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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.
Ephesians 4:31
This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
Change.
It’s what’s expected when someone chooses to accept Jesus as Savior.
As we have seen in Ephesians, chapter 4, God’s word calls us to put on our new self as we become a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). This means we have to discard the ways of our past. Those sinful worldly behaviors are no longer allowed as you live every day as a disciple of Jesus.
Over the past five messages, we have looked at some of those former actions that need to be eliminated and today we’ll add more to the list as we find Paul heaping on transgressive actions in rapid fire fashion. Look again at his words here from verse 31:
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.
Note how all of these are associated with the way we get along with others. If there are issues in any relationships, long standing or temporary, it usually is because we are either feeling or actually carrying out one or more of the items mentioned by Paul.
Maybe you feel like someone has done you wrong or offended you in some way. It’s easy to allow the insidious infection of bitterness creep into your heart and mind. It brings the onset of resentment of another person or persons and if unchecked, it can lead to one or more of the three actions that follow on the list.
For bitterness leads to resentment which can fester into anger towards another or others and anger doesn’t produce positive outcomes unless it is the righteous, indignant anger shown by Jesus when merchants turned His Father’s place of prayer into a marketplace. If bitterness and resentment erode a person’s spirit from the inside out, anger often emerges from the damage and if anger isn’t thwarted, it can turn into full blown rage which results in aggressive external actions like brawling and, in its worst manifestation, murder.
Anyone in Christ, anyone putting on a new self, can’t behave this way. When bitterness begins to come on the scene, a Christian is to stop it in its tracks by choosing to pray for the person who has brought on the bitterness and then forgive them. By allowing the power of the Holy Spirit to lead you, bitterness can be neutralized before it turns into resentment and the other subsequent sinful behaviors like anger and rage and brawling.
The Apostle Paul also touches on another major issue that exists within relationships today, that being slander.
Slander is really just an intentional attempt to tear someone down, often times used by the offender to make themselves look better. You seek to assassinate another’s character with the goal of elevating yourself in the eyes of others.
In my view, we see this happen in politics more than almost anywhere else. If you don’t believe that, wait until the next election season and watch the political advertisements we are bombarded with. A large majority of these ads are simply one candidate doing their best to slander their opponent with the hope of winning your vote. They won’t tell you what they plan to achieve if elected. They just want to gain your favor through slandering.
And just in case you think this isn’t a problem in the church, think again. After all, Paul was writing these words to Christians in Ephesus and he wouldn’t have written them if Jesus believers there weren’t slandering others.
You may remember a few messages ago, we saw where Christians who put on a new self were to eliminate unwholesome talk from the way they spoke and instead use words that would build up another person. Slander is just one more category of unwholesome speech and it has no place in the behavior of someone who is truly in Christ Jesus.
As we see at the closing of verse 30, Paul commands the Ephesian believers to get rid of “every form of malice”.
Every means every, period, and malice is simply the desire to do evil toward another person. So you could just substitute the word “evil” into this order so it demands a Christian to get rid of every kind of evil.
Or in other words, get rid of every kind of sin.
This makes total sense when you think about it.
God hates sin. It’s what separates His created people from a relationship with Him and, minus salvation, it’s what will result in His judgment which leads to eternal damnation and torment.
And so when someone places their belief in Jesus and are saved, they are to leave their sinful, former self behind and put in a new self, one that has abandoned the sinful, worldly ways of the past, exchanging them for a new righteous and holy life through living in and through Christ.
Tomorrow, we will continue to add to the new self qualities.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to Gods4all@aol.com
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