Anger Gone Wrong

August 15, 2021

JRCC In-person/Online

Emotions: Getting a Grip of Your Heart & Mind

“Anger Gone Wrong”

Text: James 1:19-20

Focus: Anger is good when it’s not wrong. What makes anger go wrong and what is our cure?

Welcome to our teaching time, friends. My name is Wally and I am on the Pastoral leadership team here at Jericho Ridge.

• Our current teaching series is called Emotions: Getting a Grip on Your Heart & Mind.
• And the first emotions we focused on were Loss & Grief.
  • In our last gathering, we heard powerful stories of loss and the profound grief that accompanies loss.
  • And we mentioned last week that a secondary emotion, which often accompanies loss & grief, is anger.
  • And so today we want to focus on our emotion of anger.

Dare I begin by saying that not one of us can claim exemption from anger!

• • The frank truth is, everyone gets angry.
  • Neurophysiologist Nerina Ramlakham says psychology no longer categorizes people as those who get angry versus those who do not. Rather, she says, “We now separate people differently into those who hold rage in and those who express it out.”
  • In other words, we all get angry.
  • For some of us, anger is corked under a calm exterior… and it ferments where no one can immediately see it.
  • Others spout off instantly with physical reaction.
  • Some turn red in the face and tremble.
  • Others become sullen and silent.
  • Some become caustic and cutting with their words.
  • Most of these expressions sound negative or bad, we tend to immediately associate them with something that is wrong and that we would want to avoid.

But we also know that not all anger is wrong or to be avoided.

• In fact, all emotions are created by God.
• He creates us in his image with the entire range of emotions, which includes anger.
• Yes, God himself gets angry, quite regularly in fact.
• Psalm 7:11 says that God is an honest judge who gets angry with the wicked every day.
• Not all anger is bad… it can be good and right.
• It’s right that God is angry with unrighteousness/evil.
• It’s right that we get angry with the driver who speeds down our street and puts people, our kids, in danger.

 

So yes, anger can be both wrong and right … and yes, we all get angry … not one of us is exempt.

• Personally, anger is a challenge for me that often builds under the surface.
• As it simmers there, I often don’t recognize it building and when I do, I have a hard time figuring out why it’s present and increasing, and hard time quelling it.
• In the end, if I can’t resolve it, it either oozes out over days, which makes me caustic to be around, or it erupts in a moment and does immediate damage.
• Either way, in the aftermath, I am usually left wondering why? What was really going on?
• Perhaps your experience with anger is similar.

We’ll get into the “why” of anger gone wrong in more detail, but as a teaser of where we are headed, according to author Timothy Keller, the “why?” of anger has to do with love.

• I said at the onset that anger is a secondary emotion resulting from something else.
• It doesn’t come out of nowhere.
• In one degree or another, anger is our response to whatever endangers something that we love/prize/greatly desire or feel we deserve.
• As Pastor John Piper says, “anger is love in motion to deal with a threat to someone or something we care about. And in many ways, it can be right. But if we’re honest, as much as there are right instances of our anger, most of the time our anger isn’t connected to righteous loves.”

 So what are we to make of our experiences with anger?

• I am going to borrow from pastor and author, Timothy Keller, who does excellent work in delving into our emotions from a Biblical perspective.
• Keller offers four things we need to understand with regard to anger and I’ll use these as the outline this morning.

  

Anger’s Dangerous Power

The first thing we need to understand is anger’s dangerous power.

• Anger has been called the “dynamite of the soul” … it’s a power that can easily destroy…
• It’s a universal experience and unfortunately, most of it is not good in our human expression.
• James 1:19-20 says,

¹⁹ Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. ²⁰ Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires.

• We should learn how to be slow to anger because what comes quickly to us is usually sourced from human nature and unrighteous impulses, rather than a godly directive.
• And when that happens, the outcomes are negative spiritually, physically or relationally … according to James 1, they do not produce the righteousness God desires.

Let’s begin with the spiritual consequences of anger gone wrong.

• Jesus says in Matthew 5:22, that everyone who is angry with another person is subject to divine judgment.
• Why? Because anger usually diminishes our ability to make godly choices.
• How does that happen?
• Physiologically, we know that as we get angry, the chemical reactions in our brain decrease access to those areas of our brain that we need for rational thinking.
• We go into freeze, flight or fight mode as our body tells us that we are being threatened… as a result, we have less access to the rationale part of our brain.

