How to Harness Your Anger for Good

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You're listening to the Pursue God Truth podcast, the official channel for faith and life topics at PursueGod.org. Join us every week as we explore new topics from a biblical perspective. Well, hey everybody. Welcome to week number two of the series called Resilient. Today I'm joined by my beautiful wife, Tracy. We're going to be talking through harnessing your anger. But Tracy, before we get to anger, and I know some people.

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maybe really clicked on this podcast episode because they have an anger issue and we're going to help you with that. We're going to help you understand that and hopefully help you to have some victory in your life in that area. But Tracy, let's start with kind of just what are we talking about in this series? What is resilience and what does it look like to be an emotionally healthy individual? Tracy Well, what we talked about last week is this idea that emotions in and of themselves are not bad.

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we might look at some emotions like something like anger and say anger is always bad. There could never be a good source of using anger for any reason. But what we learned is that God is a God of emotions. He gave us emotion. So the matter isn't that the emotion of let's say anger in and of itself is bad. It's what we do with it, how we react to it, how we respond with that emotion. And so

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What we're unpacking in this whole series is this idea of rather than trying to stuff an emotion and say, I don't feel it because I think that's bad for me to feel angry. We look at it, we understand it, we say, why do I feel that? And then we harness it, we put it in its proper place and say, now what do I do with that? What's the appropriate response? How can I do something that builds my faith, draws me closer to God and then also helps me to be healthy in my relationships with others?

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this memory verse, this key verse that we're using throughout this series, the fact that Bible says that we should guard our hearts because our heart determines the course of our lives. And we talked last week about the fact that that means, you know, in the Old Testament when it talks about heart, it means your mind, your will, and your emotions. So it's not just your feelings, like when we talk about our heart in our culture today. But in this series, we are exploring the feeling part of that. You know, they're all connected. Your mind, your will, your intentions.

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your emotions, all of that's connected, all of it's from God, and God can use all of it to draw us either closer to Him or further away from Him. And so, I know for a lot of Christians, they don't even think about their emotional life when they think about their discipleship, but God wants all of us. He wants the whole person, and that includes our emotions. Emotions aren't bad. So, we're talking in this series about how to harness those emotions for good, and today we're talking about anger.

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And we're going to get to the end, we're going to see Jesus at the very end and how He experienced what we'd call righteous anger. He's a perfect example of how He harnessed anger and emotion like anger for something good. But before we get to the positive example of that, Scripture gives us plenty of negative examples of anger and one of those is from Cain, right? So Genesis chapter 4, first book of the Bible, Cain.

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He has a brother Abel, you're gonna see some jealousy involved in this, Genesis four, starting at verse three, it says, when it was time for the harvest, Cain presented some of his crops as a gift to the Lord. Okay, so Cain was a farmer, and Abel also brought a gift. It says, the best portions are the firstborn male lambs from his flock, and it says that the Lord accepted Abel in his gift, but he didn't accept Cain in his gift. And this made Cain very angry.

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and he looked dejected. So Tracy, help us to, let's pause right there on verse five and let's talk about kind of what anger can sometimes mask for us because in this story we don't just see one emotion, the emotion of anger. Actually, there was an emotion before that. The Bible says that he looked dejected. So talk about how that works in our lives sometimes.

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when you cut an onion, there's so many different layers to it. And so anger is oftentimes just the surface level of emotion. That's really the expression of something that's deeper, in the layering of your heart. And for Cain, as you see, there's probably, there had to be some comparison, maybe not feeling like he measured up, that that dejection came from feeling like he was not as good as Abel.

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maybe he felt just total lack of self-esteem. So rather than being honest about how he felt about himself or his abilities or how he measured up to his brother, it came out that was masked by anger. Yeah, we talked about this a couple of years ago in our seven deadly sins series. I encourage people to check that out if you've never gone through that series. But anger was one of the deadly sins we addressed in that series. We called it substitute anger. And especially for men.

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The reason we call it substitute anger is because like you said, it's not anger is the presenting emotion, but the emotion down beneath it is something like a lot of times insecurity or depression or something like that. And especially in our American culture, and especially for men, it's more acceptable.

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to show anger and it's less acceptable or less manly to show insecurity or depression or something like that. Well, and also anger is an emotion that puts somebody else on the defensive. So you can feel like you're in control of a situation or you're coming from a position of strength as you express emotion by raising your voice or your nonverbal, the way your posture is.

