Ephesians 4:25-5:2

[0:00] Well, good evening. If you have not been here for the last couple of weeks, you'll know we are continuing in our series in the book of Ephesians.

[0:12] We're looking at the end of Ephesians chapter 4. Someone have a page number for me on that in the Pew Bible. 9.78 in the Pew Bible.

[0:24] If you want to turn with me to Ephesians. And what we've already seen is that the book of Ephesians lays out the first three chapters about the work of Christ in Christ.

[0:37] The work of redemption that he has done and the calling he has placed on our life to be his because of this redemption. And then chapter 4 through 6 is what does it mean to live this out? All right.

[0:47] What are we doing here? Sorry. That's me. I'm banging against my beard here. So we'll try to fix that. So all right. See how we go. All right. Here we go. So 4 through 6 is how do we live that out?

[0:58] It's a practical instructions about how it is that we now then as Christians are called to live. You may be here tonight. You may be exploring Christianity. And hopefully as you'll hear it, you will see some of the connections between the way Christians fail and the Christians succeed in doing this.

[1:15] And also the wellspring out of which Christians seek to and are called to by the scriptures to live a different life. If you're a Christian here tonight, hopefully you will see how the connection between chapters 1 through 3 and chapters 4 through 6 actually work together.

[1:31] And you'll see how the great news that Jesus died on the cross for your sins can actually change how you interact with people on a day-to-day basis. Because that's kind of where we're in.

[1:42] We are down in the weeds of how do we live? How do we then live? So I'm going to read chapter 4. I'm going to give a bunch of... I'm going to read a bunch of the passage. We're not going to look at a lot of it.

[1:53] But I want to make sure we have the context. Because what Paul has said right before in verses 17 through 24 is what Paul has said is God has now in Christ done something that when you believe in him, you are now made new.

[2:09] And the command then is to live more and more out of this new life that God has given you. And in order to do that, what you have to do is take off the old part. You have to forsake your old patterns of living, the things that shaped you before you knew God.

[2:25] And now, because you know God, because you know this redemptive work in his life, how is it supposed to be different? And verses 17 through 24 give that framework. And then verses 25 through chapter 5 verse 2 give some real specifics.

[2:39] And we're going to jump in tonight. So let's read this scripture together and then we'll take a look at it. Now I say this and testify in the Lord.

[2:52] You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of their heart.

[3:04] They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learn Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him and as the truth is in Jesus.

[3:20] To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires. And to be renewed in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

[3:38] Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with his neighbor. For we are members of one of another.

[3:50] Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the son go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

[4:08] Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

[4:25] Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

[4:41] Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

[4:55] Will you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for this word and thank you for that Paul has written them to us so that we might know of your great work of redemption in Christ and so that we might know how to live.

[5:07] Lord, help us to not only know how to, but help us to see, Lord, how you empower us and are able, Lord, to help us change so that we might put on this new self that you give us in Christ.

[5:24] Lord, will you be with us tonight to do this? We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. All right. So we are going to look tonight specifically at the topic of anger and forgiveness.

[5:40] So obviously there's a lot of things in this section that we could take out and really delve into. But as we planned this, we thought, you know, this is true in most of our lives.

[5:52] If you're a parent, you know that you have an anger problem. If you're not a parent, you might be getting by, skating by with thinking you probably don't. But there's a great book out by David Powlison called Good and Angry.

[6:07] And chapter two of it is titled, the chapter is titled, Everyone, including you, has a serious anger problem. And the whole chapter says, yes, period.

[6:19] And then there are questions afterwards. And he just sort of posits, the truth is we all struggle with this in different ways. And so we thought it was worth exploring.

[6:30] And so we're going to look at it. We're going to delve into it. We're going to talk at it. Obviously, the passage, the verses that are particularly pertinent that I'm going to sort of hang this message on tonight.

[6:41] Verse 26 and 27. And then verses 31 and 32. So, and I just have three points that come from that. Be angry and do not sin.

[6:52] Then the second one is going to be, do not let the sun go down on your anger and give the devil an opportunity. And the third one has to do with verses 31 and 32. Put off all these things, but put on something else.

[7:05] Forgive as the Lord has given you. So those are the three things that we're going to talk about tonight. As I thought about this, goodness gracious, I would, you know, do we have time? Can we go for like an hour and a half or two hours?

