Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, all, Mark Clark here. Hope you're doing well, and welcome to the Mark Clark podcast. This is week two of this series that we're doing called trapped. And we're tackling a tough but crucial topic, the topic of anger. So again, these are four of the seven deadly sins, and this one's about anger. So often this is hidden deep within us. Anger can destroy our lives and relationships if it is left unchecked. So we're gonna explore what the Bible says about anger and wrath, sharing insights from both scripture and a bunch of personal experiences.
Mark Clark [00:00:28]:
So I'll talk about how anger can quietly simmer beneath the sun of our lives, much like the lower decks of the Titanic, only to rise up and actually sink us if we don't address it. So we're gonna delve into practical steps for overcoming this powerful emotion through forgiveness, patience, and love. So let's dive in and discover how we can find true peace and freedom. Let's go. The church has been talking about this for, you know, 1000 years. The idea that these seven deadly sins, we're honing in on four of them and today's is anger or wrath. And let me jump into this by defining anger, wrath for you see what the Bible says going to reflect, which is so this thing is so relevant to our lives. Maybe none of the sins hides in our lives, even from our conscious thoughts, more than this sin, the sin of anger, the sin of wrath.
Mark Clark [00:01:15]:
Lust we know is there. We kind of feel the tingle of it. Greed. We're like, oh, I want a new car. And then we're like, oh, no, that's not right. That was greedy. But anger or wrath is weird. It's like that sin where you go to a psychologist for a year and unpack all your weird hang ups about everyone, your weird actions and your selfishness, this or that.
Mark Clark [00:01:32]:
And one day they go, you know what? I think it's very freudian. I think you're angry at your father and you're like, wait, what? Shut up. No. Yeah, he left you at ten. You're still mad at him. This is why you lash out at people. This is why people hate you. You got to let that go.
Mark Clark [00:01:44]:
And you're like, oh, my gosh, it was so hidden. Like, that's the reality, right? So, like, think of the movie Titanic, one of my favorite movies in the world. You got the upper deck is oblivious to the lower decks filling up with water. But sooner or later, the upper decks get flooded. Sooner or later, the issues on life's lower decks, though we remain oblivious to them are actually gonna rise to the top and destroy us and sink us. And that is the problem we face with wrath or anger. We don't take time to go deep within ourselves because we have been disciplined into superficiality in our culture. And the issue is, it's in the lower decks, the hidden decks, that no one sees that our spiritual lives take true shape and texture.
Mark Clark [00:02:25]:
Jesus wants to transform our entire beings, not just the 10% that shows above the water. And that's the reality of our lives impacting us right now more than anything, we think, are the sins that so easily entangle us. And that's why we're exploring it, and we're going to find freedom and fight it. So here's the definition of wrath or anger in our life. A desire for vengeance and emotion of resentment toward others or circumstances that arise out of self preservation and one's life or ego being challenged or threatened. This is a sin that not only affects us, the present now, but passes from generation to generation. Kids see it in their parents, and it defines them. It defines the workplace.
Mark Clark [00:03:08]:
It's in your marriage. It's a part of your life that, if carried on, it presents a kind of life to the world versus the life of Christ in the world. It's kind of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of anger, right? This is where it ends up going. So what does the Bible have to say about anger? A ton of things. I'm gonna throw a bunch at you. Matthew five, Jesus says that anger at your brother or sister can make you liable to judgment, counsel, or even the fires of hell. Psalm 37, refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Do not fret.
Mark Clark [00:03:37]:
It leads only to evil. Psalm four, when you're angry, don't sin. Ponder it on your beds and be silent. I'm sure that's how most of you deal with your anger. I shall ponder this on my bed and be silent now. Proverbs 14, whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temperature exalts folly. Ephesians four, be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger.
Mark Clark [00:04:04]:
Do not make room for the devil. Colossians three. But now you must get rid of all such anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Even when we're talking about lust in this series. Hey, name some sins. We all go, oh, lust, that's a sin. That's clear. I'm not sure everyone would just go, yeah, no anger.
