SERMON: Wisdom And A Trained Mouth

The Being of Wisdom and the Need for Regeneration

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word and may the Lord be with you. Over the last four sermons in this wisdom mini series, we've been laying down a foundation for what Christian wisdom is. And I guess the whole book of Proverbs is technically about that.

So we could just preach the whole book, but we've kind of been covering a highlight reel. We've been watching the stone skip across the top of the nice glassy surfaced pond, as it were. And we've been studying what you might call the anatomy of wisdom.

And the anatomy of wisdom is just simply what we've been looking at, the eyes that are used for wisdom, the ears, the mind, the heart, the feet. And we've seen how all of these faculties are involved in the process of gaining and living out wisdom.

But our focus over the last four weeks has actually been not on what we must do or the doing of wisdom. Instead, we've been focused on what you might call the being of wisdom. We've been asking the question is, what does God have to do in a man in order for that man to become wise?

And our answer has most certainly not been, well, just try harder. Just grin, grit it, and bear with it, and just do more, be more religious, say your Hail Marys, do your little rosary beady thingies, and just, you're gonna be great.

Our answer has not been that. Our answer has not been make your eyes just look at better stuff, make your ears just wanna hear better stuff, make your heart love things better, make your feet walk better.

And if you can do all of that, if you can juggle all of that, keep all those plates spinning, then you'll somehow be wise and pleasing to God. No, we've not said that. We've said the opposite of that.

We've said that in our fallen condition, we can't please God at all, that our eyes won't see because they're blind, our ears won't hear because they're deaf, our hearts beat after nothing but death because their hearts have stolen, and our feet run eagerly to evil, as the scriptures say, in our flesh.

Sin doesn't merely give an otherwise healthy man a few bad habits. Sin corrupts the totality of man. That's why we call it total depravity, that we are depraved across the totality of our being. Which means that when it comes to wisdom, we can't simply implement a kind of veneer level, surface level, try harder behavioral improvement plan, and assume that wisdom is gonna somehow automagically appear.

We cannot simply take a spiritually dead man and spray a few drops of cologne on it and call it good. The Bible says that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, which means that you cannot have wisdom if you don't fear God.

And as we know, you will not fear God unless you belong to him. Because the natural man's eyes are blind, and God has to open those eyes. The natural man's ears are deaf, God has to open those ears. The natural man's heart is of stone, he has to give him a heart of flesh.

The natural man needs God in order to even walk for God. And that's precisely what God has done when he saved us. He's put his spirit inside of us. He's regenerated our deadness. He's given us life where there once was only death.

He's planted the fear of God inside of us as a gift that we did not work to obtain pure grace. And then by the Holy Spirit's work, that work begins changing us, changing the whole man from the inside out so that we actually become people who love God instead of hate God.

We become people who hate sin instead of love sin. We become people who want to grow in wisdom because God has put the fear of God in us and wisdom comes downstream of that. He opens our eyes to want to see things that are true, good, and beautiful.

He opens our ears to long to hear the truth of God. He opens our hearts to be able to love Christ and love his people. He turns our feet from paths of sin and ruin to walk in the paths of righteousness like a tree planted by streams of living water.

And all of that, and all of what we've talked about that we can't, Christ can, all of that has been absolutely necessary for us to establish a theology of wisdom because without Christ, there is no wisdom because he is the very wisdom of God.

Now today, we're gonna build on that foundation by changing our emphasis just a little bit because for the last four weeks, we've been primarily talking about the being of wisdom. Now today, we're gonna be talking about the doing of wisdom.

And we're gonna ask the question, now that God has opened up our eyes, what must those eyes do? Now that God has awakened our ears, what's the responsibility for us and what we listen to? Now that God has regenerated our heart, what is it that we are supposed to feel?

And today specifically, we're gonna be talking about the tongue. What must God do with our mouths now that he saved us? What must we now therefore do in the way that we speak, in the way that we praise, in the way that we critique, in the way that we complain?

What must we do? And to do that, we're gonna be asking one fundamental question, how do you train your mouth to be wise as a Christian? And we're gonna be looking at that with three different points. The first is we must train the heart first.

The second is we must pump the brakes on our mouth. And then the third is we must actually guard our tongue. Those are three things we're gonna be looking at. I'm gonna read some passages, we're gonna get into it.

