A Different Way - The Sermon on The Mount - Dealing With Anger - Matthew 5:21-26

Matthew 5:20-26

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Morning everyone. Alright, pull your Bibles out. And we're gonna be in Matthew chapter 5. So if you guys have a Bible, I'd love for you to get that out. If you don't, there's actually some in the chairs around you. So feel free to grab one of those. And if you didn't get a worship guide when you came in, if you just uh lift your hand real quick, uh some of our ushers could get you one of those uh so you can take some notes or I have the scripture reading for this week and even a few things you can connect to. Anybody need one of those? See a few hands on here. All right, good deal. Um, Matthew chapter 5 is where we're gonna be. Oh, hand over here. And uh we're gonna get to work pretty quick here. Before I do, uh, if you're on my left, your right, the end of the aisle, there's a little black pad called a connection pad. You just reach down there real quick if you happen to be sitting in that seat or near that um and fill that out and pass that down. It's just the way we keep up with who's here at point on a weekly basis. And uh not too long from now, I can't remember the exact date, but we have another starting point class for those of you that are new and want to know more about who we are, what we're about, um, find out how you can get more connected here and involved here. 3rd of March. Okay, so coming up. I knew it was quick. A couple weeks now. Uh we encourage you to be a part of that. Uh, it's a great just lunch that follows our gathering, and uh, and we talk a little bit about uh again who we are, what we believe, uh how we work as a church, and we would love for you to be a part of that, okay? Matthew chapter 5, verse 20. I'm gonna read it to us this morning. Here's what it says. For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you, every one who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. And whoever says to his brother, fool, will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But whoever says you moron will be subject to hellfire. So if you are offering your gift on the altar, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. Reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him, or your adversary will hand you over to the judge, the judge to the officer, and you will be thrown into prison. I assure you, you will never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. I feel like I need to pray again after reading that this morning and ask God's Spirit to really allow us to hear what He wants us to hear. So I'm gonna do that. Father, I just want to say a simple prayer, God, of help us to humble ourselves and to receive what you want to say through your word and by your spirit this morning. God, I pray that this sermon would not be one of those sermons that we say, Father. I'm so hopeful that somebody else would hear it. I pray you would help us in our own hearts to receive what we personally need to receive and do what we personally need to do in response to it. We pray it's in your name, Jesus. Amen. So this is the next section in the Sermon on the Mount. And uh some of you guys know that. And I specifically read the end of last week's section of scripture. So, verse 20, I tagged it into this week's message because I want to remind us of a couple things. He says there, he says, I tell you the truth, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus is giving us a picture of his kingdom. When we come to know Jesus as our Savior, when we accept his sacrifice in our place, and we become a citizen of his kingdom, there are ways that citizens in his kingdom live. And in the Sermon on the Mount, he describes those ways. So when we read them, though they're tough to read, and even this one this morning about anger, it's hard for us sometimes to say, oh man, like I'm excited to hear this. This is describing the kingdom life. This is describing how we will live as we increasingly submit to the king, as we get under his leadership, under his headship, under his rule. And so when Jesus is standing on this mountainside and he's teaching these people, he's saying, Listen, this is how my people live. It's how they do life. And so it's not this disconnected, uh, you know, uh, unrelevant, irrelevant uh teaching. It's actually very true that this is how we as Christ followers live. Now, again, they didn't get all that at the time, but he is saying, and we know that even in the verses that precede the Sermon on the Mount, it says that Jesus went teaching the kingdom. Now, if you remember all the way back to the first sermon that we talked about in this series, we said that Jesus is a greater Moses, okay? That Jesus is a greater Moses. If you look at the Old Testament, Moses goes up to Mount Sinai and he receives the law from the God. Some of you guys know that story, some of you that may be new to you, haven't been in church. Um, but in the Old Testament, we're told that Moses goes up on top of a mountain where there's smoke and there's fire and there's a cloud, and the people are kind of scared and they're trembling and they're afraid, but they're like, Moses, you go, we're staying down here, right? Moses goes up on the mountain, he receives the law from the from the Lord. We call those the Ten Commandments. They're on stone tablets. He comes down to God's people and the 12 tribes and he shares with them what God has said about how