[0:00] Proverbs chapter number 22. Well, there's still several of you in here, okay? I thought I might be all alone, but there's plenty in here. And I didn't want to tell the other group, but we're actually going to have more fun, okay, in here in the book of Proverbs.
[0:12] I didn't want them to know that. But there's plenty of Bible to be taught in every room here, Spanish Church, in the other room. And we're continuing our series in the book of Proverbs.
[0:23] I was thinking that my monitors weren't working. I couldn't hear anything, but I just don't, I feel disconnected from all of you. I can't hear any of you, so I can just kind of have a sound check right now. Could maybe say good evening or something on the count of three.
[0:36] One, two, three. Good evening. All right, good. You are there. You ever feel that before? Sometimes you just feel like you are so far away. And I think I'm just not hearing very well.
[0:47] Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe that's it. Maybe certain volumes go out in your kids and make you lose certain volume. Yeah, that's right. I heard that. So whatever that was.
[0:57] All right, Proverbs chapter number 22. And we're just going to look at two verses, but there's a lot to be said here. Since we have many little kids in here, I'm going to try my very best to make sure that they stay engaged.
[1:10] Because this is something that no matter how young you are, it applies in regards to friendships and how to demonstrate our emotions. How to not be carried away by them.
[1:21] But what is the biblical reason and purpose for them? We're going to look at Proverbs 22, verse 24 and 25. And I'm going to have Carson and Hudson join me up front here so we can walk through this together.
[1:33] All right, Proverbs 22, 24 and 25. It says, Make no friendship with an angry man and with a furious man thou shalt not go, lest thou learn his ways and get a snare to thy soul.
[1:57] All right, Carson and Hudson, if you two guys will come up here, we will act that out. I know you guys will at least pay attention for a moment. Aiden, will you come over here?
[2:08] Would you mind helping me? Yes, sir. All right. We've got three men here in this example. And so it says in this verse that, where are we at here? I'm at Proverbs 22, 24.
[2:20] So we make no friendship with an angry man. All right. This is an angry man. Show me angry. Err, okay. Look at this smiley kid. He can't not smile.
[2:30] All right. Show me angry. Hudson, can you show me angry? Err, all right. So this is an angry man. Should you be friends with him? You should be? All right. Let's try this again.
[2:42] Make no friendship with an angry man. Should we be friends with him? No. All right. Good answer. Good answer. But now let's say with the furious man, you shall not go.
[2:55] So Hudson's the furious man. We get angry man. We're walking with these guys. We're walking, Aiden. And we realize that these guys are there. We realize that this is a furious man and this is an angry man.
[3:06] What should you do? If they are angry and you've been walking with them, what should you do? Run away. Run away. That'll work. Okay. You run away. And so he's going to go. He says, I can't go with you guys if that's happening.
[3:18] And here is the reason in verse number 25. It says that if you walk with these two guys here, these two rascals, if you walk with them, verse 25 says, you will lest you.
[3:29] If you do this, you're going to learn their ways and their ways are the ways of angry people. And the ways of angry people in verse 25 says, a snare will come to their soul.
[3:41] Do you know what a snare is? You guys set snares. I've seen y'all do this before. What do you make at your house? You make traps for animals, right? You make snares for animals.
[3:52] So Aiden here, here's the lesson for the day. Then we're going to go home. I'm just kidding. And for job security, I've got to go until closer to six. All right. And so here we have, you can't walk with these guys if they're angry.
[4:04] Because if you do, then you're going to learn to be angry like them. And if you learn to be angry like them, then you're going to fall into the same traps they do. And so we need to figure out what is anger and why do we have it?
[4:16] What is the purpose of it? And how would we recognize it in somebody's life? You guys did a great job not looking angry. All right. Thank you. All right. And so that is it in a nutshell.
[4:29] But let's look here. Is there a valid time for anger? Is there a valid time for anger? And the answer is yes, certainly. Sherry P knows that.
[4:40] There is a valid time for anger. Our emotional makeup is totally from God. All emotions, however, can become destructive when we fail to express them in harmony with biblical limitations and structures.
