All Sermons

How to Handle Anger By Jay Adams

On this tape we're going to discuss a very vital issue, how to handle anger.
Sometimes in counseling people have advised look for the sad, the bad, and the mad.
I suppose it's this last item that you find more frequently than almost any other.
Not always by itself, but often in combination with other problems,
the question of anger emerges as a significant factor.
Even in situations of grief you find anger intermingled with the pain of grief.
Persons who are angry at the causes for the death or the persons who brought about the cause.
Angry at the person who died and yet feeling somewhat guilty because that anger still remains even at death.
Angry sometimes at God overtaking the life of another.
Anger sweeps across our lives.
The very first man who was ever born was so angry he murdered his brother.
Anger has a long and sad history behind it and yet the thing I want to make abundantly clear at the outset is that anger in and of itself is not wrong.
You see every emotion that God gave to man is right.
When you within the right context for the right goals in the right manner.
As a matter of fact even such emotions as hatred are in the bible exposed as praiseworthy when properly used.
God hates evil.
We're told you who love the Lord must hate evil also.
Indeed one of the ways in which we can take an index of or a reading on our love for God is how much we hate those things that he hates.
I did not say those people but those things that he hates the evil that he opposes.
And you see every emotion therefore has its proper outlet and proper purpose.
But every emotion can be misused according to the patterns that we develop in our lives as sinners.
And as sinners we learn early from the beginning of our lives how to misuse and misdirect those emotions.
That's why you have such an interesting statement in Ephesians 4 26 as this.
Be angry yet do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.
You see we're commanded to be angry. Indeed it is wrong not to be angry when God's name for example is trodden underfoot.
When his causes are opposed. When his honor is brought down in disgrace before the eyes of men.
It's proper to be angry and yet that anger can turn to sin.
It's even proper to be angry when wrongs are done in this world between one person and another.
That's what he's talking about in this context. Anger within interpersonal relationships is not wrong.
So long as that anger manifests itself in a biblical way.
Now there are some people, fine Christian people who would try to tell us that all anger is wrong.
We have to stand against that kind of thinking because the Bible says that Jesus was angry.
In Mark 3 5 we read that in anger he turned and spoke to the Pharisees.
To say that all anger is wrong is to accuse Jesus Christ of sin. Something none of us wittingly
would ever want to do. We read in Psalm 7 11 that God is angry with the wicked every day.
And we read in 1st Samuel 11 6 that the Holy Spirit came upon someone and he became very angry
as a result of the Holy Spirit's coming.
So anger is not necessarily a sin but it can become sinful.
That's why Paul warns us that anger in interpersonal relationships must be
carefully monitored and properly used within the confines of biblical principles or it will become
thin. It's interesting that he raises the question of anger in this section of Ephesians 4.
Because as you recall we were talking on an earlier tape about this being the passage in which
we are dealing with practical personal matters of how to get along with one another.
And as Paul talks about that unity in the early part of the fourth chapter of Ephesians and
then tells us about how we can have change in our lives that's fixed once we become Christians.
He moves on in the fifth and sixth chapter to deal with specific interpersonal relationships
that exist for example between wives and husbands and between children and their parents between
slaves and their masters. Here are the family and workday relationships in which Christians
find it very easy to rub each other the wrong way. Paul is going to get into those specific areas
in these next two chapters. But prior to moving to those specific questions,
those concrete relationships, we find that in the fourth chapter he talks about how husbands and
wives children and parents and so on can learn to walk together properly. And the means for walking
together properly is first learning to talk together properly. Two people who can't talk
together can't walk together, can't develop manners or patterns of life and conduct
that are pleasing not only to God but to one another.
And so in verses 25 through 32 we have largely a discussion of Christian communication
and those factors which facilitate good communication. Also we are warned in those
verses against those practices which hamper and hinder this kind of communication.
