Breaking the Chains: Conquering Resentment with Grace . Ephesians 4:11 - 5:2

Be at enmity, be enemies with somebody, be at enmity, but be at enmity with the devil and not with a member of your own. For this purpose, it is that God has armed us with anger, not that we should thrust the sword against our own bodies, not that we should attack our brother who is part of us, but so that we should baptize the whole blade in the devil's breast. So instead of the sword, which is just its imagery of force and attacking, that we should make that attack towards the devil and be nasty, like plunge it the whole way in and really hurt the devil.

Bury it all the way to the hilt and leave it in there and actually pull it back out and do it some more. So there's a way to vent that when we face that struggle. It's like, "What do I do? This makes me mad. It wasn't right. He was so mean. That wasn't fair." There's something to do with those feelings. And that's to realize I'm in a tight spot here and things are going to go really bad if I don't do something.

And the thing to do is start attacking those attitudes. Well, how do you do that?

So the last message I preached, the title was, "Becoming Part of Each Other in the Same Body." But we spent the whole time talking about what's wrong with us naturally, what's wrong with the Gentiles, the people who are still living in bondage to the dark powers, and how we learned from Jesus to put off that and put on the new man. And we never got to the end of it. So this time, that's all we're going to talk about is the end of it and part of some very practical instructions about how to work together and become part of a body that is a temple that demonstrates to everyone God's wisdom and goodness that He created humans with in the beginning.

So just a little quick review. The book's purpose is to open our eyes to God's secret purpose, which is to demonstrate His manifold, His many-forked, all-covering everything, His wisdom to every being through us, His church. And that happens by reuniting everything together in following King Jesus.

And the book has two distinct sections. The first part is drawing us into the mystery and the plan that God has now opened. It's already waiting for us to be involved in. It has been open and many people have already involved themselves in it and been part of demonstrating God's goodness to the world and trying to get us excited and enthused and help us realize the privilege that we have. And then the last part of the book is some very simple practical directions about how to start making that happen.

And we've been looking at the two pictures that it gives of what God wants us to become together as a group. One is a temple. This is the artist's rendering of the temple of Diana or Artemis in Ephesus. We read the story about how they were all excited about, well, the silversmiths were excited about the money they could make off of the tourism, but they thought she was great. And her temple demonstrated that. People looked at it and they got an impression and they went there and they experienced what she was about and joined in the activity about the things that were important to her. And the other one is a body. All the different parts working together to make life happen and all the things that a healthy human body can do and experience.

So last time, we started the chapter by looking at the Gentiles who are the walking dead. They're people who are walking in futility of their mind. Their understanding is darkened. They're aliens from the life of God because of ignorance. They're blind in their hearts. They're past feeling. They're desensitized. And so they've given themselves over to ungodly lusts. And they do all kinds of nasty, horrible things with greediness because they can't ever get enough of what they want.

But instead, we learn from Jesus, the true human, a different way of life and the way of life that is truth or it's what's real. It never stops. It never has to be corrected. And so we learn from Him to put off those old behaviors and to put on the new man. And the new man is renewed in the spirit of our minds, a new creation that is created after God's true righteousness and holiness. So we're going to read verses 11 through chapter 5, verse 2. Chapter divisions are helpful for finding things. If we just say, "Go in Psalms in that one spot where it reads this and this," that would be pretty hard. Those actually are divided up into groups.

That's not a good illustration. If you said in the book of Matthew, "So go there, find the place where Jesus told the parables about the kingdom." How are you going to find that? You're going to flip the whole way through and, "Okay, now we're getting there." So chapters are helpful, but sometimes they create a separation that is actually unhelpful, especially the epistles, I think, are that way because the epistles were letters written and they weren't some sort of a treatise that was laid out like that in chapters necessarily. So I'm going to read on into chapter 5 just a little bit, and I think there's a good purpose for that. You'll see the text turn blue when we get to the spot that we will actually be working with today.

But I think it's important to remind ourselves of the context. "And He," that's Jesus, "himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a perfect man to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but speaking the truth in love may grow up in all things unto Him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body joined and knit together by what every joint supplies according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.

