Evaluating Our Anger As a Parent

Chap Bettis is a Bible teacher who teaches a lot on marriage and on parenting, and he admits when it came time to teach about parenting with patience, he was approaching the subject, not just to try to help other people. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You can find us online at familylifetoday.com. I think all of us could use a refresher on how to be a little more kind and patient with our kids.

We'll get some help today from Chap Bettis. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. There was a song our kids learned. You remember back in the day when there were, you know, there was Salty the Singing Songbook.

Oh, yeah. That's a long time ago. Back when our kids were growing up, there were all of these musicals for kids and our kids listened to them. So there was one song that our kids learned and sang, and we sang to each other from time to time. It was a song that went, Have patience, have patience, don't be in such a hurry. Have you heard this one?

No, but this is good. Inpatient, you always start to worry. I think it was about like some worm or something that was slow or, you know, anyway. Our kids would remember, remember that God is patient too, and think of all the times when others had to wait for you. Isn't that a good one? That's a great one.

I don't know if I'd call that a good one, Bob. Well, at our home, it came in handy to look at our kids and say, kids, have patience, have patience, and just get them to slow down. Then we realized, Marianne and I realized they're not the only ones who need to have patience. Were you singing it to yourself? Sometimes we had to look at each other and go, sweetheart, have patience, have patience, because we can get exasperated as parents. It's easy. Oh, it happens almost daily.

I can remember. I mean, we live in such a fast paced culture that we don't slow down and have patience. Have you ever stood in front of your microwave and been like, hurry up, hurry up? It's a microwave.

And yet, you know, some of us are old enough to remember you had to put that in the oven or on the stove, and it's the world we live in. We want an instant download now, and we want that in character as well. It's especially hard when you're a fast paced person anyway.

And then you've got three toddlers and everything takes forever. Well, we've got a friend who is back with us on Family Life today. Chap Bettis is here. Chap, welcome back. Thank you.

Chap is a dad. He is also a church planting pastor who, a couple of years ago, you started something called the Apollos Project. Where'd you pick that name?

How'd that come up? Well, Apollos in Acts chapter 18 is articulate, he is zealous, he's mighty in the scriptures, and then he's courageous. And I just felt like as parents, we want to raise our children to be like Apollos. So, we know Daniel of the Old Testament, and we know Timothy. Timothy seems to be somewhat fearful, and I just think as our culture becomes more and more anti-Christian, that we need young people who are going to be able to be articulate, be mighty in the scriptures, and courageous as well. There came a point in your pastoral ministry where you felt God pressing on your heart to make parenting your focus and to help moms and dads raise the next generation. Tell us about that process, stepping out of pastoral ministry and saying, this is what I'm going to talk about, and this is what I'm going to make my life's work. Well, I think one of the joys of pastoring is you get paid to study, but there's always next Sunday coming.

So, the blessing is you're paid to study, but you're also driven by what is next, and you can never take some time to spend a lot of time specializing in one area. And so, there are so many sermons or side studies where I just wanted to do something, and more, and especially in the area of the family, thinking about, I want my kids to follow the Lord. I had a bumpy transition from a childhood faith to an adult faith, and then as I look out over at church, all these young people, I want, as a pastor, to look back in 20 years and say, yeah, these kids are walking with the Lord.

They didn't see hypocrisy in the church. They saw a loving church. They heard the true gospel, and their hearts were changed.

So, that was my heart. And then eight years ago, God just changed my heart, and at the same time, my wife's heart, and said, you need to pursue this. You need to pursue this full-time. And so, I stepped out in faith, and now our ministry is supported by friends, and this is what I do full-time. And you're going to churches and doing seminars, and you're putting books and resources together. You've been with us on Family Life Today talking about your book, The Disciple-Making Parent, which is kind of your major thesis.

It's the core material. When it came time to write a second book, you zeroed in on the subject of patience in parenting. Why that subject?

Well, can you see my smile? It's a problem for some people out there. It's not a problem. No, this was my sin, and I'd done a lot of thinking for my own heart that I need to change. And kids say one of the reasons they walk away from the faith is because of hypocrisy. The home is the hardest place to live out the gospel.

People who know how to push your buttons, and you're tired, and you just want to be left alone, and then comes a toddler or teenager or something like that. And so, they see the worst side of us. And so, this is my sinful area. And so, had studied, had thought about it, and I think, by God's grace, had seen some growth. And then, as I would talk with people, find out, oh yeah, this is an issue as well.

So, felt led to put it in a video series. Yeah. So, a lot of what you wrote in the parenting with patience is about anger. Now, is anger like the opposite of patience? What is anger?