his people are going to live, this kingdom of people that he's set apart for himself. Jesus is now up on a mountain, and he's talking about God's law, and he's interpreting it for them, and he's giving it to his twelve disciples. See the parallels? And so we know that Jesus is giving us a new understanding. He's in a sense reinterpreting the law that the Jews, specifically the the scribes and Pharisees, mentioned in that verse 20, that they had had an interpretation of God's law given way back to Moses on Mount Sinai. And I can tell you right now that when Jesus is giving this reinterpretation of the law, that he was causing some people to be a little bit frustrated, a little bit uneasy, uncomfortable. In fact, Jesus is actually being pretty provocative here. Um, many times when we picture Jesus, we think of Jesus as this nice, sweet little Jesus who tells everybody God loves you, right? If you read the New Testament and you think about the culture and the context Jesus was speaking into, he was not this weak, wimpy little dude who was just speaking these nice little soft truths, okay? He was saying things that were very hard for his listeners to hear. They were very provocative. In fact, what he says today, in a couple of places you're going to find, very hard to understand and to really receive for these scribes, these Pharisees, and even some of the people that were listening in the crowd. But I think that what we understand is that God, his truth is good even if it's hard. His truth is freeing even if we don't want to receive it when we hear it. Now, when we get into these kind of passages, we're reminded, and we should, every time we open the Bible, we should be reminded where we fall short, where we um we don't measure up. Uh I was interesting yesterday, our life group, we went out and took some uh some bottles of water and breakfast tacos to some of the homeless in our area, and uh we get out. First thing, there's a guy sitting there in the parking lot over here at South Park Meadows. And so my family and I have got my kids, and one of my sons, he's like saying it's so cold, Daddy's so cold, you know, and wind's blowing his face. I'm like trying to have a conversation, and he's you know, like telling me it's cold. Can I go back to the car? And um I'm starting to talk to this guy, and you know, you never know who you're gonna meet and who you you you're you're really surprised by the stories of these people. And this guy was brilliant, okay? This guy, um, he had worked as an astronomer uh out in in uh in New Mexico in an observatory. Uh he was very, very intelligent. He's quoting Aristotle, he read and knew a lot of it. I'm like, man, what what are you doing out here? He just he just had chosen this way of life, um, and and and he decided this is where he wants to be. And we had a very interesting conversation. It was relatively compact because he was trying to deflect anything that I said about God or Jesus. Um, and I said, hey, that's fine. Like, you don't you don't just keep trying to talk to somebody or argue them in just because you feel like, hey, we're mount here to do that. If they're not ready to receive, they're not ready to receive. But one of the interesting things I said is I said, hey, we just want to give you a breakfast taco and some water. And um I said, is there anything I can pray for you about? He said, Oh man, no, you can't pray for me. He's like, I I can't participate in prayer. I was like, that what do you mean? He goes, you know what Matthew 5 through 7 says? I didn't want to say, well, yeah, I'm teaching through it right now. Um, but I said, No, tell me, what do you what does it say? He's like, well, it's Jesus' sermon on the mount. So, well, what does it mean? He says, Well, it means we're all hypocrites. And I can't be a hypocrite and pray to God. And I actually said to him in that moment, you're getting it. You're actually getting it. You actually get this more than many Christians get. Because many Christians see what's there and say, well, that's just what you know, we just obey it. But he actually understood in that moment that I can't do that, so I'm a hypocrite, so then I can't talk to God. I'm like, yeah, you're right. You're closer to the kingdom than you think, buddy. Here's the reality: when you read these kinds of sermons, when you read kind of these kind of truth and content, you should feel a sense of inadequacy. You should feel a sense of your humanness and your brokenness. And you should feel a sense that there is a huge chasm between a holy God and us as human beings. But you also, in the moment, as we will talk through this message today, remember that God has bridged that chasm. Not because of our good works, but because of his goodness and his grace and his mercy. All right? And that's why we can actually live this stuff. In fact, we cannot live this stuff on our own. But by his power, by his grace, by his Holy Spirit, we actually can. Now, first thing he says here is he says, You have heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. This is the first of six times that Jesus is going to say this in a sermon. You have heard it said. Now, what he didn't say is it is written. And that's important because it is written, he would just be simply quoting the Old Testament. But he's not just quoting the Old Testament, he's actually attaching to it and saying, uh, it is written for sure. That's a fifth commandment, it's in the scripture, but your interpretation, how