This, I say therefore, and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who being past feeling have given themselves over to lewdness to work all uncleanness with greediness. But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning your former conduct, the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man, which was created according to God in true righteousness and holiness.

Therefore, or because of that, putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.

Let him who stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good that he may have something to give him who has need. Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.

And be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore, be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma." Let's pray.

Father, thank you for the words of Jesus that Paul brings to us in the book of Ephesians. Thank you that you've preserved these things and that through Jesus we can learn the way of life and we can bring wholeness to the world and to ourselves and be part of reclaiming and again experiencing the goodness that you created in the beginning. Help us, Lord, as I speak and as we listen, that our minds could be opened to what you have for us and the ways in which you want us to change. In Jesus' name, amen.

So we have the two pictures of what God wants us to become: a temple and a body.

In Sunday school, we sing a song about building a temple and it has hand motions. And it is a story about what character in the Bible.

Any of the children who go to Sunday school? We sing the song about building up the temple. And what story in the Bible is that about? Nehemiah. And Nehemiah was building a literal temple like this. So let's sing the song. Ready? All the children ready to go and all the grown-up children with hand motions? Ready? Building up the temple, building up the temple, building up the temple of the Lord. Say, "Brother, won't you help me? Sister, won't you help me?" Building up the temple of the Lord. Building up the temple, building up the temple, building up the temple of the Lord.

Say, "Brother, won't you help me? Sister, won't you help me?" Building up the temple of the Lord.

So like often happens when we're little, when I was younger and we moved to the Mennonite churches and we learned that song, I was probably eight or nine years old. And we sang a song about how do we build up the temple? How do you do that?

And how do we help each other building? What temple are we building? And sometimes as I grew up, I kind of thought maybe it was kind of like building the church house. So when we fixed the roof, we're building the temple and different things like that. So this story is about Nehemiah trying to rebuild Solomon's temple, which was torn down because people quit going there and quit obeying God, and so God's presence left them. And the people all worked together to help rebuild the house of the Lord. But the problem is it got torn down again and again.

And God said, "Really, I didn't really need a house to live in. What I wanted was people to live among." So when we talk about building up the temple, we're not talking about building a building like Solomon's temple or like these.

That's not what God wants. And that's not what our goal and our effort is when we sing that song today. The temple that God wants is this. He wants people that he can live in and through. And that when the way we act and the way we live together, people can see God. So children, today we are going to look in the message. We are going to learn some very simple practical ways. Practical means something you can practice.

Of ways that we and you all can learn already to begin to build a temple, to build a group of people, to relate to each other in ways that makes us a good group of people and a people that please God and are like him.

So as we look at this passage, again, at the beginning, there's a therefore. And when there's a therefore, it's important because it links us back and says because of what we've been talking about before. So because of how awful the Gentiles are and how damaged and ruined and ignorant and helpless they are, and because of Jesus, the true human who shows us the way to life, the true way to live, and that there's important things we need to do to put off and put on new ways of thinking and behavior so that we can be renewed. Because of that, here are some very simple and practical directions to start changing our behavior and changing our thinking.

The first one he starts with is putting away lying. I'm sure that none of us has a problem with lying.

I did when I was a teenager and younger.

But I thought about this and Paul talking to a church of grown-up people, converted Gentiles, why does he need to tell them, "Stop lying to each other"?

And maybe people who were not trained by Christian parents would have more of a trouble with breaking those kind of habits. But this goes very subtle. So I was thinking about this and experiences I have had with people who were lying in Mennonite churches.

Or I'm pretty sure they were lying or they at least weren't being straightforward about things. And it's usually because I've done something wrong and I don't want to take responsibility for it. So I went and said this and this and this about that person. Then when somebody comes and says, "Hey, the way you said that about this person wasn't right." "Well, I didn't really" "Well, I don't remember saying that." Or, "I don't think I said it quite that way." And we start, we don't just say the exact opposite of the truth, but we start twisting it or trying to change the subject or evade it. We're not straightforward.

And I think that's probably one of the quickest ways that we run into this in our churches. Hopefully, nobody's lying.

John Chrysostom, in starting talking about this, he says he deals with falsehoods. So that's the way he understood it when he read Greek and he grew up reading and speaking Greek, that this is talking about falseness. And he says right away, he clarifies, he says, "He's not talking about falseness like idols because the idols are not true gods.

