Ephesians, 4:25-29

Today we get to start Ephesians 4, 25 through 29, which is entitled, Enter the Imperatives. All you Bruce Lee fans out there. Okay, Ephesians 4, 25 through 29. Who would like to read our verses for today? You can read them off the handout, out of your own personal Bible, whatever works for you.

Therefore each of you must put up all falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor. For we are all members of one body. In your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who Who remembers what we talked about last week, or what Jeremy talked about last week, or what we all talked about last week?

We remember everybody did. Isn't that what you asked? Do you remember hearing? We remember that he talked, yes? If you look back, what was the pith of the passage before it? is that follow from Christ at work in us. There we go. Yeah, we're getting into the logical imperatives that follow. And has anybody done? Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you raised a hand. Just a reposition. Excellent. OK, well, let's look back at verses 20. Let's start at 20 and go through 24, shall we? Layton, do you have that pulled up?

But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard him and have been taught in him, just as truth is in Jesus. That in reference to your former manner of life you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lust of the deceit, and may you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

Awesome. So, those verses, right, and Jeremy made a great point, he said, those verses, if we give those verses as a tool for evaluating our church, it suggests that we should evaluate our church by the teaching of position, unconditional truth, or positional truth, right? That was kind of one of Jeremy's major points at the end, and I thought it was a good one. That we can If the people in the body understand their position, then we're probably going in a good direction. We're probably heading in a good way. And it's out of this talking about positional truth that he starts giving imperatives. Tommy used the term logical imperatives, which is fantastic. So, just briefly, what are these imperatives not? Law.

In fact, it's amazing how much that term is utilized through these scriptures here. I think a lot of Christians take that very lightly as to what they speak and say. And you look at these things and there isn't any hint of that in there. It's uncanny, isn't it, how much the tongue is...

I have the treasury of scripture knowledge, which is one of the tools that I use. It just gives you links to Bible verses that are related. for different passages, and when it got to this, don't speak evil, or don't, yeah, watch your mouth. It, boy, it had more than a few. Usually it's two, three, four verses that it'll link you to, and it had seven or eight to ten.

And I'm sure it wasn't exhaustive. In fact, I know it wasn't exhaustive. But, yeah, but getting back to the nature of these imperatives, they're not law, right? I mean, you can't go, or should we, maybe more appropriately, should we go through the New Testament, gather all those New Testament imperatives together and write them all down and make it our life's goal to earn our salvation by following those New Testament imperatives? Why not? Whether it's earned or not earned, it's just a boasting tool instead.

And it's got to be the Holy Spirit at work in our life as we listen and yield and go do what it tells us. He tells us to, in his story, at his timing. Awesome. I like that yielding that he used the word, the thing. Yielding to the direction he gives us. But it isn't according to who you are. It's according to who he is. Yes. Who Jack is? Oh, that's right. That's good. Don't hijack that one. No, that's outstanding. I think that's it.

I think that's why he, Paul, the Holy Spirit, whoever you like, chooses to start the imperatives right after another clear sounding of the positional truths. Now, does that mean that these imperatives, are we here to try to make these imperatives go away? Like say, it's an imperative, but it's not an imperative because, are we hiding from the imperatives? Are we scared of the imperatives?

Probably. We need to heed them and yield to them. Exactly. So it becomes our attitude with which we come to them that becomes important, right? Cool. Okay. Outstanding. I think that you know, he uses this clothing, and he's going to use clothing language again.

Actually, starting here in verse 25, he says, Therefore, each of you put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbor, for we are all members of one body. So, therefore, as we've just been talking, relates us back to what came before, the positional truth, right? And then, each of you denotes the individual level. So these are not general, ethereal concepts. This is something that's practically, specifically, each individual believer is ready to appropriate this. Does that make sense? So Paul isn't just saying, hey, you as a body, he's saying each of you individually and as a body appropriate this.

Now, put off, this is what I wanted to get to. Put off is the same verb as we saw putting off the old man in verse 23, I believe. Nope, 22. Yes, lay aside in the NASB.

