Introduction

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Introduction There's a story that is attributed to lady Astor and Winston Churchill - I'm not sure if it's true or not, but it's worth repeating either way. Lady Astor was the first woman to be on the English Parliament and she and Winston Churchill did not get along very well, for whatever reason. And as the story goes, at one point her anger boiled up so intensely that she lashed out and said, “Mr. Churchill, if I was your wife, I would put poison in your coffee.” And Mr. Churchill said, “Lady Astor, if I was your husband, I would drink it.” That’s so Funny! Broken relationships are a great source of funniness, as long as you’re reading about them and instead of actually going through them. But they are literally horrific if you have to go through them. To feel the verbal stabbings and to absorb the icy stares. In all serious conflicts there is this heart of anger that underlies it all. Well Jesus is going to address the heart of anger in our passage today. And what we say today is critically connected to last week. Last week we looked at Matthew 5:19-21 where Jesus said, unless your righteousness EXCEEDS that of the scribes and pharisees you have no chance of entering the kingdom of heaven. We saw that Jesus, in making these claims, was setting himself up as the ultimate authority figure so that he can speak to the issue of ethics. And what is ethics? Ethics deals with this issue of what is absolutely right and wrong; ethics deals with defining what is good and what is evil. Here's where I am going with this: because Jesus is dealing with the subject of ethics, he needs to set himself up as an authority.

You see, what is so interesting (it was true in Jesus' day and is just as true today), there is no place where someone's authority is more questioned, no place where a person's authority is more disputed than when you get into the realm of ethics. For example, if I say, abortion is wrong or homosexuality is wrong instantly your authority is questioned. Who are you to say that abortion is right or wrong? That may be how you want to live your life but you don't have the right to force your moral standard on me. What makes your standard the right one? Who gave you permission to make judgments over me?" Who do you think you are? That is so arrogant.

And this is correct. Who am I? I am nobody. One person does not have the right to impose his ethics over another. My ethical system is just as arbitrary as the next guys. If you look up the words ethics in wikipedia is says that Ethics it defines ethics as, "the branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct." Do you hear the lack of authority in that statement? Some really smart guys get together and think and then based on their thinking, they recommend something. Recommending is as strong as you can go. You have no authority to make it any stronger. All any human can do is recommend concepts of right and wrong. But Jesus can go way beyond that. He can shock you with his bold, brazen claims. That is why we spent all that time last week explaining that Jesus is setting himself up as the authority figure. He's God. He created it and so he has the authority, not to just recommend but to tell. He's letting you know what the divine standard is. He's trying to end the debate and the squabbling. He's just telling.

And here's his first bone to pick:

Now just a word of explanation right up front here so you don't get misled. When Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said to those of old...." he's not quoting the Mosaic Law. He's using this as shorthand to reference what others have said about the Mosaic law. He's talking about the swirling debate, the cultural conversation, the adages, the cliches that hang around society. Society is always talking. We have our own versions of these things religious sayings that float around our culture. I recently read a Barna research statistic that 81 percent of American's who identify as born again Christians think that the statement, "God helps those who help themselves" is a verse out of the Bible. This saying got started somewhere and just circulates around.

And so if Jesus were giving this sermon to Americans he might bring this up, "You have heard it said, God helps those who help themselves, but I say to you God helps those who die to self and come as needy beggers to the throne of grace." The point is that he's not quoting the Bible. Whenever Jesus wants to talk or quote the OT he uses a formula to let us know this is what he is doing. Whenever he talks about the OT he says, "It is written." Now the reason this is often confusing to people is because what Jesus says here is in the Bible. "You have heard it said, "You shall not murder and whoever murders will be liable to judgment." You can definitely find a chapter and verse for that. But based on what Jesus says next, they had obviously missed the heart of it. You get the sense that what was taught must have been something along these lines, "As long as you don't physically destroy them such that their heart stops beating, you are guiltless.. God is okay with you holding a grudge, after all, he's a God of justice. God is okay with you harboring hatred in his heart, after all he hates the wicked. He just doesn't like knives in chests.

