No Longer A Slave To Anger! Series

No Longer a Slave to ANGER!

Series: No Longer Slaves

Chuck Sligh

February 24, 2019

NOTE: A PowerPoint presentation is available for this sermon by request at chucksligh@hotmail.com.

TEXT: Ephesians 4:26-27, 29-31 – “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: 27 Neither give place to the devil. [Now go down to verse 29] 29 Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. 30 And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. 32 And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.”

INTRODUCTION

Illus. – Did this ever happen to you”—“Your respiration deepened. Your heart began to beat rapidly. Your arterial pressure rose. Blood shifted from your stomach and intestines to the heart, central nervous system and muscles. The processes of the alimentary canal ceased. Sugar was freed from the reserves in your liver. Your spleen contracted and discharged its contents of concentrated corpuscles and adrenaline was secreted.”

You might be saying, “If it did, I don’t recall it.” Well, guess what: if you have ever been angry, it happened to you. I just described the physiological description of what happens when a person gets angry.

Richard Cumberland of the 17th century wrote: “Of all bad things with which mankind is cursed / Their own bad tempers surely are the worst.”

Joke – I like the anger management strategy of a young man with a crying baby in a baby stroller. He kept saying quietly, “Calm down George, don’t scream, George, quiet, George!”

An elderly woman passing by stopped and said to him, “I see you’re really patient with your son George.”

The man answered, “I’m George.”

Joking aside, let me share some interesting statistics with you…

• Did you know that family members who were angry commit 60% of all homicides?

• Dr. Redford Williams, director of Duke University’s Behavioral Medicine Research Center said, “The hostility and anger associated with Type A behavior is the major contributor to heart disease in America.”

• If you have a problem with anger, you are five times more likely to have a heart attack than the average person.

• It’s also been found in a study that men who score high for hostility on standard tests are four times more likely to die prematurely than men whose scores were low.

• Indeed, Clarence Macartney was right when he said, “Anger is one of the most common sins, yet one of the most dangerous and injurious to the peace and well-being of man.”

We’re in a sermon series titled, “No Longer Slaves.” A lot of people are enslaved to wrong expressions of anger, but God does not want that for you! Let’s see what the Bible says about anger, and how we can be freed from its destructive grip on our lives:

I. CONSIDER WITH ME FIRST THAT ANGER ITSELF IS NOT A SIN!

That may surprise you but look again at verse 26 in our text– “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”

Paul doesn’t say, “Don’t be angry” but rather, “When you’re angry, don’t sin, and especially do not let the sun go down on your wrath.” Anger is a normal human emotion, and though all emotions must be controlled and channeled properly, in itself, anger is not wrong.

In fact, there is an anger that is sanctioned by God and is even exhibited by God Himself. At least 18 times in the Old Testament we read of God being angry, but we know that God is without sin of any kind. In several of Jesus’s parables, various characters are metaphors of God, and in these, God is portrayed as angry against wrongs and sins and injustices committed. Divine anger was always directed against sin or those who committed sin.

On several occasions Jesus Himself was angry, yet He never sinned. – He famously became angry at the temple wheelers and dealers because they turned the house of God into a den of thieves, yet we’re told by the writer of Hebrews that Jesus was tempted just like us, yet was without sin.

Likewise, when we—God’s followers—hear of evil deeds, we often become angry about it, and that’s not only not wrong; it’s actually a right and holy response.

Henry Ward Beecher said, “A man who does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good. A man who does not know how to be shaken to his heart’s core with indignation over things that are evil is either a fungus or an evil man himself.”