you guys were actually taking the Old Testament law and how you're using it. And I would say, in Jesus' words, just speaking for him, how you're misusing it, how you actually have lost sight of it. You see, Jesus didn't come to contradict the law, but to clarify it. He didn't come to eliminate it. He didn't come to get rid of the law. He came to show it how it actually works and how we as people can actually fulfill the law, not in of ourselves, but through his fulfillment of the law. He perfectly followed the law. So don't think that Jesus for one moment came in to say the law doesn't matter anymore. He didn't come to get rid of it, like we said last week, right? But in this moment he says, You have heard it said to our ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. If you took Exodus, where we find it in the Ten Commandments, and you took Numbers, where we see it again listed out, where it says, judgment will come on those who uh who do murder. In fact, it even tells you what the judgment is in Numbers. So we know that judgment was attached. Well, what's the problem, Jesus? I'll tell you what the problem was. That verse above where it says your righteousness must be better than the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes and the Pharisees, describes those who literally would copy the words of God in the Torah. They had to be ceremonially cleansed, they had to be really set apart for this work. The Pharisees, who were the legalists of their day, literally the word Pharisee means separatist. It means they set apart themselves by their own external behavior, their own external righteousness, that those two groups of people, their righteousness was based on what they were doing to obey. Their righteousness in their minds was based on how they, in fact, we know that they didn't just obey the Ten Commandments or even uh the few hundred commandments that are in the Old Testament. They actually had added to those commandments to the degree that they literally up in like in the five hundreds of commandments that they would follow and they would display and they'd say, look at us. Um we actually have one of our elders who just recently came on an elder board. He went to a Jewish law school, and he'll tell you stories about how Jews, even today, still follow some of those extenuating commandments that they've added on. Uh even like one simple one, and I'm not making fun of anybody, but I'm just telling you, if you literally go to Israel today and you get on an elevator on the Sabbath, they will not push the button because that would be work. You see, it's very detailed for them and elaborate in how they obey the law. For what purpose? To earn righteousness, to attain a status. And these scribes and Pharisees had an external righteousness. That's how they based their worth and their status in their community. And Jesus is saying in this moment, I'm sure that those Pharisees and scribes were like, look, I'm not a murderer. So I'm good. I'm righteous. And as I said, this is one of six statements where Jesus is actually going to go past the external behavior to what's really going on. In fact, by the time he finishes with this, no one is left untouched by his words. And he says, Do not murder, and whoever murders will be subject to judgment. That's exactly what they were saying. We are not murderers. You could say that they were killing it and not killing anybody, right? That's where they were. They were awesome at keeping that law of do not murder in their minds. But Jesus then takes on their view of the law and he begins to pick it apart. And he does it very directly, very wisely. No surprises, it's Jesus talking. Here's what he says in verse 22. But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. He just ratcheted that up, didn't he? He goes on to say, and whoever says to his brother, fool, will be subject to the Sanhedrin. But whoever says, you moron, will be subject to hellfire. So he just took this commandment that they all knew, the fifth commandment, do not murder, and he starts saying, if you're even angry, you're headed to judgment. If you say to your brother rakah, which means empty-headed, airhead, nothing between the ears, if you say that to your brother, you're headed to judgment. If you say moras, which is also moron, if you say that, then you're headed to judgment. Now, in that there's a progression because there's a there's an angst in the heart, and then it moves to an insult. And we in our country and in our world today, we love insults, right? In fact, we find entertainment in them. There's whole TV shows, sitcoms built around uh insulting people. Uh, even this week, this is kind of not uh a modern example, but this week I heard a story um about Winston Churchill. Some of you guys like history, I like history. And one time he was written uh he was he was confronted by a lady, she said this. She said, Winston, if I were your wife, I would pour poison in your coffee. So you would drink it for breakfast. And he said, Ma'am, if I was married to you, I would drink it. Clever, huh? Here's the fact. Okay. We love insults. And we we actually are entertained by them, unless it's us who's the brunt of the joke. Because there is something powerful about the words that come out of our mouths when we condemn and slander one another, isn't there? When someone posts something on social media about you that's not true, when somebody says something to a group of friends behind your back, when people