Mark Clark [00:04:22]:
I think that's a sin. We just kind of go, well, I'm getting angry. It's kind of numb. First, Timothy two, lift holy hands without anger. James, chapter one. You must understand this, my beloved. Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger. And I'm sure that's how you deal with your social media, especially during an election time and especially during COVID Over and over and over again.
Mark Clark [00:04:41]:
The Bible just throws so much at us about not being anger angry. Proverbs 15. Those who are hot tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention. There are few of these sins that I identify with more than the others, and this is top three for me, to be honest. I know we're only doing four in this series, and I probably connect with four, three out of the four of these. But this is how I am. I'm constantly, I'm someone who goes from zero to 100 in a second. Probably part of my genetics, seeing my dad yell.
Mark Clark [00:05:16]:
I don't know. I yell at people. I get in situations. I get angry. I get angry for justice. I get angry if something offends me. I get angry for the sake of my family and my friends. Something just snaps in me.
Mark Clark [00:05:27]:
And many of you deal with this sin. This is not a gender thing. Many men, for sure, deal with anger. It's a huge problem in the context of men's groups. But in counseling and cops call me all these kind of things, you see situations where, hey, this person's angry at me. And there's scenarios where women are constantly saying, he speaks negatively. Yes, that happens. But also, this is an anger issue with women, too, because they can be nasty, they can be mean.
Mark Clark [00:05:52]:
They can be cutting to their husbands and friends and kids. And behind all of that is anger. And proverbs says it's better to live on a rooftop in the rain than to live in the house with a nagging and complaining wife. Don't get mad at me. That's the Bible. Take it up later. You can email me directly@pastorjefnexis.com. that's how you get.
Mark Clark [00:06:14]:
No, but this is literally the Bible, because people can get angry and nasty, and behind all that is anger. So you have to understand something. The way anger plays out sometimes might be different with men than women, but we got to understand not just wrong, but different. When I do marriage counseling, we talk about this often. Not wrong, just different. One type of person will do this, another type of person. With that, a husband and wife team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that well done amygdala is a similar size in men and women. A second region called the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in controlling aggressive impulses, is much larger.
Mark Clark [00:06:54]:
Actually, in women, they tend to be able to control those impulses. So this suggests this could help explain why women seem to be better at keeping the lid on explosive outbursts in life. Point is, ladies, just because you don't yell and throw stuff doesn't mean you aren't angry. It may be more controlled, but doesn't mean the heart is calm and the soul is chill, which is constantly what God's actually after. See, all of us are on the hook. Here is the point. It isn't a loud thing. It can be a quiet thing.
Mark Clark [00:07:25]:
I privately resent my boss, that co worker, that neighbor, that friend. I'm so angry, but I play canadian passive aggressive games. I bury it deep, but I'm still mad and angry at the world. That's a problem. So here's what CS Lewis says. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets, he'll only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself, which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he's tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it.
Mark Clark [00:08:05]:
Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again. Each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing seen from the outside is not what really matters. That's the issue. God doesn't want that for any of us. We want to be free internally and externally, which is what we all need ultimately. Hope. The hopeful message about how to be free is the gospel.
Mark Clark [00:08:36]:
Because to be honest, as the meme I read recently says, when you hold grudges against someone, you're just giving them free rent in your head. They follow you around and you become enslaved to that anger. The most freeing thing you can do for you is to figure out a way not to be mad anymore. And we're going to see that Jesus is actually that way. This is the kind of anger the Bible is against constantly. It's an evil. It's not just something that's like a personality flaw on you. It's evil.
Mark Clark [00:09:06]:
It destroys you, it destroys others. It destroys our relationship with God. So here are practical examples of anger and wrath that are evil when directed at something that is not unjust, right? So if you're losing a game of monopoly, and you freak out and throw the table and scream at everyone in your house. You have problems. You're fuming over receiving a bad grade on your calculus exam. You're getting mad at yourself for eating 14 chocolate chip cookies in one sitting and beating yourself up about it. A spouse when they're trying their best but gets it wrong. Folding laundry, getting home a few minutes late, not as a habit, but one time.