[4:54] Meaning there's a right way to be angry and there's a wrong way. There's a time to be sad and there's a time we shouldn't be sad. There's things to be happy about and things not to be happy about. Ecclesiastes tells us that there's a season for everything.
[5:06] There's a time for each of these emotions in our lives. And so anger in itself does not have to be sinful. And we learn that distinction in Ephesians 4, 26.
[5:17] Don't we? Paul says, be you angry and what? Sin not. Which tells us that there's a distinction. That it's possible to be angry and to sin not and let not the sun go down upon your wrath.
[5:28] Psalm 7, 11 says, God judges the righteous and God is angry with the wicked every day. So if God can be angry and we're told to be holy and God has expressed that he is angry.
[5:43] Then obviously between that and what we see in the New Testament that there is a time for us to be angry. Now let's look at Jesus in Mark 3, 5. And when he had looked round about them with anger being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto them, stretch forth thine hand.
[5:59] And he stretched it out and his hand was restored whole as the other. So as there Jesus was healing, he looked out upon the other people that had a hardness of heart, angry towards them, but he still cared and brought healing to the person that was in front of him.
[6:14] So anger, in contrast to rage, is very necessary and it's a useful reaction. Anger is appropriate as a communication of feeling into the reaction of another person or another set of circumstances.
[6:29] There's things in life that ought to cause anger and that judgment that we would have with that anger ought to be directed appropriately. And we should look to the life of Christ and see the way that he lived and see the emotions that are expressed in the life of Christ.
[6:46] So anger is part of our ability to judge. At the very base of anger, right, it says, I am against that, fill in the blank. If you were just to sum up when you're angry, you would look at something or someone and say, I am against that.
[7:00] This is wrong. There's an injustice. This needs to be corrected. And so it's a diagnostic way of pointing to something within us. Sometimes it's very loud and sometimes it's real subtle.
[7:12] Sometimes there's this where you blow up and there's arguing and frustration and you're irritable and you're cranky and passive aggressive or grumbling and bitterness or self-righteousness.
[7:23] So sometimes it's real loud and then sometimes it's just brought in. So the question in here isn't who gets angry, but why we all get angry. What are the reasons? I could give all of your wives in here a microphone tonight and it would be a lot of fun, right?
[7:37] Tell us something silly that your husband gets mad about, you know? What is it in your life that you just find yourself getting more irritated about than you know that you should? And so in our lives it's a diagnostic to say that what matters to us, what we believe ought to be done.
[7:54] So what is anger? We all know what the emoji looks like on the phone, right? We know what anger looks like, but what is it? In our hearts and our minds we all have desires and motivations and this drives our attitudes and behaviors.
[8:11] If you'll turn with me in James chapter number 4 verses 1 through 3. We're going to look and we're going to see where it talks about desire. It speaks about lust and how it has an effect upon our behavior.
[8:26] My pastor in a country church growing up, he always told me to stay, to be aware of LSD, all right? Not the drug, but he would say lust, sin, death. He says that's the path, lust, sin, death.
[8:40] He was always warning me about it. Your desires are going to lead towards actions and those actions are either going to bring life or they're going to bring death. And he said that's a natural order. You can't change it.
[8:51] You need to be aware of it. James 4, 1 through 3. From whence comes wars and fighting among you? Come they not hence even of your lust that war in your members?
[9:01] Where does wars and fighting and disputes all come from? And the answer says it doesn't happen in the office. It doesn't happen on paper. It doesn't happen through policy. It all starts in the heart of man.
[9:13] All that you would ever see is going to start the lust of war in its members. You lust and you have not. You kill and desire to have and you cannot obtain. You fight and war, yet you have not because you ask not.
[9:26] You ask and receive the mist. Is this correct here? Is this correct, James, here for? Okay. Yes. Thank you. Sorry. And because you ask a mist, they consume it upon your lust.
[9:39] And so consuming that whatever is placed in your heart, you're going to have to act upon. Those of us parents in here, you've all seen when your kid becomes just obsessed or preoccupied with something and how hard it is for them to just let go and move on.
[9:59] And they can just stay with it forever. And the same with us. We have to protect our hearts because whatever's in there, we are going to obsess about until we act upon it. And so anger is often the reaction of us trying to set right what we believe was set wrong inside of our heart.
