Freedom From Anger
Freedom From... prt. 1
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
August 30, 2009
Colossians 3:1-8 (MSG)
1 So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides.
2 Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that's where the action is. See things from his perspective.
3 Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life.
4 When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you'll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.
5 And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That's a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God.
6 It's because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger.
7 It wasn't long ago that you were doing all that stuff and not knowing any better.
8 But you know better now, so make sure it's all gone for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk.
A woman once told evangelist Billy Sunday that she had a bad temper, but that it was usually all over in a minute. Sunday replied, "So is a shotgun, but it blows everything to pieces." Do you know those people who just come totally unhinged when they get upset? They spew nasty stuff all over everyone around them. Some of them do it again and again and them always apologize, but don't actually stop doing it. Others do it over and over and say, "I was venting."
Now this is not a message where I tell you that anger is sin and you shouldn't be angry and then leave it at that. I'm interested in anger as a force in our lives that somehow weaves itself around and in and through so much of who we are, and expresses itself in the ways the scripture text talks about: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity -- and in other ways as well. I'm interested this morning in anger as a force that both keeps us enslaved to our desires and shows how deeply enslaved we are. After all, why do we get angry in the first place?
James 4:1-2 (NCV)
1 Do you know where your fights and arguments come from? They come from the selfish desires that war within you.
2 You want things, but you do not have them. So you are ready to kill and are jealous of other people, but you still cannot get what you want. So you argue and fight. You do not get what you want, because you do not ask God.
And we so often do not ask God because we are enslaved to ourselves. We are the rulers over our own little kingdoms, each of us battling on behalf of ourselves and our loved ones, trying to get what's ours - or what we believe should be ours. We often live in a state of independence from God. Anger comes when our desires for our lives are frustrated, and the angrier we get, the more determined we are to make things right, which drives us further into dependence on ourselves, which by definition drives us further and further away from God and his infinite resources and love and peace.
This is the state we so often live in, and it shows itself in all the ways the scripture says. Bad tempers, irritability, meanness -- these forces of anger lie within us, always sharpening their swords, ready to do battle for us when we have gotten the short end of the stick, when someone has done us or someone we love dirty, when it becomes clear that God isn't going to ride in on a white horse and save us and so obviously this battle is mine. And so the sword is drawn, the battle is waged, and it is waged without God -- even though we wage so many battles in his name. Jesus said, "I am the truth," in John 14:6. And so at Wildwind we try to find, face, and follow the truth. And the problem with anger, in the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, is that “In a controversy, the instant we feel anger, we have already ceased striving for truth and have begun striving for ourselves." The truth is that we do not have to act aggressively, either in defense or in offense, when we are in God.
So we must begin by seeing anger as a sign that we have cut ourselves off from God and from his abundant life, and are now wielding the sword on our own behalf - in effect, living as if there is no God, or as if God does not love and care for us. Any other explanation of our anger fails to capture what is nearly always the spiritual reality. Not that we don't have thousands of other explanations, almost always based on whatever we think prompted our anger in the first place. "I was just angry because you..." "I was upset because..." "My bad - I thought you were saying..." "It's just that..." But no matter how we might defend anger that came out of us, we are left with only one explanation for why it is there in the first place, and that's a sense that we must fight our own battles, wage our own wars, and secure our own best good. And the only way to have this sense is to lose sight of God as our foundation, our Rock, and our Reason. So anger is a symptom of independence from the God who said,
John 15:4 (NCV)
4 Remain in me, and I will remain in you. A branch cannot produce fruit alone but must remain in the vine. In the same way, you cannot produce fruit alone but must remain in me.
After we stop justifying ourselves, defending our temper outbursts and irritability and meanness with whatever excuses are handy, we come to the truth about our anger. And when we find the truth about it, and face that truth, we are then ready to ask what we might do to follow truth where it leads. So where does it lead? It leads us to the fact that if we are to confront and deal with anger appropriately, we must address the root issue of independence from God. We must "cleave unto" God, abide in him, and take up his life into our own so that the life we are living is increasingly the life he would be living if he were us today. Now let me give you a hint. This will be the first point in every sermon in this series. Why do we struggle with fear? Independence from God. Why do we struggle with lust? Independence from God. Why do we struggle with guilt? Independence from God. So I will address that issue first this morning, then simply remind you of this each week.
