Angry Saints

Sunday's sermon was about angry Christians. (10-17-10: "Blessed are the Angry?") I applied the words of Christ to the bad reputation churches have for anger and division. And at the end of the service, I challenged everyone to examine their attitudes and let their anger go. In fact, I asked members of the congregation to bow their heads and turn the palms of their hands up toward Heaven, asking God to take hidden, deep seated anger away.

Afterwards, a woman came by to ask if she could speak with me for a moment. She indicated that her son and daughter-in-law had been angry at her for over a year. They'd been offended by some innocent decision related to a crisis in the larger family. As a result, they hadn't spoken to her for months. She shared that she has occasionally tried to offer an olive branch, but that she has always been rebuffed.

Finally, she confessed, "I never thought I was angry. I always thought I was perfectly fine and willing to be at peace with them. So today when you asked us to turn up the palms of our hands to God and release our anger, I thought, 'I don't need to do that.' Then I thought, 'I'm not going to do that. That's silly!' Then the Holy Spirit just turned my hands over, and I realized I've been extremely angry and have just been trying to hide it."

That dear lady is not alone. It's very common for church people to deny that we're angry. We try and conceal the rage with more polite phrases like "I'm just concerned," or "I'm hurt," or "I'm merely offended." We are unwilling to confess that we're still angry because we know it's wrong.

And when we're not in denial, we rationalize. We cleverly concede that ongoing anger is generally wrong, but this case is the exception. We try to make it all right by suggesting this is a spiritual matter or a biblical matter of it's something we've prayed about. But deep down in our hearts, we know we're not behaving like Jesus. We're acting like the Pharisees who were angry at him for three whole years!

You can't help it when anger suddenly rises up in your life without warning. That's what emotions do, and that first rush of rage is beyond your control. You're not accountable for that. But you and I are accountable to God for what we do with our anger- or rather, what we allow our anger to do to us and the people around us when we allow it to simmer for days or weeks.

Paul warns us, "In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry." (Ephesians 4:26) The truth is, if I've been angry at someone for more than the last hour or so, there is no excuse. Anger is like a raging cancer. We want it treated and removed as quickly as possible.

Selah.