This lay aside, putting off, which last week, when it says putting off the old man, Laban's translation, and most translations translate it as an imperative. It exhorts you to put off the old man. What did we talk about last week in regards to that? Is it imperative? Is God telling us to put off the old man? Remember last week we talked about the grammar of that, and really the grammar of that is a past tense. It's having put off the old man.

You have put off the old man when you put your faith in Christ. We talked about, very briefly, and I'd refer you to our course, in biblical anthropology, if you have interest in this, there's a difference between the old man and the old sin nature. The old sin nature is what's the force that's constantly at work in us to try to, in Romans chapter 6, to try to get us back to abiding in our flesh. However, the old man was crucified with Christ.

He's no longer a real factor. So what Paul's saying here is you have put off your old man and now he's going to say, Now that you've already put off your old man, or rather Christ put off your old man, if you like, also put off falsehood. So there's almost this level of, hey, your old man, he's gone. Why are you still wearing his clothes? Why are you still wearing his socks and his buttons and his belt buckles? Right? That's kind of the idea that's going on here. He's saying, your old man is gone. Your old man is history.

And yet you're still clothing yourself with your outward action, your outward expression, as if he were still the God, as if you were still him. Or you're animating this dead body, as I think it was Jeremy alluded to, Weekend at Bernie's, you know, moving that dead body around. So, it's phenomenal as that is. Alright, so, the other, so that's the logical motion here, right, is from position until condition.

The other The other distinction here is between the truth and the lie. Jeremy ended last week near the end and said the truth is what or who? Christ. Christ is the truth. And our life is where? With whom? Christ. Right? The other option for us is to live out of the lie, right?

So now he's going to detail out some of the things of the lie and he's going to actually use specific examples that some of them, well I guess you could say they all work in a rather general sense, but he uses examples. We all know that Ephesians and Colossians are parallel books. He uses examples in Ephesians that he doesn't use in Colossians.

Theft, for example. And there's good cultural reason for that. He specifically pinpoints the parts of the lie that seem to apply to them in a more specific way, which is exciting. So. You know, there's another feature of putting off the old and putting on the new. That's a simultaneous statement. You must put off the old before the new comes in. There's no intermediary period of making this? You must do both. Yeah. And there's some other scriptures that verify that.

2 Corinthians 5.17.

When was the old gone? Well, when the new came. It wasn't that period of took off the old. I just kind of wanted to let everything breathe for a little bit before I put on the... No. None of that. It is not the fact that we're all in control of it by either the old man or the new man. Well, or the flesh or the... There is no middle ground. Yeah. Well, exactly. It's that switch on Hal Moway's map.

So you're either toggling between the flesh, or the old sin nature, or the spirit. For his second illustration, as you are growing in Christ, you're going to have all of the sin nature on that lower part of the graph, or living in Christ. We are continuing to live in Christ, but sometimes not so good in the way we are. So we're reiterating what's already been said.

Paul has been contrasting the truth and lies since Ephesians 4.17. That's been kind of one of his little contrasts, not little, his contrasts throughout this. We've been positionally redeemed out of lies so we can continue to live in the falsehood. So we cannot continue to live in that falsehood and dishonesty.

Would someone like to open to John 8.44?

John 8.44. This passage will give us a little bit more light. Some of them wanted to take him, but no one laid hands on him. Is that what you're talking about? No. That's seven. Okay, eight. Now to have a kind of a low tent area over these long because you see that large slightly tinted ape in front of you.

You are of your father the devil and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie he speaks from his own resources for he is a liar and the father of it.

So, before we were in Christ, who were we of? We were of the devil. When we spoke lies, we spoke of ourselves. If we ever spoke the truth, it was not characteristic of us. It was the exception for us, right? And now, in Christ, what's changed? New creature. Now when we speak... Yeah, now we're from above. Now being in Christ, being of Christ, when we speak the truth, we speak out of our true character that he's created in us. And when we speak lies, we speak outside of that, right?

Which is kind of cool and exciting. So speak truthfully is in the imperative mood or the mood of command. It means that we are commanded to speak honestly and truthfully. And this is often more difficult, I'd say, than it seems. We saw before, truthing in love, which often times gets spoken of as speaking the truth in love. But here, so that was talking about a whole truthful lifestyle. Here he's specifically talking about our speech. Do we often have a truth, yes?

