Defense Against the Dark Arts

Hey, if you have a Bible, Ephesians chapter 4 is where we're going to be. I want to start with this question. If you knew there was something in your life that was harming you or hurting the people that you loved, wouldn't you want to know? I was on the phone with a friend this week, and he just came to my mind. And I hadn't seen him in a while, so I just checked in. He said, how are you doing? He's like, sorry, I can hardly hear you. I'm in a moving truck. I said, what are you in a moving truck for? He said, you know how my kids have been so sick lately? He said, we found out there was black mold all over the home that we were living in. And it explained the sickness. It was harming us. And so the moment I found out, he said, I got out. We got out. He said, they offered us to stay there and live there while they were working on it, ripping everything out. He said, no, thank you. So he was in a moving truck. Why? Because he found out what he didn't know. There was something harming him, something harming the people that he loves. Welcome to Killing You Softly. The seven different things we're going to discover today

are all things that God's going to open our eyes through his word, through his spirit, to see in our lives, harming us that we don't even realize like black mold are there. The list that we're going to be using as a syllabus first emerged only a few hundred years after Jesus' ascension to heaven in the deserts outside of Egypt, where just after Christianity was legalized and normalized in the Roman Empire, there began to be a growing sense of, for many people, of dissatisfaction with what that was doing to the church. While the church was persecuted, it remained somewhat purified. But the moment it became normalized and everybody was sort of a nominal Christian, they began to realize, man, so many people are impure with their motives now. So many people are naming the name of Christ because there's something to be gained from. There's power now. There's money now. So there was a group of people who thought, you know what? Let's just get out of town. Let's just move into the desert. We'll sort of form these monasteries so we can really see Christ. And here's the crazy thing they discovered. They got out of the sinful city and found out they brought sin with them inside of themselves. They smuggled it into their perfect communities,

their little heaven on earth. And so it was in the midst of these monasteries that they began to realize, dang it. What we thought we would do is escape defilement actually turned up right here in our midst. And so they began to take note. They began to make lists. And what emerged out of that period of time was eventually formalized under the language the seven deadly sins. Now, when we think about that, that's a shocking thing to talk about. Like, what are they? What are they? Do I have toxic mold in my soul? It's been said that sin has 1,000 faces, which is terrifying. Sin has 1,000 faces. There are so many different ways that it can show up in your life. And let me tell you something. There is not a single version of its face. There's not a single manifestation of it that you'll discover in your life that is to be taken lightly. All sin is deadly. The wages of all sin is death. All sin must be treated as the enemy in our lives and not to be toyed with, regardless of the form it takes. But not all sins, it would seem, have the capacity

for multiplication, right? You could put it this way. These seven sins that we're going to be focusing on in this series have a way about them where they sort of spawn other sins. They can create nests of sin in your life. Where these sins are tolerated, they're uniquely deadly because of their capacity to multiply. Sort of like if you imagine maybe a group of kids can only afford, they only have enough money for one movie ticket, but they want to all see a movie. They pool their resources to buy one ticket. All they have to do is get inside, and they can go up in the emergency exit and let their friends in. Teenagers, this is not life advice here. That's what these seven sort of deadly sins. History kind of records theologians as referring to them as sort of the captain sins. Once they're in place in your life, they can open the door and command battalions of other sins. They weaken your resistance to sin. And so more sin is able to show up in your life once you tolerate these seven. So I guess we could talk about these sins as gateway drugs. We talk about a gateway drug. Once you take this drug, it actually makes you easier to say yes to the drug down the road. And here's what the list is.

