead, you idiot. Here's what happens.

What begins with feelings moves into words. Then people say things they shouldn't say, and ultimately words become deeds. And people either hit each other or fight with each other or sign divorce papers.

You see, when anger gets a hold of our lives, we become destroyers instead of builders. What a joyful privilege it is to build a home. What a tragedy it is to destroy a home.

I firmly believe, I firmly believe that every home that has been destroyed by sin at some point could have been saved if people had only been honest with themselves and with God. I was reading in the book of Proverbs recently and couldn't help but notice the power of words. Jesus said, don't you call your brother a fool.

Don't you call him an empty-headed fool. Don't you call him a blockhead. Be careful about your words.

Proverbs chapter 18 and verse 21, wise Solomon says this, death and life are in the power of the tongue. That's true. You see, when Jesus says anger is murder, he's saying if you aren't careful, you'll kill somebody with your words.

Now you may not kill the person's body, you may kill his reputation. There are people in America today and there are publications in America today dedicated to one proposition, to wreck the reputations of people. And so when you start living with anger and letting anger control you, you become a destroyer instead of a builder.

Proverbs chapter 25 verse 18, a man that bears false witness against his neighbor is a club of war and a sword and a sharp arrow. That's the way words are. Some words you club people with.

Some words you stab people with. Some words you hide off at a distance and shoot them like you'd shoot an arrow. But the second thing that happens is this, when you get involved with anger and anger starts to control your life, it not only makes you a destroyer instead of a builder, it makes you a victim instead of a victor.

You only hurt yourself. Only hurt yourself. There are people who for some reason nurse grudges and nurse malice, they can't clear the poison out, and they lie in bed at night and think up ways to hurt people.

And they say I'm going to, and yet they aren't hurting anybody, they're hurting themselves. A lady stopped me some years ago following a church service and she said, Pastor I want to apologize, I owe you an apology. I said for what? She said for all the evil things I've been thinking about you.

I said now let's get something clear, in the first place nowhere does the Bible tell us to confess to other people what we think about them. If I say something about you that's wrong I better go confess that, if I do something against you that's wrong I better confess that. I said secondly you didn't hurt me, you only hurt yourself.

And so when a person lives with anger and cultivates anger and malice down inside he becomes a victim. Jesus says your guilt gets worse. First you're angry with your brother and you're in danger of the judgment, that means the lower court, the local court.

And then it gets worse and you say to your brother Rekha, which means blockhead, ah then you're in danger of the Sanhedrin. Then you say thou fool, which means idiot, rebel, apostate, oh then you're in danger of hellfire. In other words our Lord is saying here each of these is guilty but it gets worse and worse and worse.

Anger is the kind of a thing that when it is nurtured it goes deeper and poisons us more. In fact Jesus warns us here the same thing that John warns us of. Over in 1 John chapter 3 and verse 15 the Apostle John says, if you hate your brother you're a murderer.

But you know the one you're really murdering? Yourself. Something else happens when you become filled with anger and we don't do anything about it, we become prisoners instead of free people. He talks here about going to prison.

He says you better get this thing settled before they turn you over to the judge and the judge turns you over to the officer, that's the fellow who does the executing, and you're cast into prison. Oh it would take several hours to deal with this in its entirety and even then we'd just be scratching the surface but let me just say this to you and I speak to my own heart. When a person nurtures anger and malice, when he cannot forgive, when he cannot get reconciled to his brother, he becomes a prisoner, a prisoner of his own feelings.

He's shackled by his own selfishness and his own feelings. He puts himself in prison. There's no freedom.

He's not free to talk to his brother as he should. He's not free to pray as he should. Jesus said when you stand praying, if you've got ought against your brother, you better get it settled.

You better forgive. He's in bondage, all for the luxury of hating somebody. A famous man once said, choose your enemies very carefully, an enemy is a very expensive thing.

More than that, when a person's life is controlled by anger, it makes him an outsider instead of an insider. He can't come and worship. Jesus said, you come to the altar to bring your sacrifice.

God says, don't give me your sacrifice. Go get reconciled to your brother. Now in Matthew chapter 18, Jesus tells us how to get reconciled with our brother.

He said, if your brother sinned against you, go see him privately. Don't go to win an argument. Go to win your brother.

If that doesn't work, go back and take two or three brethren with you. If that doesn't work, tell it to the church. If that doesn't work, you've done all you can do.

Paul wrote and said, as much as life in you lives peaceably with all men, there are some men you can't live peaceably with. There are troublemakers. There are difficult people who won't submit to the authority of the word of God.

There's nothing you can do about that, but you've tried. But the tragedy is when a person lives with anger, when he can't forgive, when he can't take steps of forgiveness, then he can't worship like he ought to. And oh, he can sing, but it doesn't mean a whole lot.

He can pray. It doesn't mean a great deal. Jesus said, you better leave the altar and go take care of your brother.

And so consider the fact of anger. We've got to face it. And consider the foolishness of anger, all that it does to us.

It makes prisoners out of us, and it makes outsiders out of us. We can't worship as we should. It makes victims out of us.

And that guilt keeps growing and growing, which leads us now to our third consideration. Our Lord says, consider the forgiveness of anger. Can anger be forgiven? Of course.

