Peace Over Anger

Hey everyone, this is Josh from Encounter Church Henley and thanks so much for tuning

in to our podcast.

Our prayer is that through this podcast you can have an encounter with Jesus that will

change your life.

And now get ready for an inspiring message from our preaching team.

Hey church.

Thanks man.

It is nice when somebody says hello back, that's always a good start.

Just give me half a second here, it's always that first initial clumsiness as we come up.

I might actually start with a little bit of prayer today.

Feels like one of those weeks.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that we have the opportunity to join together like this.

I pray that the words that I speak today will glorify you, will be of you and from you.

I am merely your vessel.

Amen.

So I want to speak today.

I'm going to start by talking about a date, not that long ago.

January 1st 2020.

Seven children in Sydney went out for a walk to get ice cream.

It was a nice treat to end a hot summers day.

On the other side of town a gentleman by the name of Samuel Davidson has been on an all

day bender and he heads out in his youth to do a quick ATM run.

During the process he runs red light, crosses a double lined road, accelerates to 130 kilometres

an hour to pass a vehicle he considers is moving too slow and he loses control of the

youth.

His vehicle mounts the curb.

Anthony, Angelina, Anciena Abdullah and their younger cousin Veronica never stood a chance.

All four pass away at the scene.

Three younger siblings that were all with them are rushed to the hospital with various

injuries.

One spends almost 80 days in hospital in recovery.

How are you feeling?

A little bit mad yet?

Davidson records a blood alcohol reading of 0.182 at the scene.

A 12 hour binge of beer, vodka and cocaine ends here.

How about now?

A little bit mad yet?

This was the kicker for me.

Davidson's computer on board the youth shows that at the time of the crash the accelerator

was fully depressed.

No attempt had been made to put on the brake in the five seconds preceding or post the point

of collision.

As a result for innocent lives taken countless others altered forever.

Families broken.

How about now?

I'll be honest.

That story just rises a sense of anger in me that I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit.

As a parent there's just genuinely no tragedy more or less imaginable.

I just think of my own experiences, my own time with my kids, swimming lessons and laughing

at the dinner table and I love used before bed and those are all gone in an instant.

These families are now forced to live out a nightmare that is absolutely beyond belief.

Now as a human being there's no doubt you hear a story like that of the Abdulers or

something awful that's happened to a friend or something that's hurt you deeply and you

see that the title of today's sermon is peace over anger and there is part of you that goes

I cannot fathom in that instance trading one feeling for the other.

Now part of that is natural by the way.

We as people we have an inbuilt fight or flight mechanic.

We're actually hardwired to elicit emotions like fear and panic and anger quickly.

Joy, happiness, peace.

They take a little bit more time to register.

And social psychologists have actually proven that emotions not just that feeling within

us but those motions, fear and anger they spread much quicker than emotions like joy

and happiness, emotions like peace.

That's how are we meant to choose a path of peace when the wide road of anger is so available

to us.

Now Romans 12 says that we can and we should choose the path of peace.

We do so because evil and anger perpetuate their own cycle but peace breaks it.

When we hear words like never meet evil with evil you could just as easily read that as

never meet anger with anger.

Why do we not want to do this?

It's because these emotions and their reactions they tend to intensify as they go on.

They don't tend to soften, they tend to intensify and they escalate and that kind of creates

that perpetual cycle of anger within us.

Little example Thursday.

Thursday sucked for me personally.

I got home grumpy from work.

Kara's like amen.

I had an early start to the day.

I had a late finish to the day.

I was like maybe I'll just sneak in the food shopping.

My mind is swirling because earlier in the day, Tim, Pastor Tim and I had had a text exchange

in which we realised that we have very different definitions of edit and rewrite.

These are, we've cleared the air there now.

So we've had some very different definitions and now it's 8.30 at night and I am actually

staring down the barrel of a blank page that is meant to hold a sermon that I'm preaching

right now.

Then Kara says are you okay?

I'm fine.

I'm fine.

I'm fine because I was totally fine.

I was not fine.

A decision needs to be made in this moment which is I can either escalate or I can look

down at to a laptop with a header that says peace over anger and go, are you an idiot?

Lucky for me, I mostly chose that.

Now anger again is perpetual.

Peace is a cycle breaker.

I didn't have, I didn't actually have a bad day.

I had a long day.

I didn't have a bad day.

What I had though was a day that kind of had a series of little moments that I then let

set my mindset towards disappointment and anger.

And it turned to the negative and then I just kind of let anger take the wheel there for

a minute.

I wonder if you can relate.

These small moments and then that transition to anger was super quick.

And it only took like one small shock to the system to provide me with a little bit of

clarity to create that little circuit breaker.

And then it kind of makes you realize if you take that moment to reflect of like what would

have happened if I had in that exact moment responded with really explosive anger instead

of my little underlying anger instead.

Instead of choosing to try and align a little bit closer to that path of peace.

How quickly could I have done like really, really, really long standing damage to those

people around me and to myself like that?

Which leads us to Jesus, right?

Like, thank God, hopefully in this room we always do.

But in this exact moment, Jesus says, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn

to him the other also.

