God's Answer to Anger | Part 1

From the Love Worth Finding studios in Memphis, Tennessee, I'm Byron Tyler, here with Kerry Vaughn, the CEO of Love Worth Finding. Kerry, today Adrian Rogers starts a brand new series, Getting a Handle on Your Emotions. And I'm emotional right now, right? I'm all over the place.

I'm up, I'm down, I'm all around, but that's the key is to try to harness that. Kerry, many times Adrian Rogers would stop by the studio and we had the privilege of asking him questions. We asked him the question, what can our listeners learn from this series about our emotions? They can learn how to use their emotions rather than letting their emotions abuse them. They can learn how to have the joy and the victory, the peace, the satisfaction, the contentment that is our legacy in the Lord Jesus Christ. Kerry, today's message is called God's Answer to Anger, Proverbs chapter 19 verses 11 and 12.

We'll be looking at that with Adrian Rogers. You know, it's been said that unjustified anger is like an asset that brings harm to anything that's poured on, including the very container it inhabits. And sometimes that container is our very lives. That's true. I also think a righteous anger, you know, doing it in the right way for the right reason at the right time, God can honor it. Well, I think that's so true, Kerry, learning how to use our emotions the right way. And Adrian Rogers said it this way when it comes to learning how to use our emotions the right way. Someone has wisely said the only way to be angry and sin not is to be angry only at sin. If seeing little children abused doesn't make you angry, if seeing dope pushers take advantage of innocent youth doesn't make you angry, if racial pride and arrogance or prejudice doesn't make you angry, then there's something wrong with you. But that anger needs to be channeled. It needs to be controlled. It needs to be righteous anger.

And so this is a very important subject for us. You know, that's a great word. I think many times we have to remember that, you know, people are looking at us almost as the pace setter, and that depends on our emotions and that depends on our reaction to the action.

Yeah. Well, I think that's a great point Adrian Rogers makes about righteous anger. It is expected.

In fact, injustice ought to stir us and move us to act. Well, Kerry, we love hearing from our Love We're Finding listeners, and I think you have a comment that's come in recently. This says, having been saved for over 70 years, and I've taught Sunday School for over 30 of those years, yet I'm still learning so much from the teaching and preaching of Dr. Rogers, thank you for sharing these timeless messages. I mean, we love to get this. I mean, this is a affirmation. It's a shot in the arm for what we do. Well, if you've been listening, you know, just for the first time or like this listener for 30 years, benefiting from the ministry of Love We're Finding in your Christian walk. And that's the ripple effect of the ministry. And that's our prayer, that it will continue to saturate.

Well, Kerry, as we wrap up 2021, the year winds down. You know, Love We're Finding really appreciates and values the prayers and the faithfulness of our friends. We do.

And let me say this. This is a critical time of year for us. This is the time of year that our supporters and friends really rise to the occasion. And they just give. I mean, they give of their time. They give of their treasure.

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You can call with your calendar year end gift at 1-877-LOVEGOD or you can give online at LWF.org slash radio. Once again, we appreciate so much your support. Well, with today's message called God's answer to anger, part one, here's Adrian Rogers. Today, we're going to deal with something that I believe I just believe may be personal and pertinent to you, but I want to check up. So let me ask you a question while you turn to Proverbs chapter 19. How many of you ever get angry, lose your temper or find it? Whichever the case is, we're going to be speaking today on God's answer to anger. God's answer to anger. Proverbs chapter 19 in verse 11. The discretion of a man defereth his anger.

That is a smart fellow. It's not quick to get mad. The discretion of a man defereth his anger. And it is his glory to pass over a transgression. The king's wrath is as the roaring of a lion.

But his favor is as the dew upon the grass. God's answer to anger. Now, somebody said that anger is an acid that destroys its container. Indeed, it does.

And it's a corrosive acid that does harm to anything that it is poured on. I'm talking about ungodly anger, unjustified anger. Not all anger is bad, as we're going to see in a moment. As a matter of fact, some anger is good. As a matter of fact, we're going to see in a moment that the Bible, on at least one place, commands us to be angry. So we're going to learn about God's answer to anger, unjustified, ungodly anger. Now, there are four basic thoughts.

And the first is this. That sudden anger, sudden anger is to be controlled. That is, if you're a person who prides yourself in having a short fuse, you better be careful. The Bible has a lot to say about you. Now, there's some people, you know, they just say, Well, it's my Irish.

