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"Let
no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such a word as is
good for edification according to the need of the moment.
That it may give grace to those who hear.
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by Whom you were sealed for
the day of redemption. Let
all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away
from you along with all malice. Be
kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God in
Christ also has forgiven you."
Ephesians 4:29
Clearing
Away Brushwood
Let’s clear
away some brushwood here before we begin.
Immediately, the moment we speak about anger versus love, our minds
automatically supply names of those we know we’d like to have listen to
teachings on this subject. As
soon as we hear the title of the tape, we think, maybe I can send this
tape to Joe, because he surely has a problem with anger.
If that’s your attitude, you are missing the main point.
I’m not trying to deal with other people about this matter of
anger, I’m talking to you. You
are reading this because you are
supposed to read to it. When
applying this to yourself, please, do not categorize yourself as having,
or not having a problem with anger until you have heard me out.
If you come to this study already thinking of yourself as an angry
person, or if you read this thinking you don’t have a problem with anger
and therefore this doesn’t apply to you, then you are going to miss half
of what I’m going to say.
Because of
having a preconceived idea of anger, you already think of anger as
negative. And because you
think of it that way, you’ll fight what I say all the way through,
arguing, I’m not an angry person. If
you believe that not being an angry person is a positive assessment of
yourself; you will probably miss the whole intent of this lesson, so I’m
asking you right up front, not to categorize yourself.
Sometimes not being an angry person (you’ll see what I mean
later) isn’t actually as positive as it may appear.
We’ve got to
get into this using different words.
Instead of saying “anger”, “fear”, or “love,” I want to
use the expression “the moving of the human spirit”.
Because when we use the word “anger”, most of us mean it as a
negative term. But,
“anger” is really and truly but a “moving of the human spirit.”
When we say, “fear”, it is a negative, it really is, because
fear is the paralysis of the human spirit.
When we say, “love” we usually think of some gushy, silly
nonsense, but real love is the mightiest power on earth; for love is the
human spirit joined to the Spirit of God going forth to bless, and to
heal, and to create.
So, let’s
drop, until we really have to use them, the words “anger”,
“fear”, or “love”. And
let’s understand that what we are studying is the going forth of the
human spirit. I want
you to realize the tremendous, creative power of this.
Not
Angry - Not Good
Now, to begin,
don’t we often equate easy-going with godliness?
There was an elder in a certain church and everybody described him
as such a godly man. They
said this because he never seemed to get ruffled about anything; he was
apparently peaceful about everything.
And although he may have been as godly as any man in that church,
he was also practically useless because he didn’t get stirred in his
spirit about anything. He
didn’t know how to let his spirit go forth.
He never got angry as some people count angry and therefore he
never came under the control of God in anger.
Would you call this being godly? Actually, it might be more correct
to call such a character, useless.
Rather, give us
someone that knows how to put his spirit forth under the control of the
Holy Spirit, and then you’ll see released among men the most mighty
energy the world knows, which is love in action.
Spirit
We are made in
the image of God. God is spirit. That
is the first great definition God gives us about Himself.
John 4, says, God is spirit. And
when God made man in His Image, in His likeness, He made us spirits.
That tells us at least two things, probably more than that, but at
least two. Because God is
Spirit; and I am spirit; my spirit can join with His Spirit and I can
become a member of His family and
can know true fellowship. This
differs from the simple sort of relationship I have with, say, my dog,
Chica. My dog receives
commands from me. My dog is
not made in God’s image. I
can point my finger at the floor and say, Chica come here, and Chica will
come. The relationship we
have is due to what we call training, or instinct.
But I fellowship with God. Man
enters by choice into fellowship with God; we know Him person to Person.
I, as a little “p” person know Him as eternal, unbeginning
Person. And we are able to
come together because I am spirit and He is Spirit.
The
INSIDE Word
Secondly,
because I am spirit and alike to Him in that way, I “tick” as God
“ticks”. Spirits
work in a certain way; and you work in life the same way as God works
because you are spirit. The
method whereby a spirit works is a going forth to express.
