Sermon Tone Analysis

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Anger
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Anger
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Prescription for Healing
 
September 17, 2006
 
/./ *1 Corinthians 13:5**; **John 21:15-22*
* *
 
It may have been King David’s lowest moment.
His son Absalom was leading a revolution against him.
Absalom was a charmer and had convinced many that David was too old and ineffective to lead.
When Absalom stormed the city with his troops, David and his army left Jerusalem and left the palace vacant.
David decided he would rather be humiliated in retreat than to be involved in a bloody civil war against his own son.
What a horrendous moment this must have been for Israel’s most celebrated king.
On the way out of Jerusalem, David must have thought, /It can’t get any worse than this/.
But it did.
A commoner by the name of Shimei taunted David as he fled the city.
Shimei stood on a hillside throwing clods of dirt and stones at the king and cursing him saying, “God is finally getting even with you for what you did to King Saul, you bloody traitor!”
One of David’s men snarled, “Let me go up and run that impudent coward through with a sword.”
David’s response was incredible.
He said, “No.
Don’t kill him.
Let him go.
Maybe I’m just getting what I deserve.”
If that were the end of the story, we would hail David as a great man—how magnanimous to forgive such an offense.
Well, David was a great man, but that’s not the end of the story.
The memory of that offense festered in David’s mind for years.
On his deathbed, about a decade later (see 1 Kings 2:8), David speaks his final words to his son, Solomon:
/“Remember you have with you Shimei, son of Gera, the Benjamite from Bahurim, who called down bitter curses on me the day I went to Mahanaim.
When he came down to meet me at the Jordan, I swore to him by the Lord: ‘I will not put you to death by the sword.’
But now, do not consider him innocent.
You are a man of wisdom; you will know what to do to him.
Bring his gray head down to the grave in blood.”/
Those were David’s final words.
Do they sound like loving, forgiving words?
We do the same thing.
Have you some deeply-buried resentment which you haven’t dealt with?
– against a former friend, a boss, a fellow Christrian?
 
*I.
The Problem of Resentment*
That story introduces us to the problem of resentment.
First Corinthians 13:5 says, /“Love does not keep a record of wrongs.”/
That is an accounting term.
It’s the term for entering an item into a ledger so that it will not be forgotten.
Paul is saying love does not keep a ledger of offenses.
Love does not build up indebtedness.
Love doesn’t harbor a grudge.
That’s exactly what many people do.
They nurse their wrath to keep it warm.
They brood over their wrongs until it’s impossible to forget them.
Or they hide these wrongs under a band-aid hoping they will go away.
And what happens to an unclean wound that is never aired or purified?
Like David leaving Jerusalem, most of us have had a Shimei, hurling insults and wounding us from the sidelines.
Some of you can remember childish insults said on the playground.
Maybe you were a good scholar, but you’ll never forget how the athletes made fun of your lack of athletic ability.
Or maybe you have a good personality, but you’ll never forget somebody making fun of your physical appearance.
It’s amazing how we can recall almost verbatim some things that were said to us as children.
They’re like video tapes replaying in our minds.
 Some of you were hurt by teachers or coaches or counselors in school years ago, and you have never forgotten.
Listen to this story from an unknown source: During my freshman year of Bible college, I worked on the maintenance crew at the school for 70 cents an hour.
I got released from that job because I took time off to play on the basketball team.
The supervisor said to me, “Bob, I’ve observed that young men who don’t do well on this crew usually don’t do very well in the ministry either.”
That was 30 years ago, but I remember him saying that.
Not that I hold a grudge against that judgmental old codger!
He couldn’t tell a preacher from a pagan to begin with!
We remember those things.
And worse, we harbor bitterness.
Hurts from the past can stay in our minds forever.
Instead of letting the wound gradually heal, leaving a slight scar, resentment keeps picking the scab, and usually with dirty fingernails pick!
Pick! Pick!
We keep a record of the wrong, and we keep underscoring it in the ledger.
Some of you encountered a Shimei in your own home.
Maybe you were wounded by an alcoholic father who terrified you or by an inconsistent mother.
There are husbands and wives who live under the same roof but barely speak because resentment has built up over the years.
Maybe you were cheated out of money or a position at work.
It’s easy to let resentment toward the offender build over a period of time.
We all know, resentment destroys relationships.
Some of you are so bitter over the Shimei in your life you won’t speak to him or have anything to do with him even though he is a close relative or you see him frequently.
You’re going to take your pride or your alienation to the grave with you.
It alienates you sometimes from close friends.
If you’ve ever had a relative go through a divorce, you know the tendency to divide into camps.
In order to be a friend to somebody, you must be an enemy of their enemies.
Has that happened to you?
Is it really necessary to take sides in a dispute?
No! Is it really necessary to place blame?
No! God says, love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you.
Proverbs says, don’t rejoice when your enemies fall.
That’s in chapter 24:17 And in the next chapter, we are reminded in the 21st verse to supply our enemies with food and drink when they are hungry or thirsty.
God says that will be like heaping  burning coals on their heads, bringing them to shame.
Heaping burning coals on their head means you are willing to give them fire from your hearth when theirs has gone out.
By returning good for evil, we are acknowledging God as the balancer of all accounts.
Check these verses out for yourself.
Then add them to Jesus’ injunction to forgive.
How many times?
Seventy times seven times!
In other words, don’t ever stop forgiving.
The last verse in Ephesians 4 is our injunction from Paul ….”forgive one another, just as God has forgiven you.
 Resentment alienates you from people because it destroys your personality.
I don’t know many great things that Buddha said, but he did say one thing that was good.
He said that holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal in our hands with the intention of throwing it at someone.
But we’re the ones who get burned, aren’t we? Often while we are burdened with hurt, our enemy has no idea how much we are aching inside.
Resentment is emotional suicide.
It’s self-inflicting because it will destroy you.
Maybe you withdraw into a shell and become very protective, planning never to allow yourself to get close to somebody again because it hurts.
You’re the loser.
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