She just runs in the family, whatever it is. And they're like a loaded shotgun with a hair trigger. And anytime they're jostled, they blast away. Oh, well, they say it only lasts a little while.

Well, so did that tornado. I want you to see what the Bible has to say about getting angry in a hurry, about being quick to be angry. Now, our verse, our text says here, the discretion of a man defers his anger.

That is, a man who is a wise man does not fly off the handle. Now, let me give you some other scriptures. And by the way, the book of Proverbs has themes that go all the way through it.

So you might as well just lick your fingers. We're going to look at a lot of passages in Proverbs. Proverbs chapter 14 and verse 17.

Look at it. He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly. Now, friend, in plain, unvarnished language, you are a fool if you're quick to get angry. You say, Don't call me a fool.

I didn't. God did. He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly. Look again, if you will, in chapter 15 and verse 18. A wrathful man stirreth up strife, but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife.

If you want to get in trouble, I mean, if you want somebody to rearrange your face, then you be one of these kind of fellows who is quick to anger. And somebody is going to explain some things to you that you don't want to explain one of these days. That's what God is saying right here in Proverbs 15 verse 18. Look, if you will, in Proverbs chapter 25 and verse 8. Go not forth hastily to strive. That is, don't jump into an argument quickly. Lest thou know not what to do in the end thereof.

That is, you're going to start something you can't finish. And when thy neighbor hath put thee to shame, you put your mouth into action before your brain is in gear, and you're going to find out that you're not going to be able to finish what you've started. That's what God's word says.

Look, if you will, here in Proverbs chapter 29 and verse 20. Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? There is more hope of a fool than of him. You don't even come up to being a fool.

I mean, you've got to improve to be a fool. Now, when you're quick to get angry, dear friend, there is so much that you're going to lose. You can lose your job. You can lose your friends. You can lose your children. You can lose your wife. You can lose your health.

You may lose a few teeth. You can lose your testimony. There's nothing more debilitating your Christian testimony than for the fact that you just fly off the handle. Now, the Bible tells us here that we are to defer anger. That is, sudden anger is to be controlled.

Well, how do you control it? Well, first of all, you have to confess it. Now, there are a lot of us who just, we don't like to admit that we get angry. I'm a Christian, and I am not mad. I mean, we're sweet little deer, little us. Now, we couldn't get angry, could we?

Of course we can. And so the very first thing we must do is confess it. By the way, if you repress it rather than confess it, it'll do you all kinds of damage. You may say that you're not angry, but your stomach keeps the score. As a matter of fact, you'd be surprised what kind of physiological, psychological, and spiritual problems take place when you have repressed anger or, for that matter, even expressed anger that is not handled properly. First of all, your body responds and begins to pump that adrenaline into your bloodstream, and then your blood pressure rises, and then your muscles get tense and ready for fight or flight or both, and your heart beats, your hands become sweaty, your eyes dilate, and one man said, my life is at the mercy of any rascal who can make me angry. My life is at the mercy of any rascal who can make me angry.

And every time you get needlessly unjustifiably angry, you just drive another nail into your coffin. So first thing, when you find these feelings coming, confess them. Confess them. Don't repress them. Confess them to the Lord. Bring them to the Lord and say, Lord, there's something moving in me I don't like. And tell the Lord about it.

Someone has well said that if you repress anger, it's like lighting a wastebasket and putting it in a closet and closing the door. It may burn itself out, or it may burn the house down. It's just burning there. So the very first thing you need to do is just open the closet door and say, there it is, Lord, in there.

That's my wastebasket, and I set it on fire. Now, that's the very first thing you need to do is to confess it. And then the second thing you need to do, you need to consider it. You need to say, I'm getting upset. Now you need to consider and say, what is it, Lord, that is making me upset? Look, if you will, in Proverbs chapter 14 and verse 29 here for a moment.

Chapter 14 and verse 29. He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding. You see, when you don't get angry right away or when you feel this anger coming, you just kind of confess it to the Lord and say, now, Lord, show me. He will show you.

He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding. You need to analyze what it is that's making you angry so you don't go off half cocked. Confess it, consider it, control it. You say, I can't control it. Oh, yes, you can.

You know, the people say, oh, well, you know, if something comes over me, I can't control myself. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You know, sometimes a husband or wife be having one of these family discussions can be heard about two blocks away, and they will just be at one another's throat and rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, and the phone will ring.

Hello? Don't tell me you can't turn it on and turn it off. You can, right? Yeah, you know, don't you?

