How to Deal with Anger

The power of anger can bring down nations. It creates wars. It ruins families.

It destroys marriages. And so it's very important for the Christian to understand the nature of anger and how to deal with anger. And we're going to do just that today on Redoing Your Mind. All week Dr. R.C. Sproul has been examining what Scripture has to say about life's difficult problems— suffering, guilt, forgiveness, anxiety—and today we're going to take a look at anger. I think we can all recognize the destructive nature of misdirected anger, whether you've been on the receiving end of it or dealt it out.

So let's dive into this study on a subject that the Bible addresses so clearly. During the summer when I was in college, I worked in a hospital outside of Pittsburgh, and after work every day I would drive to downtown Pittsburgh to pick up my mother from work and drive her home. And traffic was always congested, leaving the city, going across the bridge, and we'd go across the Liberty Bridge and enter into these tunnels that went under Mount Washington called the Liberty Tubes, narrow two-lane tunnels. You go through the tunnels, and after you come out of the tunnels, the thing widens into six lanes. And if you came out of the tunnel in the left lane of the tunnel, you had to turn left. And if you came out of the tunnel in the right lane of the tunnel, you could not turn left. You were not allowed to get into the left turn lanes.

Well, for some reason this particular day I got stuck in the right-hand lane in the tunnel, came through the tunnel, got to the other end, and I saw that the light was green about 100 yards up in front of me, so I darted into the left lane where I wasn't supposed to go, and just as I got to the light it turned red and I had to stop. And I looked in my rearview mirror, and there was a policeman who was standing at the edge of the tunnel. He was a motorcycle cop, and he was overweight, and he saw me make this darting move into the left lane, and he started running towards my car, and I could see him. And I could see his face getting redder and redder and the steam coming out of his ears, and he came up to my car and took his fist and pounded it on the roof of my car. And I opened the window, and he said, What do you think that you're doing? He was enraged.

And the first verse that came into my mind was, A soft answer turneth away wrath. So I came up with the softest, gentlest reply I could ever do, and I said, I'm very sorry, officer. I should not have done what I did. And he was not prepared for that. He just started sputtering, and finally he looked at me in disgust, and said, Oh, all right, just don't do it again.

And he turned around and walked away. And I thanked God for the wisdom of the Scriptures that allowed me to escape the policeman's wrath. Well, we all experience the consequences and the effects of human anger. We have all been angry at times in our own lives, and we've had people who were angry with us. And anger as a force or as a power is one of the most destructive forces that can be unleashed among human beings.

And it is an emotion, a posture, an attitude that is so powerful and so real and so pervasive in our culture that you would think we would have a better handle on our understanding of it. And yet it seems as though we don't understand very much about anger. And yet the Scripture is by no means silent on this matter of anger. And I'd like to turn your attention for a moment to the New Testament, to the fourth chapter of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, beginning with verse 25, Ephesians 4.25.

The Apostle writes these words, Therefore, putting away lying, let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin, and do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. Now here Paul addresses this difficult problem of anger, and he does it in a rather unusual way. The opening statement that he gives with respect to anger is this, Be angry. If I had just read this passage to you and I said, Did you know that the Bible tells you to be angry?

I think you wouldn't believe me. But here the Apostle actually states in a positive, imperative way. Be angry.

Now what's he saying here? It's really not an injunction that we should be characterized as angry people. That's not the point of this. But what he is realizing and acknowledging is that inherently and intrinsically anger is not a sin. Anger in and of itself is not a sin. If it were a sin inherently, then that would mean two things immediately. One, that God is evil.

And two, that Christ was a sinner. Because we know that it is part of the character of God for Him to express His wrath. And we see occasions in the New Testament, particularly in the episode of Christ's cleansing the temple, where He fashioned a whip out of ropes and went in there and turned over the tables and drove the money changers out of the temple. And Christ was angry. He was visibly angry with what was going on here. Now we have a phrase that we use to describe that particular type of anger, which we call righteous indignation. That any time God is angry, it is a righteous kind of anger. And any time Christ manifested anger, it was a manifestation of righteous indignation or righteous anger. But our episodes of anger are not always quite so righteous. Sometimes we are angry without just cause, which again Jesus warned against in the Sermon on the Mount.

But again Paul is saying here, be angry. There's nothing wrong inherently with being angry. But anger is such a dangerous and volatile human emotion that many, many, many times when a person is in a state of anger, that anger becomes an occasion for sin, where we lose control, we lose our temper. What does it mean to lose one's temper?