Now, why?

Because Jesus is asking us to do two things with this statement.

He's asking us to rise above actual acts of injustice.

But because he knows us better than we know us, he's also asking us to rise above perceived

acts of injustice.

He knows how quickly we can take that one bad moment and we twist that in a bad way

or take it to its extreme and in that we turn a brother to an enemy or a co-pastor or a

wife.

Right?

There lies, but it doesn't take long to get ourselves there.

Right?

And that's why we turn the other cheek.

So that if we do respond at all, we respond with hopefully nobility and humility and not

anger and frustration.

Because sometimes through the peaceful act of simply not responding, we can turn people's

expected reaction to us, from us to those that reflect Jesus, which is really what all

of this is always designed to point back to.

Because the path of peace actually aligns and resolves with this kind of next point,

this fact is that we can actually just trust in the justice of God.

Now Paul tells us specifically, we never take revenge.

We never take revenge, but God takes revenge, but isn't God a loving God?

Yeah, of course he is.

His love for us is also why at times he is an angry God.

And we don't need to take revenge because God is angry about the things that make us

angry.

Okay?

And I think we hear that sometimes and I do.

This is where I got stuck.

Like, this has been a week.

I get stuck on a bit of this.

You hear things like God's anger and wrath and this and you just kind of get stuck because

I don't want to think of God that way.

I didn't.

Right?

And then when I reflect, I went, I'm actually really glad that God at times is an angry

God because I want a God that sees evil and injustice in the world and says no.

And he gets mad about it.

AWTOSA has this beautiful line, which is justice is not something God has.

Justice is something that God is.

So, where does that leave us?

It leaves us wanting a God that sees pain and abuse and chooses to say no and sometimes

has to meet that with anger.

Now I want God to be the one that carries the wrath and desire for justice over me, not

over me, but instead of me, if you will.

Because truth be told, I just think that God is better at being angry than I am.

Because God is just and loving and impartial and he loves you and he loves me with a passion

that we just simply can't understand.

So I want you to run an exercise for me, which is just think of the person in the world that

makes you feel the most warm and fuzzy.

When you see them or when you get a hug from them, it could be your partner.

It made me think of my granny Audrey is kind of this person.

She was this big woman.

She was beautiful.

But when she hugged you, she just like wrapped you up.

It was amazing, right?

And I want you to think about that and just think about how personal that felt, how deep

those kind of loving embraces can feel from someone.

You know when you hug someone, you kind of get little tingles on the back of your neck.

That kind of love, right?

That's that for me, that's that little earthly reminder of God's love for us.

And then that reminder that we have to have, that God loves our enemies and those that

perpetrate things against us, just like that as well.

That's not just for us, it's for them too.

Now I find it hard to muster up the same kind of enthusiasm for that kind of love.

I'm happy to be the benefactor.

I'm happy to be the recipient, not so enthused to be the provider.

But we actually need that mindset.

We need that thought of the path of peace.

We want our hurts and our wrongs to be set right.

But more often than not, we want them set right in a way that appeals to us, in a way

that makes sense to us.

But God doesn't work that way.

God's not only the breaker of chains, He's the breaker of cycles.

And if we can just learn to trust Him to do just that, we're edging ever, ever closer

to that very narrow path of peace that we're pursuing.

And if we can see that path and we can recognize what it is and we can recognize our need to

walk it, how do we do so?

We can do that.

There's two really obvious ways for me.

One of them is going to sound really familiar.

One's probably slightly easier on its face than the other.

So we'll start with that, which is you can pray for those that you are angry with.

You're going to notice a theme the longer you're encountering, Henley.

But often one of these is going to be prayer.

Enjoy.

Right?

It's really hard to choose peace over anger.

Really, really hard.

Now, it's especially hard because we know now that our very impulses, our very humanity,

has us wired against that.

So we are tuned towards instant and negative reactions.

So that then our duty becomes to not just sit in that, take that to God.

Now, this is a starting point.

We take it to God.

And what if we did that and we prayed to begin with, if we're not ready to jump straight

to the person that we are angry with, what if we prayed for us, for our own anger, for

our own evils, for the things that have been perpetrated and acted against us?

Start there.

Just start praying.

Can I find the peace to rise above this?

To either not respond at all or to be able to respond with a touch of the divine that

may allow us to respond with peace, maybe even love.

And then maybe that'll allow us to pray for the perpetrator themselves.

So again, that steps really, really hard.

So we don't start there.

We build to it, right?

We start with that sense of peace.

We start not necessarily by praying for them or praying for this release, but maybe we

can pray like, hey, God, can you meet them where they are?

That recognition that maybe we can't, maybe we're not ready yet.

And maybe it's about chipping away, right?

Maybe I can pray that maybe I can just start to see them the way that God sees them.

Maybe if I can start to see them a little bit the way that God sees them, maybe I can

start to see them as that beloved child of God that I hopefully can recognize that I

am.

And maybe I can start to see a little bit of that in them.

And you'll know, church, that these steps don't involve praying for justice, imploring

God to change the outcome to meet our personal desire.

All we're doing in this prayer is trying to align ourselves with Jesus' vision for

His church and for His people.

