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Sermon
The Gospel of Matthew

Homicide in the Heart

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January 19, 2025
Matthew 5:21-26
Nick Whitehead

Killing Sin & Holiness

Pride & Humility

Forgiveness

Transcript

0:18Good morning. It is a joy to worship with all of you again, to be led by our children. Uh, I love these Sundays where we dedicate our children and and trust them to the Lord is this sweet thing. If you don't know me, my name is Nick Whitehead. I serve here on staff as the pastor for global outreach. And I'm very eager to open God's word with you. So let me pray as we begin. Father in heaven, we don't take for granted that you speak to us. We thank you Lord that you do not leave us to our own devices, but instead you've given us your very words. So would you sanctify us this morning by the truth, your word is truth.

1:00Awaken our hearts to truth about you, truth about ourselves, truth about what you are calling us to be. We pray in the name of your Son Jesus. Amen. If you've been at North for any length of time, you have heard some of our pastors refer to and biblically condemn major sins in our country and culture. We referred to one of them this morning, the abortion genocide. We've mentioned others like the transgender movement, homosexual marriage. These are some of the great societal sins of our day. And these ideologies are challenging many Christians to move away from biblical faithfulness. And so it's appropriate, I think, I believe for the church and its leaders and its members to be a voice of word wrought reason when the winds of false teaching are assailing us.

1:59And so I'm thankful to be a part of a church that is holding fast to biblical morality and an anti-Christian age. And yet yet I'm sometimes concerned that our preoccupation with the egregious sins of society may blind us to the more refined and subtle sins that plague our own personal lives. Well-known author Jerry Bridges calls these respectable sins. These are sins that we've come to tolerate in our own lives because frankly, we're just not doing as bad as the next guy or that guy. We might condemn the high handed rebellion of the world, but we ignore our own sins of gossip, greed, envy, anxiety, pride and patience, judgmentalism and anger, and certainly some sins are more serious than others.

2:59But have we begun to think brothers and sisters that these lesser sins are no sin at all? Have our consciences become numb to them? Do we get incensed and riled up about the murderous sin of abortion, yet feel no guilt or remorse? When we harbor hate in our hearts do we find ourselves lamenting in prayer over the big sins of the world while failing to mourn over our own selfishness and lust and pride? I say this because I know my own tendency to justify myself, to defend my own righteousness, to make myself look better than the next guy. And one of the most frequent ways that I do that is to look at other people, point at other people and say, but at least I don't do what they do.

3:49And so in our Texas morning, Jesus is going to break down this self-righteous approach to God's law and he'll do it in the ensuing verses as well and the following weeks, this is how the Pharisees approached God's statutes. They did everything they could to interpret the law or apply it in order to make themselves appear righteous before men. They were concerned with outward appearances instead of internal dispositions. And what we see in the remainder of Matthew chapter five are six examples of how Jesus rightly interprets God's law and applies it more deeply to the heart. This morning we're gonna be tackling the first of these six sections and each one you're gonna see a certain formula that Jesus uses says you have heard it said, but I say to you, and each of these sections, Jesus is contrasting a misunderstanding or a misapplication of God's law with the true intention of the law.

4:55So our text this morning, keep it open in front of you, Matthew five verses 21 through 26, Jesus is gonna authoritatively, interpret and apply for his kingdom citizens, his people. The sixth commandment, you shall not murder. We're gonna observe the text in two parts. First Jesus's teaching that anger is murder in the heart. That's verses 21 and 22. And then in verses 23 and 26, we see Jesus use two illustrations to demonstrate how we might apply this teaching in our lives, how we are to live it out so we have the interpretation of the law and the application. So let's look at verse 21. Jesus repeats the Old Testament law that is hears would've been familiar with.

5:44He says, you've heard it said to those of old you shall not murder and whoever murders will be liable to judgment, you shall not murder. Of course we know it. It's a direct citation of the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. It comes from Exodus 2013 in Deuteronomy five 17. It's condemning intentional manslaughter, but Jesus also reminds us of the consequence for disobedience to this command. Whoever murders will be liable to judgment. That's just a summary of Old Testament legislation set forth on what will be the judgment for murder. For example, Exodus 21, 12 says, whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death, murderers will be liable to judgment, death for death.

6:33So in verse 21, Jesus summarizes the Old Testament teachings about homicide and its consequences and it's clear. He's saying again, God condemns murder. But then we get to verse 22 and Jesus says, yes, murder deserves judgment, but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council. Whoever says, you fool will be liable to the hell of fire. Last week, pastor Steven helped us see that Jesus does not contradict the law. He doesn't correct it, he doesn't add to it. Instead he draws out the deepest sense of the Old Testament law and he brings it to its true intended application.

