Getting Past the Right Answers - Becoming Honest with Ourselves

People who have been churchgoers for a while know the right answers to say so that we can look like we are totally committed to Jesus, but when it comes to actually living out the right answers, we fail more often than not.

For instance, we say that we believe in the power of prayer, but when was the last time that we spent thirty minutes in prayer?

We say that we believe that the Scriptures are the inspired word of God, but when was the last time we seriously studied them?

We say that we believe that following Jesus is the best life that anyone could possibly live, but when was the last time that we shared the gospel with someone?

We say that we value living life together in Christian community, but when was the last time that we sacrificed, whether financially or with our time, for our community?

We say that we trust God, but when was the last time we despaired and doubted?

What we do shows what we really believe.  The right answers are easy.  Too easy.  But living out the radical call of the gospel in our lives is difficult.

Paul wrote in his letter to Colossae, "Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.
Colossians 3:9-10 (ESV)

I heard Craig Groeschel give a sermon the other week where he said, "I'm guessing that some of you know someone who has told a lie so many times that they start to believe the lie is true."  Then he went on to ask, "How many of you would honestly say, that for you that battling with self-deception is a significant problem?  You're really, really deceived about a lot of things?"  Only a few people raised their hands.  Then he asked, "How many of you know someone else who is really self-deceived?"  The hands then raised from nearly everyone.  He told them to look around and ask, "Do we have a statistical problem?"  The problem is that we can notice the self-deception in other people while we consider the self-deception in ourselves justified.

Why is it so hard to be honest with ourselves?  Do we not like who really are?  Are we embarrassed about our failures?  Paul said to not lie to one another, but I think we really need to stop lying to ourselves.  We need to put on that new self, allow the knowledge that we become enlightened with to transform us, but we can never do that if we keep telling ourselves that the old, out-of-style clothes that we are still wearing are still in.

We have developed an immunity due to familiarity with the Gospel that should transform us.  As churchgoers, we have developed, what I consider, sermon immunity.  It means that we can listen to a sermon, think it is great or awful, and go home and not do a thing about.  We have learned how to listen to a message and remain immune to any change.

This has become easier because we have become more and more inundated with knowledge.  Wikileaks just leaked 251,287 State Department documents.  It was said back in 1989 that a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person in 17th-century England was likely to come across in a lifetime (Information Anxiety).  Around 1,000 books are published internationally every day and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every 5 years.  More information is estimated to have been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000 (The Reuters Guide to Good Information).  Information is everywhere.  If we have any question about any historical event, we can just Google it and have the answer.  But allowing the right knowledge to transform us is more important than just knowing some information, being able to wow your friends with trivia, or passing a test.

What Paul wants us to do is really believe in the depths of our being.  To allow our beliefs to wash through our body and come out in the way we live.  For a belief that is kept in the head and not expressed in the hands and feet is not a true belief.  It's just us deceiving ourselves.  And if we won't be the hands and feet of Jesus' head, who will be? 

James wrote:

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.

If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.  James 1:22-27 (ESV).

Let's stop lying.  We have places to go and new clothes to put on to get us there.

How To Handle Our Anger

When we get angry, the problem we have is that we either get angry at the wrong things, we fail to proceed to make the right change that our anger is inspiring, or we deal harshly with the people we are angry with.  Anger should be our natural impulse when we see the world not line up with what God intended it to be.  It should be our response to sin, but then we need to deal with that anger in the right way.

I put my mom through a lot growing up.  One of the scariest experiences for me, and I am sure for her, was when she was trying to teach me how to drive.  We had an old Ford Taurus, and the great feature about it was that it had a manual transmission. I had enough trouble accelerating, turning, and braking.  Combine that with shifting, and I was one scary driver.  Driving did not come naturally for me.  I remember roaring around corners too fast, but, most of all, I remember accidentally driving through my neighbors yard when we arrived home after our first time out.  Mom could have used those passenger side brakes when she taught me how to drive.  I'm just glad we lived through it. 

Shifting gears is tough, at least for me.  And when we are angry, we need to learn to shift gears.  We might be angry, but we cannot allow that anger to control us.  We should never deal harshly with another when we are angry.  That is allowing our anger to cause us to sin.  We need to allow our anger to highlight the problem, but then shift from being angry to fixing the situation.

Moses had trouble shifting gears.  When he saw the Egyptian beating a Hebrew, he was rightfully upset.  But then he went and killed the Egyptian.  For that, he spent forty years in the wilderness.  His response was not the response God would have him do, although his anger was proper.  (Exodus 2:11-15)

Cain also had trouble shifting gears.  When he and his brother Abel gave an offering to God, God looked favorably on Abel's offering but not on Cain.  So Cain became angry.  God told him, "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."  Cain's response was to kill Abel.  He placed his anger on the wrong person; it should have been himself.  His response was completely inappropriate; he should have committed in his heart to give better offerings to God.

Justin John Boudin (you know it's bad when you hear all three names) was waiting at a bus stop when he began to have a disagreement with a 59-year old woman.  He yelled, "Why don't you show me some respect?"  The lady, disturbed by Justin, proceeded to call the police.  Justin then punched her in the face.

At this point, a 63-year man stepped in to protect the lady.  Boudin smacked him with a folder then ran away.  The folder that he left on the ground after using it as a weapon was his homework for an anger management class that he was going to at that time.  At least we know that he was working on his problems.

Paul wrote, "Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger."