 

• From a spiritual perspective, that’s why the writer of Proverbs 14:29 says, “²⁹ People with understanding control their anger; a hot temper shows great foolishness.
• In other words, an angry person isn’t using their entire brain to access the wisdom that God created them to use.
• And then it says in Proverbs 19:19, “Hot-tempered people must pay the penalty. If you rescue them once, you will have to do it again.”
• Why? Anger is so difficult to admit, that we usually deny or rationalize our anger:
  • “Oh, I’m angry because of so and so…”
  • “If you hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be mad…”
  • “Of course, I’m angry! You would be too if you were in my shoes. Why don’t you try being me?”
• Rather than dealing with our anger, we then repeat it.

 

The spiritual impact of anger comes in the form of a lie that says it’s not my problem, it’s someone/something else’s problem.

• My brokenness, my sin, my pain, is not the source of my anger … and subsequently, I refuse to name what’s wrong inside of me and I refuse to process that with God and with those around me…
• Which takes us back to James 1, “our anger doesn’t produce the righteousness God desires.”
• God cannot produce righteousness in me if I refuse to acknowledge that my dangerous anger IS MY anger.
• If it’s not my issue, then I don’t need his mercy and grace to change me.
• In which case, I remain spiritually broken and unhealed.

 

Which eventually leads to relational consequences:

• Anger gone wrong and left unresolved is often a precursor to the loss of a spouse, kids, family, friends.
• Anger will dissolve and obliterate healthy relationships and community, including spiritual/faith communities.
• Proverbs 15:18 says, A hot-tempered person starts fights…
• And James tells us that quarrels lead to division among us.

 

Can you see the powerful danger of anger gone wrong? And we haven’t even touched on the physical consequences:

• In short, medical studies link anger to heart disease.
• Studies indicate that within 2 hours of an angry outburst, the chances of a heart attack or stroke skyrocket far beyond what extreme physical exertion does to your system.
• Anger is also linked to high blood pressure, headaches, stomach issues, ulcers, and insomnia.

 

So first, we need to understand the dangerous power of anger.

• And yet, not all anger is wrong and destructive.
• In fact, there is a basic goodness to anger that we also need to understand.

  

The Basic Goodness of Anger

 I said earlier that Scripture is very clear, God regularly gets angry and does not sin in his anger.

• We too have the capacity to be angry and not sin.
• Scripture would not command us to do something that was impossible for us to do.
• So the direct association of anger with sin, negativity, destruction is not the only viable association.
• Theologian Richard Rohr writes,

“Anger is good and very necessary to protect the appropriate boundaries of self and others… I would much sooner live with a person who is free to get fully angry, and also free to move beyond that same anger, than with a negative person who is hard-wired with resentments and pre-existing judgements.”

Friends, the Bible tells us that anger as designed and intended by God is a good thing.

• God is continually associated with the phrase, “slow to anger”.
• In Exodus 34:6, God says of himself, I am…

“Yahweh! The Lord! The God of compassion and mercy! I am slow to anger and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness.

• The compassionate and merciful God describes himself as both filled with unfailing love and anger.
• As God describes his glory, he includes anger as a part of who he is.
• So, in Proverbs 16:32, we are told that he who is slow to anger, emulating God, has great stature.

 

• The ideal in the Bible is not “no anger” or “damaging anger”, but “slow anger” … which is what we are supposed to emulate.
• Saint John Chrysostom of the 4^th century said, “He that is angry without cause, sins. But he who is not angry when there is cause, sins.”
• As counterintuitive as this may seem to many of us, slow anger is not a sin … it is a divine attribute of God and we are created not only with the capacity to manifest it, but we are commanded in Scripture to imitate God with it.

 

Friends, God’s love and God’s anger go hand in hand. How?

• Because of his great love for his creation, God gets angry when it is threatened or corrupted.
• Whenever sin is present, God is angry because it’s a threat to his holiness and that which he has created to be good.
• In other words, anger and love go hand in hand.
• We are called to love righteousness, that which God loves, and to hate that which threatens it.

 

 Why Anger Goes Wrong

 So why then does our love go wrong?