If you avoid that, you are guiltless. So Jesus is using shorthand. You know what you've heard taught about this verse, but here's what I say to you. He takes it to the core. He goes past symptoms to the heart. And the first thing he looks at is the heart of anger. And the reason I bring this up is because Jesus isn't pitting his words against the OT. He is pitting his interpretation of what the OT

said against what was popular understanding of what the OT said. Jesus was standing up his interpretation of the law against Rabbi Ben Haddid It was Jesus vs oral tradition It was Jesus vs the commentaries It was Jesus vs the religious establishment. Jesus is not saying something new. He's trying to affirm what God has always said and what he always had meant by the OT. Using all his authority, He says, "You want to know what the ethical standard of my kingdom is. Not only is there such a thing as right and wrong. Not only are you guilty of wrong. Your guilty of the worst kind of right and wrong. All of you listening here today are murderers."

This is shocking. Now let's look at Jesus' reasoning here. How can

he make such a claim? Now I think the average person who reads this would say to himself, "Wow, that's strong." Does Jesus really think of anger as the same thing as murder? Was my outburst last night the same thing as they guy who went out and murdered someone in cold blood? If I lash out in anger and say, "Your such a fool, that is worthy of hell-fire?" Sounds like Jesus is using some hyperbole maybe? Sounds like he's exaggerating a bit to make a point? Jesus doesn't really think this does he? The short answer is yes. And let's look at why. Why are we all guilty of murder?

The true crime of murder isn't the contraction of the muscle that moves the knife. The crime is what was in the head that cause the contraction. The crime was the motive. The true crime is what brewed and boiled and simmered over into murder. The true crime is anger. And any anger, small or large is part of the same disease.

You see, Jesus is always thinking in terms of root causes, he's bypassing symptoms and thinking in terms of sickness. Belittling someone, calling someone a fool, lashing out in character assassination or actually going out with a knife and killing someone are all part of the same spiritual sickness. It's the same sin in different forms of maturity. Here's two analogies. A single spot of cancer on the skin and full blown stage 4 skin cancer are indistinguishable under the microscope. It's the same EXACT problem in different stages of maturity. Or to use a different analogy, if you hold in your hand one of those little twirling maple tree seeds. Your holding in your hand all the information to make that giant 100 ton tree. When you plant that seed in the ground it's just a progression, from a seedling to a sapling to a 6 inch young tree to a giant maple. It's just a question of how mature it is. That by the way is why Paul could say, I'm the chief of sinners. He could see the DNA of Hitler in his core. That's how Jesus thinks about sin. Anger has a thousand different expressions but the same cause. So often we see deep, mature expressions of anger and we recoil in horror. That is horrifying. How could a person ever do that? What sort of person would do such a thing. And Jesus is here to say, I'll tell you what kind of person, a person exactly like you. You have the sickness in seed form, the exact same problem. Anger is the seed of murder. Do you ever see a little kid who is just crazy gifted in sports. And you

think, he's got what it takes to be a gold medal Olympian. He can't do it now, but with enough training, the core stuff is there. That is exactly what God is saying about us. You're all murders. You got what it takes. You've got the same spiritual DNA. Water it in a bit and you'll be right next to him. And the proof of this is to just look at your life. Is there anything you are currently doing that you've said at some earlier point, " I will never speak to my spouse the way my dad did I will never speak to my kids like my like spoke to me. I will never harbor a grudge like that. Look at the way that guy suffers under the weight of his hate. I'll never do that.

And now you are that guy. You've done all that. You're on the spectrum. The best thing to do here is just admit, "I have the seed forms of murderous anger in my heart." So that's the first reason we are murderous.

What is behind anger? Why are we angry? Because we are protecting something we love. You see what causes us to get angry is when OUR preferences, OUR values, OUR scruples are violated. Anger is protecting what you love. It is self-defense. And in God's economy, this is the greatest crime. I was thinking about the way our justice system reverses this. In our justice system the most excusable form of murder is self-defense. If you kill someone whose running at you with a gun, you'd be let off the hook because it was self-defense. But I think if Jesus were to set up the terminology, he wouldn't choose that term. Because Jesus is saying that the most mature form of anger is murder and what it takes to move from a hateful thought to picking up a gun and pulling the trigger in icy cold blood is the highest, ugliest form self defense. I love myself so much that if you even dare to cross me, I will literally kill you. Your life means nothing to

me, because me getting what I want is more precious than anything else in the world, including your life. And Jesus' point is that we are all on this spectrum of ugly selfdefense. Every time you get angry there is some form of love for self at the core of it. Nobody can make you get angry. Your love of self is revealed every time you get angry. Depending on your personality or depending on your roll or depending on your situation this love of self will have different expressions. The elders helped me think through some of these examples.