This is what we're going to be talking about. Talking about pride, sloth, gluttony, envy, lust, greed, and wrath. And we're identifying these as sort of strongholds the enemy wants to get into our lives so that he then can launch further attacks. We always have to remember the devil is playing chess, not checkers. To where we might go, oh, what's a little indulgence in this? What's a little bit of that? Oh, that's not. Because you can think of worse sins, right? Every one of us look at that list and go, come on. Come on, you could do better. What about cannibalism? That's worse. You know, like the most crazy thing you could say. You know what I'm saying? And I think what is precisely so dangerous about these sins is just kind of how innocuous they can seem to be. And really, in our day, some of them actually are kind of treated as virtues, not vices, and at the best. And in the worst, kind of like scoffed at a little bit. And maybe that's the reason that they're so powerful. And it is in this season, as we are now in the days moving towards Easter, that we want to solemnly sweep the house, right? That's always something that went together with Passover. There was, in fact, as you move towards the Jewish Passover,

which is when Jesus was arrested and illegally tried and sentenced to death and butchered for our sakes at Calvary, before, of course, rising from the dead, it was during that holiday that they would actually sweep the house, looking for any presence of leaven. And leaven, in scripture, always is a picture of sin. And so that's what we're trying to do in these days. We're trying to sweep our metaphoric houses, right? The symbolic houses of our souls to find out where is there anything that would defile. We're asking the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the living God, to fall afresh on us and help us to have our eyes open to see any evil we are indulging or being hospitable to that would contaminate and infiltrate our souls, keeping us ready for the Lord's return. Because any weakness, any sin in your life or in my life is a way that defiles us and does not keep us ready for Christ's return. So that's where we're going in this series. I'm really believing this to be a major time of growth, especially if, as you looked at that list, you go, eh, I'm doing pretty good. I'm doing pretty good. Feel like I'm going to be fine in this series. I'm really especially praying for you. We start with wrath. We start with the deadly sin of wrath. And I will say, you go, why did you pick this one first? Is it the deadliest of the deadly sins? No, it's just the one I'm most personally convicted by.

And so I thought we'd just start right here. I said, God, oh, and it has been a week of that. Let me just tell you. Let's frame our time with words from the apostle Paul. This is Ephesians chapter 4. We're just going to excerpt it. You can read the whole paragraph on your own. It will be profitable for you, I trust. Paul says, be angry. These are words to live by. Be angry, thank you, and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Nor, and this should scare you, give place to the devil. And then he continues, verse 31, let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. This is God's word. Paul uses what should be a startling, startling phrase here. To get anger wrong, to get wrath wrong is to give the devil a place in your life, to give a place for him, a spot where he can use to set up a headquarters to attack you, to let the enemy come in and open up the back door and bring all the friends in. Don't give place to the devil. Instead, here's what you're to do with this emotion, with this response of anger.

He's saying that rage, vengeance, wrath, fury makes your life hospitable to the enemy and what he wants to accomplish inside your spirit. Not all at once. He kills us softly, slowly. Wrath, he is saying, is danger. dangerous. And so in telling us how to treat wrath, thus make our lives inhospitable to the dark, powerful Lord the devil, right, with a small l, he's telling us how to be open to the Spirit's movement in our lives. So this is supernatural. Your temper, your anger, your emotional outburst, this is supernatural stuff here. There are implications far beyond what you can see or hear or touch when we talk about our mood, our disposition. So I wanted to give a real serious title to this message. What Paul gives us is essentially defense against the dark arts. That's the title of our message here. He's trying to, if the enemy wants to attack you, launch an attack against you. And Paul's saying, in how we handle anger, how we deal with this deadly sin, we're given a defense against the dark arts. Now, of course, in treating it as serious as it is, we're having to acknowledge how out of step this is with our culture.

I mean, our culture is increasingly full of rage. When I was a teenager, it was just a band. But now it's everywhere, right? It's everywhere. It's all the bait. It's rage bait online. It's trolling with it. The algorithm favors things that will get us all up in our feelings. I mean, it's an outrage culture. Behind the wheel of our cars, there's road rage waiting for us. And we're to be treating it seriously, even though our culture is just like spoon feeding it to us with every news cycle. Now, let me back up here and address the elephant in the room. Paul doesn't say, it's really important you hear me say this. Paul doesn't say, don't be angry. He doesn't say, don't get mad. That's not the sermon. You're like, OK, all right. You twist my arm, Pastor, I'll stop getting mad. I'll quit swearing when I miss my golf swing. No, no, no, hold on here. The sermon isn't, don't be mad. Because Paul says, be angry. Just when you do, don't sin. It's not the anger that's the sin. It's what happens next.