• To be slow to anger toward that which God loves, is good.
• But if our anger is a result of that which threatens what we love … when our anger goes wrong, we need to look at what we are loving.
• In other words, if our love is correctly rooted, our connected anger is warranted when that love is threatened.
• But if our love is misplaced, then our connected anger goes wrong when that misplaced love is threatened.
  • For example, to love my wife is a correct rootedness and orientation of my love… it aligns with God’s love.
  • So when my wife is threatened, my love for her moves me to godly anger.
  • But, if I love self more than my wife, if ego is at the root of my love, when that is threatened by something my wife says or does, the connected anger is ungodly; it flows out wrong and is destructive.

 

So when we ask why our anger goes wrong, we need to look within at the things that birth our anger.

• We need to do a constant assessment of our anger and be looking at that which we think is being threatened when we get angry.
• When I get angry with my children, for example, is it because my pride, my want for control, my ego, my selfish desires, my schedule, my finances… are being threatened?
• Whatever I am defending in that moment is what my heart loves most.
• And that tells me whether my anger is rooted in God’s righteousness or my human brokenness.
• And guess which category my anger falls into more often than not.

 

When I get angry, my anger often comes because my loves are misoriented, distorted, sinful.

• That’s why God can be angry all the time and not sin… because God is and remains in perfect love.
• His love is never misplaced or corrupted.
• And so his anger is perfect, without sin, righteous.

 

• But I am not God, far from it.
• I am a sinner and my anger more often than not, flows from my old, sinful self … not the new creation I am in Christ.
• My anger is disordered because, as Saint Augustine said, it flows from our biggest problem, which is our “disordered loves”.
• Disordered loves, according to Augustine means that while there are many things that are good like family, just causes, accomplishments, nature, order … we turn those good things into ultimate things and look to them to replace God and only what God can do in our lives.
• And when we love good things more than we love God, our emotions, such as anger, become disordered and disoriented.

 

So back to my example as a parent and my kids.

• I like to have order and a sense of control and direction.
• Kids are good at disturbing that for parents.
• So when I allow my want for order to turn into control and let that become the ultimate thing I desire, I displace God and his purposes for order in my family life.
• And with God out of the picture, my emotion flows from that ungodly place as an ungodly emotion.
• My love is disordered, so my connected anger is also disordered and it ends up manifesting in a destructive way.

 

• My anger is a response to something being threatened – that which I love and have given ultimate power - which in this example is control.
• My desire for control has displaced the God of order.
• And when my desire for control is threatened, my anger manifests itself in a dangerous manner.
• I take something or someone and give it the priority that only God should have… when that is threatened and because God is removed from the picture, I can’t be like him; I can’t come from a place of righteousness and be slow to anger.

 

So, disordered love creates disordered emotions such as dangerous anger.

• We place things on thrones in our lives and displace God and his love… and the outcome is unrighteous anger.

 

Curing Anger

So what can we do to re-orient and heal our anger?

• I mentioned at the onset that one of the dangers of anger is the lie of denial, which means the first thing we need to do is name and admit our anger.
• Admit it … “I get angry! Anger is an issue for me.”
• You need to admit that you get angry and that your anger is usually corrupted and dangerous.
• If you cannot admit your anger as sin, then God cannot forgive your anger and do a work of mercy and grace to bring about change in your life.

 

In addition, if you cannot admit your anger, even if you are rightly angry with someone who has offended/hurt you, you cannot open the door to reconciliation.

• What do I mean by that?
  • We are hurt … we get angry … and we say,

“Oh that person really hurt me and they are totally in the wrong. I am furious with them and they better come to me before I’m going to say anything to their face.”

• And with that, you close a door to reconciliation.
• The other person may come to you first and open that door, but they may not.
• Your vulnerability of admitting your anger to the other person, even properly manifested anger, allows the door for reconciliation to remain open.

• So we need to name/admit our anger, so God can either work in us, or work in the other person toward reconciliation.

 

Once we identify and admit our anger, we need to assess it.

• What’s making me angry?
• What do I love and what is threatening that thing?
• I need to ask myself, “What do I believe is the big thing that someone is threatening?”
• “What’s the big thing that is so important to me that I am defending it and willing to fight someone for it?”
  • Most of the time it’s not something that grieves God’s heart, but something that threatens my heart’s desire.
  • Most of the time I’m not defending God, I’m defending me.
• So, assess your anger by assessing what you love in that moment.
• And friends this can get complicated and take you to deep rooted places of pain, shame, guilt or pride…
• And often we need a counsellor to help us process these deep inner places that are too challenging to go to alone.

 

And yet, if we want to ultimately change our anger, we need to go there.

