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Many of the questions we face in life are complex and aren't directly addressed by the rules. So, do I say something now or do I wait? Should I take that job or stay put? That's why wisdom is so crucial for our lives. So how do we develop it? Today, join us as Tim Keller explores how we apply God's wisdom to the complexities of our lives.
After you listen, we invite you to go online to gospelandlife.com and sign up for our email updates. When you sign up, you'll receive our quarterly newsletter with articles about gospel-changed lives as well as other valuable gospel-centered resources. Subscribe today at gospelandlife.com. Tonight's reading comes from the book of Proverbs. A patient man has great understanding, but a quick-tempered man displays folly.
A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones. A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel. He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who captures a city. A man's wisdom gives him patience. It is to his glory to overlook an offense.
A hot-tempered man must pay the penalty. If you rescue him, you will have to do it again. Do not testify against your neighbor without cause or use your lips to deceive. Do not say, "I'll do to him as he has done to me. I'll pay that man back for what he did." If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you. This is God's word. We're looking at the book of Proverbs, looking at the subject of wisdom. What's wisdom? In 1 Kings 3, Solomon prays for wisdom. And when he prays for wisdom, he defines it like this. He says, God, give me a heart that can discern right from wrong.
And you might say, he was the king of Israel. He had the law of God. Why does he need a heart to discern right from wrong? And the answer is, wisdom is not less than being moral and good, but it's quite a bit more. It's knowing what is the right decision to make, what is the right course of action in the vast majority of life situations that the moral rules don't address.
Now, tonight we come to one of the main themes of the book of Proverbs, which is if you're going to live a wise life, if you're going to have a heart that discerns, you need to understand anger. You need to be able to understand and handle, doing this all day, so...
There's probably more to come. You have to understand how to understand and handle anger, not only in yourself, but in other people as well. There's four things we're going to learn about anger that you have to know to be wise. It's dangerous power, it's basic goodness, why it goes wrong, and how it can be healed. It's dangerous power, it's basic goodness, why it goes wrong, and how it can be healed.
So let's look. First of all, it's dangerous power. The anger is an explosive. Literally, it's the dynamite of the soul. And as a result, anger has the power to disintegrate things, to pulverize things like an explosive.
First of all, it can disintegrate your body. Look at the very first couple of Proverbs. A quick-tempered man displays folly. A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones.
All kinds of research shows that anger is much worse on your body. Anger is far worse on your heart than anxiety, than sorrow, than any other emotion. Even it's harder on your heart than extreme physical exertion. Nothing sets you up for heart attacks. Nothing sets you up for heart disease. Nothing rots your bone and disintegrates your body like anger. Secondly,
Anger doesn't disintegrate, only disintegrate the body, but also community. If you look down to the fourth, a hot temper man stirs up dissension. When you get angry, you throw words around like weapons. They have an enormous amount of damaging power and they wound people, they wound relationships, they destroy relationships. Very often you can never get them back.
So anger disintegrates body, and anger disintegrates the community. Anger, third of all, disintegrates your wisdom, that is your ability to make wise choices at all. So the very first proverb, a patient man has great understanding, but a quick-tempered man displays folly. After you've cooled off,
When you think of the things you said, when you think of the things you've done, after you've been angry and you've cooled off, don't you feel like a fool? You know why you feel like a fool? Because you were a fool. That's the point. When you get angry, it distorts your view of things, your view of the situation, your view of yourself, your view of the world, your view of others, so that you make stupidly destructive choices. But not only does anger disintegrate the body,
and community, and your ability to make wise choices, it actually destroys your will. It actually destroys your ability to make intelligent choices at all. The last one to look at here would be, if you run down to the sixth proverb, a man's wisdom, pardon me, the seventh proverb, a hot-tempered man must pay the penalty. If you rescue him, you will have to do it again, and again, and again.
Of all the emotions, anger is the one most like an addictive substance. It's because anger leads you to denial. You can admit you're worried. You can admit you're sorrowful. You can admit everything but anger.
