Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here and excited to continue this sermon series that we've been doing over the last several weeks in which we're calling good questions. We're trying to ask good questions, create a few answers in the middle of that, and then, really, I don't know if you discovered this yet, but in our faith walk especially, we encounter good questions, and then sometimes we find answers, and then a lot of times, even those answers create more questions. So this is kind of just a part of the process that I hope you get comfortable with. There's a lot of big, good questions out there, and we get to engage in a few of those together over the last couple weeks and then the next couple.
[00:00:42] Today, I want to ask the question, what do we do with anger?
[00:00:47] What do we do with anger? I was leaving my house this morning. I got in the truck, and pretty quickly after I left the house, my wife called me to tell me something about the house. She said, oh, yeah, and you're preaching this morning. What's the question? I. I said, what do we do with anger? And she said, that is a great question for you.
[00:01:04] And she left a little gap and then added the prepositional phrase just like that. And I said, oh, thank you. You're immediately inserted into the beginning of my message right now.
[00:01:14] And, you know, she's not wrong.
[00:01:17] My entire life, I have kind of been asking myself this question, where does this belong? What do we do with anger? I can be, especially left unchecked, a pretty angry person. I can put this kind of react.
[00:01:29] Anger on top of a lot of experiences that I have, and it's shocking how broad the spectrum is. Actually. I can be really angry at myself, and I can be really angry at you, and I can be in a great mood, and I can immediately be angry at the person driving a particularly loud vehicle by my home.
[00:01:45] I can just turn it on. You know, my kids and my wife and I walk. We walk my daughter to school right across the street every morning. But we go across the crosswalk at Coulee, and then we walk on the sidewalk.
[00:01:56] And most days, there is somebody that just waits till they get beside me. And I know it's calculated. I know it's on purpose. I know you're in the room, you know, and it's not just trucks. It's cars. It's everything. You know, they get right by me and, you know, and we'll be talking and I'll just be going, yeah, I think, you know, when I get home, have some coffee, maybe some over what? What is that?
[00:02:17] My wife's like, you. People can hear you. I'm like, I know.
[00:02:20] Trying to get me heard over the noise of this vehicle right now, you know, And I will turn and we got a lot of construction in our house right now. There's a big ste that's been across the road. Some people are hitting that thing at full speed. At four o' clock in the morning. I wake up instantly angry.
[00:02:35] And I'm like, oh, this is apparently like a part of who. Hey, look, it's little things. It's, you know, watching football and getting angry at the refs. It's vehicles.
[00:02:42] It's politics that I don't feel like go my way. It's interactions that are legitimately difficult that offend me or bother me personally that I get angry with. Anger. It just pops up all over my life, it turns out. And it's gonna be great as you watch me just process this publicly in front of you for next 20 minutes.
[00:03:02] But I think the, the question that kind of goes along with this question of what do we do with anger is this question of how do we give our full selves to God? And what does it look like to give our full selves to God? Because I have to tell you, the solution isn't any defective pieces of our lives or our personalities to say, okay, we just got to shut that thing down and never bring it up again and suppress it as best as possible.
[00:03:22] That's not Christianity, and that's not giving yourself to God. That's just not how this thing works. There's a better way to do it. You know, we know what to do with a lot of other emotions and things, right? We. We like to celebrate joy and gratitude. We want to practice gratitude, compassion. We want to practice that and understand it and continue to grow in it. Grief is something that I've learned a lot about here since I've been at Westside over the last 10 years. I've learned about the beauty of grief and how this is an important part of not just our Christian faith, but just our. Our humanity.
[00:03:52] We kind of know what to do with a lot of these things, but I'm not really completely sure, but what to do with anger. And that's what we'll talk about this morning.
[00:04:00] But I don't want you to have the impression or the understanding, especially if you've grown up in church like I have, that good Christians just aren't angry.
[00:04:09] We're not here to suppress things. We're not here to be fake patient and fake gracious.
[00:04:14] We're not here to pretend that things don't bother us. That's not the entire idea. And I would encourage you that Jesus got angry in Scripture.
[00:04:24] The prophets in Scripture got angry. The Apostle Paul got angry. God himself is described in Scripture as being angry at injustice and evil.
[00:04:32] So I don't know that we can make the argument that anger in and of itself is defective and it's a problem. And there's this interesting passage in Ephesians, chapter 4, verse 26, where the apostle Paul says this. He says, in your anger, do not sin.