You say, pastor, how do you know? I know, too. I'm telling you, folks, I'm telling you that all is just a lot of excuses to say that we can't control it. We can control it. We can control it, and we'd better learn how to control it.

Turn out of control. Look, if you will, in Proverbs chapter 29 and verse 11. A fool lettereth his mind, but a wise man keepeth it till afterward.

Now, you can keep it. I mean, a fool just spouts off everything. A wise man can control it if he will. Now, we're talking about God's way to health, wealth, and wisdom. So what I'm trying to say is that if you find that first flash of anger over and over and over again in the book of Proverbs and in other places in the Bible, the Bible says that we are to control sudden anger. Do we have a chance to confess it, consider it, and contain it? All right, now look, sudden anger is to be controlled. Secondly, sinful anger is to be condemned. Why do we defer anger as our text tells us to do?

Why is it that we are slow? So we might find out whether it is righteous anger or sinful anger. If it is sinful anger, it is to be condemned.

It is to be dealt with harshly. It is to be repudiated. It is to be repented of. Now, don't treat anger, unjustified anger, sinful anger, as weakness. It is not weakness.

It is wickedness. The one thing that God will not accept for sin, it is an alibi. Well, by the way, what is sinful anger? Well, number one is anger without a cause.

Remember when Jesus said, Whosoever shall be angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of hell fire? Anger without a cause. Many times the problem is not what somebody has done, but the problem is within us. It's our own frustration. It's our own lack of peace with God and sin that's in our own lives. Now, by the way, nobody outwardly can control your emotions.

You do that. It's anger without a cause. I'll tell you something else that is sinful anger.

It is anger that is centered in a person rather than anger that is centered on an offense. When you get angry so that your anger makes you hate a person rather than hate what that person has done, and we'll say more about that in a moment, that's sinful anger. Sinful anger is anger that burns and desires revenge. That is sinful anger. Sinful anger is anger that is cherished up and stored up in the heart. We're not to stir up anger and we're not to store up anger. Some people love their anger.

They hold onto it. Sinful anger is anger that has an unforgiving spirit that will not, refuses to forgive. Now, we must deal with sinful anger as we would deal with any other sin. It must be condemned. It must be repented of. God will not accept an alibi.

All right. Sudden anger is to be controlled. Sinful anger is to be condemned. Now, stubborn anger is to be conquered. Now, the Bible goes on to say in our text, look at, again if you will here, in Proverbs chapter 19, the discretion of a man defereth his anger and it is his glory to pass over a transgression. What a glorious victory it is when we learn to pass over transgression. That is to forgive and to get over.

But some people don't seem to be able to do that. You're not to be conquered by anger. God wants you to be victorious.

Now, how are you going to do it? How are you going to get rid of this stubborn anger? Well, leave the book of Proverbs and turn, if you will, for a moment to Ephesians chapter 4. Let me show you some amazing scriptures here on anger in the book of Ephesians and we'll use our Proverbs as a stepping stone to the New Testament. Ephesians chapter 4 verse 26, be angry and sin not and let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Now, here he's talking about stubborn anger again. When you let the sun go down upon your anger, that is when you live with your anger, your husbands and wives, you get into an argument and then rather than kneeling by the bed and getting right with God and getting right with one another, you go to bed back to back.

Angry, you let the sun go down upon your wrath. You know what you've done? You've opened the door to old Slewfoot, to the devil. What you've done is this, you've said, devil come in and wreck my home.

Devil come in and destroy my family. Devil come in and ruin my testimony. You have given the devil a place.

That's what the Bible says. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give a place to the devil. What you've done is you've given the devil a beach head, a foothold, a foul nest and believe you me, he's ready to come in and it is that anger, that stubborn anger, that stubborn anger that the devil loves to have as a campground.

Now, let me show you how the devil works when you open the door. You let the sun go down upon your wrath and you come in. The devil has six steps that he's going to destroy you with, this matter of stubborn anger that I'm talking about. Begin in verse 31. We're in Ephesians 4 verse 31. Let all bitterness, one, and wrath, two, and anger, three, and clamor, four, and evil speaking, five, be put away from you with all malice, six. Those are the six steps.

Six, the number of a man. And when you open the door to the devil, when you let the sun go down upon your wrath, sudden anger becomes stubborn anger. Let me show you what happens. First of all, he talks about bitterness here. What is bitterness? Bitterness is that feeling of resentment when somebody does you a wrong or you think they've done you a wrong and you get bitter in your heart. Now, the Bible in the book of Hebrews calls this a root of bitterness. You ever try and get a dandelion up?

