The date was June 11, 1963; the place- The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Vivian Malone, a young black woman, enrolled that day as a freshman. Federal troops ensured her entrance, but the doorway was blocked by Governor George Wallace. Holding out for segregation, the governor ultimately failed, and Ms. Malone became the first African-American to graduate from the University of Alabama.
Vivian wasn't the only newcomer that day. James Hood was at her side and needed encouragement. So she slipped him a note; on it was this prayer: "Whatever may be our adversary this day, our Father, help us to face it with courage, for it can be conquered when thou art with us. In faith we pray in the name of Jesus. Amen."
Years later, after an assassination attempt and a deep change of heart, Wallace was rolled in his wheelchair into the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, and there asked forgiveness. More particularly, the former governor regretted how he had treated Vivian and sought her forgiveness face to face. He wanted to make amends before he died. At their meeting, Vivian told him that she had forgiven him years earlier. Interviewed in 2003, she was asked about the meeting: "You said you'd forgiven him many years earlier?"
"Oh yes."
"And why did you do that?"
Her reply: "This may sound weird. I'm a Christian, and I grew up in the church. And I was taught that- just as I was taught that no other person was better than I- that we were all equal in the eyes of God. I was also taught that you forgive people, no matter what. And that was why I had to do it. I didn't feel as if I had a choice."1
That is what we are after! That is what is means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and to have the Lord’s wisdom go deeper in your soul than any of the meanness of this world. Not forgiveness and reconciliation as an occasional choice but as a settled habit of character. As Vivian Malone said, “I didn’t feel as if I had a choice.” She had lived so long in the faith that forgiveness had become a reflex.
If we take the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and turn it into a new law, another burden we must carry to earn the title of disciple or bear the name Christian, we will have misread his intent. This teaching is a gift. It is a description of what life looks like from inside the kingdom of God. In Jesus as its visible ambassador, and through the Holy Spirit as its invisible power, we have access to the kingdom rule of God the Father. In the midst of this fallen world, shot through with evil and conflict at every level, Jesus invites us to be a new kind of people, a people who deal with God at the heart level, not just at the level of outward obedience but at the deeper level of imagination where desires and habits are transformed. We live out of a new center with a new companion. We become peaceseekers, peace-keepers and peace-makers instead of peace-breakers and peace-fakers; we become people who see possibilities others ignore and exploit them for the kingdom of God. It is only in Christ’s presence and in his service that we have the chance to become a new brand of people who offer hope to this angry, bitter, hurting, conflicted, litigious, resentful world, and to do it one relationship at a time. Unless the church is a place of honest peace, and genuine forgiveness, we have nothing to export.
If you want to change the world, ask Christ to change you first. Deal with the sinful component of your angry responses. Take time for self-examination and prayer. Put away slander, gossip and name-calling. Control your tongue. Monitor your prejudices. Be quick to confess mistakes and seek reconciliation. Camp out in these six verses until you have a story to tell about how you obeyed and how God came through with healing. We all want our way; we resent frustration; we feel angry and lash out. What shall we do with these thoughts and feelings and actions? Only one answer has promise: we take them to Christ over and over again; we ask him to deal with us on the inside so that we can be new on the outside. He can do for us what no counselor can, which is give us grace to change, often in remarkable ways, and to become a people skilled in the ways of peace.
Frances Ridley Havergal is the author of well known hymns like "Take My Life and Let It Be" and "Like a River Glorious." As a young woman she had a quick temper, the kind that would explode. Afterward she would be mortified and confess it to the Lord. Then she would lose her temper, again and again. One day after a particularly bad explosion, she threw herself down by her bed and wept. She prayed, "Lord, must it always be so? Will I always have this temper to keep me humble before you?"
While on her knees, the Lord injected a verse of Scripture in her mind: "The Egyptians whom you have seen today you will see no more forever." God spoke these words to Moses when the Egyptians pursued the Israelites to take them back into bondage. Frances related the verse to her temper and the way in which Satan used it to pull her into bondage. She saw that God could tame her inflamed temper.
She asked, "Lord, could it be forever?"
It seemed to her that the words came back, "Yes. No more, forever."
