Father in heaven, you are gracious and merciful God. Righteousness and justice are the foundations of your throne. You're holy, holy, holy. Lord God almighty. We come to you this evening, oh Lord God, to worship you, to open our ears and our hearts to your word that it might do us good this evening. You will work in us, oh God, exposing our idols, those sinful things that control us the way that only You should enable us, O God, to be sanctified, in particular in regard to the anger that so often grips our souls. We might learn to be angry and not to sin. To let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from us, along with all malice, we would not grieve the Holy Spirit, by whom we were sealed for the day of redemption. We pray your word will perform its work in all of our hearts, saving the lost, restoring the backslider, and building us up in our most holy faith, for Jesus' sake. Amen. Please take your seats, and if you would, Turn with me in your copy of the Word of God to the book of Genesis in chapter four. We'll be in Proverbs this evening and thinking about what Solomon has to say to us about sinful anger in particular. We're gonna read Proverbs four, sorry, Genesis four, because it exposes the power and the destructive effects of unmortified anger. in the life of Cain and the first covenant family. Please listen carefully. This is the word of God. Now, Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again, she bore his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering. But for Cain and his offering, he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? Why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. ' Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. And the Lord said to Cain, Where's Abel your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper? And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground and from your face. I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. And whoever finds me will kill me. Then the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who find him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Amen. The grass withers and the flower falls off, but the word of God endures forever." Well, Ed Welch, the counselor At CCEF has written a book called A Little Book About a Big Problem, and it's about anger. And so it's a helpful series of devotions that deal with the subject of anger in the Christian heart. And this sermon this evening is a little sermon about a big problem in our society today. Anger is a big problem in our culture. We live in an age of outrage We are a nation of short fuses and long grievances. Our blood pressure is up, our patience is down, and our tongues are sharp, ready to go to work against any and all who dare to stand on our toes. Rage is everywhere. On our highways, we see rude rage, and we experience that far more than ever before. People on your bumper, your fender, sorry, right up against you, honking their horn, swearing at you, cursing at you, gesturing at you, and all manner of such things. We hear it now also in flights. Our social media feeds are full of air rage. Even at 35,000 feet, people can't get over themselves, it seems. And our airwaves, too, are full of rage. You just turn on Fox News or CNN, whichever one you watch, and you'll see talking heads who yell at one another, expressing their outrage. It's frustrating. I try to stop watching those shows because it puts my blood pressure up. But evidently, Roth has ratings. And in sports, yesterday even Dabo lost his temper on the sidelines. Now, in his defense, he was yelling at the best player in the Duke team. He was the referee. So I'll give him a pass this time. But I was surprised. to see him become so outwardly frustrated. And with the Palmetto Bowl coming up again after Thanksgiving, all I can say is, Josh, you better keep your schedule free over Christmas, because about half the congregation is going to need a lot of therapy. Well, Genesis 4, as I said, is a chapter that shows an illustration of anger out of control, unmortified anger. You know the story well. It's the first covenant family. And Cain, the firstborn, and Abel, his brother, go to church to worship God. And they both bring sacrifices. And Cain's sacrifice is rejected, but Abel's sacrifice is received. And of course, people wonder what was the problem. And instinctively as human beings, we tend to think there must have been something wrong that they did. Maybe God's a vegetarian, doesn't like the grain offering, but he did regard Abel's offering. And that's not the issue, of course, at all. Grain offerings were perfectly acceptable. You can say that Abel brought us the first fruits and Cain just brought the fruit of the ground. That's maybe a hint of a deeper problem. But when you look at the text, the problem with Cain's worship was Cain. God had no regard for Cain and for his worship. And it's a principle in Scripture that if the worshiper is wrong with God, his worship will never be right with God. Cain was the problem with his worship. It wasn't so much what he brought, it was the person who brought it. He wasn't a man who had fellowship with God, whereas God did have regard for Abel and therefore for his worship. We know from the New Testament that Abel's worship—you read Hebrews 11—was mixed with