“What in the world do I do with my anger?”

Steve Brown:
“What in the world do I do with my anger?” We’re going to tell you, on this edition of Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus in the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. 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. Hey Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey man. Finally, we’re going to deal with something I’ve been wanting to bring up with you for a long.

Steve Brown:
I have no anger. I am not an angry person. I’m gentle. And I can’t believe that you said that. That’s Pete Alwinson and he comes in on Fridays, as you know, and we answer your questions. By the way, go to ForgeTruth.com and if you haven’t read, is that audio book out yet?

Pete Alwinson:
No. Yes. Yes, it is. Like Father Like Son is out. Yeah.

Steve Brown:
They can get that at Key Life or at Forge.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
Like Father Like Son. So, if you haven’t read it and you’re not a reader, you’d rather listen to it, be sure and check. And you’ll like it a lot. We meet to answer questions and we love your questions. You can ask your question, 24 7, call 1-800-KEY-LIFE and then follow instructions. We record your question and sometimes put it on the air. You can send your question to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
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or if you’re in Canada, it’s

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

or you can send your e-mail or your get, send your question. Listen, I’ll get this right, just stay with me. You can send your question to [email protected] that’s an e-mail. And if you want to make a gift, you can go to keylife.org or any of those other places. And we have never been known to turn down a gift. Sometimes we think it’s tainted, that it taint enough. That is so bad. I’m sorry. If you can help us financially, all kidding aside, we will appreciate it. And we’ll use it carefully and faithfully. If you can’t, we understand that too. Say a prayer for the ministry. Pete, why don’t you lead us in prayer and we’ll turn to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Let’s pray together. Oh, Father, we thank you that we can come into your presence with joy. Thank you for the laughter of the redeemed. Thank you that truly our sins have been forgiven, borne on that horrible cross by our Lord and Savior, Jesus. And we honor you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the authors of life, the author of our redemption, the author of our forgiveness. And we praise you. Lord Jesus, you are our Lord. We follow you and you have earned our right, the right for us to follow you with all of our heart and soul and mind. And so, we love you because you first loved us. And we end this week by stopping for just a minute and asking for your power and mercy and grace, to descend on us, to enable us, to trust you more, to enable us to see the problems that we have and give them to you and ask that you would go to work in our lives. We love you. And we ask that Lord, even as we ask questions that you would deal with the many questions that we have, and even the ones that we don’t even ask yet, that you would help us to grow in the grace and knowledge of you are Lord Jesus Christ. Be with our pastors and leaders this week-end as we gather together for worship and we commit this time a Q&A to you. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.

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

Caller 1:
How can I know whether I’m feeling anger or hatred? And what can I do about it?

Steve Brown:
Well, you made the first step, you know, we, and I was, we were kidding at the beginning of the broadcast and you said you were glad we’re going to talk about anger because I needed to deal with it and then I got angry with you because you were saying that, but there are a lot of Christians who say what, me angry? And there’s a passive aggressive kind of anger that is more devastating than in your face anger sometimes. But it’s there and it’s a part of who we are. And I would suggest that any human being who is aware and not in denial will have to deal on occasions with anger and frustration and even sometimes hatred. You find as you read the Bible, the Psalms, there are some Psalms that would curl your toes, they’re so angry. And so, God recognizes that, Paul says, be angry. And you go, whoa.

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

So, our caller has made the first step. Is that enough?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. I think that’s, I think it’s great. It’s a step of recognition, right?

Steve Brown:
Right.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, but right, we do need to, we do need to deal with our anger. And Paul talks about putting aside all anger, wrath, malice. And so, it is a part of our sanctification that we need to consciously engage. So, you know, the first thing we need to do is recognize it and then confess it. But then we need to also go say, why? What is it that motivates my anger or, and or hatred? And I, you know, I know a lot of times people who are raised in really broken homes, dysfunctional homes, have anger toward their parents for the way they were raised. And they bring that anger that then becomes kind of free floating. They don’t, they don’t really know why they’re angry or the why they get ticked off so easily, but they do. So, it’s good to trace back some of that with some help.

Steve Brown:
I’m sure you can do that with a counselor or a mature Christian, friend who understands these kinds of issues. What do you think about anger management courses?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, I mean.

Steve Brown:
I don’t have much of a high view of those things.

