This afternoon, we're going to study the Sixth Commandment from the perspective that the Catechism provides in Lord's Day 40. Lord's Day 40, which you can find on page 555 of your book of praise. Here we read as follows. What does God require in the Sixth Commandment I'm not to dishonor, hate, injure, or kill my neighbor by thoughts, words, or gestures, and much less by deeds, whether personally or through another. Rather, I am to put away all desire of revenge. Moreover, I'm not to harm or recklessly endanger myself. Therefore, also, the government bears the sword to prevent murder. But does this commandment speak only of killing? By forbidding murder, God teaches us that He hates the roots of murder, such as envy, hatred, anger, and desire of revenge, and that He regards all these as murder. Is it enough then that we do not kill our neighbor in any such way? No. When God condemns envy, hatred, and anger, He commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to show patience, peace, gentleness, mercy, and friendliness toward him, to protect him from harm as much as we can, and to do good even to our enemies. After the ministry of the word, we will sing from hymn 61, stanzas one and two. Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ. I once heard the story of a man who was a heavy smoker. One day he got cancer of the larynx and he had to have his vocal cords removed. And as part of that procedure, he had a tracheotomy. So he had a tube put in underneath. But as he was recovering, he would still roll out of the hospital. multiple times per day and smoke a cigarette and put it inside of that tube while he was smoking. Smoking was killing him, but he wouldn't stop. Now, we all know smoking can kill us. You've probably heard the stats before. There's a research group called, ironically, the ASH group, it's an acronym, which has discovered that smoking kills 50% of its users over time. There's one person who dies from smoking-related illness every six seconds. And every year, 200,000 children die from complications due to secondhand smoke. And smoking has gone down in the Western world, but a lot of people still smoke. Why do we do that? Now, we're not going to talk about smoking this afternoon, although it would be legitimate to do so in connection with the Sixth Commandment. Regular smoking definitely falls into the category of harming yourself, as the catechism explains it. But my point in bringing it up this afternoon was simply to use it as an analogy for something much more dangerous. And that something is anger. Anger is very dangerous. Anger can kill you. And on some level we all agree with that. But I don't really think we take it seriously. Just like we don't take the dangers of smoking seriously either. Now the catechism this afternoon doesn't let us get away with that. It mentions anger several times in these three questions and answers. And then it says that God regards anger as murder. That means he condemns it. He judges it. He finds it reprehensible. Evil. So anger is very dangerous. Anger can kill you. And we know that, but we treat it just like that guy out of that hospital ward smoking a cigarette after a surgery. We don't really believe that it can kill you even when we know that it does. And that's why we need the grace of God. And that's what this is about this afternoon. Because God provided us with a way out. So this afternoon I want to preach the gospel of God's grace to you under the following theme, anger can kill you and that's why you need God's grace, that's why you need God's word. So anger can kill you and that's why you need God's grace and you need God's word. Now if you look at Lord's Day 40, it is striking how deeply rooted anger really is. Question and answer 105 says I'm not to dishonor, hate, injure, or kill my neighbor. And we'd all agree with that, I hope. But then it goes on to explain what that all includes. And it says it includes thoughts, words, or gestures. Gestures we understand. We all know that angry words can do damage. We talked about that this morning. But where does that begin? begins in the mind, it begins with your thoughts. And that tells us how deeply rooted anger really is in our lives. We might have the occasional outburst, we've all been angry at some point in time. And maybe we've excused it before and said, well, whatever, that happens. You could think of it, You might even apologize about it, but the catechism here draws a connection between that outburst of anger and the thought life that fuels it. And you could think of it as a volcano. That's actually a really good analogy. Every now and then a volcano blows up, maybe only once every 100 years, but there's a lot of lava bubbling underneath that fuels that. And that lava never really cools down, and that's what anger is like. The tongue, says James Thiever VI, is set on fire by hell. And it runs deep. And catechism says that's a part of the root of murder. So anger can kill you, and it actually does that literally. Did you know that one study from the University of North Carolina showed that those who scored highest in hostility on a standard personality test were five times more likely to die of heart disease as their less hostile classmates. It was done among university students. And that finding has been duplicated. And so anger can actually shorten your lifespan. But that's not even the biggest danger. The biggest danger is that it kills