Anger hides itself. Anger, like an addictive substance, leads you into denial. You say, "I'm not angry. I'm just sticking up for myself. I'm just getting it off my chest. I'm just an activist. I'm just looking out for justice. I'm just a direct speaker. I just tell it like it is. I rock the boat." Because you deny your anger, you can have anger. And the more angry you are, the more these problems, social and psychological problems, show up. And the more you have anger,
And the problems that anger brings into your life, the broken relationships, etc., the more that happens, in order to keep up the fiction that you haven't induced these problems yourself, you have to be even more angry. You have to be angry at people who let this go wrong and people who do that. In order to stay in denial about how angry you are and how much your anger is at the root of your problems, you have to get even angrier.
anger becomes addictive. Here's a letter to a newspaper counselor. Dear Counselor, you told the mother of a three-year-old with anger problems to let him kick the furniture to get the anger out of his system. Well, my younger brother used to kick the furniture when he got mad. He's 32 years old now. He's still kicking the furniture, what's left of it, but he's also kicking his wife, the kids, and anything else that gets in his way. Last week, he kicked a television out of a second-story window. The window was...
Close at the time there that came that was quoted in a psychology today article that was bringing out the fact that Whereas 20 or 30 years ago in our culture there was a lot of emphasis on ventilating your anger and the best way to If the most healthy thing is to express your anger but more and more People are starting to see what the proverb says is right and that is the more you are angry the more you need to be angry and the more you will be angry you lose control do you see the destructive power of
the enormous destructive power, the ability to disintegrate things that anger has. But that's not all you need to see. Proverbs doesn't just tell us about it's a dangerous power. On the other hand, Proverbs says some astounding, the Bible says astoundingly positive things about anger because according to the Bible, anger is basically a good thing. Notice in the very center of the list of Proverbs, you have the fifth proverb here in our list,
He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who captures a city. The ideal in Proverbs, the ideal in the Bible, is not no anger or slow anger, pardon me, or blowing up anger. It's slow anger, not no anger. So I did it again. I told you there'd be a few more. Not no anger or not blowing up, not no anger, not blowing anger, but slow anger is the ideal.
It is a sin to never get angry. It's a sin to blow up with your anger. According to the Bible, the ideal is slow anger. You say, what? It's a sin to never get angry? I thought good people didn't get angry. That's not what the Bible says. Slow to anger, that's the wise man or woman. That's the ideal. In Ephesians chapter 4, verse 26, Paul says, be angry, but sin not.
What? Be angry. Not, he doesn't say, well, some people are going to be angry eventually, but if so, try to minimize the damage. It's an imperative. Not, you will be angry. We should be angry sometimes. Be angry, but sin not. John Chrysostom, an early Christian preacher,
summarize the biblical understanding of anger perfectly and shows how positive the biblical view of anger is. Listen, here's the perfect summary. He says, he that is angry without cause sins, but he who is not angry when there is cause sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices. That is really weird. Not no anger.
And not blow anger, but slow anger. Because no anger and blow anger are sins. Slow anger is the way to be. Why? Because that's how God is. Slow to anger, which is the mark of the wise person here.
is an attribute of God. The Bible again and again says God is slow to anger. In fact, when Moses meets God on the mountain of Sinai in Exodus 34, and Moses says, show me your glory, tell me the essence of who you are. God says, I will declare my name for you. And you know what he says? He says, I am the Lord, slow to anger. That's my glory. I get angry, but I'm slow about it. Now, a lot of modern New Yorkers have a lot of trouble here
A whole lot of trouble. They say, I believe in a God of love, not a God who gets angry. But if you have a God who never gets angry, you can't have a God of love because if you never ever get angry about anything, you don't love anything. Because if you love and you see the thing you love threatened, you're angry. If you're indifferent, you're not in love. Becky Pipper puts it perfectly when she says, think how we feel when we see someone we love in
ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might towards strangers? Far from it. Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is. And the final form of hate is indifference. The more a father loves his son, the more he's angry at the drunkard, the liar, the traitor in the son. And if I, a flawed, self-centered woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them. Now, see, here's what it's saying.
True love always gets angry. In fact, we can even be stronger than that. Love, in its uncorrupted origin, is just love moved to deal with a threat to someone you love. You know what anger is? In its original, you know what anger is? In its pure form, the way it's supposed to be? Anger is love in motion toward a threat. Is that what you love?