One of the main ways we come to abide in God, to increasingly carry God's life around with us, is through meditation. Now some Christians, when they hear the word "meditation" instantly think about Buddhism or Hindu. Some even fear it, thinking that it opens our minds to Satanic influence. Those who fear this simply do not understand what meditation is and what it does, and the way it brings exactly the kind of freedom we need. So let's talk about that.
My friends, there are two yous. There is you, and then there is the you that is sick of you and has had enough. There is one you that goes around talking and acting and thinking, and then there is another you that is able to watch yourself as you do these things, in your mind's eye, and is fed up with what it sees. Let me show you Biblically how this happens in the life of Paul.
Romans 7:15 (NCV)
15 I do not understand the things I do. I do not do what I want to do, and I do the things I hate.
There is Paul, sick of himself. There is one part of Paul going out and doing stuff, and another part of Paul evaluating what he does and whether it's right or wrong and sickened by the other Paul's behavior. You function in the same way. Aren't there times when you think "I just can't deal with these anxious thoughts anymore." There's the part of you that thinks the anxious thoughts, and another part of you that kind of stands beyond it and is sick of it all. That part of you craves peace, craves release from anxious thoughts, from incessant needs and drives and desires, from constant thinking about self. That part of you is spiritually sick of you, and is reaching out to God - that part of you needs what God has to give.
Jesus promised we can only know him as we die to ourselves.
Matthew 10:39 (NIV)
39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Now there's a lot of ways you could say this, but basically this means that there's a part of me and a part of you that needs to be shown to the door and given the old heave-ho. That is this part of you that you are sick of. Moment by moment we are dominated, defined, and kicked around by a thousand thoughts that run ceaselessly through our minds. They determine the boundaries of our consciousness. Thoughts about our kids, about our health, about the future, about money, about work, about that sound outside the window, about what our spouse should do differently, about how we were wronged the other day, about that promotion, about sex and all of its associated fantasies, about whatever we must think about to drive our cars - and listen to our radios - and talk on our cell phones. These thoughts are always in our minds and determine the landscape of our minds, which in turn determines how we feel. This is what we must bring under control or else we will never abide in Christ - we will never stick with God for more than a few minutes. Because we will be ever distracted, ever flitting about from this thought to the next one, and never really focused much on anything - except by some thoughts that might bring with them very powerful feelings, which will fix our attention for a period of time, but more often than not on the wrong things - thoughts of harming others, of bringing ourselves unneeded pleasures, and the like. And there will remain that part inside each of us that is sick to death of the whole mess. That is where our spirit cries out for the spirit of God.
It is in this chaotic mental landscape that anger and irritability and meanness are able to easily find a home and thrive. The entire landscape is made up of what we happen to be thinking about and feeling at any given moment, and such things as anger, meanness, and irritability spring directly from how we're feeling at a given moment. We're defined by this endless and actually mindless and habitual thinking, and we give ourselves over to it as if there is no alternative, no other way of being. And yet:
Psalms 46:10 (NIV)
10 "Be still, and know that I am God...
Psalms 23:2 (KJV)
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Mark 4:39 (NKJV)
39 Then He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.
Somehow we must find a way to quiet the never-ending voices in our minds, which are voices of fear, of worry, of concern for tomorrow, frustration, guilt, regret, and even the attempts that we then make to generate voices of hope and optimism to combat the dark stuff. We may succeed for a time, but the anger, the meanness, the irritability remain because they easily find a home in this chaos and, like all those other thoughts, they are charged with the destructive energy that attempts to do things right and make things right without depending on God.
And so, one way or another, silence and stillness must come to our minds. It is not optional. It is not something only the super-Christians need tend to, while the rest continue to rely on mere belief in God, mere profession of Christ, mere religious activities. No, if we are to know God, and possess the divine life, we must rid ourselves of the forces of death that surge through us moment by moment, that in themselves wield power to separate us from God. Meditation is the way we do that.