[7:17] Because there's so much to say about this topic. I'm going to hope that and pray that the things that I prepared are going to be useful for us tonight. So first one, Paul lays this out.

[7:29] He says in verse 26, be angry and do not sin. Now for some of you, that is a contradictory statement from the very beginning. Because you think, how is that possible?

[7:42] What is the nature of anger that he is talking about? Right? Paulus and in this book, Good and Angry, which I highly recommend to all of you. You can go read it.

[7:52] It might be down in our bookstall. If not, come see me and we'll help you find it. He says that anger is best defined as an active displeasure towards something that is important enough for us to care about.

[8:08] Anger is, there's a response to it, right? Anger is almost always a response to something that we see, that we hear, that happens to us, that we encounter in the world.

[8:19] And it is an evaluation of it. We see this and we think that there's something wrong with that. And that's why we have this active displeasure towards it. And in this evaluation then, there is a response.

[8:32] And it's, response comes partly because we care about it. People who don't care about anything don't get angry. There's something else seriously wrong going on with that because our hearts weren't made to not care about anything.

[8:46] But they might actually get away with not caring about anything and not getting angry because of it. But most of us, we do find this, right?

[8:57] There is something that we care about enough to have these responses when we see that there's an active displeasure towards something that is wrong. Now, the question that rises up is, is it possible to do this without sinning?

[9:13] Now, some of you are going, well, we know this. We know the answer already, right? In fact, there is. The Bible describes God as being a God of anger at times, right?

[9:26] Now, here's the thing. Some of you, when I said that, just thought, yep, he's like my father. And when I messed up at home, he would whip out his belt and he'd beat the living daylights out of me.

[9:40] And that's what God is like. And I can't believe I'm sitting here in this church listening to you preach to me about a God like that. Hold on. Give me a chance to try and shape your mind about what kind of God he really is.

[9:53] Because that is a caricature that is not true in the Bible. Although there are times when the church has proclaimed him like that. And there are times when we have experienced Christians saying that is what God is like.

[10:08] But that, in fact, is not the God of the Bible. Now, there are some of you that are on the other opposite end going, I don't believe he's talking about this. The God I believe in is a God of grace and a God of mercy.

[10:22] He could never be angry about anything. He would never have this active displeasure towards me. Isn't God there to redeem me so that I can feel good about myself and to rescue me from my self-condemnation?

[10:37] And again, what I would say is, hold on. Because what I hope you will see is that a God who is angry is actually a good thing.

[10:48] When he is angry at the right things and when he expresses it in the right ways. And in fact, this is the definition of God's anger. When Moses, having been delivered from Egypt, brought into the wilderness, brought up the mountain of Mount Sinai.

[11:08] God coming down to meet with him and giving him instructions on how to be God's people. Which is what the Ten Commandments are. And Moses said, who are you God?

[11:20] How can I know what you really are? Do you remember this? It actually is, well, there's a lot more context to it. But basically, Moses at one point in this interaction is saying, God, how do I know who you are?

[11:34] And God says, Moses, hide yourself in this cleft of a rock and I will pass by. And Exodus 34 says this. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of the Lord.

[11:49] The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

[12:02] Keeping steadfast love for thousands. Forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But who will by no means clear the guilty.

[12:13] Visiting the iniquity of the fathers and the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation. And Moses quickly bowed his head toward the earth and worshiped. So what do you see here?

[12:25] When God wanted to make known, make himself known to Moses, what did he say? I am the God who is merciful and gracious, compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.

[12:38] And when you know the story of the Old Testament, you know how many times these people doubted him. How many times they complained to him. Why aren't you good? Why aren't you taking care of me?

[12:49] Why haven't you fixed our problems? How can I trust you? Over and over and over again. And God comes and says, no, I am the God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness.

[13:03] But I am also the God who will not leave the guilty unpunished. And this is the crux of the nature of God's anger towards us.

[13:15] Because when God sees something that is wrong, he needs to call it wrong. If God didn't see things that were wrong in the world.

[13:28] If God didn't see sin. If God didn't see evil. If God didn't see unrighteousness and call it that. Then he wouldn't be good at all.

[13:40] He would be morally completely neutral. And anything goes. And each one of you, if you stop and think about it. There is something that is wrong.