[10:17] Then in James 1.13, just a few chapters before, it says, Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted with either, neither tempteth he any man.
[10:29] For every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust has conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Do not err, my beloved brethren.
[10:41] So the lust inside of us, the desires inside of us, are always shaping our behaviors. I was just at this pastor's conference in Jacksonville, and there's all these pastors in there, and they said, No matter what you tell me about your testimony, all of you in here today are pastors because at some point in your life, you wanted to be.
[10:59] And that's the truth about it, right? Is that we had a desire to do that. You act upon what you're doing, you're going to find that you must ultimately wanted to do that, or you wouldn't have made the actions.
[11:11] Maybe you wanted to do it, you did it, now you look back on it and you say, I wish I didn't want to do it, but in the moment of doing it, or maybe you didn't want to do it, but what you did was greater than the consequences of not doing it, which means you actually wanted to do that.
[11:25] I'm trying not to make this complicated, but it's to say that what is in the desire of your heart is going to lead into your actions. Or as where Patrick Henry and I went to school, we would hear all the time, right?
[11:37] Your beliefs affect your behavior. Beliefs are so important because it's out of those in the heart where life will come from. And so our anger is going to reveal what we love.
[11:49] The solution to sinful anger is not anger management, but new affections. You know, what's that joke, I've been so good at being angry they've promoted me now, the anger management, all right?
[11:59] I got a new office, I got office anger management. And so you don't manage anger, but you look at the affections that are leading. What is it that is causing you to be so angry?
[12:11] I don't expect this by anybody in this room tonight, but there will be people tonight that will be spitting mad at the football game tonight. At some point, some people are going to just get so angry at the football game.
[12:25] I'm not judging them because there's other very silly things that I get mad about. Greg, he gets road rage driving. I mean, he just thinks that everybody needs to be doing something different than they're doing.
[12:40] I don't have that problem because I'm like, I'm a bad driver. I'm like, a guy cuts me off and he's like, I'm like, I understand. That could be me next time. Don't worry about it. Not a big deal.
[12:50] And I could never imagine getting too upset about a football game. I just don't feel that much about it. But there's other things in my life that are very small that I could get mad about, but it just really shows our affections.
[13:02] So when we're having an anger problem, we really need to ask ourselves, what is this anger, what affection is it connected to? What is it motivating? What is the anger supposed to be motivating me towards?
[13:14] Which there could be a conflict of our will. Is it my will or God's will or is it mine versus somebody else's? So our anger could be, I want this to be my way, but God is not doing that the way that I want.
[13:29] Now there's anger. Or it could be between people. I want something one way and you want it another way. And so anger could come in there because it comes with a conflict of will.
[13:40] And so the desires become demands if we do not submit our will to God. So these expectations are going to lead to disappointments when they're not met.
[13:52] So there's an affection in your heart. There's a desire in your heart. You want something to be a certain way and it's not going to happen. And now you're disappointed and that leads you to being angry. And then now that you're disappointed, it leads you to wanting to balance the scale.
[14:08] Constantly wanting to balance the scale. The kids give us a great education, right? Our kids give us, sorry Tinsley, you're in here tonight. You're going to have to just know. What's true about my kids is true about all kids, right? Have you ever heard where they just want the other kid to be in trouble?
[14:22] It doesn't matter if you can undo what they have done. They just want the scales to be balanced. They did this because they did this. They did something bad towards me.
[14:32] Now I need something bad to come their way because they had an expectation about their will and it wasn't met. Now they're disappointed and now they're angry and now they're set out to try to balance the scale.
[14:44] And that's where anger is not righteous and it's not right, but it will lead towards sinfulness. It's when you want to correct the scales in life and make it conform to your will and they're not God's will.
[14:58] Or at some point you're no longer motivated by a love for God and the people around us. You think about the first and second commandment, Matthew 22, is that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind.
[15:12] And then we also are supposed to love our neighbor. Well, there's a time during anger where neither one of those things matter to us. All we love is ourselves and getting things the way we would want.
