Anger: Handle With Care

Anger is the most powerful of emotions.

With one swing of a fist or lash of the tongue, anger can ruin us in an instant. It undoes relationships, destroys lives, even alters world events. And while not all anger is in itself wrong, such is its power, that it must always be handled with care.

I tasted this recently, when I lashed out at one of my children.

We’d sat down for dinner as a family and were discussing the week ahead. It was busy. My wife was away for work. And I had a bunch of ministry commitments that meant the kids would need to wait around a bit longer than usual before and after school.

When one of them complained, my anger boiled. I unleashed a torrent of rebuke aimed squarely at highlighting their ungratefulness and putting them in their place.

Now, at one level my outburst was legitimate.

It was a busy week and I'd already made a bunch of concessions to make it easier for them. This request was more than reasonable.

The problem, however, was not the anger itself but my expression of it. Rather than handling it with care, I immediately launched an attack. As a result I spent the remainder of the evening (and much of this week) mopping up the mess.

Anger in Ministry

It got me thinking about how easy it is to make the same mistake in ministry. Those time’s when there are legitimate grounds for anger or frustration but where our handling misses the mark.

For example...

• That snide comment when a congregation member fails to show-up (again!) to a meeting

• When we publicly 'take to task' and humiliate a colleague after they drop the ball on something

• When we maliciously vent to someone about a church member who’s been undermining us

• Or when we freeze out that "naysayer" on a committee who's just never happy with any decision or new idea

In each case, there's legitimate grounds for frustration and even anger. But in none is our response the right one. No instead, sin has simply been met with more sin.

Those of you who've been there know how disastrous this can be.

A failure to handle our anger carefully, leaves a much bigger mess to cleanup. Forgiveness has to be sought, trust won back and relationships reconciled. At times, such is the power of anger that these things might be impossible altogether.

Slowing Down our Anger

We do well therefore, to tread carefully when it comes to anger.

James chapter 1 is so helpful:

"My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires." (James 1:19-20, ESV)

His encouragement is to ‘slow-down’ in our anger.

This ought not surprise us for this is how God himself deals with anger. The Old Testament declares that the LORD is 'slow to anger' (Ex 34:6). A truth that the scriptures bear out as He patiently deals with the sin of His people, ultimately expressing His righteous anger in the gracious death of His beloved Son.

James' exhorts us to reflect God's character.

When anger comes upon us, we are called not to respond immediately but to first listen and then only slowly become angry.

This doesn’t mean that anger is never the right response. But slowing down helps us make sure it comes from a place of understanding. It gives us time to weigh what has happened, examine what's going on in our hearts and ensure when we do react, it is godly.

Alisdair Groves and Winston Smith tease this out in their book ‘Untangling Emotions’:

You will almost never go wrong by pausing before you act when you are angry. Anger in the raw, like radioactive uranium, is deadly unless harnessed with exquisite caution. If you bring it out into the open without careful preparation, you will poison everything within a ten-mile radius.’[1]

This especially applies in those times where there are legitimate grounds for our anger.

In these moments we can get swept up by the fact that we're “in the right” and so launch into an immediate response.

This is certainly what happened for me at the dinner table earlier this week. My child’s lack of gratitude and flexibility fooled me into thinking I was entitled to fly off the handle. But to borrow James’ language – this was not the ‘righteousness the Lord desires’.

Had I slowed-down and listened to my child's complaints, I would almost certainly have responded far more constructively and been left with less to clean-up. I also would've likely calmed down and begun to see my own contribution to the situation.

The same is true in in ministry.

We honour the Lord and his people when we slow-down in our anger. This is not the same as giving bad-behaviour or poor performance a ‘leave pass’. No, it means understanding the damage anger can do and so making sure we think carefully before we respond.

[1] J. Alisdair Groves and Winston Smith, Untangling Emotions (Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL.: 2019), 179.