Last week while I was at the weekly prison ministry down at the Tucker Unit, I talked with a young man for about a half hour about some spiritual struggles he was having and issues with his upbringing. My conversation reminded me of what we discussed on Sunday about killing, anger, and the sixth commandment.

This young man (we’ll call him John) grew up in rural northern Arkansas and was essentially raised by white supremacists. From an early age he was told to judge other people based off of appearances. Countless family members and friends of his had been involved in illicit activity, from weapons and drug trafficking to even murder. He talked about how a relative of his had killed someone because they “looked” hispanic.

Fortunately, a few years ago John had a conversion experience and came to know God’s all-inclusive love. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is–God loves us all equally and invites us to become a part of his family. John was also being mentored by two African American inmates in the program and growing in his faith each day. He would actually reach out to folks he knew from his previous life and try to evangelize them (even if they responded by insulting, threatening, or disowning him).

During my conversation with John, I noticed something very important about the sixth commandment and Jesus’ teachings in Matthew’s gospel:

Anger and killing are often on the same spectrum.

If we never address anger in our hearts, the outcome will never be pretty. Either we will become jaded and calloused to the world around us, or even worse, we might act on that anger and harm someone. This was clear in John’s family and their friends. They indulged in racially-motivated anger, believing that folks with nonwhite skin were to blame for all the world’s problems. And in the most extreme cases, this anger actually lead to murder itself. Personal hate produced more hate, and often that produced “public” sins of violence and terrorism.

As Christians, we subscribe to a completely different reality in God’s kingdom. I’m so grateful that John began to realize this as he pursued Jesus Christ. In our world filled with violence, we always must remember prophecies like Isaiah 2:4:

God will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.

In other words, the fullness of God’s kingdom has absolutely no hatred, violence, war, death, or destruction. Everyone will finally experience the hope and resurrection only Jesus can offer. When we finally live in God’s presence, we will experience the indescribable peace of Christ. There will be neither violence nor anger in the age to come.

The sixth commandment sounds so simple, yet it cuts to the heart of how we oftentimes view the world. We are tempted to think of our earthly struggles as ones that can be solved through violence. Our own personal struggles with violence might not be as extreme as John’s case, but we still struggle with it on a daily basis. As Christians, you and I are called to put our full faith and hope in Jesus alone.

Killing someone will not bring resolution. Neither will winning a war or even hitting someone back. Even indulging in anger will just leave you feeling unsatisfied in sin.

Jesus is the only thing that can fix our broken world.

Danny Silk is a pastor from California who specializes in Christian counseling. I’ve studied quite a bit of his material as part of a team building group I was in during college. I also often use his premarital counseling material with young couples, too. You can explore more of his organization Loving on Purpose by clicking here.

One of the crucial things I gleaned from Silk’s teaching is how he approaches human development. He argues that everyone has a toolbox, so to speak, filled with “tools” for interacting with one another. These include anything from conflict resolution to how we communicate love. Ideally, we would have a healthy, complete toolbox.

We received these “tools” from our parents and other adults we encountered from a very early age. We watch and observe how people interact with others. We see how a father treats his spouse, and vice versa. We see how a parent or relative interacts with a child. We learn about consequences when we are disciplined. And we learn from all these observations over the years. For example, when a parent treats a stranger with kindness, we gain that “tool” for ourselves–hopefully we remember in the future to imitate what we saw and be friendly to people we meet!

The problem, however, is that our toolboxes are always incomplete or deficient in some way or another. This problem obviously arises with dysfunctional families. Perhaps a mother did not control her anger too well, so we were left with a deficient “toolset” and are unable to control our emotions. Maybe a father always had a negative outlook on life, so he gave us a tendency to be worrisome or fearful. If we saw parents in our childhood resolve conflict through screaming and throwing dishes against the wall, there is a chance we might come to think of that act as “normal” for our future life. If we don’t develop healthy emotional tools, we are stuck with a broken toolbox.

And perhaps most notably, our emotional and psychological toolboxes become lacking when we have absent parent figures, too. If a father or mother was never around, children tend to look for other parental figures to learn about the world–whether that be from a grandparent, neighbor, relative, or even a depiction of parenthood on television or a movie. Sometimes, we are successful in gaining these missing tools from an absent mom or dad. Other times, we continue to struggle with how to communicate with people if the problem was never addressed.

Think about that for a moment and ask yourself these reflective questions…

What was my childhood like? Did I learn “good” things from my family? Were my parents supportive? Did my mother and father teach me about faith in Christ?

How did my parents treat me? How did they treat one another? Did they live out a healthy relationship? Or were did they deal with problems in an unhealthy way?

How did my parents fall short? Were one or both of them absent? How did that affect my upbringing? Did another parental figure help me? Or did I struggle with an incomplete emotional toolbox?

This all relates to the 5th commandment of honoring our father and mother. If our parent has given us great tools for our life’s toolbox, then that is obviously cause to be extremely thankful. As I mentioned yesterday, we don’t exactly live in a Jesus-centered culture, and have not been living in one for quite some time.

And this also impacts how we deal with broken parents, too. If our parent gave us lousy tools to face the world, we need to recognize where they fell short. It is important to identify these areas of sin from our family past in order to not repeat them again. Abuse is a major example of this in our world today, so it is important to address broken parts of our past.

Even if you had a picture perfect childhood with involved, faithful parents, we still often struggle with having broken or missing tools in our emotional and psychological health. Sometimes this is due to the mistakes of a mother or father. Other times we break them ourselves or refuse to put into practice what we’ve learned! The point is that we all need to consider what our toolbox looks like.

The good news is that despite our broken toolboxes, despite all our brokenness, and despite our struggles… God still loves us and accepts us. Keeping the 5th commandment means we realize that God is our heavenly parent. And the most important thing we could ever do to honor our earthly parents is to pray for, love, and share God’s grace with them.

The fourth commandment to keep the Sabbath is all about how we offer up our time to God. As Christians, we know we ought to live our entire life dedicated to God. That includes obvious things like giving our heart to God. It also means dedicating practical things like our finances by being generous towards people in need. But dedicating ourselves to God also includes using our time in a Godly manner, too. We usually forget about this important resource!

Taking time out of your week to worship God is a crucial part in keeping the fourth commandment. We are called to have this sacred time of rest in order to properly honor God with our work. As I preached on Sunday, we can obviously do that by worshipping on Sunday morning. But if you’re like me, however, chances are we need that regular Sabbath time. Daily devotion to God is obviously ideal, but chances are, we often struggle to make this a weekly, monthly, or otherwise infrequent commitment.

This means setting aside time to intentionally and directly praise God each day. It often helps to do some sort of devotional, pray with family, or even just sit in silence for five minutes. Regardless of how we practice Sabbath, the point is that we ought to budget our time, so to speak, to prioritize and remember our relationship with God.

Abraham Heschel was a Jewish theologian from the mid 20th century who often wrote on the importance of the Sabbath. His own work has influenced how I approach the fourth commandment. Here are some quotes from books he wrote about Sabbath rest:

• “The Sabbath is the most precious present humankind has received from the treasure house of God. All week long we think God is too far away… But on the sabbath, we can meet God.”
• “Zion is in ruins, Jerusalem lies in the dust. All week there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world, man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the earth.”
• “He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul. The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”
• “Unless you learn how to relish in the taste of sabbath, you will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.”

Sabbath is when we can experience God by setting aside time for rest. Honoring God with how we spend the time in our week is something we often overlook. Yet it is so important for us to seize this opportunity for divine intimacy, otherwise we risk drifting away from God.