[15:23] Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
[15:37] One of these two commandments, on these two commandments hang all the law and prophets. It's hard to see that verse and understand it when anger has got into our lives. When we're not thinking, how do I serve the person that I'm arguing with right now or debating with?
[15:51] When we stop saying, how do I minister to that person? Or when we stop saying, how do I make sure that I'm living according to God's will? And all I do is I care about my own personal will.
[16:03] And so there's two options in our response. Christians, when we love God and others, we will use ourselves and the things in our lives to express that love. That's what we should do. That's what's happening.
[16:16] Stephen and Stephanie Cofield are going to California to see Mitch and Jackie. And I'm so thankful for that. They wanted to let you know that if you'd like to send a note or a card or something, they would take that with them.
[16:28] But now they are using their life to express love towards them. And I could name a thousand different things that I know inside of this church that are going on where people are saying, I'm going to be motivated by love towards my actions.
[16:41] So that's one motivating force in our lives. And others, in our moments of anger, we love ourselves or things, and then we manipulate people and even try to manipulate the Lord to fulfill our desires.
[16:52] And we get mad when they impede our aim. That anger that I cannot get the circumstances to be the way that I want. I cannot get people to do what I want.
[17:03] And now we're using that energy of anger to not be like Christ, to not minister one another, to try to get things for our own. And so when exactly does anger become sinful?
[17:15] And it's at that point. Anger can become unrighteous anger in two different ways. There's the ventilation of anger. That's where it just comes out and it just blows up in front of everybody.
[17:29] And then there's the eternalization of anger. It's where you just kind of clam up. It seems in most marriages, there's two types of people. There's those that like, they have to talk about everything.
[17:40] And then there's the one that give the cold children. And it seems like God likes to put those two people together a lot of times. On occasion, like my wife and I, who's in the nursery, you just have people who love to talk.
[17:50] I mean, we just, we will both be talking at the same time, right on top of each other. Neither one of us can do the cool, cold part where we just want to, we try to do it for like 30 seconds. And so they're like, we got to talk about this, all right?
[18:01] And so it's constant like that. But there's two different expressions. And in here, you may know which one that you are. When there's something that you're angry about, either you've been hurt legitimately or not, what is your response?
[18:14] In both cases, this emotional energy of anger is wasted. It's wasted. It's wasted. When the anger that has come into your life towards a problem, it's wasted.
[18:26] The anger, there's a problem that's here, and that you have a husband and wife, and that anger or that where something shouldn't be the way that it is, that desire like, this isn't right, it needs to be corrected.
[18:37] And both of you recognize it, and you see that, and that energy that ought to be directed towards the problem, it ends up being directed towards each other. And so, you know, it's wasted. Or when it gets internalized, and where it's not being going towards solving of the problem.
[18:53] And so one of these here, this internalizing, or the venting, that's a very common thing. People say, I just want, I need to vent. You ever heard that? Anybody ever told you that? I just need to, you know, and we know we're not a little teapot, short and stout, you know?
[19:06] We don't need to set off steam. We're not made like that. We're not teapots that have to vent, or we will explode. We're the children of God. We can hand things off to God. It isn't part of what we're made of.
[19:17] We say that, but it's just not true. When you say, I just have to vent, because if I don't, that's not what we're taught in the Bible. The Bible is not told that we have to let off steam, or vent to one another, or we will explode.
[19:31] The Bible tells us to take all of our cares to the Lord. So here's some very explicit scriptures about the sin here of doing that, of venting. Proverbs 29, 11.
[19:43] A fool uttereth all his mind, but a wise man keepeth it till afterwards. Uttering all your mind? What does that sound more like? It sounds like venting. What does keep it until afterwards?
[19:54] It sounds like going to God in prayer and saying, I'm not going to talk about this. I'm not going to act upon this. I'm only going to take it to the Lord. Proverbs 25, 28. He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls.
[20:08] I can't help it. I just have to vent that somebody looks like a broken down wall that is not made in the way that it is to protect itself, to protect the people inside of it and those around it.
[20:20] It's destructive. Proverbs 19, 11. The discretion of a man deferreth his anger, and it is his glory to pass over a transgression.
