We’re called to feel peace and yet anger can boil up so easily in the midst of the turmoils of life. What do we do with that as we seek to follow Jesus?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight. I hope you’re glad to be here, but we’re not going to be talking about gladness tonight. As we continue our series, we’re going to be talking about anger. What do we do with anger? What do we do when we feel anger? What makes you angry? Something that made you angry today? Something that’s been festering and upsetting you this week? Maybe it was some of the baseball that we got to see over the weekend. If you’ve been following the Cardinals’ race towards the postseason and claiming the wild card spot, the second one this past week, and all the excitement around that, there was some reason to get a little upset over the weekend.
In the midst of one of the games that we had, a crucial game to getting to the postseason, the umpire couldn’t seem to call balls and strikes. He couldn’t tell the difference, it seemed like—and not just in the sense that all the Cardinals fans are stressed and feeling emotional right now, and we want everything to go our way—but actually, someone drew out the chart and the man was just radically off. The players were having to deal with this, and the fans were having to deal with this and feeling the anger over this. How can you be so silly? How can you be calling these balls and strikes wrong? Imagine how much more so if you’re one of the major league players and you feel the weight of the entire season, possibly your career on your shoulders, and you’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, and yet there is this umpire who’s just radically off.
One moment like that came in that game on Saturday when Tyler O’Neill was up to bat. He’s trying to see the ball correctly. He is seeing the ball correctly, but the umpire wasn’t, and he gets called out on strikes that weren’t really strikes. How frustrating would that be? In the moment, you could sort of see a little bit of that anger go across his face, but he held it in. He held it in, and thankfully he did because if he’d let it all out and he’d been yelling at the umpire, he might’ve gotten thrown out of the game. If he’d gotten thrown out of the game, he wouldn’t have hit the game-winning home run later in the game. He needed to hold it in, and he needed to ponder that anger and to process it.
I love what he says in an interview after the game. He referred to the umpire and said, “Phil’s a good umpire. He’s been around the league a long time. I thought a couple of calls to me were off the plate, but that was his zone, and I’ve got to adjust as a player. The thing with me is just trying to stay as disciplined as I can and not miss a pitch to hit. That was it. Just maturing. That’s it.” I really love how he says that last part because he’s speaking, of course, of a baseball game, but he’s really speaking about our experience in life too. How do we call the situations in life? How do we face when people are calling balls and strikes and getting it wrong with us? And not just we wish it were different, but even when it is just that we are being faced with unjust calls and our anger is righteous, how do we discipline ourselves? God’s word calls us to. How do we mature in Christ? God’s word calls us to do that so that we can wrestle with the anger that we feel and live righteously.
Let’s come before our God and ask for his guidance as we think about this subject tonight, for he is the only one who can help us to do that. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your word and for the wisdom we find in it, for the guidance we find in it, for your love that we find in it. As we think about times that we become angry, both righteously and unrighteously, would you help us? Help us to mature. Help us to be disciplined. Help us to be focused more on sharing your gospel and showing your love than expressing and venting in the moment. Help us to know how to truly be righteous. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Was O’Neill wrong to have anger in that moment? Was it wrong if maybe even he channeled that anger and he used it to be all the more focused and he hit that home run later on? Well, in a baseball sense, I’d say that was righteous anger. And that’s what we learn about in Scripture, that not all anger is sin. In fact, anger and sin are not synonymous at all. We often think about that because we think about the excesses in our own lives and in the lives of others. But as we continue our series on Psalm 4 and we see what David writes in verse 4, we see that anger itself isn’t the problem.
Let’s take a look. David says, “Be angry and do not sin. Ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent.” Ponder in your own hearts, be angry, do not sin. It sets up the biblical model of anger, which is different than a worldly model of anger. We have worldly models of anger that just say, if you feel angry, just be authentic. Let it all out. Roar and rage at people. And there are also models that say, well, you need to be stoic and hold it all in because anger is bad and must be defeated. But what do we see in Scripture? We see example after example of righteousness, example after example of righteous anger shown.
For example, Moses shows righteous anger when he becomes enraged at the Pharaoh for holding God’s people and rejecting what the Lord has called the Pharaoh and God’s people to do. Once again, Moses becomes enraged when he comes down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandments. And what does he see? He sees the people of Israel worshiping a golden calf, turning their hearts away from the Lord. He becomes righteously indignant for the Lord.
