The last couple of weeks in Proverbs, we have looked at what it means to have a peaceful heart in conflict, as well as in giving and receiving correction. And this morning, we looked at God’s wisdom in our anger. It was all dovetailed together. So we looked at the reading of God’s word, though, if you please join with me in prayer. Our blessed Triune Lord in your great and kind providence, all holy scriptures were written and preserved for our instruction. We ask that you would give us grace to hear them proclaim this day, that you would strengthen our souls with the fullness of their divine teaching and keep us from pride in your reverence. And may it please you to guide us in the deep things of your heavenly wisdom. And from your great mercy, that you would lead us by your word into everlasting life through Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior, in whose name we now pray. Amen. Starting with Proverbs 16, the medley of text, Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules the spirit, then he who takes a city. Make no friendship with the man given to anger, nor go with a raffle man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare from the Psalms.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices. Refrain from anger, forsake wrath. Fret not yourself, it tends only to evil. The Book of James. Now this, my beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. In Beaverton, Oregon, Samir Pozado-Filo, he ran the motorcycle with his Kia minivan, and he shoved him across two lanes of traffic into the Jersey rail. And this chilling incident was captured on a dash Many of you probably saw it, it was on news agencies all over the United States. Random road rage. His aggressive driving ended with charges of assault and attempted murder. He is currently at large after cutting off his GPS monitor a few weeks ago while waiting trial. And between driving, flying, and domestic disturbances, anger issues daily make headline news for us somewhere. It’s a constant. It should not surprise us that Proverbs warns repeatedly against angry people.
It’s universal. Every ethnic group stakes a claim to anger. I’m Irish. I have an Irish temper. I have a Scottish temper, a German, a Russian temper, a Chinese temper, an Arab temper. Just pick a location and add the word temper to it. Everybody can claim to have that as a reason for their anger. We all understand the damage our anger brings and the difficulty in curbing it. To be sure, outbursts of anger are universally condemned in Proverbs, and we are called to be slow to anger. Not the same as no anger, but slow to anger. And because our Lord Jesus was a man of peace and did not take up his own cause in anger, we too must be men and women of peace. Scripture gives us nearly 600 references to anger or its emotional equivalence. And we recognize the problem that anger can be in our lives. Scripture tells us quite plainly, the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. So much so that we sometimes just wonder why God would even give us the capacity to begin with. It can cause so much devastation. But like nuclear energy, it can be a force that does rightly move us, wrongly It is a force that causes much sin and destruction in an atomic blast.
Righteous anger is a catalyst that ought to move us to certain actions. But we cannot say camped out on anger. If we do, it actually keeps us from acting rightly. One writer has put it well, Anger is a powerful catalyst, but a life-sucking companion. A powerful catalyst, but a life-sucking companion. And this is why we need wisdom to navigate life as sons and daughters of God. To that end, I’m framing this pursuit of wisdom regarding anger in terms of two paths, the fear of pain and the freedom of peace. What do I mean by the fear of pain? Certainly not the sole reason, but it covers enough ground to be very helpful. We run into that block. We run into something that causes this discomfort, this pain within us, and we respond to it. Usually, anger is a secondary problem. Something else drives us into anger. Proverbs 6: 34 says, For jealousy makes a man furious. Proverbs 29: 8, scoffers set a city aflame. We see repeatedly about arrogance, pride, and haughtiness that go before angry outburst. Proverbs 29: 11, A fool gives full meant to his spirit. So we ask that question, why do we get angry?
The good diagnostic question that’s meant to get to the heart of our sin. The very thing that we are defending shows what we value most, what gets us upset. That’s what we value. And in that, there’s often this perceived fear of pain, of losing that. It drives our angry response. Dan Ellender and Old Testament professor, Trimper Longman, they put it this way. They speak of anger as a response to an assault. Desire is blocked in some way, and we’re forced to wait. Our waiting, it makes us feel helpless, powerless, and anger becomes a way of taking justice into our own hands. They write, Waiting intensifies pain because it forces us to see that we are dependent creatures. It forces us to see that we are dependent creatures. And all of this happens almost instantaneously. Think about the guy who’s looking at his phone when the light turns green. How fast does it take other people to see what he’s doing and then to hit the horn, slam against the dash of the steering wheel with an angry response? It happens so quickly. Well, let’s Let’s go back and look at the first time anger is mentioned in the Bible.