A spirit can externalize itself; a spirit is ever going forward in
order to accomplish a goal or a certain expression. Monkeys don’t have
goals. They just are. But, a spirit has a goal; a spirit has a purpose in life.
Because a spirit is a spirit, it must ever be going forth to
achieve that goal. How does
it do that? Well, it
does it with words. Two kinds
of words. One is unspoken.
Inside yourself you say, I’m going to do that one day.
Or, internally we state, that’s
what I think and that’s the way it’s going to be.
That happens inside. That’s
why you’re reading this. Somewhere
you saw this article available and you decided to read it.
And inside you said, I will read it.
So, your spirit said, here we go, and your spirit is now going
forth to that end. Going out.
Saying, this what I shall do.
The
SPOKEN Word
The other kind
of word is spoken. You actually speak. It
comes out and then everybody around knows about it because they actually
hear your word. They know
where your spirit is going and what your spirit wants to do, and what it
intends to achieve. That’s
how God created us. When God
created the Creation He spoke forth and in speaking brought into being
what He purposed. Let there be light and there was light. Let dry land appear, and dry land appeared.
God’s Spirit came forth; it came forth in words and said,
that’s it, let it be so, and it was so. So
you see, spirit can create, and spirit creates when spirit goes forth and
is expressed.
The final going
forth of God is Jesus. That’s
why Jesus is called the WORD of GOD. In
the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh. God
came forth, took to Himself our humanity, and accomplished His Purpose. Jesus said of Himself, "The words that I speak to you, they are spirit; they are life."
So, words coming
out of my mouth are spoken first in my thought life. Words, whether inside
or outside, are my spirit. See
if you follow this: I talked into a cassette recorder onto a tape and
created by giving words. I
first said I will make this tape and then my spirit came forth and said
this is what I purpose. Lynn said
she would produce this article from the tape and her spirit came forth and
said this is what I purpose. You
said, I will read this article and your spirit went forth and made a
purpose. Now, these three
purposes, yours, Lynn's, and mine are meeting right now and we’re together;
now as you read this. Something has
been created that has never been before; do you see what I’m saying?
We have the going forth of a human spirit.
And so all of us
in that sense, in a finite sense, I emphasize the word finite, we are co-creators with God. He
made us to be those who can speak alongside of Him , and as we speak our
spirit goes forth, and as our spirit goes forth, joined to His Purpose, we
diffuse throughout the world His Love, His Blessing, His Purpose for His
creatures.
Distorted
Spirit
Now, in the fall
of man, when sin came in, that power to send out the spirit to accomplish
a purpose was in no way diminished. It
became distorted and rechanneled. The
human spirit became a servant of sin. But, in no way did the human spirit
diminish. Now, that is
frightening. Something has happened to the human spirit, its awesome power
to join to God and create is now broken from God, but it is not diminished
in power, for man still walks on earth able to send forth his spirit.
Consider this,
when God sends out His Spirit we call that omnipotence. Whenever we say
that God is almighty; we mean that He sends out His Spirit and says,
that’s it, and it is so. When
man sends out his spirit he is more like his almighty creator than at any
other point in his life. The
moving out of the human spirit is as close to omnipotence as a human being
will ever get.
When this
sending forth is out of control; when it is broken from God; you have a
power that is terrifying. Sending forth the human spirit is the most awesome power a
human being is capable of. Apart
from His Spirit, the human spirit is in the worst sense of the phrase,
“self”-controlled. By “self”
control we mean out of the control of God’s Spirit. It
is the going forth of the human spirit united to Satan’s spirit, instead
of to God’s. Here the human spirit, in its awesome power, joins now to
Satan, the murderer, and goes forth to destroy. Man who has broken from God, now joined to the sin-spirit,
Satan, still has this awesome power to go forth hell-bent for destruction.
To destroy and destroy and
destroy is the ongoing agenda of the sinful human spirit. This
misuse of power originated, of course, in original sin. You
could say that’s how original sin came about. It
was the going forth of man’s spirit saying, I am number one. Remember
when the devil tempted Eve, he said, you shall be as God. That
is the lie that the human race fell for. You
shall be as God. You’ll be
in control; you’ll have your way; your will.