Now you see he begins in verse 25 about falsehood and speaking truth
and then discusses the need for truth speaking within the relationship of believer to believer
in any organization whether it be in the church, whether it be in the home, wherever it is persons
who work together become members one of another. They are parts of the same body, parts of that
same organization or organism and as parts of the body each member needs that adequate amount of
truth which is necessary to enable him to function well with other parts and other members of that
body. You see he says lay aside falsehood speak truth each one of you with his neighbor for we
are members one of another the only way to function well together anywhere in any relationship
where people are brought together in a body is to function on the basis of truth rather than
falsehood and adequate truth so that all the parties and all the persons involved have all
the information that is necessary to coordinate the activity of the whole. Well that's where he
begins but then he immediately turns to one of the problems that keeps us from speaking truth
and speaking all the truth that is necessary this difficulty that we have with ourselves and with
one another of anger getting in the way of good communication. So he says quoting the fourth psalm
be angry yet do not sin don't let the sun go down on your anger. Now anger can become sinful
in two ways. These two ways are opposite extremes and I just like to say parenthetically that
the biblically oriented life is never a life of extremes. Some people think that Christianity
is an extreme. It's anything but an extreme. It is always the well-balanced life
when a man lives as a Christian. He never does this kind of pendulum thinking that the world
involves itself in. He never swings from one extreme past the biblical center to the opposite
extreme and yet in society that's what we find periods of rationalism swinging them to periods
of sheer irrationalism such as we live in today and then back again to press rationalism and so on.
People in one way or another striving to find answers apart from God and his book
find themselves always out on some extreme reactionary extreme or other.
But the Christian is always when he is in accordance with the word of God
a well-balanced man. He believes for example that prayer is asking God to do things in his life and
that God really hears and really answers in a powerful way but he also believes that God has
already given some pre-answers as to what to do about prayer in his word and so he doesn't as we
said on an earlier tape simply sit back and expect God to intervene in the situation in some
miraculous way but he searches the scriptures to find out what God has said to do and then he obeys
asking God to answer and if need be or if it's God's will to use him as part of that answer.
You see the Christian never becomes a mystic. He never becomes a sheer activist.
He believes the word of God is his directive for life. He believes the God of the word is the power
to enable him to follow those directions. That's valid. Christians have always gone off center off
of the biblical center when they have neglected one or the other of these.
When John writes his letter to the man who had been thrown out of the church
by the theotropies that is this little book called Third John he writes to Gaius and says
to the well-beloved Gaius whom I love in the truth and there you have that balance again love and
truth. The history of the church could be written in terms of those two words I think
where she has gone off center by either stressing truth to the detriment of love
or stressed love to the detriment of truth and when you stress love apart from truth
it isn't love anymore and it becomes sticky sentimentality and when you stress truth
apart from love obviously you've missed the truth of God about love so it isn't God's full truth
either you have to have truth in love and love in truth or you don't have love or truth
when you have the two in balance you have a balanced life you have a man who's dead
center on God's center not at either extreme all right now that's the kind of thing we're talking
about in terms of anger there is a biblical center for the use of anger which is sinless
and proper the correct expression of an emotion that God put within man a very powerful
emotion fear and anger are two powerful body sets or emotions that are given in order to
move man to certain responses that have to be dealt with according to the scripture
but because they are so powerful and because we are sinners they tend to break loose
they tend to get out of hand and this powerful motivational factor that we call anger
is the one that Paul first focuses upon because of the tremendous damage you can do
in interpersonal relations when it does
what are the two opposite extremes of the pendulum swing that take us
past the biblical center for anger well in the one extreme we have
what might be called and you understand being a seminary professor i need to use the
technical terms or i'll never get away with the with these lectures so i'll employ two
technical terms here on the one hand we might talk about blowing up on the other hand we might
talk about clamming up more popularly these two are known as ventilation and internalization
but i prefer the technical terms blowing up and clamming up so these are the two extremes
blowing your stack doing a mount vesubius or doing a slow burn
winding up tightening up the screws inside well both of those are looked upon in the word of god
word of god as sinful ways of handling anger for example i'd like to talk about
this matter of blowing up or ventilation as it is sometimes called and i shall read for you just
a series of verses out of the book of proverbs there are other passages but so many in proverbs
that they can be sort of coupled together i'm reading from the berkeley version which