If something you really love is threatened, you get angry at the thing that's threatening it. And that's why anger pulverizes. That's the reason anger disintegrates. It disintegrates the thing that's endangering that which you love. Anger is nothing but love in motion when someone or something you love is under threat. And if you look at those things, I mean, this is really wild. You know, anger originally was, until it got corrupted, we'll talk about that in a second, a form of love.
And that means that if you look at the things in your heart that most anger you and then ask this question, what am I defending? Look at the things that get you the most angry and say, what are you defending? And you have an answer to the things your heart loves the most. The answer is the things your heart loves the most. And that's the reason why when the Bible says God is angry all the time, it's because he loves us. And he's angry at the cancer of sin that's destroying the human race which he made and he loves with his whole being.
And if you look at Jesus, who the Bible continually says is perfect, you'll see him getting angry. He's angry at the money changers in the temple, John 2. He's angry at the religious leaders, Mark 3. He's angry at the tomb of Lazarus, John 11. Very often, the Greek words describing his emotions are incredibly strong. He bellows with anger. He snorts with anger. Why would Jesus Christ get so angry? Because he's a man of love, of perfect love, of pure love. That's why he's getting angry.
He gets angry, but he sins not. Now, do you see that individualistic cultures who put all this emphasis on getting your rights hold up anger as too positive and say, express it.
And moral traditional cultures that some of you are from, where all the emphasis is not on the individual but on the family and on doing the right thing and on the tribe and on the clan, they make you suppress the anger. Anger is seen as a very negative thing. Good people don't get angry. The Bible has nothing to do with either of those kinds of cultures. The Bible has a unique approach. It sees its basic goodness and yet its destructive and dangerous power. Well, you say, if it's really that...
good a thing. Why is it so destructive? Why are both those things true? And that brings us to our third point. How does anger or why does anger go wrong? Look at the second last couplet of Proverbs. Do not testify against your neighbor without cause or use your lips to deceive. Do not say, I'll do to him as he has done to me. I'll pay that man back for what he did. Ah, look at verse 29. Somebody is really angry at someone.
But verse 28 says that in spite of the fact that you're angry, you don't have just cause for that anger. Now, how could that happen? How could you have anger that's disproportionate to the cause or inappropriate to the cause? Here's how it happens. Our anger is disordered. St. Augustine, and we talked about this about three or four weeks ago, St. Augustine said the biggest problem we have is disordered loves.
Disordered loves means there are many things in this world that are good. Your family or your job or a political cause or your accomplishments or your mate or whatever. There are many things in this world that are good, but we turn good things into ultimate things. We don't just love things that are good, but we look to certain things to give us the happiness and the significance and security and self-worth that only God can do.
And when we turn good things into ultimate things, when we love good things too much, more than God, that's when our emotions get absolutely distorted. So, for example, if you break up with somebody you love, you're going to be profoundly sad. But if when you break up with somebody you love, you try to kill yourself.
What's happened is you've turned that good thing into an ultimate thing. You've turned the person or your need for sexual affection from the other gender into an absolute. You've got to have it. That's the only way you'll be happy. And when that happens, when you turn a good thing into an ultimate thing, when you love something...
and look to something in a way you should only look to God, that's when your emotions are totally over the top. That's when they're completely magnified and completely uncontrollable. They're completely disproportionate. That's what happens. Now, let's apply this to anger. If it's true that anger was originally just a form of love,
Disordered love creates disordered anger. And our anger is disordered in three ways. Let me just go through them rather quickly. First of all, anger is disordered in its cause. Why is it that we get so much more angry if we're snubbed? We get so much more angry about a snub than we are about the injustice to a group of people in another part of the world or the city.
Why? Well, St. Augustine says it's disordered love. See, there's nothing wrong with being ticked, getting angry to a degree, if somebody slights your reputation. But why are you 10 times, 100 times more angry about it than some horrible, violent injustice being done to people in another part of the world? You know why. St. Augustine said, here's why. Because
You may believe in God, but if God's love is an abstraction, if what you're really looking for for your significance and security is people's approval or a good reputation or status or something like that, then when anything gets between you and the thing that you have to have, you become implacably angry. You have to have it. You're over the top. So you can't shrug it off.
