Unexpected Anger | Plot Twist - Week 5 | June 14, 2026

The Chosen clip featured in this message is from Season 5, Episode 2. Watch The Chosen here: https://watch.thechosen.tv/seasons/season-5

Case File 5: Detective's Log

The temple was supposed to be sacred ground. But somebody had turned it into a racket.

In week five of Plot Twist, Pastor Geoff Eckart pulls back the curtain on one of the most explosive moments in Scripture - a scene so raw, so unexpected, it shows up in all four Gospels. Jesus walked into the temple courts that day and didn't like what He found. Tables flipped. Coins scattered. Doves flying. And a city that should have known better.

But this wasn't just a man losing His temper. This was something calculated. Something righteous. Something that had been building since before the foundation of the world.

The question isn't whether Jesus got angry. The question is what are you doing with your anger?

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Daybreak | June 14, 2026
Plot Twist | Week 5
Unexpected Anger | Geoff Eckart

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0:00 – What Annoys You?
4:17 – Prayer for NTS & Summer Camps
6:28 – The Temple Cleansing
9:48 – What Made Jesus So Angry?
11:17 – Jesus Wept First: Compassion Before Action
13:40 – Seeing Deeper Than the Surface
15:25 – The Court of the Gentiles & the Extortion System
17:25 – Four Stages of Anger
20:11 – Godly Anger vs. Human Anger: Jesus Had a Plan
23:45 – A House of Prayer for All Nations
25:09 – Called to Be Bridge Builders, Not Bridge Blockers
29:13 – Closing Prayer

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Scripture Referenced:

Matthew 21.12–13
Mark 11.15–18
Luke 19.41–46
John 2.13–16
Isaiah 56.6–7
Exodus 19.3–6

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#DaybreakChurch #GeoffEckart #PlotTwist #Jesus #UnexpectedAnger #TheChosen