So here we go. Proverbs 10, verse 14. Wise people store up knowledge, but the mouth of the foolish is near destruction. Proverbs 12, 23. A prudent man conceals knowledge, but the heart of fools proclaims foolishness.

Proverbs 16, 23. The heart of the wise teaches his mouth and adds learning to his lips. Proverbs 17, 20. He who has a deceitful heart finds no good and he who has a perverse tongue falls into evil. Proverbs 17, 28.

Even a fool is counted wise when he holds his peace. When he shuts his lips, he's considered perceptive. Proverbs 18, 2. A fool has no delight in understanding, but in expressing his own heart. Proverbs 18, 4.

The words of a man's mouth are deep waters. The wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook. Proverbs 21, 23. Whoever guards his mouth and tongue keeps his soul from trouble. And then Proverbs 29, 20. Do you see a man's hasty in his words?

There's more hope for a fool than him. So obviously Proverbs has a lot to say about our tongue and our mouth. That is just a sample of the verses. We're gonna do an entire series on communication. But until then, let's pray.

Amen. God, thank you that you have given us such practical wisdom in your word, that you've brought the beautiful, glorious theology of the scriptures down to the level that affects even our speech and our habits and our patterns.

Lord, we thank you that you have instructed us on how to live with wisdom, how to live in a way that's honoring to you, even in our habits. Lord, I thank you that there are many different things that we could be talking about today.

We could talk about the beauties and the glories of the triune God. We could talk about the depth of your humanity and your divinity, the hypostatic union. We could talk about justification by faith alone.

We could talk about sanctification. We could talk about any number of glorious doctrines. And today we get to talk about how to practically wield the tongue as a weapon of holiness for your glory and honor.

A Trained Heart Teaches the Mouth

And Lord, I thank you for that opportunity. May we use it for your glory and may we learn how to use our tongues in the service of you. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. So after we've become Christians, after we've been reconciled to Christ, after the Spirit has came into our heart and began the work of remaking us into people who fear God, well, we have to ask the question, where does he want to remake us?

And one of the most obvious places that he wants to remake us is in our mouth and in our tongue. And Solomon begins with that very fact. How do we do that as Christians? How do we as believers actually have a reformation of the mouth?

Well, he begins in Proverbs 16, 23, by saying this. The heart of the wise man teaches his mouth and adds learning to his lips. So that's the first point. A trained heart actually is going to train the mouth.

He doesn't say that a wise mouth is gonna create a wise heart. He doesn't put mouth before heart. He actually says that the heart that is given over to wisdom is the thing that's gonna train the mouth.

The heart is the headwater, the mouth is the river. And that's very important for us to understand and remember. It means that the very first place you go to train your mouth is not your mouth. Which is astounding.

I've been doing some lifting lately. And if I wanna train my chest, I do bench presses. If I wanna train my shoulders, I do shoulder presses. It's kind of obvious. The thing I wanna train, I go train.

Not here. If you wanna train your mouth, you go to your heart. You have to begin further upstream because it's the heart, it's the control center that fuels the mouth. It's because the heart is our teacher.

The mouth is simply the student. Jesus says this in Luke 6, 45. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good. And an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil.

For out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. Notice what Jesus is saying here. He doesn't describe the mouth as an autonomous, independent criminal doing its own mischievous, maleficent work.

He says the mouth can only speak what the heart already is. And sadly, we get so confused over this concept, especially in the modern world. Let me give you an example. It's getting ready to be fall and apple picking is like a thing in New England.

I didn't know this until I moved here and I was like, everybody does this. They don't just go to the grocery store and buy their apples, they go pick them. Okay, we didn't do that in North Carolina because we don't have apple trees.

I guess it's too hot. Anyway, you walk into an orchard in October and imagine that you take a Louisville slugger and you begin slamming it against the tree. Well, it's a good chance that an apple is gonna fall off of an apple tree.

No one would be confused by that. No one would think that's crazy. What they would think is crazy is you going bananas and berserk over an apple tree, but that's a different story. My point is that apples fall from apple trees.

Well, in a similar way, we should not be surprised when angry words come out of angry people. We shouldn't be surprised when boastful words come out of prideful people. We shouldn't be surprised when filthy words come out of perverted people or anxious words out of fearful people.