Jesus, of course, famously goes into the temple, turns over the temple tables. If there’s ever the perfect example that we like to go to when talking about righteous anger, there it is. Jesus goes in and says, “You’ve turned a place of worship from my Father into a den of thieves.” It’s been corrupted. People can’t even get around to worship because now you’re trying to overcharge them for various services in the temple itself. He turns his anger once again to the Pharisees elsewhere in the Gospels. He’s angry over the temple. He’s also angry over the distortion of God’s word that the Pharisees do.
Likewise, Paul, for example, in Galatians 1, becomes outraged at those who are perverting the gospel and trying to change it to fit their own inclinations. So there are examples of righteous anger throughout Scripture. In fact, Jim Crenning took us to the book of Nehemiah last night to think about the work that God called Nehemiah to, and we see examples throughout Nehemiah of him also becoming quite angry, both of how the Israelite people restored to their land were actually taking advantage of their own fellow Israelites, and also how those people being restored by God to their land were turning their hearts away from focus on God’s glory. Nehemiah became angry in those moments.
Throughout David’s life, there are examples of righteous anger as well, and we see those expressed in the Psalms. Psalm 139, for example, shows a picture of righteous anger. It says, “O that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! They speak against you with malicious intent. Your enemies take your name in vain.” What do we see in examples like that? We see an anger for the Lord, a jealousy for the Lord’s name, that when people are speaking ill of the Lord and mocking what He’s doing, when people are just being awful and in doing so harming the Lord’s reputation, the righteous person can get angry.
But even when the initial instance that causes us to become angry is righteous, there’s always a risk that we’re going to allow it to fester into an unrighteous result. And so, for example, I mentioned Moses had several cases of very clear righteous anger in his work that the Lord called him to. But one of the final examples we see is where that righteous anger goes wrong in Numbers chapter 20. You see, Moses once again becomes righteously angry over the people grumbling against the Lord and what the Lord’s called them to do. But this time, he takes matters into his own hands and he doesn’t do what the Lord has called him to do. He instead changes what he’s going to do, disregards what the Lord has said because he is so angry at the people.
And in that, he ends up bringing attention to himself rather than towards God. He’s not pointing the people towards God anymore; he’s simply pointing them towards his own rage. Now, to be clear, Moses is still favored by the Lord. God refers to him as a friend. But Moses doesn’t go into the promised land. There are consequences to that unrighteous anger that he shows. And there are consequences when we show unrighteous anger. Time after time, that unrighteous anger is pointing people away from what God has called us to do.
For example, the disciples in Luke chapter 9, they’re preaching in Samaria and the people aren’t receiving Jesus. And the disciples start to feel anger. It says, “But the people did not receive him,” that’s Jesus, “because his face was set towards Jerusalem.” The Samaritans didn’t like Jerusalem. So what happens? It says, “When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’” Talk about a fire and brimstone sermon. The disciples say, “These people, they’re being stubborn. They’re not listening to your gospel, Jesus. Why don’t we just have a barbecue? Let’s just roast them. Be done with them.”
They’re just fools, and they’ve hurt my pride. They’ve hurt you. I just want to see them punished. Notice the problem in what they’re doing. It doesn’t provide opportunity for pointing people to God’s kingdom. Yes, it does show that these people were wrong to reject Jesus, but the disciples didn’t know those people’s hearts. Jesus did. And Jesus clearly knew that these people were people that were still going to be given time, time to hear the gospel and time to respond to it. It wasn’t their time for judgment. The disciples, just in their unrighteous rage, wanted to bring down fire.
And so the first thing they needed to do, and the thing that we see here in Psalm 4, is to ponder. Notice what David says. He says that you should ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. In other words, when you’re feeling this emotional response rising up in you and you’re just angry and you just want to take out vengeance, and maybe you think it’s vengeance for the Lord, but if we could really peer in our hearts, a lot of it’s vengeance for ourselves and how people are attacking us. Ponder it. Make sure that what you’re doing, not just the initial impulse, but the action, is pleasing to God.
Now, that’s one side of where we fall into—that we act too quickly. The other side, though, is that we let it simmer and we just feed that anger and we allow it to fester and grow worse and worse. And that’s what Paul refers to when he quotes from Psalm 4 in Ephesians chapter 4. Take a look. He says, “Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.”