your spiritual growth. And that's what our reading talks about as well. It says in verse 19 or 20, the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Now what does he mean by that word righteousness? The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. This is only confusing when you look at the word righteousness from the perspective of Romans, which you should not do because James wrote his letter before Paul wrote the letter to the Romans. See, James is writing with an Old Testament perspective in mind. When he says righteousness, what he really means is having a right relationship with God, which is expressed in right behavior. So in other words, righteousness is behavior that's in line with the covenant. David talks about this in the Psalms all of the time. So when he talks about righteousness, he means righteousness in the sense that you live according to the demands of the covenant. And so when James says the anger of man does not produce a righteousness of God, he's simply saying this doesn't produce behavior that reflects the character of God or that accomplishes the will of God. But you know what? Anger feels good. You have all this pressure building up. You think of the volcano analogy again and then it blows and there's this relief of pressure. We even have an expression for that, that we talk about volcanic rage. Rage that makes you feel powerful. Rage that makes other people cringe before you and back off and do whatever it takes to just settle you down. So anger can give you a feeling of genuine power. But the truth is that actually Anger itself is powerless. It does not produce the righteousness of God. And righteousness in this sense is behavior in line with the will of God. You could even draw a line between righteousness and the kingdom of God, right? If righteousness is living in line with God's covenant, then you could draw a connection even to the second petition, your kingdom come. So rule us by your word and spirit that more and more we submit to you that we live out this covenant righteousness in our day-to-day life. So the spread of righteousness in the world is a spread of God's kingdom in the world. And James is saying anger sabotages that. It doesn't produce the righteousness of God. And so it shows how weak anger actually is. Even as it makes you feel powerful, it doesn't produce any kind of meaningful change. So anger is actually profound weakness. It doesn't create change. And that just goes to show how weak we are, because you have something weak like anger, but we're not able to break with it. It becomes an integral part of our life. It is so deeply rooted. It's in our thoughts, words, and deeds. You know, you might think for a while that you're doing okay, and then along comes someone, and often it ends up being a family member, and they push just the right buttons, and boom, and you're angry again. You can't just brush it off, but you have to get rid of it, because James says here, this doesn't produce the righteousness of God, this actually retards your spiritual growth. So what do you do with that? Well, in understanding anger, it's good to reflect on the fact that it's not morally neutral. Verse 20, 21 says, put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness. That word filthiness is also used in 2 verse 2 to describe the shabby clothing of the poor man. You think about a street person. You've all seen street people before. Some of them have severe mental illnesses. They're very sad to see. It looks like they never wash themselves. They're caked with dirt. Their clothing is worn to tatters. It could be 10 years old, probably covered in bed bugs. And that kind of clothing is filthy, and that's the kind of filthiness that James is talking about here. And he says, the anger of man doesn't produce the righteousness of God. The anger of man is kind of like that filthiness. It's morally filthy, it's impure, it's gross. And not only that, but it's even, he says, he describes it as rampant wickedness. Rampant meaning uncontrolled all over the place. You can't put a lid on it. And there's no end to it. And why is there no end to it? Because it comes out of the heart, comes from us. You know, the thing is, people sometimes say, well, the reason I'm angry is because of this, this, this, this, and there's a list of stuff to go with it. People that push my buttons and so on. But you could take all of that away and there would always be more things that would cause anger because ultimately anger doesn't come from the outside in, anger comes from the inside out, and that's the problem. You'll never run out of anger. You'll never run out of things to be angry about because it comes from the heart. In Luke 6 verse 45, our Lord Jesus said, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So the heart is where the anger is coming from. And now you contrast that with the glory of God. You think about this for a moment. Our own anger is so often unrighteous. There is such a thing as righteous anger. Well, most of the time our anger is unrighteous. I mean, look at how we react when someone cuts us off. It's silly. Our anger sometimes is just petty, and even if we are angry about the right thing, we express it in the wrong way. We get worked up over all these unreasonable things. And it's so, so small, so narrow. And now you contrast that to the glory of God. God the Supreme, the Maker of heaven and earth. How exalted He is. How