[13:52] It may be socioeconomic injustice. It may be global conflict. It may be the personal suffering that you or others have experienced at the hands of other people.

[14:04] But each of you, if you stop and think about there is something that you know is wrong. And how important is it to you that God stands with you in that and says, yes, that is wrong.

[14:17] And when we know that he calls it wrong. That is so important for you to know that he is a good God. This, in fact, is one of the most amazing things.

[14:31] Is that when God has active displeasure towards something that is important enough to care about. God always cares about the most important things. And his active displeasure is always perfectly weighted towards the wrong that is done.

[14:47] He sees all the sin and all the wrong in the world. And he promises that he will not leave any of it unpunished. He will vindicate what is right and punish what is wrong.

[15:00] He will not just say, I don't care. The problem is that we don't always trust him in that, do we?

[15:11] Partly because we've thought, well, if God could fix it and he hasn't, then how can he be good, right? There's a whole mystery there.

[15:21] I can't get into the whole problem of evil tonight. But I'm just going to say that the reality is that we often can't imagine God's anger being unlike our anger.

[15:34] All of your experience of anger has been mediated towards you that you've experienced through a sinful person who is imperfect and limited.

[15:45] And we often extrapolate onto God our own problems. And what is the problem with our anger? Well, this is fun. Let's delve into our own hearts a little bit to think about what is it, what is the problem with anger?

[15:59] If God is a good God who, and his anger is a good kind of anger because it sees things that are wrong and he promises that he won't forsake it, that he won't just overlook it, right?

[16:13] Then what's wrong with our anger, right? Well, all right, let's talk about this for a minute. A couple of things, right? Fundamentally, one of the problems is that our anger is almost always self-oriented.

[16:26] All you have to do is to know a two-year-old, to know this, right? I am angry because I am not getting what I want.

[16:36] I'm hungry. I'm tired. I want that toy. I want my sister to do what I want him to do or want her to do what I want her to do, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[16:48] It starts very young and it is deeply ingrained in us. We get angry when the guy cuts in front of us on Elm Street because that's where I was going.

[16:58] You just got in my way. That's where I go. You can't do that. And we get angry. We get angry because we are so desperately self-centered so often.

[17:13] And when other people do things that don't serve our kingdom, that don't fit into our vision of how life ought to be, we get angry.

[17:25] And the problem with that is two things. One is that sometimes we think things are wrong when they're not wrong. The classic marital problem of which way do you put the toilet paper and the toilet roll.

[17:36] It really doesn't matter. But if you've been married, you know at some point it may not be the toilet paper roll, but there will be something. Something is going to happen where you're like, why do you do it that way?

[17:47] And you know what? There's nothing wrong with it. It's just not the way you like to do it. And that's what happens. And we get angry about these things. So that's part of the way that our anger is expressed wrongly is when we call things wrong that just aren't wrong.

[18:04] They're just different. And they're different from the way I want to do it. So it thwarts our will and it threatens our ego. And so we get angry. The other thing that's wrong with our anger is that we usually or we often want to exact revenge or somehow sit in judgment and bring punishment to people who we think have done wrong.

[18:28] Even when we see something that's wrong, we so often want to be the judge, jury, and executioner to bring the condemnation that that wrong deserves.

[18:44] And so when my child disobeys me, when I respond in anger, I want them to feel my wrath. I want them to feel it.

[18:56] I don't beat my kids. But I want them to know how angry I am. And it is possible as a parent to do that without sinning.

[19:10] But I don't do it that way most of the time. I do it because I want to punish them. I want to bring upon them pain and hurt because I'm angry with them.

[19:26] And even if they have disobeyed me, my response is out of control. It's over. And ultimately, it's selfish. Because ultimately, it's that I want them to get in line.

[19:39] And so I'm going to bring whatever pain I think is necessary for them to get in line so that my world is back into the way it ought to be. Okay? Okay? Now, one other thing I want to say about this is that there are lots of different kinds of ways that we can show anger.

[19:59] I just want to list these off. The Pauluson book is really helpful in this. Sometimes we're angry with irritability. Do you know people who are just kind of hair trigger?

[20:11] If you don't do it just the right way, you're always walking on eggshells wondering if they're going to respond badly because you don't do it quite the way they want you to? That's irritability. Second thing is someone who's argumentative, who tends to be quarrelsome or pick a fight to be defensive.

