Last week I was listening to Andy Stanley's sermon series "It Came from Within." I like Stanley because he does a great job talking to southerners (his church is in Atlanta) who are considering coming back to a faith they have put on the shelf for a while.
He was talking about anger. He proposed that the basic premise behind anger is that someone (in our mind) owes us something: your dad owed it to be in your life, your professor owed you a fair test, your friend owed it to you to be loyal, etc.
This has been rolling around in my head for the past couple of days and I find it to be really helpful in deflating my anger. If I'm angry, who do I think owes me? What do I think that they owe me? Often what I find is that my anger is really just my over-inflated sense of entitlement. Sometimes it's legit: there's promises that have been broken, reasonable expectations that have not been met, etc.
Stanley argues that it doesn't matter whether your anger is justifiable or not. To carry anger with you from one stage or area of your life into the next is poisonous to our souls. We then mis-place our anger onto our dog or friends or family when the real source is work or a parent issue that we never dealt with.
This "open account" of anger, this sense that we were owed something, will ruin all of our relationships if we let it. This is particularly true if we carry it over from one life stage to another (from adolescence into adulthood, or from one marriage to the next, for example). And the trick is that the debt in most cases can never be fully paid. Even the one who hurt you can't make it up to you. Nothing can be done by anyone to make up the debt.
So the work that we must do, of course, is the same gift-work done for us. We must forgive. We must forgive the full debt. That's not letting anyone off the hook, it's freeing us from the hooks that anger has in our soul. It's freeing us from being a freight train of anger, destroying all the things that we really value most.
Stanley poses the question: "No matter what's been done to you, and I know there's some of you with awful stories, the question remains: how long are you going to give this thing power?"
Test drive that for a while, see if it doesn't ring true for you.
1 comment:
We were in our regional day of intercession yesterday looking at Jonah to lead us into a time of confession, and I realized that I live a large part of my life positioning myself to feel "owed" in order to justify my anger. Jonah outwardly does what he's supposed to do in Chapter 3 - go to Ninevah, say the right things, etc. You get the sense when you see his heart in Chapter 4 that he only did these things in order to gain a platform to say "I do" when God asks him if he has any right to be angry.
I do this in ministry especially, trying to follow all the rules and do the right "InterVarsity" things so that I earn my right to be angry when things don't happen the way I want them to. I think this happens in my relationship with my girlfriend too (ie, if I do enough things to care for her, then it earns me the right to be exasperated and passive when I'm confronted with a way that I failed), though that's a little harder for me to understand.
I think this has something to do with my white male fear of being exposed too, but that's even less developed for me.
It's an odd thing to learn about myself, that I spend so much active energy putting myself in a position be angry.
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