Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Anger
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Introduction
Please open your Bible and turn with me to .
If you do not have a Bible, you can follow along by looking at the screens in front.
The passage will be on those screens.
Today we are going to be studying and learning from Jesus’ teaching on anger.
A topic I’m sure you need no instruction on, but as we make our way through the Sermon on the Mount, it is here nonetheless.
Of course, it’s false that you need no instruction on this.
We all do!
Everyone of us struggles with anger.
We get angry with each other, with our spouses, children, friends, and football team so it’s a very common experience for us.
What is God’s opinion about our anger?
Is he indifferent to it?
Because it’s so common, it can’t be too big of a deal, right?
I have a lot of other sins in my life right now, does God really care about my anger?
I hope that you will see that anger is important to God and as a disciple of Jesus, it should be important to us.
Living under his reign means that we take anger seriously.
Today, I hope you learn why.
Let’s begin by reading this passage.
Please read with me as I read -16.
Read .
Pray.
There are many ditches that we can fall into as we walk the Christian life.
Two of the more prevalent ditches are (1) the ditch of legalism and (2) the ditch of antinomianism.
The ditch of legalism says that we can earn God’s blessing and favor.
We can work and earn his grace.
As good Christians, we know to not let those words come out of our mouths but we subtly speak them with our hearts when thoughts like these go through our minds: “Why are things going so well for him and not for me?
I bet I read my Bible more than he does.”
This is legalism talking.
The other ditch is just as evil.
“Antinomianism” is just a fancy word for “lawlessness”.
It means “no law”.
Christians reveal lawlessness in our hearts when we think thoughts like, “I have all of the righteousness I need from Jesus Christ.
Worrying about and dealing with sin is irrelevant now.”
These thoughts lead us to not care about obedience or holiness.
We become lawless.
Of the many ditches that Christians need to avoid, these are two of the most prevalent.
We’re often fighting for a balance between legalism and antinomianism.
And balance is what we need to be striving toward.
Why are we talking about this now?
This is very important as we look at these verses because of what Jesus is building on here.
In verse 20 of Jesus said this:
That’s quite the challenge.
Scribes and Pharisees were observant of the Law.
They were thought of as righteous people.
So, it is possible to read this and think, “I need to be a little better than they were in order to be saved.”
However, what Jesus is talking about here is not a little more righteousness than Scribes and Pharisees but about a qualitatively different righteousness.
A righteousness that we cannot produce on our own but that must come from outside of us: from Jesus.
For the unbeliever: If you are here and do not consider yourself a Christian.
First, we are very glad that you are here.
There are a lot of wrong things taught about Christianity.
One of them is that a person has to be “good” in order to call herself a Christian.
This is wrong.
In fact, Christ did not come for good people but for bad people, which is good news for me.
If you look around this room and think, “I see a lot of scribes and pharisees around me.”
We want you to know that it’s not true.
We are broken and sinful people, and this is exactly who Jesus came to die for.
But by trusting in Him we have received His righteousness, which makes us acceptable to God.
But as we rejoice in this it can be easy for us to slide into the ditch of antinomianism.
We can think that since we have Jesus’ righteousness in our account, we don’t need anything else.
Jesus teaching is contrary to that, however.
When Jesus says that your righteousness must exceed the scribes and pharisees, he is not saying that you need to be a little better than them.
He is saying you need an entirely different righteousness, one that can only come from him.
He is also not saying that obedience does not matter.
The righteousness that he gives us in a transforming righteousness, that makes us different from the inside-out.
The salvation that we receive makes us different than the pharisees, who Jesus said were like whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside but full of dead bones inside.
Instead, we are made clean from the inside and begin to live truly holy lives from the inside-out.
What follows in Jesus’ teaching is what living righteously looks like.
Throughout the sermon on the mount we are learning what living like a true disciple looks like.
And Jesus begins with anger.
These verses are the first of 6 times that Jesus will say, “You have heard…but I say to you.”
Not only will Jesus teach us about anger but also about lust, divorce, swearing, revenge, and love.
Each time Jesus will say, “You have heard that it was said” and then say, “But I say to you.”
And when Jesus says this, we need to keep in mind what I said just a second ago, what Jesus is teaching us here is about an entirely different kind of righteousness.
He is not simply correcting misinterpretations of the law, misconceptions, or even just the true meaning of the law.
Jesus is teaching us here, through these 6 contrasts, about an entirely different righteousness that will identify his people.
As he teaches us about anger, Jesus begins by teaching us about anger and then giving us two practical (and potentially confusing) examples of anger to illustrate what he means and how this righteousness should be practiced.
So our sermon will have two parts, Jesus’ Teaching and Practical Illustrations.
We’ll begin with Jesus’ Teaching.
We Must Deal With Anger In Our Own Hearts
In verse 21 Jesus begins by saying,
Matthew 5:21
Clearly, Jesus is making reference here to the law of the OT.
Specifically, Jesus is pointing us back to the Ten Commandments.
Commandment number 6 tells us, “You shall not murder.”
And then the book of Deuteronomy goes on to tell us legal proceedings that take place when someone is guilty of murder, which Jesus is also referencing in verse 21.
I assume everyone in the crowd knew about this, both the command and the judgment that came when someone broke the command.
Though I said it before, it bears repeating again, what Jesus is doing here by offering this contrast between teaching that they had heard about the law and what he was about to say is showing us a higher righteousness.
He is giving his people a higher standard.
He is not abolishing the law, but instead he is showing that He can as the law’s fulfillment.
He was it’s goal and is the perfect revelation of the law.
Now, he is giving to his people a deeper, higher standard to live by.
This week in our Bible reading we read .
This chapter speaks to what we learned about Jesus last week and are seeing again this week:
Jesus is “the exact imprint” of God’s nature.
He perfectly and completely reveals to us what God is like.
He is God!
And through his teaching, he is showing us how his coming and revelation are showing us a higher righteousness in himself.
The OT was pointing us to Jesus and now Jesus is teaching us about an entirely different kind of righteousness.
And what does he say?
“Whoever is angry with his brother, whoever insults his brother, and whoever says ‘You fool’ will be judged.”
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