You know, you just pull the tops off. But you haven't dealt with that rascal because the root is down there and there is that root of bitterness. And it gets in there and you begin to feel hurt. Somehow you feel that your rights have been trampled on. Somehow you've been overlooked. Somebody done you wrong.

Huh? And you feel that you're justified. And that's what the Bible calls bitterness. That's step number one, bitterness. Now, what happens to bitterness? Well, the next thing is the next word he uses here is wrath.

That's step number two. The word wrath comes from a Greek word that means hot. You get all hot about it. You get all hot and bothered. There's a slow burn that starts. And the bitterness turns to burning. And you just feel that fire start in there.

And it smolders and smolders. You know that feeling? It's an ugly feeling, isn't it? That bitterness, I felt it. That bitterness becomes that hotness, that burning, that smoldering thing.

And then look at the third step here. The third word is anger. Now, wrath speaks of that which is on the inside, but anger speaks of that which is on the outside. And the Greek word for anger here means that which is open and outward. It is outward hostility now as the smoldering rags that are in the attic of the mind now burst into flame. We may have been bitter for quite a while.

We may be doing the slow burn for quite a while. And then just the right catalyst happens, and then it's anger. That's the third step.

This is outward now and is active now. And then that's followed by number four, clamor. Now, the word clamor has the idea of being vocal, being loud. It may be tears, but most often it is shouting. You ever notice when people get angry, the voice rises, and you're talking with a person, you say, well, now you don't have to shout. He says, I'm not shouting.

He gets louder. And clamor comes in here. But then what follows when we start, when we lift our voices that way? That clamor turns to evil speaking. Then when we hear ourselves talking that way, and that open hostility breaks out, then we start to say things we never really meant. We begin to speak evilly.

There's evil speaking, slander. I hate you. I wish you'd never been born. You're a stupid child.

You're the meanest person I ever knew. And we begin to say things that we know are not true. But we're on a roll, aren't we?

I mean, we're doing good now. I mean, the devil says, and tell him this. And you start to say those things.

You don't mean them. But you verbalize them, because that bitterness turned to a burning, and that burning turned to an anger, and that anger turned to a clamor, and that clamor turned to an evil speaking. Then that evil speaking does what? Turns to malice. You know what malice is? That's when you want to hurt somebody.

Pow! Or if you can't hurt them with your fists, you'll hurt them with words. If you can't hurt them with words, you'll hurt them with money.

If you can't hurt them with money, you'll hurt them somehow. That's when a mother will slap a child. That's when a husband will abuse a wife. That's when somebody goes for a gun, or goes for a stick, or does some foolish, silly thing, and the whole devil just sitting over there grinning.

Oh, he's having a time. And you're the one who opened the door, said, come on in, devil. Wreck my home, wreck my life, wreck my health, destroy the whole thing.

You're the one who did it. You gave a place to the devil, because you let the sun go down upon your wrath, and that smoldering anger there begins to take its toll. Terrible, isn't it? Awful, isn't it?

Hideous, isn't it? I think it's not a one of us hadn't been there one time or another. You say, pastor, that's exactly the way it works. Sure, that's exactly. You don't need some psychologist to tell you. God's word is already here to tell us exactly what the devil wants to do, to harm us, to hurt us, to ruin us, to wreck us, to destroy us, to destroy our testimony. Listen to me, friend. You're not going to be able to conquer anger or anything else until you have Christ on the inside. It is not victory over the devil you need.

It is the victor of the devil, the Lord Jesus Christ. And having Christ on the inside, and you know whatever you're filled with is what spills out when you're jostled, isn't that right? If you want to know what you're filled with, just see what spills out when you're jostled. If you're filled with Jesus, somebody jostles you.

Jesus is going to spill out. And we'll hear part two of this message coming up tomorrow on Love Worth Finding. Today, if you have questions about who Jesus is or what He means to you, how to begin a relationship with God through Christ, go to our Discover Jesus page at lwf.org slash radio. You'll find resources and materials there that will answer questions you may have about your faith. Again, go to lwf.org slash radio and click Discover Jesus. We're so glad you joined us for today's study in God's Word. To start receiving daily devotions and links to our program, sign up for our daily heartbeat emails at lwf.org slash radio. And join us tomorrow for the conclusion of God's answer to anger, right here on Love Worth Finding.