Four year old, Bobby stood watching his dad work on the wiring for the unfinished bedroom his dad was working on. Bobby wanted very much to be a helper to his dad like his big brother, Dave, was. So, when his dad asked him to run to the workshop and get the pliers, Bobby was thrilled. The only problem was that he didn’t know the names of all the tools.
He ran to the workshop and standing on his tiptoes, just barely reached the screw driver sitting in the middle of the workbench. Thinking it was pliers, he raced back to his dad, thrilled that he too could be a helper to his dad.
The work project had not been going well for Bobby’s dad. When he looked up and saw Bobby with the screw driver in his hand, he exploded in anger, “XXX XXXX it, Bobby. This is a screw driver. Don’t you know the difference between a screw driver and pliers.” Over 50 years later, Bobby cannot remember this story without welling up, so deep was the wound to his tender, four year old self-esteem from his dad’s verbal bullets.
Jesus was deeply concerned about the anger-driven damage we can do to others. In his Sermon on the Mount he applied the sixth commandment not merely to inflicting physical harm on another. “I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to the judgment. Again, he who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fires of hell.” Matt. 5:21-22
One of the most universal struggles of Christian men is with our tempers. We know that our anger causes us to wound our wives and drive our kids away from us—but we sometimes feel powerless to overcome this foe. The first step towards defeating anger is understanding it. Fundamentally, anger is a response to pain. It is a secondary emotion, always a reaction to some form of pain. In fact, you could say that anger is deflected pain. Pain comes in and our self-protective instincts put up a shield of armor and that pain is reflected back out as anger.
This response to pain that we call anger is usually an emotion of hostility towards others. It is true that Jesus got angry, God gets angry, and at times Christians ought to get a lot more angry. But most of the time our anger is selfish anger that directs feelings of hostility, even if only momentarily, towards others.
Many sources of pain can generate anger. When her husband is late for dinner for the fourth time that week, the dinner gets cold and the wife gets hot. What is the cause of her anger? It is the pain of disappointment, combined with the pain of feeling like she isn’t as important to her husband as work.
Three forms of pain seem to generate the most anger, 1) the pain of frustration, being blocked in reaching our goal, 2) the pain of injustice, having our rights violated, 3) the pain of having our self-esteem attacked. Our masculine make up is such that we regularly experience these three types of pain, so it should not surprise us that men struggle with anger.
For a fuller study of anger click here. Click here to download an article called, The ABC’s of Overcoming Anger. Click here to download a free men's bible study on anger.