Genesis 4. Cain and Abel, both brothers, bringing an offering to the Lord. We are told that the Lord had regard for Abel’s offering, but not for Cains. And there we read, So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. I mentioned that before, how anger is seen on her face, and the Hebrew expressions for that are a part of that. Anger that we see vividly on someone’s face, and either their nostrils flaring or their face getting red. His face fell, and the Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crashing at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. ‘ And then Cain spoke to Abel, his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Murder coming out of his anger. Cain thought he was wrong. His offering was blocked and he became angry. He became angry at his brother who had nothing to do with it. The Lord, his questions to Cain were to get him to consider his own heart, his own sin.
It was an invitation to push against the pain to the real issue of why he wasn’t accepted. But he took up his own cause with his own hands, and he murdered his brother. How easy it is for us to minimize our sin, to blame other people, and to justify it almost at the same time. In our anger, we demand others to respond to what we think is our plight. And if they don’t, then they must pay the consequences through our anger. How different It’s important. Psalm 37 is, be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, which often makes us angry. Somebody’s prospering and usually contrary to the ways of God. Over the man who carries out evil devices. Refrain from anger, forsake wrath, fret not yourself. It tends only to evil. But the last thing we want to do in those circumstances is wait. If the Lord or others do not respond the way that we want in the time that we want, then we feel justified to take action on our own behalf. Like, Lord, you’re taking your sweet time on this, so I’m going to do and stand up for myself because nobody else is, and you’re sure not.
How easy it is for us to justify that? All in a matter of seconds. Proverbs 14: 29, Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who is hasty temper exalts folly. Well, how do we get a slow temper? How do we slow things down? Well, we do so by working against our bent towards anger. You may have a short fuse, but it did not get that way without cultivating it. Patience also must be cultivated. If you do not, then a habit is formed and one that’s difficult to change. Proverbs 19: 19, A man of great rath will pay the penalty, for if you deliver him, you only have to do it again. That’s the habitual cycle. How easy it becomes to get entrenched in this angry, sinful way of dealing with life. We go slow by working against that. And we know that our anger is not simply some unstoppable force. We control when we get angry. A coworker, yelled at his subordinate, but not at his boss. And we even developed this great skill with our cell phones, where you can be arguing with someone next to you and talking to someone on the phone and alternating between mute and unmute.
To yell at the person, to talk to the person, to yell at the person, to talk to the person, all very fluidly. We can control that. And yet we often act as if we are overcome with anger that there’s an instoppable force. If you have a hair trigger, you have spent years crafting it. Quickly begin the long process of repentance to destroy that simple habit. A question, why are we angry? Our anger becomes a way to deaden the pain that we feel. It makes us feel like we’re doing something, that we’re taking control. And often our anger is just that. It’s about control. I’m trying to control other people. A violent outburst at one point will convey, remember what happened last time when you set me off? You want that to happen again now, do you? And the memory of that can last for years within a family to control everybody else by our angry and violent outburst. A simple look can convey all of that. Proverbs 29: 22, A man of wrath stirs up strife, and when given the anger, causes much transgression. Proverbs 22, Make no friendship with the man given to anger, nor go with a raffful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.
Now, to be sure, anger comes in various shades, from being irritable and to being a person who give in to arguing constantly. Others can make their anger into a form of bitterness that can hold grudges for years. Violence and yelling are the easy forms to see, but there’s also that vindictive self-righteousness rolls into a passive, aggressive behavior that’s still destruction on the spectrum. Distorted desires moves us to distorted passions, and we can easily justify these distorted passions. Someone heard yelling throughout the building and then later saying, Well, I’m just a passionate person. I’m not angry, I’m passionate. I’m passionately telling people why they’re wrong or what they did against me. How easy that is because anger distorts our ability to think. Proverbs 14: 17, Short-tempered people do foolish things. It distorts how we think. We do foolish things. In my sin, what I value most is me. We get most upset when our pride is at stake, when our identity is at stake, when we don’t want to look bad, when we don’t want to be inconvenienced, we don’t want to feel hurt or pain. The heart of our anger is me. Me and how I feel.