You know what I was going to say, I was just thinking that before we were in Christ, we didn't have the Holy Spirit. And so, I think what happened is we weren't convicted of those untruths. Whereas now we're in Christ, and even though we're in the world, we live here, and the world is so full of lies and deceit, that it's easy for any of us to just go along with that flow, but the Holy Spirit convicts us of those untruths. And He puts it on our heart that those are untruths.

Whereas we didn't have that before, and the world doesn't have that. Right along with that, it's when the Holy Spirit begins to convict unbelievers, that they begin to just have that inkling of, you know, this doesn't seem right. Because that is His job in this world, and He convicts both unbelievers and believers, and until He convicts the unbeliever, They're not going to begin looking.

Yeah, no, it's fantastic. I think, you know, what's been said, it's the frog in the water, right? You put the frog in the pot, when the pot is boiling, he'll make his way out really quick. But if you slowly, if you put the frog in cold water and slowly heat it up, he'll just kind of happily sit in there until he's dead. I think we as Christians have a tendency to, or run a risk of doing that, of being in the world's water and all the dishonesty that abounds in this world. I mean, and it really does, right?

Anyone who's had a job in any secular field or work with non-believers in any respect. I've worked in the auto industry and even in the most basic and honest places of it, they're just, oh no, these are the lies we're allowed to make. These are the mistakes we're allowed to make. We could make this mistake on purpose. It's just like when you watch football and you see someone foul someone else because the penalty for the foul is worse than the problem if they behave properly, if that makes any sense. I think that should be punished more severely, because you're using the rules to win, or breaking the rules in order to come out ahead, which seems problematic. Or even in the field of accounting, I mean, I took one accounting course and found out there's plenty of generally accepted accounting principles that you and I would look at and go, isn't that dishonest? Well, yeah, kind of, but we've all decided it's allowed. It's within the rules. But it's dishonest. But it's a lie. And I'm not attacking accountants by any stretch of the imagination. I don't want to.

I don't have to deal with that world anymore. So I'm sure the Lord in them will make those decisions. But that is the world. That's the milieu of the world we live in. So it's so easy to start accepting the lie. Start accepting the accepting and just kind of moving along with it, right?

Abortion. Oh my. We're going to talk about be angry and do not sin later so we can bring that up again. Does anyone else have another comment? Tom? I'm thinking of something else and that is all the stuff we have, stuff that just sits around, doesn't do anything, it's just there. It's effectively junk. And I think of that, just the words to a certain Christian couldn't ever ask for another time.

And though I've put my faith in Christ and felt his spirit move my life, it will be just a fleeting taste of his glory in another place. If I could suggest for you an application point to take home, one would be to ask the Holy Spirit to show you places in your life. I know it's been an interesting exercise for me, but asking the Holy Spirit to show me places in my life where I've adapted to the lie or allowed the lie to roll. There's one application for us. Our position dictates that dishonesty in every form must go. Lies of any sort are not consistent with who we are in Christ.

Let's just pull up Colossians 4.6, rather than pull up both of these. Let your speech be always with grace, even with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. Awesome, so this is gonna hit we've got We've got anger yeah Yeah, we've got speech kind of sandwiching our two Our two sides we've got one about lying and then we talk about anger which could definitely Involve speech and then verse 29 would come back to speech again, and then he's gonna talk about speech again in chapter 5 so Yeah, I just love this image of our speech being seasoned with salt, with grace. Yeah, so we'll move forward.

The object of our honesty is supposed to be the neighbor, right? Our neighbor in here. So to me, that means he's drawing it down to our closest level, the person who lives closest to you. How did Christ define neighbor? Yeah, if the Samaritan could be a neighbor to the Jewish fellow who's beat up on the side of the road, I'd say that this is more universal. Like, hey, that guy's not my neighbor. I'm gonna go lie to him. Probably not, right? Paul gives us a clue that this is a very personal command. It's something that we're to consider in our own personal lives and evaluate ourselves for our daily living.