There's demons behind them that want us to believe and practice things." But the idols, he's not talking about that kind of falseness, but he's talking about the kind of falseness where somebody communicates to the other something that's not real, it's not true.

So when we broaden it out like that, get rid of falseness and be genuine with each other. I think that's one of the ways that we can tend to do that is we kind of just try not to go there or we kind of try to just position things where we don't look quite so bad or we don't have to face something that we've done. We give a false impression.

And I think that's one thing that's a blessing to us in our relationships at church with things like discipleship is it's opportunities to be open and talk about the things in our life that are more private that you can't necessarily talk to everybody at church about, but it gives opportunities to be. There's brothers and sisters who do know us very well at a very deep level and know those things going on in our lives. And so it makes it easier to be real about our lives, less likely for us to just come to church Sunday morning and say hi and look good and go home and be struggling with things. We still can choose that, but it's another thing that can be a help to us to have a place to be real about the deep things in our lives and to change them.

He does something interesting here. Then he says, "Don't just say don't lie and don't do this and don't do this and don't do this." But he starts telling us some other things to think about. He says, "Put away lying and speak the truth because you're members of each other. You're part of each other." Whether you want to use the building illustration and one part's holding up the other or protecting the other one or like the roof does, or if you start taking away something that the other part should have by keeping the truth back or by telling it something false, then it's not going to be able to do its part and the whole thing is going to come apart in the body.

John Chrysostom has some interesting things to say about this. He says, "Notice how he," that's Paul, "is always bringing up the analogy of the body to show how shameful and wrong their actions are." This is modernized to make it easier to follow. "Let not the eye lie to the foot or the foot to the eye," he says. For example, if there is a deep pit and it is concealed by having some reeds, some grass, or some brush laid over top so that you can't see it, and yet it shall by its appearance give to the eye the expectation of solid ground. It looks just like solid ground. So when you're walking across, your eye can't tell is it real or not.

Well, will not the eye use the foot and discover whether it yields and is hollow underneath? So that's what you do when you're not sure if it's good. Whether it's a loose board or ice, you go out and you try it with your foot, right? And yeah, it's good because my eye can't tell. So it uses the foot.

Will the foot tell a lie and not report the truth as it is?

Well, what good would that do? If the foot doesn't tell the eye, "This isn't good. Don't go there." What's going to happen to the foot? When it falls in the hole, probably which part is going to get hurt?

Most likely the foot's going to get hurt when it falls, right? So it's hurting itself.

And what again, another illustration. If the eye were to spy a serpent or a wild beast, will it lie to the foot? Will it not at once inform it? And so the foot does inform by the eye, refrains from going on. So if the eye sees something dangerous, it's going to tell the foot, "Stop. Don't go there." It's not just going to sit there and say, "I'll let the foot go on." And then all of them are going to get gobbled up or get bit by the snake.

Here's another illustration. And what about when neither the foot nor the eye will know how to tell what's good or bad? But they all have to depend on the smelling. Like for example, whether a drug is deadly or not. If something is good to eat, what do you do when you want to know if meat is bad? You can't really tell by looking at it. Your foot's not going to help you with it. Your hand even isn't going to help you smell it, right?

And the nose isn't going to lie to you and to your mouth and say, "Ah, it's fine. Go ahead and eat it." It's going to tell the truth. And they all work together so that they can all help each other because sometimes one can do better than the other. And so they all help each other so that the body stays healthy.

And why not? Because it will be destroying itself also. But it tells the truth and not withholding from the other members what it knows. Here's another example. Sorry about my question, Mark. I didn't change the punctuation after I changed the sentence. Here's another example. Will the tongue lie to the stomach? Does it not when a thing is bitter, reject it? And if it is sweet, pass it on to the stomach? So if you're eating something and it's like, "Eh, something's wrong with this," your tongue doesn't just say, "Ah, just don't tell them about that. Just shovel it on down through there. I don't feel like it was." No, it helps the rest of the body out.

And that's the way we should do. We should help the rest of the body out by passing on to each other what's real. That's one of my favorite ways to think about truth. It's just what's real. And whenever we're not telling the truth, we're telling something that's not real. And when things aren't real, eventually you have to face what is real. And the sooner we do that, the better.