[20:28] It's so easy for us to express our anger in always going at people. Well, why are you that way? Well, why are you right? Prove yourself to me.

[20:40] Explain yourself to me. I didn't do anything wrong. You must be. Why do you have a problem? I don't have a problem. This kind of aggressiveness is one of the ways that we express our anger.

[20:52] A third way that we show our anger is by holding on to bitterness. Well, you know that person, what they did to me. Never going to forgive that.

[21:04] Never going to forget that. It doesn't always blow up. It doesn't always come out. It doesn't often. Bitterness isn't even expressed directly towards the person where anger is.

[21:16] A fourth way that we show anger is being violent. We attack people and we find pleasure in their pain.

[21:30] A fifth way that we do it is passive aggression. Right? You guys know this word passive aggressive? What does it mean?

[21:40] Well, it means I'm being aggressive without looking like it. Right? I'm being passively attacking you and showing my anger. Often those people who do it can be unaware that they're doing it.

[21:53] It's not always a conscious ploy. Sometimes it's an unconscious pattern. When you withdraw from a conversation or from a relationship because they did something you didn't like.

[22:06] But rather than blowing up at it, you just, I'm going to pull back. One of the interesting things about being passive aggressive is that it often has secondary effects like depression and lethargy and pessimism and cynicism.

[22:22] We internalize all that feeling towards ourselves and it does great damage to our souls. And finally, there's a, one of the ways that we express our anger is self-righteousness.

[22:37] Where we exalt ourselves and say, what's wrong with you? Why can't you be as good as I think I am? And how we hold that over people.

[22:48] And how it's one of the ways that we show our anger at the wrong that we see in other people. And often in ourselves, often self-righteousness is a way to cover up the wrong we see in ourselves by pretending that it's not there.

[23:07] So friends, Paul says, be angry, but do not sin. Recognize all of these different aspects of how we can be angry and sin and put them off.

[23:21] We saw the list in verse 31, right? Bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, slander. It's interesting. Some of those words are actually, like the word for slander is actually the word to blaspheme.

[23:37] To speak something untrue about someone in an attacking or destructive sort of way. These are the things that we're meant to put off.

[23:49] Right? Um, what does that look like? What does it look like in your life? What does it look like in my life? Really briefly, sometimes anger looks like blowing up.

[24:01] I'll never forget a number of years ago, a young child was visiting our house, our backyard. There was a flower growing. It was late spring. It was a beautiful stem. The buds were just about to burst into this beautiful thing.

[24:15] And this child, who was no more than two, and doing what two-year-olds do, took a stick and wandered around and just kind of whacked things and whacked the bud right off the top of the flower.

[24:25] I'd had a bad week. I'd had a bad month. I'd had a bad year. I was under a lot of stress. And I exploded. And I am, it is, it stands out in me as one of those times when God laid bare my heart.

[24:40] And it was really ugly. I roared at the poor two-year-old. There's no other word for it. I roared at him. I was so angry that he had ruined this thing that I had actually been anticipating watching it bloom and seeing the beauty of it.

[24:57] And holding on to that as something, making it much bigger than it needed to be. He was just being a two-year-old kid. And yeah, there's probably a proper discipline of don't hit the flowers in the garden, you know, that would have been appropriate.

[25:12] That's not what I did. So, I can think about, you know, maybe you've experienced this if you've gone on a date and you've been really hopeful that it's going to be like this really sweet time or this really special time.

[25:28] You had particular expectations, what it was going to be like. And then half an hour in, you realize it's not going to look like that at all. Maybe your date is having a bad day.

[25:39] I can think of times when it just, my late wife and I, we would just miss each other on what we thought was important. And rather than saying, okay, I love you.

[25:53] Let's engage. Let's do this. In my disappointment, I would pull back. Okay. It's going to be that kind of date, huh? All right. Well, hope you can carry the weight on it because I'm pulling back here.

[26:05] My disappointment, I'm not here anymore. You know, we'll get through this and we'll just go home and get on with life because what's the point? But you see how that came from an angry response.

[26:19] I was disappointed and in my disappointment, I was angry. And I used that anger and expressed in a way that then sucked the life out of this opportunity for relationship. I punished my wife because she had disappointed me.

[26:33] Probably in a way she didn't even know because I hadn't said anything. Thirdly, anger can be frustrating and complaining. Again, it's hard for me to not think about this.