Injustice People whose injustice alarms are particularly sensitive can get angry when someone has an easier life than they do. They read a Facebook post about someone's awesome vacation and they get angry. That's not fair. Or when someone had more advantages in being raised. They had a better opportunities, better education, more money at their disposal. And they didn't do anything to deserve it. Hey, that's not fair! Or it could be anger that comes from being stereotyped as a woman or stereotyped as a man.

This can express itself in justice-oriented children who are in submission relationships to their parents. They get angry when they sense they are being compared to their siblings unfairly or that mom and dad are unfairly dealing out consequences. Or they go against what they have promised. In the workplace this injustice alarm goes off when your boss at work isn't recognizing your accomplishments over some other

person.

Principle Based Principle-based people get angry when you don’t agree with them. For me this rears it's head, when I have some philosophical idea that I've put a lot of time into articulating and someone says, "Well, that just doesn't feel right to me." And they dismiss my idea out of hand. I instantly get angry. You didn't put any thought into it at all; you dismiss all my efforts with the fact that you don't like the way it feels!

Passionate People Passionate people get angry when they don’t get what they want right NOW. They have this strong sense they need to act, that to not act would be a violation of moral fabric of the universe, act now think later. And so when a slow thinker stands in their path they get angry. Your foiling my plans. Your the problem.

Introverts Introverts get angry when the schedule fills up with lots of people activities.

Cognitive Types Cognitive types get angry when others talk down to them or imply they are stupid in front of others. And so the expression of anger is wide and diverse but the heart is the same. You have crossed me. My kingdom is being invaded and I will defend it by lashing out. I will defend it by verbally thrashing you. And this is what murder is in it's most mature form. I love

myself and my kingdom and my values and my perspective so much that if you threaten me in any way, I will destroy your life. Anger or jealousy that causes you to gossip and cold blooded murder have the same root cause. Jesus of course is not saying it doesn't make any difference whether you stab someone or gossip about them. No, of course their are degrees. But it comes from the same fundamental heart condition. It's always the heart condition that matters. It's not about the words. Jesus says in verse 22 that if you call someone a fool you will be liable to the hell fire. Calling someone a fool is not intrinsically wrong. The proverbs call people fools. Jesus calls people fools. What is wrong is the heart behind belittling. What is wrong is the hear of contempt. Defaming of someone's character because you have hatred for them. The Bible uses a Greek word here that we all know. It's the Greek word moros from which we get our word MORON. When you call someone a Moron or an idiot what are you trying to do? Your trying to destroy their confidence in themselves. The only reason you’re calling them that is because you hope they’ll believe you. When you get them to believe that, you have put a dagger in a part of their heart that no surgeon can get. To murder somebody is to murder their reputation, but to murder somebody is also to murder their confidence in themselves. The heart behind that kind of name calling, the heart behind that kind of anger and murder is desiring to have mastery over them. I will prove that I am more powerful, more noble, more dignified. Hate in the heart - jealousy is a form of hate.

And the ultimate form of hateful mastering is murder. I will show you I have ultimate control over you by murdering you. By the way, there are church versions of this. I feel like some ministries have put a lot of time and effort into getting their version of ministry out there. And there version is a good version. And when someone crosses their ministry preference, when someone takes a position that is biblically allowable but different than their own, they get angry. And they are willing to ruin someone's reputation under the banner of "Getting out the truth." Or someone crosses your personal preference on how to dress or how to school your children or how to parent or healthy eating or how to use your money and you get angry. And so you gossip about them under the banner of needing to "pray for them." All of this is knifeless, verbal murder.

You know what Jesus is doing here? He's exposing the incompleteness of religion. That word religion is used in so many different ways. Some Christians, to make a point will say things like, "No person hated religion more than Jesus." And if you use the word that way, your defining it as the trappings that get in the way of the actual message. And of course that's true. But statements like these can be dangerous because it hides where the true problem is. It makes it sound like the organizational element is what is bad. Some people will just toss out ever going to church, ever fellowshipping with other believers because after all, Jesus hated religion. I know many people who have used this exact line of reasoning. That's not good thinking. Christianity is a religion by anybody's definition. So it is right to say that in another sense, Jesus loved religion more than any other person who ever lived. He was the essence and definition of true religion. This is the way James uses the word.

