“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” Ephesians 4:31
When we give our lives to Jesus, we are supposed to change things about ourselves. We are to change our attitude, our values, our thoughts, our words, and our actions. The reason we are to change these things is because before we give our lives to Jesus, we are filled with fleshly desires. Our fleshly desires encourage us to think the way the world thinks. The world tells us that we should seek revenge when we have been hurt, we should become angry when we don’t get our own way, and we should talk about people, even spread lies about them to make ourselves look better than we are. This is not the way to think in the kingdom of God.
Obviously as sinners, we all participate in these thoughts and behaviors to varying degrees. Some people possess and express very little, if any, of some of these whereas others possess and express a larger amount of them. We are all different and we all need to work on how we handle our thoughts and behaviors. Once we give our lives to Jesus, these changes do not occur over night, we need to work on them, ask for help from God and give their control over us to Jesus.
In this verse, Paul was talking to the Christians in Ephesus and he was encouraging them to be united in their service to Christ. The church of Ephesus was diverse in multiple categories, there were married couples and widows, children and older people, wealthy people and poorer people, Jewish people and Gentiles, and people who were of higher status than others. While this diversity should have given the church at Ephesus a wonderful opportunity to be able to understand and work with individuals from all of those areas of life, it hindered them instead.
They were very used to being segregated in their economical status, their nationalities and their neighborhoods. The idea of a Jewish person working along side a Samaritan was unheard of and the Christians in Ephesus were struggling. There was fighting, there were arguments about who should be doing what based on their status or their ‘right’ to hold a position because of their nationality and there was bitterness as some of the Christians thought differently about division of assets.
When you put a diverse group together like this one, there are going to be challenges whether they are Christians or not, they are still humans with thoughts and feelings. That is when our individual work with Jesus begins, the moment we accept Jesus and then agree to work on ridding ourselves of the world’s way and adopting Jesus’s way of living.
Our growth as a Christian and the changing of our thoughts and actions such as bitterness, rage, slander, malice, anger and fighting are directly connected to each other. As we approach the throne of God and ask for help with these areas, we can choose to change our thoughts about others and how we interact with them. however our minds are complex and simply stopping being angry isn’t enough, we need to replace those thoughts with different thoughts so we don’t resume our old behaviors.
So what do we replace those thoughts and actions with? Come back tomorrow and find out………