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And the reality is it's like you're making noise to deflect from what you really feel on the inside that you maybe don't want people to see. Right. And, and you can, you're trying, I mean, think about it guys. And it's not just men, but I'm going to talk to the men for a second. You're, you feel like that when you get angry, maybe you can control the situation around you. The irony is that the reason you're angry is because you've, you have lost control. I mean, that's, that's Kane's example. Kane was not in control.

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He didn't like that his brother was accepted and praised and he wasn't, he didn't like that. So there was a kind of a loss of control there for him. And so anger was part of his way to try to control it. We'll see what he did here in just a second. But before we jump into all of that, I think it's good to talk about there's another, there's something else I see here, Tracy, that's interesting. And I don't want to get too sidetracked, but it also says there that he gave some of his crops, whereas his brother gave the best portions.

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So when he's trying to figure out like why did God accept his brother and he didn't accept him, part of it might be there's a little clue that maybe he didn't give the best part of his crops. In other words, maybe he was a little bit stingy. And I do think sometimes stingy people, not just sometimes, all the time, stingy people are dejected. I want guys, people out there to stop and think about that.

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when you're generous, the Bible says it, it's better to give than to receive. So what that means is that when you're generous, that you're going to end up having more joy in your life because of your generosity. And I think it's interesting here, I mean, not to turn this into a money sermon, but it's interesting here that maybe part of the dejection was coming from the fact that he wasn't as generous as his brother was. Either way, whether it was the comparison game, his insecurity, his stinginess, whatever it was, he was...

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Dejected he was depressed. He was downcast as some translations say and here's what Jesus or here's what God said in response to that Genesis 4 verse 6 he said he looks at Cain he says why are you so angry? Why do you look so dejected? You'll be accepted if you do what is right But if you refuse to do what is right then watch out and I love this. This is this is a perfect message for this whole series because it to me it speaks it speaks to the way that

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emotions can kind of put us right at the fork in a road and we have a decision to make and either it's like we said in Proverbs 4, we've got to guard our hearts because it's going to cause us to go down one path or another. And here's how God says it in Genesis 4, He says, sin is crouching at the door eager to control you, but you must subdue it and be its master. That's like a perfect commentary on the Proverbs verse about guarding your hearts because what

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to Cain in this specific example is, I know you're dejected, I know you're angry. And so this anger is either going to take you in one direction or if you deal with your emotions properly, it can take you in another direction. And as we know, many of us know the story. I'll read the rest of the story, verse eight. It didn't turn out well. Cain's anger took him in the wrong direction. It says, one day Cain suggested to his brother, let's go out in the fields. And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.

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And so in Cain's example, again, it's a stark example of what we're talking about in this whole series, that emotions, if you don't handle them properly, if you just stuff them, that emotions can bring you down this pathway that really ends in death, you know, one way or the other. Well, and I feel like it just shows the grace of God too. He knew Cain's heart. He knew the battle. He knew the peeling of the onion or the underlying emotion there of anger and was giving Cain an opportunity like you can do what's right.

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You don't have to make a decision that's going to lead to murder. But God didn't create us to be robots. He had the choice to make. And unfortunately for Cain and for many of us in that moment when it matters, we don't choose the right way to harness our anger and to be productive in our response or to be honest about what's really in our heart about it. We just lash out and we make decisions then that change the whole course of our lives in many cases.

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Yeah, and I think it makes me think of that famous verse from Romans that says, the wages of sin is death. And so because, again, emotions aren't sinful, anger isn't even sinful in and of itself. It can be sinful. And in this case, obviously, it was sinful and it was rooted in insecurity and sinful stuff. But because he didn't keep it in check, that anger led to death. So again, the wages of sin is death.

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And it's a good, maybe we can pause before we move on to the next example, Tracy, and we can ask this question. So if you're listening to this in the car with your spouse or your family, or maybe you're prepping for a small group or a mentoring conversation over this, I want to pause and have you answer this question. What has anger killed off in your life? Right? So the wages of sin is death. In Cain's example, it literally meant killing his brother. But

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For us, hopefully it doesn't go that far, but it can cause death. It can bring death into our world. Tracy, maybe what are some examples of how anger can bring death in our world? Well, I mean, you can just turn on the news and you can see, you know, road rage or different situations where people just in a moment make terrible decisions and are destructive and hurtful to people. I mean, I think even just more simply as a parent, how many times...

