Escaping Anger
(This references Lisa Bevere's book, "Out of Control & Loving It". This post discusses Chapter 11, "Escaping Anger.")
Anger – what is it? What causes it? What is its purpose? Is anger a sin? There are lots of questions we need to think about when we discuss anger. It is a topic most everyone can relate to, and most folks can benefit from learning more about how to handle anger appropriately.
The dictionary defines anger as a strong feeling of displeasure and usually of antagonism; rage. Read Galatians 5:16-22 Amp. The scripture here tells us to “Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.” This means “living one’s life in the power of the Spirit while being guided by the Spirit.” It then tells us that the works of the flesh are evident or obvious…and he names several works of the flesh. One of them is identified as “outbursts of wrath.”
There are two main words used in the New Testament that have to do with anger. One of them is this word. This is the word from which “thermostat” comes…indicating a “temperature that may rise unbridled, calling for some means to regulate and direction passion toward proper investments rather than carnal ones.” In other words, anger or wrath can rise up in us rapidly, but we need the power of the Holy Spirit operating in our lives in order to properly manage anger.
The scripture here points out that anger is a work of the flesh, and that is true. However, anger is also, in addition to being a work of the flesh, an emotion. It is a God-given emotion, believe it or not!
What is the purpose of anger? Anger is given to us as part of our make-up so that if an injustice is done or we or our loved ones are endangered in some way, anger will rise up in us so that we will protect ourselves and our loved ones if we are improperly treated or put in danger in some way. If we did not have anger, we would allow anyone and anything to happen in our lives, and go merrily on our way. We would never challenge something wrong being done to us. We would just accept it. Anger is a God-given emotion, given to us as humans so that we may better protect that which He has placed in our hands…but as with anything else He has given us, it has to be managed well.
It is not anger so much that is a sin, but it is what we DO with anger that causes it to become sin or a work of the flesh. We will discuss this more in a bit. (Anger is only a sin when we want to hurt someone with our anger.)
The first thing that Lisa addresses in the book is that we make excuses for our anger. We say things like, “I’m on my period. It’s hormones. I’m pregnant. I’m Italian/Irish/French, etc.” We all make excuses as to why we become angry and lose our temper, but the truth of the matter is that there is no good excuse. It is part of the way that we as humans were made – and for good reason. But part of becoming mature is learning to appropriately and wisely manage our anger.
Lisa talks in the book about how that she had a problem with anger, but that she did not want to take the necessary steps to deal with it. “I felt certain I could control any anger as long as all my circumstances and everyone around me cooperated by being perfect!” As you can imagine, this did not happen. Life is not perfect, and neither is everyone surrounding us! If you have a problem with anger, be sure that things will happen to cause you to need to deal with it. Lisa points out that at first she only lost her temper occasionally, but it soon progressed to becoming a way of life. And most often, this happened to her loved ones, the ones she loved most. They were the ones she felt safest with, and therefore, they felt the brunt of her anger. If you have a problem that you refuse to deal with, be sure that the ones that love you most – that you love most – are the ones who will suffer for your refusal to deal with this problem.
Sometimes circumstances created a situation that caused Lisa to “lose it” but some days she would just wake up feeling like she was “about to blow.” She would warn her husband not to cross her that day. She would find that ordinary things would cause her to feel out of control and usually by the end of the day, she would lose it by saying ugly things to her husband that she later regretted. She believed she was under a demonic attack, but there was nothing demonic about this. She simply was not in control of her fleshly nature. She was allowing her feelings to control her actions. She tells the story of how one day her husband very calmly & gently picked her up and set her outside the house, announcing to her that she would not damage anything in their home due to her anger. She was of course, incensed, and took out her anger on the Weber grill sitting in the garage. God spoke to her immediately and said, “This is not a spirit of rage. You are in total control of yourself.” Lisa talked her husband into letting her back in the house, and she went on as before.
Lisa never allowed her anger to get out of hand in public. She only displayed fits of rage in the privacy of her home. She says that in her family of origin, they did not attack problems, they attacked people and assigned blame for problems. One day Lisa was at home with her two young sons and in trying to get her older son to lie down for a nap, she picked him up roughly with the intention of slamming him against the wall when she saw the fear in her son’s eyes. She immediately recognized the look of fear in his eyes and knew that she had come very close to breaking the vow she had made to herself regarding anger – that she would never allow it to harm her children as it had harmed her childhood. She immediately apologized to her small son and comforted him. Then she headed downstairs to weep before the Lord and beg Him to remove this awful thing from her. As she lay broken at His feet, weeping, she had no one else to blame – the anger was hers and she had to own it so that she could ask God to remove it from her life. God then instructed her to call her mother and to ask forgiveness of her mother for the many years she had withheld forgiveness from her. Through asking her mother to forgive her and receiving it, she broke through the barrier of anger and unforgiveness as the grace of God swept in to bring healing.