Her sister said that Frances never again lost her temper. She believed God, and God did a miracle. It is not always so simple, but any who seek God over an inflamed temper will find their fuse lengthened and their self-control expanded, both of which are also gifts.2
Have you noticed how angry people seem these days? Road rage, airplane rage, grocery store rage, violence at youth sports events. Flight attendants and pilots report a dramatic increase in problem passengers: 66 incidents in 1997, 534 in 1999. C. Leslie Charles, author of Why Is Everyone So Cranky? writes:
“I'm describing a fuming, unrelenting, sense of anger, hostility, and alienation that simmers for months, even years, without relief. Eventually, all it takes is a triggering incident, usually minor, for the person to go ballistic. Cell phones, pagers, and high tech devices allow us to be interrupted anywhere, at any time. This constant accessibility and compulsive technology, fragments what little time we do have, adding to our sense of urgency, emergency, and overload.”
James Garbarino, professor at Cornell, reports a major social shift:
“There is a general breakdown of social conventions, of manners, of social controls. This gives a validation, a permission, to be aggressive. Kids used to be guided by a social convention that said, ‘keep the lid on.’ Today they are guided more in the direction of taking it off.”
Dr. Emil Coccaro has studied anger for decades. He says many hotheads suffer from a newly named pathology, Intermittent Explosive Disorder (I.E.D). Dr. Coccaro is championing treatment with the drug Depakote. Oddly enough, an effort to find volunteers with volatile tempers for the clinical studies has been unproductive. Apparently, few people see their anger as a problem, and that is itself part of the problem. In an interview Dr. Coccaro gives this anecdote, "The other day I got into a friend's car and I noticed the visor on the passenger's side was gone. I asked what happened.”
My friend told me, “Don't get me started on that. My wife ripped it off.”
I told him these things are hard to rip off.
He told me, 'Well, she was really angry.'"3
I am leery of taking every bad human behavior and sin and redefining it as a new psychological disorder for which people need to have their brain chemistry adjusted. Drugs help in certain situations, but what folk need is a new heart and a new community that will love and teach them how to connect with Jesus Christ and disconnect from the Evil One. Eleanor Doar got my attention with this bit of wisdom, “Irritation in the heart of a believer is always an invitation to the devil to stand by.”4 It’s why Paul warned in Ephesians to put a timer on anger and to be aware how it opens to door to serious compromise, “Be angry,” he said, “but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”5 A mind set and lifestyle of simmering anger is an open door to evil.
Journalist Hunter Thompson, longtime contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, committed suicide last year at age 67. His addiction to drugs and alcohol and his abusive actions towards others were no secret. After his death, his first wife, Sandy, wrote:
“He was, on the one hand, extremely loving and tender, brilliant and exciting.... On the other end of the spectrum... he was extremely cruel…. I will never forget something Hunter once said to me. In one of his tender moments I asked him if he knew when he was about to become the Monster.
He said, "Sandy, it's like this. I sense it first, and before I have completely turned around he is there. He is me."6
Whatever psychologists might label this man’s character or mood disorder, the biblical name for it is demonic, and it means that people have, through the habitual misuse of anger, given Satan so many open doors that he now breezes in and out of their psyche with no barriers whatever, a master of destruction and finally death. Hunter said of himself, “I sense it first, and before I have completely turned around he is there. He is me." You don’t want to become that kind of person. You don’t want to built a house of anger and then have someone come occupy it as a permanent guest. I have known men and women like this; they wither everything they touch. So if people are frightened or intimidated by you, and if you take a pride in that because it feels strong, it is not a good thing. It’s from the other guy!
In an angry world, what a wonderful opportunity for Christians to offer an alternative. We should be able to walk into a room and bring peace by our prayerful presence. We have spent time with Jesus; we take his wisdom and peace wherever we go. But if we are just as short-tempered as the world around us, as quick to take offense, claim our rights, and get mad over the smallest personal issues, what good are we in a world that is looking for answers and finding few? We must be changed on the inside, and that comes from paying attention to the Lord and his teaching about the kind of people he is out to produce, people like Vivian Malone who can do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. 6
TURNING TO THE TEXT
Reminding people of what they already know is a powerful form of learning. The familiar is often overlooked. It was not new material that Jesus started with but old, all the way back to Moses and the Ten Commandments. Life is God’s gift, and not to be ended carelessly.
