Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is It OK to be Angry? | New Testament | Galatians 6

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Is there such thing as righteous anger? You might have a hard time telling the difference between righteous and unrighteous anger in your heart. In today's episode, Patrick uses Galatians 6 to discuss anger. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Galatians 6

Welcome to 10 minute Bible talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. Today we're coming to the end of the Book of Galatians, and it concludes in a way that I think is highly relevant for our cultural moment, and that's because it's partially about anger. You might have asked yourself this question, is it ever okay to get angry? Are some forms of anger wrong or some forms of anger righteous? I know that I've had to ask this question myself many times. When I was a teenager, even into my young adulthood, I never thought of myself as an angry person. In fact, I thought of myself as a rather patient person who very rarely got angry with

others. But all of that changed after I had kids. I remember after we had my daughter, there was a time where she wouldn't go to sleep. She was crying a lot, and I was losing sleep, and I was frustrated. And I left the house to go to work. And on the way to work, I'm driving there in my Ford Taurus, because I'm a fancy guy. And I literally started yelling at the top of the time. And I literally started yelling at the top of my lungs and then I punched my steering wheel and I stopped and I thought, whoa, what just happened? Where did all this wrath and anger and frustration come from? I started thinking, what happens if I let out that kind of wrath and anger in the presence of my daughter? What would that be like? I mean, again, I never thought of myself as an impatient person. I never thought of myself as an angry person.

But the truth was that having kids, it was like a revelation. It pulled back the curtain on my heart and just showed that I hadn't been in circumstances where I'd had the chance to get angry. I hadn't been in circumstances where my patients had slowly over time been whittled down. And when that happened, it made me realize a lot of my anger is not righteous. A lot of my anger seethes under the surface even if I can't see it. And if I let that anger out, it could be incredibly destructive. And so that set me forward on a journey of taking my anger seriously and wanting to resist inside of myself what I saw in my car.

on that day. Or maybe you've had an outburst of anger and you thought that was righteous. I should have gotten angry. I needed to be angry. But then in retrospect, you wondered, well, was it righteous? Did I do the right thing? And I think why this is so apropos to our moment is because of the internet. I mean, right now, if you're on social media anywhere, it's quite likely that you see anger performed online on a regular basis. It might be your friends on Facebook yelling about the latest political scandal, about the latest news event, or it might be your favorite pundit who's releasing an online video explaining why he's angry about the latest event, the latest thing to happen in Washington, D.C., or whatever sphere of interest you have.

The more we live our life online, the more outrage we tend to see, and this isn't an accident. According to a leaked document from Facebook, they actually designed their algorithm to keep people on their platform by showing them content that made them outrage. They realized that the angrier you get, the less likely you're. are to leave the platform because, well, you want more anger. You want to fuel the outrage. And I see this happen all the time online when someone gets angry and then someone else replies and says, why are you being so angry? Why are you being so unkind? Why are you using these kinds of words? And the common response will be this. Well, Jesus got angry. Was Jesus sinful? Well,

the prophets, they got angry. Were they sinful? Again, it's a good question. I mean, Jesus, he flipped over tables. According to the Gospel of John, he got a whip and was whipping it around in the temple to scare people out. Clearly, Jesus got angry. And if Jesus was without sin, then doesn't that mean that there is such a thing as righteous anger? I think that's a valid question, and it's exactly the question I want to center today's episode on. I'm going to pick up in Galician 6, verse 1. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit, if you remember yesterday, we talked about the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Well, he's saying, for those who are living by the

spirit, in the spirit's way, he says, you should restore that person gently. But, watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Now, the question is, what would you be tempted by? I mean, when you're correcting someone, what are the temptations that come along with that? I think the answer is actually the verse before because Paul says that you should restore that person gently. In other words, the temptation is to confront someone, but not in a way that restores them and not in a way that's gentle. In other words, our temptation when we are confronting wrongdoing in others is what? It's anger. It might even look like righteous anger because the thing we're confronting is in fact a sin. The thing we're confronting is in fact unjust or wrong. And so when we get angry about it,

we might think that we're doing the right thing. I'm just like Jesus flipping you. over the tables. It's righteous anger. But Paul warns his readers and he says, no, be careful to restore them with a spirit of gentleness. And so again, he might say, well, is Paul correcting Jesus? Is he saying, well, if Jesus could go back to the temple when he was flipping over the tables, he should have maybe thought twice about that. Because when he did that, he wasn't restoring people in a spirit of gentleness. I don't think that's right. Because I don't think that Paul is laying down a law here. I think he's dropping wisdom. He's saying that when we confront people, we will be tempted by unrighteous anger. When we confronts people, we're going to be tempted to lose our temper and think that it's okay