Now, every
member of the human race thinks they are God. They
send forth their spirit saying, I am number one. We
send forth our spirit into other’s lives,
saying, I’m going to establish myself as number one. All
of that is sin. Whether, “I
am number one” translates into what we call anger, or whether it results
in some other form of destruction - in envy, or jealousy - these
manifestations are just the human spirit asserting itself saying, I am
number one. It’s the human
spirit going forth taking God’s place as a judge. “Vengence
is mine; I will repay,” says the LORD. But, the human spirit rises and says, “Whoa, I will repay, vengeance
belongs to me!”
And so, it goes
forth, not only to judge, but also to deny forgiveness to anyone who gets
in its way. It condemns without any mercy. In fact, the human spirit takes sides against God. God
says, "I love that person."
So,
when the human spirit rises against that person and says, “that person
is in my way, remove them,” it takes sides against God and against the
objects of His love. This is the sinful going forth of the human spirit. To
bring this closer to home, do you like being judged by a god who is like
you? I think you understand what I mean, don’t you? Do
you like being judged by that spirit that comes forth in wrath from
another human being?
Let’s look at
James 4:11, where he says, “do not speak against one another. He
who speaks against a brother, or judges his brother, speaks against the
law. There is only one law
giver and judge; the One who is able to save and destroy. But,
who are you to judge your neighbor?” That’s James’ question.
Romans 14:4
“Who are you to judge the servant of another?” That
is, if that’s God’s servant, who are you to stand up against that
person? To his own master, he
stands or falls, therefore, let us not judge one another. He’s
saying, if this man is going to fall, let God bring about his fall; if
this man is going stand uncomdemned, then let it be God who says he’s
not condemned.
Ecclesiastes 7:9
says, “Do not be eager in your heart to be angry, for anger resides in
the bosom of fools.”
James 1:19 It
says, “Let everyone be slow to speak and slow to anger. For the anger of
man does not achieve the righteousness of God.” So,
whatever you do, keep your mouth shut when it comes to the moving forth of
the spirit in terms of judging and vengeance.
The
Greeks Had Two Words For It
In the Greek
language there are two words that describe this sinful moving out of the
human spirit. The first Greek
word is “orge”. It is
usually translated in our Bible as anger. It means an inward, settled condition of mind. So,
it means that my spirit is active for revenge. This
not an explosion; it’s an implosion. The
person is angry, but you can’t see it, unless you really look hard. It’s taking place deep on the inside. The Greek word has sometimes been translated “agitated”,
“puffed up”, “excited.” That’s
how you would describe yourself, isn’t it; inside you’re blowing up
like a helium balloon. You’re
getting very agitated. No one
knows about it yet, but that’s what is going on. In
the Old Testament, the literal translation of this same word in the Hebrew
means “to blow your nose.” Their
idea was that the person is blowing, snorting, like a raging bull. His
nostrils are flaring and he’s snorting in anger. The way the Hebrews looked at it, thinking in pictures as they
did, the spirit is breath and whenever breath comes through the nose it is
the spirit coming out, and anger is the forceful going forth of the human
spirit. Still, it is coming
out because of an inward word; it hasn’t been voiced externally, but it
has been said within and within the spirit has already gone forth.
How does that
work out? How do you know when “orge” is actually occurring in us? You
begin to regard the object of your anger with suspicion. You find every reason to believe that the person you are angry
with deserves to be your enemy. You
walk into a room and the person is talking to someone else and you
immediately assume that they are talking about you. This is a symptom of a bad case of “orge”; it’s already
the going forth of a bad spirit. You
find that you are scrutinizing the entire lifestyle of this person and
despising it. Whatever they
do; you see it as wrong. You
look at them with a certain kind of glasses on; everything is colored by
the lens you are looking through. So,
it doesn’t matter what the person does; in your mind there is something
wrong. If they enjoy
something, you come up with reasons why you should hate it. If
they purchased something, you want to get rid of yours; you
don’t want it around to remind you of them. Everything
they do now is, in your mind, wrong. They
can’t even pour coffee right; they’re wrong. There is a theatre of the imagination that plays these movies
deep down inside of us where we remember our hurts and play them over and
over and over. This repeats
and repeats inside of us. Unless
its dealt with, it becomes a settled malice inside of us. Or
another word for it is bitterness. That’s
a Bible word; it’s attended by bad moods. All of life becomes dark, dismal. You feel bad about things, because there’s this one thing
that hangs like a lead weight in your gut.
