I spoke yesterday on anger as a natural, though not necessary, emotion. Today, we discuss anger indulged.
Anger first arises spontaneously. But we can actively receive it and decide to indulge it, and we usually do. We may even become an angry person, and any incident can evoke from us a torrent of rage that is kept in constant readiness.
We have all known this anger at some point in our lives. Anger that, when accepted, takes away our will to act as rational or even emotional beings. Such anger takes away our humanity, for our decisions are no longer our own. We seek retaliation; we seek justice.
Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.
Such an elevation of self causes this type of anger to become the new ideal worshiped within us. Our lives can no longer be about serving God or serving others, for anger pushes all of that aside in an effort to exact the price it demands. Indeed, many go so far as to believe that if their anger is not satiated, the world cannot continue working as it has. We think to ourselves, "How, in such an unjust and perverse world, can we possibly survive?" And therefore we give in to anger.
All our mental and emotional resources are marshaled to nurture and tend the anger, and our body throbs with it. Energy is dedicated to keeping the anger alive: we constantly remind ourselves of how wrongly we have been treated. And when it is allowed to govern our actions, its evil quickly multiplies in heartrending consequences and in the replication of anger and rage in the hearts and bodies of everyone it touches.
Keep in mind, you do not have to be an outwardly angry person to be tragically affected by anger. The most devastating anger is the anger that is bottled up inside for years, slowly tearing away at relationship after relationship, never letting healing begin, never being dealt with for lack of an obvious target.
Such anger is anger of the heart. It is to this that Jesus speaks, I believe. Our grudges. Our resentments. Our "woe is me". When we give in to anger, when we indulge it, we break the first commandment by placing ourselves on the throne to be worshiped instead of God. And we drop immediately out of living an eternal kind of life.
In the United States there are around 25,000 murders each year. Most of the murders occur after long periods of open rage and threats, and many involve multiple murders of innocent bystanders. None of them, or only a negligible number, would have occurred but for an anger that the killers chose to embrace and indulge.
We live in a society that tends to think most anger is justified.
"He harmed you!"
"She totally went behind your back!"
"You got there first, what were they thinking!"
"You can't let them get away with that!"
Always we are asked to call upon our sense of self-righteousness and justice in an attempt to free this world of such unbearable wrongs as these. Emotion is used to fuel the fire and drive us on to the finished product of gleeful vengeance. And often this is exactly what happens.
Initially it begins on the playground with getting even. Eventually it ends in law courts around the countries. Broken families. Crippled companies. Burned villages. Anger causes it all. And still we cling to it as though it is some life blood of our existence.
But there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be done better without it. The answer is to right the wrong in persistent love, not to harbor anger. To retain anger and to cultivate it is, by contrast, "to give the devil a chance." He will take the chance, and there will be hell to pay. Anger always comes at a high price.
You might wonder at the possibility of such an existence. I tell you again, as I have before, that living a life where you do not indulge anger in your heart is impossible. That is to say, impossible without God working inside of your heart to change it from the corrupt nature it has come to possess. Begin living with a Kingdom Heart, and you will find yourself blessing those who persecute you. You will answer violence with peace. You will seek to love your enemy.
Jesus starts here. If you desire to possess his Kingdom Heart, begin by ridding your heart of all the anger that currently blocks him out. No more grudges, no more winning, and no more life being all about you. You'll be amazed at the difference it can make.
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