[00:04:47] In your anger, do not sin. He doesn't say, okay, never be angry, ever.
[00:04:52] He says, when you're angry, don't let anger become something more. Don't let it become sin. Which means anger can then begin in one place and then end up in somewhere completely different.
[00:05:03] Anger can begin as a response to something wrong.
[00:05:08] But if we're not careful, anger can become a lot of things, including resentment. And then it kind of grows. It goes through this process in which resentment becomes contempt and contempt becomes hatred. And hatred eventually changes us and pulls us completely off the path of Jesus intended for us.
[00:05:25] And that's where an author, maybe you've heard of him, C.S. lewis, is incredibly helpful to me. In this book that he wrote called Mirror Christianity, which I. I believe is. Is a radio recording, actually, that just got written down into book form. He actually wrestles with Jesus's command to love our enemies and forgive those who hurt us.
[00:05:45] But he makes this important distinction in the middle of it. Christianity doesn't require us to pretend that evil isn't evil. That's not what he's asking.
[00:05:52] We don't look at cruelty and then call it kindness.
[00:05:55] We don't look at betrayal and then pretend that it never happened or it didn't hurt. And we don't have to look at injustice in the world and just kind of shrug our shoulders and say, I guess that's just the way the cookie crumbles.
[00:06:06] Lewis says Christians can hate what someone has done without learning to hate the person who did it. And that distinction might be one of the most important things we can learn about anger, because anger can tell the truth about what happened. That's important, without deciding that hatred actually gets the final word.
[00:06:24] The anger could tell the truth about what happened without deciding that hatred gets the final word.
[00:06:33] And I believe that anger is trying to tell us something. There is Some beautiful utility in it. My freshman year of high school, I made the varsity football team, which you should be really impressed with.
[00:06:44] Although it was a 2A school is pretty small, so you should be less impressed.
[00:06:48] My first game out, I went out for a pass and a beautiful, perfect pass to me. I turn, I get my hands up, and that ball hits me right square in the helmet. And you guys, we're not, like, on ESPN or anything. We don't have cameras and microphones next to the field. We have a little camcorder up in the crow's nest at the top of the grandstand, and I kid you not, from across the field, you can hear the sound of leather meeting plastic off the top of my head from this little camcorder across the field. It hit me so hard, and I was so embarrassed.
[00:07:17] I came over to the sideline and I took my helmet and I threw it down. And the athletic trainer, you know, the guy who's there to, like, tape our ankles and be nice to us, came over and goes.
[00:07:28] He says something to the effect of, like, oh, you think you're angry? You're just throwing a temper tantrum. And then he walked off. I was like, that's convicting right there, sir. I perceived that you were a prophet, you know, kind of a feeling.
[00:07:42] And why I bring it up, and what I think I learned from that is that anger in and of itself, if it's real and true and there's conviction behind it, can have some real utility.
[00:07:53] But sometimes I wonder if we're just throwing temper tantrums.
[00:07:57] And so James, the brother of Jesus, writes In James, chapter one, verse 19, he says, Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, because human anger doesn't produce the righteousness that God desires.
[00:08:10] See, James doesn't say that anger has nothing to tell us. He says, you got to be careful about what you then do with your anger.
[00:08:17] Maybe anger is this kind of alarm system that's telling you, look, something matters. Something's happened, Something's gone wrong. There was a boundary that was crossed. And now all of a sudden, anger has entered into the picture. You know, you can think about the things that make you angry, right? Somebody lies to you or mistreats your child or abuses power.
[00:08:34] Someone takes advantage of someone vulnerable. Someone betrays your trust, Someone humiliates you. And anger rises inside of you because there's something that really just plainly says, look, this shouldn't be happening. Whatever's happening right in front of me right now, this shouldn't be going on, and to be honest with you, to defend those of us who are a little bit more prone to anger. I'm gonna encourage those of us like me or only me, and tell you that sometimes that voice is right.
[00:09:02] There's things that we should be angry about even as Christians or especially at Christians. Right. Jesus walks into the temple. And it doesn't say that Jesus got angry, but he walks into the temple at this, at one moment, and. And he sees that people are exploiting worshipers and they're trying to. To pull and extract money out of poor people in order to make a dollar for themselves, and they're using religion in order to do so. And Jesus turns over the tables of the money changers. It says in the temple, in defense and in care for those who are far more vulnerable and those who simply can't afford those who are being told, you can't worship because you don't have enough money to do so.
[00:09:40] He gets angry with this.