I think I'm going to keep going here. So he says, "Where therefore, putting away lying, let each of you speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." So there's something that he's doing here that I missed for a long time in my Christian life. Most of the time, a lot of people anyways, when they think about being a Christian, they think about all the things you don't do, right? You don't do this and you don't smoke and you don't drink and you don't be immoral and you don't have fun. Right? They think, "All this is just all these things I can't do, all these things and I better not." And they feel trapped.

But God also gives us do's. And this passage is just a really good example. They're real close together, so it's easy to practice this. And then not only does he tell us, "Don't lie," instead he says, "Do speak truth." And then he tells us a new way of thinking. So instead of thinking about you and how it's going to affect you, think about how you're going to affect the rest of the body.

I am calling this today the Tootle Principle.

How many of you read this book?

Okay, very good. So when I was thinking, whenever I think about this, there's a picture from this book that comes to my mind and you will get to see it here in a little bit. So Tootle is a train and he wants to grow up to be a big train, a fast train who can take lots of people to lots of places and can pull the dinner without spilling the soup.

And so he has to go to school with the other little trains and learn all the important things that trains have to learn, like I forget what they were. They had some interesting ones about tooting and how to go through tunnels. But the most important was to stay on the tracks no matter what. Because if a train gets off the track, it's all over, right? The train can't go anywhere and there's a big wreck and everything on the train turns into a big mess. So that was the most important rule. Well, the problem is Tootle faced some temptations and he got into this habit of liking to go off the tracks and run around in the field.

And he thought it was fun. But Tootle wasn't turning into a good train. He was going to wreck himself and he was definitely not going to pull the dinner without spilling the soup. And he was never going to get to his destination and all the people were going to have a big problem because of it.

So his teacher thought of a plan because they had been taught to stop when there's a red flag. So he got a bunch of people and when Tootle went out in the meadow one day, this is what it looked like. There's red flags all over the place. And he's like, "Where can I go? I can't do anything because there's just red flags everywhere I go. I have to stop."

And suddenly he looked up and there on the railroad tracks was his instructor waving a big green flag. And Tootle went over and he got back on the tracks and all the people cheered for him. And Tootle learned that lesson very well that the most important thing is to stay on the tracks and not to think about all the stuff that he shouldn't do. And that's how he learned to be a good locomotive and to be the fastest train to the city and get the people there on time and to pull the dinner without spilling the soup.

So as you look at God's word and you read the don'ts, this is really, really important. There's simply a danger sign to turn you around. God doesn't want us to sit around not being able to do things. And he's not here to ruin our lives. He's actually here to teach us the best way to live. And the turn around and the wrong way signs, the do not enter signs that God has in his word are to turn us around from a way that's going to lead us to destruction. And whenever God puts a stop sign or a do not enter sign or a wrong way sign in the Bible when he tells us, "Don't do this or this is bad," it's because there's a good way that he wants us to live.

So whenever you see the don'ts, always look for the do. And that will give you something to move forward into, something to put your heart and your focus into. It will be work, but it also will be very good. And if you can learn that when you're young, whenever there's a don't, don't hit your brother. Instead, do something kind to him. Share with him. Pat him on the shoulder, but do something good. And as you become Christians and you give your lives to God, do it because you want to pursue the do's that God gives us as a gift, as the way to real life.

So as we look at these things, instead of a guilt complex and thinking, hearing in them, "You better walk straight or else," instead think about it this way that these passages and these teachings are telling us we make a tremendous difference. We have the potential to be an incredible blessing to the world around us and to God's kingdom. Or we have the ability to make big problems.

So he says, "Putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," because we need to think about this that we're part of each other. And so that's why I've followed that theme through all the rest of these things. It's building on that concept that our purpose is to work together to be a demonstration of God's goodness in the way people are supposed to live. And so then when we look at different of these things, stealing and speaking evil and all those things, they don't make sense. And we realize, "Wow, I'm actually hurting myself along with everybody else."

So the next part says, "Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath nor give place to the devil."