You know the Bible: as a people the Hebrews waged war, and as a people they lived with the death penalty for serious offenses, but murder, the act of killing another for personal reasons, was absolutely prohibited, and when it did occur, sanctions followed. Jesus reminded them, “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill’; and ‘whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’” God says don’t do it, and if you do, this is what will happen; the community through its legal institutions will call you to account for violating its peace and unleashing a new cycle of violence. In those days, as in the Middle East today, blood feuds and honor killings went on all the time. No murder was a first step to halting a chain reaction of vengeance that would draw families and clans into a vortex of increasing violence. And if you don’t start the cycle of killing, you don’t have to stop it. And if you deal with the root early, you won’t have to deal with fruit of murder later on.
It was then, after quoting what everyone knew, that Jesus said something extraordinary. He put his own words alongside those of the Old Testament in a breathtaking display of authority. “But I say to you....” Hidden in that little phrase is an indirect revelation of who he was as God’s mouthpiece, God’s unique representative telling people what God’s intent was. How would you react if I were to go to Washington and declare, “You have heard it said by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, but I say to you....” You would think me a crackpot, and you would be right. I would be taking to myself authority I do not possess. But if Jesus is who the church claims him to be, God incarnate, then he has every right to tell us what the commandments mean. It is not just killing that shatters community, it is the underlying spirit of anger and the accumulation of little offenses that breaks peace between people.
One of the perennial temptations of biblical religion is to focus on externals. That’s because it’s easier. Easier to whitewash the outside of the tomb than to deal with the rotting corpse within. Easier to work on how I look to others than deal with who I am at the heart level. Easy to play to the wrong audience. Easy to fool ourselves, “Well, I haven’t killed anyone, so I must be one of the good folk.” “Not so,” said Jesus. As long as there is unresolved anger in your heart, we are potentially as evil and malicious as the worst of people. God is not satisfied with external conformity; God wants to deal with the deepest you and make you a new person from the inside out. The world needs a few more of his kind of peacemakers, those who have in fact trained under him.
The second thing Jesus did was to trace the action of murder down to the underlying attitude of anger, to move, as we said, from the wicked fruit down to the evil root. A lot has happened before murder takes place. And it all starts with anger, which is the emotion we often use to cover up hurt and disappointment.
At one level anger is physiological, a form of arousal, the fight-or-flight reaction than helps us deal with threats. But it is also more than chemistry; anger is a danger signal that something is wrong and needs to be addressed. There has been an injustice, at least a perceived one. The old adage about counting to ten still counts as wisdom. It give us time to punch the pause button and dial a question up to our awareness, What am I angry about, and is it really worth it? Jesus claims the right to do two things: first, to tell us what the law of God means, and secondly, to take each of us on a journey down to the depths of where we live, the internal maze and labyrinth we call the heart. And when he lifts the lid, what he finds is an inner cauldron of anger, a hidden flow of hot lava.
Every act of interpersonal violence starts with a feeling of interpersonal resentment. Gossip, slander, name-calling, character assassination, holding a grudge, refusing to forgive, taking delight in the troubles of another, preferring to inflict suffering rather than bear it: all these are indicative of an angry heart. And when we fall in public, it is because we have first failed in private. And if his disciples were going to be made into new men and women in the image of the Prince of Peace, then this is where reconstruction begins, with the anger issue.
“But I say to you,” said Jesus, “that everyone who is angry (and the Greek present tense here means habitually or continually angry) shall be liable to the judgment.” When not dealt with quickly and constructively, anger has an amazingly negative power of transformation. It goes deeper. It burrows into the soul and corrupts everything it touches. Max Lucado traces the destructive path of anger this way:
“Resentment is when you let your hurt become hate. Resentment is when you allow what is eating you to eat you up. Resentment is when you poke, stoke, feed, and fan the fire, stirring the flames and reliving the pain. Resentment is the deliberate decision to nurse the offense until it becomes a black, furry, growling grudge.”7
“Bitterness,” someone said, “is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”8
A Christian counselor once spoke of a man who came in because he was having trouble with his anger. He had these outbursts, and it was affecting his work and his family.
The counselor wanted to find out if this new client could conceive of a different way of living. She asked, "What would your life look like if you got rid of your anger?"
He was quiet. He then asked, "But if I get rid of my anger, what will I have left?"9 Know anyone like that? I do. With them you feel the energy of anger at all times just below the surface, a volcano about to erupt. It’s their source of energy; the adrenalin of anger has become an addiction, and it is toxic in the extreme. That is what unresolved anger does; it torches all it touches till it‘s all that’s left. A once healthy soul is slow-roasted to a burnt crisp by the inward heat of anger.
