Before the Sun Goes Down

When Paul writes “Be angry, yet do not sin” in Ephesians 4:26, he is quoting the fourth psalm, where David says, “Be angry, yet do not sin; on your bed, search your heart and be still” (Psalm 4:4). Neither David nor Paul pretends that God’s people never feel anger. Jesus Himself, in a synagogue on the Sabbath, “looked around at them with anger and sorrow at their hardness of heart” (Mark 3:5), and in the very next moment He healed a man’s withered hand. His anger served His love and never turned into sin. With us it is different, because in a single heated moment we can move from feeling angry to saying or doing something wrong.

James offers a sequence that helps explain how we cross that line. He asks that we be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.” These three instructions belong together, and in our experience, when we speak before we have really listened, our words come out fast and sharp, and anger follows close behind them. When we listen first, we slow down, and there is time for the Lord to calm us before we answer. James then adds that “man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness that God desires.” Even when we are right about the issue, our anger cannot produce what God is after in our home. A husband or a wife may win an argument with raised voices, yet neither of them becomes more like Christ through that kind of win.

Scripture speaks to both the start and the finish of our anger. James asks us to be slow to begin, and Ephesians asks us to be quick to end, as Paul writes, “Do not let the sun set upon your anger.” This gives anger a daily limit. Paul is not saying that every disagreement must be fully settled before bedtime, since some conversations need more time and a clearer mind. Rather, the sunset marks the point at which we lay the anger itself down, even if the topic remains open. When we keep anger overnight, it tends to grow into resentment, and a few verses later Paul lists “bitterness” first among the things we are to get rid of (Ephesians 4:31).

Paul adds, “and do not give the devil a foothold.” A foothold is a small place to stand, the kind a climber needs before he can pull himself higher. When we nurse our anger, we give our enemy exactly that kind of small place in our home. From there he can stir up suspicion and turn a single bad evening into a long season of distance. Thus, setting our anger down before the day ends protects our marriage as well as obeying God’s word.

The psalm that Paul quotes also shows us how to set anger down. David writes, “on your bed, search your heart and be still.” When a conversation begins to overheat, it is often wise for us to stop talking for a while so that we can bring our hearts before the Lord. Proverbs observes, “A fool vents all his anger, but a wise man holds it back” (Proverbs 29:11). Holding anger back in this sense is different from burying it. It means stepping away long enough to be still before God, to ask what is really stirring in us, and to receive His peace, and then coming back to the conversation at a time we have agreed on.

When we do come back, Ephesians 4:29 gives the goal for our words. Paul asks that we speak “only what is helpful for building up the one in need and bringing grace to those who listen.” Our spouse is the one who listens to us more than anyone else, so our spouse is also the first person our words can either wound or bless. Words that bring grace rarely come from willpower in the middle of a hard evening. They come as we turn to the Lord and let His kindness toward us shape what we say to each other.

The Lord Jesus is our example here. Peter writes, “When they heaped abuse on Him, He did not retaliate; when He suffered, He made no threats, but entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). Jesus did not need to settle every wrong at the moment it happened, because He trusted His Father with the outcome. As His life grows in us, we can do the same, and we can hand the unresolved parts of a disagreement to the Father instead of holding them in anger.

Before the sun sets today, if something still stands between you, bring it to the Lord together and ask Him for the grace to set it down.