We're to be truthful in all things. And then the why for that, on top of the logical imperative connected with who we are in Christ, there's kind of an auxiliary why, and it's because we are all members of one another. So what illustration, what picture is the Holy Spirit giving us here, or alluding back towards? Saying we're all members of one another. Church membership, right? Oh, no, the body. That's right. Excellent. It's the body. It's not about church membership. It's about how we're all a part of this same body. I can't remember which commentator I was reading. So I apologize.

But he said, if you've got problems with dishonesty between your hand and your eye, you've got big problems. If your eye's telling your hand that something's there, and so you reach for it, it's just a dagger I see before me, you've got issues, right? The body miscommunicating with itself is a big, big problem. In fact, it sounds like that's part of what Eric is coping with at the time. Something, maybe being dishonest with something else in his body. And it causes big problems.

So part of our reason for honesty is because of how destructive it is in the body. Does that make sense? And also because the body represents, or any part of the body represents the whole body. Can you imagine going in on a charge of theft and saying, oh, your honor, I didn't do it, my hand did.

It's okay. Ridiculous, wouldn't it? Nobody would do that. That'd be silly, or at least no judge would honor it. So, as we are all part of the same body, we share in the same position in Christ, it should inspire us to, or rather, as we rest in Christ, as we abide in Christ, lift us to a higher level of outward behavior. It will affect our behavior.

Questions, comments, complaints? Sweet. Alright, in your anger do not sin, do not let the sun go down when you're still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold. This, I believe, is the NIV, and you know, anger, do not sin, it's softened. Actually, this is an imperative. It says, be angry, but sin not. Does anyone have that imperative in their text? Yeah. Is that an ASB? So that's actually correct.

I think translating the Bible is definitely hard, and I think that you kind of run the risk of not wanting to encourage or condone things that you think are bad, so you soften the language of the Bible. a little bit to try to make it feel better. A great example of that is centuries and centuries ago, we believe that one of the church fathers removed the story of Christ and the adulterous woman from his manuscripts because he thought, if people find out that Jesus forgave people for adultery, then everybody will become adulterous. So he pulled it out. Now, the oldest and best manuscripts we have don't have that, and yet he specifically you know, spoke out against that. So it's kind of one of those dangers that we run in wanting to shield people from the Word of God because we're so afraid of what might happen if they actually had it. In any event, so we're told to be angry and sin not. How can we command to be angry? Anger on the scale of emotions. Would that be on the higher end, the more powerful emotions, or the lower end, the lesser powerful emotions?

To the max. To the max, right? I'm trying to think what what's more powerful than anger as far as a flash when you're in the middle of it. I'm sure we can all relate and I don't think we should. A story of when anger overtook us and just you're not yourself anymore. Until the Holy Spirit disarms that anger he, I mean there he is, he's more powerful Amen. And that's ultimately the point.

However, emotion, specifically, is not condemned in Scripture. Even though anger is the most powerful emotion, which is what makes us, I believe, react to it and want to soften it and want to stay away from it and say, well, it's just best not to get angry.

Obviously, there's other passages in Scripture that tell us not to be angry at people, not to be people who are characterized by anger, fits of temper, the picture of spiritual maturity given in Titus and verses like Timothy both highlight that. And we're not to be angry at people. But that's not necessarily what this is talking about. This isn't talking about rage. This is talking about a different kind of anger.

So are emotions, in and of themselves, sinful or not sinful? Anger itself is not sinful. Right. Anger itself, it is not sinful to be angry. Why do we need to be more careful with anger? That we sin not. Because we're more likely to sin in anger than, you know, if you get a tickle in your nose and you sneeze. You're probably not as likely to react to that and sin because you just sneezed.

It's not that big a deal. Or because you're happy as a result of a cupcake. You're not going to go, ah, that was a really good cupcake. I'm going to go steal a car. You know, the lesser emotions are not as likely to cause that huge reaction. So we do need to be watching ourselves, and yet anger is a trait, a characteristic, an emotion that God has. His anger is obviously righteous. You know, obviously we might all think of Christ in the temple. driving up the money changers. I'm thinking that he wasn't going, out, go, come on, move on, no, thank you, no, bye.