[00:09:43] And then Jesus encounters religious leaders again. It's the religious leaders, both of these situations, who care more about rules than they do suffering people. And Mark says this. He says he looks at them in anger, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts.
[00:10:00] Both times, Jesus anger is directed toward those who are within the religious establishment that are being exploitative of vulnerable people around them.
[00:10:10] First of all, there should be a warning to those of us who would consider ourselves religious, and I would imagine that the majority of us in here do.
[00:10:18] But it also tells us that this anger has some utility. There's a reason for it. It can be useful. Biblical faith doesn't teach indifference toward evil.
[00:10:26] And so sometimes anger comes up and is evidence that we still know the difference between what's right and what's wrong.
[00:10:33] But here's the news for you, and here's where those of us who are a little bit more prone to anger need to slow our roll. Okay. Anger is a really terrible driver of the vehicle, but it's a pretty useful warning light.
[00:10:48] It's not a reliable steering wheel. Right. Anger says something is wrong. But anger doesn't always know what to do next, which is. James gives us this encouragement in this passage. He says, slow down, quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, not because you shouldn't care.
[00:11:04] Right.
[00:11:06] Some of us, again, who are prone to anger are prone to this maybe a little bit more than others.
[00:11:11] Another thing that makes us really angry is when someone tells us we shouldn't be angry.
[00:11:16] Well, I'm angry. Well, you know, you shouldn't be. Oh, tell me that again.
[00:11:21] I Dare you. You know, and there's something. And I went through this, you know, again, I was throwing equipment well before my freshman year of football and I've had my own issues since then.
[00:11:35] But there's something, it's like, look, you just can't, you shouldn't feel that way. And there were so many times that I shouldn't. But then I began to shut it down on things that I really should have been angry about.
[00:11:46] And so we don't always love when someone says we shouldn't be angry, but we have to remember that anger moves way faster than wisdom does.
[00:11:56] And most of us know this from experience, right? How many sentences have you spoken in anger that you desperately wish that you could go ahead and put back into your mouth immediately?
[00:12:04] Or maybe like some of us, you've thought about it, you know what you were about to say and you've gone, this is a bad idea and I'm going to say it anyway.
[00:12:13] Yeah, that one person is like me, like, oh, this is bad, this is mean, this is not cool. And this is the perfect time to say it and cut this person down at the knees.
[00:12:26] How many texts did you send a little bit too quickly? How many conversations do you then replay afterward? And you go, oh, I was right about the issue. All the conversations that I have, I start with, I was right on the back end.
[00:12:39] That's not true.
[00:12:41] I was right about the issue, but I was wrong about how I handled it. Right. This distinction matters. You know, you can be right about what happened and still be wrong about what anger is then turning you into.
[00:12:53] And so I actually think this is where CS Lewis helps us out again. In Mere Christianity. Lewis says for years that he's heard Christians say that we should hate a person's bad actions without hating the person. At first he found this distinction difficult until he realized that he had been doing this toward himself for his entire life.
[00:13:13] Lewis knew there were things about himself that he disliked. And then this is, it's a little bit of a long quote, so try to stick with me. But he says this in Mere Christianity. He says, my self love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself.
[00:13:28] So loving my enemies doesn't apparently mean thinking them nice either.
[00:13:32] That's an enormous relief for a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they're really not such bad fellows after all when it is quite plain that they are preach. CS Lewis said, go a step further. In my most clear sighted moments, not only do I not think Myself a nice man, but I know that I'm a very nasty one.
[00:13:55] I can look at some of the things that I've done with horror and loathing. And so apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things that my enemies do.
[00:14:06] So there's things he says that he's regretted, things that he's wish he's never done things, and he hates those things that have happened and that he's done, but he never concluded, therefore, I will stop wanting anything good for myself.
[00:14:20] He never came to that point.
[00:14:24] He could condemn his own actions without deciding that his own life was worthless.
[00:14:30] He could repent and he could have regrets.
[00:14:33] And so Lewis says that's how a Christian is then called to understand an enemy.
[00:14:39] We can say, what you did was wrong. What you did hurt me, and I can't trust you right now. And for the sake of safety, sometimes you even need to say this in your life. There needs to be some distance between you and I.
[00:14:50] Forgiveness doesn't require foolishness, just so you know. And love doesn't eliminate healthy boundaries that we need in our lives. But Christianity does refuse one particular and popular move in that it refuses to let what someone did become the entire definition of who someone is.
