[Gary Petty] Probably, six, eight weeks ago, I had a couple people ask me if I would give a sermon on a very specific subject. And I said, yes, I would. No, I haven't given it yet because I was waiting because I knew this was going to be part of this whole series of sermons we've been giving on 1 Corinthians 13. So, let's go to 1 Corinthians 13. I'm losing my voice. I think I talk too much at camp. Just everybody wanted to talk. I was eating dinner that last night, and I look, and there's this wee little guy just standing there staring at me. I looked at him, and he looked at me for a while. And I looked at him, and he said, "Do you know Jelly?" I said, "I work with him." We had this long conversation. And after a while, he said, "You do realize," and it was very adult-like, "You do realize I do know Jelly is a puppet, and it's a man making his voice." So, I figured that much, and it's good because he just wanted to make sure I knew he didn't think it was real. But I bet you we talked for 10 minutes. He just had some things he wanted to talk about. It was just funny. "Do you know Jelly?" It wasn't hello. It wasn't anything else. It was like right to the point.

Verse 5, here's what we've been going through, thinking and knowing and understanding here that agape is the very character of God, and it reveals how he interacts with others, and how he expects us to interact with each other. So, every, at least once a month, sometimes once a month, we've been going through these series of traits, that is part of the mind of God. We see it in the way Christ deals with people when He was on earth, and it's how we are to deal with each other. He says in verse 4.

1 Corinthians 13:4 "Love suffers long."

And we talked about how that doesn't mean it deals well with a sickness or some kind of financial problem or a job problem. This means how you deal with other people. We suffer for the sake of others, just like God suffers for our sakes. And it is kind. “Agape does not envy.” When other people get something you don't have, if they get blessings you don't have, you don't wish you had what they had, you actually become happy for what they have.

“Agape does not parade itself.” Doesn't have to be the center of attention. “It's not puffed up.” We talked about how you can't have agape unless you have humility. It's not possible. “It is not puffed up. Does not behave rudely, does not seek its own. It is not selfish.” And then it says, “is not provoked,” is not provoked. So, doesn't lose its temper. Now, what does that mean? Does that mean we never have anger? What does it mean is not provoked? People do provoking things all the time, and we feel provoked, and we feel angry. Is all anger sin? That's what we're going to have to look at today. What does it mean to be not provoked? Because to be not provoked comes down to a couple simple concepts, but we're going to look at this in a lot of components. And there's no way to go through all these components in a short period of time, but we're going to look at enough to realize that when we start talking about is not provoked, we're talking about a whole way of looking at life.

Remember, not all anger is wrong. In fact, it is impossible for you not to feel anger at times. We are wired. We are created in a very particular way. If certain things happen to you, you feel angry, right? If you feel threatened, you feel angry. It is impossible... You know, if someone pulls in front of you and you have to jam on the brakes, and in that moment of almost hitting their car, you feel some anger, it would actually be impossible for you not to feel anger. Anger is when we think something and it creates a chemical reaction. You can't stop the chemical reaction. It's part of who we are. We're human beings. We have chemical reactions to everything all the time. So, you can say, "Oh, I wish my purpose in life is to become so godlike that I never feel angry." Well, there are many places in the Bible where it talks about God feeling angry.

Now, when we talk about God feeling angry, there's a couple things we've got to realize. One, it is His nature never to feel anger that produces evil. It is not possible for Him to do that. And two, He doesn't have adrenaline and the other cocktail of things that happens inside of us when we feel anger. He doesn't have any of that. We do. We have it. We have a physical reaction, chemical reaction, the things that happen in our mind. So you can say, "Hey, I don't ever feel angry," but you can't. You know, it's interesting in Psalms, David said that God is angry with the wicked every day. God is angry with the wicked every day, and yet God doesn't go around zapping the wicked, does He? There's patience, there's love, there's God's grace, there's all kinds of things going on that is part of God's character, and yet, He experiences whatever He experiences at His level, which I would think is probably even much, much greater in its impact than the little chemical reactions we have. He never loses control of that. It never produces evil.

Most of the anger we feel produces something not very good, either in our actions or in the repercussions we have in ourselves. We'll talk about that in a minute. So, we can't confuse God's righteous anger with the type of anger we experience most of the time so that we're not provoked. Something doesn't come along and provoke it. It pushes us towards this point where we're actually lost control of what we're doing, and we are actually doing something wrong. Because most of the time when we feel anger, when we express it, we actually do it in a way that we're doing something wrong. So, how do we not do that? So, we have to realize, first of all, not being provoked doesn't mean you don't feel anger, because that's not physically, emotionally, or spiritually possible. But what happens to us? Let's go to Proverbs 29. How do we learn to deal with that? Once again, lots of concepts today, lots of things we're going to go through, but we could break this down into a series of sermons itself on dealing with the issue of anger.

