“Is it okay to get angry?”

Steve Brown:
Is it okay to get angry? The answer that and other questions on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and suffers. Life’s hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there is a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So here’s seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson to answer your questions.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. Good to see you.

Steve Brown:
I’m doing good. Do you ever get angry?

Pete Alwinson:
I, never.

Steve Brown:
I knew you didn’t.

Pete Alwinson:
Are you kidding?

Steve Brown:
There’s kind of a halo over you.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
I’ve watched the gentle way that you deal with all issues.

Pete Alwinson:
And that’s, that’s me gentle.

Steve Brown:
And if you believe any of this, you believe anything. Not only that, he carries a gun. And if you don’t agree with him, Pete can be really hostile.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, there’s a way to settle everything.

Steve Brown:
And to settle it, finally. By the way, and as you know, Pete comes in on Fridays and we enter questions. And as I’ve told you before, checkout ForgeTruth.com for all things Pete Alwinson, and you’ll find such good stuff there. And as I said, we answer questions together and we’ve done it for a long time. You can ask a question, and we love your questions. You can call 1-800-KEY-LIFE, and that’s open 24 seven, and you can record your question and sometimes we put that on the air. You can write to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

In Canada it’s

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

Or you can email us at [email protected]. And those are places you can touch us and help us financially if you pray about it and feel called to do that, because this is a very expensive ministry. And so many people aren’t able to help us financially, about 10% do. That means when you give, you become a champion for some other people. And I promise that will squeeze every dime for the glory of God. And not only that, we understand when you can’t and by the way, try out the new way to give. I’m told, and when I said hello to you, I told you everything I know about technology, but I’m told that you can give on your smartphone. You can text to 28950 and just follow the instructions. And as I said, we’ll be faithful. And we understand when you can’t. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer. And we’ll get to some of these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
You got it. Let’s pray. Father, thank you today, as we come into your presence for, just the reality of your grace and mercy and kindness to us. At the end of this week, we’ve stopped for just a couple of minutes here as we, do some questions and answers, but we come into your presence and we thank you for your mercy. We thank you that you’ve been in charge all week and we trust and depend upon you. Lord, you know our needs though, we’d be lying if we said we didn’t struggle with some fear and anxiety, some worry about the future, some not knowing the next steps. We need you. We need answered prayer. We need your powerful work in our life. And humbly, we come to you and ask that you would, so Lord honor yourself through our lives. Thank you for Key Life. And those who work behind the scenes tirelessly to get the gospel of grace out to our country and the world. We commit this time of Q&A to you now and ask that you would use it to further the glory of your name. In Jesus name. Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, let’s go to our phone lines.

Caller 1:
I think Steve Brown is best homiletics professor, I never had at RTS.

Steve Brown:
What was that? You’re the best homiletics professor, I never had.

Pete Alwinson:
At RTS, so maybe he was, he was one of your, not one of your students, but listens to your speaking and learned from you.

Steve Brown:
Maybe, if it’s that positive, it could be a negative comment.

Pete Alwinson:
Wow.

Steve Brown:
You were not my professor and God is good.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, I don’t think it was at, I think, you know, that’s how I, that’s how I connected to you. I was visiting down in Miami, went to church, Key Biscayne, and heard you preach and asked that you be my mentor. And you said, yes, that shocked the heck out of me.

Steve Brown:
You know, I never say yes to those things. I get those kind of requests. I really don’t.

Pete Alwinson:
All the time, you do. I know.

Steve Brown:
I don’t do that thing. I say, I’ll be your friend, but I ain’t going to do that. Evidently, but I really like you and we were friends by the letter,

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
long before we knew each other.

Pete Alwinson:
And that’s probably why you said yeah, because it was, it was really through a letter. And then when I came down, you’d meet with me. It wasn’t going to be like, I’m going to be hanging on your front doorstep, but you are a great communicator and you’ve taught a lot of us about how to get into the word of God.

Steve Brown:
Well, that makes me feel good. I think you think too highly of me, but it makes me feel good. So you could say that kind of thing, whenever you want to say it.

Pete Alwinson:
Alright.

Steve Brown:
Okay. Is it okay to get angry?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, we’re talking about feelings. It makes you feel good. I want to make you feel good. So anger, are part of our feelings,

Steve Brown:
Part of our feelings.

Pete Alwinson:
you know.

Steve Brown:
What does the Scripture say?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it’s okay to get angry.

Steve Brown:
In fact, it says be angry.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s a command.

Steve Brown:
Yeah. Be angry, but don’t let the sun go down on your anger.

Pete Alwinson:
Be angry and don’t sin.

Steve Brown:
Yeah well, I forgot that part.

