Is anger allowed in the workplace? In the home? By a leader?
Surely it does not belong or might it?
Reconsider the core of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the only Fully Righteous Author of it.
The narrative of the inerrant Author is clear in Mark 3:5. Jesus looked around in anger when observing Pharisaical stubbornness toward human suffering. And this record of his emotional reaction stood not in isolation. In Matthew’s record (21:13), the meticulous tax-collector recalled The Messiah in enflamed zeal (anger!) toward those who had reduced temple sanctity into Saturday shopping.
Further study of Scripture, Old and New, does confront us with more evidence that anger does belong and it has legitimacy. “In your anger do not sin…” Seems clear enough in Paul’s Letter to the Ephesian believers. (Eph.4:26). Let’s admit the challenge in our anger is aligning to biblical standards and formulating the best and most timely expression.
When aligning and allowing this emotion, consider the caution of these six condition adapted from J. Oswald Sander in his book, Spiritual Leadership
Your anger needs re-adjusted when…
1. you only imagine an injury done to you and your expression favors a resentment or feud.
2. you allow your mind to dwell upon and enlarge a personal injury such that it becomes larger than reality.
3. re-adjust when pain or inconvenience is allowed to fuel resentment when no real injury, in fact, even exists.
4. when we allow indignation to eclipse our ability to show restraint.
5. when we gratify our resentment by inflicting reciprocal harm as revenge.
6. when we think that our anger adjustment is accomplished by crusading maliciously against it in others.
May we find freedom and necessity in the expression of this powerful emotion. The Bible affords us such. May we also embrace “anger as our zeal for truth and purity with the glory of God as its chief objective” Sanders, p.81.
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