say things or do things that are hurt, that is that is very difficult. And it is condemnable. It said it's not the way that we as Christ followers are to live. And he says to them, if you say those things, you're headed to judgment. If you do those things, you're headed to judgment. If you say moron, which interestingly enough, what's implied here is something much deeper than just an insult. If Raqqa saying he's an idiot, they're stupid, is is a is a uh you know an insult, the word moron here actually what he's talking about is you're not even worth my time. I'm completely disinterested in engaging you. I don't want to see you, I don't want to be around you, I don't want to have anything to do with you. What he's saying here that is so profound is he's saying that disinterest in other people is actually like murder. Indifference towards other people is literally like murder. Anybody feeling uncomfortable yet? I've got a feeling that when he said this, that you could have heard a pen drop in this crowd. Because he just took a Ten Commandment that everybody's like, I ain't killed anybody, I'm good. And he says, if you have anger in your heart, if you say you're a fool, if you say, I don't want to be around you, get out of my life. And you treat them like that, you're just as guilty. You're just as much headed towards judgment as the person who literally takes a knife and stabs it in somebody's chest and takes away their very life. As I've read that this week, as I've thought about that, I felt the weight of that. You see, I I just get lots more days of conviction before I get to share these messages. And it's hard. It's hard to hear those things. And to be reminded that we as human beings, we do these things, we act in these ways, we feel these things. Now, he says here, I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. And I want to make sure that we're clear because anger is, for all of us in this room, it's something that we're working through, it's something that we're dealing with, okay? Um, I would say that most men I interact with are always at a low-level simmer. Right? I mean, I just think we we have to realize that we we have anger in our world, and it's it's the lava that's below the surface, and it's always just right there, ready to blow, given the opportunity. How do I know that? Because I know my own heart. Because the people that I interact with on a regular basis, I see it in their lives. And the truth of the matter is that every human being on this planet feels the emotion of anger in some form. You see, anger, um, I think it's important for us to grab a hold of this, that anger by itself is morally neutral. Anger is an emotion that God actually gave us. It's an emotion that actually reflects being created in his image. Did you know that God gets angry? But anger itself, I mean, we tend to we tend to kind of classify um emotions as good or bad. So if we say joy is a good emotion and anger is a bad emotion. But that's actually not biblical. Uh anger, if it's the right kind of anger, anger is a good thing. In fact, anger that's reflecting the heart of God, wanting to see the world right. Remember when we were going through the Beatitudes and we said that there are those who want to see the world be made righteous, put right, both the standing with God and the standing with one, like that kind of anger is actually a good thing. That's why Jesus, who's saying these very words, then goes into his temple, God's house, there in Jerusalem, throws over tables, cracks a whip, and shows what? Anger. He also is the same one who stood on the hillside and talks to the Pharisees and says, You fools, you whitewash tombs, you clean your outside and you look all pretty, but inside you're rotten and you're dead. You're sons of the devil. Like, how can he say that? Nice Jesus, right? He can say it because it's true and it's offensive to the Father. It's offensive to him. You see, anger in and of itself is not wrong, but unrighteous anger. Anger that's rooted in my offense and not God's offense is wrong. That's why even Paul writes in Ephesians, he says, In your anger do not sin. It's interesting that all through the Proverbs we find this idea of anger, and where anger is involved in people's lives, it's a very common human experience. And he talks about those who vent their anger, those who let it unleash, it's gonna create destruction, isn't it? So we have to know how to deal with it. Anger is an emotion that's a crossroad. See, again, joy is an emotion, and we automatically ascribe it as a good thing. But what if my joy is in the wrong thing? Then it's no longer righteous, is it? It's no longer good. I get my joy in temporary stuff. But see, anger is. Again, same thing. Motion. It's what we do with the anger. God feels anger when he looks at his broken world and he wants to relieve that. He wants to fix that. In fact, he has made a way, and we'll talk about that. But we need to understand this morning that anger is something we all experience, and anger is a good revealer of what's going on below the surface in your life. It shows you where you're hurt. It shows you where you're wounded. The way we say it sometimes with our elders or some of our ministry team, we say, like, follow the emotion. When you see somebody getting angry, just kind of ask questions and kind of keep pressing in because chances are there's something underneath that where people are really stuck or they're really wounded or they're hurt and