Let’s go back a few years to COVID. The yelling that we saw at who? Restaurant servers, nurses, clerks, school officials, teachers, people who could do nothing about some of the regulations handed down to them. But because in all of that, my anxiety ratcheted up, my frustration went up, my helplessness went up. And we can feel better by directing all of that internal feeling and drive when we blow it out towards somebody else. I feel better now that I have released all this out there onto someone else, fomenting anger on them who had no say in the matter. They just got blasted. But that was all about me. As James tells us, know this, my My beloved brothers, let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires. Well, how then do we move from the fear of this type of pain to the freedom of peace? In Exodus 34, several places in scripture, but Exodus tells us the Lord himself is speaking. The Lord, the Lord, a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
That is what God desires for his people, that we reflect that. Proverbs 16: 32, Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty. He who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. We are to reflect God in our slowness to anger. A quick reading of scripture will tell you that the Lord is angry with many things. Anger in itself is not necessarily bad. Paul tells us in Ephesians 4: 26, Be angry, but do not sin. See, to be angry at the injustice done to others is a right response. Empathy is a focus out to the pain of other people, not ourselves, but looking out towards others. That’s the heart of empathy. When insurance companies purposely deny claims, it should make you upset. You should care about the people who are suffering for that. Criminals who target the elderly, those hurting children. There are things out there that should cause us to rise in our temperature, but never to stay there. It is a catalyst towards movement of empathy towards another. We have to be very, very careful here because our ability to deceive ourselves, to justify our sin, has been well-crafted by us over the years.
Remember an angry man who considered himself to be a theological savvy He spent a lot of time telling me and others how his anger was a righteous anger. If you spent a lot of time defending your anger as righteous, just letting you know, probably not a good place to start. How his anger was righteous. He is now on his third wife. His anger was always about what he saw as sins committed against him. I tell you what, it is easy to memorize scriptures if you want to use it to point out the failings of other people. We all struggle memorizing scriptures, but man, if you want to use it to beat somebody over the head with, it will indelibly ingrain itself in your heart. If you can use it against somebody else. That is not what it’s for. Because righteous anger looks to defend others, to undo injustice, to look out. We saw this in the response of many in the civil rights movement. Peaceful marches, not riots, not firebombings, but a righteous anger as a catalyst for right actions. In the gospel of John 2, we read that in the temple Jesus found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons and the money changers who were sitting there and said, making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen.
He poured out the coins of the money changers, overturned their tables, and he told those who sold pigeons, take these things away. Do not make my Father’s house a house of trade. ‘ And then his disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for your house will consume me. ‘ Now, one does not casually crack a whip or quietly overturn tables. And yet Jesus was a man of peace, the Prince of peace. The anger was directed at those in the temple area this courtyard was. It was the courtyard of the Gentiles. It was where they were to come and worship. And for convenience’ sake, to the Jewish worshippers, they put all the trade issues there, blocking the worship of the nations so that Jewish worshippers could be more convenient. It angered Jesus, rightly so. To be righteously angry, we must be consumed by the fear of our God. When Jesus stood in the temple, he was filled with righteous indignation. He acted redemptively. His wounds were meant to chastise, to heal. There was real empathy in the life of Jesus. How often we read that he was, what? Moved by compassion. He saw the plight of others, and that empathy directed him towards their needs.