[26:46] Every morning I get up and I have to decide how much do I care that my kids get to school on time? And how much nagging do I need to do to get them out of bed, dressed, fed, and into the car at a reasonable time?

[27:00] And how easy it is for me to be frustrated. How easy it is for me to be gracious and gracious and gracious. And then I look at the clock and I'm like, no more grace.

[27:10] Let's go. I am tired of you. No, I won't talk to you. No, I'm not going to listen to your answer. Just get your shoes on and get out the door. Maybe you don't know anything about that.

[27:25] But as you can see, I can embody that really easily. Anyway, and so there's so many ways in which we do sin in our anger. There's so many ways in which we do exalt ourselves and inflict this on other people.

[27:41] And it's not a proper response to a wrong that we see, but is either an outsized response to a real wrong or an irrational response to a wrong that isn't even there.

[27:57] But it is possible because of God to not have to live there. And this is what Paul walks us through. We don't have to stay there. The second point that I want to talk about tonight, verse 26, the second half in verse 27.

[28:12] He says, do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. It's so fascinating because what Paul is saying is, look, you will get angry, right?

[28:26] He's not even saying like, if you get angry, there's no conditional here. He's saying you will get angry. But recognize how important it is to respond properly in that moment.

[28:38] And in this verse particularly, he's talking about the necessity of limiting our anger. Because he knows that anger festers in our hearts.

[28:52] That anger gets inside of us and it eats us up from the inside out. Here's a question for you. When you've had a frustrating conversation or you saw something, have you ever lost the conversation in your head when you've talked to that other person about it?

[29:10] Have you ever gone to them and said, look, you're wrong. And they've come back and said, no, look, there wasn't anything wrong there. And you go, oh, okay, you're right.

[29:21] Have you ever done that? When you replay the things that you're angry about in your head, you are always right. Right. Right. Because that's the way we work in our sin.

[29:36] And it situates in our hearts. And unless we address it, unless we do something about it, it will center and it will begin to color our interactions.

[29:48] It colors our interactions not only with the particular situation and the particular person that we are angry with at that moment, but it colors all of our interactions. We often get angry with other people because of something that's completely unrelated.

[30:02] Have you ever experienced that? I've had all this stress at home and then I come into work and this little thing happens and I just, I can't handle it.

[30:13] Well, why is that? It's not because the thing at work is so bad, but it's because of all the other anger that I haven't addressed in my life. And now suddenly here it is. Right.

[30:28] Part of what it, part of the, what the gospel allows us to do in beginning to process our anger so that we don't let it go down on the, don't let the sun go down on our anger is this.

[30:41] Part of how we are called to respond to that is we need to surrender the control of judgment about things that are wrong. Right.

[30:52] There are times when we see something that is wrong and we are rightfully angry about it. And yet part of what we need to do is to suspend or to give up our control of we've got to make that right.

[31:09] Right. Okay. Right anger is seeing things properly, seeing things clearly and responding properly to it.

[31:21] Judgment is not only seeing the wrong and internally responding to it, but it also is bringing out, meeting out punishment or bringing the pain or the condemnation.

[31:34] Now look, there are times and places where we have the reality of consequences. If I tell my child, I give them a pair of scissors and I say, don't cut your sister's hair.

[31:48] And then he cuts his sister's hair. Right. There may be consequences to that. You must give me the scissors immediately. You may no longer play with them. You may not have scissors again, unsupervised for the next month because you did not obey.

[32:03] You could not fall through. That's a logical, that's a helpful training consequence of it. But it is not the anger of, why did you do that? What's wrong with you?

[32:15] You stupid child. Give me those scissors. That's the angry response that so often we fall into. And so I want to make sure that we recognize that there is a place for healthy consequences.

[32:29] And, you know, to take it on a more global level, if you have a spouse who has a gambling problem, right, you may be, you're recognizing there's something wrong here. And it's good to be angry about that.

[32:40] And you may severely limit or completely take away their access to any finances because they don't stop. But those consequences are not acts of condemnation or meeting out judgment.

[32:55] They're discipline in order to be helpful. This is what Hebrews 12 tells us God is like. He says everybody disciplines their children for their good. In fact, it's a sign of love.

