April 30, 2020

Anger is powerful. When you are driving and someone cuts you off the road with your young children in the back seat. You blow a fuse. When you are watching a documentary on the depravity of human trafficking with the most vulnerable being abused. You begin seeing red. When you are in an escalating argument where common sense and reason are left behind. You are foaming at the mouth. Uttering words that you know you’ll regret with everything that is within you yet you say them anyways because it just feels so right. Idioms cannot adequately express anger’s power. We have felt it. 

What exactly is anger? Well, I had the benefit of making it through another chapter of J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith’s book, Untangling Emotions. They point out that anger is fundamentally a moral emotion. It declares that something is wrong. It is very powerful. And with anything of great power,  it can be used for good or bad. On the one hand, the best of anger protects what God loves. It is righteous anger against the injustice of the oppressed. Such anger motivates action against the wrong. On the other hand, the worst of anger is utterly arrogant. It declares, “obey my will or suffer my wrath.” It’s the emotion of the dark side that beckons you to unleash your anger. And you become none other than Dark Vader’s minion. What is to be done? Let’s listen to the authors:

“As a rule, anger is dangerous. Here is the slightly more detailed rule of thumb: anger that you act on instinctively, without thinking it through, is so likely to be sinful and godless that you might as well say “always.” If you want to live out of righteous anger, you need to start by slowing down.

We’ll say it again: when you’re angry, slow down.

You will almost never go wrong by pausing before you act when you are angry. Anger in the raw, like radioactive uranium, is deadly unless harnessed with exquisite caution. If you bring it out into the open without careful preparation, you will poison everything within a ten-mile radius. If we turn back to the first chapter of James again, we find James making this same point right next to the verse about man’s anger not leading anywhere good. “Be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” he urges (James 1:19). Or, as pastor and author Zack Eswine put it, we need to “wait out [our] racing thoughts and emotions until [we] can choose good, even for an enemy.”3

Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to slow down. Count to ten in your head before you respond. Take a deep breath. Talk about the matter later, after you’ve cooled down. In short, slowing down means taking time to think before you act when angry.

Another really basic yet surprisingly helpful response to anger is to simply acknowledge that you are angry. I (Alasdair) was so proud of my six-year-old daughter this week, who, in the midst of several simultaneous disappointments, did not follow her normal pattern of screaming or kicking the middle seat in our van, but instead calmly said, “Dad, I’m so mad I could just tear this whole car up.” To name anger rather than spray it at everyone around you is a great step of maturity and tends to help you respond to your anger rather than respond in your anger.

Doing this well is really hard, but really important. Anger is dangerous enough when shared and processed and brought well to the Lord. It is lethal in isolation. This doesn’t mean you go to the person you are angry with and say, “Here’s why I’m so furious with you.” It does mean that if you see anger in your heart, you want to bring someone else in. We all need help bringing our anger to the Lord and thinking about constructive responses to wrongdoing, rather than ranting or gossiping about what others have done.

Make no mistake: action—albeit a carefully controlled and constructive action—is the right and good goal of anger! Righteousness does not mean doing nothing. Once you’ve taken your own heart to the Lord and to your brothers and sisters as best you can, you are called to act with redemptive, merciful boldness. With the log in your own eye gone—or at least chopped up—you will have the chance to help the person next to you with the ugly speck in his or her eye. Remember, God’s anger is fiercer than yours or mine ever could be, yet look what he does with it. He disciplines his people in order to bring us back. He rebukes in order to convict our hearts and turn us to repent. Our God ultimately poured out his wrath on Christ, unleashing his fury without restraint one time and one time only, so that those with whom he is angry might be restored. True love attacks evil with vigor, and yet the attack is always a rescue mission. Our God is never bitter, petty, or cruel. Instead, his anger is always part of his larger purpose: protecting and upholding all that he loves (and every sinner who begs his forgiveness becomes the treasure of his heart) to the praise of his glory.”