7:22Jesus is not a new law giver saying out with the old in with the new, he is the faithful interpreter of scripture. And that's what he's doing here. He's saying to his, to his audience, you've heard a very literal interpretation of what the sixth commandment requires. You've heard the Pharisees and the scribes say that if a person keeps their hand from murderous violence, then they fully satisfied the demands of this law. But what I'm telling you, Jesus says, but what I'm telling you is that there is more to obey that law than just mere outward performance. If all you avoid is homicide, you haven't applied the law deeply enough, murder cannot be reduced to that last act by which you take the life of a man.

8:13Murder starts in your heart. Jesus' point, of course, is that anger is the root of murder. When you I are filled with rage, hatred, contempt, bitterness, disdain towards someone, we've already committed the act of murder in our hearts. Notice the parallel parallelism between 21 and 22. Verse 21 says, whoever murders will be liable to judgment. Verse 22 says, everyone who is angry is liable to judgment. The murderer and the one who becomes sinfully angry are liable to the same judgment. Soto are those who insult a brother. Call him a fool. They'll be liable even to the hell of fire. Now, some commentators suggest that verse 22 is describing sort of an intensifying progression of sins and their corresponding judgments.

9:08So they see a progression from anger to verbal insult to total condemnation of a person's mental and moral faculties. You fool coinciding with this, they see a progression in the degree of punishment. So you'll be subject to judgment to the counsel and finally escalated to the hell of fire. I'm not inclined to read this as an intensifying progression. Um, that certainly could be a faithful reading of this verse. I'm more inclined to just think that these three lines are simply depicting different manifestations of har murder. It's to open up the door to show us there's a multitude of expressions of what it looks like to be sinfully, angry, seething, anger, unrestrained insults, calling a fellow Christian names like a moron or a fool.

10:00These are all violations of the command not to murder. In fact, to this list, I think we could add more manifestations like frustration, irritation, impatience, bitterness, dismissiveness, rolling of our eyes behind somebody's back, all the way up to cursing and yelling, rage, verbal and physical abuse and hatred. All of these from the least to the greatest, all across the spectrum, they merit judgment before the council of God and ultimately they merit eternal punishment of the fire of hell.

10:42We should feel that. And so let me summarize these two verses before we move on. Jesus is fully aware of our self-righteous tendencies that we'll even use God's law to make ourselves look better than we really are. That's what the Pharisees had done. They knew physical out physical murder could be outwardly seen and condemned by men, but hatred in the heart could go undetected. People couldn't see it. And so they narrowed the implications of the sixth commandment and they made it relate merely to outward duty. But Jesus gets to the heart, anger, hatred, destructive insults and attacks on someone's character.

11:22These are all forms of murder. You go to the New Testament, you continue on one. John summarizes it like this in verse in chapter three, verse 15, anyone who hates his brother is a murderer. But I think if we jump back to the Old Testament, we see that the seeds for this kingdom ethic have always been there. For example, Leviticus 19 verses 17 and 18 say, you shall not hate your brother and your heart. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. This is part of the sum of the law. So Jesus rightly interprets the sixth commandment.

12:07He applies it to his kingdom citizens in verses 21 and 22. And then in verses 23 through 26, he draws out further implications of this command using two illustrations, one in the setting of temple worship and one in a judicial setting. So both both of these illustrations move us from merely avoiding anger and animosity to proactively loving our neighbor. The first illustration is in verses 23 and 24. Let me read it again. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go first be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift.

12:55And notice something in verse 23. It doesn't say, if you remember that you have something against your brother. Instead, it says, if you remember that, your brother has something against you. So unlike the previous verses, this illustration does not call us to avoid sinful anger in ourselves. It actually calls us to be reconciled to those who are sinfully angry against us. The text doesn't even tell us if the person that we've offended has the right to be offended or if their anger is reasonable, we might have sinned against them or they may be upset for no reason at all. Nevertheless, Jesus is saying that anger is so serious that we are not just to prevent these murders attitudes in ourselves.

13:42We're actually to seek to prevent it in others. We're not just called to avoid animosity. We're called to proactively love our neighbor and pursue reconciliation with our brothers and sisters. Now, one of our pastors this week reflected on this imagery of these verses here, and he just kind of called us to imagine the ridiculousness of this situation that we see before us. Imagine an Israelite, we'll call him Enoch. Enoch is standing in the temple with his goat, pulling it up to the altar to be sacrificed by the priest. And he finally gets this stubborn animal up to the front of the line. He's handing over the rope to the priest and something pops into his mind.