We're watching the same apple tree principle play out whenever we watch what someone is speaking from out of the heart, the mouth speaks. And this ought to alert us to something actually really important and that is the fruit of your language tells you about the fruit of your heart.

The words themselves tell you about the soul of the worshiper, whether they're healthy or whether they're sick, whether they're free in Christ or whether they're slaves to sin, whether they're captive by fear or bound in pride or everything in between.

And this also means that one of the greatest mistakes that you and I can ever make with our own tongue is treating our sinful speech as if it's just a mouth problem. I've said this, you've probably said this as well, man, I really need to clean up my language.

Man, I need to really stop being so sarcastic. I need to stop yelling. I need to have better communication skills. I need to stop saying that particular word. And maybe perhaps all of that's true, but none of that actually goes deep enough to address the problem.

You can polish or you can wash out the bucket, but if you're still dipping it into the septic tank, it doesn't really change anything, does it? You can polish the faucet, but if it's connected to a muddy river, it doesn't make anything any better.

And this is because the mouth doesn't manufacture the contents that are coming out of it. The heart does. Whatever words that are spilling out of you say more about your heart than the syllables that are coming out of your mouth, which means that if we want to bridle our tongue, if we want our mouths to be sanctified, if we wanna purify them, we have to train the heart.

Proverbs 16, 23, the heart of the wise teaches his mouth. I think it's an astounding phrase. He says that the wise man, if he is wise, he cultivates a submitted heart unto God so that his words or so that his heart may teach, so that his heart may discipline, so that his heart may bind up his mouth.

And this is because the wise man understands that the mouth is one of the most powerful members of the body and it must be bridled by something, it must be. James even says that it's a little member and yet it boasts of many things.

It's like a rudder on a ship, the smallest little part of a ship and yet it turns the entire vessel, a spark and yet it causes a wildfire. This thing that we use to praise our God and also to curse our brothers, this should not be so, James says.

And because it's such a powerful member of our body, it needs desperate discipleship, it needs to be on lockdown. When I was in the prison systems, we had ordinary inmates and then we had special inmates.

That's not what we called them, but there were certain inmates who either because of the crime that they committed or because of their inability to get along with other people would be on 23 hour lockdown where they were in a cell for 23 hours and they only got out to stretch their legs and take a shower and go right back in.

We need to treat our tongue like a special inmate that needs to be locked down because it is wild and it will roll when you let it roll. An unbridled tongue can burn down your marriage. An unbridled tongue can leave your children scorched in your sarcasm or in your criticisms or in your wrath.

It can break, maim, shatter and slice apart every relationship you hold dear much quicker than it takes to build it in minutes. And unlike bullets, that if you fire them into people, they usually come out the other side and they don't stay lodged in, words do.

Words stay lodged in for decades. Words will echo in someone's mind about what you said for a very long time, months, even years. And that's why the wise man first trains his heart and uses his heart to train his tongue.

Now notice what Solomon says about the training process. He says that when he does that, he adds learning to his lips. When he uses his heart to teach his tongue, it adds learning to his lips. Solomon's telling us that if the redeemed heart is cultivated, that it's not only gonna reduce the number of stupid things we say, which is true, but it will also make our mouths say something worthy of being said.

Proverbs 18, four says, the words of a man's mouth are deep waters. The wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook. He's saying that our hearts are deep waters and whatever comes out of it is from that. And the wise man who spent time cultivating his heart, cultivating his heart actually has something beneficial to give, a wellspring of life.

You give something to someone that's living when you've cultivated your heart. As opposed to a stagnant puddle of pond water when you haven't. The words you need this very second for the situations that you're going to be in this very moment are not cultivated on the fly, haphazardly, impromptu, on a whim.

You don't fly by the seat of your pants and just have wise words. When Solomon says that it's a deep well that wellspring water flows out of, he's saying that it must be cultivated over time. The heart that's cultivated over time will have something worthy to be shared when the time has come.

And without it, can we be surprised at all of the things we say? If your heart has spent the entire week, for instance, chewing on outrage, can you really expect that honey is gonna drip from your sweet little lips?