John Chrysostom says there's actually a pattern to this. So he first says, "Don't lie." But if someone lies towards you, that's not actually going to make you upset, right? And so Paul's giving you a cure to take care of things that could happen out of this. He's trying to help us dig a little deeper and work on some other things so that we can be part of being a blessing to the body and we can demonstrate God's incredible goodness.

Be angry and do not sin. I want to talk a little bit about anger first. Anger is a defense mechanism. So it's something that we do. We don't really think about it, but it's something that naturally your body does to defend, to protect itself. Just like if somebody comes at your eye with their finger, you can't help it. It's going to poke your eye. It's something you don't really think about, but it's a natural lid's already off.

It's a natural response to protect yourself. It's triggered by a perceived sense of injustice. That wasn't fair. That wasn't right. Naturally, we tend to something rise up and we get upset about it. Now, notice it's underlined. It says a perceived sense of injustice. That's really important. Just because we look at something and say, "That's not fair," doesn't mean that it wasn't fair. And often, especially towards ourselves, we can get upset about things because we feel like somebody treated us wrongly and it wasn't.

Or we're just being too touchy about it or there's something else. There's lots of things that can affect that. So we need to really be careful about how much we say, "My anger was a response to something wasn't done right." Often that's our sense of justice is selfish and it's also twisted.

It's kind of an antibody release mode. So your body, your physical body, when you get a germ inside, it has these little soldiers that it sends out in the blood and it attacks these. The bad guys that are getting into you. And anger is kind of that way. It's kind of releasing soldiers. And so usually you respond in some way, some sort of a rrrrr, or some way you fight back or push or give somebody a look to let them know they better back off because you're not going to be walked over.

One thing that has just come to my attention is how much this shows up is just being defensive. Just getting offended about things and feeling like I got to if somebody says something about me that I think is putting me in a bad light, that I got to straighten it out.

That's kind of a root of this that I'm becoming aware of in my own life. But that's what anger is. It's where we're trying to defend ourselves and we're pushing back and we start attacking the other person. The problem is if we're members in the same body and we start attacking another person in whatever small way it is, we're actually attacking ourselves and we're hurting the whole body.

If you're in whatever way, if you're last night, I got up and I was coming back into the bedroom and I kicked my work boots with my little, just my little toe hit it. And you know what? I think a lot about that little toe. Actually, it was Friday night. I've been thinking a lot about that toe the last couple of days.

That toe got hurt and it's letting the rest of my body know that that wasn't okay and it needs some help. And I'm not saying that was wrong. And there's ways in which we need to cry out when there are things that happen. We need help. We need to cry out to the body for help. But we don't want to do things in revenge. This book has been a big help to me. It's by John Coblins' Putting Off Anger. Deals a lot with anger and bitterness. We'll talk about that a little bit later.

It's been a big help to me. I highly recommend reading it if you struggle at all with anger, which I'm sure none of us do. Or if you're around somebody who is an angry and a bitter person, it can help you understand some of what gets you to that point and why the person's the way they are and maybe some things to deal with it, whether it's in your own life or with working with someone else, which that's actually very minimal.

A spark of anger is lit. Something happens and you have that reaction of and if we don't take care of that, a fire burns and we get this pile of coals that's called wrath. It's this smoldering of heat that holds a grudge. And a root of bitterness grows out of it then. And we begin to look at the other person. Everything we do gets interpreted. Just like when you love somebody, you can overlook faults and everything gets interpreted in light of that you love the person. You're convinced the person loves you.

And the same happens in reverse then. When you start getting this idea, somebody does something to you, you get a little upset about it. You don't get over it. You let that smolder and it builds this burning, smoldering fire inside that then turns into a everything in life. And you can't enjoy anything, especially about that person, because everything you see, you're determined that they're against you. And there's horrible things that come with that. Look at the life of King Saul if you want a classic example. That's actually the example that John Coblins uses in the book is Saul. And he's throwing javelin at his best servant.

Things like that. And that road starts by allowing anger to take root in our lives.

So he tells us something to do about that. He says, "Be angry and don't sin." He says, "Don't let the sun go down on your wrath nor give place to the devil." So I'm just going to read some things that John Chrysostom says about this because I think they're well said. I'm going to paraphrase as we're reading just to make it make more sense because I didn't have time to go through and modernize the English here.