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Good morning. Let's hear it. Daybreak. Good morning. Oh, wow. Great to see you today. Are you ready to talk a little bit? Normally I have to be quiet during this section, but I want to hear. I'm going to ask you a question here, but I want you to think about it. What annoys you? I want you to think about that for a minute. Because, you know, probably not a day goes by where something doesn't annoy us at least once, right? You got any suggestions? What annoys you? What was that? FJ cruisers. Whoa, now we're getting personal here. He just called out my vehicle. Wow. We're getting personal here already. How about well on that theme? How about slow drivers? I heard tailgators. What else? People that don't leave the butter out so that it's too hard to scrape on your bread. I heard someone say that today. What else annoys you? Come on, I want to hear it. People that what? Don't like gags? Cats? People that don't like it, those annoy? Oh boy. Man, we're really personal here today. Oh man. What about people that rinse the dishes before they put them in the dishwasher? Does that annoy anybody? How about people that don't rinse dishes before they put them in the dishwasher? Does that annoy anybody? Come on. Man, I'm not feeling the love here. Anything else? What annoys you, Steve? Packer fans? Oh boy. People from Ohio. How about those ads that pop up when you're trying to look at something online? Does that annoy anybody? Alright. Well, then, you know, you can go from annoyance to like frustration a little bit deeper. Like frustration would be maybe you pull up and you see someone park in the handicap spot that's not supposed to be, right? Things like that. Think about the things that frustrate you. It's a little bit more than annoying. Let's go a little further. And then let's talk about what makes you hostile. So I know in our house, eating someone else's leftovers, man, that is serious. And I don't know. I never do that. But it happens, I hear. But there's things that make us hostile, and then there's things that maybe enrage us. Now, those things maybe for some of you don't happen very often. But maybe you find yourself enraged on a regular basis. And what we're going to talk about today is what happens when we get angry. Because we all deal with this emotion. And, you know, there's times I get up here and I love that song that we just sang because this is a message that has a lot of grit and toughness because of what we're going to see with Jesus' response. And it's really one of the most shocking moments of Jesus' life that we see. Maybe the most shocking moment that we're going to see in Scripture. Something that through Jesus, what I would say, now this is my opinion, into not just anger, but rage. Can you experience rage and still be godly? That's the question. But we're going to look at the life of Jesus and see what he shows us today. Week five, plot twist. We've been looking at Jesus a little bit different. Some of those moments that that maybe aren't our stereotype. This sweet caricature that we may have of Jesus as this very nice, polite person, but in in the last few weeks we've been looking at these different things. And his anger today, which is so unexpected, maybe if you're not looking beneath the surface of what we see about Jesus in the Bible, because his anger today, we're going to see it in full force. Now it was mentioned earlier that our students leave for NTS next week. We had dinner with Wes and Clyde, and they're here, our founders, and we're talking about Daybreak has been a partner in this ministry since the very beginning. Something I founded with a friend back in 2000. Daybreak came in 2001 and been there ever since. And who knew but God that all this would come around? It's so amazing. But our students will be joining students from around the country. Our team for NTS, which is starting tomorrow with a whole other set of churches from around the Midwest, and then next week our church will join a bunch of other churches, and then Camp will move on to Pennsylvania and New York and South Carolina and Iowa and thousands of students. And I just want to thank you that you are ascending church, that you're ascending me to go and to witness and to be a part of how God is moving across America. Now, when it comes to this time of year, we're going to have a time of prayer next week for our students. But you know what I think about? I think about the thousands of camps that are happening around America in the next few months. And I want us to just stop for a moment. Can we just pray? This is one of the most pivotal times of the year for young people because they're going to be experiencing God in so many different venues. And it's such a privilege to think about being able to witness that with our own students here. But would you just take a moment and bow your head with me? And Father, we thank you for NTS. We thank you for our students that will be going there next week. We thank you for the lives that will be impacted. And I pray protection over our team, over my wife Arianna, who leads this ministry and our staff. And as our students from daybreak gather together next week, Lord, I pray your blessing over them. And for all the camps happening around the country. Father, we thank you. Thank you for what you're going to do this summer. May it be a fruitful summer. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you for your prayers. So in the Bible, there are four different books about Jesus, his life and his teachings. They're called the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And in the Gospels, what's really amazing is you can see different, as they were inspired by God to record this, different perspectives on different things. Now, there's some events or some sayings and teachings of Jesus that only appear in one, some appear in two or three. There's a handful that appear in all four. We're going to do something different today. We're going to look at all four. What we're going to read today is found in all four. And if you find in all four, that means it it was a big moment. It's something to pay maybe a little extra special attention to. And I want you to kind of put on your detective glasses here for a minute. I want you to see if you can find some of the little differences between these. So we're going to start in the first one in Matthew. It says this that Jesus entered the temple courts and he drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, he said to them, My house will be called the house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers. So that's the first version there in Matthew. Let's go on to Mark chapter 11 when it says this. On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise to the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations, but you have made it a den of robbers. Wow. The chief priests and the teachers of law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching. Then let's go on to Luke. Look at what it says in Luke here. It says as he approached Jerusalem, he saw the city, and he wept over it, and he said, If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side, and they will dash you to the ground, and your children without walls, within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you. And when Jesus entered the temple courts, he began to drive out those who were selling. It is written, he said to them, My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers. And then one more in John. And John says this When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts, he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at the tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and he drove all them from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves, he said, Get these out of here. Stop turning my father's house into a market. It's stunning what Jesus does here. It's riveting to consider that Jesus, this peaceful, polite character that we may think about going into the temple and doing this. And some of you might be familiar with the chosen. It is this dramatization of the life of Jesus, and it's so powerful. And I feel like it's worth us capturing a visual of what this could have looked like. So let's watch.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

During this portion of the message, a clip from The Chosen, season five, episode two, was shown. Check the description for the full link.

