Wild Horses: Tame Your EmotionsSample

In Matthew 21, we have a recorded fact that tells us about a time when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became angry. In colorful detail, Matthew regales us with the account of what happens when the zeal of the Lord breaks forth in righteous indignation. Cut to Jerusalem, and the scene is the Second Temple. However, instead of a house of worship, we find a marketplace.

In this text, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, is angry. He walks into the Second Temple in the center of Jerusalem and goes into a state of rage. Why? Did He sin? Or was His anger righteous and justified? You can be angry and not sin. You can be filled with righteous zeal and indignation and passion and give no cause for sin to overtake you. Jesus showed us how.

Living a righteous life doesn’t mean you get along with everyone you meet. One day, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue. But His message was not all about feeling good.

He said, “Either assume the tree to be good as well as its fruit good, or assume the tree to be bad as well as its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. You offspring of vipers, how can you, being evil, express any good things? For the mouth speaks from that which fills the heart” (Matthew 12:33–34, NASB). He called the congregation gathered there that day a generation of vipers and hypocrites, snakes and fakes.

It’s both a comfort and a challenge to consider that Jesus didn’t get along with everybody. It’s a comfort because we can’t get along with everybody either. It’s a challenge because it makes us think about the divine nature of Christ, and we come face-to-face with the fact that God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours.

What is His divine nature, really? When Jesus entered the temple that day, to Him, it was the house of God. The zeal of the Lord consumed Him because He knew it was to be a house of prayer.

What is the issue that you have made the cause of your life? Does zeal for the house of the Lord consume you? Or have you let the pleasures of life and the desire for other things sway your emotions and seduce you into the trappings of the world?