If you spent the last season of your life steeped in complaining, can you really expect that you're not gonna grumble? If you're feeding your heart with petty grievances, watching Phil, enjoying impurity, nursing contempt, fantasizing about winning arguments, rehearsing point one, point two, point three, if they say this, I say that, can you really be surprised when everything that comes out of you is nothing but verbal sewage?

Your heart is the chamber, your mouth is the trigger. What you load in the former will come out of the latter. Which leads us to a really important question. What actually has my heart been training my mouth to do?

Or a better question is, what is my mouth doing tells me the state of my heart. Has my Christian heart, we're Christian people, has my Christian heart, the heart that Jesus died to redeem, the heart that is being cultivated to love God and hate sin, desire intimacy with him and hate the things of darkness, is that heart training my mouth in this season or am I letting my heart fester in the septic tanks of sin?

What kind of words am I saying? What kind of hateful tone am I spewing? What kind of vindictive insensitive bullets am I firing? And where does it come from? It comes from the heart. It's like an orange.

If you grab an orange, most people peel them if they wanna eat them. But for analogy's sake, just hear me out. If you wanna know what's inside of an orange, you squeeze it. If you wanna know what's inside of your heart, let life squeeze you a little.

It'll come right out of your mouth. I met a woman yesterday, I didn't meet her yesterday, I've known her for a while. She's going through things that are just unthinkable to me. She goes three times a week for dialysis at four hours a pop just in order to keep her alive.

She can't really walk, she has a brace, her hip socket, her hip literally fell out of its socket recently so that now she's really in a wheelchair most of the time and a very, very particular walker if she can walk.

Her husband who's a pastor has to help her with everything, even a shower, she can't even do that on her own. And I was blown away when I talked to her and I said, Kristen, how are you doing? She said, God is so good.

He's been so good to me, so kind to me. And I said, you're going through a lot. And she said, yeah, but I just think about what I should be going through and what I'm actually going through and how gracious God has been to me.

And I don't know, I can't help but be joyful. And I was so convicted. I was like, man, I whine a lot. Maybe you don't, I do. It's all coming from a heart posture that's not submitted to Christ, not submitted to the things of God.

When you look at what your mouth says, you have a really clear picture of where you need to repent. And that's a grace. That's the first thing that I want us to talk about today is that our heart must train our tongue if we want to have any level of sanctification over our lips.

Slowing Down Before Speaking

The second thing that I want us to talk about is we actually have to learn how to pump the brakes on our mouth. We actually have to learn how to stop and not just say the thing. Proverbs 18, two says, a fool has no delight in understanding, but in expressing his own heart.

Which I think is such a funny passage, especially for the modern world was so addicted to expression. I just need to express myself. Oh, it's everywhere. So I wanna say what makes the fool foolish is not merely what exists inside of him, but this tendency for what he feels like has to come out of him.

His delight comes from expressing himself. He feels it, therefore he needs to say it. There's no discretion in his words, no filter, no ability to discern what might be good and what might not be good, what needs to be silent, what needs to be spoken.

A thought enters his mind and he speaks it. An emotion rises up inside of him and he begins yabbering. Irritation wells up in him and he's shouting. Someone disagrees with him and he's arguing. Someone corrects him, he's immediately backpedaling and justifying.

Someone gets halfway through a sentence and he's already interrupting them. Everything comes out of this man bubbling out like a volcano erupting for good or for ill. And Solomon calls that man and that woman a fool.

And I think it's funny that Solomon contrasts this understanding with expression in the passage because understanding requires you to slow down long enough to think for half a second. I wanna know about this.

Let me think about that. In order to understand, you have to slow down. In order to express yourself, you don't have to slow down at all. You just go for it. You just grip it and rip it, as John Daly used to say.

To get understanding, you must slow down. It's the opposite of what a fool does. Anything going on inside of him comes bumbling out because he doesn't want understanding, he wants expression. And that means one of the most necessary skills for us, if we don't wanna be a fool and if we want to be a wise person, is to learn to create distance, to create time and space between what rises up in us and what comes out of us.

We need to actually learn the sacred art of slowing down because every single irritation inside of you, even if it's righteous, even if it's just, doesn't deserve to come out instantly. Every disagreement in where you are blissfully, righteously right, doesn't necessitate you to go and inventory it to the person who's opposing you.

