Colossians 3:15 – “Let the peace of God rule in your hearts”. When we lack peace in our heart (some may never have had peace of course), but peace is God's gift: to be at rest in the midst of life, to be in a place of calmness. When all else is falling away and panicking, you're centred on the Lord, and know that even if you don't have the answers, He does.
Notice here the list of things it says, one after the other: bitterness; wrath (that's rage; raging anger); anger; clamor (loud speaking or yelling), loud quarrelling; evil speaking be put away with malice.
Malice means you hope someone really gets theirs. You're looking for a chance to pay them back. These are all heart issues.
Now here's the pattern - it's normally: a person gets hurt, they get angry. They don't deal with the anger.
The hurt, you can't do much about; life deals stuff up that hurts us. That's life - get used to it.
But when you get hurt, then the normal thing is to feel angry - and I've got to do something with the anger, because if I don't, I'll soon feel a growing, smouldering resentment towards people; and that can go deeper down in the heart, until it forms bitterness.
Once bitterness is rooted in your heart, then there's malice and ill-will; and before you know it, you erupt at the least things. This is what people do!
I had someone do that the other day - they just stood in front of me: face red, going for it. I tried to appeal to them, and talk to them.
What they were talking about, I had nothing to do with, but it didn't make any difference. They had built up this reservoir of anger, and I was the one it was directed to, and I was going to get it.
The person responsible came up, and said: excuse me, it was actually - it's what I did; and they just... It was me they were out to kill!
And I say ‘kill’, because whenever you've got wrath, you'll have the spirit of murder with it; and it ministers to you something that'll steal your life away - it's a horrendous spirit. If you get this spirit of anger, it brings with it a spirit of murder. It takes away life.
Cain was angry at his brother, and he ended up killing him. So you may not physically murder people, but there's lots of ways we can murder people, lots of ways.
Notice there, it starts off with people getting hurt; so here's the question I ask you: why are you so angry?
Ephesians 4:26 says: it’s okay to get angry. It's okay to get angry, because God gets angry. ‘Angry’ is just an emotion. Anger's a signal that something's not right going on inside. We want to know what the message is, so anger is just a signal.
It says: it's okay to be angry, but don't sin, and don't let the sun go down on your anger.
So here's the deal; you can get angry. Now that's quite a release, because actually all of us get angry - you see a person that’s so sweet and nice - they'd never get angry. Don't you worry, they get angry! They've just learned habits of burying the anger – a smoldering, seething, rage inside.
It's just part of what happens, when something happens in our life, and we lose something. So it says: be angry, but don't sin with your anger.
Deal with your anger properly; and thirdly, here's the timeframe to deal with it: one day. Before the sun's gone down, deal with it. Sort it out, and get rid of it.
If you've had something that upset you yesterday, and you're still sitting on it today - you are now sinning.
It doesn't matter whether they were right or wrong; if you've held your anger overnight, you've kept your anger. You've laid there, just lying awake stewing about it, wake up stewing about this thing; and you know what you should have done was, before you went to bed, sorted it out.