What do we do when we're mad? That's the million dollar question. It's been said that feelings are terrific indicators, but terrible dictators. So we want, when we feel something, to feel it deeply, to feel it authentically. Not to suppress it, but to look at it like gauges on a dashboard. It's a tremendous indicator, but it's not to be your dictator. You get to choose what happens next when you feel it. I've heard it put this way. Anger in your life is like a child in your car. You don't want the child to be behind the steering wheel, but neither can you put it in the trunk. You see what I'm saying? That's some great parenting advice. You might want to put the child in the trunk, but you can't. The child might want to be behind the wheel, but they shouldn't. And anger in your life, simultaneously, you're going to find yourself drawn to one of those two. To either feel it and, well, this is what I feel. This is real, especially in an era and an age where authenticity is valued like an idol. It wouldn't be authentic to not be me. This is my truth. This is me. Angry me is just me, right? You're letting the child behind the wheel. Or, oh, this is not good.

I feel uncomfortable, so I'm just going to suppress it and shove the child into the trunk. So there are exploders and there are imploders. The exploders just let that kid behind the wheel, and the imploders shove it into the trunk, where eventually it will build up and be even more dangerous. So your style of anger might be the machine gun, or you might be the ice machine. And you might have both of these perfected depending on the audience. So blowing up, clamming up, both of these things are a problem. Why? Because your temper is the one thing you can never get rid of by losing it. You can never get rid of your temper by losing it. But, hear me, whenever you lose your temper, you always lose something. Whenever you lose your temper, something gets lost. It might be your health. Studies have linked anger, both suppression and explosions, with hypertension, colitis, migraines, heart disease, and the list goes on. Please do Google it. Just see what every leading medical institution talks about when you're an angry person. Listen to me hint, it's killing you, and not even that softly. But it might not be just your health you lose. It might be the respect and love of your family. It might be your job. It could also be your life.

I just kept coming back to the story, the tragic story of Eric Neumann. A man from Oregon who came to the state of Montana a few years back to do some boating, and while trying to back up the rental boat into the lake, got into an altercation with someone who was irritated with how long Eric was taking to back his boat. Now, every man in the room all of a sudden feels this deeply on one level or another. We've backing up a trailer, backing up a boat, a boat launch. Man, your ego is out there. There's nothing like that feeling of you can't get it right, someone else is coming. There's a lot of tension. And Eric wasn't getting it right. His kids were in the car, also some nieces and nephews, his sister, his wife in the car. And this other guy made a comment to him, maybe something about, could you do this sometime today? And they got into a verbal exchange. And the other guy went to his vehicle, got a semi-automatic pistol out, and in cold blood murdered the man on the boat launch, and then went into his car and took his life. His anger that day, his temper that day cost two lives and the tragic, of course, pain of Eric's family on that day. Frederick Buechner said of the seven deadly sins,

wrath is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back. In many ways, it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback, of course, is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. You see, sin is its own punishment. I need you to understand that. Theologically speaking, there is, of course, punishment to come for sin. But sin is also its own punishment, meaning that what you're getting is also the punishment and not just what eventually is going to be triggered. Do you understand what I'm saying when I say sin is its own punishment? I heard the story of an elderly couple. They had been through quite the ordeal in their marriage, their emotional temperaments and climate. And the man was an exploder. And the wife had to shoulder a lot in the time married. And eventually, in a moment of rare introspection, the man said to his wife, he said, honey, I'm so sorry for all these years, all the times I lost it and just exploded on you and laced into you. And you just took it. You seemed to bite your tongue.

