R.C. Sproul (0:00)

Ask yourself, what is your pattern? Do you allow things to mount up to the explosive point or are you able to handle them in an even tempered way?

Nathan W. Bingham (0:17)

How do you respond in a crisis moment? How do you respond to a slight inconvenience that happens again and again and again? Understanding how you respond and knowing how the Bible calls us to respond by God's grace helps us to deal with our anger this is the Tuesday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. Some people have a greater tendency to anger than others. Even as we grow in sanctification, small frustrations can turn into explosions of anger if we're not on guard. So today R.C. sproul is is going to help us think about anger and how we tend to react in order to help us deal with our anger. Today's message is the final message in a five part study as you'll only hear two of those messages this week because tomorrow we'll turn our attention to Joy. Be sure to request access to all five messages and his short read titled Is Anger Always a Sin? When you give a donation@renewingyourmind.org in support of this daily outreach. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on dealing with anger.

R.C. Sproul (1:30)

We've seen that there is a legitimate place for anger. There is such a thing as righteous indignation as we see it, first in the character of God and then in the life of Christ himself. And we've looked at the apostolic injunction, be angry, but sin not. And yet at the same time, we've seen how dangerous this emotion can be, how volatile anger can become, how it can lead to violence, to estrangement, to bitterness and a host of other destructive sins. And what I want to do in this concluding message on anger is explore briefly the root causes of anger and offer some practical suggestions on how we as Christians can learn learn how to manage anger and exercise the fruit of the spirit of self control. I am reminded of a couple of things. First of all of a friend that I spoke with many years ago who gave the following metaphor or analogy about human personality. He said that he looks at every person he meets as a large open field and he assumes that in that field are planted or buried beneath the surface mines. And so that really the human personality is a veritable minefield. And as he continued with this analogy, he said some people have only a couple of of minor mines buried in their field and you can traverse the field back and forth and reign freely throughout the field and possibly never step on a landmine and lose A toe or a foot to the explosion that follows. Other people's personalities seem to be like a field that is wall to wall minds. And wherever you step, you get this volatile reaction and that image stuck in mind, because all of us have minds buried somewhere in our personality. Have you ever made the statement that really makes me mad or that tease me off? And not everybody is irked or irritated or angered by the same thing. Some of us can remain very calm when the airplane is late. Other people begin to fret and to fume and to get angrier and angrier so that our tolerance levels differ from person to person. And there are reasons why things make us angry. Now, the second illustration I want to use here goes all the way back to Socrates. When Socrates the Greek philosopher was working with the whole field of ethics, he became convinced that there was a correlation between right behavior, doing the right thing, and right understanding. So that if you wanted to develop the character trait, the virtue of courage, the way to do it was to come to an intellectual understanding of what courage actually is. Now, my problem with Socrates is that he had a tendency to reduce all of these behavioral patterns simply to the cognitive level, to the level of knowledge, and tended to minimize or overlook entirely the affective dimension, the emotional dimension that is so vital to an understanding of these behavioral patterns. But certainly Socrates was on the money when he understood that there is a. A real correlation between our feelings and our thoughts and between our understanding and our behavior. And at that point, Socrates was merely anticipating something that is found throughout the scriptures, namely that the way to the heart is through the understanding, through the mind. So if we're having difficulty controlling our emotions and our passions, I think it goes a long way to help us at a very practical level, to try to understand the nature of anger. What causes anger, what causes it in general, what different types of anger are there in the world. And then see if we can relate to this in terms of our own patterns of behavior. Now, the first principle I want to give us in terms of our practical understanding of anger is what I consider to be the most important thing that we understand about anger. And it's this, that almost all anger, if not all anger, is rooted and grounded in some kind of pain. Let's think about that for a minute. Anger doesn't occur in a vacuum. It is almost always, again, if not always, generated by some kind of pain. Think about what it is that makes you angry. If somebody would walk up to you and slap you across the face, chances are that would annoy you. It might make you furious. And the initial response is to the physical pain that you have just experienced. But physical pain is not the only kind of pain. If someone steals your