I've never been mad, so I just need somebody to tell me. Well, I think the definition by Dr. David Paulsen has really helped me. It's an active stance you take to oppose something that you assess as important and wrong. An active stance you take to oppose something you assess. That's what anger is?

An active stance you take to oppose something that is important. You believe is important and wrong. And I just found that very helpful, because on the one hand, it helped understand why not all anger is sinful. So, we know Jesus was angry and obviously didn't sin.

Mark chapter 3. And Ephesians 4 26 says, in your anger, don't sin. And so, there are times that things are important and wrong. And we need to address that. And on the other hand, of course, then there's huge, huge warnings in Scripture about the destructiveness of anger.

And the problem is when you have an active stance opposing something that you assess that is important or wrong, and it's really something that's just trivial and something that is inconveniencing you, right? And that's, I think, the heart is you have to be able to look and say, yes, Jesus was angry in Mark 3, when people were, the Pharisees were sinning against this man, and God's glory was at stake. When they sinned against him on the cross, when he was reviled, he reviled not. And so, that's most of the time, 99% of the time, my anger is not righteous anger.

Well, talk about that. What's the difference between righteous anger and sinful anger? Well, I think it's what we talked about before, which is that there is something important and wrong, and is my, am I involved in it? So, in other words, I can see something in the church and say, we've got to deal with this, and have a little emotion behind it, and say, this is not right. As opposed to, if it's attacking me, it's often, my self-interest is at stake. Yeah, is God's glory at stake, or is my comfort at stake, my desires at stake? I think that's really the heart of it, don't you think?

Right. Well, James 4 says, what causes the fights and quarrels? It's the desires that battle within you. And to me, what was hard for me to assess, though, as a parent, is that I've got bad desires, and then I've got neutral desires, or good desires that become demands. So, in the moment, watching the game on Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon and not being interrupted, that's a neutral desire, maybe a good desire.

But if I'm interrupted and then I erupt, now that became, that was a good desire that became a demand. Well, you talk about two major ways that we express anger, and you just talked about one. We blow up. Right.

What's the other? Well, we can clam up, right? So, every couple knows the silent treatment, right? I'm not going to talk to you until you apologize, you know, and I'm going to punish you by withholding affection. And just going inward as well, you know, just mulling over in our mind resentment rather than saying, oh, this is actually something we should talk about. I should bring this up, and I should talk about with this person. I just bury it, and it becomes- Toxic.

It becomes bitter, yeah. So, how did impatience or anger manifest itself in your life when you were raising your kids? Bring this to the parenting. You're smiling again. Bring us into your home.

How big is your listenership? Do I have to confess my sins? It sounds like this happened on more than one occasion. Yeah, I'm raising my voice, yelling, being short with the kids.

Do you remember a time that was kind of a defining moment where you said, I really got out of hand here and had to go back and make things right with my kids? Well, okay. Okay, true con- man, this is humbling. This is humbling. So, it goes back to expectations.

And so, as a church planting pastor, we were not growing the way I thought we should grow. Been there, done that. Yeah, yeah. And you know why? Pride on my part.

These people won't do what they're supposed to do. Yeah. Horrible, wicked pride.

Just wicked, terrible. But can you explode at the congregation? No.

So, you bring it home on Sunday. And yeah. So, my wife, like Nathan, plotted. She took me out. We went out on a picnic and she said, we're starting to call these Black Sundays.

This is not acceptable. And I heard that. And I said, you're right, you're right. Because I think one of the things with anger is you underestimate how much you're hurting people. So, you're saying, I just raised my voice a little bit or I just yelled a little bit. You were coming home from a frustrating time at church where it wasn't going the way you wanted. And you were displacing, you were taking that frustration out on your wife and on your kids. Yeah. And they knew they better walk on eggshells with Dad on Sunday.

Yeah, yeah. And that was very helpful. That was eye-opening. And I think sin is deceptive that way, where you just think, oh, it's no big deal, or my anger is righteous, or I just raised my voice a little bit. And it is interesting that the anger that your family was getting was not about them.

Right. You know, I was thinking, you come home from church and I've been a pastor. And yeah, you can take out what you're feeling about church. I had it even worse. I had to go from church to the Detroit Lions sideline and then come home.

So I lost twice that day. I'm just kidding. But I want to get at something, because you talk about this, you get into it in the book. And I experienced the same thing in my life when my wife said to me early in our marriage, after a conflict in the kitchen, she just looked at me one day and said, you know what?

I'm not going to bring stuff up anymore because every time I do, that's what you do. You blow up. And I just looked at her.

She walked away. And I'm not kidding. I didn't even realize I do this. I go, what are you talking about?