[00:15:09] Because that's actually what anger, if it goes unchecked, it loves to do. Anger begins with, you did something terrible and turns into, you are terrible. And then it's, everything about you is terrible and nothing good should happen to you. And then eventually, if completely left unchecked and we allow ourselves to dig deeper into this, it becomes, I would actually enjoy watching you suffer.
[00:15:32] And that's the line that we have to notice that there's this difference between justice and vengeance.
[00:15:39] Justice says, what happened was wrong, but it needs to be made right. And vengeance says, I need you to hurt because I hurt.
[00:15:49] Justice is better. It seeks restoration, while vengeance seeks satisfaction.
[00:15:56] Justice would say, the evil needs to stop. And vengeance says, I actually want to watch you pay.
[00:16:02] And the problem is that those can feel sometimes almost identical inside of us. Which is why your anger requires very careful attention.
[00:16:14] Jesus pushes this even further. In Matthew 5, verse 21, he says, you've heard that it was said to the people long ago, you shall not murder. But I tell you that anyone who's angry with his brother or his sister will be subject to judgment.
[00:16:27] Now understand, Jesus isn't saying that anger and murder are identical actions, right?
[00:16:34] But he is tracing this spiritual trajectory. He's pulling on the yarn of anger and telling you where it eventually lands. If left Unchecked, because before you can destroy somebody physically, you usually destroy them internally, right? We reduce them, we label them. We stop seeing their humanity. Jesus talks about the importance of these contemptuous words that we love to throw out. He says, you call someone a fool, right? Essentially what he's saying is you're saying that someone is worthless.
[00:17:05] And contempt is different from anger, right? Anger will say you did something wrong. And contempt goes further, and it says, there's something wrong with you. Anger says, this behavior is unacceptable. And contempt will say, you are beneath me.
[00:17:20] And you guys, this is where we love to get, because this is a place even inside of the Christian faith that we love to get because there's such a relief on the other side of it.
[00:17:29] Contempt is dangerous because once somebody is beneath us, we no longer actually have to love them and treat them like they themselves are a child of God.
[00:17:39] And this is the problem with where the church in some ways has gotten nationally, internationally. This is a problem for each of us individually.
[00:17:46] You guys, it is so hard to do faith and to do Christianity in a nuanced place where we actually try to understand not just those who are friends, but those who are our enemies, and not just those in our home, but those of us who are in our neighborhood and in our city, in our region. It is so much work to live this life with real care and nuance. And you know what is so lovely, is to just label somebody and put them in a box and say they are are an idiot and a fool and a buffoon, and everything they say and everything they do is wrong. And I never have to acknowledge them in any other way ever again.
[00:18:25] It's way harder to understand.
[00:18:28] It's easy to fire off in the Instagram and the Facebook comments, and it's difficult to meet someone over coffee.
[00:18:39] And again, if anger allows itself to then turn into contempt, that is where we completely disconnect ourselves from the way of Jesus.
[00:18:49] If you find yourself in a position where you no longer have interest in listening, you no longer wonder whether or not you're missing something, you no longer have to pray for them.
[00:19:00] You actually just simply and quickly dismiss them. It's such this great relief.
[00:19:06] And you guys, our world is training us in this. We are. We are constantly. People are efforting to train us in this kind of contempt because sides, the goods and the bads make a lot of people a lot of money, and they put you in a terrible place. As a Christian, it's just simpler to label people. I'm gonna do this at my flag football Game. I'm gonna label the other team this afternoon, the bad guys.
[00:19:31] I had a kid ask me that this last week. He said, who's winning? I said, oh, the good guys. He said, well, who are the good guys? And I was like, us.
[00:19:38] Every time.
[00:19:43] They want us to label good people and bad people idiots, and enlightened contempt gets clicks and nuance gets ignored.
[00:19:51] Someone makes one terrible comment, and it becomes their entire personality in your mind.
[00:19:57] And the same often happens when you discover that someone voted differently.
[00:20:01] Suddenly, you and all of your enlightenment, you know everything about them.
[00:20:07] But here's the problem with Christianity, and here's the greatest piece of Christianity is Jesus just won't let you do it.
[00:20:15] You cannot do it.
[00:20:17] Our faith can't go there.
[00:20:19] Every human being we meet bears the image of God.
[00:20:23] Even the person that you believe is profoundly wrong or you know is profoundly wrong, you've got all the evidence, you know, that they're a terrible person and how they behave to you. And still Christianity and Jesus won't allow you to take their humanity from them.