We can learn some things from Lisa’s testimony, and I’d like to share some of my testimony with you about how God has dealt with me about anger in my life. The reason I volunteered to teach this chapter is because it’s something I’ve dealt with myself.
First of all, as Lisa points out, “we buy what we justify.” So if we justify our anger instead of dealing with it, we’re going to keep it, not deal with it. Anger is an emotion, as well as a work of the flesh. It is part of our fleshly nature, so it is something we have to learn to deal with, and we have to learn how to allow the Holy Spirit to help us.
The first principle we must learn is “I am responsible for managing my anger responsibly.” It is no one else’s fault. Even when we are provoked, how we choose to handle our anger is our responsibility. If we are truly being led by the Holy Spirit, then we will not conduct ourselves in a way that will not only embarrass ourselves, but also our Lord.
I remember the story told by a minister of going out to dinner with a few other pastors. They sat in the restaurant talking and sharing. Something that I don’t recall occurred, and one of the ministers became very angry, lost his temper, and as part of his outburst, cursed. Flustered, he said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that.” The other minister told us that he reached out and shook the full glass of water that was before him, and water flew out of the glass. He said, “It’s because whatever you’re full of will eventually come out.” If we are full of anger, it doesn’t take much to cause it to spill over on others. Usually, this is to our great dismay and embarrassment. Think about it for a minute…would you say to your husband or children what you usually say if you knew the pastor or a church member was standing behind you? Or would you miraculously control yourself in such a setting? You should not say anything to your family that you wouldn’t say if the preacher were there. Even worse, God is there and LISTENING! Think about that, and see if it helps you control your tongue!
Something else I heard a minister say is that “I can’t make you angry – I can only stir up what’s already in there.” So if we have something like anger in us, it will come out so we can deal with it.
Another principle we can learn from Lisa’s book is that “I am to blame for what I do when I’m angry. It’s not the person who angered me or the situation’s fault. I am in control of myself, and I only am to blame for what I do with it.”
So we see from this that we can’t just excuse ourselves by saying, “She really makes me mad.” No excuses…the buck must stop here with us. We cannot try to blame someone else for how we respond to a given situation. We are responsible for what happens and what we do when we are angry. Playing the blame game is just a waste of time.
Several years ago, I was in a car accident. I’m not sure what there was about it, but something about this incident caused me to deal with the many emotions that were swirling in my life, and that I had so far avoided dealing with. I was raised in a home that silently taught me that anger – any anger – was a sin. I was a Christian and therefore should not get angry, because it was a sin. I am a Christian – therefore, I am not angry! Wrong – even though I refused to acknowledge its existence in my life, circumstances were such that I was about to be forced to understand what the real deal was.
I clearly remember the first time I yelled at my husband when angry…I remember thinking to myself, “I am going to get his attention!”
I had a lot of emotional problems as a result of this accident, and I found myself very depressed. I was not suicidal, but I understood for the first time why people must feel that way. I felt as though my heart had disappeared and that there was a big black hole in its place. I wept and prayed before the Lord, week after week, begging Him to take this awful feeling from me. I would feel His touch, but the bad feelings did not leave me, so I continued to seek Him and asked Him to help me find the help I needed to recover. Though my children were the ones who had suffered physical injuries in the wreck, I too, had been emotionally scarred as a result of the wreck, and it had thrown me into an emotional tailspin that seemed to be spinning out of control.
Several months down the road, I knew that I needed help from outside myself. Sometimes we have to know and acknowledge when a problem is bigger than we are or that we don’t have the answers we need and begin to seek that help outside ourselves. I finally found a Christian pastor to act as a counselor for me who would help me examine the issues in my life, and hopefully help me resolve them.
At the end of our first session, he looked at me and said, “You are a very angry lady.” I was very upset by this announcement, and I thought on it all week long until our next session. I began by asking him what God thought about my being angry. He looked at me with compassion and said, “God understands.” And he basically told me that as long as I was seeking the Lord and seeking to resolve these issues in my life, that I didn’t need to worry about it, but to trust Him to bring me through it, as I sought Him and allowed Him into those hidden places in my life.
This began a long and arduous journey in my life. It caused me to do a lot of deep thinking and to begin to deal with some of the issues in my life that I had been afraid to touch. One of them was anger.
My counselor shared with me that very often, we mask other emotions and call them anger because we are used to dealing with anger, and it is more acceptable than others. We have to learn to identify the emotions we are feeling, as well as learning how to appropriately manage them. We have to learn to take our “emotional temperature” so that we can adequately do this. When as situation happens and we begin to respond emotionally to it, we need to ask ourselves what it is exactly that we are feeling.
Another principle we can learn about anger is this: If we do not process anger honestly and emotionally, it will manifest in a different way. I found this to be very true in my life. Within just a few months of the wreck, I began to experience pain and swelling in my knees that I had never had before. This was soon diagnosed as arthritis, and I was put on a prescription to help manage it. It was so bad in the mornings, that sometimes I could barely walk. I was only 34 years old! What was I doing with arthritis?