I don't blow up. And she just turns and goes like, exhibit A, you know? And I'll never forget that moment again. It was decades ago because I went to the three guys that I met with every week and I said to them, hey, of all the emotions that you experienced as a man, which one do you think you experienced the most? And they all looked at me like, what are you talking about? What emotions?

What are those? And I listed, you know, like joy or happiness or tenderness or anger or sadness. And I just said, what do you think? Every guy sitting there said, oh yeah, definitely anger. And I said, why? And they go, I don't know. And I said, well, here's what Ann said to me this week.

I got to find out where this is coming from. Long story short, I discovered what you talk about in parenting with patients that anger is a second emotion. In other words, when the emotion that you should be feeling in this situation is uncomfortable, we often skip right past it and we're angry. And I was like, I wonder what's going on, like emotional hurt. You feel hurt. What do guys do often? We don't cry.

Not saying we don't, but we should. We often don't even realize we go right to anger. You come home from church, you're feeling frustrated and there's an emotion attached to the church thing, but all your family gets is anger. So talk about that a little bit, because I think you identified something and most of us don't even understand that often our anger isn't about the situation we're sitting in.

Sometimes it is, but often we don't even realize it's plugged into something else and we've never even looked at that. So talk about that. Well, I think going back to that passage in James 4, that it's coming from a desire that is within me. So I can be a desire to have obedient children, to parent on cruise control, to have, in this case, a church that's just growing, just blossoming and all these other expectations or rights that I feel like I have. I have a right. I have a right to obedient children. I have a right to this.

I've worked hard all day. I have a right to this. So to me, to be able to drill down and what I think for me, what was clarifying in my head to, so I stopped justifying the anger was to say that some of these desires are good, but I can't express them this way.

And I need to figure out, Lord, how can this desire to see our church grow or to have obedient children or whatever those things are, how would you have me at this moment progress? Did you end up apologizing to your kids? Oh yeah. More than once, many times. But yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. But I think also part of that, we get into a sin-confess, sin-confess cycle. So there needs to be, what's the restitution?

So what is part of the restitution? My restitution in my heart was journaling what just happened? What was going on in my heart? What were the desires going on? And then what am I going to do differently next time?

So to me that anything, but especially in this sin area, we can get into a sin-confess, sin-confess cycle. I think this is really typical, at least for me as a young mom with three boys that were super active and really going crazy. I thought, I've never been angry in my life. These children have brought this out of me. And then because I would blow up at times during the day and some of it was just frustration, then I would go to bed at night feeling so guilty, full of shame.

It was like the enemy just pounced on me at night. What do we do with that? Because I think that can be very typical, especially for moms with young kids. You could do what Ann did. She got up at two in the morning, went and tapped each boy on the shoulder and said, hey, I'm really sorry.

Or I'd write letters. And this was ongoing sometimes. Well, so to me, part of this, Ephesians 4 talks about that we're to put off, put in and put on. So we're to put off the sin, we're to renew our minds and then we're to put on the positive. And so to me, part of the reason I wrote this is because I, at least my judgment of some of the literature out there, what I see young moms talking about today is exactly what you're saying, which is I confess it as sin.

This is wrong. Having said that, along with that comes a resolve. Second Corinthians talks about repentance, what repentance brings.

It brings a resolve. I'm going to repent. I'm going to change.

And then the positive, seeing anger as a, as a quote unquote friend saying, what was the issue? It's going to happen tomorrow. What am I going to do differently tomorrow? Whatever happened today is going to happen tomorrow.

Why am I going to be surprised? Oh, they did. They, you know, they got out of bed 15 times for water last night. Oh, you know, they're going to do it again tomorrow night.

So what is the put on? What is the consequence? I'm going to think hard because my own sin is so, so destructive. So on the one hand, taking it very seriously, not just getting caught in a sin confess cycle, but say, okay, I need to see how ugly the sin really is, is a foe to fight. And it's an emotion that says something is important or wrong.

Maybe, maybe. And God has given us as parents, we get, we get this little realm to rule over. You know, we get to think about our family's really cool. Like you make your own culture.

So you have different foods you like different traditions, different, you know, music or sports, whatever is emphasized. So that's really cool that God gives us as part of being made in the image. We're ruling over this realm. But what this anger reveals is there's a problem in this little realm. And I need to think about what am I going to do about it?

Because it's going to come up again. And one of the things you're going to have to do about it is you're going to have to guard your, not just your heart, but your tongue. Because out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And one of the ways we can tell if somebody is angry is the words that are coming out of their mouth. So how does a parent who recognizes my speech has become explosive, the words I'm using are toxic words.