And as a result, our causes, we get angry over causes that, there's certain things that make us incredibly angry when the cause really would be warranting only a little bit of anger. And there are other causes for which we ought to be incredibly angry, but because of our selfishness and our pride and our ego and our disordered loves, we're hardly angry at all.
Secondly, therefore, our anger is not only distorted in terms of its cause, it's distorted in terms of its proportion, it's always over the top, uncontrollable. And thirdly, it's disordered with regard to its goal. Loving anger always seeks to do a surgical strike on the evil. If you love, really truly love, say, your teenage or your adult child, and you see them being an idiot, you want to destroy the idiocy, not the child.
You want to destroy the fool in the child, not the child, right? That's ordered love. That's anger the way it should be. But in disordered anger, you don't go after the problem, you go after the person. You don't just want to do restitution and justice, you want vengeance. You don't just do a surgical strike, you slash and burn. And see, there's levels to our disorder.
There's levels to it. What do I mean by levels? Well, what I mean is at the level one, there's things that just bug us every day, things that make us angry. Level two, there are things, there are betrayals and injustices and letdowns that we haven't forgotten. We haven't forgotten them. We haven't been able to totally forgive them. And you know what? Level two leads to more level one anger.
If you're a man and a woman has wronged you and you haven't totally forgiven that woman, you're going to be more quick to be angry at other women. You're going to be quicker to take slights from women than men. If you are a member of a particular race or class and you were wronged by a person in another race or class and you haven't totally forgiven, that creates an anger level. Level two, it's under the surface that it makes you more prone to take slights and offense and get angry at people of that race or that class.
And underneath the whole thing, there's a low level of anger toward God himself. You see, if you, and I'll get to this in a second, if you, we all do, build your life on things, I'll be happy if I have a family, I'll be happy if I have a job, I'll be happy if I have a life like this or like that, and life never gives us the things that we are building our happiness on, then there's a low level, a bedrock of self-pity and anger against life and God itself.
that makes it hard to forget wrongs, that's level two, and makes it therefore easier to be slighted at level one, which of course creates fodder for level two and level three. And on and on we go. Anger is at the bottom of so many of our problems in this world, so many of your psychological problems, and you deny it because you don't admit it because it's the one motion that most leads to denial. And it leads to wars, and it leads to oppression, and it leads to so much of the misery in this world. How do we heal it?
In the midst of life's uncertainties, where do you turn for wisdom? The book of Proverbs is filled with wisdom to help guide us in all aspects of life. In Tim and Kathy Keller's devotional book, God's Wisdom for Navigating Life, you'll get a fresh, inspiring view of God's wisdom each day of the year from the book of Proverbs. This devotional book will help you unlock the wisdom within the poetry of Proverbs and guide you toward a new understanding of what it means to live the Christian life.
This resource is our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share Christ's love with more people. You can request your copy of God's Wisdom for Navigating Life when you give today at gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. That's the fourth point. How do we heal it? All right, three things you have to do. The first thing you have to do is admit it.
The first thing you must do is admit it. All of the Proverbs that say a wise man or woman is not no anger or blow anger, but slow anger. Well, the key to being angry well, that's what slow anger is. Being angry smart, using your anger well. Being angry well is you have to own your anger. You have to admit your anger. You have to be in touch with your anger. You have to know how angry you are.
It's absolutely critical. Let me tell you what happens if you will not admit your anger, if you disguise it from yourself, if you deny it, if you hide it. When someone wrongs you, you come after them and here's what you say. You deserve anger, but I'm not angry. Now, you know what you're really doing? Well, here's what's going on. I'm not angry. You're saying you deserve anger, but I'm above you. You know, I'm too far above you to let you make me mad. But you say, of course, you really are angry. You're saying, well, I'm not angry.
because you're just punishing them, you're making them feel bad. But do you know that even if you're the victim, even if you have been wronged, to even admit you're angry is an act of vulnerability, isn't it? It's an act of weakness.