Mark Clark [00:09:48]:
I'm not talking about myself in particular, but this might be a thing. I just go, hey, are we really going to get angry about this? Something that is not a justice issue, not right to get angry about those things. Secondly, when something is done, not out of love for your neighbor, this means wishing them harm or suffering out of pure vengeance. That's. We do this in our life. So you're on the road. Someone is driving slow. Hey, you got to get out of my way.
Mark Clark [00:10:17]:
Get out of my way. I got. That's narcissism. You're in such a hurry, but they aren't. You think they love just sitting there in traffic and you're better? You don't know what they're doing. You don't know what they're going through. We get angry at strangers, but you don't know they're actually on their way somewhere. They're dealing with a family member that's lost.
Mark Clark [00:10:34]:
They're dealing with their family. They're dealing with their debt. They're dealing with their cancer diagnosis. And your basic assumption that you need to wivel and swivel says you're the center of the universe. No one had more motive to get angry at the world than Jesus. Here's why. Because he could see behind the veil of our lives, the actions. He could see beyond the external things.
Mark Clark [00:11:01]:
Can you imagine how much that would make you angry? Like I always say, if there was a phone call and if someone thought I was already hung up on a group call and a bunch of people were talking about me, would I want to hear what they had to say? Absolutely not. Would you? Some of you were, like, so curious. You want to listen. If people are talking about you, I do not want to know what people. I would hang up. I don't want to know what people think of me. I would hate everybody. Can you imagine Jesus? He knew what everyone was thinking about him at all times.
Mark Clark [00:11:34]:
Can you imagine how easy it would be to just hate people? That's the reality. He knew that sin that Jairus had done that morning and yet healed Jairus daughter in Mark chapter five. Anyway, he healed people. Knowing their greed and their lust and their pride and their anger and their envy, he heals them anyway. I would just let it all burn out of anger. Jesus Christ was amazing. Not only the smartest man who ever lived, as Dallas Willard said, but the most unmad man that ever lived, the most anti anger, most loving. And I never thought of that until I prepared for this sermon, even from the cross.
Mark Clark [00:12:22]:
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Even though they're spitting on him. Someone spits on me. A few months ago, my wife and I were walking downtown Vancouver, and a woman just walked up to us, and she was kind of like. Like, off a little bit. She's like, boom. She spit right in front of me. I'm like, what? It's Covid.
Mark Clark [00:12:42]:
What are you doing? And I started following her and being like, don't you know what's wrong with the world? And my wife's like, calm down. I'm like, okay, yeah, good point, good point. Yeah. So I was like, don't you know you're preaching on anger this week? Yeah, yeah, good point, good point. It's like, we got to like, I ain't perfect. This person's not perfect. Jesus Christ gets spit on. He doesn't bring down the fire.
Mark Clark [00:13:06]:
He brings down the forgiveness. I just thought of that line right now. That is tweetable right there. Boom. He doesn't bring down the fire. He brings down the forgiveness of people he should legitimately hate. See, when we stop expecting perfection from the world and circumstances and people and spouses, anger goes away. Here's another time.
Mark Clark [00:13:30]:
Anger is wrong. It's wrong when it's disproportionate to the severity of the situation. It would be sinful to throw a tantrum in Starbucks, for instance, because the server messed up your order. It'd be sinful for just hitting a bad golf shot and being mad and swearing at everybody. Never happened to me. I'm just saying I've heard that it's happened to other people. It's interesting because we react to things differently, right? I read this stat. If I.