puts these verses so pointedly in modern english a fool gives full vent to his anger
there's ventilation but the wise man holding it back quietly proverbs 29 11
like a city whose wall is broken down so is a man whose spirit is without restraint
25 8 28 it is prudent for a man to restrain his anger it is his glory to overlook an offense
proverbs 19 11 have you seen a man of hasty words there's more hope for a fool than for him 29 20
29 20 a quick-tempered man stirs up strife and a wrathful man abounds and wrong 29 22
he who is quick-tempered acts foolishly 14 17 he who is slow to anger is of great understanding
whoever is of hate whoever is hasty of spirit exalts folly 14 29 a hot-tempered man stirs up
strife but one slow to anger quiets contention 15 18 a man of great wrath must bear his penalty
but if you deliver him you must do it again proverbs 19 19 do not associate with one
given to anger and with a wrathful man do not keep company lest you learn his ways and get yourself
in a snare that is 22 versus 24 and 25 so you can see that the book of proverbs as well as
many other passages for example even the 31st verse of this fourth chapter of ephesians
where we're told that all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away
from you along with all malice the book of proverbs and other places are dead set against
the modern notion that we need to get it out of our system that is not the problem
that is not the way to solve the problem of anger
it's not a matter of getting it out of our system blowing up ventilating letting it all hang out as
they say today i never have incidentally been able to get everything in proper coordination
about the modern phrases you're to let it all hang out but you're to get it all together
and i just can't quite put those things into any sort of perspective it makes sense but at any rate
all the sensitivity and therapy groups that use this method of getting your feelings out
and all of the counselors who stress this method of trying to pull out an evoke from people angry
responses thinking that they're going to relieve the problem thereby run directly counter to the
book of proverbs and everything else that the word of god said and we need to be very clear about
that point because there's much experimentation going on much uncritical adaptation of various
views under the name of christianity that only does harm and injures the people involved
here's a uh an encounter group
here is a woman who is put in the middle of the group she's handed a pillow she's asked who are
you angry with she says well i don't like my mother very much okay punch the pillow
punch the pillow yes the pillow is your mother start punching it well she punches with just a
small nudge to begin with oh come on says somebody from off on the sidelines around the group that's
not hitting it really give it a swat a little bit more effort put into it this time but by
then the whole group begins cheering come on let's really have it let that pillow have it
punch hard and they all encourage her on and she gets into the spirit of the thing and her fists
begin to fly and she punches and punches and punches until her anger is being bent on that
pillow and pretty soon the pillow is torn to pieces and the feathers begin flying around the
roof and she has been encouraged by that group to murder her mother in her heart
what it amounts to that's not biblical nothing biblical about putting pictures on a dart board
and throwing at the eye or the nose or the ear that's christian to get rid of your anger seeing
that person's face on the golf ball and swatting at heart that's christian no nothing christian
about it all those pieces of advice are encouragements to do what jesus warned against
whoever hates his brother in his heart
murdered him in his heart
we don't allow this kind of ventilation in our counseling sessions
and the more you encourage that kind of nonsense the more you encourage sin
the more you encourage the person to go on doing the thing that's caused him problems in the first
place you have to solve problems by that method oh but you say people feel so good after it sure
they do four or five minutes or five hours but what have they really done they've gotten a little
tension relief temporarily you could do that by going fishing they've uh gotten a little bit of
something out of them temporarily but really the hardcore bitternesses and resentments and all the
rest have never been dealt with the relationship between them and the person that they're angry
at has not been resolved nothing really productive has occurred and five hours
later they feel guilty about what they did with the pillow or the burst of anger take a mother
who has trouble dealing with her children
she loses control let's say she has decided to use the decibel method
of uh
of uh discipline well the decibel method doesn't work very well you understand you begin by saying
johnny and johnny's out playing with his little friend next door and johnny his friend says your
mommy's calling you he says oh i don't have to go yet and i don't have to go until she puts on her
mad voice and then uh she says johnny and that shatters his nervous system a little bit and he
says okay i better go now and in he goes so he has taught mom and she has learned very
well that if she wants results she's got to yell more than once and yell a little louder
than she did the first time so she does this four or five times and then she starts out on that
new decibel level but pretty soon if you live next to a waterfall you don't hear it
so she starts out on this new level of sound but the first thing you know johnny is is treating
that as if it had no meaning and so she has to raise the sound a little bit higher and
so she gives him even a louder shout johnny and that shakes his little nervous system up and then