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I've tried to be a good example for my kids, wanted to set the right tone, model the right behavior. And when I would get frustrated with something, for my kids, maybe it was their tone of voice that was like triggering for me and I would lose my cool and I would raise my voice and yell, like just how it stripped away my...

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the respect maybe of my kids for me as their mom, right? Like you can't get that back. I mean, you can apologize and repent and say, I'm gonna grow in that area and that's great to model for our kids too. But you can't take back that reaction or the words that you spoke in that moment of anger. And it really can, left untamed or left without being harnessed as we're talking about in the series. I mean, we all I'm sure have examples of how anger means spirited words.

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Maybe even physical violence has completely ruined lives and relationships with others. Yeah, for some people, you might have lost a job over it. So again, it could have brought death to a job. It can bring death to inner peace. Some of you might be listening to this saying you recognize you have a real anger problem and there's an inner peace that you're missing as a result of that. So anger can kill like it did in Kane's example.

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Tracy, our second example is a guy a little bit later in the Old Testament, his name is Moses. And there's a slightly less well-known story with Moses compared to Cain. I think a lot of people would have heard the Cain and Abel story, kind of the first example of emotions going wrong. But it happened to Moses too, and Moses was a good guy. He was called by God to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land. And that's really a metaphor for all of us. We'll come back to that metaphor in a second. Here's what happened when he's out there.

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He's in the wilderness with the people, they're complaining. They've been complaining the whole time and now they're complaining again. And Moses is frustrated. I think a lot of people can relate to this. And it says in Numbers 20, in the first month of the year, the whole community of Israel arrived at this wilderness and while they were there, Moses' sister Miriam died. So that probably didn't help. Sometimes a lot of times our anger or emotions...

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get out of control when we've got other stuff going on. So here he's lost his sister and it says that there was no water for the people to drink at that place and so they rebelled against Moses and Aaron. Now it's interesting, it wasn't the first time. So we're reading Numbers 20 here, but if you go back and read Exodus 17, 40 years earlier, the same thing happened. The Israelites are thirsty, they're complaining and Moses was instructed in Exodus 17 in the previous story.

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40 years earlier, he was instructed by the Lord to take his staff and strike a rock, actually. But it was the same staff that he used to strike the Nile, so it's kind of a famous staff. So here he strikes the rock at Horeb now, and sure enough, in Exodus 17, this water flows and all the people got to drink from the water. And here they are 40 years later, they're complaining again, and this time, I want you to pay attention to what God says this time, okay?

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compared to the first time. He says, you and Aaron must take the staff and assemble the entire community and as the people watch, speak to the rock over there and it will pour out its water. And you'll provide enough water from the rock to satisfy the whole community and their livestock. Now this time, God instructed Moses to speak to the rock the first time he told Moses to strike the rock. Now it might seem like a small detail, but apparently it wasn't a small detail to God.

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because the rest of the story is that Moses goes over in verse 10, Numbers 20 verse 10, it says that he and Aaron summoned the people and they gathered at the rock and he says, pay attention, he says, listen you rebels, must we bring you water from this rock? And then Moses raised his hand and struck the rock twice with the staff and water gushed out so the entire community and their livestock drank their fill. Okay, Tracy, let's talk about

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this just for, let's pause right here and talk about this. As a dad, I understand this. Anyone who's ever like put a fist through a wall before, put a foot through a wall before, anyone who's ever slammed a door before, I think we can see shades of this in Moses' response. God wanted him to show restraint. God gave him this commandment, but Moses instead, he ends up hitting the rock.

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Yeah, to me, it's just such an interesting picture of how it works in life and emotions that God is doing something. He's doing something in us. He's doing something about us in relationship to others. He wants to demonstrate His power through us. And we're kind of sidelined by our own little mini version of the movie that we're dealing with and we're missing the bigger thing that for Moses, it wasn't.

