Ephesians 4:31
What does Ephesians 4:31 mean?
Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice.
The short answer
Ephesians 4:31 is a short verse with a long list: "bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander" — capped off "with all malice." Paul is not simply naming six unrelated bad habits. He names them together because they belong together, as stages of the same downward spiral. Bitterness is the resentment we nurse quietly. Left alone, it heats into wrath and anger. Anger, once it boils over, becomes outcry — the shouting, the public quarrel. Outcry curdles into slander, the words we say to damage someone's name. And underneath the whole sequence runs malice: the settled wish for another person's harm.
Notice what kind of damage Paul is describing. Every item on the list is relational. Bitterness poisons the one who holds it, but wrath, outcry, and slander poison the community around it. Paul is diagnosing what corrodes shared life — in a church, a family, a friendship — and telling his readers to "put away" the whole chain, not just its loudest links.
Does that mean Scripture condemns anger absolutely, in every form? That question is worth sitting with, and the excerpt below takes it up directly. The Bible itself records the anger of God and of Jesus, which suggests the deeper concern may be less the feeling of anger than what we let it do — whether it shapes our relationships and shuts the door on reconciliation.
Finally, this verse doesn't stand alone. The very next verse supplies the positive counterpart: be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Bitterness is not put away by clenching your jaw and suppressing it. It is displaced by something stronger — a deliberate goodwill that refuses to let injury harden into hatred.
What scholars say
Kathleen Long Bostrom surveys the commentators' debate over whether the Bible's condemnation of anger — including Ephesians 4:31 — is absolute, and suggests the real concern is what anger does to relationships and reconciliation. William Barclay then describes the alternative: a goodwill so determined that no insult or injury can turn it into hatred or bitterness.
“It is interesting to see the commentators debate whether such judgment against anger is absolute or not. Supporting an absolute reading of Jesus’ words, other Scripture passages are equally strong in their condemnation of anger (Eph. 4:31; Col. 3:8; cf. 1 Tim. 2:8; Jas. 1:20, but also Ps. 37:8; Prov. 14:29; Eccl. 7:9). Against it, some commentators point out that the Bible nonetheless records God’s and Jesus’ anger (Matt. 23:17; Mark 3:5); others even refer to the biological basis of anger that makes it inevitable (of course, if biological urges were the measure of ethics, the next passage of Jesus’ sermon makes even less sense!). The concern of Jesus’ saying, however, seems to be less the having of anger than what one does with it: does anger shape our relationships, or preclude reconciliation?”
“(iv) The Christian love goes out to our enemies (Luke 6.27; cp. Matt. 5.44), We have seen that Christian love means unconquerable benevolence and invincible goodwill. No matter what any man does to him, the Christian will never cease to seek that man’s nighest good. No matter how he is insulted, injured, wronged and slandered, the Christian will never hate and will never let bitterness into his heart. When Lincoln was accused of treating his opponents with too much courtesy and kindness, and when it was pointed out to him that his whole duty was to destroy them, he answered: ‘Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’ The Christian’s only method of destroying his enemies is to love them into being his friends.”
What it means for you
The practical question this verse raises is not "Do I ever feel angry?" but "What is my anger becoming?" Trace the chain in your own life. Is there a resentment you've been quietly feeding? Has it started leaking out in sharp words, or in the way you talk about someone when they're not in the room?
Paul's instruction is active: put it away. That usually means naming the injury honestly, and then choosing kindness and forgiveness before the bitterness chooses for you. The goal is not to pretend you were never hurt, but to refuse to let the hurt write the ending of the relationship.
Ephesians 4 in context
Ephesians 4 opens with Paul urging believers to live in a way worthy of their calling — with humility, patience, and a real effort to preserve unity. Midway through the chapter he shifts to a before-and-after picture: take off the old way of life like worn-out clothing, and put on the new self. Verse 31 sits in a run of concrete examples — truthful speech, honest work, words that build up — and just before it, a warning not to grieve God's Spirit. Verse 32 completes the thought with kindness and forgiveness.