they need to turn to Jesus in. Maybe they haven't fully acknowledged it yet, but anger reveals that. Put it this way anger's like a check engine light. Now I know some of you guys are really good in ignoring those. Like I had an uncle and he just put tape over it. It's like, you know, that's great. That helps a lot, right? But a check engine light, when it comes on, that's saying something's wrong, you should probably go get it checked out, right? Anger's like that in our lives. It's a check engine light. And when it comes on, when you see that emotion, when you feel that emotion, when you sense there's something, you need to say, God, what what is that? Where's that coming from? Is it righteous anger? Or is that me just being frustrated and offended or embarrassed? I mean, there's all kinds of things that are attached to that, right? Maybe even baggage from our past that we've not really dealt with. Anger from things that happened in our home when we were growing up. I mean, this isn't pop psychology. This isn't like, let's just go and like lay on a couch and like let's unpack everything. I'm saying what we do need to understand is that we have to get to those root issues where there's hurts, there's wounds, and we have to take them to Jesus. And anger is a great way to indicate, show us, reveal us that there is some issues, that there's some things that are there. So anger is a good revealer. And anger, as I said, is a good response to a broken world. It is a God-given way to deal with what we sense is wrong. So the word for anger, uh, Jesus is speaking of, it's not just a random, you know, past flare-up. It's not just this quick like response, it's gone. He's talking even the word that he uses there. This is where we kind of geek out a little bit in the Greek, but he's literally talking about this undercurrent of anger that's just there and it's just festering. It's that lava thought. And he's saying, if that's there in your life, not okay. It's not okay. And we know that, right? And you guys know, like, when you're bitter, when you're angry, like you you can feel it in your heart, you're not okay. There's there's a lack of peace that's there. Somebody said once that, you know, bitters, bitterness is like uh when you give somebody poison hoping that they would drink it, but it's really like the whole time you're the one who is poisoning yourself, right? Hoping that someone else would experience hurt like you feel hurt. This is a common human experience. In fact, there's not one of us in this room who's exempt from feeling these emotions. So Jesus says these things, and he says that what we deserve because of it is judgment. And all the people there that day on the hillside, they would have immediately understood he meant not just earthly judgment, but divine judgment. They would have immediately said, God is behind, because as Jews, they believed that God was behind all earthly authority, and that that judgment that was coming was going to be a divine, heavenly judgment. Now, here's the truth this morning. When I read those things, anger in your heart, saying things to people that you know or don't know, love, don't love, I don't know, but you're saying things like idiot, foolish, stupid, and when you literally get to the point where you're indifferent to people and you just want them out of the way, um, we are all guilty in some form. Jesus is pointing to the fact that we are all guilty. But here's the beautiful thing if we want to be healed from our anger, we don't have to deflect it, we can accept it. If you actually want to be healed from the anger that's in your life, that low-level lava-like simmering that you're doing, you have to admit that you actually have an anger problem. Now that seems so like basic, but I'm telling you, um, most of us in this room are really good at deflecting. Now, my wife, she'll come to me periodically and she'll say, Um, are you okay? You ever had this conversation? I'm like, Yes, I'm okay. Sure. Fine. Fine. Fine. I mean, we have this thing going on, and and you know, we don't want to admit it. And part of it sometimes is because I'm like, I just want to just get just move on. But the fact is, you don't get healing until you acknowledge that it's there, until you actually admit that it's there. So what happens in our home, I know probably not yours, but she says, Are you okay? And I'm like, fine. Totally fine. Then she keeps asking. Now I'm angry. Because she knows. But when I just say, you know what, that really that really hurt me. That really offended me. That really frustrated me when that happens. And I'm it's silly that I'm offended, but I am, and I need to deal with it. We can move on. We can like deal with it. I grew up in a family of stuffers, right? Typically in a relationship, you have a powder and a shouter. I see how this works out. And people who like to just stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff, and you got all this emotion going on. Eventually, that's going to come out of there. We have to admit it. The faster we can admit it, acknowledge it, we can actually deal with it and we can get free. You remember what the first beatitude was? Blessed are the poor in spirit. See, that was the key to the whole sermon. The whole sermon on the mount is really rooted again in that first thing where blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who know they don't have it all together. Blessed are those who are spiritually bankrupt. Blessed are