There may be days, even whole weeks when you are just in a
bad mood. Did you know that
boredom is really suppressed anger? The trouble is “orge”. You
are angry at a circumstance, or an individual, and as a result you’re
bored with all the joys of life. In
fact, the joy and love of life has been sucked away.
There’s
another word, often translated as wrath in your Bibles, is “thumos”.
From the Latin translation of that
word we get smoke and steam. Now
this isn’t something that you keep on the inside. Like
smoke and steam, there will soon be an explosion. If “orge” is
the implosion; thumos is the “explosion”. Many times thumos arises out
of orge. It has been boiling
a while inside of us and suddenly there’s an explosion and the top blows
off. Wrath has taken place. So,
thumos can be, a sudden outburst of temper and then it’s gone. Thumos
can be a passing thunderstorm. But,
it can arise out of that which has been brewing for a long time. If
you had a boiler in your basement and you took rags soaked in gasoline and
kept throwing them down into your basement, and then one day there’s a
terrific explosion and the house burns down; you don’t tell the fire
department you don’t know what happened. You
know the situation had been building toward an explosion, layer upon
layer, for a long time. “Orge”
is layer upon layer upon layer. “Thumos”
is kaboom!
Thumos is that
outward explosion that arises from inward indignation. And this is
characterized by outward hostilities.
These outbursts of temper are what the Bible calls “clamour” or
“brawling”. It is the act
of murder: whether one is murdering someone’s emotions, or spirit, or
reputation, or actually physically murdering them, this is the word to
use.
And something
that you might not realize is that one of the most restrained and
dangerous outbursts of wrath is sarcasm. Sarcasm
is not the lowest form of wit; it’s the subtlest form of anger and
wrath. Proverbs 26:18, "Like a mad man who throws firebrands and
arrows and death; so is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, was I
not joking?" He says he was
throwing a firebrand; he was planning and plotting death. Then when his
neighbor turns around he says, was I not joking? It’s a suppressed, subtle form, but it is the outgoing of
this human spirit. The orge,
the inner word of the spirit going forth, but unexpressed, and then thumos, are both anger, but now it comes forth on its way to destroy.
What is God’s
solution? That’s what we are going to spend the rest of our time in this
lesson discussing. The solution will take a lot more time than we spent on
the definition.
The
Solution
The solution is
this: the death of Jesus does not only deal with our sin. We have to
realize that God not only deals with the sin, but with the sinner. If
God only deals with sin, then we have to come back every week and ask
God’s forgiveness over and over. Since
we are left with the sin nature we’re going to just go on doing the same
thing over and over. Salvation
is God wiping out our past; He places His Spirit within us, so we can
truly say that Christ lives in us. That process is elsewhere described in the scripture as a
death/resurrection process. And so, this spirit, this human ‘ I’, that sees itself as
number one, is taken to the cross and is put to death. If you are born again, you are first a dead person. The
old, “I” that you were born with, raised with, died. To
some people that may be very obvious, but let me establish it, because I
hear so many question from people, from Christians, who are looking toward
a day when they will be crucified with Christ. They
are always looking for that blessed experience, that final work of
grace whereby they will be able to say, I am dead with Christ. You
do not come to death with Christ by looking for it, but by looking back
and realizing that it has already happened. You
are a dead person. If you are
born again you cannot truly say “I am an angry person.” If you are born again, you are a Christ person. You
might get mixed up in your spirit sometimes and do angry things, but you
are not angry because the angry you died with Christ on the cross. A
Christian sometimes will say, “I hate that person.” Christ lives in you, and He is love. You may have feelings of hate on the surface, but recognize
them for what they are, feelings. You
are a Christ person. He lives
in you. Do you really see
this? Whatever happened to
Christ on the cross happened to you. Until
you see this, you will regard yourself as the sin person and you will
either struggle with that or continue to look for some mighty life
changing experience that has already happened.
