The Pastor's Pen
The Pastor’s Pen is a weekly devotional space where our pastor offers reflections, spiritual insights, and words of encouragement rooted in scripture and everyday life. These writings are meant to challenge, inspire, and draw us closer to God and one another as we seek to live out our faith with boldness and compassion. Whether offering comfort, conviction, or a call to action, each column invites us into deeper discipleship and shared community.
It is typically posted on Thursday each week.
“In God’s Household” - Eph. 2:19 | July 10, 2025
Let’s be honest. A mad Jesus makes us nervous. When he turns over the tables at the Temple courtyard, throws the traders’ money as far as he can toss it, and runs
off the sacrificial animals by cracking a whip, we take spiritual cover. Who knew he could do such things? And if he did that, what else could he do?
Anger is hard enough to handle; its unpredictability, though, may be the worst part. What will set it off is the big unknown.
There seems to be a lot of anger around our country these days. Unfortunately, the problem is getting worse. It doesn’t help that the social media fans the flames. Anger at some point loses reasonable bearings. Typically, it ends discussion, chokes off dialogue and negotiation.
Which is what makes “righteous anger” so perplexing for most of us. How can something so destructive be “righteous”? The Bible has many examples of “righteous anger,” more frequently among the prophets.
Righteous anger isn’t about blind referees, or political passions, or aggravation at not getting your way. “Righteous anger” is an outrage over injustice. It is a fury at watching the weak being overpowered by the strong, and the innocent charged guilty while the guilty go free.
The purpose of righteous anger is to first empower the powerless and then to mobilize the comfortable. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that the biggest “stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” was not the actions of the so-called bad people, but the apathy of the so-called good people.
Righteous anger moves us from a warm and comfortable personal faith, through an acute awareness of the suffering of others and the realization that personal faith cannot develop separated from that suffering.
The practice of righteous anger doesn’t mean we all stay mad till we need high blood pressure medicine. It means we actively acknowledge injustice in the world, take that anger to God, and then wait to see where God takes us. When Jesus starts turning over tables, you see, you want to be following behind him, not in front of him.
~ Dr. Tim Moore