property, that might make you angry because you've experienced some kind of personal loss. You've lost something that was important to you and that hurts somebody else may make you angry by insulting you or criticizing you. And that hurts. It hurts because, again, you're feeling some kind of loss. You're feeling some kind of pain. And out of that pain, then comes the anger. So that there is a sequence and a process where we move from pain to anger. Now, what happens if my wife, for example, does something to hurt me and my pain goes to anger and I express that anger? What's her normal response or anybody's normal response? When you manifest anger to another person, that usually elicits a response of anger in return. Why? Because in my anger, I hurt you. And then you respond by being angry with me, and your response of anger hurts me. And so now I become even more angry and express that anger to you, and I hurt you back, and that hurt becomes more anger. And do you see how this multiplication of pain exacerbates the anger and the anger begins to escalate, and it can actually end in warfare or terrorism or any other of a multitude of violent expressions. Whereas if that syndrome or that cycle could have been stopped early, so much of the pain and the further destruction could have been averted. Now, how do we do that? By understanding the relationship between anger and pain. So that if somebody is angry with me, I need to stop and ask the question, where is the pain? And look past the anger and try to find the pain. Think of it this way. Somebody comes up to you and in a calm, quiet voice says to you, what you said to me yesterday really hurt me. How would you respond to that? If somebody comes up to me and says, horsey, what you said to me yesterday really hurt my feelings. What's my normal human response to that anger? No. How all of a sudden I feel empathy for that person, and my first thought is, oh, no, the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt you. And it's not hard for me to want to apologize and to want to reconcile with that person. But if they come up to me and they say, rc, I am so mad at you, you know, I can't say now your first reaction is what to be angry back. But really, when that person comes up and says, I'm really angry with you, they're really saying, I'm hurt. And if we can hear that and see that we're going to be in a much better position to alleviate the pain rather than to multiply the pain. Now, the pain that we experience can be of different sorts. We also need to understand such things as what are called, for example, situational anger. Situational anger. Well, all anger happens in a situation. But sometimes we get confused as far as the actual cause of the pain in a situation. Think of it this way. How many times have you seen the scenario on soap operas or in the soap opera of your own life, where the husband comes back home after a bad day at the office, where everything that he planned during the day went wrong. He lost his account, he got into trouble with his boss. You know, his coffee was cold at lunch. It just was a lousy day. And he has to manifest a certain self control and dignity at the job. He can't fly off the handle there, or he may lose his job. But all day long, he's seething inside. His pain is being multiplied. His anger is growing to a strong sense to the point that he's irate. And the first thing he does when he walks in the front door is kick the dog. And then he unloads on his wife, who may have had an equally stressful day and an equally trying day. Or it could be reversed. She could have been home all day and the kids were giving her nightmares and all the rest. And the husband comes home and he comes into his place for rest and relief. And as soon as he walks in the door, his wife starts yelling at him. Or this can be reversed. In this day and age, the wife could be home working and the husband could be home taking care of us. We understand that. But whatever the model is, we've all experienced that where we become the target of the release of somebody's anger that was caused quite apart from us. We didn't have anything to do with it. But the situation was such that the person was wounded and hurt, and the person then lashes out at the first human being they meet. We do that, and we need to be able to recognize situational anger of this type and also see it in many cases as misdirected anger. Misdirected anger. And we are all guilty of that. Where we direct our anger at an innocent person because they happen to be the closest one there. We're frustrated. Watch little children and see how frustration manifests itself in anger. Give an infant the classical toy where they have a little workbench and it has a round hole and a square hole and a triangular hole and Then they have different blocks and an oblong hole. And they have rectangle block and a triangle block and a round block and a square block and a little wooden hammer. And you see the little child pick up the round peg. And try to pound it into the square hole. Have you ever seen a child do that? I've watched them do that. And you watch what happens is that they'll tap it a couple of times. And they're cheerful and happy. And their mood's just fine. And it doesn't work. And they're not all that upset, you know, they keep. They hit it a little harder, a little harder, a little harder. And they keep trying. And you can just see it. You can see the cloud descend upon the