You just never lashed back. And she said, it's OK. It's OK. I found ways to cope. And he said, no, but I just want you to know, I'm really sorry. She goes, no, honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Every time you would lace into me and you would go off and you would lose your temper, lose your cool, she said, I would just go clean the toilet. And he goes, really? That helped? And she goes, yes, because I used your toothbrush. Wow. Exploder, imploder, sin its own punishment. There's a corrosive quality to sin that is looking to kill. This is why in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus made such startling language about calling your brother a fool and being angry, but then he linked it to murder. There's a way in which when you're doing it, it feels so good, but it's corroding yourself. It might have felt good to you in the moment, but it's harming you. He warned of hellfire. It's not just something like, oh, well, I'm Irish, or the dumb things we say. Well, everyone in my family is a hothead, or just hair trick. No, no, no, it's hellfire. There's a punishment. It's harming you every time you do it.

But Paul says it's tricky because not all anger is automatically sin. He says in your anger, sin not, but then he tells us putting off wrath, putting off bitterness, putting off anger. So really, what I'm trying to say is, how do you know when you've crossed that line from just feeling it to now you're sinning in your anger? Well, that's why we need to define it, define it, first of a series of takeaway truths. When you feel anger, you need to define anger properly so you can run your anger through that grid. Now, what grid can we find? Well, we're going to use Aristotle, who said something very astute about anger. He said, a person who is using anger correctly is the person who gets angry, look at this, at the right things and the right people, also in the right way, at the right time, for the right length of time. Thanks a lot, Aristotle, right? But what he says lines up with the teachings of Scripture. Because what he's essentially, if we can boil down that pithy statement, he's saying, here's when you've crossed from anger feeling into anger sin, when it's a case that you're too angry, you're too easily angry, or you stay angry too long. So we're going to run our emotions through when we feel this. Am I too angry?

OK, what do I mean too angry? I mean, the infraction was a 2, but you're a 10. Anybody already convicted, right? Have you ever caught yourself like, oh my gosh, why am I? Do I find myself hulking out at the highest level of death calm? I'm too angry. OK, listen, you're sinning. Too angry for what is called for or justified? Or too easily angry, meaning it took almost nothing, the hair trigger to just get you to full blown, or you hang on to it too long. You're turning it over in your mind. You're nursing that grudge. You're telling another person about it. It's robbing your peace. It's been days. It's been weeks. It's been decades. But you can still put yourself in that scene, what they said, what you said, how you felt, right? Too angry, too easily, too long. In your anger, sin not. OK, so we're going to define it that way. I've crossed the line when it's too big of a deal. I'm hanging on to it too long, and I get there too quickly. But what we really need to do, rather than defining it, because I think at the end of the day, we all know, we know, you know when you're not just feeling something now, but now you've crossed the line, and you're in it,

sticking voodoo doll pins into the eyes of that. We all know when we're doing it. What we really need to do is now diagnose it, OK? We need to diagnose it. What's going on here? Here's the real question. What's under the anger? What's under the anger? Almost all psychologists will tell you anger is most often a secondary emotion. And if you want to take some time this week, Google emotional color wheel, and look at what are primary and what are secondary, right? And then on it goes from there. And anger is almost always, when it occurs in your life, not a primary emotion. That is to say, something is under the thing. What you're seeing in your anger always points to what you're not seeing in your life, in your heart. So when you find yourself, I'm too angry for what's happening here, right? This breakfast table, the orange juice got spilled, but I'm screaming at my child. Like, you see what I'm saying? And I'm so mad. It's like the actual infraction is like, eh, eh, eh, eh. Something's trying to get out of the trunk. Something's trying to get out of the trunk. And you go, what is it? What is it?