To be temperate is to be moderate, to be sober, to have ourselves in a state of self-control. And anger can cause the loss of self-control and provoke us to behave in ways that are destructive and harmful to ourselves and to other people. So Paul says, be angry, but he doesn't leave it at that. He says, be angry, but sin not. In the wisdom of the Apostle, he understood that anger becomes the occasion for all kinds of wickedness. And then he adds another injunction to this, be angry, but don't sin in your anger or sin not, and don't let the sun go down on your anger.

Now that's a metaphor, of course. And what is the Apostle saying when he says, don't let the sun go down on your wrath? Anger, as I said, in and of itself may be a legitimate righteous emotion, but so easily can turn into those emotions that are completely destructive. For example, bitterness, resentment, harboring grudges, all of these things flow out of anger that has never been dealt with where the sun goes down on it. The sun sets on that anger, and we carry over the anger to the next day and to the next week or perhaps our entire lives. Many of us walk through this world filled to the brim with anger that's never really been dealt with. You've heard of guys who are angry young men or people that seem to be explosive in their temperament, that walking through their lives is like walking through a minefield.

You're afraid to step without looking where you step. You have to walk on eggshells around them because they're so explosive, they're so temperamental, there's so much anger in them. See, they never dealt with the anger in the first place. The sun set on that anger, and that anger then began to eat away at their insides to become bitterness and resentment and producing an attitude of grudge and hostility. That happens, and we've all experienced it, and we've all known people who seem to be perpetually angry about this or the other, incapable almost of smiling.

We see this in the criminal world at times, unbelievable hostility. So the power of anger can bring down nations, it creates wars, it ruins families, it destroys marriages. And so it's very important for the Christian to understand the nature of anger and how to deal with anger. And one of the principal things is not to allow the sun to go down on your anger. This is a thing that we all have to deal with I'm sure, but again the heart of it I think is understanding the nature of anger in the first place. We all need to ask ourselves from time to time, what makes you angry? Certain things that might anger me wouldn't bother you at all, and things that bother you wouldn't make me mad. I mean, it's just the way it is.

We're just built different, and we have different reasons for responding the way we do to certain things. Well, there are basic elements to anger that have been isolated, and I would say the three most common causes for anger, and though I'm distinguishing among three, and in one sense they're all variations of the same thing. The first one is what I'm going to call disappointment. How do you handle disappointment? This is one of the most difficult things for children to learn how to deal with is disappointment. Mom, can I stay over at Blake's house tonight? No, son, we have things on in the morning.

Why can't I? And all of a sudden there's all this anger and all this rage coming out of the kid because he wanted to do something. He had plans to do something. He had hopes to be able to do something, and these hopes had now become an expectation, and the expectation was not realized, and the result was anger. And disappointment creates and provokes anger, and here's the axiom, people disappoint people. We are not able to completely fulfill all of the expectations that people have from us. If we fail to meet their expectations, if we let them down, isn't that a strange phrase, let them down? We use that vertical quantitative measurement to talk about various levels of the Spirit. When we are unhappy, we are said to be low, and when we're happy and exalted, we're said to be high.

Alright? So here we are, happy as clams, and all of a sudden somebody lets us down. Somebody fails to meet our expectations, and when that happens, we had expected one thing, we got something else in this place, we're disappointed, and that disappointment now is expressed in terms of anger. Now closely related to disappointment is its twin, which I call frustration. Now frustration is really disappointment repeated, where your hopes are not realized repeatedly. It's one thing to hope for something, have it not come to pass, you're a little bit disappointed, but you're not angry yet.

Then the same thing happens the next day, or the next day, or the day after that, and pretty soon you're frustrated. So if you see somebody who's angry, you might want to check and see what was the goal or the desire or the hope that they had, the dream of their life that wasn't realized, left them in a state of frustration, disappointment, which then turned to rage. These are two of the most frequent causes of anger there is.

Now the third cause of anger is really still part of the same theme, and I want to focus on this because this is the essence of it. Pain or hurt. Pain or hurt. If somebody walks up to you and slaps you in the face, chances are that's going to make you mad. It hurts to be slapped across the face.

Somebody knocks you over, causes you to scrape your knees. That might make you angry because that person has inflicted pain upon you. But here, this is a simple matter of understanding physical pain. But we all know that there are other kinds of pain besides physical pain. The person who hurts your feelings, who insults you, who slanders you, who gossips about you, injures your reputation, injures your name, provokes pain in your life. The person who cheats you out of your money in a business deal has inflicted pain on you.

It hurts to lose your investments. And so that pain is transferred into anger. Now notice that all three of these involve some kind of pain. Disappointment is painful. Frustration is painful. Being slandered is painful.