I don't know if you've ever done anything praying for these people that have hurt you

or tried to pray for a situation you're not sure how to resolve, somebody at work that's

bothering you, a family member, et cetera.

It's actually really hard to pray for someone and not feel your heart soften just a touch.

To not feel yourself feel that little bit warmer.

At the minimum you should start to see their own humanity.

Maybe if we're lucky we'll see that identity as a child of God.

A child of God you may be at odds with, odds with, but a child of God nonetheless.

And if you find yourself able to break that cycle through prayer, you may find yourself,

you may find yourself able to go with the most radical act of peace that you can offer

another human being.

And that's forgiveness.

Nelson Mandela says that resentment is like drinking poison and hoping that it will kill

your enemies.

Now if resentment and anger are the poison we need an antidote and forgiveness is the

best antidote that God can offer us and in turn that we can offer others.

Matthew 6 14 tells us if you forgive others their transgressions your heavenly father will

forgive you.

Because make no mistake we have been forgiven too.

We have hurt.

We have sinned.

We have chosen anger over peace.

We have chosen the world over Jesus time and time again and yet still we are forgiven.

Still we are loved.

Will Jesus choose his peace for us?

I didn't make this a point on a slide but I want to make it a point in what I say.

If you are a Christian, forgiveness is a non-negotiable.

God's love and forgiveness of us is the very heart of the gospel.

How can we receive this is true.

Allow it to create a very foundation for our lives and then just go I am going to let that

stay and sit with me.

Forgiveness is a gift that has been given to us but God's vision was never that we just

kind of get it and take it and keep it.

There is an endless supply.

The idea has always been that we are to dole that out as much as we can.

You can continue to give it and you will never ever dwindle your own supply.

Forgiveness is the hardest but surest way to provide a consistent reminder to someone

of the narrow path that we are looking to follow and a way that we can shine a light

onto that path for others.

Ben, you can come back up.

The Abdullas chose the narrow path of peace through prayer and a trust in the justice

of God which actually culminated in the most radical act of peace imaginable, that forgiveness

we were talking about.

On the 2nd of February, if you remember back in the beginning of the story, that car crash

happened on the 1st of February.

On the 2nd of February, 36 hours after the crash, three of her children's bodies are

not yet laid to rest and Lila Abdullas speaks to the media from the roadside vigil of the

crash site.

This is her quote.

The guy, I know he was drunk driving on this street but right now I can't hate him.

I don't want to see him but I don't hate him.

I think in my heart to forgive him but I want the court to be fair.

It's all about fairness.

I'm not going to hate him because that's not who we are.

So husband Danny, Danny and I were so blessed to have six kids.

We love our kids so much.

We tried to focus on their spiritual side more than anything.

We tried to teach them to pray the rosary, to read the Bible and to share God's faith.

Now her husband Danny took sharing his faith one step further than I can possibly imagine.

I've spent hours pouring over this story and articles and stuff in the buildup to this

and it still shocks me.

Once convicted, Danny Abdullas went and visited Samuel Davidson in prison.

Again his quote, for me it gave me not closure but it helped me move along in my life through

the journey that I'm in.

He said the main reason for his forgiveness of Samuel Davidson aside from his faith was

that he did not want the feeling of revenge and bitterness and anger in his household that

could be passed down to his kids.

Danny Abdullas knew that he and his family needed an antidote.

He had a desire to walk a journey to break that cycle of anger to ensure it didn't become

a legacy for his children.

He did so with a choice to walk the narrow path of forgiveness and that ended miraculously

not only with a visit to Samuel Davidson to forgive him in prison but in Jesus' name

Samuel Davidson is now also a follower of Jesus.

Now if you're like me you're probably sitting there going, man what those Abdullas, those

comments they've made, the acts that they've taken, that is amazing.

And it is amazing but it shouldn't be.

It doesn't look like it on its face but they actually chose the simpler path, not the easy

one but the one to them was the only path.

A radical act of forgiveness being the closest approximation they could offer of Jesus'

own radical act of forgiveness.

Abdullas took the weight of our sin on his shoulders.

An innocent man put to death forever ensuring that our cycles were broken too.

The most extreme example of peace and forgiveness that could possibly be shown, literally creating

that path of peace that we so desperately need to walk.

As Jesus hung, mounted to a cross, now is driven through his hands, his crucifixion

the result of a wrongful arrest and a sham trial.

His executioner sat mocking him and even then not anger but an intercession on their behalf.

Refusing even then to give in to anger he prayed, forgive them father, they know not

what they do.

He hung on that cross not just for us but for them too.

He ended up just hanging on the cross for the Abdullas and their kids.

He hung on the cross for Samuel Davidson as well.

No anger, no retaliation, forgiveness being laid as the very stones that line that path

of peace under our feet.

We recognize that we have a God that conquered death but far too often we choose to show

through our actions that we don't always believe he can conquer the deepest and darkest fears

in our hearts and in us.

So as we come to a close today and we stand in worship, I need you to see that this chosen

path of peace is not just for the benefit of those that may have wronged you but it

is for your benefit too.