Proverbs 29:22 "An angry man stirs up strife, and a furious man abounds in transgressions, abounds in sins."

An angry man stirs up strife. Have you ever met somebody, we all have, or had a time in your life where you were angry so much of the time? It's like you're talking to somebody, and they seem grumpy and just mad and somebody else says, "Man, they're just looking for a fight." They're just like looking for strife. If we're not careful, we can become so overwhelmed with all the outside things that affect us and make us angry, that we walk around in reality looking for a fight. We're just prepared for someone to say something or to do something, and we respond immediately in anger. And when we do, it all happens. The chemical cocktail gets mixed, the thoughts keep racing, racing, racing, and pretty soon we're what, shouting at the person at the checkout counter, or we're kicking the door because we didn't want to shout at her boss because we might get fired.

Anger, out of control. We hurt each other so much. And inside a family, anger can be a very dangerous thing. We'll talk about that some too. I mean, anger's part of life. Getting angry isn't. And we're never going to control it all the time correctly in this life. But we have to be learning all the time. We can't stay angry people, or we'll just stir up strife when God's way is a way of peace. So, we're at conflict here with God. James 1, another scripture that's often read when we start thinking about anger. But this one is... Do an in-depth study on this just yourself.

James 1:19 "So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God."

Our anger drives us towards something else. It drives us away from the righteousness of God. There's three little steps here that would take us 45 minutes just to really discuss. He says you have to be swift to hear. We talked about this in our men's group, this point, we didn't even go through this whole concept of anger. We probably should at some point.

Swift to hear. First of all, in any situation, as much as possible, try to understand the other person before you respond. I didn't say agree with the other person, try to understand the other person. You know what a lot of arguments are? Two people trying to force the other person to understand them and angry because they don't. And they're just both doing the exact same thing. If you strive to understand the other person, then the other person, you can say, "Okay, now I get it. I can talk to you in a way that I can deal with what you're actually thinking about or what you're feeling."

Slow to speak. Boy, this is tough. Well, it depends on your personality. For me, this is tough because, okay, I think I understand. I now have a 27-minute sermon I can give you, and you'll know everything, okay? Of course, that's not how it works, right? So, what I have to do is step back and think through, and sometimes I don't do this well, but I try, what is agape here? How do I say this that benefits that person? See, I said this is a whole sermon itself. And then, slow to wrath. We control the anger. I'm not saying you don't feel the anger. Now, the anger at this point, if you're doing these things, your anger will actually start to subside some. You have control over it. But there's a certain point, we lose control of anger. It controls us. If we do these first two steps and the third step, "Okay, I got control of this. I have now control of this. I can work through with this. I'm trying to listen, I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to respond with agape, and therefore, I can let this anger drift down some, and we can have some kind of conversation."

This means that we have to have reasoned anger. It has to be controlled by our reasoning, by our thoughts. And you know what the most difficult thing is? Anger is a feeling. It's not always possible to control feelings with thoughts. This gets very complicated. And so, we do very stupid things. We say things, and the immediate thing, sometimes someone will say, "Well, I didn't really mean that." You ever say something really ugly, and then you say, "Well, I didn't really mean that"? Because the other person says, "Yeah, you do, or you would never said it." But you make me think, "No, I didn't mean that." Anger scrambles your brain. And we will do very wrong things. There's a number of reasons for that. Where do we get some of the sources for our anger? Where do they come from? Because this is very complicated. The Bible tells us some. We're going to look at the Bible a little bit here just to explore a little bit where does it come from.

Well, for many times, I mean the quickest way to anger, for you to feel anger, it's when you feel threatened, right? Someone threatens your life. There's either fear or anger, or usually a mixture of both. And someone threatens your well-being, or the well-being of a loved one. There's a mixture of anger and fear. Here's the scary thing. Someone can threaten your self-image, and you can respond with the same level of anger as if they're threatening your life. I mean, that's the premise of every Western movie that's ever been made, right? Why are the two guys having the gunfight in the end? "You insulted my honor." "What?" And they're going to shoot each other down in the street because you insulted each other's honor. You hurt my self-image. Like, if you really had a strong Christian self-image and you're a child of God, it's like, "How can you insult me? I'm a child of God." But, no, not if you're a cowboy, of course. So, you've got to have a gunfight. You've got to settle this. And in that, is a truth about human nature. If we feel like someone has hurt my feelings, hurt my image, hurt how I feel about myself, then I'm angry.