No, he was obviously pretty worked up because he could drive all these people and all their livestock out. And yet... He threw over the table, didn't he? Yeah, I mean... He made a whip. Which, I mean, how cool would it be to say, like, you know, one of those guys later became a believer. I got whipped by the Lord.

But anyway, yeah, so obviously anger in itself is not sinful. So what's the caveat? What can it possibly mean to be angry, but sin not? And sin not, actually, is what it is. It's easy to overrun the purpose of the anger and go beyond it, and then just go overboard and go thermonuclear.

Hugely, right? Frankly, I read ahead. on your notes, and I think what you've said there is excellent. It's good to be angry when there is reason, but even in our anger, we are to act in love and consideration towards others. Because, I keep thinking of what our friend Art said back in Nevada, the goal of love is restoration. And you can be angry about someone's sin, deceit, whatever, but your goal should still be to restore that one. Yeah, and that's anger within the body. I mean, it's the beautiful thing that...

I mean, has anybody read a newspaper lately? I can only get through one about once every week or two. Because, I mean, wow, dude, where's my country? It's amazing. You just, you read through and it seems like every day I pick up the paper there's an article on how abortion just became easier or more legal. There's an article on how Golly, there was one week where I picked it up and there was two or three articles that just assumed evolution was what happened, the Big Bang was what happened, and we just figured out this new evidence about how smart are we. Every single week, and I'm just thinking, what's the difference between us and Pagan Rome?

I'd say we're worse off because we pretend to be a Christian nation. As much of a joke as that is. But here's the point, right? We as Christians in America have put way too much hope in the nation. the idea that we're the great white hope of the world and we're a Christian nation and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that was never Christ's intent.

We think the Lord can study the Bible dispensationally and know that God is not trying to use America to Christianize the world so that da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, right? We know that the perfect government will only be in Christ's reign. We know that any government controlled by human hands, whether we voted for it or they na-na-na-na-na-na-na, which, never mind. is going to fall apart, is going to be sinful, because it's run by sinful people. God didn't intend to change the world through government. He intended to change the world through Christ.

So, is it okay to read those articles and say, man, I work with probably 15 or 20 Korean kids who are absolutely brainwashed about evolution. And, oh my, does it make me angry? Yeah, it does. What's my response? To blow up an abortion clinic? No, pass out the action facts on that evolutionary thing. Tell them, hey, here's the truth. I'm speaking it in love. If you want to talk to me about it later, that's cool. Yeah. And that's what we're doing in a micro sense. And so I've got that You know, we're trying to help those kids along. But even then, they're being told on the other side by their science teachers.

Oh, never mind. The point is, there's reason to be angry. The other danger, the other side of the road that we need to be careful to err on is justifying all of our anger, right? Oh, this is holy anger. I'm so mad that she, I'm so mad, right? I'm so mad that he, this, and I'm so mad. And it's holy anger, because I'm right.

I think that sounds really Apparently a lot of Christians justify their behavior by just that. Righteous anger and it's alright to do whatever because of that. I think anger is supposed to be, according to our bodies, is supposed to be a very short term emotion.

And if you hold it, like holding a grudge against someone or deciding you hate them because of something they did 30 years ago or whatever, Avoid your body. You know, because you produce all these chemicals that kill it. Because you stay angry. Not being a scientist.

So, anger needs to be used and diffused. It needs to be used constructively so you just let go of it. And if that means walking out on an argument and saying, I gotta take a run in the park and then come back with that anger spent, then you can deal with the situation with a clearer head. And maybe you want the Holy Spirit listening in and acting on it.

So, that said, let's move on to exactly what Carol was talking about. Let's not let, talking about not letting the sun go down on your anger. This was an This wasn't something of Paul's generation. There were other sources saying the same message before, but Paul gives it, obviously, a special place in scripture saying, hey, we've got to keep short accounts. Deal with it now. Now this word for anger here is different from the word for anger before. This word for anger is more the idea of exasperation or irritation. So, in other words...