What is it? The answer is going to surprise you. No matter what has made you angry to a sinful degree, I want you to write this down, and you're going to go, this does not make sense, but here's the answer. What's trying to get out is love. Why are you so angry? The answer is because you love so deeply. That's the good news. The bad news is, according to Augustine, man's primary problem is disordered love, disordered love. These seven deadly sins are all going to expose disordered love. And anger is one interesting thing that's impossible to experience without loving, which is why God is so angry. Isn't that crazy? The Bible says He's angry all the time, every day with the wicked. How is He so angry? Because He loves more than anybody. God is love. That's what 1 John tells us. And it's impossible to love and have the object of your love be harmed or tampered with and have you not get mad. So if you think the answer to this sermon is just to walk around, mm, mm, mm. Listen, if you're not mad living in this broken world, you're not paying attention.

So God is angry with the wicked every day. Why? Because He knows their wickedness is harming themselves. Sin is its. own punishment. So he's watching us invite corrosion, sleeping with spores of toxic spiritual black mold, and we're just putting our babies to bed in that house. And he's angry because he loves. Mark chapter 3, a man with a withered hand in church, the religious leaders not caring about him a bit, Jesus was furious because he loved the man, and he wanted him helped, and he wanted him whole, and he was angry that those who should have cared the most did the least. Jesus was angry turning over the table. Jesus was furious. He was angry that his father's house was not pointing all nations to prayer, but had become perverted and polluted. God is so mad because he's so loving, but his love is perfectly ordered. The same cannot be said for mine, and the same cannot be said for you. So according to the definition of sin, we are trying to find happiness outside of God. That's the definition of sin. We disorder our loves away from God, who's the source of all happiness, all joy, all

blessing, all pleasure. But we think, I can find happiness somewhere else. Turning from him, we turn to things that are toxic to us. None of those things can deliver. They then disorder our loves. We love what can't help us. And as we love those things, listen, we get mad when they're either exposed to be frauds or they get tampered with. And so what we need to do is ask this question, what does your anger point to? What is your anger trying to help you see that you've disordered or rearranged your loves to love incorrectly? Follow your anger, you'll find out what you really love. And warning, it's embarrassing. Because the next time you are red-faced and shaking, ask yourself, what do I love that is being tampered with and this is exposing? And that's where the benefit of anger comes in because it now can help us what's more important to God than God in our lives. I did a quick deep dive this week through scripture. And I tried to make a list of every angry person in the Bible. It took a long time. Let me just give you a couple of them. The first angry person in scripture is Cain. Cain, so angry, so shaking, furious in the moment, swept up into the passions of what he was feeling.

What did what? Jesus linked it to murder. What did he do? First time anger shows up in scripture, murder comes next. And notice it's in his own home, which is almost where these crimes of passion happen. It's far more rare for it to be strangers. It's husbands and wives. It's children killing their parents. It's parents bludgeoning their children in a fit of rage. They regret for the rest of their lives. So Cain, he kills Abel. But before he does so, God says, Cain, why are you angry? Why? You're not really mad at Abel. No, no, no, listen. Abel's pure offering of faith exposed what Cain really loved. Cain, he wasn't mad at Abel at all, actually. He was rather mad about how Abel's pure offering made him feel about himself, how it threatened him in his own self-image and importance as the firstborn son of the first ever couple to ever live on this place. And this challenged how his pure love was for what? Cain, not for God. And so killing Abel just was his way of lashing out at what he actually was feeling, which wasn't really just anger at Abel. It was hatred and self-loathing about himself.

The same exact thing can be traced to Esau, who tries to kill Jacob for threatening his spot on the pecking order. The same for Joseph's brothers, trying to stamp him out because they, that occasion, the insecurity they felt about the father not loving. They were just trying to get their dad's love. I would argue the same thing is at play in Moses, who has this mom and dad, but they're not the people who raised him, and ends up just with him. What a deep wound that would give you. Why is Moses one of the most angry people in the Bible? From beginning to end, he tries to suppress it, but in a fit of rage, he kills a man, and he's impetuous, and he lashes out. He strikes the rock at the end where he should have spoken to. He broke the, one of the only things God ever wrote with his own hand. He smashed it on the ground. And God's like, well, I'm going to have to redo that. Thank you, the 10 commandments. Amos, Moses, in these moments when his authority was questioned or challenged, his anger came from a deep fundamental insecurity. You could point to Saul, his frenzied rage against David. Why are you trying to kill David? You're not mad at David. You love David. David's your guy.