A second is biological disposition. We all have hereditary traits that help determine how we deal with anger. Have you ever met somebody, you could tell as a baby, they just coo and laugh. You know, it's like, "Does anything make this baby angry? And now, they're 6 months old and nothing seems to..." Then you have this one at 3 months, everybody's saying, "Oh, you're going to have trouble with that one," because their face is red, and they're screaming, and they're hollering because you've got to change my diaper now, right? And you could tell they're angry. They say, "Where does it come from?" There's just something in their brain that they react quicker in anger than another child. That means all of us have different kinds of anger, right? Mine tends to come in a flash and then goes away. The problem is between the flash and it going away is where I'm always in trouble. "Oh, wait 30 seconds, you'll be okay." Oh, I meant I've already punched the kid in the nose. "I don't want to fight." Too late now because the flash came and went, right? Others, that anger will boil forever. Some people have a low threshold, a higher threshold. Some people anger will destroy their health, and anger can destroy your health. A third way we develop anger in an improper way is because the influences of our environment. We don't realize how much our environment shapes how we deal with anger. This is why we have these instructions in Proverbs 22. A lot of Proverbs today.

Proverbs 22:24-25 "Make no friendship with an angry man. And with a furious man, do not go, do not hang out with him, do not go with him, lest you learn his ways," verse 25, "Lest you learn his ways and set a snare for your soul."

Even who we interact with can determine, especially who you're spending a lot of time with. That's why... I mean, I've used this example once already, but if you're in a workplace where you're with angry people, and it can just get to you and get to you and get to you, and then you come home and you're upset with your husband or your wife or your kids, and you're taking that anger out on somebody else because of the environment you're coming out of. And that's why, and I speak to the men here, we need to remember why Paul would say in Colossians 3:21 that fathers should not provoke their children.

Now, the bottom line is we are to discipline our children as fathers. I discipline my grandchildren sometimes, a different way than their father does. In fact, usually, all I have to say is, "I'm going to tell your dad." "Oh, no, grandpa, whatever you do to us, it's okay, it's okay. Please, please, we'll do whatever you say." And their dad's really a nice guy. He's a gentle man. But it's like, "Not dad, he gives us the look, you know, and we don't want that." But, you know, there are times when they don't like that. And, okay. If we as dad or granddad are teaching the difference between right or wrong and they don't like it because you're teaching them good, then that's their problem. And they're going to have to learn to work through it because good is good, and it doesn't matter how you feel. But if we provoke them, if everything is about you are upsetting me, I'm always showing anger because you're upsetting me, you know what they learn? Not the difference between good and evil. They learn how not to make dad mad. And if their whole purpose is not to make dad mad, they will do evil so their dad doesn't get mad.

See what I mean? They'll lie to you. They'll do whatever they have to do not to keep you mad because that's all...if their only reason why is dad gets mad, then we're teaching them just to keep dad from getting mad. Do not provoke your children is a really, really important part of us as men dealing with children. "Okay, you're angry with me, but this is what's good. This is what God says." Sorry, you're going to go back, and you're going to give that child back what you stole from them, and you're going to give them $3 for doing it. "Well, $3 is all the money I have." Doesn't matter. You stole what they had. You're going to go apologize, give it back, and you're going to pay them money for it. Why? Well, here's what scripture says. If you steal something, you got to go pay it back four times the value. So, that's what you're going to do because stealing is wrong. You don't want somebody to steal from you.

But see, if we're teaching right from wrong and we have a right relationship, usually, they'll work through that. You don't want people doing this to you, you're not going to do it to somebody else. But if the only purpose is dad's mad at me, "Did you steal this?" "No." They're going to lie to you. So, you're actually provoking them to do wrong. They can't be taught simply, keep mom and dad from being frustrated, keep mom and dad from losing their temper, and that's the purpose of family because it's not. The purpose of family is teaching them the difference between right and wrong. Do not provoke your children, or what happens is they can become angry adults missing the point of what right and wrong really is. What is right and wrong? Just keep mom and dad from getting mad. And then a fourth is in Ephesians. So, we have a threat to life or well-being or to our self-image, biological disposition, influence from our environment, and then here in Ephesians 2. Ephesians 2:1. This is a memory scripture. Most of you know this.

Ephesians 2:1-3 "And you He made alive," talking to the Church, "who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you were once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind," this is what we were before God worked with us, "and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others."