lofty. How holy. In the words of Psalm 102, enthroned forever remembering Remember throughout all generations, it says, nations will fear the name of the Lord and all the kings of the earth will fear his glory. In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth and the heavens are the works of your hands, says the psalmist. They will perish, but you remain. They will all wear out like a garment, like clothing. You will change them and they will be discarded, but you remain the same. Your years will never end. That's the God that we're dealing with. He is glorious and He witnesses every moment of our anger. And God is angry too. But His anger is righteous. There's anger against wickedness, anger against our sin, anger against the filth that comes out of our mouth when we're angry, and it's anger in a whole different category. You think you've seen anger before? Well, your anger over the things in your life compared to the anger of God against sin is like someone holding up a match to the sun. There's no comparison. Talking about two fundamentally different things. Now consider this. Jesus Christ bore that anger. He died on the cross. He died at the hands of angry people for angry people. And he carried the full brunt of God's anger against sin, including all of the times that we were angry, including all of the times that we showed inappropriate anger and rage against people around us and we offended a holy God. Did you know that the Lord Jesus Christ was murdered? He was murdered. His crucifixion was murder, and it was a violation of the sixth commandment at the hands of people like us. But it was a murder that God used to atone for our sins. A murder used to give us life, so to speak. And bear in mind that this is the one person who kept the sixth commandment perfectly. The catechism says the sixth commandment says that means that if we're really serious about it, it means that we show patience, peace, gentleness, towards our neighbor who did that more than Christ, who was praying for the people that were in the act of murdering him. He kept the sixth commandment perfectly. And his righteous life is ours. 2 Corinthians 5 verse 21 says that God made him who had no sin, you could say who had no anger even. Whatever sin it is, him who had no anger, let's say, to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. so that his righteous life is ours. So then who are we to despise the lives of our brothers and our sisters, to be angry with them? Jesus died for them. He considered it worthwhile to die for them, and now we're going to hate them? His whole life was like that, you know? His whole life showed the grace of God. And even now the gospel is going out to people who hate it, to people who hate him. It's even gone out to us. So anger can kill you in ways that you can't even imagine. And it is stronger than you, but God's grace is stronger than your anger, and that's the gospel. And that's why you need God's grace. And as part of that, you need God's word. And that was the other thing I wanted to touch on this afternoon. God's people in the Old Testament knew what to do. They knew that hatred was also murder on a smaller scale. They knew that anger was wrong. They struggled with the same sins we did, and God promised he would deal with it. Turn with me for a moment to Jeremiah 31, but don't lose your spot in the letter of James. Jeremiah chapter 31. Jeremiah 31 verse 31. I'm going to show you something. Jeremiah 31, starting at verse 31. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother saying know the Lord for they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest declares the Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more. So he says here that he will write the law on their hearts and you compare that to verse 21 of James 1 receive with meekness the implanted word. So in other words, a word which has been written on the heart. When did that happen? Well, it happened at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the church and when the law, so to speak, was written on people's hearts. And that tells us three things. First of all, it means the word has been implanted. It came from the outside, it was put into us. And that means that it does not come to us naturally. So if you live by the word of God, if you let the word of God guide you, you're doing something that doesn't come to you naturally. And that's a good thing. That means that God's at work in your life. And the second thing is that James is assuming here that these people to whom he is writing are God's people. These are people with problems. Obviously he tells them put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness so that people with problems or people with anger management problems even but he's saying to them still, he's still speaking to them as if they are believers which they are because he says you have the word implanted within you. You're God's people. And what that means is that God has kept his promise to them and that's the third thing. He kept his promise to his people when he put that word in them at Pentecost and still does it today by the Holy Spirit. If you have faith, if you're a believer, if you seek to follow the will of God, you have that word written on your heart and the Lord is making you live that. See, the focus here is on God's grace. And that's, I guess, the point that I'm trying to get across by mentioning these three