No, no, no. Saul loved who he used to be and was trying to cling to it, trying to get it back. Look at Jezebel, who's irrationally angry at this guy Naboth because he won't sell land to her husband. And her immediate response, we should kill him. Because what she loved was a life where she could do whatever she wanted to do. No one could stop her. And she wasn't angry at Naboth. She didn't care much about the guy. But the same thing is at play in Herodias, who hated and was angry and killed John the Baptist, was willing to degrade her own daughter in the process. Why? Because she loved that autonomy, that ability to do whatever. The same thing, Uzziah, 2 Chronicles 26. This king who was king at 16, a phenomenal king, could do no wrong, thought he could do anything, and so decided he should be able to do everything. But there are some things that God said are off limits for a king. And that is the function of a prophet, the function of a priest. You're the king, but these other offices have different roles. Well, he said, I should be able to burn incense. And 80 priests came in to say, you should not be in the temple offering incense. It's not the job of a king.

And he burned, the Bible says, with anger at them. He wasn't angry at these priests. He was angry at being told he couldn't do whatever he wanted to do. And leprosy broke out on his forehead that day. Always a picture of sin. We could go on and talk about, why was Martha so mad at her sister Mary? Because what she loved most was the image of her as the perfect host, her unquestioned hospitality. And her irritation at her sister actually camouflaged her anxiety that she wouldn't have value if she couldn't be the best host that there was. Well, I'll stop whenever you're highly convicted. But Peter, chopping ears off, why? Well, he wasn't mad at Malchus, this priest of the servant of the high priest. No, no, listen to me. This anger was because Peter loved the idea that he was Jesus's defender and refused to let Jesus be his defender. I'll go to the, I'll die for you. I'll never, I'll never do, right? No. His anger, this cussing, this, what's going on here? His love was disordered. So we have to answer the honest question. When I'm so angry that, and you're like, where is it? Tell me from this almost like shaking,

like how have I become so angry? There's things going on that your anger's trying to help you to see are disordered loves in your life. And then the gift is in seeing that, you have the choice to actually deal with it. This is point number three. Because if you don't, you've opened a door to the devil. You've given place to the devil by not dealing with it. And that anger, which now is wanting to turn into full-blown wrath, wanting to turn into full-blown fury, Hebrews warns, it will become a root of bitterness defiling everybody. It will defile everybody. Question, how do you get bitter? Simple. You never admit you're angry. And you become bitter automatically. So of course, the alternative would be choosing not to just deal with the symptoms. OK, I'm never being angry again. Yeah, good luck with that. Give me five minutes, and then give me 10 years, and we'll see the angriest person there is. The real question, of course, is how do I reorder my love? Because there's obviously some love in my heart that's disordered. It's put an object of love above God. And my anger is there because this idol is being tampered with. Like, Jesus is lashing out because a guy

who has a withered hand is not being loved. No, no, you're lashing out because something you care about more than Jesus is being touched. And so we have to reorder our lives. How do we do that? I wish I could tell you it's anything other than just repentance, and confession, and prayer, and belief, and return. But there's no other formula. It's just those hard, bitter pills to swallow of repentance, and confessing, and forsaking, and returning, and praying. I mean, it is really hard to stay angry at people you're praying for. And I know we like to say I'm praying about a situation, but usually we just mean gossip and seething. We don't actually. I have a jacket that smells. It's a jacket I've worn for four or five years whenever I'm doing high-output cardio in the wintertime, which I need some wind protection. I need something to keep me, you know, when I'm first starting, you know, it has a lot of zippers you can open to vent things out, right? Cross-country skiing, uphill snowboarding, those times when you're dumping sweat, but you still need a little bit of air. You need a little bit of air. Uphill snowboarding, those times when you're dumping sweat, but you still need a little something.

