Anger is right when we respond to the right things in the right way. It is the appropriate response to sin and injustice. What provokes Jesus’ outburst in Luke 11 is the hypocrisy of the religious leaders and the way they prevent other people coming to God. The climax of his tirade is: “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering” (Luke 11:52). We begin to enjoy the anger of Jesus by understanding it as the flipside of his love.

Here’s a surprise. In preparation to write about how we relate to Jesus day by day in the here and now, I re-read the Gospels. I was looking out for how he related to people when he was on earth as pointers to how he relates to his people now from heaven. Much of what I found was what I expected. He cares, protects, energizes, touches, and intercedes for his people—then and now. But one thing took me by surprise: Jesus on earth was often angry.
His emotional state may not often be specified, but his words can be surprisingly sharp and his attitude shockingly abrasive. Consider what happens when he goes to the home of a Pharisee in Luke 11:37–54.
Jesus is angry at hypocrisy and injustice (Luke 11:37–54). Imagine the scene with me. Jesus enters a home. Instead of washing his hands, as custom dictated, he goes straight to the table and sits down. This is not a failure of personal hygiene—the Pharisees had extended the ceremonial cleanliness required of temple priests into everyday life. But Jesus deliberately ignores this expectation. Make no mistake: this is a provocative act.
A shocked hush descends, into which Jesus speaks, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness.” These are the first words anyone speaks. This is not a discussion that turned into an argument that then got heated. Right from the start, Jesus is confrontational. “Woe to you . . .”, he says three times. It’s as if Jesus is firing off accusations from a verbal machine gun. An expert in the law intervenes. “Teacher, when you say these things, you insult us also.” Big mistake. For Jesus then turns his fire on the experts in the law. They too get three “woes”—just like the Pharisees.
Then Jesus leaves. There’s no record of any food having been eaten! The religious leaders follow him out “to besiege him” with questions. It’s the language of violent assault, as if Jesus is a city under attack. Luke says they “began to oppose him fiercely.” We might say that things have turned ugly, but that would imply a preceding moment of calm!
This is the story told in Luke 11:37–54. But we see this confrontational posture throughout Luke’s Gospel. Here’s just a snapshot.

“Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort” (6:24–26).
“‘You hypocrites! . . .’ When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated.” (13:10–17).
“Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division” (12:51–53).
“When Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling.” (19:45–46).

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Even in life’s mundane tasks, God is shaping us into a people who beautifully reflect his glory to the world. Left to our own devices, we will never naturally drift toward holiness. We rely totally and completely on God to rewire us and re-mold us, making us more like his son, thereby making us more and more holy. Because he loves us so perfectly and immensely, there isn’t a moment of our existence that he won’t use to accomplish just that.