Mark Clark [00:13:55]:
If I bought $1,000 of Microsoft stock in 1986, I'd have $2.2 million today. If I bought $1,000 of flea sports card flir. Remember those FLIR sports cards as kids basketball cards? If I bought $1,000 of flir sports cards back in the day when I was a kid, I would presently have $8.8 million. And I remember the cards. I had boxes of these things, I just threw them out. When I read that stat, I got mad at myself. I started cursing myself, like, why are you so dumb? You should have known flir sports cards back in 86 would have been worth 8 million. That's my anger.
Mark Clark [00:14:35]:
I'm disappointed at me, not so much others. I whack my toe on something in my house, and I'm like, ugh. And I get angry at myself because I shouldn't be this dumb. Then I start to punish myself. That's how my anger works. Data indicates that about 25% of angry incidents involve thoughts of revenge towards strangers, such as, I'm gonna spread rumors about my boss to get even, or I'd like to just bump her car to get her in her place. But most anger usually emerges from interactions with people we like or love, such as kids, spouses, close friends, whatever. See, God wants what is best for us, even socially, not just vertically with him, but socially horizontally.
Mark Clark [00:15:18]:
Do not live in a state of anger for long. This is what Ephesians is about. Don't go to sleep. So many people consider excessive anger to be just a psychological problem. That's a gross implication of what it is. It becomes physical over time. Arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. These physiological reactions that we actually have can lead to an increase in cardiovascular responding, respiration, perspiration, blood flow to active muscles, and in strength.
Mark Clark [00:15:51]:
We have these psychological states that actually start to affect us physically. As the anger persists, it affects many of the systems in our body. Our immune system, our digestive system, our central nervous system. This all leads to an increased risk of hypertension, stroke, heart disease, ulcers, increase in certain types of cancers. Even research has found that anger is an independent risk factor for heart disease. One study followed 12,000 adults for three years and found a two to three times increased risk of coronary events in people with normal blood pressure, but with high anger levels. See, God even cares about your physical life when he's telling you, don't be angry. Don't be angry, like, we're going to make it.
Mark Clark [00:16:37]:
We're going to know what it's about. He's going, guys, this impairs decision making, kind of like drugs do. It almost makes us myopic, where we can't see beyond the next few minutes. That's why there's acts like murder, acts of violence, and anger becoming blind to, oh, yeah, two years from now, this probably won't be good for me because I'm going to be in jail. That's my opic now. It's a dramatic scale. But for your life, be careful what you say and do in moments of anger because it can destroy you. Because you become only thinking of the next few minutes.
Mark Clark [00:17:14]:
Be able to walk away when you're tempted to use your words or actions to hurt because it will not go well for you beyond that moment. So what do we do? First? We do coping. Right? And so airplanes, okay, think about airplanes. For various reasons, airplanes flights tend to be late. Like, they're not always on time. There's little you can do about that. So you hit a situation where something. Accept the delay as an opportunity to read or relax.
Mark Clark [00:17:47]:
It's not disastrous or worthy of anger. When your airplane is late, the anger felt when dealing with family members or friends is different because of the ongoing interactions. So to address that kind of anger, you gotta do avoidance a little bit. Relaxation, assertive expression. All these things that psychologists tell us to do, we need to be able to do them in a Christ centered way. Here's what I do. If I hear something, I go out with the person, hey, you've talked about me. I wanna talk to you about this.
Mark Clark [00:18:16]:
I heard this. Let's talk about it. I try to be assertive. That's not everyone's favorite thing, but it's the way I roll. It helps me get over anger because I've addressed the issue. So before we think in our brain that it only looks like aggressive, loud, road rage guy, let me just say it's actually not. There's silent sufferers of wrath where life is against me and it hits their pride and their ego and they don't know how to cope with it and they resent and they hide and then they lash out. It's like watching if you've seen the movie the Joker.
Mark Clark [00:18:49]:
It's like the Joker ends up killing people. But he starts out as this useless, hopeless, helpless, weak person who just resents the world for all the circumstances of his life. And so he goes. So it's interesting. We tend to hear and reflect more often on angry experiences in our life than almost anything else. And that also kills. Like, if you sit around with a bunch of people and you're telling stories, like, if you're sitting around one night, think about the stories you tend to tell. The stories you tend to tell with your friends don't tend to be, like, sad, right? They're not like a good friend.