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It wasn't supposed to be about him being frustrated that people weren't listening to him. I mean, ultimately, it was disobedience to God. How many times these people would complain and cry out that God wasn't giving them what they wanted when they wanted. And so then Moses is kind of taking on his own care and agenda here by not being obedient to what God said. And what God says later is, you missed the opportunity for me to show my holiness through

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what I asked you to do, which was this time to speak. Just speak. I didn't want you to hit the rock, Moses, because there was gonna be more to reveal about God himself to the people. The plan was something different that God was doing, and Moses missed it because he got sidelined and sidetracked by his anger. And I just think that's such a good picture for us to realize, instead of getting so myopically focused on the situation that we're feeling so much anger over,

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We're missing the bigger story of what God might be trying to do. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that we don't know why God told him to speak to it instead of to strike it. The Bible doesn't tell us that. It doesn't give us that detail. And I wonder if it wasn't just maybe to test Abraham's obedience or Moses' obedience, and maybe test his trust of God, maybe to test his self-control, maybe it was just to test his attention to God.

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attention to detail like we don't know, but it was a test that Moses didn't pass. And I can understand why. I mean, he's frustrated. Any parent out there can understand this, that, you know, the Israelites were like disobedient, stubborn obstinate children. Man, that's so frustrating. And that definitely can drive you up a wall, cause you to be angry. But his sister just died and she didn't get to see the promised land because of the people, because of their...

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stubbornness and the rebellion. And so maybe he had stuffed that a little bit that he was frustrated that his sister didn't get to go to the promised land. And really, you just wind up even back to the beginning of the story of the Exodus. Moses was enjoying his retirement in the desert before God called him out of retirement and to go, you know, to go like do ministry and lead his people out of Egypt and toward the promised land. So look, you can understand how

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why Moses was frustrated. You could understand why he was angry. In fact, maybe he was just angry. You know, they're thirsty, maybe they were also hungry, so maybe he was just angry. I mean, there's so much to relate to here in this story. But the bottom line is that he lost his cool, and he hit the rock instead of speaking to it. And in God's grace, water still flowed out. I think that's also interesting. He didn't say, oh, you disobeyed, you did it wrong.

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So no water for the people today. No, he let the people still drink, but that's not the end of the story because Moses still had a consequence to pay. And that's kind of the point, right? Here's the consequence, numbers 20 verse 12. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, because you didn't trust me enough to demonstrate my holiness to the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land I'm giving them. And I've always found that this is hard to understand that

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such a small insignificant thing like Moses losing his cool could cost him the promised land. You know, he had spent the last 40 years of his life leading the Israelites toward the promised land. He was a faithful leader. He was one of the good guys in the story. And now because of this small thing, the consequence was that he couldn't enter the promised land.

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make us angry, you know, and really peeling the onion, the things that make us feel insecure or not worthy that if we kind of stay stuck in that thing and then we just kind of express ourself in relationship with others, we're angry, we're resentful, we're bitter people, we're just robbing ourselves from the joy and the peace that God has for us, this promised land that's right there that God's saying, hey, I want to help you understand that. I want to meet the need of where that insecurity is coming from. You're a new creation in me. If you'd let me...

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redefine that for you, you could be free of some of this. You don't have to respond with this anger and bitterness or lashing out at people. But yet so many of us stay in that place in the desert, trapped, angry. We don't want to be there, but yet we don't do anything to remove that from having control of us anymore. Yeah. And again, it's kind of another question then is what promised land are you missing out on because of anger? I mean, similar to the to the Cain question, what have you, what

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What have you killed off in your life because of your anger? But again, I think Christians have to understand we're not talking about that if you get angry, you're going to lose your salvation. We're not talking about missing out on heaven because we're not saved because we're perfect. We're not saved because we keep a list of rules. We're saved because of what Jesus did on the cross for us. We get that. But so many Christians are missing out on the land flowing with milk and honey. So many Christians are missing out on the joy.

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of living in the promised land, of landing in this place. Again, it's kind of that Proverbs four verse that because they don't guard their hearts, that it ends up bringing them at this fork in the road, it brings them down this path where now 10 years, 20 years later, they're saying to themselves, how did I get here? How did I get in this place where my kids don't respect me anymore? Or there's a wedge in my marriage because of my anger problem.

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So maybe you're still married, maybe you're still not, you know, you're not divorced because you understand that marriage is a covenant for life and all that stuff, but you're missing out on the joy that you otherwise could have had if you didn't strike the rock. If you just trusted God and learned how to harness your anger, you wouldn't end up missing out kind of like Moses sort of standing, some people listening might feel that same way right now. You're standing on the edge.

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looking into the life that you could have had. Yeah, I think for people to, I mean, I just, we know so many people that have had situations that have happened in their lives. Someone's hurt their feelings. Somebody said something that they've just let that anger control them and it's isolated them. It's hurt them. They, you know, they're unforgiving then toward that person. You know, whether people leave.