How is anger forgiven like any other sin is forgiven? First thing we have to do is confess it. He says, therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar and there, remember that thy brother hath anything against thee. Now, it's not that you have something against your brother.

Your brother's got something against you. Leave there thy gift before the altar. Go thy way first.

Be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Three times in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses the word first. First, be reconciled to your brother.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. First, take the beam out of your own eye. First, be reconciled.

What are we supposed to do? We're not supposed to use religion to cover up our sin. We aren't supposed to piously go through the church services and come. No, we have to come and admit it.

Father, I've got to admit there's something in my heart. I know that my brother and I are not getting along. We've got to get this thing settled.

And so we confess it. We don't cover it. And then we go to see him.

We do it quickly. Some years ago, I was speaking at Word of Life camp up in Scroon Lake, and Jack Wurzen asked me to give a seminar to the kids on speech, on talking. Kids can say such mean things, and so I did.

I talked with them about the words that come out of our lips. And I mentioned to them some words that all of us ought to be able to use, like please and thank you, and I'm sorry, and I love you, and I'm praying for you, and things like this. And when the seminar was over, they started running for the telephones.

And I'm glad they did. There was many a teenager on that island who ran for the telephone and phoned home and apologized to mother and dad for the way he'd been talking. There's a marvelous Bible conference over in Keswick, England, as you know.

They put a huge tent up out there in the field in Keswick, and they preach the word of God on holiness and righteous living. And more than once, the post office has run out of stamps at Keswick when people have been under conviction, and they've gone and written letters of apology to people. And our Lord says, you better do it quickly.

Verse 25, agree with thine adversary quickly. Don't wait. You might die.

He might die. Don't wait. Get it over with.

Confess it. Be reconciled. If the brother won't be reconciled, you've done all you can do.

Then he says, accept my forgiveness. Come on back and offer your gift. I'll accept it.

I'll forgive you and worship me. Now, these few verses that our Lord gives to us here are very practical. There are many people who'd like to hear a sermon about prophecy, the end times, but I think the thing we need more than anything else is a sermon on our relationships with one another.

And Jesus is saying, you can't have a right relationship with God at the altar unless you have a right relationship with your brother at the table or the shop or the office. We have to consider the fact of anger. We can't hide it.

We can't bury it. We've got to consider it. We've got to consider the foolishness of anger, what it does to us.

It only hurts us. It doesn't hurt other people as much as it hurts us. And we've got to consider the forgiveness of anger, that God wants us to straighten things out.

Come to him. He will forgive and he will cleanse. You know, a person is measured by whatever makes him angry.

The next time you and I get angry, we're measuring ourselves. If some little old thing makes us angry, we're showing how little we are. As I was preparing this message and thinking about the anger that sometimes comes into our heart, something struck me and broke my heart.

It was this. We commonly think of the Lord Jesus, and rightly so, on the cross bearing murder and loss. These awful, horrible sins that we read about in the newspapers.

But you know that Jesus bore your anger. In fact, can I put it this way? Jesus Christ felt the anger of God against sin when he was on the cross. There is a wrath of God against sin.

Now the world doesn't see that wrath yet. Someday it will. Someday God will push the button and the wrath of God will be delivered upon this earth.

But today it's not the wrath of God, it's the grace of God. It's the patience of God. I'm glad God has been faithful and patient and kind with my petulance and my impatience and my anger.

As I prepared this message, I had to come before the altar and say, Now Lord, where is my life? Do you want to deal with me? There have been times in my life when I have not been as patient as I should have been. It might be a good thing if all of us today would agree with our adversary quickly. It might be a wonderful thing.

It might be the beginning of a revival in our hearts, in our homes, in our churches, if we'd settle things today. Perhaps there's a husband and a wife and things are rather shaky at home. Let's go home and pray and say, Now look, I've been angry.

I've been harboring malice. I've been wrong. I want you to forgive me.

And God, I want you to forgive me. Parents and children may be at odds with each other. Friends may be at odds.

I don't know. All I know is that Jesus says this. Deal with it.

Take care of it. Settle it. I'll forgive you.

I'll cleanse you. I'll give you a fresh new beginning. Anger doesn't lead to murder.

Anger is murder. I wonder how many people we have murdered in our hearts. May the Lord help us to show the love of God, the fruit of the Spirit, which is love and joy and peace and patience and kindness.

Heavenly Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you that Jesus Christ bore even the awful sins of our anger and our dispositions upon the cross. I pray in Jesus' name that you'll bless this word.

If some of us are lingering at the altar when we ought to be making reconciliation with a brother, help us to get going. If there are phone calls to make or letters to write or people to see, help us to do it. I pray for homes, Father, where anger and malice are about to destroy, that you'll work there.

I pray for lives that are being eaten away by the cancer of malice and anger. Oh, God, heal. I pray, Father, you'll set us free.

Oh, the blessed freedom that there is in love. Oh, the blessed freedom that there is in forgiveness. Deliver people from prison today, where they're paying so dearly for anger.

Cleanse us all, Father. Fill us with your Spirit. I pray for the one who doesn't know Jesus, that he might come and be saved today and never have to taste and feel the wrath of God.

Oh, thank you, Lord Jesus. We consecrate ourselves in a new way now. In your name we pray.

Amen.