those who can admit that they have an anger problem. Blessed are those who, every one of these we're about to talk about over the next six weeks, blessed are us who understand that we have a gap between God's holiness and our holiness. Blessed are those of us who realize we have been rebellious, that we have needs, that we are human, that we chase after our own selfish desires. Blessed are those, because in that moment, God can actually come in and bring healing. But when we keep deflecting and pushing it to the margins, when we keep stuffing it, whatever you do in your life, however, you try to avoid that conversation, avoid that issue, you're not going to get healed. But blessed are the poor in spirit. We have to humbly accept it. Another word on this, too. And again, this is this is applicable for marriage. It's also applicable for friendship or relationships with your family. But often you find somebody who's really struggling because the relationship's not going well, and they say, But I didn't do anything. Now, first off, that's rarely completely the case. Right? I mean, if we're completely honest. So what I'm what I typically would ask, and this is because I've learned this in my own life, okay, can you can you say that maybe you have 1% ownership and they have 99? Paul Tripp says, when marriage problems arise, first thing you need to do is draw a circle around yourself and say, okay, God, the problem's in here. It's really wise. But the point is this if you were only 1% guilty, own the 1%. Own the 1%. And for those of you that are competitive in the room, we always say that the most mature person acts first. Okay? Some of y'all got that. You're going to move towards reconciliation first because you want to win, right? You want to move towards getting it right, making it right. Even if you own 1%, you've got to own it before the Lord, before that person. We are all guilty. In fact, verse 23 says this to speak to this very issue. He says, So if you are offering your gift on the altar, this is how serious God takes this, by the way. This is not lightweight stuff to God. So if you are offering your gift on the altar, and there you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift. This is a big deal. The Jewish people understood that offering your altar, offering your gift on the altar, once a year their families would come to the temple and they would offer a gift that was an offering to basically say, we're acknowledging we need God's forgiveness. And it was a major part of their act of worship to God. In fact, it was kind of the pinnacle of their year. And he says, literally, if that's where you are, you're doing your pinnacle religious duty. What's more important is not offering that altar, but going to your brother or your sister who you've got a problem with and dealing with it. In this specific issue, did you notice what he says? He says, if somebody has something against you. Now in Matthew 18, he talks about if you have something against someone else. But both scenarios are true in that we need to be reconcilers. This is consistent with what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5 when he says that God's reconciled us to himself, and now we have a ministry of reconciliation, that the Christian life is continually a ministry of reconciliation. That we take serious going to people and seeking peace, asking forgiveness, offering forgiveness. God says it's so important that he would literally tell us today if he was standing here. He said, if you are sitting in this room and you're listening to a sermon, or you are taking communion, or you are singing worship songs, and you know in your heart that there is something wrong with you and your brother, then you need to get up and you need to go. I won't be offended. God will be honored. Because we can't play the game. What's the game? The game is where we say, well, everything's okay. God, I love you. You're awesome. But we know in our heart this is the issue here. This here relationship affects this relationship. This relationship affects this relationship, right? They aren't disconnected. That's why John says in his short book, 1 John, he says, if we say we love God but hate our brother, we're liars. Strong words, but reminding us that God takes very serious our relationship with one another. Now, let me make this very clear to you. The Bible also says, as far as it is up to you, be at peace with all people. As far as it is up to you. This is very hard for me. Can I just be honest? This is very, very hard for me. There are some people who don't want to be at peace with you right now. There are some people they're wrestling with their own anger. They're wrestling with their own sin. The Bible doesn't say that you have to go fix their sin. The Bible doesn't say you have to go change how they're interacting with you. The Bible says, own what you can own. Humble ourselves, humiliate even ourselves. But then let the Spirit of God work. And sometimes, as even in the book of 1 Corinthians, where Paul says, listen, catch this. Paul says that there's a guy that's in their congregation and he's living in immorality. He says, you need to disassociate with him. You need to like literally kick him out of the family and hope and pray that he will come to his senses. There are moments like that where in your life you probably need to avoid toxic relationships in order to let God deal with that person. So I'm not standing in front of you today saying that if