Why Do You Get Angry?

My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness. - James 1:19-20

Have you ever counted how many times you get angry in a day?

According to the psychologist Dr. Harry Mills, the average adult gets angry between one and fifteen times a day. 

But reading this, I wondered if these experts have ever tried to drive across! Atlanta. If I have to go somewhere during rush hour, I can easily get angry fifteen times a minute.

But why do we get angry?

To simplify, anger is a signal that something we value is threatened, and we want to protect it.

• Biologically, there's a complex system of chemicals involved.

• Psychologically, our families, friends, and culture taught us when and how to get angry (or that it wasn't safe to do so).

• Environmentally, high levels of stress can wear down our patience, and lower the threshold for when we lash out. It's unlikely we will get road rage when we go to the grocery store, but after we've slowly driven down a clogged highway for ten hours?

Doctors, psychologists, and sociologists can help us understand all these components of anger, and it helps us to have precise concepts and clear language to make sense of our anger.

The Spirituality of Anger

But James is focused on the spirituality of anger.

So we need to pause and ask ourselves: what is my anger trying to protect?

Remember, anger is a universal, everyday, natural human emotion that's provoked when we're not getting what we want. Jesus experienced anger. So did every person in the Bible.

But if we stop here, we still don't know how to evaluate our anger.

For instance, we can get angry because the IRS caught us cheating on our taxes, or because a financial advisor looted our grandmother's retirement funds.

In both cases, we're angry about money, but only one of them is righteous!

Angry People Are in The Bible!

In the Scriptures, some people got angry for bad reasons.

For instance, Cain was furious that God rejected his offering, and so he murdered his brother. Herod was angry that he didn't know where "the King of the Jews" had been born, so he had every baby boy in Bethlehem slaughtered. The disciples James and John asked if they should call fire from heaven down upon a Samaritan village that didn't welcome them!

At the same time, other people got angry for good reasons.

Famously, Jesus got angry at the people who exploited the Temple for financial gain. It's the same anger God revealed against Eli and his sons when they abused the tabernacle. Moses got upset with the Israelites for worshiping a golden calf, just forty days after God had appeared to them at Mt. Sinai. The apostle Paul got angry at the apostle Peter when he denied the gospel.

What's the guiding principle?

James tells us in verse 20: does our anger accomplish God's righteousness?

Unless I'm intentionally living for God and his kingdom, I find that nearly all of my anger has nothing to do with that objective.

As the comedian George Carlin quipped, "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

It's a principle I can generalize to the rest of my life! Anyone smarter than me is showing off, and anyone who doesn't get it is in the way. One of my most beloved insights is that anyone who isn't helping me is selfish. When I blame others, it gets me off the hook from helping them.

By contrast, it's convicting to notice how intuitively James pivots to evaluating every circumstance, emotion, and relationship in light of God's righteousness.

Whether it's experiencing trials (1:2-4), receiving gifts (1:16-18), talking (1:26), caring for orphans and widows (1:27-28), James evaluates it in with these questions:

• Are you loving your neighbor as yourself (James 2:8)?

• Are you believing in God, and living as his friend (James 2:23)?

Righteous Anger

We all get angry. The question is, how will we respond to our anger?

Here are the discernment questions that give us life:

• Will this anger help me love my neighbor?

• Will this anger help me love God?

By asking these questions about our anger, we automatically fulfill James' command: we're slowing down our anger.

And depending on how often we get angry each day, that's 1-15 opportunities to remember our purpose in life: to accomplish God's righteousness!

Every time we feel angry is an invitation to choose between serving ourselves or serving God's kingdom.

When we realize our anger is pointing us to address injustice, protect the vulnerable, or defend the truth?

Then we need to ask God for wisdom, to weigh our words, and to decide how we can courageously step forward to do what is right.

But when we realize our anger is about our convenience, pride, or our need to be right, it's a moment to remember that God could have buried us in his wrath.

Instead, he chose to love us, sacrifice himself for us, and forgive us, so that he could restore us to wholeness.

God isn't asking us to stop being human!

No, he's inviting us to become fully human, and to handle our anger the way that Jesus did: to show a watching world what God is like.

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Credit: Photo from Luis Morera on Unsplash