How Anger can lead to Sin

Intro

In your Bibles please turn to

Ephesians 4:26–32 (NIV)

“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. Anyone who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.

In your anger do not sin. As Christians we are to look at the world through the lens of Scripture. And there are also times when we need to turn that lens on ourselves as well and look at how we are living. How are we spiritually growing as followers of Jesus? Are we moving towards being the person that God has called us to be?

It isn’t difficult to see the anger in the world outside these doors. Actually fall sports are getting started. Go to any youth sports and you can see some interesting things happen with adults.

In the welcome letter to Rowan’s fall soccer league there was an entire section for how parents need to treat the refs. It’s kind of funny to think about someone having to put this into the welcome letter , but it’s also pretty sad that we need to have this type of warning given to us.

As society has shifted goals towards happiness seemingly at any cost. There has been a byproduct of this. People are angry. It is hard to see the amount of vitrile and venom spewing out all around us. But there is good news, there is alway good news because of Jesus.

He meets us where we are. If you are full of anger, even anger at God, Jesus will meet you in that place. It’s only Jesus that can heal these wounds because that is what is underneath all that anger. There are wounds that need to be healed.

That is the difficult part of Christianity. Jesus meets us where we are, but He doesn’t leave us there. Throught the power of Jesus we move from where we started to where God wants us to be. That is the hard part, that means taking our wounds, taking our trauma taking our anger to God.

When anger is present, look for the pain.

R. C. Sproul

We are going to look at three different lessons this morning

How anger affects us

We can bless or we can curse

Righteous Anger vs Sinful Anger

We look toward Cain and Abel to see the danger of anger.

Genesis 4:4–5 (NIV)

And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

Anger is one of those emotions that can completely take over our very minds and actions. People lose their tempers, people can lose control, or they see red. When we look at Cain we do not know a ton about him before this incident. However we know that his reaction to the offering was anger. His reaction wasn’t to look up Abel and be happy for him or to maybe learn from him so that Cain could fix his own offering the next time. No he was angry and that was the foothold satan was looking for.

Genesis 4:7 (NIV)

If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

Lord says to Cain, if you do what is right. That’s what God was looking for, for Cain to do what is right. But He comes with a warning, sin is right there waiting. That is the danger of anger, If it is not dealt with, sin is soon to follow. In our anger it is impossible to make a good decision, and because of this. That foothold that place the enemy is looking for to come into your life is right there.

Ephesians 4:26–27 (NIV)

“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

These verses here in Ephesians link back to our verses in Genesis. There can be nothing good that comes of sinful anger. Paul tells here not to let the sun go down while we are still angry. The command here is that this is something that we must deal with and we cannot push it down. Because anger doesn’t just go away, it changes and morphs into resentment and bitterness. When we let that take a hold of our heart we move into when sin becomes the most dangerous and the devil is the most dangerous because we are vulnerable in our anger.

So in our lives anger is the root cause for a lot of the problems we face day in and day out.

Now let us look toward how our anger effects other people

Matthew 5:22 (NIV)

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister, will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

In these verses we can see just how serious anger is. Jesus tells us here that we are subject to judgement if we are angry with our brothers or sisters.

A few weeks ago Pastor Rick gave a great sermon on the type of language that we use. This applies here as well. It matters how we speak to each other, what we call each other.

What we need to understand is that we have the power to bless someone or we have the power to curse someone. We have the ability to build people or we have the ability to tear people down.

This is especially true how we talk to the kids and teenagers in our lives. How we treat them especially when they do something that can make us angry has a lasting impact on them. When we tear people down , that is what leaves us to judgement. Jesus is a servant leader, He builds people up. We need to work on doing the same thing.

We Go back to our core scripture for today

Ephesians 4:29 (NIV)

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.

Only what is helpful for building up others, it is what we have been discussing here. This takes an ability on our own part to recongize these situations and to react in a Godly manner.

Now we turn to our final point, the difference between righteous anger and sinful anger

John 2:13–17 (NIV)

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

Jesus has a righteous anger, people have turned the temple into a place of commerce. A place where people were taking advantage of the poor and marinalzied people. So Jesus cleared out those people from the temple.

Now it is great to cheer Jesus on in these verses. However we must understand one thing. Jesus is God. He understands what righteous anger is. And that we need caution is to understand that we are not God and we are not Jesus There is a fine line to walk when it comes to righteous anger.

I am not telling you anything that you do not know but there are a lot of injustices in the world. Corruption runs rampant in our country. Secular ideologies are the norm out west and are headed toward the east coast. It seems that instead of talking to each other we mostly yell at each other.

This is where we take the previous to lessons into account. We need to deal with our own sinful anger, and before we can tackle injustice. We need to make sure we are looking at things with scripture in mind.

We cannot trust our own emotions because they can lead us down the wrong road. We must trust the Word of God. This isn’t always going to make you popular with different social justice groups. One thing I really admire is that Pastor Rick leads in these matters and whether it is popular or not, he leads us in Biblical values. That is how you find the line, it is the injustices that God calls injustices. We must rely on that, otherwise we will find ourselves in a tough spot

Conculsion :

Ephesians 4:31 (NIV)

Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.

This verse from Paul isn’t a suggestion. He is telling us to do this. All of these reactions or emotions are what happens. No one slanders anyone when they are praying or when they are living for Jesus.

Rage and fighting , malice, you know nothing gets accomplished when these are the weapons of choice. Things get accomplished with the Love of Jesus is our weapon of choice.

So When we find ourselves losing our temper or feeling rage there is an antidote for that and His name is Jesus Christ. Here is a secert, anger is a secondary emotion. It is masking a hurt within us. A hurt that only Jesus can heal. Always remember the miracles in the Gospel accounts. When Jesus performed a healing on someone, it wasn’t just an ailment, the entire person was healed.

When we feel anger in toward our loved ones we need to put Jesus at the center of all our relationships. He is the great mediator. Especially in our relationships when anger is allowed to simmer it will boil over to bitterness and hate. Try not to let your relationships get to that point. Bring Jesus into the relationship and begin healing it. And you might have to be the person that humbles themselves

And when we see injustice in the world the answer is spreading the Gospel. The Gospel is the only thing that can fix what ails the world.

Most importantly do not get caught up in anger and rage that is plauging our culture. It will only lead to bad decisions and sins. Instead turn to Christ and take that anger to Him, allow Him to heal those wounds

Let us pray