Being slapped across the face is painful. And these are the things that provoke anger. Jesus was angry at what He saw happen to His Father's house because it pained Jesus to see His Father's house, which was to be a house of prayer, turned into a house of merchandise. And Jesus expressed His anger that grew out of His pain. I can't think of any kind of anger that isn't rooted in some kind of pain.

Now why is that important to understand that? Well, in understanding my own anger and certainly in understanding somebody else's anger, particularly if they're angry at me, it goes a long way if we can discipline ourselves to look past the anger to the pain. If somebody comes up to you and says to you, I am really mad at you, what's your normal reaction? You're going to be defensive. You're not going to be sympathetic.

You're going to be uncomfortable. Or if somebody comes up to you and says, I'm really hurt. Well, why are you hurt?

Well, because of something you said to me the other day. I mean, how are you going to respond to that if I realize that I have hurt somebody? My basic human response to that is to want to bring healing, is to want to bring soothing salve to get rid of their pain. I don't want to hurt people.

Do you? I don't want to inflict pain on other human beings. And so somebody comes to me and says to me, I'm really hurting. I say, why?

Well, it's because of something you said. Then I all of a sudden start getting mad at myself instead of that person. But if a person comes on to me in rage, I don't want to hear it. And if they become abusive, I don't want to listen to them.

Because now they're inflicting pain on me and I don't understand it. And anger and angry responses provoke angry responses until that anger begins to escalate and a war starts. Where if we can just get past the anger or look behind the anger, look underneath the anger to see where the pain is because it's always there.

It is always there. And a person may feel pain in an unjustifiable way. As I said, people have unrealistic expectations. Somebody might come up to me and say, I'm mad at you. Why are you mad at me? Well, because I called your office and wanted to play golf with you and your secretary said you were too busy and I'm really ticked about that. I said, well, you know, I'm sorry. I don't want to offend you.

But whatever gave you the idea that you could just call my office and have my secretary schedule a golf game with you. You maybe wanted that and you expected your desire to be fulfilled, but you had no right to have that expectation. And so sometimes we create our own pain and we create our own anger by illegitimate expectations. But still it's important for us to understand it so that we can understand our own anger and understand the other person's anger. They had an expectation.

Maybe it was a legitimate expectation and I failed to meet their expectation and the weight of responsibility is on my head. We actually do offend people and there's a distinction between giving offense and taking offense. Sometimes we take offense when no offense has been made and people will take offense at us when we have done nothing to offend. That's also part of human nature. But when a person is offended, they are hurt and often the response to the pain is anger.

We need to understand that. We also understand the way anger works in relationships, in families, in homes, the office. A couple kinds of anger that I want to talk about briefly are those two types of anger that I call situational anger and misdirected anger. These also are closely related.

Let's see how they're related. Let's take misdirected anger. A guy comes home from the office. He's had a bad day. His boss chewed him out. He lost an account and he dented his car on the way home and he walks into the house and he says to his wife, honey, I've really had a bad day, darling, and I hope you'll help me get over it.

That's not usually the way it works. Rather, he comes in, kicks the dog, starts yelling at his wife and creates havoc in the household because he's had this buildup of frustration and anger all day. And so now he can't afford to let it out to his boss or to his employees at work, so he stores it up and brings it home and pours it on his dog, on his kids, or on his wife.

That happens every day in America. The misdirected anger. I'm just saying there can be a dangerous pattern of storing up anger and never dealing with it because it's going to come out.

And it's going to come out usually in a destructive way. And so if we are to be people who deal with this difficult problem of anger, we need the wisdom of God and we need the wisdom and the patience to look for the pain because it's a whole lot easier to respond to pain than it is to respond to anger. You know, when we listen to a message like this, it's common to find ourselves wincing, both with guilt for the anger we've inflicted and with pain for the misdirected anger we've received. So grateful for Dr. R.C. Sproul and the practical biblical help he provided today in dealing with this issue. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

I'm Lee Webb. Thank you for being with us today. We are wrapping up a week of programs featuring Dr. Sproul's series, Dealing with Difficult Problems. He's shown us what God's Word has to say about dealing with guilt, forgiveness, anxiety, and other important issues, and we'd like to send you this six-part series when you contact us today with a gift of any amount.

You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. Here at Ligonier Ministries, we want to bridge the gap between Sunday School and Seminary, and that was one of the reasons we developed Ligonier Connect. From your computer or tablet, you can choose from more than 80 interactive video courses to help you grow in your knowledge of God's Word, and you can study with friends or dive in at your own pace.

Learn more at connect.ligonier.org. Well, in line with our theme this week of dealing with difficult problems, there are times when we may feel defeated, unable to carry on. Next week, several of our Ligonier teaching fellows will help us understand what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that we are more than conquerors. I hope you'll join us beginning Monday for Renewing Your Mind. .