Pete Alwinson:
I know. In fact, you know, the Scriptures are very clear. We often overlook this, but the Scriptures are very clear that if we really love God and are his, by grace. Then we will hate unrighteousness.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
We will hate evil

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And certainly hate, includes anger. Does it not?

Steve Brown:
Of course.

Pete Alwinson:
So, when we see it in ourselves, when we see it in the world. Yeah, but I think on a personal level, is it okay for me to go off, to be a ballistic out of control, man? No.

Steve Brown:
No. And you’ve got to even be careful, don’t you? I agree with you. I agree with every word you said we should hate evil and eight unrighteousness. The problem is, that that can be, if you’re not careful a recipe for self-righteousness.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Which is certainly, clearly a sin in Scripture.

Pete Alwinson:
Clearly. So how do you, how do you balance that, Steve? Huh? I mean, I think, I mean, we both have tried to balance that the hatred of evil, without becoming angry, nasty, always critical people.

Steve Brown:
Well, I think at least one thing is when others are involved and they’re being hurt. I think that is clearly a place for anger and for intervention and for doing that sort of thing. And I, and so that’s a clear cut thing. If a kid is being hurt by an adult, the anger and the intervention on my part is clearly commanded by God.

Pete Alwinson:
Right. Right.

Steve Brown:
And there’s a sense in which all evil hurts people, and that should bother us too. The problem is you gotta be aware of your own proclivity and the people that you hurt and the unrighteous that you manifest in your life, which makes the anger less angry.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it does.

Steve Brown:
But it doesn’t mean you can’t, that you shouldn’t speak truth.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
And, you know, you say Jesus was angry. Yeah he was, because the poor people were being hurt and he stepped in, but the last thing you would use to describe Jesus is an angry man.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s a really good point.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And yet, yeah, he was always stepping in for those who were abused by religionists, who were abusing their power in self-righteousness.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
That made him really angry.

Steve Brown:
And that’s true. But not an angry person. And I think. I think we should not be known as angry people.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But I think we’re not to be known as being wusses either.

Pete Alwinson:
And it goes back to what you said earlier. We got to speak the truth in love. Don’t we? And so we speak truth, but we speak it in love. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wimpy.

Steve Brown:
No, not at all. And it’s a place of identification with humankind. If we say nothing, if there’s no anger about it, Then we’re missing something really important.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
If we do it in a self-righteous way and don’t include ourselves, but, but back to the psychological thing. That’s a very, very good thing that Paul said, it’s in Ephesians, isn’t it? Be angry, do not sin and don’t let the sun go down on your anger.

Pete Alwinson:
Process your anger as quick as possible. And I think that’s a big deal as it, we don’t. And men, as I minister to men, we often don’t even know what we’re feeling.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
And then people say to us, why are you so angry and we say, we’re not angry. I’m not angry.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And usually our wives are right. And our friends are right. You’re angry all the time. You’ve got to do something about that. This is an email. As for guarding our minds, does thinking something without acting on it, keep one right?

Pete Alwinson:
Thinking something without acting on it, keep one

Steve Brown:
righteous, I guess, or right. Jesus said, if you even think a lustful thought, you’re guilty. So that, that is not what we’re going to say, is not carte blanche, so you can think whatever you want to think.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
Because there is the sin of the mind, that is sometimes even worse than the sin of actual doing something.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Fred Smith used to say,

I believe that the spiritual sin is worse than fleshly sin.

Maybe there’s some truth to that, I don’t know? But with all of that being said, Martin Luther said,

I can’t keep the birds from flying over my head, but I can keep them from making a nest in my hair.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. There you go.

Steve Brown:
And, but I think that’s also the wrong question, isn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, it really is. I mean, in terms of the sanctification process, what God wants to do is to renew our minds so that we’re thinking properly and basing our life on truth and on truthful ways to live that then fuels our faith and trust in him, that then leads to the proper actions, whether they be mental actions or, you know, real, everyday life actions.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s the process.

Steve Brown:
And you get in the process of calling everything sin. You know, when Jack Miller used to say,

You’re a lot worse than you think you are.

That was profound. It’s really true.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s really true.

Steve Brown:
I don’t think we have any idea of how selfish and ego centered we are in almost, you know, I’ve gotten, so Lord, I wish I could bring something to you that would cause me to commend myself in your presence, but I can’t think of anything. It’s getting so you’ve taken all that away, when I was feeling good about stuff, then you let me see. And that’s always because he loves me. And so we have to be careful at that point too, but I think you’re absolutely right. It starts inside and it creates in us a process of sanctity.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Right. Wow. Well, God is good. You know, it’s so good that he is willing to bring the power of the gospel and the change in our thinking, because we often are our own worst enemies in what we allow to dwell in our mind about ourselves or about other people.

Steve Brown:
That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Good thought to end the program on and we are ending the program and have to leave. But first, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.