Goin' ballistic. Goin' ballistic, yeah, exactly. And I kind of got the sense of it as I studied it. It's when, you know, the person you live with, whether it's your wife, husband, mother, son, daughter, whatever it is, you know, whatever, leaves butter in the peanut butter, jelly in the peanut butter jar, just drives you nuts. I mean, everything from that level, which we have a tendency to write, absorb, internalize, and then it turns into this huge green monster that comes out at the slightest provocation.

Why not just deal with it honestly right off the bat? Right? You've, you know, so and so, or such and such annoyed me. Why not deal with it right off the bat? Because most of the time, at least in April and my relationship, when I'm annoying her with something or she's annoying me with something, I have no idea that it's annoying. You know?

Perfect illustration. You're in class in grade school, lower grade school, where you're still trying to learn the ropes of how to behave in class. And your teacher looks at you and snaps. Perfect. expressed in a controlled fashion, and then you're ready to listen instead of reacting to the anger. Precisely. So, I think that's one element of it.

One element of it is just, let's just be honest with each other. Let's just deal with each other. What is it that stops us from having those discussions? Is it not trusting in the bond that we have in Christ? Golly, I don't know if she's going to accept it if I bring up this little petty annoyance to her. Is it cowardice? I just don't want to have to fight? What is it that keeps us from bringing up everything from our annoyances to our major issues with each other? Would it be Charlie Brown wishy-washiness? I think that's often times. You don't want to hurt their feelings a lot of times. You don't want to cause them any you know, kind of problem. Yeah.

But I think, too, you know, I always remember one time, you know, sometimes we have this indignation when we really have no right. I mean, what gives us the right to think that we're we're we should be treated any other way? I mean, you know what I mean?

It's sort of like we have this indignation. Somebody shouldn't treat us this way or we shouldn't. And it's it's like under grace and in Christ, you know, we don't have any right. I mean, we, as a person, we really are the worst of the worst. I mean, in our sin nature, in our old man. And so now we're in Christ, and that's where our focus should be, not on how someone else maybe is treating us. Because we really don't deserve You know what I'm saying? I think we have this indignation. They shouldn't be treating us this way. I'm so much above all that. Absolutely.

If you think you're getting vibes about hurting someone's feelings, a way of dealing with which happens at work that works excellently is you're doing a good job doing A, appreciating Well, but that's exactly, that's fantastic. The reality that when we get into a place of asserting our rights, and that comes into evaluating what kind of anger is this, right? Because if this is anger because you have affronted my pride, that's something I should deal with in me, not something that I should deal with with you.

Or maybe we should deal with it together, but with a view towards correcting my mindset and my not resting in Christ, not yours, right? But we do have a wonderful, sarcastically speaking, ability to impute our sin upon others. Oh, it's actually his sin. No, no, no, no. If I was resting in Christ, this wouldn't be a big deal.

So that's certainly a piece that, once again, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, if you're going to go to someone and rebuke them, Whether there's holy or righteous anger there or not, as Nancy noted, it's got to be in love. I made my commitment to myself that I feel like is biblical is I'm not going to rebuke anyone until I'm ready to walk the road with them. I'm not going to rebuke anybody telling them that they're in sin until I'm ready to meet with them every day or every week or whatever it takes to be Christ to them. or to walk in the spirit with them.

I'm not just going to blow in and say, you know what, you're cynical at this, this, and this, and you stink at this, this, and that, and I'm out of here, so have a nice day. No, never, ever want to be that person. I feel like that's monstrously ungodly. So, do not let the sun go down. Once again, keeping short accounts with our anger, dealing with it right away, not pushing it back. And what What Margaret was saying is absolutely right. We need to be evaluating our anger to know if it is Godly anger or not. Is it an affront on your pride? An affront on God?

No. So we'll move forward from there. The word give the devil a foothold. Here is the Greek word topos, which is where we get like a topical map. Topographic, thank you. That's different. Anyway, topographic map. And then, so it has the idea of a place.