faith. He came trusting in this sacrifice and what it represented. Somehow he had some sense that a great hero would come who would crush the head of the serpent, and that God would send this hero to right the wrongs, and this hero would be crushed by the serpent, of course, at least in the heel. And he had some faith, a weak faith perhaps, but it was true faith in the Messiah, and it justified him, and he was received as righteous and brought into God's presence, and his worship was therefore acceptable to God. But all this, of course, made Cain angry. His face fell. He didn't like the fact that his worship was rejected and his brother's was received. And Cain's anger is twofold. He's angry at his brother, obviously, from the passage. He's also angry with God, that God would reject his worship. And it's an illustration of what we said this morning, that the carnal mind is not subject to God. We are hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, even when we try to come to God and worship our resentment of Him. as unbelievers, incapacitates and unqualifies or disqualifies, sorry, our worship. Interestingly though, and this fascinates me as an aside, when God comes to Cain, he has a remarkably fatherly conversation with the lad. Remember, the lad is a covenant child. Right? And it's a paradigm in my mind of how God relates to covenant children in the church who are not yet converted. He has a very fatherly conversation with Cain. Now think of what do you know about Cain. We know he's unconverted. We know he is the seed of the serpent, read 1 John. Talks about that clearly. We know he was never part of God's elect and we know he was under the dominion of sin. And yet God comes to him and he doesn't say, son, you gotta be saved. Be born again. He says, Cain, why is your face falling? You look angry. It's all over your face. And interestingly, Cain doesn't answer God with his mouth, not at least at this part of the story. God is the one doing all the talking. And that's a good lesson for covenant children. When God speaks to you in his word, talk back to him. Bring your heart to him. Speak to him. Cain didn't. God is speaking. Cain is silent. And then God says something very interesting. Sin is crouching at the door like a wild animal. Its desire literally is to master you, but you must rule it. He holds Cain spiritually responsible. Of course, Cain should have said to God, Lord, I can't, I'm under the dominion of sin. I think your son will say something about that in John chapter 8. Hasn't been written yet. Help me. He doesn't say that to God. There's no answer from God. It's from Cain, to God's very fatherly conversation with him. Cain's answer comes with his hand as he goes out to the field, finds his brother, and either a rock in the field or maybe a dagger in his belt, and he slaughters his brother mercilessly. And at that moment, everything changes. He passes beyond the point of no return. He is reprobated. He is cursed. He's the first man to be cursed. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve aren't cursed. The ground is cursed. The devil is cursed. Adam and Eve aren't cursed. They're sheltered under the blessing of the covenant promise. Read the passage. The first man to share the curse of the devil is the devil's seed, which was Cain. He is cursed as the curse of God falls upon him. And his soul and his fate are sealed forever. Now, all that to say, it's an illustration of how anger, un-mortified anger, can wreck your relationship with God and with other people. That's what Paul was saying in Ephesians 4, 29, the passage I quoted in the Prayer of Illumination. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, not some, but all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, which means loud, angry speech, be put away from you. Along with all malice, malice is the intention to hurt other people, often with our lips. There is one who speaks rashly like the thrust of the sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. Put away all malice. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. And Paul's saying there, the most powerful redemptive force in all the world is at work in your heart. And when you get angry with your wife, with your husband, with your children, with your parents, with your brother or with your sister, you're grieving, quenching the Holy Spirit, which is the last thing you want to do if you want to grow well and be healthy as a Christian. Now, Cain's story shows what anger does when it's left to rule the heart. In Proverbs, we see anger up close and personal in everyday life. The fool on the street, the spouse in the home, the child in the home, the brother in the pew, or the sister, or the man or the woman in the mirror looking back at you in the morning when you're brushing your teeth. And you can sort of categorize Solomon's wisdom on anger into three areas. First of all, the folly of anger, the folly of anger. In Proverbs 14, verse 17, Solomon says, a man of quick temper acts foolishly. In other words, if you vent your anger quickly, you rob yourself of reason and wisdom. and you open your soul to folly. You know, I've heard many things in my study, some of which make my toes curl, some make me laugh under my breath. One thing I've never heard in a study, my study, is someone coming to me and saying, you know, I lost my temper last week with my wife, and it was the best decision I ever made. Proverbs 14, 29. Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding. But he who has a hasty temper exalts folly. So men of wisdom, women of wisdom, knew how to get their anger under control. They're not quick to anger. They're not quick on the trigger. Like this tombstone in Tombstone that says, here lies Ned. We buried him raw. He was slew on the trigger, but quick on the draw. The vexation of a fool is known at once, but the prudent ignores an insult. The vexation of a fool is known at once. Somebody insults him. He gets immediately angry, but the prudent ignores the insult. Being a fool is a bit like being a vegan. I realize that's the second time I've mentioned vegan in a pejorative sense this evening. I really haven't got a vendetta against vegans. If you're a vegan here, I am sorry. But being a fool is like being a vegan. How do you know if someone's a vegan? Talk to them for five minutes. And it's exactly the same with a fool. Talk to them for five minutes, especially if there's an insult thrown in there that was unintended, and you'll find out immediately what they're like. A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back." Proverbs 29 verse 11. The fool will tell you all and everything that he has to say, especially when he's angry. He'll give you a piece of his mind. He won't just give you a piece of his mind. He'll give you all of his mind. A fool gives full vent to his spirit. Twitter should make that its motto. Such a waste of space on the internet. Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and YouTube. We should put them all into one website and call it snaputwitface.com. Good sense makes one slow to anger and it is His glory to overlook an offense. Again, people who are wise overlook an offense. They're not quick on the draw. They recognize they might not have meant that as offensively as I took it. I'll just let it go. And anyway, you never argue with a stupid person. They'll just pull you down to their level and beat you with experience. So the folly of anger. The second group of proverbs that deal with anger show about the fruit of anger. A man of wrath stirs up strife. And one given to anger causes much transgression, right? Anger, we speak of things in the military as being a force multiplier, like the AC-130 gunship. It's only one plane, but it multiplies destruction and death from above, right? It's a force multiplier. Well, anger is a sin multiplier and a strife multiplier. If you want to have lots of sin in your life, lots of strife in your life, just be an angry person. The fruit of anger. The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit the quarrel before it breaks out. Proverbs 17, verse 14. The fruit of anger. A brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle. When you offend someone, your brother, your spouse, a child, Keep doing that and eventually they'll close the wall off their soul from you to protect themselves from further pain. A man of great wrath will pay the penalty, for if you deliver him, you'll only have to do it again, the fruit of anger, Proverbs 19, verse 19. That great wrath is an habitual sin, more about that in a second, happens again and again and again, and a man gets himself into a bar fight, because he's quick-tempered, and you pay his bill, well, brace yourself, he'll call you the next week for the same problem. It's habituated. It's also infectious. Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare. Proverbs 22, 24, and 25, the fruit of anger. It spreads. If you make friends with a man who is angry, you will learn, because, I mean, I remember this, when I was a physician, there was one of my junior house officers with me when I was at the Ulster Hospital in Donald, first year out of medical school. You're basically a dog's body, right? And you do all the bloods in the morning. Back in those days, there were no phlebotomists, and you're just working from dawn to dusk 100 hours a week or more. And it was exhausting. And one of my friends there, he had a very sarcastic anger that was funny, right? He would just be funny. And a nurse would call him, and he would say, no, no, I'm sorry, you've got the wrong person. You mistake me for someone who actually cares. And hang up. And we'd all laugh, right? And when people are sarcastically angry, they can be funny. They can seem strong and witty. And we find ourselves aping them, especially when we're in a similar situation. And then you get punishment bleeps for the rest of the evening when you're trying to go to sleep in the middle of the night. But that's another problem. But, sorry, punishment pagers, as the nurses call you all night for nothing, just because you were not maybe as helpful as you could have been earlier in the evening. But the fruit of anger, it spreads, it causes trouble. Solomon also has something to say about freedom from anger or pacifying anger. That's the third F. Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. When we get angry, we feel as if we're strong. Men often only know how to be silent or to express anger, because in both those moments, we feel strong, silent, the strong, silent type, John Wayne. We don't say anything. And then we get angry, and we feel strong, too. But it's not true, actually. Whenever you get angry, you shrink. You become weak. People lose respect for you when you become angry. You feel strong, but you're actually weak. Anger is a man's weakness or a woman's out of control. I've known some men who can bench press 300 pounds, but they can't hold back one angry word when they're frustrated. He looks weak, strong in his body, but he is weak in his soul. A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls. We're defenseless. People can rage-bait us, and we just explode. And the answer, of course, is self-control, learning to have a grip on our thoughts and on our emotions and channeling them in words that are constructive, not Destructive. Proverbs 15 verse 1, a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. When someone's yelling at you, lower your tone. Speak softly and see what happens. It's very hard to do, but they will almost always lower their tone likewise. That's not normally what we do. They raise their voice, we raise ours. They raise their voice, we raise ours. And you're off to the races. Always remember Al Capone, you can get more with a kind word and a gun than a kind word alone. Don't apply that. It's an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife, but every fool will be quarreling." Again, men who are wise, men who are honorable, women who are wise, women who are honorable keep aloof from strife. They fly over it. The earthquake doesn't affect the plane in the air because it's flying above. It's not in contact with the ground. It's hard to do. It's a skill we must master. Freedom from anger. Whoever restrains his words has knowledge. And he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. Again, restraining your words, one of the hardest things to do when you're arguing with your spouse, or one of your children, or anyone for that matter, but particularly at home, because we feel more free to speak our minds at home, is not to interrupt them constantly. They're angry, they're pouring out invectives in your direction, and we instinctively want to answer every invective when it's said, and we interrupt them, and it just ups the ante. restrain your words, and keep your spirit cool. And then the last part of freedom from anger, hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses. Proverbs 10 verse 12, freedom from anger, that anger is the friend of hatred, and hatred is the friend of anger. But love, which is the great Christian imperative, learns to cover offenses and not to be so easily upset. We'll talk about this later, but we have to learn to minister to the anger of others, and that's helpful because it takes the focus off us. We take their sin too personally, and when we minister to them, when that's our mindset, we're stepping in in love, trying to help them. Like if a dog was wrapped up in barbed wire and you're trying to help the dog and he bites you, you're going to think to yourself, the dog's in pain. Of course he's biting me. He thinks I'm trying to hurt him. I'm not. And so you don't punch the dog or hit the dog. You keep on working and try to avoid getting bitten. But you're acting in love as a minister. And you don't take it so personally. It's one of the reasons why we find it much easier to stay cool with other people's children, right? If you're looking after my kids, or I'm looking after your kids, and your kids are disrespectful to me, or mine are disrespectful to you, they would never be, of course. But let's say they were, for the sake of argument. You'd find it much easier to stay calm. You wouldn't take their disrespect so personally. You'd have a more ministering mindset toward them, but we take our kids' disrespect personally, especially what happens out there in the parking lot, because people from the congregation see, and they'll think we're bad parents, and they'll think we've got bad kids, and we then get really angry, because we take it too personally. So Solomon speaks about the folly of anger, and the fruit of anger, and freedom from anger. Now, before we go any further this evening, Let's take a moment and define anger. What is anger? Is anger always a bad thing? Is anger sometimes a good thing? What do you think? Well, anger, properly speaking, is actually part of God's creation. God designed human beings to be angry, not to be apathetic in the face of real evil. Properly speaking, anger, listen, let's just write this down if you're taking notes, anger is the passion God intends to motivate you, to energize you, to enable you, to defend what really matters. and to destroy evil in all its forms. Anger is the passion God intends to motivate you, energize you, enable you to take action, to defend what really matters, and to destroy evil in all its forms. So for example, we're sitting on my porch, we're relaxing, we're chatting, enjoying a beverage, and our children are playing outside in the yard, and suddenly a pack of hyenas come, Not hyenas. What do you call them here? Jackals? Coyotes, thank you. Coyotes. Coyotes come out of the forest and surround them, right? Well, if you and I sat there and said, you know, I've got five other children. You've got three other children. It's fine. You know, we can lose a child. That wouldn't be a good representation of our character, would it? It would be laziness. We shouldn't be