[00:20:40] And so I wonder if the question isn't whether or not we're angry and if that should exist at all. The question then is, what is our anger becoming? What does it then turn into?
[00:20:51] Again, Paul says, in your anger, don't sin. So don't let the sun go down while you're still angry. And don't give the devil a foothold, right? He talks about this foothold, this place to stand, this little bit of territory, this little piece of the neighborhood. Because I think Paul understands something about anger. Anger grows when you give it somewhere to live.
[00:21:12] Look, you know, something happens. You replay a situation, and then you replay it again. You reconstruct a difficult conversation that brought pain to you.
[00:21:21] And this time, when you reconstruct it, you say the perfect thing. You've got the exact retort that you need.
[00:21:27] And then you imagine telling someone else what happened. And then someone validates your anger and another person validates your anger. And before long, you're not just angry about something that happened. Instead, you're living continually inside of this story of this offense, and you go to visit it constantly. Anger then at that point has moved into the neighborhood and potentially into your house.
[00:21:47] Anger all of a sudden has furniture, it's got a mailing address. And eventually anger becomes a part of your identity. It's a big part of your story, and it's who you are. Maybe you've met people like that. Something happened 15 years ago, and it was a situation that took place in 5, 10, or 20 minutes. And now all of a sudden, it's occupied the next 20 years of their life.
[00:22:07] And you can see it as they retell the story again, right? The body tightens, the face changes, the voice changes, and you know every word. You can hear every detail. There's every injustice that comes out in that. And the original event hardly took any time. But all of a sudden, it's occupying the vast percentage of that person's life, which means the person who hurt them has continued to take something away from them every single day.
[00:22:39] This is where forgiveness has to enter into the picture.
[00:22:43] Now, I want you to be really. I want you to really understand and really hear me.
[00:22:48] Forgiveness doesn't say that offense that happened. It doesn't matter.
[00:22:53] I actually think the better way to understand forgiveness in this scenario is that forgiveness says it actually mattered too much to let this own the rest of my life.
[00:23:09] And so then we. We take a look at Jesus, right?
[00:23:12] The apostle Paul says in Romans 12, verse 17, he says, don't repay anyone evil for evil. And then he says, don't take revenge.
[00:23:21] And then finally he says, don't be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
[00:23:30] Don't let evil reproduce itself inside of you.
[00:23:35] Don't allow someone being cruel to you to make you a cruel person.
[00:23:39] Don't allow an insult to allow you to become insulting. Don't allow someone dehumanizing you to give you permission to dehumanize them. Because then evil wins not just once, but twice.
[00:23:52] And so let us follow the example of Jesus on the cross, suffering the greatest injustice that maybe history has ever known.
[00:23:59] And while he is in the middle of that injustice, he says, father, forgive them, for they don't understand.
[00:24:09] I wonder if the best Christian response to anger is not to stop calling evil evil, but instead it's to refuse to let evil teach us then how to hate.
[00:24:19] So I want to leave you with these four questions to ask yourself if you find yourself angry.
[00:24:30] And again, totally worth my time. If these questions are just for me and you guys are just in the room watching me process, I'm okay with that. I'm comfortable.
[00:24:38] It's a good. It's a good question for you.
[00:24:43] Question 1. What is my anger trying to tell me?
[00:24:47] Yeah. I want you to not feel shame around anger, and I want to encourage you to not immediately suppress it. Okay.
[00:24:54] I want you to get curious about it.
[00:24:57] I want you to ask, well, why am I angry? Did something happen? Am I embarrassed? Was something unjust? Am I sticking up for a friend? Or a loved one. Was I afraid?
[00:25:06] Sometimes our anger reveals injustice and sometimes it reveals insecurity.
[00:25:13] But if we understand that anger in its best form is information, we should listen to it and then understand that we don't automatically obey it.
[00:25:25] And the second question is this. What story am I telling about this person?
[00:25:32] This one's big.
[00:25:35] Our brains are desired to create story. Or desired. They're designed to create stories so quickly. Just yesterday I was driving on Mount Washington, headed toward the west side of town, and this Dodge Caravan minivan pulled out in front of me.
[00:25:52] And you guys, it was going 10 miles per hour.
[00:26:01] And you guys, I made up a story about who would be driving that Dodge minivan. And you guys, I did it in about three seconds.
[00:26:12] I'm really good at this. Take that chat GPT. I created a massive story in my mind way faster than you can.