Some translators, a lot of translators bring it across as occasion, which It can be translated to mean that, but actually, given all the spatial analogies, that of a building, that of a temple, I mean, all these pictures that, and then he's going to actually go forward to warfare, that Paul is using, the Holy Spirit is using, will be, it just, it feels best to say, don't give the devil a place. And in fact, this word tapas could also be used for a military stronghold. So don't give the devil a military stronghold, a military spot to squat in your life and sit. Isn't that kind of a cool graphic illustration of what happens when you let anger rule in your heart? Once again, this is the different anger than just the pure righteous anger.

This is your irritation, your exasperation. Every time you let that sit there, without either grace, simply forgiving, and I've often fallen into the, out of my cowardice, fallen into the trap of saying that, you know, I'll just forgive that person who hurt my feelings, because, you know, it's grace, I can overcome it. When really, I need to have that conversation with them, just so that I could say that I was wrong. Just so that I could say, because that's what I want to avoid more often than not, is the humility of having to eat some crow and say, oh, you know, I screwed up, and I apologize. So moving forward with that, the idea is that any time you let that anger just sit and fester and roll, you're giving the devil a place.

And boy, doesn't that Isn't that most apparent to us in our marriages, in our lives at home, amongst family, kids, brothers, sisters, whatever it is? Amongst the people who are closest to us? Can't we just let something like that just wear on you and burn on you, those little things? Isn't that giving the devil a foothold?

Isn't that stopping the Lord from using your family, your marriage, your friendships, whatever it is, for His glory? Remember that our weapons are not flesh and blood, but mighty to destroy you. Amen. Amen. So, verse 28, moving forward, because we're running short on time again.

He who has been stealing must steal no longer. The Greek word is kleptos, which is where we get kleptomaniac, right? So, he who has been stealing, or the thief, must steal no more. The cultural point here, why he says this here and nowhere else, is because in Ephesus at the Temple of Artemis, if you could make it, if you could steal something and then make it to within a bow shot, the area around the Temple of Artemis, you were not held responsible for what you've done.

How great is that? You got to keep it, too. Yeah, you're good. It's like hide and seek. I got to base. OK. You know, I mean, real humans actually did this. It's not I'm not making this up. So I don't know how they feel like if they had guys like shooting bows from Artemis constantly or they had a line or a ring. I don't know. But you would have to think that the thieves market would be right there within the bow shot range. And there were. There were squatters sitting around this place. So, this was the culture of Ephesus.

Furthermore, the culture of the Greek gods and goddesses didn't demand any sort of moral response. In other words, to get something out of Zeus or Apollo or whoever else, you didn't have to do anything good. There was no connection between morality and and the gods favoring you or not, if that makes sense. The Jews gave us a more legalistic look. If I'm good, God will give me physical blessing. Mosaic law, right? If we obey the law, we will be in the land.

So we've sadly adopted a whole lot of that in our life with Christ, right? As Christians, we run that risk as well. But the other risk that we run is, eh, it don't matter, don't worry about it, right? I just, you know, your conduct is not at all important.

It isn't. Of course it is. The scripture is incredibly clear that us not stealing is a big deal. A big enough deal that Paul actually specifically Put it out. Stealing, I think there's another, there's more room for application as we obviously visit our own life.

These are easy, but you know, did you claim all your income on the taxes? Did you, I'm not meaning to be condemning here at all, but these are just some of the ones that came up in my life. Did you, did you claim your correct hours on your time card? Did you, did you, did you, did you, did you? Did you use company material for your own personal prophet without permission. All these kinds of things that I'm not suggesting we become legalistic, fastidious, blah, blah, blah.

But here's the reality. What does sin in our life do? What's the effect of sin in a believer's life? Separates us from fellowship in Christ. In my life, if I'm coming from the right standpoint of resting in Christ and wanting to reject those temptations as they come up of dishonesty, of theft, of whatever, I am hopefully doing it not so I can say, hey God, look what I did.

Buy me a car. I'm hopefully saying, Lord, I get to have greater fellowship with you. I get to continue to be in fellowship with you. And you know what? Whatever I was going to take, no matter how small, like a lollipop or a bit of ice cream, wasn't worth it next to the fact that I get continued fellowship with you and to be with you still, which is phenomenal.