you've got a situation with someone who you've already tried to approach and seek forgiveness and help them, and they're not listening, that you have to just keep on banging on that door. That's not the goal. We have to give room for God. We're not the Holy Spirit, right? We're not part of the Trinity. But our job is to love people, to serve people, to humble ourselves, to seek forgiveness, and then let God do his work. And I think it's really important because some of you might feel a sense of, oh man, I'm gonna go, I've got to go fix that. Now, if God's saying it may be time to go try again, that might be the word for you today. Maybe you have a relationship that's broken and it's just been a while. I was in a church one time, it's a small country church, I was in college, and we were we were there and we were um we were teaching uh these it was called revival, these these uh it was called life action revival or whatever. Anyway, so we did these summer deals and we were doing these revivals, and you know, I didn't know what what I was doing. I prayed a lot and just was like, Lord, use me, I don't know what I'm doing. And God used me because um I didn't know what I was doing. So I had to have a lot of room for the Holy Spirit to work. Okay? And we'd get up and preach these sermons, we'd do them every night for a week. And one of these little small country churches we were in, there was these two ladies, and they had been at each other for like 30 years. 30 years. They had had a grudge against each other. They'd literally sit on two different sides of the church building and they'd scowl at each other. It was the dumbest thing. Did I say they were dumb? Oh, Lord forgive me. It was dumb. And here's the thing. Finally, through this revival, again, the Holy Spirit working, not 19-year-old Nick, who didn't know what he was doing. And God's word came and they said, we need to make this right. And what was crazy is we asked Lady, do you remember why you're mad? And neither one of them could remember. They couldn't even remember what the offense was. It's ridiculous. But that's how the human heart works, right? So what I'm saying to us is we have to be serious, like God is saying, Jesus is saying this, to be serious about making relationships right. And notice he even says in the next verse, reach a settlement quickly with your adversary while you're on the way with him, or your adversary will hand you over to the judge, the judge to the officer, and you'll be thrown into prison. He says, you need to do it now. Like, don't wait until it's a public spectacle. Do it now. Don't wait until everybody's like has to view this thing. I mean, he's saying on the way. Get it done. Deal with it. Ephesians 4, I already referred to it once. I'll say it again. He says, before the sun goes down. Don't let the sun go down on your anger, right? Literally, don't let the day in before, don't let your head hit the pillow before you deal rightly with this stuff. Don't let it fester. The longer it festers, the more bitterness, anger, hatred, even will start to well up in your heart because that's where we are as human beings. Deal with it now. Jesus is serious about urgency. We got to deal with this. Can I just be honest? I am not very good at this. I said earlier, all of us handle conflict and situations like that different. I'm just like, maybe it'll blow over. God says, no. Go deal with it now. Maybe you, some of you in this room, have sat here, and God at times has stirred your heart to say, you need to make a relationship right, and you're like, well, if I just wait long enough, that feeling will go away, and then I can just keep making it for a little while until the next time they teach on forgiveness. Listen, the Holy Spirit will not let us be at peace if we aren't forgiving and seeking forgiveness. Our salvation is not based on our performance in this area, but our peace with God and our communion with Him is impacted by how we handle our obedience to these commands. Is that makes sense? And some of you are suffering and feeling like, God, you feel so far away. You feel so distant. Where are you, God? Do you even exist? You don't hear my prayers? He's like, I've been telling you, go and deal with your brother. Go work this sin issue out. And you're just like, nope, not that. Everything but that. Lord, I want to feel your presence. Lord, bless my bank account. Lord, help my job go well. Lord, help my kids behave. He's like, there's an issue. And we're like, oh, I don't want to mess with that. Guys, we've got to deal with it. And if that's not enough, the very last thing that Jesus says, I mean, I told you already, Jesus is just ratcheting this thing up. Just he gets to the very last sentence of this section, and he says something that's pretty odd and it's just disruptive. And he says this, he says, I assure you, you will never get out of there until you have paid the last penny. The prison, you'll never get out. Why? Because once you're in prison, you can't earn a living, can't make money, so you can't pay the debt. So he says, You're kind of in a hopeless spot. Well, thanks, Jesus. That feels great, you know? This is where you're gonna be. You know what Jesus is doing? Jesus is pointing us to the gospel. He's pointing us to the great reality that you and I could never earn our way by our own righteous acts. We could never get to God by being moral enough. We could never earn our way into right standing with Him, justify ourselves before