Mark Clark [00:19:24]:
Moved away. Man, that's tough. We tend to tell stories about anger, like anger causing events. Like, I got sold a faulty car. What? You got sold a faulty car. We should do something about that. Yeah, you know, my house and this person said this about me. Can you believe it? And we got.
Mark Clark [00:19:43]:
Because that's more interesting to us. So this depends on the personality profile. At times, there's a kind of person whose sin it is to be angry. Who is that person? It's like the domineering, loud bully. Not all the time. It's the people who tend to look like they can be gentle sometimes because they resent quietly. They work so hard. See, when you look at something, there's a personality profile that I know of that looks at the seven deadly sins, and it connects it to people's personalities.
Mark Clark [00:20:21]:
And the sin of anger is actually connected to people. Listen to this. To the perfectionist. It's the person who works so hard to make everything perfect around them at all times, that when things don't go exactly according to plan, they freak out, not in fear, but in anger. The type a perfectionist or the helper type that doesn't feel supported. My husband needs to grow up. The school needs to fix this. The neighbor left their garbage cans out again and so on and so forth.
Mark Clark [00:20:55]:
And this non perfect world creates anger in them. That's the personality type. There's so many things to fix in the world. Doesn't anyone care about things? Like, I care, I'll just do it myself. And anger seeps out of them. See, emotionally, spiritually, there's a kind of self righteousness in this heart, and you need to be protected and not accept this as part of life or just the way things are, but see it as a sin. Right? I remember being on the golf course one time, and I was, this was years ago. And I got a little angry on the golf course.
Mark Clark [00:21:31]:
And my buddy walked up to me, he goes, bro, like, you gotta understand, like, when you get angry, it's not really fun anymore. And we don't wanna golf with you. And I'm like, oh, okay, well, it's your fault, you know, whatever. And it's like we try to be defensive. See, why do we need to deal with this? Because we're self protectors. And when someone tells us we might have an anger issue, we protect and deny it in the end. Theologian and pastor Richard Baxter, who lived in the 16 hundreds, put it this way. He says, self is the most treacherous enemy and the most insinuating deceiver in the world.
Mark Clark [00:22:08]:
Of all other vices, he says, it is both the hardest to realize and the hardest to cure. See, here's the reality. Proverbs 18 says, a fool finds no pleasure in understanding, but delights in airing his own opinions. The definition of our culture online right now, behind our anonymity and our keyboards is we get angry about everything. We get angry about politics. We get angry about theology. We get angry about celebrities. We get angry about COVID And the Bible is trying to say, everybody chill.
Mark Clark [00:22:44]:
Everyone's on edge. Everyone thinks their opinions are gospel. So instead of going, yeah, I disagree with this person, but I'll keep it to myself, we go, no, that's not right. And so I'm going to come out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, online in person. And the Bible's like, there is a time and a place for that, to be sure, but not every time. Sometimes with your opinions, you should just shut up. That's the message translation of those passages. Sometimes in those moments, you just need to shut up.
Mark Clark [00:23:19]:
You got to understand, if you watch Woody Allen's Annie hall, which won the Academy Award in 1977 for best picture, actually beat Star wars for best picture. So he talks about how he gives this little monologue where he says, I'm one of the old strong types. Maybe I'll be one of those people drooling, walking into the grocery store, screaming about socialism, right? That's one of the lines of the movie. And it's literally what many in our culture are doing. It's like the definition of what's going on. Everyone rolls and just goes. And we go, oh, my goodness. Everyone just needs to calm.
Mark Clark [00:23:58]:
This ain't the time. It's Christmas dinner. Grandpa Joe's going to be dead next month. Maybe we don't need to talk about all this right now. Like, be discerning in life. The Bible goes, don't be hot headed. A hot headed person's a fool. They're dumb.