[20:30] The discretion of a man deferreth anger. He's able to see something and to be angry about it, but to pass over it and to not act upon it. And there is a glory that is brought to the Lord by being able to do that, to be able to wait and to calculate it and go before the Lord and ask him for wisdom.
[20:53] Proverbs 29, 20. Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? There is more hope of a fool than of him. That's strong, isn't it?
[21:04] A man that is hasty in his words, that there is more hope of a fool than of him. Greg and I, in our drive back from Jacksonville, were talking about a podcast we listened to where it said that you just ought to run everything through a computer software, like every decision.
[21:21] We don't really need a judge can be partial, and that, you know, hiring and all that, why couldn't it just be ran, be automated? Well, one of the things that happens in a job interview, right?
[21:32] Many of you have been on them, and many of you have put other people through that, all that for a job interview, is to see how people respond to something. No matter how good somebody might look upon a resume or what they have accomplished, the Bible says that if they're a person that's hasty in their words, then you'd be better off hiring a fool, right?
[21:51] That you'd be better off working with a fool than a person hasty with their words, because it says there's more hope in a fool than one that's hasty in their words. And constantly needing to vent to other people is being hasty with our words.
[22:05] Proverbs 29, 22. An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression. And so he pushes it farther along.
[22:16] He's not a peacemaker, he's not a peacekeeper, but he's one that keeps, he's stirring it up wherever he goes. He leads people to wanting to be angry with him, and this fury will just abound, and it will continue until there is a transgression.
[22:33] Proverbs 14, 17. He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly, and a man of wicked device is hated. And so if you act quickly, when you are soon angry, you'll do foolishly.
[22:46] If you don't take the time and reflect and ask God for wisdom. Proverbs 14, 29. He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding, but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.
[23:00] That is slow to wrath is of great understanding. I said some time ago that how Stephanie jokingly tells me something that we've learned with kids, that you need to sip your hot chocolate.
[23:11] And I think some of you thought that every time I got mad, Stephanie made me hot chocolate, which sounds wonderful, all right? It'd be hard to be mad if somebody's bringing you hot chocolate. But to take hot chocolate, and it's just the idea of having to take some time and breathe.
[23:27] You know, to teach our kids to take a moment and to breathe and to not act quickly. There's nothing magical about pretending that you have hot chocolate, nothing magical about the breathing, but the biblical principle here is not to respond immediately, but to take time and allow God to work in your heart, and so that you can respond appropriately there.
[23:50] Proverbs 19, 19. A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment, for if thou deliver him, thou must do it again. A man of great wrath is going to continually find himself dealing with the same problems over and over again, never moving on, just stuck at it.
[24:09] Proverbs 22, 24. Make no friendship. This is our verse for the night. With an angry man, with a furious man, thou shalt not go. And so, one, there's the venting that shouldn't be happening, and now the internalizing, where you just take it in, and you don't really deal with it.
[24:24] And the Bible tells us in Ephesians 4, 27, where it says, Be angry and not sin not. It says, Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, which means if there's a place in your heart that is not filled with the gospel, it's going to hold all kinds of internalized hurt.
[24:41] When I was a teenager, I wrote a paper for something, some kind of contest, and my paper was on the God-shaped hole in all of us.
[24:51] I think there was a popular song at that time about that. Brother David knows about it. And it just said that there was, in our lives, there is something that's made where God belongs, when the gospel fills, that if the gospel does not fill it, it's just going to catch all kinds of other hurts that are there.
[25:09] And so, this uncontrolled anger often is going to point to an unaddressed hurt in your life. An uncontrollable anger is going to point to an unaddressed hurt.
[25:19] And that hurt that you have, it may be legitimate, or it might be illegitimate, meaning that it's just your pride was hurt, your ego was hurt, something was hurt that shouldn't have been hurt, but you allowed it to.
[25:32] And so, now you have this uncontrolled anger, you don't know where that it comes from. And so, maturity means that we have a better understanding of our emotions. And I've seen this so clearly as of late with a young kid, you know, in our home.
[25:48] And as I watch him as a 10-year-old, I see so many of the things that I dealt with as a kid and even as an adult, where there's this uncontrollable anger that boils up in you and you just don't know where it is.