Now, there is absolutely a need to take time to think through things at times, because our initial knee-jerk reactions are wrong. But Paul says, don’t feed it and allow it to keep growing. And you may say, “But Tim, it seems like these are contradictory.” David says, the anger that you’re feeling, take it and ponder in your heart. Go to bed. Don’t act rashly. But Paul says, don’t let the sun go down on your anger. And so, unless I’m going to sleep in the middle of the day, what am I supposed to do?
They’re hitting two different things. And part of that comes out—the word translated anger in Ephesians that Paul uses is an unusual word for anger in the New Testament. And it’s thought that it’s really capturing more of a sense of not continuing to feed the initial blaze, not provoking more and more anger. You see, what we often do is we not only become angry. I become angry, for example, when Siri triggers in the middle of a sermon, like she’s doing right now. And I think, “Why are you on right now? I don’t want to talk to you right now. No, no, Siri, there isn’t anything you can help me with right now. There really isn’t.”
And so I become angry. Now, imagine, though, if I feel that anger and I just want Siri to go away. And as I do that, I spend all day reading about how horrible Siri is, and I get rid of her. And how I want somehow to take vengeance on the person that created Siri. That’s clearly unrighteous anger. We shouldn’t let it fester.
And we do that so much in our culture, and not just silly examples like that. We do that in big examples. We go online and we read the news and we read social media. And what do we do? We gravitate towards the stuff that makes us angry. And we feed the anger we feel about our political opponents. We feed the anger we feel about people who live in different parts of the world. We feed our anger about people who aren’t Christian. And we just build up and we just build up more and more anger.
And I believe that’s what Paul’s talking about there. Don’t build that up. Shut it down. And if we see something and we have the ability to shut it down, shut it down the same day. Don’t keep feeding that anger. Paul knows as much as David does that the anger is a complex subject, that situations don’t often get completely resolved in a day. His feud with Barnabas didn’t get resolved in a day. And I don’t think that’s contradicting his advice. But he didn’t keep feeding it. That’s the key thing.
We need to reject our culture of outrage, and when people are trying to get us to be outraged at people, we need to slow down first before we jump in knee-jerk on it. But then we also need to speed up and move away from the thing that makes us angry and move back to God’s Word. And if there’s an opportunity and we’re angry at a particular person, seek restoration. Seek it rapidly.
That’s what we see here. The whole driving force of both of these pieces of advice is to lead to greater restoration of God’s people, to lead to greater restoration before the Lord. That’s what we need to do. Now, one of the things we need to do to get there is to ask the question, am I facing a genuine wrong? Or am I just feeding a rush of anger? Because sometimes I’m just getting angry and it feels sort of good. I’ve had a hard day and we go online and we read whomever we happen to agree with and they give us reasons to be angry. And I’m feeling a little better. I’m feeling excited. I have a reason to be righteously indignant at all those people who aren’t as wise on whatever subject as I am. And it makes me feel good, right? We do that.
That’s why we all like to tune to the cable news channel we agree with most. But here’s the problem. That’s not leading people to Jesus. It’s not causing us to be righteous. It’s just making us feel self-righteous. And that’s the question we need to probe our hearts with. We need to ask ourselves, when I’m feeling angry and I’m feeding it, am I simply making myself feel self-justified? I’m not pointing people to Jesus. I’m not turning hearts towards Him. If I’m really just making myself feel important, like the disciples were when they wanted to call down that fire, that’s the problem.
And maybe you’re listening tonight and you’ve been hesitant to turn on a live stream like this because you’ve run into Christians who are really angry. And I hate that that happens. I’m glad you’re here because what I want you to hear is that’s not who Jesus is. That’s not how Jesus is. And it’s not who He calls us to be. Yes, we fail. We’re sinners. And we are desperately in need of His grace and His transformation continuing throughout our lives. That’s not what we’re supposed to be. And I’m glad you’re here. And I hope that you hear that.
And if you’re listening tonight and you are a Christian, I hope that what we’re all hearing who are Christians is we need to do better on this because we’re all going to struggle on this. But we need to be aware of what’s happening and flee unrighteousness. And when God provides opportunities to flee it, when He provides wise advice to flee it, to seize it.
Another story in David’s life shows us an example of that. And that’s the story of David and Nabal. Nabal heard of David while David’s fleeing from Saul, and David is seeking refuge. And David’s men have been protecting Nabal’s shepherds. And so David thinks, “Nabal will give me some refuge for a few days. This is a hard time, and I’m sure he’ll provide it.” That’s not how Nabal responds. Nabal says, “And why would I help you? You’re just a servant running away from his master Saul. I have no interest in helping you.”