apathetic in that moment. No, we'd feel anger in our beings, and it would energize us. We wouldn't be thinking, well, those dogs have got sharp teeth. They could bite me and scratch me, and that's frightening. No, anger would deaden all those fears and give you strength beyond the human. And you'd go out, and with an ax or a gun or a stick or your fists, if necessary, you'd fight those dogs off to protect your children's lives. And in that moment, anger has been a powerful force for good to defend what really matters and destroy evil in all its forms. And in that sense, God is angry. And His anger is a beautiful thing. You might say, God is the most angry person in the universe at the moment. And He's right to be angry, and the angels worship Him for it. O Lord God of vengeance, God of vengeance, shine forth. Psalm 94 verse 1. A jealous and avenging God is the Lord. His wrath is poured out like fire, and the hills and mountains dissolve before him. It's a beautiful thing. Now, you've got to remember, when you think about God, that there's a beautiful simplicity to the being of God. I'm not saying that God is simple or mentally deficient. What I'm saying is there's a oneness to God. God's essence is his Godness, right? And so it's not as if part of God over here is mercy and part of God over here is justice and wrath is somewhere in the middle and all of his attributes are swirling around and God is a spirit full of contradictions. No, there's oneness of God and God is all of his attributes. And the words we use to describe God – being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth – are just ways we use to describe the one, simple, glorious essence of our God. So think, for example, of His wisdom. God is wise. He always acts sensibly, wisely, infinitely wise and righteous in His thinking. But His wisdom is also His power. His wisdom has a power in it, an almighty power to get things done. And His wisdom is also His mercy. He's wise, He's powerful, and His wisdom is His mercy that is inclined to flow toward those who are in need. And His wisdom is also His justice. His wisdom is never unjust or unrighteous. And His wisdom is also His wrath when He looks at real evil in this world. He does not feel nothing. His wisdom is his power, is his justice, is his wrath to destroy it. You might say God is fiercely fair-minded. John Stott says, God's wrath. It's His steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms. His anger is poles apart from ours. What provokes our anger, injured vanity, never provokes His. What provokes His anger, evil seldom provokes ours. So God is wrathful, but wrath is a way to describe not a kind of a passion in God. God has no passions. It's His wise will that's powerful, just, righteous, and holy. You bring evil into the presence of God, and it is destroyed by His being. But it's perfectly consistent with His blessedness. He's a happy God. He doesn't have bad moods or temper tantrums. And that'll blow your mind if you think about it, but God is all of his attributes, his wisdom, is his power, is his being, is his holiness, justice, and goodness, and truth. It's all part of the oneness of our great God. But also you think about Christ. Christ was an angry person. Now, he wasn't unrighteously angered, never once. But he was angry when he ought to be angry. And his anger was often perfectly, always perfectly measured to the situation at hand. When he's dealing with his foolish disciples who are slow of heart to believe, he's angry with them. He doesn't punch them in the nose. He looks at them, speaks to them, words of wisdom and righteousness to correct them. But he isn't apathetic, he's not like Buddha sitting in heaven with his legs crossed and his hands in some yoga position with a kind of a smile on his face, the bare hint of a smile, this apathetic Buddha in the heavens. That's not our Savior. When the Pharisees were objecting to him healing a man on the Sabbath day, he looks at them in anger, blazing anger, but it's under control. When he walks into the temple there in his last week, and don't forget, these are the people who were gonna crucify him in two weeks' time, or not two weeks' time, the next week, and he knew they would do that, but he wasn't angry with them for that reason. He was angry with them that they were turning his father's house into a bizarre marketplace. And he grabs these heavy tables. They're probably made of oak, and they were long. And he overturns them. But no one's crushed by those tables. He tosses them over, and the money flies across the courtyard. But it's under control. There's no wee child playing there, crushed by the table. No money changer has his leg broken or trapped under the massive weight of that table. He makes a chord of whips and drives the money changers out. But we're not told he hit them, hit the animals maybe, to get them moving. but it's under control. There's a holy fury there in Jesus, but it's measured and it's beautiful. Because he was motivated to protect what really matters, to defend what really matters, the sanctity and holiness of the temple, the right of Gentiles to worship in that space unmolested by the bleating of oxen, not the bleeding of oxen, the bleating of sheep and goats and the mooing of oxen. And he was motivated strongly to take action. So God is