The early desert monks categorized anger as one of the seven deadly sins. Frederick Buechner says this:
"Of the seven deadly sins, anger 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 confrontations 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 is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you."10
Long ago a wise one of Israel wrote in the Book of Proverbs, "A tranquil mind gives
life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot."11
Anger makes people sick of soul and sick in body. So if you are chronically angry, if you have a short fuse, know that you are not only scalding those close to you with a boiling temper, you are also cannibalizing your own body and placing layers of unfeeling callous over your soul's most tender surfaces. We are not meant to live on anger or control others with it. It is a selective tool for occasional usage. Other pearls from Proverbs on anger are these three: "The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent man ignores an insult.”12 Don’t let the unkind remarks divert you from your purpose. “He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.”13 Self-control is real power. “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare.”14 Anger is a contagious disease, so monitor your companions.
Most of Jesus’ followers came from villages where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Privacy is largely a modern luxury. Houses were only a room or two; life was lived in the public square. There is anonymity in cities and no secrets in a small Jewish village. Anger between individuals quickly spills over to effect the community, just as anger between a husband and wife immediately registers with the children. Private expressions of anger are a public concern, which is why Jesus notes the village elders as the first line of appeal, “But I say to you that everyone who is (continually) angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.” In other words, “If the two of you can’t solve it, we will find help, for your benefit and for the welfare of the whole village. What is going on?” Families and churches that don’t do this are neglecting their duties. Unresolved anger is a cancer that eats away at the healthy tissue of love and respect that hold us all together. Better, as Barney Fife used to say, “to nip it in the bud.”
Perhaps the best way to monitor your anger level is to listen to your words and monitor your thoughts; they will not lie. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. So if you hear yourself using words like Idiot and Numbskull and Stupid, or even worse, if you are given to profanity, beware. The desire to humiliate another person is a form of violence and of itself morally evil. If I dismiss you with a cutting remark or a slur, or if I gossip and plant innuendos with others, then I have assassinated your character and implied I am superior to you. That, says Jesus, at level two, is an offense worthy of the highest court in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin, “...whoever insults his brother, shall be liable to the Council.”
Negative political ads and the routine slander of political campaigns is immoral, and after a candidate of the left or right has taken this tact, it is impossible to retake the high moral ground from which to lead with vision. Separating issues from people is a form of wisdom. Christians who enter politics must not adopt these tactics, and if they do, fellow believers should hold them accountable. Who will elevate the national discourse? Who will be a statesman or stateswoman? Name calling only polarizes and divides, and Jesus is against it! At a minimum, no Christian should participate in or support such.
But there is a step beyond that is more dangerous still. To label a man or woman a fool was the equivalent of branding that person a pagan and an unbeliever. It was to kick them out of the people of God. With this word I presume to know where they stand with God and appoint myself as judge, jury, and executioner. In effect, I damn them. Jesus says that such a verbal offense is worthy of Gehenna, the perpetually smoldering, stinking garbage pit outside the walls of Jerusalem that served as an image for the terror and torments of hell, where the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched. Anger, says Jesus, will, if unaddressed, tear up your home and village, threaten the stability of the nation, and finally cause you to be labeled unfit for the kingdom of God. By giving us three levels Jesus was saying that escalating anger carries escalating penalties. So take your anger to God; ask God to sift motives at the heart level; decide whether this is a real justice issue or not. It takes proven character to fulfill the ancient philosophical ideal which echoes biblical wisdom: "Anybody can become angry- that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way- that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.15
At the center of Jesus’ treatment of the roots of murder is a vivid example in verses 23 and 24. The altar of which he speaks is in the courtyard of the Jerusalem temple. An altar is a place of sacrifice and reconciliation with God; it is a holy place. You come to an altar to do business with God. Perhaps it went like this:
“It’s Passover, and my family has made the pilgrimage from Nazareth down to the city of David. We have purchased our lamb and taken our place in line for the sacrifice. The knife will flash, the blood flow, the lamb will die, and we will be forgiven. It’s the religious high point of the year.
Standing here I look back twenty or thirty slots and see a neighbor of mine. Must have left after we did. Haven’t spoken in three months. I promised to help with the building of a new sheep pen but never followed through. I got busy, and besides that, our wives had a tiff the week before. Four of his ewes got out and were eaten by wolves. I didn’t keep a promise, and it cost him dearly. We were once friends.