And what we see next is David’s mood after that. He feels anger, and some of it’s righteous. He’s been doing the right thing and he’s been treated poorly. It says, “Now David had said, surely in vain have I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him. And he has returned me evil for good. God do so to the enemies of David. And more also, if by mourning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him.”
So David feels that rage. He wants to give the response that’s going to feed into that rage. And in that moment, he’s gone from a righteous indignation all the way into unrighteousness because he thinks, “I’m just going to kill him. I’m going to kill everybody associated with him.”
Fortunately, Nabal has a very wise wife who realizes what Nabal’s done and she realizes how unrighteous her husband’s acted. And she goes and reaches out to David. We see that as we go on in verse 23. It says, “When Abigail saw David, she hurried and got down from the donkey and fell before David on her face and bowed to the ground. She fell at his feet and said, ‘On me alone, my Lord, be the guilt. Please let your servant speak in your ears and hear the words of your servant.
Let not my Lord regard this worthless fellow Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name, and folly is with him. But I, your servant, did not see the young men of my Lord, whom you sent. Now then, my Lord, as the Lord lives and as your soul lives, because the Lord has restrained you from blood guilt and from saving with your own hand, now then let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my Lord be as Nabal.’”
She goes on a few verses later in verse 30. “And when the Lord has done to my Lord according to all the good that he has spoken concerning you and has appointed you Prince over Israel, my Lord shall have no cause of grief or pangs of conscience for having shed blood without cause or for my Lord working salvation himself.” And when the Lord has dealt well with my Lord, then remember your servant.
Abigail recognizes some really important things here. She’s heard that David’s been promised the kingdom. She can see what’s going to happen because it’s the Lord’s will. And she sees what David’s done in the past—that David has resisted going and just taking all of his anger out on Saul for Saul rejecting him, just killing Saul and being done with it, and then ascending to the throne. We know through history that’s often how kings rise to power. It wouldn’t have been weird if David had done it. But David was called to something different. David was called to live as a righteous king, to follow the Lord’s will, and to trust the Lord. And to an extent, he had been doing so. He’d been resisting doing that sort of bloodshed, but now he’s going to fall into it on a much lesser, silly sort of incident.
And Abigail says, “You’ve resisted being the one with blood guilt on the big things. Don’t fall into it here. Don’t take it into your own hand. Trust the Lord and allow it that when your kingdom comes into fruition, it is fully exactly as the Lord has promised. Allow it to be that fully. Don’t allow that guilt to stain it.” David needed to trust in the Lord in that moment. That’s what he talks about back in Psalm 4 verse 5. He says, “Offer right sacrifices and put your trust in the Lord.”
You see, as David reflects on this anger and pondering it and not allowing it just to come bursting out in unrighteous ways, I have to think he’s probably thinking back to times like this and other times in his kingdom where he’s seen people that want to defend him even, that are righteously angry that the enemies of David want to kill the Lord’s anointed. David says, “You need to trust the Lord. Focus on Him. Make sure you’re offering right sacrifices to Him. Don’t worry about the people who are attacking you. Don’t worry about the people who are opposing you and doing wrong to you. Worry first about the Lord. Make sure you’re bringing Him glory.”
David, in that moment with Abigail, I believe the Lord’s speaking clearly through Abigail, and David sees that very clearly. Verse 32, David said to Abigail, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, who sent you this day to meet me. Blessed be your discretion and blessed be you who have kept me this day from blood guilt and from working salvation with my own hand. For as surely as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, who has restrained me from hurting you, unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by morning there had not been left to enable so much as one male.”
Then David received from her hand what she had brought him, and he said to her, “Go up in peace to your house. See, I have obeyed your voice, and I have granted your petition.”
David hears the word of the Lord speaking through Abigail. He realizes he needs to trust in the Lord, and in the psalm, that’s what he’s challenging us to do too. It’s okay to be angry, but check your heart. Ponder what’s going on in your heart when you’re angry, and trust in the Lord’s justice. Because when we trust in the Lord, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be angry anymore. It doesn’t even mean at times that we shouldn’t take action, but it means I don’t need to unleash vengeance. I’m not the one that’s ultimately going to make things right.