because we're confronting something that's wrong. You see, there's some major differences between Jesus and me. Jesus is without sin. So when he has anger, it is always righteous anger. When he has anger, it's not because he's trying to be performative and show how righteous he is. when he has anger, it's not because he's trying to hurt someone and harm them. When he has anger, it's so that he can restore them. And even his anger could be a form of gentleness. Why? Because his anger is always calibrated to heart change. And so if he gets angry at you, I think his goal is to ultimately be gentle, to welcome you back in. The problem is that unlike Jesus, I can't see inside of people's hearts. I can't see inside of people's minds. And so I don't know what kind of response

my anger is eliciting. More importantly, I don't know if my anger is appropriate to the moment. You see, Jesus knew exactly how elevated to get. I don't always know. I often overreact. I often get more angry than I should. I mean, everybody knows this. In the moment, when you're angry, you think what you're doing makes sense. When you're angry, you think what you're doing is righteous. But then you give it a few days and you look back and you go, whoa, man, maybe I was right. But why did I get so elevated? Why did I get so frustrated? You see, there's a big difference between me and Jesus. And that's why Paul is giving us wisdom. He's saying if you're walking in the fruit of the spirit, I've already listed them all. If you're walking in those fruit, you're going to be slow to speak. You're going to

watch your own heart. You're going to be more worried about making sure that your response is kind and gentle and restorative than you are about performing anger or taking a pound of flesh in return for what's been taken from you. You see, this is wisdom. Before you go into any conversation in person or online, you have to evaluate your own heart first. So let's pull back the camera. Is there such a thing as righteous anger? Well, yeah, of course there is. Jesus had righteous anger. But Paul's point is that you have a hard time telling the difference between righteous anger in your heart and unrighteous anger in your heart. You have a hard time telling when your anger is properly elevated and calibrated to the problem, or when your anger is out of balance and too extreme.

So Paul's wisdom is this. Watch your own heart. Don't get angry because you're not sure where that anger's coming from. Instead, correct people and restore them with a spirit of gentleness. I find it really interesting the way that Paul ends, Galatian 6. He writes this little note from himself. He says, see, with what large letters I write to you with my own hand. And so clearly someone else was writing the letter.

He was dictating the letter to them. And at the end, he takes the pen and he writes out in big letters. Because he probably had some sort of eye deficiency, and so he could only see the big letters. But anyways, he keeps going, and he summarizes his whole letter in verse 12. He says, those who want to impress people by means of the flesh are trying to compel you to be circumcised. The only reason they do this is to avoid being persecuted for the cross of Christ. So he's going back to the main theme.

There's people out there who say that you need to be circumcised to follow Jesus. But he's saying, the only reason why they're claiming that is that they won't be persecuted by their fellow Jews. But then catch what he says next. He says, not even those who are circumcised, keep the law. Yet, they want you to be circumcised, that they may boast about your circumcision in the flesh. And so he's saying again, look, they might be circumcised, but they can't even follow the entire law. And the only reason why they want you to be circumcised is so that they can brag about it. They can say, see, look at what I did in Solentose life.

It's all performative. Verse 14, may I never boast in anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been circumcised to me and I to the world. Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything. What counts is the new creation. I want to end here, and it actually relates to what we're talking about, because Paul's big concern with circumcision is that it's a self-righteous performance. Again and again, he's saying people talk about circumcision,

they call other people to get circumcised, he calls it a performance. He says that they're doing it so that they can brag. He says, they're doing it so that other people will see. And he says, look, whether you're circumcision, or uncircumcised, whatever your performance is, it doesn't matter. What matters is new creation. I think online, when we're talking about rage and anger, and even in person, it's often performative. The reason why we're out in front of people yelling about this cause or that cause, talking someone down or shouting them down for their perspective, again, in person or online, it's performative. It's because we want to show I'm a particular kind of person who gets angry and upset about particular kinds of things.

It's a way of telling the world who I am and how righteous I am that I care about these kinds of causes. And I think Paul would say, your outrage, your anger, it's a performance. It's just bragging. It's all about you. And it really doesn't matter whether you're angry or you're not angry. Do you know what matters? New creation. See, that's where his letter ends.

He says, what really matters is that God, through Jesus, is bringing about a transformation of all things. It's not just the transformation of individual human hearts, but that heaven is coming to earth. And when Jesus returns, not only will we be resurrected, but all of creation will be restored. And he says, that's the thing that really matters. It's not your performance for God. It's not your performance for others. It's the performance of Jesus on the cross on your behalf. It's the acts of Jesus when he returns and resurrects all the dead. That's the thing that matters the most. So the question that sits before you and me is this, will we give him our allegiance? Will we give him our faith? Will we choose not to trust in our external performance?

to be the things that make us righteous, to be the things that make others like us, and will we instead rest and accept the gift of righteousness in Christ. Before you forget, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get an email every Wednesday that's going to help you beat that midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.