I mean, think about the Lord Jesus Christ. He was truth incarnate, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. He understood every situation perfectly. There was not a situation ever where he was like, oh, I hadn't considered that.

So like infinite knowledge. And yet he also knew the depths of how wrong it was for those people to spit in his face. He knew the depths of how wrong it was for them to open hand smack him. He knew the depths of what it was like for them to wrap his body in salt water strips so that as his wounds were starting to heal, they rip them off of him again.

He knew all of that. He knew that whipping him with barbed whips was immoral and evil. He knew that. And yet he knew all of that full of perfect truth. Like a lamb before his shearers, he didn't say anything.

That to me is astounding. He did not proclaim his rightness. He did not announce his truthfulness. Like a lamb before his shearers, he said nothing and it was not sin for him. It was righteousness. And he wasn't silent out of cowardice.

Jesus Christ, the most manly man that have ever existed. Do not let anyone feather his hair. He was silent in that moment, not because he was about to say something sinful. He wasn't quiet because he was getting ready to really give him a tongue lashing.

He was silent because he knew that not every good thing inside of you needs to come out immediately. That's wisdom, knowing what needs to come out and what doesn't. All of us absolutely know how impossibly difficult this is.

Because if we're honest, foolish speech, hasty speech, being impetuous feels good in the moment. And it feels sincere because when we're really angry or hurt or embarrassed, the last thing we wanna do is keep it in.

I think to myself like this, well, if I keep it in, they're not really gonna know how I feel. And that's me being fake. So I'm gonna be authentic because that is a virtue. I'm gonna be authentically me and I'm gonna let them know.

And yet, we also know that sincerity is not a good judge of whether something is good or bad. You can be sincerely wrong. You can be sincere and kill your children, for instance. You can be sincere and walk off of a cliff.

Sincerity is not the arbiter of truth. In this way, your emotions are real, but your emotions are not ultimate. What you're feeling is real, but it does not mean that it needs to come out. Your interior life matters, but it does not inspire Holy Scripture.

Something can be genuinely inside of you, even true and right inside of you, and it still deserves to die there. The Christian has to learn to say, yeah, it's in me, but it's not the right time. That's wisdom.

That's what it means to be a self-ruled man or a self-ruled woman. It means to be subdued. It means to apply the brakes of wisdom and to know when is the right time to share a thing and when is the wrong time to share a thing.

That's wisdom. In the same way, Proverbs 10, 14 says, wise people store up knowledge, but the mouth of the fool is near destruction. Proverbs 12, 23, a prudent man conceals knowledge, but the heart of the fool proclaims foolishness.

These verses are astounding to us in a hyper-expressive, hyper-individualist, hyper-authentic culture, because whatever stupid, carnal imagination that's percolating inside of us happens. We wanna say it and we wanna do it.

We want everybody else to applaud it. The worst thing we think as Americans that we could have done to us is that we could lose our freedom of speech, which we think is a freedom to say whatever we want.

And I'm not saying that we should lose our freedom of speech. I'm not a proponent of that. I'm just saying that that's something that haunts us, that I'm not allowed to say whatever dumb idea that I like, says something about our heart, and also that we would lose our self-expression.

When you do that, American people act like they're in bondage. But that's the opposite of what Solomon actually says. He never says, you must always be able to freely express yourself. He says, well, you actually need to withhold yourself.

You actually need to hold back there, buddy. Pump the brakes. And he says this because the wise man knows that sometimes the things that you need to say need to wait. Whereas the fool just unloads it.

He loads the shotgun and blows it all away. Now, I don't want you to get me wrong because there are truths that must be spoken and we can't hold back. There are lies that must be confronted and we must confront them.

There are sins that must be rebuked and we must rebuke them. There are moments when silence itself becomes cowardice. And Jesus even says in Revelation that the cowardly will not inherit heaven. So there's that, I get it.

But there are also moments where the wisest thing you can do is pump the brakes and wait for the Lord to give you the opportunity for him to build the bridge before you try to walk on it. Imagine the man with a sharp mind, a quick tongue, strong convictions, but without any restraint.

That man would be nothing more than volatile and dangerous and he would hurt everyone around him. Like a Formula One race car without brake pads, things would get messy. And this is where I wanna make things extremely practical because I wanna tell you where in your life are times that you should pump the brakes.