My laptop currently sits on our island in the middle of our kitchen, and I stand here typing while I flit between making coffee and unloading the dishwasher. When I was a kid my mom bemoaned my lack of ability to stick to one task until it was completed, a frustration I can totally empathize with now as a parent! She would tell me that I was “fluttering around” like an off-task butterfly, and I can’t help but laugh at how much that pattern persists in me today. So, as I land momentarily on this flower of writing, let me encourage you that whatever mundane task you put your hands to today, for whatever length of time, you can experience glory in the ordinary.
God’s glory is no small or trivial topic, and this article isn’t going to get anywhere near unpacking it as fully as humanly possible. But I’m thankful God gives us—his forgetful children—a vast array of gospel reminders. My husband recently defined glory in this way: “splendor, honor, fullness of, the most truthful expression of, weightiness.” We see this meaning of the word in a passage like Ephesians 1:11–14, which uses the phrase “to the praise of his glory” two separate times. The surprise to the believers is that it’s talking about us! We are meant to display God’s splendor.
If you’re like me, you may wonder, “How is my ordinary life supposed to honor the weightiness of who God is?”
Jesus Doesn’t Need Our PR
Whenever I’m confronted with difficult things in Scripture, I turn too quickly to my own fleshly solutions. If my life is meant to be to the praise of God’s glory, then I must need to step up my PR game and put a pretty picture out there for the world. Maybe God wants me to billboard my productivity or church involvement. Maybe my kids will model quick obedience or my written words will garner enough likes and shares to boost my brand of “good Christian.”
But the truth is Jesus doesn’t need our PR. We don’t craft or clean up Jesus’s image to help the world see his glory. He is already utterly glorious. As we submit to his kingship and allow his Spirit to mold us, we become more clear conduits for the glory that is already there. My best attempts at shining up the gospel apart from abiding in Christ serve more as blockages, like the clumps of mud and leaves I scooped out of our gutters this past fall. The living water of the gospel can’t flow through me powerfully when I pack in my own good works too.
When I try to give Jesus good PR by looking good on the outside but my heart is not resting in the finished work of Jesus, I subconsciously pass along a burden to those who actually need to hear Jesus say, “Come to me all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). His burden is easy and his yoke is light because he has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. Paul reminded the saints in Ephesus that, “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ . . . by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:4–5, 8).
God knows we tend to drift back toward our flesh, including our self-sufficiency and works based righteousness. The Spirit inspired Paul to make the grace-based nature of the gospel plain to his audience, and we still need those reminders today.
God has graciously given us his Word and his Spirit to constantly course-correct and return us to the fountain of living water. Ad fontes, or back to the sources, was not only a necessary war cry during the Reformation, but also a needed, daily reminder for Christians in 2022.
I know I’m falling into the “Be good PR for Jesus” trap when I desperately hope people are impressed by me. Or when I walk away from an interaction thinking, “Wow, she is awesome,” rather than, “Wow, Jesus is awesome!” These moments point out to me that it’s actually my own PR that I am most concerned with, not Jesus’s, and the greatest threat to that is confession of sin.
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Written by Jared C. Wilson |
Sunday, May 14, 2023

You may not comprehend all that’s happening to you, but you can remind yourself of the purposes of the One working it toward your eventual good. That’s what I’m going to do with my “anxious nothings”—ask God to take them away and believe that, even if He doesn’t, He is still good, still here, still actively working in my life to complete my joy and glorify Himself.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was about forty-five minutes from preaching the closing session of the seminary’s annual student conference. Sitting in my office and scrolling through my phone while listening to the session before mine on the livestream, I suddenly felt something very wrong.
My heart rate began to surge. I had the overwhelming sensation of my body “shutting down.” I felt internally as though I was seizing up and was about to die. Beginning to panic, I decided I needed to exit my office and enter a public area where I might access help. I thought I might be having a heart attack.
Sitting down on a couch in the foyer, I signaled security that I was in distress. EMTs arrived, stretcher in tow. After being examined, I opted not to go to the hospital. My wife came to get me and took me home, and the next day we went to see the doctor.
Blood was drawn. My heart was scanned. My personal and family history was scoured.
It was determined I had not suffered a heart attack. The diagnosis? Anxiety-induced panic attack.
This was not a total surprise to me, as I’ve been experiencing sporadic “flashes” of panic over the last six or seven years, always while driving. I’d never suffered an attack outside that context, and it didn’t feel quite the same. It felt more severe. I’d never felt before that I needed emergency services or that I was about to die. Now I’ve learned that this thing has been building, and it can strike any time.
Part of me wished they had found something else. Something they could go in and take out. Something they could “clean up” or fix. Instead I have . . . anxiety. Even when I don’t feel particularly nervous about anything.
“What were you doing when it happened?” people keep asking.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just sitting there.”
“Were you nervous about speaking?”
“No.”
“Were you agitated about something?”
“No. I was literally just sitting at my desk, killing time.”
I am literally “anxious for nothing.”
I have had people throw Bible verses my way, none of which have I been unfamiliar with. The top recommendation is of course Philippians 4:6-7: “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”
But it’s not that kind of anxiety.
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