Mark Clark [00:24:16]:
And I agree. And so Cs Lewis says, anger is the anesthetic of the mind, meaning, you know, you go and get an anesthetic when you're getting surgery. Like, you lose your ability to feel and think. When anger and wrath is present, it numbs everything. I see that now with the present cultural moment. There's a. If you read the book the coddling of the american mind, the writer points out the idea. There's no debates on university campuses any more allowed because people get snuffed if they have counter ideas.
Mark Clark [00:24:50]:
There's no accountability to people. There's anger everywhere. People will go out and protest everything all the time. Two, people can't just have different opinions anymore. There's no such thing as being able to give a different idea. Why? Because we just get angry at each other. We call each other immoral. Conservatives are immoral.
Mark Clark [00:25:13]:
Liberals are moral or immoral. And the reality is there are times when the wisest thing to do is to be quiet, to understand that what you're breeding in yourself is hatred. When we disagree, and even darker than all of that, a high percentage of crime. So most levels of crime have to do with sex or money. But the third level of crime is done out of anger, right? A girlfriend, a spouse, a family member. Why? They always start there rarely does someone just kill someone out of the blue. Most of the time, violent crime is connected to family and friends. It's driven by resentment, payback, anger.
Mark Clark [00:26:00]:
This is why Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, he says anger is tantamount. To what? To murder. He goes, if anyone hates his brother, you've committed murder. You've already committed murder in your heart. Why? Because that's where it leads. Sometimes literally, most times emotionally. You murder someone in your heart and they're dead to you, and you hate them and you despise them, and something dies in you. How beautiful.
Mark Clark [00:26:28]:
If we heeded Jesus warning in the sermon on the mount, don't be that person, ever. Don't hate. Don't be mad at people. Life's too short. It's an indicator of your spiritual immaturity. Cutting and being offensive is an indicator that your spirit is not right with God. Hate, as one writer has said, is the wrath of the weak. See, it's weird, because think about this.
Mark Clark [00:26:57]:
What people want to be, what they aspire to be in our lives, we tend to fail to be. And when we fail to be those things, we make up that difference. In anger, I want to be this. I want to be that. I didn't get this. I didn't get that. So I'm going to be angry about it. And in the end, our life is either toward good or it's toward wrath and anger.
Mark Clark [00:27:26]:
Think about this. In John chapter three, this is exactly what the Bible teaches. Jesus says, I came, I died on a cross, and whoever believes in me will have eternal life. And if they don't believe, he says in John three, the wrath of God remains on them. Think about that. RW Dale says, it's because sin does not provoke our own wrath, that we do not believe that sin provokes the wrath of God. We as a culture have just said we don't believe in a wrath anymore in God. We don't believe in a God who would get angry at a thing.
Mark Clark [00:28:06]:
But you got to understand, God gets angry at injustice and sin and in the end, he has wrath, legitimate wrath on us. But then Jesus comes and takes that wrath for us. So there's only two states of being in the end. The one who lets Jesus take the wrath of God and the one who gets it on himself. And it affects how we live now every day, because the gospel says God's wrath is no longer against us who are in Christ. And that then begins to affect our psychology toward the world in the way we can love and embrace other people. I know this little one of the daughters of my friends bites herself sometimes. And one time I asked her, why do you bite yourself? She's like, well, when I get mad at myself or my brothers, the only person I can bite is myself because I'm not allowed to bite them.
Mark Clark [00:28:54]:
I'm like, yeah, but the only person you're hurting is you. And that's what we end up doing, and we drive people away. Now, how do we fight that anger then? One of the things that fights it is that we become people defined by forgiveness, which is super hard, which for some people feels impossible. But the reality is you're ready to do this every day. You want to know how you learn to forgive people you're angry at? Learn what you do to yourself every day. Because Cs Lewis put it this way. He said, it occurred to me when I was trying to forgive people that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life, namely myself. However much I disliked my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.