[00:26:20] And lo and behold, I could see after about a mile of 10 miles per hour, I see the silhouettes and I go, oh, nope, I was wrong.
[00:26:30] That's 10 high school boys inside of that minivan. And three of them are looking back at me.
[00:26:35] You know, I can see them going.
[00:26:40] And so I went like this above the steering wheel. My wife went, what did you just do? I said, I gave you a thumbs up.
[00:26:48] And then they took off. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.
[00:26:53] But you know, this, and this could even happen to you today, something will happen, and you can write a short story about that person, what they're doing, how they're doing it on purpose, why they're trying to offend you, why they're actually after you. There's this little bit of a narcissist, narcissistic tendency that can rise up within our anger and we can move really quickly from they did something wrong to they're a terrible person, they're defective.
[00:27:18] Have you reduced someone to the worst thing that they've done?
[00:27:22] Because I want you to be reminded of this as the basis of our faith today is that God does not think of you and treat you like that doesn't.
[00:27:32] And so I hope that none of us want to be eternally defined by our worst moment. And then we should extend that courtesy to others around us as well. Question 3. Do you want justice or do you want them to hurt?
[00:27:45] Do you want justice or do you just want them to feel pain because you felt pain?
[00:27:50] I want to encourage us to desire accountability and to establish boundaries. And I want us to. I want to encourage us to pursue godly justice. But the caution that I want you to Take away today is that you need to pay attention. When your imagination becomes enjoying someone else's pain, you've gone too far and anger is becoming contempt.
[00:28:12] That's a good warning light. Okay, question four.
[00:28:16] This is the last one, and it's the worst one. You ready for this? It's terrible.
[00:28:20] Don't do this one unless you're really serious about being a Christian.
[00:28:25] Can I desire their good?
[00:28:29] That's one of the best things about Christianity is that our desire isn't just that we get back to zero and we go, okay, forgive and forget.
[00:28:40] This is one of the most challenging ideas because I don't know that we have to feel affection.
[00:28:46] And again, I want to encourage you that you don't have to pretend that everything's okay and you don't have to restore every relationship to what it was before an offense happened and before the anger came into the picture. But I am curious. Are you willing to pray something like this?
[00:29:01] God, somehow, can you bring myself and them into truth?
[00:29:07] Can we heal? Can you heal whatever is broken inside of us and then make us into the people that you've created them to be? And me?
[00:29:17] Would they be blessed in their comings and their goings?
[00:29:21] Can we move into enemy love and not just enemy tolerance?
[00:29:31] Wanting God's goodness to ultimately win in them is part of our Christian journey.
[00:29:38] In a moment, we're going to close and we're going to take communion together and they're going to start bringing those elements around here right now. And if you want the elements brought to you, you can raise your hand and somebody will bring those by.
[00:29:50] And so I kind of want to sum it up like this real quick. Maybe anger isn't something to be ashamed of, but I am confident that our anger needs to be. Is something that we need to bring to Jesus.
[00:30:02] And as part of this surrender of all of us, can you take all of me and all that I am?
[00:30:08] Maybe it's not the suppression of all these emotions that we feel, but it's allowing them to move slowly enough so that wisdom can catch up and that we can surrender even those things to Jesus.
[00:30:20] Because I really believe that in the room. Some of you are angry today because something genuinely unjust happened to you or happened in the world around you.
[00:30:28] You've been wounded. You've watched somebody you love suffer greatly. You've suffered one last time, Christianity. And I, as your pastor, I'm not asking you to pretend that it was okay.
[00:30:44] Jesus never asked us to call the darkness light, but he does invite us into something deeper. And greater. And that is that we can tell the truth about what happened without allowing what happened to determine who we become.
[00:31:00] And so the goal isn't that we don't become angry, but instead it's that we become the kind of person whose anger is transformed by love. Amen.
[00:31:08] Amen.
[00:31:09] Lord Jesus, you know everything about us. You know all the injustices and the betrayals and all the difficulties and all the wonderings and the wanderings that we have had in our lives. You know about our anger.
[00:31:23] You know every wound beneath that anger.
[00:31:28] Teach us not to deny that emotion or that anger, but instead teach us to bring it into your presence.
[00:31:37] Allow us to slow down enough to let wisdom catch up to our emotion.
[00:31:44] Protect our hearts from contempt in that process and keep our anger from becoming hatred, keep our hurt from becoming bitterness, and teach us to forgive as you have forgiven us. In Jesus name we pray.
[00:31:58] Amen.