he goes to respond to that but if you live next to the midnight special that goes rolling by your
house every night pretty soon you don't even hear it even though your bed rumbles and you just sleep
right through it and so little johnny pretty soon doesn't pay much attention to that new level and
so it goes up and up and up until mom loses her voice you see there's no hope in the decibel
method but let's suppose we have a mom like that who's still in the process before having gotten
a severe case of vocal nodes here is the uh the woman in the middle of these terrible episodes in
which she throws a mount fusubious day after day week after week and knows it's wrong losing
control saying things she's sorry she said lashing out at the children unfairly throwing
punishments at them and that she'll never keep two days later because they were impossible
punishments like uh you're not leaving this house for a month now who has she punished you know
she won't keep that one and uh so on and you talk to her in counseling and you say uh this has got
to go it's sin it's wrong the bible says you've got to restrain you read some of these passages
from proverbs you've got to cool your anger you've got to learn how to hold it back as it
says you've got to learn she says but that's just the problem i've tried to hold it back i
can't hold it back i just can't do it you say you can she says i can't can can't can can't can can
can tell me how all right now you're ready to listen and uh so you go with her you explain
to her now look let's assume you're giving one of your biggest and best displays let's assume
that fire is smoking and spewing out of the top of the mountain let's assume that lava is rolling
down every side let's assume the kids are ducking under uh tables and and jumping through windows
just to get out of the way this is one of your greatest uh explosions of all time a real eruption
and right in the middle of all that the telephone rings
and you pick it up and on the other end is mrs what's-her-name down the street that you would
never want to see you like that under any circumstances and you say hello oh it's nice
to talk to you how are you mrs what's-her-name
what did you do you just controlled your anger even in the midst of that display
i did i said that to a woman just kind of like that one day in a counseling session this last year
and her husband chuckled and laughed and snickered and she said yeah yeah yeah it happened this week
but you see what we have learned is to control our anger under certain situations but not under
others that's the issue we've learned to control our anger so that we wouldn't lose our jobs
or get demoted we have learned to control our anger so that we wouldn't be embarrassed
by the neighbors but we have not bothered to control to learn to control our anger with
those whom we love most and for whom we ought to care most and for whom we ought to expend
the most energy at controlling our anger our loved ones at home and other close friends
you see there we think we can get away with it there we think we can let down the bars
and they still have to put up with us or they'll understand but it's sin and the point is that we
can control if we are willing to learn to control by the grace of god if we are willing to find the
biblical alternative and ask god to help us develop it in this instance anger
in blowing up is not the answer now the other extreme is the one mentioned in verse 26
do not let the sun go down on your anger and that's clamming up internalizing the anger
it's often called bitterness or resentment indeed when the old testament commandment on love for
one's neighbor is given in leviticus 19 verses 17 and 18 it is set in contrast to this very thing
very thing
in mark 6 19 in the greek literally it says that Herodias had it in for john the baptist she
had it in for him she'd been storing up anger holding it in and when she got her
chat she really used that anger to get his head
people have come into our counseling center who for 30 some years have held things as one man who
did it for 32 years down in their craw as he said
never telling another person never saying a word but the whole relationship suffering and
deteriorating and going to pieces because of this unspoken bitterness and resentment down underneath
not only does it hurt others but this kind of thing hurts oneself
it's angry people many studies have shown
who are the ones who are most likely to get a good case of colitis
hold it in and it will destroy you
you see anger is a destructive emotion in the sense that the emotion wants to tear something
apart that's its goal and that's right there are things to be torn apart anger manifests itself
in blowing up to tear people apart or the scene around you apart or just indiscriminately blowing
in all directions so that everything goes apart but it is an anger in which the force and the
power is disseminated toward others or toward the environment around you to rip somebody or
something up some people kick chairs others kick people physically or not quite so literally
but when you internalize anger it tears you up all that energy all that force that's resulting
all that tension works on you it's got to go to work and so it goes to work on you
how can you discover whether you or a person that you are counseling
has resentment and bitterness after all it's not quite so visible as blowing up is
well there are a lot of ways but let's take a kind of reading that usually works
you can ask a person or ask yourself just to check it out do you get angry super angry
over little things little annoyances you know you come home and your husband has
squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle again instead of rolling it up from the bottom
and you say that man has been at it again
or your wife has left the cap off of the toothpaste tube and you go in and you look at it
and you say i wonder if it's hard and you give it a little squeeze and that first quarter inch