Mark Clark [00:29:41]:
There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man just because I loved myself. I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. You want to try to stop being someone of hate, stop being someone of wrath. You got to learn how to forgive. You got to learn to do for the world what you do to yourself every day. We love ourself, even though we hated that person. We looked at that website, we gossiped, we lied, we slept with this person before we got married.
Mark Clark [00:30:17]:
But you still get up and talk to yourself and think you're pretty great. You still love you, you still laugh with yourself, you still go about your day. What is that? It's forgiveness. So the Lord's prayer talks about forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us. There's no, not the slightest suggestion that we're offered forgiveness on any other terms other than us forgiving other people. It's made perfectly clear if we don't forgive, we don't get forgiven. And once that is our life, anger dies. It shrivels.
Mark Clark [00:30:50]:
It has nothing to feed on. We choke it out of existence. We absorb it. He absorbs it on the cross, the sin he died for. You know, Jesus talks about blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the world. And the sermon on the mount. See, meekness overcomes the sin of anger. When Jesus was confronted by angry crowds who wanted to torture and kill them, he prayed for them.
Mark Clark [00:31:18]:
How often do we become upset and consumed by trivial matters? So use Christ as your model to control your anger, to control your resentment. Cultivate patience through this virtue of meekness. Like any passion or emotion, we need to be the one that's in control ourself, not our emotions. We need to be in control, not our emotions. It is easy to let our feelings take over and seek revenge with no charity, no mercy, no grace at all. And each instance of anger then demands making a choice that we have to make. A person can respond with hostile action, violence, words, whatever, stonewalling. Or we can let stuff go.
Mark Clark [00:32:04]:
We can walk away. Chalk it up to a misunderstanding. When Aaron wrongs me as my wife, I have two choices, and she does it so often, I have two choices. In those moments, I can either go, you know what? I know she's not a malicious person. I know she didn't wake up this morning twisting her mustache, trying to figure out ways to destroy my life, or I can go, she meant to do that, and I'm going to remember that thing she did. You know, first corinthians 13, love keeps no record of wrongs. That means in marriage you should never be heard saying, last month you did this to me. Last week you said this to me.
Mark Clark [00:32:44]:
Last year you did this. It's like, keeps no record of wrongs. That's what love is. So ask yourself, do I want to respond to hurt them back or have them know I'm hurt? Is this response actually what's best for their soul in these circumstances? Is this the right time? If so, what should I do or say with care and love? See, maybe Jesus knew what was best for the world and our own soul. Maybe when he said, turn the other cheek. Maybe that's the right call. Pray for those who hate you and persecute you. Maybe that's the right call.
Mark Clark [00:33:17]:
Could it be? Be the one in control and let the truth and love that Jesus gives us be what guides your actual next steps, and then lower your expectations of your experience of the world? The other day, I saw this James Bond movie on, and I was like, oh, man, I want to be a spy. Or I watch avatar. I'm like, I want to ride a dragon. That seems like fun. That's adventure. That's amazing. And then, like, I step into my own world. It's like, hey, you have an eye appointment.
Mark Clark [00:33:49]:
Make that phone call to that person who wants to complain about the volume of the worship music. Make sure you bring the kids school books home. It's like bored. Real life is all about expectations. If you understand the expectation of real life, then you're not going to be disappointed. That's what's going to help, not drive you into anger. Psychotherapist Michael C. Graham defines anger in terms of our expectations, our assumptions about the world.
Mark Clark [00:34:16]:
He says that anger almost always results when we're caught up expecting the world to be different than it is now. Of course, there's times when anger is okay, right? Anger, as a passion of the soul can be morally neutral. It's okay when you're fighting injustice. It's up to our reason to regulate and decide when it is appropriate to be. Anger is a good motivation when reasonably used for the good of someone. If someone's going around hurting people, we need to stop. A car. Cut me off one time, and I followed them for ten minutes with my horn on.