So now I'm going to teach you meditation. See you're at church, you're not in counseling. You might learn anger management in counseling, but that's mostly just how to keep the lid on your sin - how to hide it better - which isn't all bad if it results in fewer shiners on your wife's face, or fewer wounds on her heart or the hearts of your children. But I'm concerned about what anger is doing to YOUR heart. In church we learn to invite the Holy Spirit into the center of our lives so that the peace of God, which passes all understanding (it transcends anything we can grasp with our minds), comes to guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus.
Meditation is the cultivation of unconscious contact with God. How else are we to experience God in the midst of the clamoring chaos of our world? After all, like I have already said, it is our consciousness that creates all of our anxiety, our fears, our obsessions and compulsions. Conscious contact with God is a good thing, and always the place we must begin - but we do not want to quit there. Do we, or do we not, want God to get all the way in? If we want God to get all the way in - if we want peace that passes understanding - then we must learn to silence our thoughts and truly be still.
So here is a good way to meditate, which remember, is simply learning to be still before God.
1. Sit in a comfortable position with your spine straight.
2. Close your eyes, and breathe deeply in and out, focusing on your breathing. Breathe in life and breathe out stress and tension and anger.
3. You may wish to find a word or short phrase to repeat mentally. This can be the word Jesus, or the phrase "Peace, be still." My favorite is the word Maranatha, which is the Arabic word for "Our Lord Cometh." Whatever you say, say it only in your mind - not out loud. If you use Maranatha, say it in four distinct syllables -Ma-Ra-Na-Tha. This will keep you focused.
4. Do not expect anything to happen. You are here to be available to God and to quiet your mind. Your expectations of success, getting something out of this, something big happening - those are all things that stem from the part of you that you are already sick of and the part that is killing you. No, just be. Sit in the presence of God and stop trying to grow spiritually. Stop striving to be a better person. Stop trying to feel spiritual feelings. Stop working for the next success and hoping for the next big thing to talk about. Stop worrying about the opinions of others. Stop hoping to have a spiritual experience. All of these, even the best of them, come out of minds that are confused by sin, and incapable of letting go and letting God. That's a nice phrase, but we're not capable of doing it - we must learn to do it. Meditation is how we learn.
So that is it. It is suggested that you do this 20-30 minutes every morning and every evening - for the rest of your life. Seriously. If we are to get all the junk out of our head and learn to live the with-God life, then we must simply spend time in the presence of God learning to quiet our minds. As we do, the quiet presence of God will begin to make itself at home in us. We will find ourselves becoming less tense, less irritable, less fearful, and less frenetic and frenzied as we continue to spend time in the presence of God - not yakking at him, but just being with him.
Over time we will not need anger management, because our minds will change. They will become less fearful - and fear is always behind anger. Our minds will stop trying to control everything in our lives and we will then be freed from tension and anxiety. They will gradually stop whispering words of guilt and condemnation to us because God will come to live in not only our conscious minds but our unconscious minds as well. [Something's gonna be in your unconscious mind - it might as well be God!] See, if you're angry, bad-tempered, irritable, often stressed out and frenzied and mean, your mind is the battleground. I'll bet you know that because if you're like this, I'll bet you're sick of yourself.
Now why did I start out talking about anger and end with meditation? Because outside of meditation (a form of prayer), all I have for you is a list of things to do. And it is endless doing (and evaluating) that is exhausting us and killing us. We must begin with regular meditation so that we are stepping away from this toxic pattern, and then we can introduce practices that we can do. But for today, this is enough. It is enough to learn to meditate.
It is interesting to think about what are some traditional things we are told to do with anger. When we feel ourselves getting angry, we are told to get away, get quiet, breathe deeply and relax. My friends, that is exactly what you do in meditation, only you cultivate this state of mind BEFORE you get angry, and you learn to remain in that state of mind at all times! This will eventually dispense with your anger. I'll talk to you next week about some other spiritual exercises you can do to deal with anger. Let's bookend this message with our key text, then we'll close in prayer.
Colossians 3:1-8 (MSG)
1 So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides.
2 Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that's where the action is. See things from his perspective.
3 Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life.
4 When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you'll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.
5 And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That's a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God.
6 It's because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger.
7 It wasn't long ago that you were doing all that stuff and not knowing any better.
8 But you know better now, so make sure it's all gone for good: bad temper, irritability, meanness, profanity, dirty talk.