You see James is saying, your not religious enough. Your religion is incomplete. A better question to ask is this, what in particular did Jesus hate about religion and what part did he love. You have probably heard people say, "You know the problem with the world is religion, religious fanatics." Most atheists look at religion as a bad thing. They see all these bad examples of what religion produces. And they kind of see in their mind this link. The more religious a person gets, the more fanatical they get, the more dangerous they become. If they get fanatical enough they will fly into buildings and kill people. And Jesus is here on the sermon on the mount to agree with that. The most religious people of his day were the most unappealing people. But Jesus' solution was not like most people's solution. The atheist says, "Religious fanatics have cause all these problems, therefore we need to get rid of religion." The disillusioned Christian

says, "Man the problem is all the organized churches and the bickering over church polity and those fundamental baptists and those reformed presbyterians and those Bible Churches." Jesus says, "Yes, religious people have missed the point of religion all together. The solution is not to abandon religion, but get back to the heart of religion...to get more religious." Here's the real problem. Most of the time people who are labeled super religious are fanatical in some specialized sense. Maybe they are fanatical about dietary laws, or memorization practices or prayer practices. Super fanatical in their zeal for the religion. But the people are unappealing. People aren't drawn to them? Why? Because they are too religious? No! They are not religious enough. They are not fanatically courageous, fanatically humble, fanatically sensitive, frantically forgiving, fanatically wise, fanatically compassionate, fanatically welcoming, fanatically humbling. Their religion is incomplete. They need to read James. The problem is the religious fanatic is like Jesus maybe in a couple of areas, but he is not like Jesus in the most important areas. He's not fanatical enough. And what Jesus is saying here in the sermon on the mount is this: my ethic is not selective. You can't get super serious about tithing laws and then ignore anger or redefine anger in such a way that you are guiltless. You can't get super fanatical about the Sabbath but ignore lust. I don't want you slicing up my name and calling that poor excuse of a life obedience to the law. You can’t have some morality. My ethic is too high for that. What Jesus here says is, “If you belong to my

kingdom, if you come into my kingdom, then what happens is God begins to work a righteousness in you, a quality of character in you through the Spirit that changes everything, every part of your life.” So Jesus has established his point. We are all the spectrum of murder. You can't be selective in your obedience. We are all guilty. It ought to scare you. He's trying to scare you! So what do you do about it? What if you realize that you are an angry person? And be honest, not that you are an angry person but that you are actually angry at someone!

What do you do if you are angry at someone, if you have anger in your heart? We are going to use three words here which have all the same basic idea, but will hit at the concept from different angles.

Confess it! Jesus has designed confession such that confession of anger begins the healing process. Based on the analogies we've used, you might see this anger-murder spectrum as a fatalistic, inevitable. If all this anger DNA is in my heart what can I really do about it? But that's not true! You can do something to break that slide. Confess! Now I really like the way Jesus words this. He doesn't say, "If you have something against your brother." He doesn't say that. Instead he says, "If your brother has something against you!" Jesus is such a master of the human heart isn't he? If he had worded it that first way, what would we say. He knows what we are going to say, "I don't have a problem with him, he's got a problem with me." When in reality you do have a problem with him and your pride is so large you can't swallow it. So he forces us to go to the guy whose got a problem with us to expose

the problem we have with him! And we resist this so heavily. It feels like the most painful unappealing act. Why do I have to go to him if he's the one that has the problem with me. Why can't he come to me? And the reason you MUST go is revealed in that exact heart attitude. What that reveals is that you can't handle criticism. What is the harm in listening to the complaint. Don't you want to know if there is some legitimate offense? Do you want to walk around with a giant splotch of pudding in your beard? If someone is accusing you of something, what if there is truth in it? What is the harm in listening and confessing as much as possible? Listen if you don't take this step of going to someone and confessing, the anger that is in your heart will eventually explode. It's just a matter of time. You don't know when, but the timer is ticking and eventually it will go off and out will come the shrapnel of hurtful words, hateful speech, coldness, isolation. And Jesus is trying to say, disarm it now. The longer you wait, the harder it will be. The more damage will happen. Why not just be reconciled now. Jesus is serious about confession not as some polite protocol but as the means toward true change and healing, as a method of breaking the anger cycle. What Jesus is doing by using this imagery of murder is not to discourage you about the inevitable advance of the disease, but to highlight the serious of acting on it now while there is still time. There is this frightening principle in the Bible that if you don't get serious about confession, God will stop being serious about you. He uses phrases like "handing you over to Satan", "allowing the heart to harden" "turning you over" etc.