[33:07] If you don't discipline your kids, you don't actually love them enough to help them see what's right and wrong. That's what God does with you. And so there is a healthy sign of discipline. That is not anger in, or that is not unrighteous anger.

[33:22] The devil's temptation, this is why I think Paul brings it in, is for you to say, is he whispers in your ear at that moment, don't you want to play God in this situation?

[33:35] Don't you think you have the right to make it right? Don't you have the right to fix this and to mete out the judgment and the punishment that's necessary in this context?

[33:47] Don't you have the right to take control and fix this? These are the things we are to put off.

[34:01] This is why Paul warns us to not let sin fester in our hearts. So how do we deal with it? How do we? In some ways, what I've been talking about in these first two points have been focusing more on the put off things.

[34:16] How to put them off. What do we put on? What do we put on to replace it? Well, this is where verses 31 and 32, verse 32 in particular, gives us a different picture.

[34:29] Right? Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. The kindness that he talks about here, it's an interesting word.

[34:42] It's not used a lot in the Bible, but it's used, Jesus used it in Luke 6, 35, where he says, Love your enemies and do good and lend, expecting nothing in return and your reward will be great and you will have sons of the most high.

[34:57] For he is kind to the ungrateful and to the evil. We often think of kindness as sort of being like nice. Be nice to people.

[35:08] Be pleasant. But God's kindness is actually much greater than that. It is an active desire to do good, even to those who deserve harm or deserve judgment or deserve our shunning.

[35:21] Tenderheartedness similarly has this great root of being good towards other people in the depths of your bowels, the depths of your being.

[35:36] Be good towards them. Well, how do we do this? Here's the thing. How has God responded to the things that are wrong in the world?

[35:51] Has he fixed them and eradicated them? No, he hasn't, has he? Not yet. Why not? Well, because he has a greater plan for us.

[36:06] The Lord, the Lord, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness, who forgives all of our sins and our iniquities. He says, I am able to see the sin and to forgive them because I'm doing something greater.

[36:28] I'm doing something greater with us. And God's ability to look at the fallen world with all the evil that's in it right now and to extend forgiveness to it has two parts of it.

[36:38] One is, I'm not going to judge it all right now because I will do that in the end. There will be, like I said at the beginning, there will be an end where God will judge everything.

[36:52] Nobody's going to get away with it. That's one of our fears that drives us to anger, isn't it? But they're getting away with it. And God says, no, they won't.

[37:03] I see it all. And it will all be judged. But here's the other thing I'm going to do. I'm going to come and I'm going to free you from the wrong in the world. And most of all, from the wrong in your own heart.

[37:16] I'm going to come and rescue you from that wrong that causes my anger against you. He says, I'm going to deal with every sin and every wrongdoing that happens.

[37:31] And there are only one of two places where that judgment is going to happen. It will either happen at the final day when we stand before God on our own merits and try to plead our case and find that we are woefully lacking.

[37:44] And all of our sin and all of our irritability and all of our passive aggressiveness and all of our bitterness and all of our anger will stand before God and he will judge it.

[37:58] Or that sin, all of those things will be judged in the person of Jesus Christ. Friends, this is at the very heart of the gospel.

[38:09] That God comes to rescue us and to extend to us forgiveness. Not by overlooking sin. Not by saying it doesn't matter. Not by simply saying, oh, you know, let's just forget about it.

[38:23] He doesn't forget. He deals with it. He says that wrongdoing deserves punishment. And I'm going to punish it. But I'm going to...

[38:39] And to supine that we mark a weapon, it's just an end challenge for us, a great chase in the world. You, you do Selah's body. No, I, but... And every time that we sell our ownApp is not going to marry, you know?

[38:52] Or maybe along in the light of life or to talk about them, we're going to have a LeWeb. To think about ourselfness about meaningful... Because, the way are not going to beatif... What we're seeing is getting this process in moment, including the event that we have with us as a tender and media.

[39:07] Thank you.

[39:37] Thank you.

[40:07] Thank you.

[40:37] Thank you.

[41:07] Thank you.

[41:37] Thank you.

[42:07] Thank you.

[42:37] Thank you.

[43:07] Thank you.

[43:37] Thank you.

[44:07] Thank you.

[44:37] Thank you.

[45:07] Thank you.

[45:37] Thank you.

[46:07] Thank you.

[46:37] Thank you.

[47:07] Thank you.