As I was saying goodbye to Lena, my Russian translator in Siberia when I visited last week, she surprised me by saying, "Pastor Stan, you are a very kind preacher. The pastors here in Russia can be harsh but you are kind." Lena was in a position of knowledge to speak on this matter. I appreciated her kind comment.
As I reflected upon Lena’s words and thirty-two years of my own local pastoral ministries here in America I realized how one word could characterize God’s people when individuals in the church disagreed. That word is anger, not love, but anger. I remember all too clearly and painfully people would immediately, violently and continually become angery over something that someone said or did not say, that someone did or did not do. This anger would be like a verbal bomb going off in some while in others hide their anger in the form of a slowly burning pot of water. In time they always boiled over.
The Word of God has much to say about this particular emotion of anger. God knows how self destructive and other destructive anger can be which is why we read the following.
* Ephesians 4:31 Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: 32 And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.
* Colossians 3:8 But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.
Because anger is so destructive, because anger can rarely be justified, because anger is an emotion of the flesh that is to be mortified Christians must consciously determine to find another way to respond to the attitude and actions of others they disagree with. There are alternative emotional responses besides anger. There are the positive emotions of longsuffering, grace, mercy and understanding. What a difference it would make if Christians chose a virtue instead of an emotional vice to respond in critical moments...