[26:00] Men, the majority of time that I talk to another man about anger, or if you were to talk to me about, and say, why were you so angry? Why did you react that way?
[26:11] Almost nine times out of 10, our answer is going to be, I was just really hurting. Do you ever see men that ever look like were really hurting? Can you imagine in your mind just the guy sitting there and you're like, that guy looks like he's really hurting.
[26:26] He's in tears, he's crying, he's just really hurting. You don't probably have many memories of that. Can you think of a man that was just really angry? Probably all of you, even with good Christian fathers, can look back and think about it.
[26:38] Because more times than not, instead of responding in an emotional and mature way to say, hey, I'm just hurting, and I need to deal with hurt, that's no fun. We don't want to deal with hurt.
[26:49] So the most common emotion we have will be anger. And so angry people, I make a bad friend when I'm allowing anger to control my life. This association leads a person to take on wrathful ways which are foolish.
[27:04] Proverbs 14, 29, slow the wrath, great understanding, but hasty spirit, he exalteth folly. An angry friend is going to be one that is constantly leading you to make foolish decisions.
[27:17] Divisive. Proverbs 15, 18, a wrathful man stirs up strife, but he is slow, the anger appeases strife. If you're friends with angry people or if you're an angry person, you're always going to be divisive. You're always going to be looking for separation.
[27:29] And it's going to lead towards sin. And we see in Proverbs 29, 2, it stirs up strife and it bounds the transgression. And then as we read tonight, it's going to lead to a snare being caught up in a situation which is hard to get out of.
[27:42] In the transgression of an evil man, there is a snare, but the righteous to sing and rejoice. With my kids and in my own life, when I'm trying to help my son Thatcher pick his friends that he's going to, and I want to know who his parents are, and I want to know what kind of accountability that they're going to have at their home, and what kind of things they allow them to be entertained by, and all those decisions as I'm helping Noah Thatcher can go hang out with a friend.
[28:07] One thing that I ought to pay attention to is his friends angry, because if his friends are angry, the Bible tells us it's only going to lead towards sin.
[28:18] And then there's a bad hermeneutic that can make you the servant of an angry God. Some of you spend time in the Word, maybe not in this room, I would not believe in this room, or I hope not, but sometimes people spend time in the Word, and they become angry people because their understanding is that we serve an angry God.
[28:39] I was at a church many years ago, I won't say where, and the pastor said, if you don't pay your tithe and give it to God, he's going to get it from you at the mechanic shop that week.
[28:52] Ain't that right, Brother Trent? And I just looked down at my Bible and I didn't move. And he said, ain't that right, Brother Trent? God will get it from you if you don't give it to him in the offering plate.
[29:02] And I didn't move, I didn't move at all. And then he said, I don't care if you're a pastor from another church, I'll call you out for not listening. And so we left and my mom and Stephanie said, were you not listening?
[29:15] I said, no, I was listening. That's the reason I didn't say anything. It was not the time for me to stand up. But could you imagine, Greg and I heard a guy take that to its natural conclusion. There's God in heaven and the angels come and they say, hey, he didn't do something he was supposed to do this week.
[29:30] He didn't give his tithe. What do you want to do to him? Well, what did we do last time to him? Oh, last time he took his tires out so he's got new tires. Okay, that's no good. Well, how much does he owe?
[29:40] He owes that much? Oh, okay. How about a root canal? Yeah, that will be good. Let's send this hit team of angels down to heaven and he will make things right. And so there's a way in which God is presented where he is angry.
[29:53] And if you're a worshiper of an angry God, then there's no, you have no chance but to be an angry person. And so we handle our anger righteously. Energies or the motion of anger are used constructively in solving the problem rather than attacking people.
[30:09] People must be confronted to the extent that they're involved in their responsibility to the solution to the problem. We all know this and all of you know what it means for a person to be a Karen, right?
[30:20] A Karen. It's a name these days. A person is a Karen, all right? I became what was known as a Karen one day. We had the Shining Light players. They were here. And afterwards, I wanted to take them out to eat but I didn't want to bring them to my house because my kids needed to go to bed.