• We admit it, we assess it, and we alter it.
  • If we deny it, the anger continues and wins.
  • If we fight fire with fire, the anger heightens and we lose by becoming less and less like Jesus.
• So, thirdly, how can we alter our disordered anger?
• We follow God’s lead.

 

Keller points us to the incredible link of what God has done for us and how it’s a model for transforming anger.

• He reminds us that we, humanity, you and I, are angry at God?
• We get angry with God when we don’t get the things we want or feel we deserve.
• Which is no different than the generation before us that placed Jesus, God’s son, on the cross … 1^st century misplaced loves/desires/wants and the resulting disordered anger focused on Jesus.
• We, humanity, when we had the chance, we killed God’s son.
• Scripture says we mocked him as our king, we tortured him and we killed him…
• And then Scripture says, Jesus willingly went to the cross, yet he was without sin.
• What was happening in that space?

 

We were angry at God and he didn’t ignore us or withdraw from us and leave us to our own devices.

• Neither did God lash back at us with even greater anger.
• Instead, he went to the cross and absorbed our anger, all of it.
• And rather than focus on our anger, he focused on our disordered love.
• He went to the root of who we are as broken people/sinners and offered grace, forgiveness and love.
• “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”
• On the cross, Jesus took my dangerous, ungodly anger, and said, I see where this is coming from … a broken, damaged, corrupted heart… and I’m going to ultimately heal that.
• Romans 5:8, “But God showed his great love for us by sending Jesus to die for us while we were still sinners.”
• “Father, forgive Wally” and love him in his brokenness.

 

What does that act of love do for me?

• How does that ultimately transform me?
• It permeates and heals my broken, disordered loves.
• That incredible act of perfect love, gives me the capacity to name, assess and change my anger… to be more like Jesus.
• What he did for me on the cross as a response to my anger toward him/God, models and changes how I can deal with my anger today.
• If Jesus can do that for me, then when I am wronged, I can begin to allow that to influence the rootedness of my love and if, when and how I express my anger.

 

If you acknowledge and experience how Jesus dealt with your anger toward him, then you have the understanding necessary to deal with your anger in the same way.

• Jesus takes root at the centre of your heart/desires.
• He modeled it and he calls us to follow him.
• Our response is to stand in awe of the one who hung on the cross because of anger, and yet responded in ultimate love.
• Jesus alone, in that one act, gave us power to re-orient our lives/the things we love, so that we could change our disordered, disoriented emotions.

 

• We need to name it, we need to assess it, but ultimately Jesus’ example is the only way we transform our anger.
• Only when we are overwhelmed by the one who hung on the cross for our sins, can we be angry in our world and not sin … can we have the same heart and emotions of our God.
• In short, we are freed to be angry as God designed anger to be in this world… based in love and without sin.
• Jesus modeled this and calls us to follow…

 

Friends, as we transition into a time of singing and response, we welcome the opportunity to probe deeper and pray with you.

• If anger is affecting you, either coming from you or toward you, we are hear for you.
• If you are watching live, you can click on the Request Prayer button and one of our Pastoral staff is ready to talk with you.
• If you are watching this recorded on our YouTube channel or on Telus TV, please email us at
• Let’s join with one another in response to our God.

 

Benediction

• Our benediction today comes as a prayer written by Jessica Brodie and published on Crosswalk.com,

 Lord, You are all-powerful and almighty. You created the sun and the stars, the seas and the heavens above, the earth and all creatures upon it—the very universe and time itself. Who then are we to stand in Your way and let our tiny flares of rage ignite?  Help us to step back and allow You and only You to reign supreme. Help us to know and take comfort that You will dole out Your holy wrath justly and completely.

Enable us to rest in the peace of being Your child, Your people, knowing You will handle all things in Your perfect time. Help us set aside the fury and the frenzy, the angst and the nascent seeds of hate beginning to sow. Let us remember the wisdom you gave us through Your servant, James, that everyone should “Be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires” (James 1:19-20).

Let us remember the proper motivation — not pride, not prejudice, not personal insult or attack, not fear - but rather a deep and pure affront to God and all You hold dear elicits righteous anger. Allow our anger to make room for You as our center to honor You and to care for Your people above all. Give us a spirit of peace and rest in You. In Your holy name we pray, amen.

 

Friends, go in the righteousness and peace of God.

• And we hope you’ll join us again next Sunday as we continue in our series on Emotions, with a focus on Thankfulness and Delight.
• Thanks for being with us today.