I would have to humble myself to make it right, and perhaps split the cost of the dead sheep with him as restitution. That is too high a cost, personally and financially. Better to ignore him. Since we sit on opposite sides of the synagogue, it is convenient. Don’t need his friendship anyway. My children can find other pals, and anyway, his wife gabs too much.”
The implication in Jesus’ example is that the worshiper is genuinely in the wrong, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you....” This is not an accident of recall; this is the work of the Holy Spirit calling to mind a broken relationship that may be largely our fault. So take seriously who the Lord brings to mind! This past week I contacted two people with whom I have broken relationships. I can’t make it right alone, but if I don’t make a move, nothing will happen.
What Jesus calls for is radical and immediate action. Stop what you are doing or your offering is nothing but a fraud. In my fictional scenario it would mean getting out of line, going back to him in public, facing his anger, confessing my wrong, asking forgiveness, promising restitution, then following through with the necessary tools to rebuild the relationship, in other words, the death of pride and isolation. And if he is not present, if he is in Nazareth because he can’t afford to make the trip this year, then guess what? God’s call is for me to recognize that I cannot be right with God by a sacrifice if I am not willing to be made right with my brother through humility. Come back later, or next year together!
Jesus commanded that we take action immediately when the Holy Spirit shines light on a situation by calling it to memory, “...leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” So if, just before the offering on Sundays, and especially just before communion, people get up and leave quickly, I will not be discouraged but greatly encouraged because they have learned to obey Jesus and not to use the rituals of religion as a hypocritical cover for broken relationships. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade, tells the following story:
“I know two law partners who used to hate each other. When one became a
Christian, he asked me, ‘Now that I'm a Christian, what should I do?’
I said, ‘Why not ask him to forgive you and tell him you love him?’
‘I could never do that!’ he said, ‘because I don't love him.’
That lawyer put his finger on one of the great challenges of the Christian life: Everybody wants to be loved, but on the other hand, many never experience it. That's why we need to learn to love as Christ loves, unconditionally. We can't manufacture that kind of love. It only comes from God; and it's a love that draws people to Christ. I prayed with that attorney. The next morning, he told his partner, "I've become a Christian, and I want you to forgive me for all I've done to you, and to tell you that I love you."
The partner was so surprised and convicted that he, too, asked for forgiveness and said, "I would like to become a Christian. Would you tell me how?"16
In this hour of worship here before the altar of God, who is the Holy Spirit bringing to the inner screen of your mind’s eye? Who have you wronged, and who has wronged you? Will you seek them out as soon as you leave, or will you continue to resist obeying what Jesus said? If letters are written to ex-spouses this afternoon, if phone calls are made to old enemies, if old financial debts are repaid, and if some of you take trips to cemeteries to stand before the graves of those you have long hated and who are now long gone, then next Sunday will be the beginning of a revival here at Duncan, and if you do nothing, then nothing will change and my sermons will only add to the weight of your debt with God because now we know what is required. Pastor Bill Hybels got it right, “The mark of community--true biblical unity--is not the absence of conflict but the presence of a reconciling spirit.”17
In 1913, the Federal Government held a reunion at the 50 anniversary of Gettysburg. Thousands bivouacked in the old battlefield, swapping stories and looking up comrades.
For the most part the old men got along well enough, but over dinner at a restaurant one evening harsh words passed between a Yankee and a rebel and they went at one another with forks: "Unscathed in the melee of 1863," Myers wrote, "one of them- and I never learned which- was almost fatally wounded in 1913 with table hardware!"
The climax was a reenactment of Pickett's Charge. Thousands of spectators watched as Union veterans took their positions on Cemetery Ridge and waited as their old adversaries emerged from the woods and started forward again across the long, flat fields. "We could see," Myers wrote, "not rifles and bayonets but canes and crutches. We soon could distinguish the more agile ones aiding those less able to maintain their places in the ranks."
As they neared the northern line, they broke into one final, defiant rebel yell. At the sound, "after half a century of silence, a moan, a sigh, a gigantic gasp of unbelief" rose from the Union men on Cemetery Ridge. "It was then," wrote Myers, "that the Yankees, unable to restrain themselves longer, burst from behind the stone wall, and flung themselves upon their former enemies ... not in mortal combat, but re-united in brother love and affection."18
That is what God wants among his people, and that is the only hope of this world. The miracle is that it can begin today with each of us. So don’t kid yourself, if you have not taken the initiative to heal broken relationships and to humbly and without accusation take responsibility for your part, even if it was the lesser part, then you are not right with God and your religion is something of a fraud. Not because I said so, because Jesus said so. Leave and go get right; feel the burden lift, and bring us back a story to set the church on fire.