When we have that outward direction away from ourselves, we can rightly enter into an indignation when people are being prayed upon, when injustice is happening. Jesus was faced the pain of his own great loss in the garden of Gosemite. And what did he pray at that moment? That moment when everything was going to fall upon him, the weight of everything crushing him down. And he said, Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done. Not my will, but your will be done. And then he stood silent before his accusers who said, Have you no answer? Do you not respond to these men testifying against you? But the gospel says that he remained silent and made no answer. He was not taking his own cause into hands. He was trusting himself to the Father to vindicate him. He was consumed by a Holy God. We hear the cry of Jesus on the cross. He quoted out Psalm 22, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Psalm goes on, Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Oh my God, I cry day and night, but you do not answer.
And by night, I find no rest. The Psalms leading us, troubled and agitated hearts to be able to take that to the Lord in worship. Not to stuff our feelings, but to bring them and direct them to the Lord. In Jesus anger against sin, it led him to die so that we might be healed by his wounds. When we are told that is a glory to overlook an offense, we are told then to forgive as we have been forgiven. To be angry and not sin, we have to be angered like Christ. Knowing that in the midst of this, God makes us wait. And waiting intensifies the pain. It exposes our loss of control. And we will either trust in him or we will turn against him and take matters into our own hand. I will trust that God has put me in this situation. I am on the receiving end, and I will either take it up myself or I will wait upon the Lord. Righteous anger is like a surgeon’s scalpel. It goes and spends the time willing to cut carefully around the tumor or the disease part of the body so that the body can live.
It’s meant to take something bad out for the health of the body. But unrighteous anger is like a battle ax. It just wants everyone to feel the pain that they feel. It doesn’t matter where they get hit. To be truly righteous in our anger, we must be consumed by a Holy God and washed in humility. Proverbs 19: 11, Good sense makes one slow to anger and his glory to overlook an offense. If we hear ourselves saying things like, You make me so angry, or, Don’t push my buttons, or, You know how that upsets me, Sin is couching at the door, and you are to master it. Not to use and blame others for making you get angry. That’s you. That’s me. And calling back the words of the Psalm in Psalm 145, The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding. And that is what the Lord calls us to. And notice that in this, He’s not calling us to be without passion. He’s not calling us to be apathetic or indifferent.
It’s a call to use those God-given drives towards a God-given end. That we would bring life into situations of great injustice or wrong. That we would also be willing to show the great mercy and the kindness of Lord in a changed heart and be willing to receive a wrong done against us rather than respond with an abuse of anger to take it out on someone else. Both cases, we’re putting the Lord first and foremost. We’re walking in the path of Jesus, that he loved us while we were yet sinners. And we are taking that as the motivation and the emphasis for our action. Anger is a good catalyst. But if we stay there, it is a life-sucking companion. God desires that we would have a holy fear of him, that we would be consumed by a holy and righteous God who is slow to anger, who’s abounding in steadfast love, that we would reflect that. And the joy as Christians is where we all have not done this well. We all have sinned against others in our anger, that we then can go boldly to the throne of grace, confessing our sin, receiving forgiveness, and being set on a new way and pattern of life.
We’re not stuck here. This doesn’t have to define who we are. Who defines us is Jesus Christ, that we are united to him by faith alone. His righteousness has been given to us. We have been set free. That is the good news of Jesus for his people, to be filled, to be a passionate people towards the rights and the justice of other people, even while we are willing to bear the marks of suffering injustice that his name would be glorified. Brothers and sisters, be filled with the peace, the goodness of the Lord, who is gracious and merciful, who who is slow to anger, who is abounding in steadfast love towards you. Pray with me. Father God, as we come before you, we thank you for the richness in the depth of your mercy. And we ask, Lord, that you would forgive us, where we so often selfishly take up our own cause in unrighteous anger. Father, that you would not only forgive us, but we ask for transformation. We ask Lord God that the Holy spirit dwelling in would call us to a greater depth of understanding, a higher purpose for which you have made us, that we indeed would reflect the image and the likeness of Jesus in how we respond to others and how we come alongside those who are hurting.
Father, we long then for your church to be without spot, wrinkle, and blemish. Lord, continue to purify us. Continue to fill us with a Holy zeal for you in your house. And this we pray and ask through Christ, our redeemer. Amen. How firm a foundation, please stand.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.