You need to get serious about confession. He's trying to call attention to what's at stake. Normally we are walking around in a sleepy stupor. Oh common, everybody gets angry. And Jesus is saying that hate and anger and bitterness and jealousy WILL lead to murder. You are on the path. And there is one thing and one thing only that you can do about it and that is confess it. Interrupt the process. Kill the disease. Confession is like spiritual chemotherapy. Anger may not seem as serious as murder because we don't see the corpses we leave behind. We have dull spiritual senses because we don't sense the seriousness. But Jesus is saying, "Wake up! Confess before it's too late!" It's so easy to confess now, so hard to confess later. How many arguments, legal disputes, even murder could have been prevented by so simple a reconciliation, so slight and minor a humbling. The Hatfields and Mccoys have become a household word for revenge, retaliation, bitterness, resent. There certainly would have been a point where that whole thing could have been prevented by a simple, "I'm sorry will you forgive me. I heard that you were offended at my arrogant words. You know, they were arrogant. Will you forgive me?" The Hatfields and the Mccoys of course are a metaphor for every marriage in this room. Every divorce has a traceable point where years earlier the repentance stopped, where the confession stopped. Every divorce had a point where anger began to build, where hatred boils, where bitterness was internalized. And there is a point of no return where hatred and wounding go so deep that so deep a humbling is not actually possible. Where are you on this spectrum with your spouse? With a family member? With a son or daughter? Where are you on the hatemurder spectrum?

When we think of that person we have the hardest time loving. When we think of the absolute hardest guy to love. And we think Okay, I shouldn't hate him. And we get this idea in our heads that angerlessness is the opposite of anger. What's the opposite of hate. Not hating. Right? no. The opposite of anger is in fact love. Jesus is trying to say lovelessness is murder. Now what is Jesus trying to do here? He's trying to get you to see what is at the core of anger. He's trying to get us to look beyond the flat impossible condition of simply not-hating. What we are going to see is that it's actually not possible to simply not hate. We talked about this concept in Ephesians the put on and put off principle. I think we often think of this as some sort of strictly sanctification principle. Why do we want to not just put off, but also want to put on. And instantly what jumps into our mind is the parable about the man who had a demon cast out. The room is

swept clean but there's nobody living there. And that vacuum creates space for seven demons worse than the first. And the thinking is that if we just take off but don't put on then we are creating space for worse things. If we want to make progress we have to put good stuff in its place. Now that is true. But it's so much more than that. It's a way to think about the connectedness of morality. If it's not light what do we call it? Dark. It's dark because dark is the absence of light. They are bound together in an unbreakable relationship. That is how all morality works. Theft for example is not the opposite of not stealing. Theft is the opposite of generosity. So if you are not being generous you are living in the dusk of theft. Or to say it the other way, if you are a thief and your heart changes and you stop your thieving you are living in the pre-dawn of generosity.

The point here is that there is a connectedness to morality. Love is the opposite of hate and that is where God wants us to go.

There's another connectedness piece you need to see here. Hate is to love as _____ is to confession. Thieving is to Generosity as __ is to Confession. What is the opposite of confession? Apathy. When I confess, I start to care. When I confess, I agree with God instead of saying, "I dont care about your standard. I don't give a rip about what you say is right and wrong. I don't care if someone has something against me. I don't care if I've hurt someone. Confession cares. Caring really is a synonym for confession. The second we care, the second we confess, everything melts. Confession causes us to say, “Lord, the only difference between that murderer and me is one of quantity only not quality,” Saying that humbles you, and it creates a compassion in you. You

begin to put up with people you never would have put up because you can’t feel superior to anybody. Without contempt, without feeling superior, there wouldn’t be any bad relationships. As soon as you begin to say, “Lord, I am a murderer just like you said in the Bible,” you begin to soften. You begin to change. The minute you say, “I don’t love anybody,” that admission opens the gates, melts the ice, and the love flows. The minute you begin to say, “I’m a murderer,” you stop being one. Until you admit you’re not acceptable to God, you can never be acceptable. Until you admit you’re a murderer, you can’t stop being a murderer. Until you admit your lovelessness, loveless is all you'll ever be.

God uses the very admission of lovelessness and the humbling effect of that admission in our lives to actually create in us loving, humble, compassionate people. It’s astonishing. Are you willing to do it? Are you willing to say, “I finally admit. I knuckle under. I’m a murderer?” Until you admit it, you can never stop being one. Apply this to your two people. Do you know where you begin to practice this kind of relationship transformation? The minute you stand up. You can break through a lot of old patterns, and you could begin to say, “Lovelessness is murder.” Who am I going to love?