To come to somebody and say, you made me angry, even if they're completely in the wrong, gives the possibility of reconciliation because you're admitting your weakness and then they can admit their weakness. But no, not if you won't admit or own your anger. If you just criticize people and you will not own up to your anger, you not only destroy the ability to reconcile, but meanwhile, you're feeding your level two. You are being angry. You're creating a root of bitterness, but roots become shoots, become trees, become forests.
And if you will not admit your anger, you will be utterly controlled by it. The second thing you have to do besides admitting your anger is analyze it. And what do I mean by analyze? Well, we've already talked about this, but it's absolutely critical. Notice the second last couplet. Do not say, quote, I'll do to him as he has done to me. I'll pay that man back for what he did. Now, who's this person talking to? Do not say, say to who? That's self-talk. And here's the implication of this verse.
What makes you angry is not what's happened to you, but what you tell yourself about what's happened to you. What makes you angry is not what you've lost, but what you say to yourself that means. It's not that somebody is holding something away from you that makes you angry. It's if you say, I've got to have that, I've got to have that, or my life is a ruin. See, your anger comes from what you believe, not from what people are doing to you. You've got to know that. Remember, here's the analysis. Here's the analysis word.
Whenever you get angry, say, what is this big thing that's so important to me that I'm defending? What is this big thing that is so important to me that I'm willing to clobber everybody around me so I get it rather than lose it? What is the thing I'm defending? Now, if you ask that question more often than not, almost immediately, if you do this analysis, you'll immediately be embarrassed because almost many, many times the thing you're defending is your ego, your pride, your self-esteem.
If I'm in a, this happens to me all the time. If I'm running into a restaurant, I only have 20 minutes to eat and the waitress is slow and I'm getting so mad. Stop, stop, analyze. What is this big thing I'm defending? Remember I said anger is defending something you love. What is it that you love so much? Well, here's what I love so much. I didn't plan enough time in the day to have enough time to eat.
And so if I happen to get served and out of there in 20 minutes, then I won't look foolish to everybody else. But the fact is, I'm afraid of how I'm going to look. I'm afraid it's going to come out that I really didn't plan my day very well. And therefore, I'm mad at her. But what am I defending? I'm defending my ego. I'm defending me. There's a place in the book of Jeremiah. There's a place where God says, Seekest thou great things for thyself, seek them not.
Use that on yourself in times like that. By the way, for me, it only works in King James English.
But it does. Because what you're doing is you're ordering your love in a way. You're saying, look, why do I love that so much? Why is that so important that I look bad, that I don't look bad? That people realize, okay, I'm late. The reason I'm late was I didn't leave enough time. It's my fault. I'm sorry. Egg on my face. Why am I mad at her? Because I don't want to say that. And what you do, as soon as you say, seekest thou great things for thyself, seek them not, your anger gets handleable.
But sometimes, to ask that analysis question is a lot more complicated because it can take you to the very roots of your life and your soul. If you say...
I'm angry. Why am I angry? What is the big thing I'm defending? Sometimes it can take you to the roots of your soul. An example of this, which I used just three weeks ago, but it's still too good an example not to use. You remember I said there were two women I counseled once. They both had teenage sons. They both had husbands who were being lousy fathers. Because of the lousy fathering, the sons were starting to get in trouble with the law. Both the wives were really mad at their husbands. I counseled them to forgive.
And the wife who had the worst husband did. And the wife who didn't have a husband who was really nearly that bad couldn't do it. Why? Because for her, the most important thing in her entire life was her son's love. If her son loved her, then everything was fine. If her son didn't love her, she didn't even want to live. She believed in God, but God's love was an abstract concept. And because this was something she had to have to even live...
She was implacably, irresolvably angry at anything that would come between her and her son's love. She couldn't possibly ever get over her anger. Her anger was going to control her the rest of her life. She would have to destroy anything that got in her way. Why? Until she recognized her disordered love for
She couldn't deal with a disordered anger. Until God's love for her was at least as important as her son's love, there was no way she was going to get control of her anger. No way. So you have to admit it. You have to analyze it. But thirdly, you have to transform it. Chapter 15, verse 1, the third proverb. A gentle answer turns away wrath. If someone comes up to you with a harsh word, respond gently. And look at the last two verses. If you have an enemy, feed him.