Pete Alwinson:
Never went through, saw the movie, anger management, which was hysterical. But, you know, what does that mean to manage our anger? Does it mean to suppress, learn to suppress real emotions, so you don’t have negative emotions externally. I think what the gospel wants to do is transform us.

Steve Brown:
I agree.

Pete Alwinson:
Not that we control those per se, but that we actually deal with them so that we’re not angry anymore.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And it’s a lifelong, because we’re human beings, it’s a struggle. I, you know, at the risk of sounding prideful, I’m a lot less angry than I was when I was younger. When I was younger, I hurt a lot of people. I became aware of my anger problem. We had an atheist that came to the church that I served for a long time. Her, his sister was a believer and she brought him. And he was a psychiatrist. And they were walking away and said, well, what do you think about Steve? And he said, I’ve never seen anybody that angry. And I thought about that, and I thought, I don’t want to be thought of as that.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right.

Steve Brown:
And I asked Jesus to deal with it, and he really has. I’m not so angry. And I don’t think I would be defined as an angry man today.

Pete Alwinson:
No, no.

Steve Brown:
And that’s totally the sanctification process, that Jesus leads us to.

Pete Alwinson:
But it’s a very real deal. Anger, everybody has it at some level. There’s people who are angry and aggressive and those who are angry and passive aggressive.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. That’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
Women and men, I mean, it’s across the board. And this was a lady that brought this up to us.

Steve Brown:
And what you said at the beginning is ask why?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah.

Steve Brown:
I mean, there are generally reasons for that. And you can find sometimes that family dysfunctions are the cause of it. And that you’re hurting everybody, you know, because you were hurt.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. And so, in my case, I had anger modeled for me by my dad. I, it comes from my sin nature, so I learned it pretty well. Temperamentally, I can get angry quickly and it was clear way back in my twenties that it was something I had to get ahold of. A lot of anger could come and this is where grace comes into it. A lot of our anger comes from our pride, our ego and when we come to the end of ourselves and see that we need grace and we get it in Jesus, it can begin to diffuse that anger of always having to be in charge and we can become more secure and less insecure and less angry as a result.

Steve Brown:
So good. What about righteous anger and indignation.

Pete Alwinson:
That Steve, that’s a big deal. I mean, I read a Psalm yesterday, because we’re talking about, at Forge, we’re talking about men as warriors. And God says that he wants us to hate evil. You know, and if you like some of the horrible things that are being done to the innocents in our world today, you’re missing the heart of God. So, we should hate evil and we should seek to eradicate it.

Steve Brown:
And anger is sometimes the motivation of doing that.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
So, in that sense it can be good.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Brown:
Here’s an e-mail question. How can I trust God more when everything in my life seems so bad and painful? You know, she’s allowed me to share this, but George Bingham, Dr. Bingham, is the president of Key Life. And he and his wife, Ruth, had a child, whose name was Matthew, who died when, very young. And they did a promotional video for Key Life at one time. They came out of the studio and she was crying. And she said, two things. I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you. And then Ruth said, you know, the hard thing is to trust God again. After we’ve been through this pain, trusting God is not as easy as I thought it was. So, yeah, we get it. I mean, and everybody gets it. You know, you trust God, man, he didn’t, was it St. Teresa who said you’d have more friends if you treated the ones you had a little bit better? That’s a profound statement. God is not safe. And so, the trusting comes in recognizing that, and that when you say, I give you myself, that means all of it.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. I mean, we just heard the other day about here in Florida, another child that drowned in a pool.

Steve Brown:
Yeah.

Pete Alwinson:
And that happens. It’s so devastating. We do need to bring those real devastations to God.

Steve Brown:
We really do.

Pete Alwinson:
And,

Steve Brown:
What else are you going to do with them? I don’t know where you go.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Like the disciples said.

To whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.

So, there’s nowhere else to go. And you can get bitter and angry and cut him off, but it does you no good to do so.

Steve Brown:
It really doesn’t. And Pete and I are not being flippant. We know things and we know what some of you’re going through. It really is hard and, but where are you going to go?

Pete Alwinson:
There’s a lot of unfixable things in this life that only God can do.

Steve Brown:
Oh man, so true. Well, we’re out of time. I don’t want to talk about that anymore anyway. We’ll be back next Friday doing this again. Meanwhile, remember Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.