14:30He sees the face of his friend Boaz, not Boaz prince. This is another Hebrew name Boaz. And Boaz is angry. And the Enoch remembers that Boaz had sp spoken harshly with him earlier that week aggressively he had gotten angry and right there in the temple line bringing his goat to a tone for his sins. Enoch is convicted not even by his own sin, but he's convicted that Boaz is not happy with me. Things are not right between me and Boaz. And Enoch drops the rope. Everyone else behind him is yelling and the line and he runs off to find Boaz. The imagery is very absurd. The response seems overreactive, it seems exaggerated, and yet I think that's Jesus' point.

15:21Reconciliation to your brother, to your sister is a big deal. Unresolved conflict impedes your worship of God. You must make peace with men before you can make peace with God. Do you see how serious this sin is? I mean, we're all sitting in church right now. We've come to worship and some of you meditated on bitter thoughts about your roommate and the car ride over. Some of you spoke a harsh word to your children or to your spouse at the breakfast table. Some of you might just be sitting here very aware of a fellow member and this church who isn't happy with you for some reason or another. And you don't need to get all hypersensitive about this and start thinking everyone's mad at you in the hallways just 'cause they're not looking at you when you're trying to greet them.

16:14I think the text is talking about identifiable clear offenses, but nevertheless, if some tension exists between you and your brother and sister, if there's something wrong that needs to be addressed and it's troubling your conscience, Jesus is saying to you, leave the goat, leave the goat, make it right, be reconciled so that you can be free to worship. Then we get to Jesus's second illustration. Let's read it together. Verses 25 and 26. Jesus commands come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you be put in prison.

17:02Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you've paid the last penny. Now, this illustration is a little different. This is a situation in which I, we we've, I've clearly done the wrong. Okay, I, I'm guilty of this crime. The accusations against me land with full force. And if I don't make amends quickly, the consequences will be disa disastrous. I'll be put in prison and I will not get out until I pay the last cent. And I think there's a certainly good legal advice. Perhaps if you cause damage to someone's property, try to make it right with them before they sue you for a whole lot more.

17:44When you nick the bumper of the car next to you pulling outta the Costco parking lot and it leaves a dent or a mark, make it right as quickly as possible. Leave the note, find the owner. Don't succumb to the temptation to see if it will blow over or go unnoticed. If you've spoken a harsh word to your fellow Christian, to your neighbor, even your worst enemy, do not just let it sit hoping they'll forget about it. The call here is to make amends swiftly. Jesus says, we'll end up in a much better place when we are quick to admit and own our failure and our sin and our wrongdoing. So what Jesus does with these two illustrations is he demonstrates what it looks like to obey the sixth commandment from the heart.

18:35It's not just a call to sit back, sit on our hands, avoid anger, avoid animosity, avoid calling people names. It's a call to lean in to proactively love your neighbor, to pursue reconciliation when you are in the wrong and even when they are in the wrong. So I wanna spend some more time applying this, getting to the heart of this what, what might this text call us to in our lives as kingdom citizens? And so I wanna give three applications First. First application is brothers and sisters do not minimize or soften your sin of anger. I hope we can all admit it. We get sinfully angry at others, whether that comes out in yelling or rage or violence or it manifests itself in silent, simmering, or ungrateful frustration.

19:36We all sin in our anger and the temptation when we sin is going to be to justify ourselves. That's what the scribes and Pharisees did. They pointed their fingers at murderers and thieves and adulterers and they said, we are not like them. But Jesus points his finger at us in this text and says, you might be a hundred percent murder free, but you're killers at heart. And Jesus is warning us, do not let the devil get even the tiniest foothold in your life through your anger. And some of us may have some work to do before we gather and worship again next week. Either to confess our sinful anger towards someone or to approach someone who we know has been angered by something we've done before you come again to offer your gift.

20:25Go to your brother, go to your sister. Don't turn a blind eye to this sin that breeds discord in our churches and in our marriages and in our families. Don't redirect attention to the big sins of society. Jesus is looking at your heart and he's saying, if you are angry, you are liable to judgment. So that's application number one. Don't downplay the sin. Deal with the sin. Deal with the sin. And this leads to my second application. If you're going to deal with your sin of anger, if you're going to root it out of your hearts, it's helpful to grow in understanding your anger. As I prepared for this sermon, I felt like I was just beginning to scratch the surface of really understanding what causes my heart to get angry.