If he's thirsty, give him drink. Now, of all the wisdom literature of the ancient world, this is over the top. There was Egyptian, Sumerian, there was a lot of other parts of the world that had wisdom literature, and they all talked about self-control, but this is beyond self-control. This is not just saying, don't revenge yourself on your enemies. This is saying, save your enemies. I mean, you know, food and drink, these are things you can't live without. Redeem your enemies. Now, how is that possible? Here's how it's possible.
Let me tell you a story, or let me give you an illustration. The real changes in your life don't happen when you get married. They happen when you have children. My wife often said that if you're married but you haven't had children yet, it's really just like being on a long date. Because the real changes come. Your life doesn't really go into the toilet until you have children.
Because that's when, even if you don't want to, even if you're really not trying, even if you're a bad parent, a mediocre parent, it doesn't matter. It's sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. You don't do three-quarters of the things you used to be able to do that you really like doing. I mean, everything revolves around the kid and the kids. And you make all these sacrifices. And at some point, the kid becomes a teenager. And you cross the kid's will. You just ask them not to do something that everyone else in the whole world knows is self-destructive and stupid.
and the child turns on you and says something like this, "You don't love me. You hate me, and I hate you. You have ruined my life. I hate you. I hate you. You've never done anything for me." Now, when that happens, there is nothing more painful than that. Because even if you've been a bad parent, "You haven't done anything for me." Even if you didn't want to do everything in the world for your child, if you have a child, you end up doing it. You sacrifice.
And to have somebody that you have done more for, you sacrifice far more for a kid, frankly, than you do for your spouse. The one person that you have sacrificed and sacrificed to look at you in the eye and say, you hate me, I hate you, you've never done anything for me, that goes right into your heart. You know why? That is the most unjustified, disproportionate, disordered rage possible, and it hurts like crazy. And because it hurts so deeply, there's a huge test at this point for the parent. There's only three things you can do. The first thing you can do
is to withdraw. Just say, I'm going to stay away because it just hurts too much. And it does. I just can't take their anger. I can't take it. You withdraw, you give up to their self-destructive impulses and you've lost your kid. So you can withdraw and not take the anger. Or the other way you can deal with it, because it's very painful, you withdraw. The other way you can avoid experiencing their anger is you go in with guns blazing. You say they rage at you, you rage at them. Harsh word, not gentle, harsh word.
And because, you know, you have 30 years or so on them of practice at verbal abuse, you'll probably win. You'll probably win. They call you something you call them. They hate you. I hate you too. And so that's another way to keep from the pain of the disordered rage. But in that case, of course, you still lost something.
The evil is winning. You're becoming hard. You're becoming cold. You're alienating them. There's only the hardest thing to do, and the only way to save your child is to do a surgical strike. If you stay away from them, their idiocy takes them over, right? If you go at them and just blaze away, then you both become idiots. But the way to do a surgical strike, the way to target not the person but the problem, not the person, not the idiot, but the idiocy, is you have to come in close together.
and say, I'm going to insist gently on the truth. This is the way it is. This is what I'm going to tell you. This is how I'm going to... You have to come close. You have to insist on the truth, and you have to just absorb their anger without paying back.
And if you do that, if you don't withdraw, you don't come in with guns blazing, but you just say very calmly, insisting on the truth, very gently insisting on the truth, this is how it's going to be. I know you're angry. I know you're upset, but this is just what we're going to do. And this is how it's going to be. And if you just absorb the pain of their disordered rage without paying back, you can save your child. In fact, this happens all the time.
Parents who cannot take the disorderly rage of their children are not fit to be parents. One way to avoid it is to withdraw. One way to avoid it is to give it back both ways. But if you want a surgical strike on the idiocy and to really save your child and your relationship, you have to come close and absorb the rage without paying back. You can be mad, mad at the idiot in the kid. It's the only way to save the kid. Now, do you realize what God has done? We are mad at him.