The command for them not to steal, the positive command, is that they should get a job. and work brings to mind a couple things and I'm just going to blow through this so if you have a comment feel free to interject but I'm probably not going to ask many more questions so we can get through all this.

So he must work. Work is good or work is bad? Work is good. It allows you to have something to share with people who need it. Awesome. So work is great. Work was created before the fall, right? Just like marriage. Work is fantastic. Work is what God designed us to do.

It gives us something positive to do with our hands, something instructive to do with our time. I mean, it's kind of an old adage, but idle hands really don't do much good a lot of the time just because there's nothing for them to do or nothing good for them to do. So work is good in that respect. Work is good in the sense that it provides a grinding stone for the Lord to kind of shape you. and shape me into the image of Christ. Yeah, exactly. I couldn't tell you, outside of my marriage, the Lord has used jobs, and I've had a lot of really horrible jobs, to conform me to His image more than anything else in my life. So it's pretty phenomenal, all the advantage of work. The other advantage of work, obviously, Paul is kind of giving us another contrast here. A thief says, hey, you're going to share with me? And I'm not asking your permission. You're going to share what you have with me by force. In contrast, Paul says believers are supposed to work so that we can share what we have voluntarily.

How cool is that? A complete difference again between the life of Christ and our sin nature and who we were before Christ. So, I draw your attention also to with his own hands. The hands that were once to steal should be put to good constructive use. This is the nature of who we are in Christ. If you want to hear a great study on that, Bob in our Thessalonian study did 4.11-12. I think it might have been embedded in the two verses to the side.

It was fantastic about How work with your hands doesn't necessarily mean we should all be manual laborers, although I found that doing manual labor is a great, great thing because I do it during the daytime during the week. But that's not the exclusive command of what's being said at all. It's just the honest work. Do your work yourself sort of a thing.

Yeah, phenomenal stuff. Now, unwholesome talk, let no unwholesome talk, verse 29, come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, and may benefit those who will listen. Unwholesome here is putrid, nasty, stinky, and then talk is probably not the greatest translation. It should be word. This is logos. It's the smallest unit of human speech. But no putrid words.

We're going to talk about, it's going to talk more about, Paul's going to talk more about the content of our speech later because he's not ready to let this one go. But I love the opportunities that are put before us here. As these words leave your mouth, you have an opportunity, I have an opportunity to either tear down or to bless. We have an opportunity to have our speech seasoned with grace or just seasoned with destruction. It's completely the chance that you have every day as you rest in Christ or walk in your flesh. The advantage of speaking well, or what happens if you are resting in Christ and speak well, you'll benefit those who listen. You'll build each other up with your words.

If you choose the alternative, you'll tear other people down. You can tear down the body here. One lesson that I need to learn more of is when to be quiet and when to stop talking. When I don't have a good word to say or a good word to share or a loving way to say whatever it is I want to say, it's hard for me to just bite my tongue.

This is specifically telling us to be careful with our words, build one another up according to our needs, and not use these putrid, destructive words, and not just foul language, it's not really what's being, or not exclusively what's being given here. But we have the option to build one another up in love. It's kind of cool, like you came here this morning and you can go, it's actually very cool, you came here this morning and you can go out into the lobby or stay here and just build one another up in love. The Lord's given you that ability to build one another up, build one another up, build one another up.

Every word you have is not wasted. And conversely, words hit their target as soon as they leave your mouth, don't they? There's no take-backs. You've all had those moments where you say something and you go, I didn't. And then you wind up backpedaling for about 45 minutes to say, ah, it's not exact. Okay, we're massively out of time. If you have comments or questions, go ahead and bring them up after the class.

We'll pray now. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your wonderful gift of your word. Lord, your word that created, your word that saves, your word that purifies, your word is amazing to us. Lord, your living word, Jesus Christ. Lord, this week I pray that we would live resting in you, resting in Christ, that our that our lives would be fully in concordance with the wonderful gift of your truth, the truth that you've put in us and that you've made us in. Lord, of the honesty that characterizes you and that you've given us that honesty because we could not come up with it on our own. Lord, thank you for the opportunity to build one another up with our words. I pray that we can do that this week. In Jesus' name, Amen.