This then is what Paul is doing. He has said, "Lie not, yet if ever lying should produce anger," he goes on again to cure this also. We had that on a previous slide. Because what's he saying? "Be angry and don't sin." It would be good indeed never to be angry. Yet if ever anyone should fall into passion or a feeling of anger, let him not fall into it to so great of a degree. So let him not get very angry. Let's keep it limited and get over it.

And that's why he says, "Don't let the sun go down upon your wrath." Would you have your fill of anger? So if you are weak and somebody does something and you respond with anger, keep it short. Get over it quick.

Fill of anger. One hour or two or three is enough for you. But he's begging us, "Don't let the sun depart. Don't let it go into the night in the next day."

One hour or two or three is enough for you. Let not the sun depart and leave you both at enmity. It was God's goodness that he rose, the sun rose. And don't let him, the sun, the sun in the sky, don't let him depart having shown on unworthy men, men who are holding grudges and anger and destroying the health of the body.

For if the Lord, out of his great goodness, sent the sun and has himself forgiven you your sins, and yet you forgive not your neighbor, look how great evil this is.

And there is yet another besides this. The blessed Paul dreads the night. Lest overtaking in solitude him that was wrong. So the Apostle Paul really feels like this is really a bad thing if you wait until the night because then the night comes and you're alone with this thing that somebody wronged you and it's hanging in your mind. And then still burning with anger, it should kindle up a fire.

For as long as there are many things in the daytime to banish it, you are free to indulge it. So you can not really deal with your anger during the day because there's other stuff and it'll kind of distract you. And not saying that that's good, but it doesn't get as bad as if you let it sit overnight.

For should the night overtake it, the morrow will not avail to extinguish the further evil which will have been collected in the night. So the next day, you're not going to be able to just get over it. It's not just going to go out. It's going to keep on burning. All the early church fathers that talk about this passage talk about the importance of that, of not letting some sort of grudge or anger or being upset, some sort of something that's a split, something that divides your relationship with somebody, not letting that go into the next day, but resolving it before the day is over.

And I think that's very right. I'm going to skip the next part. He talks a little bit about that analogy with the weather, how in the same way at nighttime, more moisture comes in. It might have been a little cloud during the day, but then it builds into a big cloud overnight then, and then there's a big storm out of it. And the same thing happens with anger.

So it's very important to take care of those things. And later on in the passage, we're going to look at some more things to do to help us overcome those things. And then he says, "Nor give place to the devil."

So when we allow anger to sit in ourselves, when we allow that bad feeling or that defensiveness towards somebody, the feeling that that person doesn't have my good in mind and he's trying to hurt me, we are giving the devil a spot.

Actually, probably it's a little more like we are working for him. Instead of building the body or the temple and growing together and being knit together closer, we're starting to chip away at that stuff. And we're letting things get in that are going to grow and split us apart.

When we allow anger to flare up, we begin a process that does Satan's work of destruction in ourselves as a member and then attacks and divides the body. The enemy in those situations is not what my brother did to me that was offensive to me. Offensive just means in a fight or in a football game, an offensive move is where you push back the enemy. A defensive move is where you try to hold them back. And an offensive move is where you lunge toward them and you push them back. So if someone is offended, somebody is offending them and they are pushed back. It's a way that's been helpful to me to think about that.

So the enemy is not what my brother did that pushed me back, but it's the fact that I think he is the problem. That's what I need to fight. So it's not him. It's that I think he's the problem. The real problem is my anger and my resentment and my grudge that I'm holding. That is what's going to destroy the body.

Here's another quote from John Chrysostom that is very good about this. So we get in these situations where somebody does something and it's some feelings. It hurt. It wasn't kind. It wasn't right. Maybe the guy meant it. Maybe he didn't. But it didn't feel good. And there's that feeling of injustice. And let's just say, for example, this time, maybe it is right. It was unjust. It wasn't fair. It wasn't kind. It was wrong what the person did. Now, if I let that grow in me, that's going to split us apart. It's not going to help fix it. And it's going to make lots of problems. It's going to make me view everything he does now as he's an enemy.