The
Change
The truth is you
have been changed. You are
the new creation. You don’t
have to struggle with it; you just have to live as who you are in Christ. God’s
solution to our problem has already been achieved in bringing you to death
on the cross and joining you to Christ in the resurrection. You
are a dead/alive person and Christ is your life. Consider
yourself alive, united with Christ. You’ve
returned from your own funeral; you’ve looked at your own grave;
you’ve thrown the flowers and said goodbye.
Now you return a resurrected person.
Now you are in a position to understand how your spirit can go
forth to bless, to love. Not
only as a human spirit, that is powerful enough, but as a human spirit
joined to the resurrected Christ. Our
human spirit goes forth, with the choice now to bless, joined to Christ
who is our life and our love. There
we have the closest thing we’ll ever know to omnipotence: the going
forth of the human spirit joined to the Spirit of Christ.
No
Revenge
How is this
worked out? Number one, we must always understand it is not our role to be
the avengers. We must always take the wrong going forth of our spirit
seriously. This is the area
of forgiveness we’re addressing. If you have never asked another
person’s forgiveness, you have a long way to go in the terms of what
we’re talking about. One of
the first areas is to be able to say, “I was wrong. It is not mine to be
the avenger. Forgive me for the wrong going forth of my spirit.” But, how do you work this out?
How do you come under the control of the Spirit of Christ?
Patience
I told you that
the Hebrew word for anger is to blow your nose; the Hebrew word for
patience is to take a deep breath and hold it. So,
anger is blowing out, and patience is inhaling, taking a deep breath and
holding it in. It is all in the breath. In
the one, you let your spirit out; in the other, you hold your spirit in. You’ve
heard the expression, “count to ten”?
This
is the same principle that’s behind the Hebrew word, telling us to take
a deep breath. In the holding of the spirit, I’m in control, I don’t
let my spirit go, and being in control, I consider the facts, and as I
consider the facts I realize I wouldn’t be in the condition I’m in if
I hadn’t been hurt. Very well, we do not disregard the hurt, but we give
that hurt to God.
1 Peter 2 says
how specifically we take each hurt and we give it into the management of
God. As we consider the
facts, we forgive the person who has done the hurt to us and we move from
the person to the problem. Now, this is why I said at the beginning that a
person who isn’t angry doesn’t get anything done, because godly anger
is not NOT anger, because Jesus was angry. On many occasions He was angry.
From
the Person to the Problem
This anger is moving from the person
to the problem and solving the problem. You
can solve just about any problem in life if you’re angry enough. I’ve
often shared that the reason that I counsel one on one is because I was
angry enough to do it. Many
years ago I saw there were dire problems in the body of Christ and that
many people were slipping through the cracks in the floor of the church. I was angry. I
even got angry at pastors of churches. I
would confront them. I was
angry at them. I exchanged
angry words with them. I
began to talk about them to other people. I
did this until I finally realized that this was sinful anger. It was my
spirit going out to actually destroy their reputation. I
repented of this; and where there had been confrontation, I went to the
person and asked them to forgive me.
But,
I found myself still angry. I
realized that I wasn’t angry with the person, they would have to go
their own way, I couldn’t do anything about them, they would just be who
they are. But I was left with the problem of people who were not being
taught and shown the grace of God in a beneficial way. So,
I put all of that anger, energized by the Holy Spirit, into finding a
solution to the problem. Part
of that solution was to find out what the body of Christ needs in the
terms of teaching. Then, amid all the opposition of people telling us we
could not counsel, we decided we were going to do it anyway. And
we opened up the counseling service to do one-on-one counseling. I
was told you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have that, you’ve
got to have this approval, this endorsement, or whatever. But, I was angry enough to do it anyway. My whole ministry is
based upon the fact that I was angry enough to do something about the
problem.