an angry person and righteous, and so is Christ, and beautifully so. We wouldn't want Him changed, not for a moment. We don't want a Jesus with a man bun and skinny jeans and kind of a limp wrist. We want a Jesus who takes action against real evil, who will defend what really matters and destroy evil in all its forms. Let's come now, at the end of this sermon, to your anger and mine. Our anger is not like that. There's one command I can think of, be angry and do not sin, that speaks of righteous anger. The vast majority of the text of Scripture warn against our anger because we are often angry at the wrong times and in the wrong way and about the wrong things. And if you're an angry person here this evening, I need to tell you, it's very, very hard to change. Anger is a learned, habituated response to pressure. You've practiced it for many years. It's like the golf swing of a good golfer, and I'm not one of those. But you've been practicing golf, and you have this muscle memory built into your brain. The neurons fire in the right sequence. The muscles fire in the right sequence. You strike the ball, and it flies in that glorious trajectory down the middle of the fairway. And what a beautiful thing it is, and how I would love to do that more often than I do. But it's learned, right? And your thoughts are like that too. When you were a little child, your mind was like a wheat field. Imagine a wheat field in a house. And your school is across the wheat field, your daddy owns the wheat field, and you've got to get to school, and your dad says, just walk across the wheat field. Well, the first day you walk across the wheat field, it's a virgin wheat field, and you walk across a straight line from your back door to the front door of the school. And you bend the flax, the heads of wheat, the grain. in that wheat field. The next day you come back, the wheat field is not virgin anymore. You can see just a little bit where you bent the wheat yesterday. Take that path again, and again, and again, and again. And after, I don't know, a few weeks, all that wheat is crushed down to the ground. And you walk out of the house, and there's no choice to be made anymore. There's one obvious path, and you take it through the wheat field to the school. And your thinking is like that. You learn when you feel under pressure, when you feel insulted, when you feel grieved or frustrated. By a long process of mental training, you have trained the neurons of your brain to respond, and you're off to the races. And that's really hard to unlearn. Now, the Holy Spirit is in your heart and can teach you a better way, but it will take a long time to learn. So you've got to be patient, and you've got to be purposeful, or you'll never change. You need to learn three skills. You've got to mortify sinful anger. Put it to death. Gotta learn to manage righteous anger, which is rarely a problem for you, because your anger's almost never righteous. Gotta manage righteous anger so it stays in its bounds. And you gotta learn to minister to the anger of others. Two questions when you become angry. Am I right to be angry? That's the first question. Now be careful. You'll almost always answer that question in the affirmative, because anger is justice on fire. And when you feel you're being handled unjustly, whether the person meant to or not, whether the person actually did treat you unjustly or not, your anger will get going, and it's justice on fire. And anger in your soul works like this. It becomes the judge, the prosecuting attorney, the jury, and the executioner. What's missing? The defense attorney. You're not interested in defending the person, you just want to destroy them. And that's not a very good due process. So the first question to ask is, am I really right to be angry? If you can answer yes to that question, you go to the second question. Am I expressing my anger the right way? Even when you are right to be angry, That doesn't give you a carte blanche response to respond any jolly way you please. You gotta keep your anger under control and measured in the right direction. And most of us have a couple of ways of expressing anger in the wrong way. The most common way is to blow up. We know what that looks like. Wrath, anger, fury, outbursts, God forbid, physical violence. We know what that looks like in the schoolyard, punching a wall, punching a person, hitting a dog, or a child in anger, which is never righteous and always wrong, blowing up. The second way is to clam up. That's anger in the slow burn. We clam up, we keep it in. I mean, you can express that in a thousand different ways. Irritability, sarcasm, which is basically saying, you're stupid and I'm not. Oh, and I was joking. The silent treatment or stonewalling, men often do that. It's a way of kind of, we think we're deescalating an argument with our wives. We stonewall them. You leave their text unread. or take off the read receipt so it looks, if you haven't read the text, just to leave them in the cold. And we think we're doing it to calm things down, but it's enormously provocative to a wife. Grumbling, criticism, defensiveness, resentment, impatience, irritability, envy, slander, that's an often sign of anger and the slow burn. We won't confront someone to their face. We'll just stab them in the back with slander because