You don't want to admit you're mad at God, but that's right because people in anger always deny it. We want this and we want that and we wanted this and we want that and God hasn't given it to us and we are mad. We're in denial, but the proof that we are mad at him and it's the most unjustified, the most disordered, the most hurtful possible rage, but the proof that it's there was that when God became human, when he became vulnerable, when he became killable, we killed him.
When he got within our clutches, we took hold of him. We took him to the cross and we mocked him. You say you're a king. You want to be, you're going to be our king. We mocked him. We beat him. We tortured him. We reviled and he did not revile again. What was he doing? He, see, we were angry at God. God didn't withdraw and he didn't come in guns blazing. He went to the cross and on the cross, he told us the truth and absorbed us.
our disordered rage without paying back. And he didn't just take our undeserved anger. He also took the anger we deserved. Remember, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he said, take this cup from me. But no, okay, I'll drink the cup. What's the cup? Everywhere in the Old Testament, the cup is the cup of God's anger. Our deserved anger we deserve because we're ruining one another. On the cross, Jesus not only took the anger, our anger,
which he did not deserve, but he also took the anger that we deserved without paying back. The gentlest word, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. If you see Jesus Christ taking our disordered rage at infinite cost to himself, then you see the ultimate surgical strike. The ultimate surgical strike. He loved the sinner and hated the sin. He forgave our sins so he could embrace the sinner.
The ultimate surgical strike. And if you are melted by the knowledge, stunned into silence by how he responded to our disordered rage, then when other people wrong you, you can do the same. You can say, hey, I've been wronged, but I wronged God at an infinite cost. He responded with cosmic gentleness, and I can't do anything other than that. When you experience the ultimate surgical strike, loving the sinner and hating the sin, then you're going to be free to turn around and do it yourself.
Your ego has changed. You know, the ego needs aren't there when you have the love of God. Now you say, that's very impractical, that stuff that, you know, love the sinner, hate the sin. Oh yeah, that's impractical. Oh, is it really? Let me give you a sermon, a long piece of a sermon from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who led one of the most successful movements for civil rights in history. And listen to what he says. It's amazing.
This is a quote. Jesus said, love your enemies that you may be my children, pardon me, that you may be children of your father, which is in heaven. Of course, you say, all this about loving enemies is not practical. Life is a matter of getting even, of hitting back, of dog eat dog. Well, maybe in some distant utopia, the idea will work, but not in the hard, cold world in which we live.
My friends, we've followed the so-called practical way for a long time now. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered into hatred and violence. We are going to follow another way. Listen to this. We will not abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our strength, we will continue to rid the nation of the incubus of segregation. But we will not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love.
While abhorring segregation, we will love the segregationist. This is the only way to build the beloved community. To our most bitter opponents, we say, we shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will continue to love you. We cannot obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as it is to cooperate with good.
But throw us in jail, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community and beat us, and we will still love you. But be assured that we will wear you down. See, that's coals on the head, don't you see? One day we will win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process. And so our victory will be a double victory.
The great military leaders of the past have gone and their empires have crumbled and burned to ashes. But the empire of Jesus, built solidly and majestically on the foundation of love, is still growing. May we solemnly realize we shall never be sons of our Heavenly Father until we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us as he did for us. If you see Jesus absorbing our disordered love,
Just responding with cosmic gentleness that will empower you to go out into this dog-eat-dog world filled with anger What a culture of anger we've got where you too can hate segregation and love the segregationist where you too can hate sin and love the sinner you're free to do it because he did it to you and Then you will be an agent for redemptive gentleness in this world. Let us pray Thank You Father that anger is something that you handled so beautifully so perfectly
In a surgical strike, you destroyed sin without destroying sinners. And you free us from our own disordered anger. You free us from responding to others in anger. You free us to be like you, slow in anger. Angry at the right things. Angry in the right ways. Oh, Lord, we aren't very close to all this. This is wonderful. We're outlining it all, but we are not wise. Make us wise. Make us wise. Give us what we need in order to
to be like your son, Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it equips you to know more about God's word. You can find more resources from Tim Keller at gospelandlife.com. Just subscribe to the Gospel and Life newsletter to receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other resources. Again, it's all at gospelandlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.
This month's sermons were recorded in 2004. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.