things to you. The focus is on God's grace. There's other passages that talk about God, about our responsibilities. Ephesians 4 verse 2 says, put off the old self, put on the new self. And the focus, to some extent, is on putting on the new self. And that does emphasize human responsibility, but the focus here is on what God does. Receive with meekness the word which has already been implanted. So that's God's undeserved grace at work in your lives and you, and here's the point, you already have that grace. And by the way, for the word to be implanted in you, you do need to be around to hear it, which is why We encourage people to come to church, not only once on Sundays, but twice, because the more you're around the word, the more you immerse yourself in the word, also in Bible studies and things like that, the more it becomes solidified in your heart. But here's the thing. So you have this grace now. You've heard the word, it's been implanted in your heart, but now you're also called to use it. Receive with meekness, the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. So you are receiving it, but not just to hear it. And that's part of putting away all the filthiness and the rampant wickedness that it talks about in the first half of that verse. See, the idea is that this implanted word begins to trickle down to all of those roots. It displaces all of the other things that were there. And it becomes a part of your life. And you go to work with it. That's the idea. You cannot be passive. And that changes how you deal with things, including anger. See, so often people say they're struggling with a particular sin in their lives. It could be anger or it could be some other sin. But they say, you know, I struggle with this sin in my life. But then let me ask you a question. Are you really struggling with it? Struggling means that you're trying to overcome it. If you struggle with anger, what are you doing about it? Are you taking concrete steps to deal with it? If you're not taking concrete steps to deal with it, you're not actually struggling. You're living in sin. You cannot say you're struggling with sin if you're putting in a half-hearted effort or no effort at all. And it's like, well, I have this thing, this sin in my life. and it is a struggle, but if you're not engaging with that, you're not actually struggling, and then you're just living in sin, and then you need to repent. And that means then that you draw on the word, you put yourself under the word, you receive with meekness the implanted word, you submit to it. That means you acknowledge what the word says about you and you remember who you are. You're a sinner saved by grace. All this grace that God has given to us, do you realize that nobody deserved that? You didn't, I didn't. It's good to think about that sometimes. And that, if you reflect on that properly, it makes you meek. That means you're not prone to anger anymore because you realize what Jesus has done for you. How can you be angry when you realize what he's done for you? And that word says, verse 21, is able to save you. Now you might wonder, am I not saved already? And yes, you are. If Jesus is a Lord of your life, you are saved, but it's not a one-time event. And thanks to the influence of popular evangelical Christianity, there's this idea out there that being saved is a one-time event that happened at some poorly defined points in the past. And that's when I was saved. Well, that might be part of it, but it's more than that. Being saved is a process that encompasses your whole life. As you grow in the faith, as you live out of this word and plant it in you, your whole life is transformed. That's part of being saved too. And we would, if you want to use the theological terminology, you would say that's part of sanctification. But that does stretch through your whole life. And it means you do experience deliverance from sin in this life, including the sin of anger. And it's completed in the life to come. Then the last bit of Lord's Day 40 shows us what that looks like. What does that kind of a life look like? Well, it's a new life where we love our neighbor as ourselves. We show patience, peace, gentleness, mercy, and friendliness towards him or her. We protect them from harm and we do good even to our enemies. And that's impossible. for us to do on our own. Bearing in mind what we said earlier about how strong sin is, God is asking us here to do something impossible. But he also empowers us to do it. This is exactly the same thing as when the Lord Jesus told the paralytic to get up. When the Lord Jesus told the paralytic to get up, he said, rise, take up your mat and go. And the man was not able to do that, but it was in the act of obedience, in the act of hearing the word, in the act of standing up that he was empowered to do it. And in that act, he was healed. As he was obedient, he discovered he was also empowered. And that power is ours. It's so much greater than the power of anger or hatred or whatever other sin we struggle with. It's a power of the Lord Jesus Christ and a power that He has given to us and calls us to use. And He calls us to overcome envy, hatred, anger, desire of revenge. And He calls us towards life and fellowship with Him and with each other. And yeah, there will be times when we regress and fall. But remember, the Lord is there to encourage us because he is the Lord of life and that life is ours forever. Amen.