has become a hard pellet now and it squirts out and hits you in the eye and you say that woman's
been at it again well here you are you see showing far too much emotional response to that little
minor event there's a lot more pressure you see than just that and you see that's a little
minor event there's a lot more pressure you see than just that
there's something else built up inside there's a great amount of pressure from a lot of things
that have been dammed up inside and all of that pressure is coming out as you have an opportunity
now to open the faucet and it all squirts out real hard whenever you find inappropriate amounts
of emotion being shown for a small trivial event you've got a pretty good index
you can pretty well say there's some bitterness there's some resentment down there inside
what should you say when you find the toothpaste tube squeezed in half you know i mean it's
so trivial now you say oh the see the toothpaste tube squeezed in half or you get a pellet in the
eye that does no serious damage oh i gotta tell it in the eye after all that's about all the
the emotion that it's worth in and of itself isn't it i'm collecting uh by the way collecting
a variety of uh methods for squeezing toothpaste too i have a number of these that people have
given to me uh i know about the little keys plastic ones and some of the more expensive
ones that you can use to roll up the tube and so on and there are lots of ways of keeping down
these problems between people but if you're interested in a solution that is on the lowest
level the lowest level solution to toothpaste tube problems just simply have his and her too
we had someone come to counseling who said i'm going to divorce my wife because
she leaves drawers out she pulls the drawer out and leaves it there another one leaves it there
another one leaves there and i come around the corner and i get a stomach full of drawers
now that was an annoyance but he wasn't divorcing his wife merely because he had this problem this
was the daily annoyance that reminded him of an awful lot of things that he was angry at her
about he had had a stomach full of his wife not just of drawers and it all came out later on
a man said i'm going to divorce my wife because she wears pantsuits i said do you have religious
convictions against these ah no no it's nothing like that and in discussion it came out that for
years he had been saying to people my wife wears the pants in this house and now she had donned
the uniform and that was just too much bitterness and resentment held in you see all right now we've
talked about the two extremes where's the biblical center the biblical center meets both of the needs
and it does all the things that these two wrong expressions do not do
the biblical center is to release anger under control at a goal
it is on the one hand not a pendulum swing from clamming up over to ventilation
or a pendulum swing from ventilation over to clamming up but
each one of these swings is stopped in the middle at the bottom of the swing
and points up towards something else if you visualize the problem up here at the top of
a page and you visualize on one side clamming up and on the other side blowing up and you picture
a swing of a pendulum from one side to the other you can see that when you blow up all your energies
are released but they don't aim in the direction of the problem they aim at tearing up people
rather than tearing up the problem when the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme
all the energies are released within you and those energies again are wasted they are not
aimed at the problem that has arisen and they tear up you they tear you up
so the energies are wasted when they are aimed at other people to destroy them or aimed internally
at yourself to destroy yourself instead under control the bible says don't let the sun go down
your ass get it out and deal with it that way but deal with it in terms of a problem that you need
to rip apart rather than the people who are involved in the problem that's what he's saying
when he says in verse 29 let no unwholesome word that's literally rotten word pour out of your mouth
but only such a word is as good for building up others according to the need of a moment that it
may give help to those who hear that phrase according to the need of the moment might be
translated according to the problem that has arisen that is let your words of anger let this
emotion of anger lead to words that are aimed at solving the problem tearing the problem that has
arisen apart rather than the people who are involved in the problem either yourself or others
controlled anger released every day to deal with problems to rip them to shreds
rather than yourself or others there's the biblical alternative don't let problems faster
don't let the sun go down settle the problem that day but deal with the problem becomes so angry
that you say i will not go to sleep tonight until this matter is settled let that great power and
force drive you to settle the problem god's way according to his word that is what counselors
need to teach angry people to do with their anger you will notice that the assignments
frequently have been oriented toward your life there is hardly any better way to discover the
meaning and reality of these biblical principles than to put them into practice yourself
so this week keep a record during the following week and perhaps for a week or two thereafter
of your own propensities with reference to anger toward which extreme blowing up or clamming up
do you tend to go and in what circumstances do you move in either one or the other of these
two directions having discovered the answers to this question develop personal assignments
for yourself that will enable you to deal with these propensities in a biblical manner
this is the end of cassette number five side one