Anger is like our spidey-sense.  When we get angry, it's time for a change.  It might mean we need to step in to stop someone from punching a lady or stop some other form of abusive or oppressive action.  But it might mean, as in the case of Cain, we need to change ourselves.  What is angering us might actually be ourselves, our own preconceived notions, or the breaking of the box we have confined God in.  I've seen people get angry about changes in the church that were implemented to help us reach out, be more welcoming to visitors, or to just function more smoothly.  Some have even left the church over these things.  What they did was miss an opportunity to respond to their anger properly and grow spiritually.  Anger means something needs to change; More often than not, anger should cause a period of self-reflection because that something is often ourselves.

Paul teaches that our anger needs to be dealt with quickly.  The longer we let an issue go unresolved, the more it festers, and we are less likely to ever implement any change.  Have you ever seen a pressure cooker with too much pressure built up inside it.  It can explode, and when it does nothing good happens.  Just a little historical tidbit.  Pressure cookers gained a bad reputation in America after WWII.  After the war, there was great demand for pressure cookers and the manufacturers could not keep up.  New companies began making them that really did not know how to.  With these inferior pressure cookers, explosions were bound to happen.  Now, they claim to make explosion proof pressure cookers.  Although in 2009, there was an exploding pressure cooker death in India.

When we let our anger go unresolved,  let the frustration build up like a pressure cooker, we keep building pressure in our lives.  And we might not ever deal with it.  We might just stop hanging out with certain friends, we might just up and leave a church, or we might just ignore a relative altogether.  If we allow pressure to build up, it will eventually destroy things.  The life God wants us to lead is one where the frustrations in our life are dealt with. 

We like to disguise our anger with nice words like frustration, but semantics will not fix the problem.  What makes a healthy relationship is not a lack of frustration with one another but learning how to deal with one another in constructive ways.  Every relationship will have moments of frustration.  It's how we deal with those moments that shows whether what we are being a new self in Jesus or falling prey to our old self.  It's the difference between life and death.

Remember the words of Paul when dealing with someone that frustrates you.  "Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness"(Gal 6:1 ESV).  "And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, after being captured by him to do his will" (2 Tim 2:24-26 ESV).  It is never appropriate to stop loving others in our anger.

Remember that "anger" is very close to "danger."

Be Angry, But Do Not Sin

Aristotle said, "Anybody can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy."

I shared that on Facebook, and a friend replied with the question, "Is there a right time for anger?"

Paul commanded us to "be angry" in Ephesians 4:28, so I would say yes.   The NIV does not do this passage justice.  It states, "In your anger do not sin."  But the word anger here, in the Greek, is a present imperative.  John Stevenson writes, "When the present imperative is used in a command, it signifies a command to repeated or continuous action."  Paul is trying to express here that we are to live in a repeated state of anger.  The word literally means trembling from anger.  Both the NASB and ESV (both more literal translations than the NIV) translate Ephesians 4:28 as "Be angry." 

Mark 3:5 states that Jesus was angry.  "He looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart" (Mark 3:5 ESV).  This occurred when Jesus saw a man with a withered hand.  The Pharisees were watching him to see if he would heal the man on the Sabbath.  When Jesus had compassion for the man and healed him, the Pharisees held a meeting to figure out how to destroy Jesus.  How ludicrous; they wanted to destroy Jesus because he healed a man on the wrong day?  Their emphasis on the rules rather than on loving the hurting man angered Jesus, and he exhibited a righteous anger.

I just read through the headlines and looked to see what made my spirit grieve.  This is just a glimpse of our world at noon on May 18, 2010.  There are bad things happening right around us.  In our neighbor's houses, in places of employment, down at the hospital, and all around town.  It's much worse than just these headlines.

SHE LOST HER HOUSE OVER A $362 WATER BILL

Republican Congressman Resign After Affair w/ Staffer [Female]...

Senate Frontrunner Never Served In Vietnam, Despite Claims

Child Prostitution, Right Here At Home

Tar Balls Found Off Key West

WATCH: NBC Correspondent Swallows Huge Fly On Air

Mountain Climber Dies From Horrifying 1,000-Foot Fall

Anti-Semitic Incidents At School Rile Jewish Groups

Suicide Bomber Hits Convoy In Afghanistan, 5 U.S. Troops Killed

Waitress FIRED Over Status Update On Facebook

Gov't failed to assure drilling safety...

Man accused of trying to swap baby for beers...

Women tried to zap WENDY'S worker with stun gun; Botched drive-thru order...

Anger is the opposite of apathy.  Matthew Henry shares the quote, “If we would be angry and not sin, we must be angry at nothing but sin; and we should be more jealous for the glory of God than for any interest or reputation of our own."  Another commentator on the passage in Ephesians wrote, "Anger, as the mere expression of wounded personality is sinful for it means that self is in command. Anger, as the pure expression of repugnance to wrong in loyalty to God is sinless, where there is true occasion for it."

We are deluged every day with events that are contrary to what God has designed for this world to be, and this deluge of the world's sinful state has led to a desensitization of our souls.  Those terrible situations should stir in us a righteous anger that will spur us toward bringing God's kingdom into this reality as much as we possibly can.  God designed us with the emotion of anger; it is this anger that will lead us to be the hands and feet of Jesus to fix the broken world into the kingdom he designed it to be.

Tomorrow, I'll deal with how to handle our anger properly because Paul links the teaching to "be angry" with the command "do not sin."