SPEAKER_01 10:41

It's pretty shocking, isn't it? It's pretty shocking. It's uh bears the question what made Jesus so angry? Maybe you're not used to seeing a Jesus filled with that much passion. Men, I want you to listen to me. God has given you a gift of passion that's different. But some of you are wasting it on things that don't matter. You're spending your energy and your anger on things that won't change anything. But God wants you to channel that and focus it into something that can change the world. That's what we see with Jesus. Well, I don't know if you picked it up, but when we read Luke, we see that when Jesus came into the city, he wept over the city. Jesus was had a heart of compassion, of pity for for this city, for what was happening. He was moved with this compassion within him that led up to this moment that became pivotal for his life and his ministry. In fact, this is the moment that that tipped over the edge where he was no longer no longer a side story, but he became a threat to the system. But Jesus was moved with pity. It says when he looked at the city, he he wept over it. And that brings us to this idea of what do we see? What did Jesus see? What do we see? Jesus saw something that no one else was able to see because he took the opportunity to look and to see it. He didn't see things on the surface. I think that that the this idea of being busy, it's become so overplayed in our society. Hey, how you doing? You busy? I'm busy, you busy, busy, busy. We we choose to focus our time where we want to. We all have 24 hours. But we are so convinced that we're so busy, and we're so focused, a lot of us, and I'm speaking for myself here too, on our own little world that we may not see beyond the surface of what's happening around us. One of the things that this church was built on was the passion to see people that don't have a way to God find it here at daybreak. And we should be paying attention to that. We should be paying attention to the fact that our lives should be an open door to Jesus, not a closed one. It should bother us when we see something that's blocking people's way to God. It should move us into compassion. What do we see? You know, we are still discovering animal life in the ocean. We're finding that the deeper we're able to go, the more we're able to see. Look at this beautiful arrangement of all these different amazing animals that exist below the surface. And you see, as you go deeper, you start to see things like at 6,000, 9,000 feet, you see things like that dragonfish that you would never see, or something I don't really ever want to run into, and that's a vampire squid. That does not sound like a good day there. But as you go deeper, look at that Dumbo octopus that that's only there at 12,000 feet. Throughout humanity, we've never been able to capture these animals, and we still don't know what's down there, but the deeper you go, the more you see. In fact, we are we're going down to about 21,000 feet, but it goes even further. There's things that we have yet to even discover. The point is, we are meant, if we're followers of Jesus, we're meant to see the world different than everyone else. That we're not meant to just see on the surface. So Jesus was moved with compassion, then he goes into the city, and then he was driven by this passion that we witnessed there in that dramatization. That all of a sudden his passion began to boil up to the surface because Jesus was able to see the wrong that was happening, the passion that that drove Jesus to do what he did. So here he is in the temple. I want you to get a picture of where he was here. He was in this temple, and where this occurred was known as the court of the Gentiles. And that was that was the outer space. Now, this this whole complex here is massive. I want you to just think about this. 36 acres. The temple mount was 36 acres. That's enough for about 30 football fields. This is a big space. And in the outer edges was the the court of the Gentiles, which meant that anyone could could go there. And it was meant to draw people in to worship God. But then as you go further in, you see the next place in there's a there's a called the court of women, which is where anyone that was Jewish could go, including men, women, and children. And then you had the court of Israel, which was just almost exclusively for Jewish men, and then you had the very interior, which was the court of the priests, that only the priests could go. So Jesus is out in the court of the Gentiles, where people are coming and going, and he's angered because to go into the temple to worship you or to bring a sacrifice, and so they had this system set up to where you would bring your foreign money and you had to use the temple coin, and to use the temple coin there's exchange rate, but but it was being abused. So if you've ever traveled and you stop at the airport or a train station or somewhere and you exchange money, there's always a fee. Well, the fee they charged was just ridiculously high. And then you had to have a certain type of sacrifice. So if you want to have a certain type of sacrifice, you saw some of the animals there. Well, you had to have the temple special animals for sacrifice, and to buy those, those could be 10, 20, 30, even more times more than you'd find just outside the wall. And Jesus sees all of this, and he's driven to passion. And there's four stages of anger. We talked about those a little bit right up top. There's when you're annoyed, there's when you're frustrated, and then there's when you're hostile, and then you're enraged. Now, a few years ago I got married. I don't know if you knew that. But when I got married, Ariana gave me very specific and explicit construct uh instructions and said, please don't tell anyone where we're going the night we get married. Now, we got married in Michigan, but we were flying out of Indiana because their family lived there, so we were gonna stop halfway. And so she was very specific. There was no question about what her desire was there. But for some reason, and I don't I honestly don't remember, but I happened to tell one of my groomsmen who just forced it out of me somehow where we were staying. And my wife's fear was that she's heard she heard all these horror stories where people were getting pizzas delivered, you know, to your hotel room at night and that kind of thing, or showing up and all this, and so she wanted to be totally private. So I'm like, okay, no problem. But he forced it out of me, and I don't know how it happened, honestly, no, but I said, listen, you cannot tell anyone where we're going. And that was it was a couple hour drive, so I thought we're safe. Now we got married in this church where I was about ready to begin our, we were beginning our ministry together, and so um we're we're getting ready to pack up and leave after the wedding, and Ariane goes, Hey, follow me for a minute. And I'm like, oh, maybe we'll get a little warm-up here somewhere in the office. So we walked into what was going to be my brand new office that was totally bare, and she shut the door and she pushed me up against the door and put