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the church because somebody said something that offended or it's a family member. And we have so many examples of that, of people that have just let anger be this divisive thing that they just kind of hang out in this desert by themselves, or they're just would rather hang on to whatever that anger justifies for them. When the reality is maybe that baseline layer is whatever that person said to you felt like rejection.

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And maybe if you could be honest about, that was so hurtful to me, I felt rejected. You could get past the anger piece and move towards actual healing. Because just like God was gracious toward Moses, for some of us, maybe we need to remember maybe some things were going on in that person's life that I didn't understand. And that's why they were kind of loose with their tongue or angry or mean with their words towards you. Maybe they've got some other stuff going on. So it's an opportunity for you to be gracious.

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to them, to model what God modeled even for Moses in that moment. But I just really pray that as we are thinking through this idea of the emotion of anger, of how let's not let it be this thing that controls and keeps us and robs us from the promised land of peace and healthy relationships or peace within ourselves, to harness that and let God do something with it.

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Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. And so his antidote is, so get rid of all filth and evil from your lives and humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts for it has the power to save your souls. So what he's saying is this kind of anger that we've seen from Cain and we've seen from Moses and we've seen in our lives time and time again, we've all experienced this. James says that it doesn't produce the righteousness God desires. That's the problem with it.

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But it could, but it could. Anger does not have to end in death. It does not have to end in disappointment. It doesn't have to end in loss, loss of joy, loss of missing out on entering the promised land. It could end in something positive. And that's the last example we're gonna share today. It's the example of Jesus, because Jesus got angry several times in the gospels. And every time he got anger, it wasn't

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angry it wasn't sinful. And so in other words, his anger was always righteous anger. Now our anger is almost always tainted by sin, but Jesus was able to harness it for righteousness. And our example is in Matthew 21. And it's where he enters a temple and he begins to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. And he knocks over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. And then he said to them, the scriptures declare my temple will be called a house of prayer, but you have turned it into a den of thieves.

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So this was righteous anger. And again, this would have been, I'm sure, shocking to see for his disciples and for all the people because this was, it seemed like almost out of character for Jesus to do something like this. Maybe you might even misunderstand this and think that he lost his cool, but it was very calculated. What Jesus was doing wasn't losing his cool. He was sending a message. He was taking action. And in his anger, he was knocking over tables.

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and knocking over chairs. Now I'm sure he wasn't hitting anybody or causing bodily damage to anybody, but he was definitely getting their attention with his actions and it was righteous anger. And the next verse shows us what Jesus did to harness his anger. In verse 14 it says, the very next verse, right after he knocks over these tables, it says that the blind and the lame came to Jesus in the temple and he healed them. And I want people to just pause for a second and think about the distinction there.

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In one verse, he's knocking over tables, and in the next verse, he's healing people. Tracy, I need to pause here and just admit that that is not how my anger works. Now, you're a better person than I am, so when you get angry, you get over it better than I do. But some listeners might be like me, where when you get angry, it takes you hours, maybe even days to cool off and to cool down. But to me, this just shows the kind of anger that Jesus...

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It was anger under control. He gets angry, he knocks over tables, and then right away he's healing people. Yeah, so we can feel the emotion of anger. We can look at that and say, okay, what about the situation isn't right? What am I reacting to? But our reaction is from a place of love and care and concern and having a positive reaction to that emotion like Jesus did. He was sending a message here, like you aren't turning, the temple is not a place.

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for you guys to be profiting and making money off of people coming to want to offer sacrifice. So Jesus was able to call out the bad, but then say, what it is about is me healing people, me bringing peace and new life and hope to people. And that's how we can even be in relationship with other that even when we feel angry or we're hurt by someone, we can still have a reaction that says, but I still want your good. I still want us to be healthy. I still can call out a bad behavior, but it's for your good.

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not just for me to lash out and to be spiteful. Right. I mean, it shows us why he was angry in the first place, because this is what the religious leaders should have been doing. They should have been thinking about the people. They should have cared about the people. But time and time again, Jesus recognized that the religious leaders didn't care about the people. They cared about the laws or they cared about the temple. They cared about the institution. And that's what made him mad in the first place. And then he showed them what they should have been caring about all along, the people.