a holy God by obeying the law. We're stuck. We're all guilty, and we're stuck in prison, and we can't earn our way out. And you know what? That's good news today. You're like, oh, you're really weird. That's sick and twisted. No, you want to know why it's good news? Because it shows us our need for Jesus. It shows us our need for Jesus. I said well ago that Jesus, God Himself, gets angry. You know what he gets most angry about? He gets most angry as he looks down on humanity. He sees a rebellious human race and he sees that there's a chasm between us, and he sees that we're imprisoned, and that many people actually like it. And they're okay with being at odds with him. But he sees that chasm and he sees that something has to be done. He sees that there has to be a way to fix what was broken all the way back in the Garden of Eden and continues to be the trajectory of the human life, to reject his rule and his reign, to not be a part of his kingdom. He says, I've got to fix that. I'm angry. In fact, the Bible would even say he's furious about it. So furious that his wrath had to be satisfied. And here's the beautiful message this morning. If you want to be healed from your anger, look at how God dealt with his anger. His righteous anger. You know how he dealt with it? Instead of punishing you and I, he punished Jesus. He placed his wrath, his anger on Jesus. Jesus actually satisfied. And listen to what 1 John 2, verse 1 and 2 says. Just in case you forget. We have an advocate with the Father. Who is the advocate? Jesus Christ, the righteous one, the one who obeyed the law perfectly. He himself is the propitiation. That's a big theological term. And you know what it means? Summarize what it means. It means he satisfied the anger, the wrath of God. God was angry at sin and sinners. And he actually aimed that anger, that wrath towards his own son on the cross. And he satisfied his wrath on the person of Jesus. He is himself the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but for the whole world. For anyone who would actually come to believe in Jesus Christ as a Savior can have God's anger removed from them and placed on Jesus. Praise God. Praise God. In 1 John 2, 5 and 6, just a few verses removed from that one. He says, This is how we know we are in Him. The one who says he remains in Him should walk just as He walked. What is he saying? Just as Jesus loved us and gave Himself up for us, forgave us, we should also love and give. To one another, forgiving one another, what? Just as God also forgave you in Christ. What's the measure of forgiveness for the Christian? Christ. That's our measure. How much do we forgive others? When one of Jesus' disciples said, you know, he thought he was being really clever, and he's like, should we forgive seven times? Jesus says, no, seven times, right? Seventy times seven. Basically, as many times as it takes, because that's what God has done. When he went to the cross for us, we are under his blood, have been forgiven, have been set free, have been set free from that prison that we couldn't earn our way out of. Listen, this morning, every one of us in this room can identify with being angry and sinning. We are guilty. We can see God's forgiveness. And if you're in Christ, if you're already a child of God, you have his forgiveness. But we still confess our sin. We still confess it to others as well. Because the Bible says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful to forgive our sins, cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Also, we confess it to our brothers because he says we confess our sins one another so that we might be healed. There's something beautiful about speaking it out, sharing it with our brothers and sisters in Christ that I have an anger problem and I need God's healing. I'm admitting that, I'm acknowledging that, I'm giving it to Jesus today. I'm asking for help. We need to do what's necessary to make it right. And I would say, in the same words of Paul, in the same words of Jesus here, let's be urgent about it. Don't let another Sunday go by where we come and we sing songs and we hear sermons all the while we have grudge in our heart. It's not good. You're in your own prison. Let us walk in the light and the love of God. Brothers and sisters, we pray. Father, thank you so much that you are faithful and you're good and you're gracious. God, you know our hearts better than we do. You know the messes we've made. You know the offenses we've committed. You know the people that right now we're at odds with. And my prayer, Father, is that we wouldn't leave this room until we've been honest with you, maybe with another person, but at least honest with you, and that God, that this day would not end before we do what we need to do to make it right with that person. Father, I pray for us to have courage this morning, for us to be humble, quit deflecting, own it, confess it, and repent of it. And I pray, Father, for every person that might be sitting in this room without the knowledge of salvation. Not aware, or maybe becoming aware now, that they need Jesus. They need your forgiveness. I pray, Father, that today we would humble ourselves. We have nothing to prove, God. Every one of us in this room are needy. Every one of us in this room are spiritually bankrupt on our own. And so we just come humbly confessing our sin and acknowledging our need for you. I pray that you'd lead us to this time this morning. We pray this in your name, Jesus. Amen.