[30:36] And so we went place after place and no place would let us eat inside. And so Arby's, it said online, it said, the dining room will be open.
[30:48] So I went in there, we went to order and then we had all these people we'd all unloaded and they said, we're sorry sir, but the dining room's closing early the night and I said, no, it's not. It's just not, it's just not going to.
[30:59] And then Greg looked at me and he's like, don't do it. And they all started saying it and I just said, can I speak to your manager? All right? That's the first step in escalating a problem. I said, let me tell, let me who's in charge here and I went to him and I said, here's the deal, we're not going to leave.
[31:15] So we're going to go over there, we're going to eat our food, I'm not taking these people to my house, you said that you're going to be open and I acted in anger. I made a real fool out of myself.
[31:27] I embarrassed my wife and my kids and the shining light players. They were like looking at me, the drama team, they're like, what is this guy's problem? All right? And I was, and afterwards, I tried to talk to the manager, but even though my actions were very much wrong and I shouldn't have done that, the thing that I did do right is I took the energy of the problem to a person that could solve the problem, which was the manager.
[31:50] So in a problem, we ought to take that energy of saying something's wrong and we ought to devote it towards fixing the problem and not trying to hurt somebody, not trying to insult that manager, not to speak to them in a disrespectful way, in which I did.
[32:07] And so the goal of communication, Ephesians 4.29, if you go back to that example of Hudson and Aiden and Carson down here at the front, Ephesians 4.29 tells us, let no corrupt communication proceedeth out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.
[32:28] And so, that our words ought to be used to minister grace to hear. Our words ought to be used to solve problems. Our words ought to be used to be building people up. So one controls his anger best when he is solution-oriented rather than problem-oriented.
[32:47] So when we are angry with one another and it comes out, our words are just destructive and they're not helpful. But the use of our language ought to be, let's, hey, let's solve this problem together.
[32:58] Let's work together. Let's not work against each other, but let's work together. This is the problem. You and I, we love each other. Now let's work towards this problem and the anger that is there, the injustice.
[33:08] And there's plenty of that in this world, but it's not to be directed towards one another, but it's to be directed towards solving the problems that are there. So walking with angry people won't allow for that type of conversation.
[33:23] And if you're walking with people and your words, and their words aren't being used to minister grace, and when you're with them, the farther you're going to walk, your words won't be used to minister grace. And what would happen is you walk with an angry person and you will learn their ways and then you're going to fall into the same traps as those people and the same snares as those people.
[33:44] So first of all, we evaluate ourselves before we think of anybody else. Before we look at our friendships, we just say, am I being the kind of friend that I need to be? Am I allowing, when anger comes into my life, am I saying, God, this energy towards something that's wrong, am I directing it towards a problem to solve for your glory, or am I using it to hurt people around me?
[34:05] And if so, that is unrighteous and it is wrong and it needs to be dealt with. Maybe in hearing the sight of you saying, I've been venting, it's just the way that we're made. And I remind you, we're not teapots, but we're Christians.
[34:17] You don't have to steam up and you don't have to vent to other people. You can go talk to the manager. You can go talk to somebody who can really do something about it. You can go and pray to our heavenly Father.
[34:30] You can look at the example of Christ going before the Father and prayer and seeing that with all the stresses going on in life, he didn't go into being even busier and never sleeping, but he rested and he went to the Lord.
[34:43] Often when we're angry, we just go in the turbo mode trying to fix everything and it fights against our rest, which means that we're not taking it to the right people or to the God of heaven. I want to pray and then we will be dismissed for the night.
[35:00] Heavenly Father, thank you for an opportunity to come to your word and to look at this. Lord, I pray that you would help us as we would reflect upon our emotional state.
[35:13] Lord, we cannot be spirit-filled people and also be emotionally immature people. So Lord, I pray that you would help us identify when we become angry, help us have clarity to recognize what it is in our lives that have caused us to be angry and to take that energy and address problems and not be directed towards other people.
[35:35] Lord, I pray that you would help us, those that are in our lives that we have in our home or that we work with in discipleship that are just people that are constantly caught in a snare because of this, that you would use us to minister grace to them.
[35:49] In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.