And if you don’t obey the Lord in this matter, then be sure to read verses 25 through 26 because they preview the misery of the prison in which you will be incarcerated. If we don’t act quickly and let bad interest accrue on both sides, a day of reckoning is ahead, sometimes in a courtroom, but at all times at the heart level to which Jesus was speaking, and finally before God at the judgment. If I have wronged another and refuse to repent, then I deserve whatever penalties or torments I may receive from human courts, from the bar of my condemning conscience, and ultimately from the Great Judge who will want to know why I did not count Jesus’ wisdom as superior to my own. Why not confess my wrongs and ask for mercy? Why not cut the losses? Why not avoid pain now and the possibility of hell later on? It is no accident that the double petition to forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us immediately precedes the petitions and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the Evil One. Unforgiveness is demon food, and when you carry it in your heart you invite them to come and feed on you, like vultures on road kill and roaches on rotten leftovers. Jesus frankly warns us what will happen if we do not listen to the promptings of the Spirit and take decisive action:
“Make friends with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge (because the charge is true), and the judge to the guard (because you are found guilty), and you be put in prison (because you deserve it!). Truly, I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny (which when you have no way to make money because you are in debtor’s prison can be forever!).”
Many of us are in prisons of our own making and of our own keeping. We have the keys to let ourselves out, and yet do nothing. It takes two to reconcile, only one to forgive. Some will say No to your efforts because of sin, but that is not your problem. You must act.
CONCLUSION
I was startled this week to read of the casualties of war, not the most current one in Iraq with its Improvised Explosive Devices but of wars that officially ended sixty-one years ago in the case of World War II and eighty-seven years ago as regards World War I. How is that? In a 1994 article, "Wars' Lethal Leftovers Threaten Europeans," Christopher Burns writes:
"The bombs of World War II are still killing in Europe. They turn up, and sometimes blow up, at construction sites, in fishing nets, or on beaches fifty years after the guns fell silent. Hundreds of tons of explosives are recovered every year in France alone. Thirteen old bombs exploded in France last year, killing twelve people and wounding eleven, the Interior Ministry said.
‘I've lost two of my colleagues,' said Yvon Bouvet, who heads a government team in the Champagne-Ardennes region that defuses explosives from both World War I and II.... ‘Unexploded bombs become more dangerous with time,’ Bouvet said. 'With corrosion inside, the weapon becomes more unstable, the detonator can be exposed.'”19
What is true of buried bombs is true of lingering anger. It explodes when we least expect it. Jesus, who knew the heart like no other, said that God is not only against murder but against the haughty attitudes of angry hearts and the careless words of vicious mouths and the religious fraud and pride that refuses to learn the ways of peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus, “they shall be known as God’s kids; they bear the family likeness.”
A defining moment in John Grisham's journey came several years after graduating from law at Mississippi State. One of his classmates told Grisham he was terminally ill. The author asked, "What do you do when you realize you are about to die?"
"It's real simple, John. You get things right with God; you spend as much time with those you love as you can. Then you settle up with everybody else."20
Why not now? Why wait till the time is short to live in peace with a clear conscience? And if you hear today and do not act, may God afflict you till you do! It’s no good bragging on Jesus if you are unwilling to obey him and prove him true.
1. Edited by Newsweek, October 24, 2005, 10.
2. Edited from PreachingToday.com, search under anger.
3. Mike Conklin, Chicago-Tribune, July 28, 2000.
4. PeachingToday.com under anger.
5 4:26-27.
6. Sondi Wright, “He Was Full Spectrum,” Rolling Stone, March 2005, 52.
7 . Max Lucado, The Applause of Heaven (Waco, TX: Word, 1996), 100.
8. PreachingToday.com under anger
9. Ibid.
10. Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1973).
11. 14:30.
12. 12:26.
13. 16:32.
14. 22:24-25.
15. Quoted in Louisa Rogers, "Dealing with Anger" pamphlet (St. Meinrad, IN: CareNotes, 1990), 1.
16. Edited from PreachingToday.com search under Matthew 5:21-26.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.