I don’t remember too many specific events from the Eighties, but I do remember one Friday afternoon when God used some paper wads to speak to me through a short Bible verse about getting short with people.
I was a classroom teacher at that time and was straightening up the classroom after the school day. And I was getting pretty bummed. I was seeing numerous intentional violations of my class maintenance rules. Paper wads and random pieces of trash everywhere mocked me, reminding me that my students could care less about my rules. I was about to go home to my family for the weekend with a pretty bothersome chip on my shoulder. I was once again sentencing myself to yet another round of muted hatred for the younger generation, my profession, and the messed up world in general.
Chances were good that I wouldn’t be much of a blessing to my young family when I got home.
But out of the blue, a verse that I had often heard, but never thought about, popped into my head: “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” I didn’t know the reference at that moment and don’t usually use the King Jimmy versions, but the Holy Spirit nailed me with James 1:20. I was indeed a man with a soul full of the wrath of man. And I suddenly realized that my supposedly righteous indignation was in fact NOT going to yield any righteousness of God for me or anyone else.
You might be snickering right now at my low brow classroom epiphany over some paper wads left in student desks. But for me it was the first time I was definitely nailed by my Maker for my camouflaged addiction to the default response when things go sideways:
Anger.
I wish I could say I immediately repented and never again trusted my anger to fix things, but the sad truth is it took me over thirty years to be convicted of the truth of this verse and truly repent of trying to make my anger work for both me and God.
As a pastor, dad and husband, I knew that weapons-grade anger would only backfire with serious relational damage. But I thought that keeping my anger set on simmer would be OK. Without boring you with the details, let’s just say I wasted a LOT of my time trying to prove this verse wrong. By consistently stuffing and masking my frustrations and disappointments, I was able to be a fairly civil guy, even when my pet peeves were getting way under my skin.
But I didn’t realize the very low ROI I was getting for my long term anger sublimation operation. I further didn’t recognize the damage I was doing to myself every day by harboring this undercover anger in the darker corners of my soul. So I am writing this as a cautionary tale to all those whose pet peeves and real life enemies may be robbing you of some very precious commodities that you will be sorry you surrendered because of your anger habit.
One of my excuses for staying angry was that favorite comeback of teenagers down through the ages:
“Everybody’s doing it”
Americans love to be angry. Just check out social media if you don’t believe me. And since I figured God graded on the curve, and since I needed to relate to the grumbling majority, I cared for my own array of pet peeves that I can talk or complain about to like minded pet peeve owners. Think about it. Our shared frustrations are now very often the tie that binds us together in whatever “tribe” we have placed ourselves.
The Christian tribe has an unabashedly angry cohort, and I have been an enthusiastic part of it.
We feel like our anger is of course the righteous kind. My issues were with people I think deserve the wrath of God. So my ongoing irritation with them and their unrighteousness was my duty as a Christian. I thought if I wasn’t angry with all of the wicked people out there and the backsliders in my own world, then I was compromising the righteousness of God. If I wasn’t angry with them, I thought I would be starting down the slippery slope to joining them in their iniquity.
Maybe the best defense for being chronically cranky is a verse that should have been in the book of Proverbs:
“The squeaking wheel gets the grease.”
This statement is a true observation about how people interact. Many major movements for reform or social change are energized by the collective anger that propels causes into the media spotlight, then into our personal sympathies, and finally into the ballot boxes where political power forces us to accommodate people with grievances.
I could further add that anger does work to keep a person focused and engaged in disputes and debates long after normal people would. Better to be mad than sad. Better to be an energized-by-anger fighter than to be a whipped puppy running away from the scene.
These experiential observations caused me to believe the opposite of the verse in James. That in fact, the angry squeaking of man gets things done in many different arenas and issues.
But not God’s things.
That’s the point it took thirty years for me to see.
But I finally learned some hard lessons in my failed thirty year effort to prove that the anger of man can work for God.
Here from my own experience are six reasons why my anger doesn’t work:
Anger invalidates your influence and ideas among those you would want to reach.
People instinctively understand that angry people cannot think straight and aren’t open to reason. So they accurately conclude that their positions are skewed toward self-serving priorities rather than the good of others. They don’t trust the judgment of people who would like to hurt somebody. They know that seeing red all the time makes you do stupid and harmful things.
Anger attracts only people with the same problems, not people with solutions.
Though being with somebody who is bummed about the same things gives momentary affirmation, we forget that someone just as angry as I am is really no better than we are. When shared grievances are what draws us together, we begin to live in echo chambers and ideological silos where solutions will never be found because people with solutions are neither drawn to or welcomed. This keeps us in a death spiral, locked in with the fellowship of the alienated.
Anger makes you bitter, but not better, over time.
Anger that persists past the sunset deadline specified in Ephesians 4:26 infects the soul with bitterness that poisons our human relationships, angry with God, and makes us resistant to the grace we so desperately need to turn our adversity into godly character.
Anger makes you hate the very people you most need to love.
All Cain had to do is learn to love his brother and draw from his example of the kind of heart Abel had that made his sacrifices acceptable. But he dissed God’s advice and chose to become the patron anti-saint of all future murderers. We do the same thing when we fail to see that the people who rub us the wrong way are God’s unlikely sources of character development and help.
Anger makes you blind to your actual worst enemy
Anger at someone else’s fault or sin invariably makes our own faults and sins imperceptible to us. That’s why Jesus knows that the condemning person always has a log in their eye. Fixation on the faults of others makes us obsess over those we really can’t change and ignore the one person we most need to change for the better - ourselves.
Anger destroys the joys in your life and makes you a drain on others that need you to be a blessing.
Even slow burning anger like mine inflicts subtle but serious damage on its users. The joy of the Lord that is supposed to be our strength gets drained every day by our unceasing irritations that we focus our attention on by default. When that joy that would draw the right people to us for the right causes is missing, we daily miss the very strength that would enable us to really change both ourselves and our world for the better
The bottom line is anger is a fleshly indulgence that isolates, makes miserable, and leaves you with nothing to show for all the pushing and shoving you have done to get things done, whether for yourself or God.
The next time you are faced with your own paper wads left by the jerks in your life’s classroom, try the joy of the Lord instead. It comes automatically when you fully surrender your will to Jesus. The joy that should be your strength gives you the amazing ability to clean up your world with a smile on your face and a spring in your step, laughing in the face of the giants who can’t touch your peace that passes all understanding.
But full surrender requires full faith in the power of God instead of the wrath of man.
Choose joy starting today.
You and the people closest to you will be glad you did.
But, you say, “How can a person be joyful when both the world you live in and your immediate future look pretty grim?
How do you implement a turn from anger that doesn’t work to joy that does no matter what?
Find out what I discovered in the pits of my paper wads in the next edition of The Why Files on “Why We Should Win Every Time.”