I've turned to this same layer for years. And I've washed it so many times. I have the exact pants. They don't smell. I don't understand it. My wife says it's because you don't have armpits on your legs. And I said, makes sense. And it's been a big dilemma, right? You know, just we've washed it. We've washed it. We've washed it. We bought special wash just for that. We found on the internet, like, if you wash it with a bunch of vinegar, that can neutralize it. We've done everything short of renouncing it as evil. And finally, in a moment of desperation, I called the company. And I said, hey, here's my problem. This jacket is smelly. And the guy said, it's a real problem. It isn't. It happens all the time. We get calls like this almost every day. People don't understand what to do. He goes, honestly, after I told him what I was doing, he said, you literally just read my lines. You tried that kind of wash. You tried the vinegar. He goes, let me just talk amongst all

the other employees in this call center for a minute. So he put me on hold for five minutes. And he talked to everybody. And he said, this is crazy. And it's not on my sheet of things to tell you to try. He goes, but have you thought about just hanging it up outside in the sunshine? He said, someone said it's a surefire way to get rid of all the bacteria living in your jacket. He said, because nothing sanitizes like sunshine. That's good. That's great. That's awesome. And I said, it's going in the talk, because God is not just love. He's also light. And the enemy wants to keep the bacteria growing inside of our lives in the darkness. Almost nothing healthy grows in the dark. It takes light for there to be life. And the reason why these annoying things like repentance, and confession, and prayer, and faith, and openness with accountability to one another's inscription, the reason why they work is they open our lives up to the sunshine that can kill these seven deadly sins from our lives as they show up. And you've got to do it quickly. That's what the Bible says. It says, don't let the sun go down. Don't you dare let the sun go down in Ephesians chapter 4.

Once the sun goes down, there's not that sunshine. Now you're just lying in bed ruminating, just rolling over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. And what? Forming probably ulcers or tumors spiritually and physically inside of your life. While the sun's up, you've got to deal with this stuff. Go to your brother. Do what you can. You have to. And here's our last point. Discharge it. It's the only way I can put it. Discharge it. And let me just say this to you. Even after you've talked to God about it, even after you've told your small group about it, even after you've confessed it, there's still going to be very real anger that's going to remain built up in your life, especially if your anger is valid. Like someone you love got assaulted. Like someone you love got molested. Like there's been abuse in your story. You're like, OK, I'm going to go talk to God about it, pastor. There's still some stuff there. You've got to discharge it. I never heard a sermon about this before. But this is why there are psalms in the Bible that are

questionable in their theology. Did you ever wonder in your Bible reading plan why you came across some psalms and you're like, well, that person needs counseling? Whoever wrote that, that's not my David, right? Here's one, Psalm 109. Let his children be fatherless. Wait, that's bad. That's off brand. And may his wife be a widow. Yes, life first, right? What? May his children continually be vagabonds? May his children continually be vagabonds and beg? I pray they can't even get jobs. So even after he's dead, his wife's a widow, I pray his kids are unemployed. Let them seek their bread also from desolate places, Lord, in the goodness of your kindness. And then may the creditor seize all that he has. Let strangers plunder his labor. OK, this is where it gets wild. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered for the Lord, and may his mother's sin never be blotted out. This dude's cold. He's praying this guy who hurt him's mama goes to hell. That's brutal. Here's another one, Psalm 137. Let's just jump straight ahead to the real payoff here. Verse 9, God, may I be happy when the one,