Because tomorrow you might be standing in the kitchen irritated with your spouse and you need to know how to pump them. Maybe your child has done something tremendously foolish and you need to know how to simmer down for a second and think before you speak.

Someone may criticize you, someone may send that obnoxious text, your boss may do something utterly ridiculous and preposterous or say something about you. I want you to be equipped tomorrow and every other day after that to ask yourself the question, is this what I'm supposed to say?

Five Questions for Discerning Whether to Speak

Is this the right time that I'm supposed to say it? And I wanna talk about five questions that you can even ask yourself to discern whether it's a good time for you to say something. Number one, do I actually understand the situation?

Do I understand it? Proverbs 18, two begins right there. The fool expresses, but the wise man seeks understanding. If you don't have understanding of the situation, you ought not speak. Ask yourself, do I actually understand what's going on or do I just think that I understand what's going on?

That question alone will slow you down a minute. Have I let the person I'm speaking to actually finish what they're saying so that I can actually understand what they mean or am I just ready to bumble in and interrupt them?

Can I, I love this, can I, when you're talking with someone and you really wanna understand where they're coming from, can I say back to them exactly what I think they said and them say to me, yeah, that's what I said?

When that happens, then I can speak because now I've understood. Ask yourself the question, do I know the whole story? Do I have all the information? If you're trying to speak about anything before you've understood that thing, then you probably ought to do yourself a favor and pump the brakes.

That's the first question you should ask yourself. The second question is, is this my thing to say? Does this information actually belong to me or does this belong to someone else? Just because I know something doesn't give me the jurisdiction to say something.

Some information belongs to other people. Some correction must be done by the person that God has given the responsibility of it to do. Just because you see a problem doesn't mean that you're appointed sheriff for the day to go deal with it.

Instead, ask yourself, am I the one who's actually responsible for this thing? Am I the one who's actually hurt by this thing? Am I the one who the Lord would raise up to deal with this thing? Or is what I'm doing actually a sanctified version of Christian gossip?

Am I sharing someone else's story in order for me to assuage my righteous anger over the wrongness of the situation? Sometimes if it's true, it's not for you to say it. You can go encourage that person.

You can say, hey, you really ought to say something about this, but if it's not yours, don't say it. That's another example when you should pump the brakes. Third question you need to ask yourself, is this the right time?

Ecclesiastes says that there is a time to keep silent and there is a time to speak. And he says a time for silence first because at the end of Solomon's life, he realizes that time for silence might actually outweigh the time for speaking.

I've learned enough in my life that probably I ought not have said a lot of things. It's funny, you almost don't regret the times that you're silent. There are times that when you're silent, you regret it.

But how often do you regret the times that you spoke? It's like 9 .9 out of 10. Man, I wish I would have, I wish I'd have just said that thing. No, no, normally I wish I would not have said that thing.

Almost always, which means that something may be true, something may be necessary, something may even need to be said by you, but it's just not right now. It's just not the right time. For instance, your child is probably gonna need correction this week at some point, but it might not be the right time when you're red-faced and snorting, perhaps.

Your wife may need to hear a piece of feedback that you think is really important, but it's probably not the right time to do it in front of everyone else that's gonna embarrass her. Truth can be true spoken in foolish and stupid ways, and we ought to avoid that, and we ought to pump the brakes on that.

That's the third. The fourth is, why do I wanna say it? Ask yourself the question, why do I wanna say it? And give yourself enough dignity to say, I need to be honest with myself here, because how often do we lie to ourself?

Well, I wanna say it because it's true. Actually, you probably wanna say it because you wanna look good or whatever else. Actually diagnose your heart. Ask yourself, why do I wanna say it? Is it love that's motivating me?

Is it truth that's motivating me? Is it protection of the weak? Is it correction of the guilty? Is it encouragement of the saints? Or is it that I wanna win? Or that I wanna humiliate them? Or that I wanna punish them?

Or that I wanna demonstrate how intelligent I am so that I can have the final word? Or that I can defend my ego? Or that I can place, or that I can have a place to dump my anger so that I can feel better?

Well, I really felt better. I really let him have it. A sentence may be technically true while the motive behind it be totally rotten. You have to ask yourself the question, what is your motivation for sharing it?