I know pastors, who I knew years ago back in Bible school, who are still
to this day talking about how terrible things are in the church, but they’re not
angry enough to do anything about it. They
don’t transfer their anger because they don’t have any. They’re
not upset about anything; they’re just pointing out how bad things are.
So, to get the
forgiving out of the way, we forgive
the person, sometimes we forgive them and say,
into the hands of God I give them, and leave them there, I can’t do
anything about them. But, after forgiving the person there is a problem still and I
aim my spirit, not at the person, but at the problem. I give
anything they’ve
done to hurt me to God, to let Him deal with that. Then the Spirit of God flows through us so we can do something
about the problem. I’m not
saying that the going forth to attend to the problem will be
easy or instant, but once you’ve got your eyes upon the right area, on
the problem, not on the person, then you can launch forth your spirit.
Before you leave that person who hurt you, whom you’ve forgiven, the
Bible tells us not merely to forgive them and not be angry at them, but He
tells us to positively bless them.
Bless
Those Who Curse Us
If your enemy
hungers, feed him. It doesn’t say, just let him be, it says “feed him”. Christians
are those who, and this is where the enormous power of the
human spirit joined to God’s Spirit comes in, can now actually give
to the person, even while we may be leaving them in life - saying
goodbye to them and moving on to a different path. But as we leave them,
we are able to bless them. Even as before we were actively sending forth
to hurt, we are now actively sending forth to bless those who curse us.
That is the
great secret of the Christian life. In
case this is the only part of this you get, I want to touch on the essence
of this: we have to recognize that Christ is our life. If
Christ is our life, then all of this I’ve just said can be; it’s not
pie in the sky; it is possible.
One
difference between the Old and New Covenant, and there are many
differences, but I love this one, is that in the Old Covenant you would hear
“thou shalt not,” and “thou shalt.” So, the burden was placed on them to either not do it, or to
do it. But, in the New
Covenant, God said, "I’ll write my law upon your heart and put it in your
mind." You will not find from
the resurrection of Jesus on, the expression “thou shalt not,” or
“thou shalt.” The New
Covenant does not contain these phrases. What
does it say? We read it in
our text, “let anger be put away.” It doesn’t say, “thou shalt not
be angry,” because the law, who is Christ, written on our hearts, is
there already. And you can “let” anger go. And it doesn’t say, “thou shalt be kind.” It
says, “put on kindness.” And
you can find this list of “put off” and “put on”, “let it go”,
“let it be.” No more thou shalts and thou shalt nots.
We are told in
the New Covenant to “let it be.” This
goes beyond anger, of course, that just happens to be the subject we’re
talking about, but whatever the surface problem, because that’s all it
is, a surface problem, this is your life. Anger
is a surface problem, and because Christ is already your life, you can let
it go. Let it go.
Christ
Is Our Life
Because Christ
is your life, put Him on in every area of your life. In
autumn, with the gradual turning of leaves, we see a blaze of color.
Yellow and scarlet leaves, falling like vivid snow as you walk among the
trees. If you watch them over a period of the whole season, just
about all the leaves eventually fall off of the trees. I think that a tree, like a Christian, in a sense, is dead. It
is in process. It isn’t dead inside, next spring will prove this. Right
now, those leaves are only surface things to that tree; they don’t
belong to that tree anymore. In
the sense that the leaves are dead, the tree is dead, all those leaves
belonged to the former life of the tree, but they now, no longer belong to
the life of that tree; they’re just surface things, falling away
gradually. Every time
there’s a tremor of wind through the tree, the tree lets go of those
leaves. It puts off the
leaves. Life within the tree
will soon put on a whole new show of the new life. As
a matter of fact, I’ve seen some trees that hang on to their leaves all
the way through winter, but in the spring, it is the new leaves coming
forth that actually push the old ones off that no longer belong to the
life of the tree.
This is the
thing that we need to understand, when the Spirit of God touches this area
in our life or that area in our life, we let it go, we put it off. We
know that the Spirit of God is already building up inside of you a whole
new you; Jesus Christ expressed through you. Because
you are in Christ you can put off the old you and put on the new you. You
don’t have to make it be; it is.