And in that, we see a picture in the Bible of anger as something that actually can be useful. Because in all those examples we talked about where there was righteous anger, what did it do? It cleansed. It took away the filth. It took away the blindness of people. It turned people towards the Lord, and it protected God’s people.
The problem is if it’s allowed to fester, it becomes dangerous. It’s a lot like bacteria. I don’t usually think, “Oh, I can’t wait to have more bacteria around me.” We use antibiotic soap. We clean things. We want things to not have all kinds of bacteria on them because, rightly so, bacteria can be very harmful to us. But good bacteria can be used in all kinds of wonderful ways. It can make cheese. It can pickle pickles. It can cause sourdough to grow, and I love making things with sourdough. It can even apparently clean statuary.
There are a number of statues that have been restored recently of Michelangelo that had accumulated centuries of dust and grime in Italy, and they no longer showed the real true marble color. They had turned yellow and had just filth on them. The restorers wanted to clean them, but they didn’t want to use caustic chemicals that might cause other harm. They came up with the innovative idea of taking a bacteria that happened to love eating the sort of grime that was on these statues and placing it on the statue. And you can see in this picture, on the left, you can see the statue is yellowed, and if you look at the statue’s stomach area, it’s darkened from all the centuries of dirt, but on the right, it is that clean marble color—exactly how it should have been to begin with. The bacteria cleansed it. It took it away.
And that’s what righteous anger should be doing. We need to flee the outrage culture that causes us to stir up and just be angry and want to destroy things, but we should embrace anger when what it’s causing us to do is actually want to restore things.
You see, when our anger is unrestrained and we plunge ahead with it, we plunge into unrighteousness, and in that it seeks discord. We’re seeking to break things apart and to show our own superiority. But when anger is guided by love, when it’s guided by God’s word, instead it seeks true peace. Now, in our culture, we often don’t think of anger as bringing peace, but so often what we call peace is simply a toleration of a cold war.
Things are broken and wrong. People are unaware of how they are missing out on the Lord. People are doing injustices to other people, and we look the other way because it keeps the status quo. But true peace is a peace that cleanses those things. And righteous anger rightfully directed with God’s love infused in it builds up even the people we’re angry at. It builds them up and it helps them to see the truth, helps them to experience God’s love, and it helps all of us to shine with the colors that we’re supposed to.
To show what is true, it is to stay in that game and hit that home run and not get thrown out. That’s what we should be praying for—that we would show that kind of light to the world as we go into it this day and every day.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, so often our anger is unrighteous. We don’t hold it back because it feels good to let it out. We become angry at things that shouldn’t even matter to us because we just want to be angry, and then we find more things to pile on so that the raging inferno can keep going, all the time sowing discord and turning people away from you. Lord, would you help us to only be righteously angry, and when we are righteously angry, would you help us to cling to your word so that we might ponder it, that we might seek solutions that grow people, that cleanse people, not that break people apart. For that is what you do. You build people up, you restore us, and would you make us agents of your restoration. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, I hope this has been an encouragement to you tonight. And if you know anyone who’s been struggling with anger, been struggling with just things not seeming right in their lives, and this could encourage them, consider sharing this video with them. Consider sharing it on your Facebook page or other social media. I think all of us are struggling with anger. We live in a culture of anger, and you can help people hear that the Bible actually comes to that topic and doesn’t say, “Well, just hold it all in,” or “Just let it all out,” but helps us to think about how to be righteous even in anger.
Well, next week we’re going to be picking up with the last part of this series, thinking about discouragement, which is another part of this process of injustice and people mistreating us and life just being difficult. And David writes about that in Psalm 4 as well, and so we see God dealing with these range of emotions that we experience and actually coming to us in them.
I hope you’ll join me for that as well. If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week—if you’re feeling discouraged or angry or anything else—I’d love to hear from you. I’d love to pray for you or leave a comment in the comments below. We can all pray for you. It’s always great to hear from you, however you do it.
I’ll see you next week for that. But in the meantime, if you happen to have the opportunity and you’re a man looking for a men’s Bible study, I would love to see you on Thursday night. We’re going to have our online men’s Bible study. It’s going through the book of Acts. It’s a wonderful time with some other guys just digging into God’s word and seeing what God is doing, both in the past but doing right now in the present, and what He’s going to do in the future as He sends His gospel into the world. Love to see you for that.
I can’t wait to see you again next week for the final part of the series. In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week.
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