21:12And so my challenge to myself and to all of us is to get a better handle of what anger is and what motivates it within you. So lemme just take a few minutes to give you a starting definition of anger and then dive a little bit underneath the surface. Here's my best simple definition of anger. Anger is a negative response to a perceived wrong. In other words, anger is when we observe something and we say with our feelings or our words or our actions, that's wrong, that's unfair, that's unjust. I don't like it. And some of you might hear that definition and think, well, it sounds like anger isn't necessarily sinful.

21:57Like it might be possible for anger to be righteous and you would be right. Jesus got angry and he never sinned. He overturned tables in the temple. He called the Pharisees blind fools. He used the same word that we saw in our texts. And so we know there is such a thing as righteous anger, but lest we convince ourselves that our anger is usually righteous, it's helpful to ask ourselves what makes our anger righteous or what makes our anger sinful? And one way to do this is to think about our anger's object, our anger's motive, and our anger's demeanor, our anger's object, our anger's motive, and our anger's demeanor.

22:42So ask these questions of your anger. First, what is the object of my anger? The object of righteous anger is actual sin. Things that directly violate God's word. For example, it is appropriate to get indignant about human trafficking or idolatry. It's absolutely appropriate. On the other hand, sinful anger reacts to things that are not actually in violation of God's word. So this happens very commonly in marriages when we become offended or angry about our spouse's honest mistakes or their preferences or their bad habits. When we get mad, we need to ask, is this anger in me arising from an accurate perception of true evil?

23:34And I think if we're honest with ourselves, most of our anger is directed at things that are not inherently wicked. Second, second question we should ask is, what is motivating my anger? Righteous anger is motivated by God and his kingdom and his will and his righteousness. It's concerned with people offending God and offending his name. So sinful anger is when we become overly concerned with our own rights and our own concerns and our own desires and our own reputation. Sinful anger arises when we want something and something keeps us from getting what we want. It's not God-centered. James four, one through two gets to the crux of it.

24:24Unrighteous anger is me centered. James four says, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you, you desire and do not have? So what do you do? You murder, you covet and you cannot obtain. What do you do? You fight and you quarrel. You boil with anger. When your boss critiques you in front of everyone because you want respect. You bark at your kids after you get home from a long day at work because you just want a little peace and quiet. You seethe in silent anger because no one has shown any appreciation for the meal you cooked.

25:07You just want a little gratitude. When I become sinfully angry, what I'm doing is I'm making myself God. It's not his justice and his laws that I care about. It's my laws, it's my rules, it's my wants, my desires that reign supreme and I replace injustice against God with injustice against me. And injustice against me is when you do anything that impedes me getting what I want. And I hope we can all admit that's usually the way our anger expresses itself. But one last final question we should ask is if, if I'm able to actually maintain the right object and the right motive for my anger, I should also ask, am I expressing my anger in a godly manner?

25:58Am I expressing my anger in a godly manner? Righteous anger demonstrates the fruit of the spirit. Righteous anger is not devoid of love. Righteous anger presents itself in ways that are self controlled and kind. They're not out of control and harsh and demeaning, righteous anger acts in love so that we can sometimes have the right motives in being angry. We can sin because we express our anger in ungodly ways. What might it look like to respond in a righteous way when injustice has been done against us or to another? Well, again, righteous anger is God centered, not me centered, which means the ultimate aim of righteous anger is to see sinners who have offended God reconciled to him.

26:52So righteous anger must include a demeanor of constructive mercy. It's not only trying to call out wrongs and injustices, but it's seeking to pity the one who has offended God's law and bring that person into right relationship with God. For example, many of your parents, when our child sins against us, they fail to listen in the church hallway or they throw a tantrum in the grocery store. Our response should not be to enjoy punishing them in vengeance or embarrassing them or shaming them. We should certainly be displeased by their sin against us and against God. But righteous anger doesn't fly off the handles when we remember that our child defense is ultimately against God.

27:43And when we prioritize their spiritual reconciliation with God, we will address their sin. With constructive mercy, our anger towards their sin will manifest itself in calm confrontation. It will manifest itself in appropriate biblical discipline and a fresh reminder of God's forgiveness to them and the gospel. And this will work for their good and for their sanctification. So righteous anger is constructive. But my third application is how do we rid ourselves of sinful anger? How do we do this work? Perhaps this text is convicting you of your sinful anger. And I think it was designed to do that.

28:30And this morning you are hating your sin, you're hating, you're out of control, temper towards your children, your silent bitterness towards your spouse or your parents or your colleagues, your rage. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you're s sulking and you're scheming against those who have been slightly rude to you. Maybe anger controls your every single day or maybe it just sneaks up and out of you very unexpectedly from time to time or maybe today for the first time, you're admitting that what you label as frustration and depression is really sinful anger and you've been feeding on it for a long time.