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and he healed the people. And it's a beautiful picture of righteous anger. And it goes on, let me just finish this text real quick and then we'll kind of talk about how to apply this in our lives. It says, the leading priests and the teachers of the law saw these wonderful miracles and heard even the children of the temple shouting, praise God for the son of David. And then it says this, but the leaders were indignant. So isn't it interesting that we see Jesus's anger in verse 12 and 13, righteous anger.

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then he does something positive about it right away. By contrast, we see the religious leaders' anger and they're just indignant and it just makes them want to kill Jesus even more. And that's exactly what happened. Just a couple days later, they would see to it that Jesus is hanging on the cross. So once again, their anger leads to death. Their anger was not righteous. Now, they probably thought it was righteous, but they were wrong. They misunderstood.

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their anger. They thought that they were being holy. They thought that they were being right. They were indignant because they thought that Jesus wasn't God. So they just totally missed the boat. But again, so many people can be that way, is we misunderstand our anger. We justify our anger. We think that it's righteous, but it's not. And maybe we should just start, or we should end this episode, Tracy, by helping people process a few questions or a few steps.

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to answer this question, how can you harness your anger for righteousness? Because it's easy to deceive ourselves. And probably a lot of people are saying, I don't really fully know then if my anger is righteous or not, because I feel like I'm getting angry at the right stuff like Jesus was, but I'm not really sure I'm getting over it like Jesus did. I'm not really sure that I'm moving through that anger to something productive like Jesus did. And we can't really answer that for everybody. There's a million different examples of this out there. But maybe there are a few.

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I don't know, let's just call these steps we could end with to help people to know how to harness their anger. And the first step is, I would just say, to get a prayer life like Jesus. And what I mean by that is, what we're seeing here in the temple is not just revealed, it's not just a reaction of Jesus. The reaction of Jesus was prepared in His quiet time with the Father. I mean, Jesus had an incredible prayer life.

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He was so connected with the Father, so that by the time he gets into these situations that could cause him to maybe lose his cool in an unrighteous way, it wasn't going to happen because he had such a perfect communion with the Father. And it's a good example to us that we can't just make a decision to be more righteous in our anger. We really need to spend some time on our knees so that our reactions in the real world are coming from a...

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place of being connected with God. Well, right, and the more we're doing that, the more we're walking in step with the Spirit, right, and producing the fruits of the Spirit, so that when these situations come along, we have the better ability to harness those emotions for good. But especially when we're dealing with a situation where anger just flares up and it is there, that is where the first and foremost step has to be, like, time is on your side. You need to...

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hit your knees, you need to say, God, you know, as David did, show me if there's any offensive way in me to kind of take the walls down of don't live in self-deception. Don't just make this about, well, this person wronged me, I'm perfect, they're not. But rather, God, this was hurtful to me. I want to understand this time for introspection, time to say, God, show me what this really is that's bothering me, what's hurt my heart, and pray about it before you say or do anything.

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to have kind of that communion with God, let Him make that heart tender towards that other person. But ultimately, first and foremost before God, of like, I don't want to respond in a way that's dishonoring to you, God, first and foremost, but I also don't want to be dishonoring to this other person. Yeah, I mean, prayer prepares the soil of our hearts, right? We're talking about guarding our hearts because it's going to determine the course of our lives. Well, prayer...

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is one way, one practical way we can guard the heart is to really be connected. And some of our listeners, you might be saying, I don't really know much about prayer. It's a discipline I haven't developed. Well, we've got a whole series on spiritual disciplines called Breakthrough Disciplines. I encourage you to check it out and learn about prayer and silence and solitude and all these things that Jesus practiced so that when he was going toe to toe with these frustrating, arrogant, holier than thou Pharisees who I would have punched in the face, Jesus never did.

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because Jesus was so connected and his life and his actions flowed from that place of connection, that perfect relationship that he had with the Father. Now, we're not going to have a perfect relationship with God. We can do our best to stay connected, but we're still going to miss every once in a while. But to me, I think that's the first answer to how do you harness anger for righteousness is it's even before you're in the situation where you could get angry.

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It's to make sure that you're preparing the soil of your spiritual life and prayer is a huge, huge part of that. Now, the second thing I would say again from the story here is to take action for good, if possible. So that's what Jesus did, is that Jesus, you know, to me, the way that you know it's not righteous anger is if you ruminate in it and continue to ruminate in it. Jesus didn't do that. He got angry, he flipped over the tables, but he immediately moved on to take action for good. What a great example.