I eventually came to understand that as my emotional state improved and I came to better grips with the things that had put me in counseling, the arthritis seemed to improve as well. Even my doctors acknowledged that my emotional state was closely tied to my physical state. As I began to gain understanding of my emotions and better control them, I found that my physical condition also improved.
The Bible in Matthew 21:12, 13 shows us that Jesus became angry with the way that the money-changers were cheating the Israelites and not only making them pay excessively for animals for sacrifice, they were bringing unworthy (blemished) sacrifices to God to offer Him. If displaying any kind of anger were wrong, Jesus would not have “cleansed the temple” as He did. Jesus was righteously angry (and with good cause). He was angry about a situation that was causing hurt and problems for others. He stepped up to the plate and angrily confronted the problem. He did not back down, but rather, He used the problem and his anger to bring change.
The Word tells us to be angry and sin not. Huh? How do we do that?
Ephesians 4:26 says “Be angry, and do not sin, do not let the sun go down upon your wrath.” In other words, Jesus is telling us to manage the anger we are feeling and not to sin with it. He is not saying so much that because the sun is setting, I have to make things right that happened earlier today. No, what Jesus means by this passage is that we are not to carry into tomorrow the anger that we were dealing with today. We are not to carry our anger over into the next day. We are to experience every day the great victory God has given to us. If something happens that makes us angry, we need to be able to pray about it and lay it down at the Master’s feet and go on as if nothing happened. If we become angry about a situation or at something someone has said, then we need to stop and deal with it immediately, because we cannot allow it to steal another day from what God intends for us. He does not mean for us to walk in anger and strife.
So there are two principles we can learn from this scripture: it is possible to be angry and to sin not. It is not always a sin to be angry. Sometimes we become angered by a situation – the question is – do we allow the Holy Spirit to still control us? Or do we walk in the flesh and use our anger to hurt another (physically or verbally)?
Another principle we can learn from this book is that if anger is a problem in our lives, then we need to deal with the underlying problems that trigger the anger. Is there unforgiveness in our hearts? Are we bitter against someone? Is there someone who has wronged us and we just can’t seem to go on? What is the root cause of your anger?
At the hospital, there is something called a sentinel event – this is when there is a major problem or mistake that leads to loss of limb or injury or death, such as a patient receiving surgery on the wrong body part or the wrong patient receiving surgery or if a patient dies with no discernable cause of death. If a sentinel event occurs, an investigation then takes place into why this happened, and it is called a root cause analysis. In other words, they want to get to the bottom of this problem so it can be dealt with. We need to do the same thing in the Spirit…if there is a problem in our lives we are dealing with again and again, it’s time to do a spiritual root cause analysis and find out what happened to cause this event in our lives, so we can deal with it and prevent its happening again.
Ecclesiastes 7:9 tells us that anger rests in the bosom of a fool. Anger is settled in their bosom/heart. It is residing there. We have to be careful what we allow to reside in our hearts because it will lead us down a path of destruction that we don’t want to travel.
TD Jakes has written an excellent book called, “The Great Investment.” It is also available in a sermon series and videos. In this series, he speaks at length about anger and how it affects families. He shares the story of seeing a child who had been abused by his father because of less than acceptable grades, who had been denied proper medical attention because his father didn’t want anyone to know about his angry outburst. Bishop Jakes said he wanted to show that father a thing or two about anger. He also told a story about he & his wife and how that early in their marriage, they had a “screaming-standing-on-your-front-porch-in-your-underwear” argument. He went on to share that his wife was going to drive off in his car – which was only in his name at the time, and he was going to report her to the police that she had stolen his car. He was that mad…but his wife looked at him and said quietly, “Elder, it doesn’t matter” and handed him the keys. As he continued to yell, he realized he was the only one yelling and said he realized that she was making him look like a fool. It’s hard to have an argument all by yourself. Bishop also shared that people carry silent anger in their spirits that they do not openly address. They act as though everything is OK, but inside, anger is eating them alive. This is one of the things that cause people to develop ulcers. If you have anger in your heart, you need to deal with it, not let it simmer and burn out of control, or you will live to regret it. Anger rests in the bosom of a fool.
We cannot be controlled by our feelings/emotions. Sometimes they are right on target…other times your feelings will lie to you. How you feel can be controlled sometimes by outside things like hormones. We need to be aware of this so that we can guard ourselves carefully and will not allow ourselves to be controlled by emotion and drama. If we are angry, we need to identify the source of the anger, and allow the Holy Spirit to lead us to a place where we can let go of it.
Anger is a very real issue, and if it is a problem in your life, allow God to direct your steps so that you can go about dealing with it. While we are human and will sometimes feel angry, we must strive to see that anger does not control us. If we are a vessel of the Holy Spirit, only He should control us. Seek the Lord so that He can deal with issues in your life such as anger, and watch His strong hand of deliverance bring your through triumphantly!
posted by Carolyn at 7:48 PM
|
3 comments