Meek
Moses
The
person who is capable of putting forth an uncontrolled spirit is also
mightily capable of blessing in greater power than others. I’ll
give you two examples of this. Moses
was such an angry man; his anger was so uncontrolled that he murdered a
man that he saw hurting one of his fellow Hebrews. If
you are Moses and you’re known all over Egypt, you can’t do this in a
corner, you’re going to get caught and there’s no doubt about it. You know that you’ll probably have to run for your life. But,
Moses was so filled with a blind rage, orge, that had been boiling inside
of him, it exploded in a thumos, and he murdered. I
want you to weigh that. Moses,
the man who wrote the first five books in the Bible, was so uncontrollably
angry with an individual that he murdered him. And
yet, after God’s dealing with Moses, there’s a statement made of Moses
that’s not made of any other man in the Bible; it says that Moses was
the meekest man on the earth. Meek
means the most controlled man. Later
in his life, that same man facing the Israelites had a hundred reasons why
he could have murdered the whole lot of them, and in fact God, in Exodus
32:33 said, "Let me wipe this lot out and I’ll begin over again with you." That
was quite a deal. If you had
been the pastor of that congregation and God said, let’s get rid of
them, would you, like Moses intercede for them? Moses
cared for them right to the end. The
same Moses who had been so angry that he murdered, later, under God’s
control, became the absolute by which others are judged. Moses,
under the control of God, called down the ten plagues on Egypt, parted the
Red Sea, and called manna down from the sky. Moses stands alone; other miracle workers and prophets are
brought to Moses as a standard. Moses
was the angriest of God’s men, that’s why he, under God’s control,
could be such a blessing to God’s people.
Why
Paul?
Saul of Tarsus
is another. Let me ask you this. Why
did God have to use Saul? Jesus had trained Peter, James, John…all of
the apostles. Why did He need
Saul? Of course, that’s a
stupid question; you’d have to get inside of God’s mind and he
hasn’t told us. But, one
good guess is that the trained apostles weren’t angry enough. Saul
of Tarsus had such a capacity for anger, such an ability to put out his
spirit; Saul was angrier even than Caiaphas and Annas. Once they had crucified Jesus, they thought that was the end
of it. But, Saul was angrier
than those who crucified Jesus. He
wasn’t willing to let the Christian movement be. Saul
went to the Jewish leaders and asked for letters so that he could
persecute the followers of Jesus. Saul
went forth believing the work had only just begun. Then Saul, with his capacity for anger came under the control
of the Lord Jesus, although it didn’t happen all at once. You
can recall when Barnabas wanted Mark to go with them on the missionary
journey, Paul objected so stridently that it says in the Greek that they
had a knock-down drag-out fight you could hear down the street over
whether to take Mark or leave him behind. That
gives you an idea of how seriously they argued. Paul,
while still angry enough, once under the control of the Holy Spirit,
became the person who could bless God’s people immeasurably. Paul’s
human spirit that had once gone out to destroy, now went out to spread the
message of the gospel to the whole world. There
was an energy driving Paul. It
was a divine energy, but there had to be a channel for it; that’s the
going forth of the human spirit.
A person whose
spirit never moves, doesn’t make anything happen, but let a man learn
how to release his spirit under the control of the Holy Spirit, and God
has a way to reach the whole world through this sort of person.
Where
are You?
Perhaps
you’ve found yourself somewhere in what I’ve discussed, experiencing
orge or thumos. Maybe
somewhere you’re seeing you need to let God get control of your life and
you are realizing how to let God flow through you to bless the world. Let
the leaves of fall, fall; let the new life come, which is Christ in
you.
I
do so pray, I do so desire, that God would bring to you a spirit of wisdom
and revelation to know Him better. I
pray that the eyes of your understanding would be flooded with light so
you know the hope of His calling. And
that you might understand the great and mighty power working in you and
for you and through you which is the same power that raised Jesus from the
dead and seated Him at the right hand of God. I
pray you will be who you are in Christ, every day. May the LORD bless you.
Amen.
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