29:11And you're wondering, how do I rid myself of this homicide of the heart? How do I learn to love others as I should? And the answer I believe, is to look through this hard word and marvel at the one who spoke it. So just take a moment and look at him with me. Jesus in his humanity, is the opposite of us when it comes to anger. Unlike us, Jesus did not become angry when he was personally mistreated, when he was mocked, when he was beaten, when he was crucified, he was as quiet as a lamb. He did not defend himself. He did not scream harsh words at his tormentors. In fact, when he did speak, he said, father, forgive them for they do not know what they're doing.

30:00When Jesus gets angry in the Bible, it's not because he's been personally offended, it's because he's outraged by injustice and sin and unbelief against God. But look how he becomes angry. And Mark chapter three, when the Pharisees wait to catch Jesus healing on the Sabbath, he asks them, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm? And when they didn't answer, it says, Jesus looked around at them with anger grieved at their hardness of heart. Jesus's anger is mingled with pity for the sinner. His anger is never devoid of love, even for the worst of his enemies. And this includes us. We were all once his enemies, we spit on him, we mocked him with our sin and rebellion.

30:51We chose to turn our backs on the king of kings. We hail ourselves as Lord of our lives and he has been incredibly patient with us. The Lord, the Lord, a God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love and faithfulness, our God is slow to enact his wrath. Instead, his mercy and his love run quickly to our aid. If we think even briefly about biblical texts, we see that even his enemies have been receivers of his slowness to anger. Even those who have not finally turned to him have received his patience. One Peter three tells us that God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, God was about to send these flood waters to destroy the wicked inhabitants of the earth.

31:46And he waits patiently. He gives them time, a whole ark to be constructed. Many days in Genesis 15, we're told that God will wait four generations before he cleanses canan of its idolatry or an God gives Pharaoh not one plague, not two, not three. He gives him nine chances to repent and let the people go before he finally takes the life of Pharaoh's firstborn son. Even in God's just wrath, he's patient. If you right now stand condemned apart from Christ because of your sin, you've not put your faith in him. And yet you are still upright and breathing, he's being incredibly patient to you, repent of your rebellion against him, take up his offer of mercy extended to you through Jesus Christ.

32:43God is perfectly righteous in his anger toward your sin, your sin demands punishment. And yet he has mercifully redirected his sin, his or his anger onto his very own son, to display the infinite riches of his grace towards you. Come to terms quickly with him while you can, lest he hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you be put in everlasting prison. But for my brothers and sisters who are trusting Christ this morning, some of you come eager to put off these sins as I do. And we cannot do it by our own strength. We too must look to that cross. And we must remember there is no greater display of righteous anger than what happened at that cross.

33:35There God poured out his just wrath against every sin you've ever committed, including that unrighteous anger that you dealt this morning to somebody. Even this moment of the cross is full of an outpouring of God's wrath. And yet it is not devoid of his love. Because in that moment, righteous anger and wonderful mercy collide, and we who deserved the full punishment of God's wrath are saved by another who hung and are stead. And I say to you, just let the meditation on the father's immense mercy and patience liberate you to love others, even the worst of your enemies, to be reconciled to your brothers and sisters, to your family members.

34:25Not only have you been rescued from the righteous anger of God, you've been given a new heart. You're no longer enslaved to murderous thoughts and attitudes. You've really been freed to love. And so Jesus' words here in Matthew do not condemn you. They offer you hope. Jesus illustrates for us the type of people he's making his kingdom citizens to be. This is what we are becoming that is hopeful. This is what he's made us to be. So what I'm calling you to is to behold God's patient mercy, his slowness to anger. And in doing so, I think what's gonna happen is it you're gonna be rid of your hatred and your quick temper and your bitterness towards those who have sinned against you.

35:14Do not forget how long suffering God has been with you, when he should have slaughtered you on the spot. Marvel at that and let it liberate you to be patient and kind and quick to forgive. And as you look to the mercy of Christ and you follow his example of perfect patience, you will become more and more like him, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love. So let me pray for us towards this end.

35:47Father, you have done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do by sending your own son and the likeness of sinful flesh. And for sin, he condemns sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. Oh Father, because of the righteousness of your son, we can really fulfill your law truly. So we lift our eyes up off of our sin and we rest them on Jesus. And as we look to him and as we remember his patience and his kindness, would you rid us of self-centered anger so that we might love others and love you? We ask in the name of Jesus, amen.

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Sermon Text

Matthew 5:21-26

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