Mark Clark [00:34:47]:
That's justice, baby. My wife was like, we're gonna get killed. I'm like, it's worth it. It's justice. We should be willing to take a reasonable stance for the good of others and even have anger at it. And Jesus did that. He threw over the tables. Some of you need to get more angry.
Mark Clark [00:35:05]:
You're asleep at the wheel. Wake up. There's trafficking in the world. There's poverty. There's things to fight for. And maybe God is using what the Bible would deem a righteous anger to actually define your life. It helps us correct injustices. When you see women being abused, the church should get more mad.
Mark Clark [00:35:29]:
The church needs to stand up instead of just sitting around letting stuff happen. It needs to actually go after people and go, hey, I need to hold you to account. I need to. We're sitting around like hippies, just not doing anything. So chill and non responsive. Fall into sleep fast times. The ridge mount high pass. Another one.
Mark Clark [00:35:49]:
What? That's lame. The church. I hear stories about dudes doing. It's like, we need to stop these things. Pastors know these people by name, and they don't do anything. No, that's not a thing. The church is called to show up for the cause of Christ. See, the sin when it's talked about as a sin, isn't any of that.
Mark Clark [00:36:12]:
It's the vengeful anger, the selfish anger, the wrath that makes you live in ugly ways toward others and even toward ourselves. That's the thing where we're trying to get our pound of flesh to see them suffer. In fact, we don't talk about this often, but there are times when anger toward God is okay, too. It's at times healthy. Biblical scholar Leonard Pine, who has a study in the book of Habakkuk, he says, far from being a sin, proper frustration with God is the activity of a healthy faith relationship with him. Look at the psalms. Half of them are David in prayer and going, man, I love you, Lord. The next one's like, hey, I hate you.
Mark Clark [00:36:51]:
I can't believe you. Let everybody flourish except for me. Moses got angry with God. Naomi was angry with God after the death of her husband and her two sons. Elijah got angry with God over and over. In the Bible, there's people who get angry with God. And the reality is sometimes we got to lean into that and feel the freedom it brings. Let's end by reflecting on one last point, which is the time that Jesus got angry and why, and realize what it has to do with us.
Mark Clark [00:37:23]:
Mark, chapter three. He's picking grain. Him and his disciples. The disciples are picking grain. And the Pharisees get mad at him and say, why are they picking grain on the Sabbath? And in mark three, the text says he looked around at them in anger and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts. The word for anger that Mark uses to describe Jesus, it's a very intense word. It's not irritation. It's a kind of anger of soul.
Mark Clark [00:37:53]:
And what he's angry at is their religion. And let me just speak to you, those of you who've got caught up in religion, you've got caught up in a way of life that says, well, I come to church and I do my devos, and I give some money, and I go on with my life, my religion. See, what he got angry about was they were saying they shouldn't be picking grain in the garden. It's the Sabbath. And he's going, sometimes some of you love religion more than you love the God of the universe. Some of you have trusted in what you do for God versus what God has done for you. And Jesus gets angry at that disposition of heart. And so let me leave you with this.
Mark Clark [00:38:30]:
Do you trust in your own way to get right with God? Do for God so that one day God will love you and save you and let you into heaven. That's religion. The gospel says Jesus had to come and accomplish that for you and any other disposition of soul never saves you. The ultimate wrath, which is God's, was meted out on Jesus for you. If you come in behind it like a wave, it's moving toward us and you either let it hit you or you come behind Jesus who took it for you. My hope and prayer is that you would be the second one. And Father, I just pray for our hearts and souls. Some of us are even kept from faith in you because of our own anger toward concepts of you, toward maybe our circumstances in life that we blame you for.
Mark Clark [00:39:23]:
I pray all that is washed away. And we would see the person in the work of Jesus where perfect justice, perfect love and perfect anger are all coming together in one place, the cross of Christ. And when we realize that defines everything and we would give our lives to it and flourish in light of it. In your good name we pray. Amen.