infant. You can see the instantaneous mood change. And you can predict what's going to happen. Just a few more bangs of that hammer. And that hammer is going to start flying across the living room floor, isn't it? When the child then starts screaming and yelling. And they're just in that nascent stage of their human development. Learning how to deal with frustration. Come with me someday to the golf course. Where there guys are trying to put a round ball in a round hole. And they're hitting it with a stick, and they can't do it. And you can't believe the language that's going over the airwaves. And the behavior of. I've seen very dignified people on the golf course. Throwing golf clubs, kicking and screaming, losing their temperature. Why? Because they're frustrated. And again, frustration is a kind of pain, a kind of loss. I hope to play better than this. I feel bad about my performance when I hit the ball. And it goes in the bushes instead of on the fairway. And so out of my pain or out of my sense of loss grows this frustration. Out of the frustration comes anger. And the anger may be directed at myself or at the first person I see who's around me. These are just simple examples from daily life. That we all encounter all the time. And again, there is no instant cure for this. But we can gain progress if we understand what is going on now. It may help us to ask ourselves some basic human questions. What is it that tends to make you mad? What is it that makes me mad? Where do I have areas of intolerance? What behavioral characteristics of people really annoy me? That's the first thing I want to ask is. I want to identify the things that typically make me mad. And then ask myself the next question. Why? Why do they make me mad? I'll tell you one thing that drives me nuts is when I'm driving on the interstate and somebody comes flying down the road 85 miles an hour and they're weaving in and out of traffic. And that makes me angry. Why? There's an accumulative reason for that. I know of too many homes where people have lost loved ones from automobile accidents. And it irritates me when I see people driving an automobile out of utter disregard for the safety of human beings. They have a lethal weapon that they are in control of and they're using it in a reckless manner, endangering human life. That makes me angry. I don't know if it's righteous indignation or if it's just linked to my own emotional feelings about insecurity and safety and all the rest. But that's easy to understand why such a thing would make you angry. There are some things can become very complex and complicated. One of the things that I really can't stand is cowardliness. People who cave in under pressure and who flee in the midst of pressing circumstances. I remember watching Patton, the movie when General Patton slapped the cowardly soldier and he was furious. And that slapping incident became an international incident. And it's interesting how people in the theater who watched Patton had totally different reactions to it. Some of them were furious at Patton because the thing they couldn't stand was a bully beating up on a weak person. And seeing a general come and slap the face and insult the dignity of a subordinate was just intolerable to many people in the theater. My sympathies were with Patton. I just thought, I can't stand to see this coward whose cowardliness exposed his comrades to clear and present danger. So I asked myself, why do I react like that? I think I know because I have fears of my own. And in my heart dwells the corner of the coward. And I don't like to be afraid. And I know that cowardliness is contagious, just as courage is contagious. And I want to be around people who are manifesting courage because they inspire me and keep me from surrendering to my own human weakness. So I want to distance myself from cowardly people because I'm afraid I'll become one of them. That's my problem Now. Other people have different psychological inclinations towards different life situations. And the point I want, want to make today is simply this. Seek to understand your own anger. Because until you do understand your own anger, you will not be able to control it. I want to ask you not only to look at the circumstances that make you angry, but I also want to ask you how you handle it. I know one of the biggest problems I have in my own life is I feel obligated as a Christian to absorb a lot of anger or a lot of pain so that if somebody says something or does something that I don't like or is painful to me, I believe that it primarily is my duty not to respond in anger or even criticism, but to absorb it. We're supposed to have a charity that covers a multitude of sins, but the problem is that absorption process is not always as effective as we think that it is. A person says something or does something once we absorb it, that's okay, they do it again, we absorb it the second time they do it a third time we absorb it, fourth time they absorb it, the fifth time they absorb it, the sixth time we explode and our reaction seems utterly out of proportion to the situation when in reality it is the expression of an accumulation of pent up frustration. And some of us try to hold it in too long so that when it does come out it's violent and vituperative. And so ask yourself, how do you handle it? What is your pattern? Do you allow things to mount up to the explosion point or are you able to handle them in an even tempered way?