How do they begin the process of moving from sinful speech to godly speech? We talk about in the Parenting with Patients, there's an anger journal where basically you walk through and you say, okay, let me let me replay what just happened. And so part of it, we are choosing to live life very quickly and we don't slow down and replay the video. And for your example there, and to say, okay, what did the kids do that caused me to get upset and to slow down the video? And then what did I say? And writing that out is very convicting. It is. But that's part of the repentance is to say, yeah, those words came out of my mouth.

Proverbs talks about reckless words pierced like a sword. And to say, yeah, this pierced my child. You know, as you're describing that, I'm thinking, and Dave's going to relate to this. Anytime the team fumbles in a football game, the first thing that we want to do as fans is show me the replay. And show me the replay from about six different angles so that I can see what happened, what knocked the ball loose, was his knee down before he lost the ball? We want to evaluate this so we can see what happened here.

And yet we fumble as parents and we move on and don't stop and go, wait, what happened here? Let's look at this from six different angles. Look at Bob using a football analogy. You're rubbing off on him.

I love it. But it's true, isn't it? It's exactly true, and that's why that anger journal is such a great idea, because we don't replay it. And actually we don't even, sometimes we don't even admit it.

We just walk on by, our kids are telling us, our wife may be killing us. Or sometimes it actually works. And that's the scary thing is when you've got, when your kids are, you know, running around like crazy and you yell and suddenly they're quiet or they didn't do their homework and you yell and they get motivated. And you think, oh, this actually does work. I need to pull that card out every so often, the yelling card. But James 1-20 says the anger of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God. So in that moment, you're getting the homework done, but you're destroying your relationship with your kids.

And the atmosphere of your home changes. Yeah, I just wondered if Black Sundays changed. They did. They did. By God's grace.

Over how long a period of time? Well, I think it was the rebuke, the Nathan type rebuke. And then I'm injuring people that I love. And so I believe it's Paul Tripp who said, he has a statement where he says, my view of myself is about as accurate as a fun house mirror. So if I will in humility accept that here's what people are saying, and that's true, not what I'm perceiving is true, but what they are saying is true in that moment. Then I have to change because I love these people. I'm guessing some of our listeners are going, why did I have to listen to this program? This has been convicting.

Maybe they're recognizing some of these patterns in themselves. Here's the good news. It can change. By God's grace, it can change. It may take some work and some time. But trust me, this is work and time you want to do.

You want to invest because you don't want 10 years from now your kids to be saying, mom was always angry. Yeah. And I love what you said, Chap, when you start to get angry, start praying. And that could be the first step besides journaling. And I remember doing that like, Jesus, I need you right now, of just calming myself down. One of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control.

And so to pray, to take a breath and to have Jesus, that conversation going on continually has really helped. You have got a video series and a workbook available on this subject of parenting with patients. And Chap, you've agreed that for our listeners, you're going to make those videos available to anybody who buys the workbook.

You don't have to pay a separate streaming fee. You can go to our website, familylifetoday.com, to find out how you can get the workbook and access to the five sessions on parenting with patients from Chap Bettis. Again, the information is available on the website at familylifetoday.com. And of course, we also have copies of your book, which is called The Disciple Making Parent. That's available at familylifetoday.com as well. So again, go to the website, familylifetoday.com, or call 1-800-FL-TODAY if you have any questions about the video series, The Disciple Making Parent, and the workbook that goes with that, or his book, The Disciple Making Parent. And while we're talking about parenting, Dave and Ann, your new book, No Perfect Parents, has just come out.

So again, resources for parents, go to familylifetoday.com. If you'd like to order any of the resources we've talked about, call us at 1-800-FL-TODAY. That's 1-800-358-6329.

That's 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY. We want to take a minute and say thank you to those of you who are not just listeners, but those of you who have made today's program possible for all of us. That would be those of you who are either monthly legacy partners, or those of you who will, from time to time, donate to support the ongoing work of family life today. We so appreciate our partnership together with you. You are helping provide practical biblical help and hope for marriages and families all around the world. Hundreds of thousands of people every day are getting help because of your support, and we are grateful for that. This week, if you're able to help with a donation, we'd love to send you, as a thank you gift, a copy of the book Marriage Triggers by Guy and Amber Leah. Guy and Amber talk about the things we do in marriage that provoke each other, that cause us to respond wrongly in a marriage relationship.

How can we correct that? How can we respond in a biblical manner, rather than just venting? The book is our thank you gift when you help with a donation today.

You can donate online at familylifetoday.com, or you can call to donate at 1-800-FL-TODAY. Again, thanks for your support. We look forward to sending the book Marriage Triggers your way. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about how we respond rightly when our kids provoke us.

Chap Bettis will be with us again. We hope you'll be here as well. Thanks to our engineer today, Keith Lynch, with some special help from Bruce Gough and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life of Little Rock, Arkansas, a crew ministry. Help for today. Hope for tomorrow.