Anger

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So we're in a sixth in this series called Emotional Jesus. And you might go like, why are we talking about this? A lot of churches do something on emotions, but often they talk about emotions in such a way that you're supposed to, like, tamp them down, as if we're supposed to be rational beings. Well, nobody is. Even those people who say they're not that emotional, well, they're still running the show underneath. We don't make decisions based on logic too often. We use our logic to rationalize why we made a decision based on our desires and emotions. That's the way we are. But the reality is, too, God made us emotional. He made us with these emotions. And He made us in His image. So part of the image of God, how we reflect God, is especially with the emotions of love, with joy, et cetera. So now, the Bible would also say that since the fall in the garden in Genesis chapter 3, to the present, there's only been one person fully human. And that is Jesus. We've all been a little less than. We're kind of broken and a little messed up. So our emotions are out of sorts. I don't love the Lord, my God, with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and I don't love my neighbor as myself. So that shows you right there, something's out of whack here. So to find out what the emotions can be and will be one day for us is to look at Jesus. By the way, do you know you connect with other people through your emotions? Whether it's joy or sadness, hope or loss, agony, ecstasy, whatever it is, we make most of the time, the most important memories you've ever had have an emotion connected to them. And you connect through people through emotions. Emotions are everything, and emotions are involved with them. I do not connect to people through logic, okay? Reasoning is not the way we connect to people. It's the emotions behind the reasoning. So there's no such thing as well as just a logical person. Nobody's Spock. Everybody's always emotional in one form or another, whether you realize it or not. And what we've done in this series so far, this is week six. We looked, first of all, at the most important, I think, kind of a core emotion for God himself, as we see throughout the study of Israel, the core emotion of compassion. How that is the key to understanding who God is and what God is about. And from God's compassion, his connectedness to you and me, his concern over us out of his compassion, we find all the other emotions kind of as derivative, that he would look at us with joy when one sinner repents. Or he looks at us with surprise when he finds faith in a place that he didn't expect. We looked at that. Or grief over his friend's Lazarus death and the sadness that we saw in both Mary and Martha and the other people. And Jesus grieved with us. And even the emotion last week of loneliness, for Jesus, it might be a little different. He always was in communion with his father until the cross. But at the same time, he was rejected and misunderstood and not cared about by his hometown, his home family, from what we see in the scriptures. They thought he was out of his mind and wanted to take him home. So we found all that. Today, we're probably dealing with the most difficult emotion of all, at least for me to handle, or to understand, and that is anger. And you might go like, ooh, I don't like that. Well, it's not that God gets angry easily at all, okay? Psalm 103, by the way, says it this way, the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That is, in one form or another, from we saw in Numbers all the way through the Old Testament, that's the most repeated Old Testament passage. And it's the core to understanding who our God is. He is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. So did Jesus get angry? Yes. We already saw the one instance. In John 11, when he's grieving and he weeps over Lazarus, it also has that word in that text that some people find troubling, but it's the word that he was troubled or he was upset. And the word has that feeling of anger, and he was not angry with Martha or Mary. He was angry at death and the chaotic destruction of what would happen. And that movement, that anger, moved him to call Lazarus out of the tomb, but as we said in that message, it also moved Jesus to enter that tomb just a few weeks later. Is that interesting? In order to call Lazarus out, Jesus would enter death himself. That's how we see Jesus' anger, if you want to say it, work. Today, we're going to look at two instances. Very rarely do you see Jesus get angry, but we have two instances where it comes up. And we're going to see the difference between how Jesus gets angry and how we do. Boy, big difference. So we're going to look first of all at an instance where it doesn't say he was angry, but his actions display anger. And then i...