happy be the one, God, who takes and dashes your little ones against the rock. I'm going to just tell you exactly what he's saying. He's saying, these people who hurt me, I pray God's blessing on whoever can get a hold of their kids, hold them by the ankles, and smash their heads against the rocks until they're dead. That's in the Bible. Do you know why? So that the authors of these psalms wouldn't do it in real life. That's how you actually feel, but you're afraid to say it. Not me, especially you. The authors of these psalms went through horrible things. In fact, Psalm 137 was written by people who watched foreign invaders take their babies from their arms, grab them by the ankles, and dash their heads against rocks. And so what's the natural human response? I hope it happens to them so they can know. Look, look, look, look, look. That person who stole your sexuality from you, don't you deep down want them to feel the pain they put you through? And don't you think in your heart that will make you feel better? And many go on to hurt people because they've been hurt by people. Called the imprecatory psalms. Imprecatory means pray evil.

There are 13 of them. As a portion of the 1 3rd of the psalms, which are psalms of lament, just psalms of being God, here's how I really feel. John Westleaf actually said, there are some psalms in the Bible not suitable for Christian ears. But these are people who are doing what's necessary to discharge all this energy that has the capacity to actually, in real life, cause them to be bound by fury and shed blood. But by giving it to God, you find, as you walk away, it actually dissipates some of that by actually articulating it to Him in a non-sanitized way. What I'm trying to say is, and Eugene Peterson put it very well when he said, it is impossible to love your enemy until you pray your hate. And the only actual effective route to discharge what we feel sometimes is to actually see it go into the only place of the person who can take it. Because every time we do that, we are reminded that all of that hate, both of what was done to you and to God, is actually hate, both of what was done to you and what you want to do to your neighbor, is actually what was heaped upon Jesus at the cross. Under your house is an eight-foot pole made of steel wrapped in copper. And if your house got struck by lightning, all of that would dissipate because it

would go into the grounding rod, if it was wired correctly. At the cross, all of the wrath for every sin I've committed and you've committed was discharged upon Jesus. And so we don't have to have blown short circuits in our lives emotionally, or spiritually, or relationally, if we will simply tie into the grounding rod of the cross. Which was why Paul said, even, he ended the passage with, even as God in Christ forgave you. What I'm saying is you take every hard, emotional, awful thing you're feeling, you give it to Him unfiltered. And then you remember what your sin did to Christ as He hung upon that cross. And you can walk away knowing, I'm satisfied, because every sin at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the Lord, the good, the kind, the just judge of all, will either have paid for those sins Himself, or they will remain upon that person for all eternity. Those are the only two outcomes. But you can't walk away remembering your sins were what was causing Jesus to gasp, it is finished. And then walk away and be like, no, I still need my pound of flesh here and now. You can let God be God. He does very good at that. And this is how we don't end up angry. We end up in the house, like the young son who got a fatted cat. It's not like the elder brother who was angry thus wouldn't go in because of his staring at what

someone else was getting. Lord, deliver us from evil. If you needed this word today, like me, would you just raise up a hand in God's presence? Let's be the younger brother coming in getting grace, not the elder brother standing outside angry. Lord, deliver us from our fury. Deliver us from our vengeance, from our wrath and our evil. Thank you for putting our sins upon you on the cross. You can put your hands down if you're here today and you need to receive Jesus for salvation. You've not come to him today. I'm not here to talk to you about your tantrums and your mood. I'm here to talk about your soul. And until Jesus is in your soul, there's the only danger in your future. But if you trust Christ for salvation, he died for you. He rose from the dead. He can save you and set you free. And then we can talk about your moods. We've got to first start talking about heaven, hell. Are you in Christ? Can you let the wrath of God not be in your hands, but upon your Savior for you? If that's who I'm describing, I want you to pray with me. I'm going to pray a prayer for those making this decision for the first time. For the benefit of those, all the church

is going to pray it with us. Say, dear God, I know that I'm a sinner. I can't fix myself. But I believe you can. Please come into my heart and make it your home. In Jesus' name.