we're angry with them. And my personal favorite passive aggressiveness, anger without courage or honesty. We just kind of are passively aggressive in the background. What's your style of anger? Do you blow up or do you clam up? How do you deal with it very quickly? When was the last time you lost your temper? Or the last time you clammed up in anger? What triggered you? What actually happened? I want you to go back tonight, tomorrow morning, in your devotions, and write down specifically what triggered you. Triggers are very important, because they tell you a lot about yourself. Remember, anger is the passion to defend what really matters. What triggered you precisely and why did it trigger you? You gotta get right down to the nitty gritty. Why did it trigger me? Why did that matter so much to me? Other people wouldn't have responded the way I did with such fury and anger or clamming up and stonewalling. Why did that bother me so much? It's a really important question because it often points to an idol of the soul, which for a Christian is often a good thing that we want too much. Like the success of your children, your children aren't doing well in school. And what really matters to you is they do well, and they mess up on a test, or an important paper, or an important grade, and they don't seem to care. And at that moment, our children's success, which is a good thing, right, becomes so important to us that it matters more to us than God, His glory, His law, His promises, His providence. It becomes the supreme thing that must be defended, and anyone who dares knock that down, even the child, will be destroyed, and we unleash At that moment, a good thing just became an ultimate thing, which makes it a bad thing, called an idol. What triggers you? People disrespect you. Your wife, maybe. Or your husband doesn't love you the way you wish he would love you. He's on his phone when you're pouring out your heart to him, and it upsets you. Does he not love me enough to listen to me when I'm talking to him? And he's thinking, That feels really disrespectful that you would criticize me. I've had a long day. I'm tired. I just want five minutes to unwind, right? And you're off to the races. Control, common idol. Oh, if I can just order, get things done my way, it'll be safe and everyone will be OK. And then when people get in the way of all that, we become angry. Or shame. People shame you, they criticize you, they blame you, they expose you as a failure, and it triggers you. Well, triggers are important because they show you what's really mattering to you at that moment, and it's often a good thing that's become more important to you than God. It's also very often a sign of unresolved trauma in the past. It's a sign of a wounded place in your soul that has yet to feel the healing power of Christ in the gospel fully. You've let that little wounded place in your soul function like an ingrown toenail. It's infected and it's there. It's not healed. And every time somebody brushes against it or stands on it, you get furious. And the reason is you've never dealt with that thing. What is that thing? What is that trauma in the past? How does the gospel speak to it? So you define the trigger, right? Then the next thing is you go into your brain. What thoughts go through my mind? What conclusions do I come to? And a very important thing to think about is, what are my thoughts about God in that moment? Somebody insults you. Somebody inconveniences you. Somebody steps on your toes, metaphorically. Are you thinking about God, His providence, working all things together for good, His promises? Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver you. His commandments, be slow to anger. What are you thinking about God? Most of the time, we're not thinking about God at all. That's a problem. And sinful anger is almost always a bed friend, is the wrong word, a kissing cousin, with unbelief. Unbelief. We're not thinking about who God is, what God is doing, what God has promised, and what God has commanded. What thoughts are going through your mind? Slow it down and write those thoughts down. Are they right? Are they charitable? Maybe your spouse is an introvert, right? And you've been at a party in the evening. And extroverts can go to a party, and they come back brimming with energy. They want to talk about all the conversations. I'm not like that. I'm an introvert. I can do people for two hours and 10 minutes, right? And after that, my brain just collapses. When I go home, I don't want to talk. I want to go play the piano, maybe watch TV, go to bed, read a book. And my dear wife, who's a treasurer looking at me, I go, talk to me. I want to talk to you about the part, what conversation did you have? And I'm going, I'm people, my brain's not peopling. And she goes, but I'm your wife. And I go, yes, but you're also a people. And I can't people anymore this evening, right? And sometimes you'll think, now, any wife will take that as he doesn't love me, right? And that's not true. I love my wife more than I love myself. But maybe you take it personally, and Catherine doesn't, but maybe you do when your husband or your wife's done peopling. And the thought might be, well, charity might give them a few moments or half an hour to go and unwind or go to bed. We'll talk about it tomorrow. So