her finger in my chest and said, Unless you change where we're going tonight, you're gonna go on this honeymoon by yourself. She somehow the word got around, I guess. Because I didn't want to go on the honeymoon by myself, I decided it would be a good idea to change hotels. So I did. And I did not go on my honeymoon by myself. But I thought to myself, who is this person that I married? What have I got myself into here? You know, there's there's annoyance and there's frustration and then there's hostility and then there's being enraged. And wow, Jesus, I would say here was enraged. But he didn't just get mad, he had a plan. Jesus was ready. If you notice what we read, he he showed up the night before in Jerusalem and said, and he went into the temple courts, and because it was late, he left and he came back the next day. He was looking for his time. John 2 says that he made this whip out of cords that that he didn't just go in this just purely on emotion. And that's the difference between godly anger and human anger. See, Jesus was strategic. Jesus didn't just show up and just fly off the handle. He wasn't impulsive, he was deliberate. This is the difference. One's emotional, one's spiritual. Here's what I would say. Where is your anger taking you? We see the perfect example in the life of Jesus. Jesus lived a sinless life. He had to to be the perfect sacrifice for us. Let me ask you some questions. What do you see? Deeper, do you see what the Father sees? Do you feel pity? Here's what I want to say. If you haven't felt an ounce of compassion in a while, that should be a warning sign to you. If you go through life and nothing ever seems to bother you, now here's the thing that God showed me that I'd never seen before about anger, about myself. Is that how? That most of the instances in my life when I become angry, it's because of something happened to me. It was personal. Somebody did something to me, or my kids, or a friend, or something, or they cut me off in traffic, you know, things like that. But when's the last time I've been angry about something that had nothing to do with me, but it was something that was wrong. So what makes you angry? Maybe for a lot of us, what our anger would be focused on are personal reasons. Ways that we've been offended. But the Father wants us to go deeper into the world and see what he sees below the surface. If people's way is being blocked to God, I think that matters to God more than anything. And so if you're experiencing a righteous anger, and I think I think this is a little preview for next week for Father's Day, but I think men, this is a little bit maybe more for you. When you feel that anger, is it godly anger? And what are you going to do with it? Because you can't stuff it, you can't ignore it. God has put this warrior-like spirit within you. I want to give you a little bit more here. Mark 11, we see something that we don't see in the other three versions. When Jesus says, My house will be called a house of prayer, and this is the phrase, for all nations. Maybe Jesus was angry not just about the extortion happening in the temple and the injustice there. But I think Jesus had another reason to be angry. Because God's people didn't seem to catch on that from the very beginning the plan was for his people to reach the world. So what Jesus says here is referenced in Isaiah 56. Says this foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord and minister him and love the name of the Lord and to his servants, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it, and those who hold fast to my covet, these I will bring to my holy mountain. He's talking about foreigners here, using his people to reach other nations, and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house will be a house of prayer for all nations. God frees his people, the nation of Israel, out of slavery from the Egyptians, and listen to what he says. Moses went up to God and the Lord called him and said, This is what you're to say to the descendants of Jacob, this is the nation of Israel, and what you're to tell the people of Israel. You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, how I carried you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself. And these are the words you're to speak to the Israelites. Here's what God is saying to his people from the very beginning. You're called to be bridge builders to the world. You are to be a kingdom of priests. Each one of you, not just the select group, not just the professionals, not just the pastors. Every one of you are called by me to build a bridge to the world so that people can know me. I think this was the deeper level of what frustrated Jesus in this moment. Because he realized that this place that was meant to bring all people from the world to know the goodness of the Father was being blocked by his own people. And friends, let's take heed that we be bridge builders in the world and not bridge blockers. That we point the way to God with our life. That if daybreak is your home, this is a place where we pray and believe and share and invite so that people can give their lives to Christ here at daybreak. That's what we're about. We're called to be bridge builders to this world. Let's join together and let's open the door for people to find Jesus here at daybreak. Are you with me? Let's open the door for people to know him, to find him, to worship him, and let's channel those things that burn within us to find ways to create a solution to bring people to God. And in our world, this sounds so counterculture, but even if it means using anger in a godly way, because we see that example in Jesus, our church is reaching people all over the world. We are building bridges to young people in Liberia, to young people across our city, to people around the nation, to people in our neighborhoods. And when we're a part of that, we're a part of helping to build bridges to the world. We do this every week. We're gonna have an exercise in worship by giving. And we do this as a response. God's given us so much. You've got a roof over your head, you've got food to eat. God's blessed us beyond maybe what we understand or want to acknowledge. But he's been good, and we at this moment are going to return his blessing to him so that he can use it to build bridges to people. I'm gonna pray and I'm gonna ask God to bless us today as we give. Lord, we pray that your kingdom would come through daybreak. Lord, we pray that we would be a church that builds bridges to the world, to our neighbors, to our classmates, to our co-workers, that we would be a church that expresses the love of Jesus in unique ways that can reach people and help them to know the good news of Jesus. Lord, as we give today and as we think about our plot twist in going maybe to lengths we've never gone before, because we care about the world. Father, may we do that in your name. Bless us as we give today, and may it be a blessing to you in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, let's go. What do you say? Let's go and be a bridge builder to somebody. Even today, let's do it. You're dismissed. We'll see you soon.