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So in your life, as you think about the thing that makes you angry, as you think, right now, I'm sure the listeners are thinking about specific situations that make them angry. And you might not know exactly what action you can take that would be positive and beneficial and healing. And I would say, Tracy, I don't know, maybe you can speak to this, but I would say, if you can't think of an action that you can take that would be beneficial and healing and positive,

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then maybe you're not ready to take any action at all. Maybe you just need to just wait. Yeah, or maybe talk to someone and ask a trusted friend for some advice on it. But right, the attitude needs to be like Jesus, that your heart is, I need to understand what this is in me, but I also need to express it in a way that doesn't do harm to others, that brings good, that brings peace, that supports.

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reconciliation, not further dissension or to feel like in a moment calling somebody a name or saying everything that's ever come into your mind about that person feeling maybe good for a second and then realizing the damage that you've done. That if you're going to take action, it needs to first come from a heart that it's tender, tender toward God, tender towards the other person wanting the best for them, not wanting to harm them. And then that action step is, is there something productive?

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maybe there isn't a clear, direct path. So maybe you'd continue to pray for God to show you when the time might be right. It may not be right now, and sometimes there's wisdom to that. Having discretion to know I'm not ready, or that person maybe is not ready, I need more time to think about how to approach this in a positive way. I need God to show me what that is and open the right door, and I'll be ready when it's time. And if you're not sure about it, just whatever you do, don't force a door. Don't force something open. Don't...

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create further dissension because you're being rash to make a decision about something you're not ready to make. Yeah, and I think that the third tip that we would give people as you're trying to process this in your own life is to be willing to be wrong or even to be wronged. Now, we're not getting this from Jesus because Jesus was never wrong, but for us as we process this, as we think about this, as we're vulnerable and as we talk to people in our lives, we bring it to God in prayer, you might...

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You might think that your anger again, you might think that your anger was righteous, but you might come to find out as you explore it. You might come to find out that it's maybe it's not as righteous as you think. You might you might come to find out that you're wrong. Now that doesn't mean the other person's right. But you you can you the other person can be wrong and you can be wrong as well. Two people can be sinners in the situation.

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And if you come to that place, you need to be willing to admit it. You need to be willing to be vulnerable to understand that maybe you were wrong because it's so easy to deceive ourselves with any of these emotions. And anger is no exception to that. Now even though Jesus was never wrong, he was wronged. I mean, he was wrong just a few days after this. He went to the cross. He could have come down off the cross, but he didn't. He was willing to be wronged. And Tracy, maybe we should just end.

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end with that idea because maybe some people are listening to this, they get to the end, and they've got a specific situation that they're really angry about. And they feel like they have a right to be angry, that it might even be righteous anger. But at the end of the day, maybe the story is going to end where we are wronged. And it won't be the first time that happened. It happened to Abel. It happened to Jesus. And it might even happen to us. That sometimes as followers of Jesus.

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that we're going to be wronged. And so, we have a choice to make. That's the thing. We can harness our emotions to build our faith, to just trust God, to learn from it, to grow from it. Or we can try to claim our right to some form of justice and force something that maybe God didn't intend. But I tell you, that's been a good reminder for me in my life. Jesus was perfect. Jesus is God. Jesus was disrespected in a million ways. And He...

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continued on the path and he knew his mission and he was not sidetracked by that and he didn't let an emotion like anger sidetrack him into doing hurtful things. And I think for us, we get to make a choice with the Holy Spirit living in us to say, even if somebody has wronged me and I have a right to this anger, and maybe you've even tried to bring resolution and the other person's not ready, then sometimes we just have to make peace with

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it's okay that I just was wronged in that situation because I'm going to trust that God's going to do that work in the person in the timing that God decides. Yeah, that's what it means to be resilient. Again, at the end of the day, resilience is harnessing that emotion, that difficult emotion, in this case anger, and you can't fully control the situation around you, you can't fully control other people's reactions and responses.

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As followers of Jesus, we can harness that emotion because we can trust that God's in control and that we don't have to be in control of everything, that even when there's injustice in the world, and there will be, and even when that injustice is enacted against us, that we can at the end of the day say, God, I'm not going to ruminate, I'm not going to sit in my anger, I'm going to trust you, I'm going to move on. That's what it means to be resilient.