what are my thoughts? What am I thinking? What are my feelings at that moment? That's important because anger is often provoked by three feelings. I'm indebted to Josh for this insight, feelings of hurt, Feelings of fear, feelings of sadness. I'm frightened, maybe somebody's exposing me as a failure, and I fear that I am a failure, and I don't like that, and that makes me hurt and sad. What are your feelings? How are they contributing to that? Write them down. And then as I'm responding, what am I trying to achieve? What's my goal in unleashing my anger? And you take all of that, the trigger, your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, your response, and you ask yourself, what does God say about these things? What does word say about those things? And then when your anger's being sinful, you gotta come and repent. You gotta come and say, Lord, my wife, my husband, my children, my parents, my brother, my sister, I was wrong in what I did. Here's how I broke God's commandments. Be specific. Here's how my rash, angry words hurt you. I can imagine how it hurt you, and I'm so very sorry that I did that. Would you please forgive me? I wish you'd responded this way and this way and this way. And you deal openly and honestly about it. You don't just give them the cool shoulder for two days and let everything calm down and get back to normal. You've got to resolve it in a gospel-shaped way. Pray. Bring Christ into the situation. And here's the real trick. It takes a long time. If you're an angry person, this is going to take a long time. What I'm telling you now will become a grid of repentance. You're going to keep on blowing your top. It's going to keep on. That's a long-practiced, habituated problem. But what I'm telling you tonight will become a frame for you to repent. You'll catch yourself after your anger, I did it again, and again, and again, and again, and you write it down, the trigger, the thoughts, the affections, the emotions, the desires, my response, you get it all out on the table, you bring it to Christ. Maybe there is an area of your life, maybe you were bullied in high school, or whatever, and it hurts you deeply, and you bring that to Christ, and you pray about it, Lord, bring the healing power of your goodness, I know, I hated that time in my life, it was so hard, people abused me, were horrible to me, but I trust that you had a plan for that. Even that is covered by your promise. You know the thoughts you think toward me, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give me a future and a hope. Even that is surrounded by your promise. All things work together for good, and you embrace it, and you believe it, and you ask for faith to believe it more, and you let the healing power of Christ come in and heal those wounded parts of your soul so you'll not be so easily triggered again. If you're triggered by being criticized, maybe your mother criticized you mercilessly as a child growing up, and you're so wounded by that. Anyone criticizes you, you just give them both barrels. And you have to remember, you can only be sensitive to criticism if you forget the gospel, that God has forgiven you all of your sins, If the criticism is real, it's been forgiven by God and Christ, and God sees you as righteous. If it's false, just put it out of your mind. It doesn't matter. God knows the truth about you. God will vindicate you, and you believe the gospel, and let Christ heal your soul. But you're gonna have to learn, and this is the last thing I'll say. You're gonna have to learn, right, to monitor your soul. your thoughts, your emotions, because what triggered you in the past will trigger you in the future. And so you get to those situations in life when you sense, I'm about to meet a trigger, and you see your temper beginning to rise, and you get to a five or a six or a seven, that's the time to say, hold on a second, what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What should I be thinking? What should I be feeling? Bringing the Word of God to bear, and your temper still rises. You're getting to a seven, and you say to your spouse, your child, your parent, I love, I really want to continue this conversation, but I'm getting, I feel myself getting hot. I feel myself beginning to flood emotionally, and I fear if we keep this conversation on, the devil will say, it'll be different this time. It's not, he's a liar. You feel your temper, you say, Lord, please just give me half an hour to go and pray and unwind. We can begin the conversation again then or a bit better tomorrow morning. We can get back to this again. But you've got to learn to monitor that rising flood of your soul. Because once it gets to it, you lose your mind and you're off to the races. But Christian, the most powerful redemptive force is at work in your soul. Call upon me, he says, in the day of trouble, and I will deliver you, and you will glorify me. Let's pray. Father, thank You for Your mercies. This is a real problem for many of us, O God, and I pray that You would minister to our hearts and lead us away from sinful anger. Help us to mortify it by Christ, not to listen to our lying lusts, not to listen to the devil, but to put off the flesh and to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. O God, help us. For Jesus' sake we pray. Amen.