So there's a problem. There's feelings I have. And there's a way to channel that. And he says here, "If you want to be revengeful and be at enmity, be enemies with somebody, be at enmity, but be at enmity with the devil and not with a member of your own. For this purpose it is that God has armed us with anger, not that we should thrust the sword against our own bodies, not that we should attack our brother who is part of us, but so that we should baptize the whole blade in the devil's breast." So instead of the sword, which is just its imagery of force and attacking, that we should make that attack towards the devil and plunge it the whole way in and really hurt the devil.

Bury it all the way to the hilt and leave it in there and actually pull it back out and do it some more. So there's a way to vent that when we face that struggle. It's like, "What do I do? This makes me mad. It wasn't right. He was so mean. That wasn't fair." There's something to do with those feelings. And that's to realize I'm in a tight spot here and things are going to go really bad if I don't do something.

And the thing to do is start attacking those attitudes. Well, how do you do that?

I think I'm at the right spot. I might not be. Yeah, here we go. So I'm going to tell you something that I learned. And it's not about fizz. When I was teaching school, I had some students, a few of them that really made life hard sometimes.

For those of you who work at Breakfast Trailer, it wasn't David.

There was one day, there's one group of them, just I was full frustrated with them. I felt like doing some very unkind things. Well, a teacher can't do that. Okay, a teacher can't grab people by the shoulders and shake them or knock their heads together and things like that. That's not appropriate. But somehow you can't. And I just realized somehow I've got to love these guys or else things are just not going to work. And I'm thinking, "So how?

You can't just when I'm not loving somebody and I'm really frustrated with them, how do you spin that around?" And I'm not sure where, but I remember that time was when I learned that love is something you do to people.

So I've got to do something to these guys to show my love and to be loving. This just isn't going to work because there are no feelings in here right now. Not very much. Beautiful feelings, but not. And so how do you love 15, 16-year-old boys? Well, they love Mountain Dew. That's their love language. Get them a Mountain Dew and that's like, "Wow, that made their day." Well, a lot of these guys had jobs where they milked cows and things in the evening after school. So I went down the sheets and I bought a bunch of 44-ounce Mountain Dews and I went around and gave them all Mountain Dews. And it was priceless. I remember the one guy, he was in the skid loader and I kind of had to go find him.

And he sees me come. And he's like, "Oh, boy, here it is." And teachers walking towards him. He pulls up there and flips up the thing and just looks at me. I said, "Hey, you want a Mountain Dew?" And he's like, "Yeah, sure." And he took it and he looks at me. He said, and I said, "Okay, well, have a good day." And he's like, "That's all?" I said, "Yeah, that's all." And he just looked at me like, "That was so fun.

Sweet revenge."

Loving your brother is something you do to him. And so when there's something that happens like that, where somebody, whether it's you think it's just perceived on your part, whether really somebody does do something that's not nice, you have the choice. We have the choice. I have the choice to give the devil a spot in my life and in our brotherhood and start chipping away and making division. Or I can turn, I can attack the devil. And you do that by doing something loving and breaking the devil's heart. That's the best way to do it. One of the best ways to do it. Or say something good about them, begin to compliment that person. I had an opportunity to do that this week.

It was a perceived wrong. It wasn't. And maybe we talk about that later when we get to the way we talk.

So moving on. Let him that stole steal no longer, but rather let him labor, working with his hands what is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need.

So I want to practice the tutel principle on this. So whenever there's a don't, there's always a do. Sometimes in the Bible, we don't find them side by side. It's as we read the whole thing, we find out that there's don't here, but then there's do's over here. And then there's a new way of thinking that we're taught, of how to look at ourselves and the people around us so that we begin to love the do. It's something that we do out of a heart of goodwill because we realize we're building a temple. We're making a healthy body.

So let's see if we can do it on this passage. What's the don't in this passage?

Don't steal. Okay. So the don't is let him that stole, steal no longer. What's the do? Somebody who's under 21.

You can put it in your own English.

Okay, he's not supposed to steal any longer. Instead, what's he supposed to do?

Okay, he's supposed to work. Work with his hands. And he's supposed to work something good, not work gambling or something like that. And what is the new way of thinking? It's so that he can start giving to people. So instead of thinking, "Oh, I can have my stuff and be lazy," he has a new way of thinking. He's thinking, "I want to work so that I can give."