Righteous anger (Ephesians 4:25-5:2)
What does it look like to be angry without sinning?
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I have always found “Be angry but do not sin” to be one of the most confounding passages in all of scripture. The obvious implication of the instruction is that it’s possible to be angry without any sin, and the perhaps-less-obvious implication is that anger can be an emotional state that is likely to involve temptation to sin. Paul does not, for example, apparently feel the need to say “be happy, but do not sin” or even “be sad, but do not sin.” Anger, with fear perhaps as a close second, is an emotion that is particularly liable to tempt us to sin.