At the core of God's nature is peace. He gets angry because of very specific situations. At the core of Satan is anger, and he never has peace. You can't give him peace. He can't experience peace. All he can experience is war. All he can experience is anger, destruction. That's all he can experience.

God gets angry with specific things, but his nature is He's peaceful. And you and I should be very thankful, and we should thank Him that that's the way He is, because we can be in conflict with Him, and He handles it totally different than we would deal with conflict. Now, there's ways that we can deal with anger. Most of them aren't very good. Psychologists sometimes will say, "Unventilated or uncontrolled ventilation." Just go beat something till it falls apart, and then you'll feel better. Okay, you might not feel angry for that moment, but I guarantee you, you haven't dealt with the anger. Next day, you still got to go, you know, talk to your husband again. So, that's not a way to do it. Repression, that we repress it all the time, and so that we think we don't feel anger until we have a heart attack. Do we destroy our health, or do we destroy other relationships with other people because of the anger we have that's just built up and built up inside of us? Or then there's the denial. "You know, something's wrong." "No." "Did I upset you?" "No." "But you look angry." "I'm not angry." "Okay." We just deny it. And once again, you can't solve problems with denial. Now, it may not be the time and place to talk, but there has to be some time and place to talk.

So, what is righteous anger? What is righteous anger? Because that's what God has. That's what you and I should have. Since it's impossible not to feel anger at times, how do we have righteous anger? Well, let's go back to Ephesians, Ephesians 4. And we're just hitting some high spots here on things we can do and think about because you really have to think about anger to deal with anger because it's such a part of our corrupted human nature, no matter how you deal with it. We have to think about it, and we have to look at the scriptures, and we have to pray about it. The thing about agape is, remember, you and I cannot develop agape on our own. Since it's part of the nature of God, we can only develop it in its fullness through God in us. There is no other way to do it. There just isn't. How can we have developed in us the fullness of God's nature without God's nature being in us? It's not possible. But as He is in us, He's working with us if we're not baptized, He's in us if we are, then He's developing that in us. Verse 26. I mentioned this earlier.

Ephesians 4:26 "Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath."

Anger must be short-lived. We can't hold onto it and this is hard, especially if the person does you wrong, and they're really wrong. Someone's been really mean to you, and you say, "Well, they have to deal with him." "But what if they don't? What if they don't deal with it that day?" "Well, I'll still be angry the next day." "What if the third day?" "I'll still be angry with him the third day." "What if it's three months later?" I know many people that three months later, they're still angry, right? What if it's a year later? What if it's 20 years later? I've known people 20 years later, they're still filled with anger.

Now, let me say something here. Something can happen to you, and you're angry, and it doesn't get resolved, and it comes back to mind. Maybe you see that person three months later, and you feel angry again. Okay, you have to deal with it. I'm not saying anger doesn't come back over a specific situation. But since you're not an angry person, it's only through situations, what you do is the situation gets back, you go through the process again. It was interesting after Murfreesboro, I had some interesting conversations where people came up and said, "You know how I deal with this? I pray for the other person. I used to pray, God, punish them. Now, I pray, God, forgive them." See, you know what's so hard about that? If He does, you're not allowed to be angry anymore. "Well, okay, forgive them, but make them come say they're sorry to me."

What if they don't? What if God's forgiven them and it's years later and they don't remember they did it? You know, you had something, they did something wrong, years went by, God called them, they were, "Man, I treated people terribly. I did terrible things to people. Please forgive me. Please forgive me for all those terrible things I did to people." Now it's years later, you meet them, you say, "Do you remember when you did this to me?" And the person says, "No, because I asked God to forgive me for all those things, but I was a terrible person." "No, you have to remember what you did to me. You yelled at me one time. You screamed at me. You called me dirty names." "I don't remember. I've asked God to forgive me." "No, no, no. Until you say you're sorry, God won't forgive you." It doesn't work that way. There's some point you begin to realize something. In God's relationship with another person, He wants us to fix the problems we have with each other. But it is very, very harmful to go through life saying, "I'll finally get over it when that person says they're sorry."

But we want to, right? "If I give up the anger, they're getting away with it." Actually, they're not. God judges everything. "No, no, no, no, they have to say... I can't give up this anger because that means I'm letting them win. They have to say they're sorry." What if they don't? How long are we willing to hang on to that anger? How long? How long? How many days of your life do you waste waiting for someone to say I'm sorry? Now, to have a close relationship with somebody and they've done you real harm, they have to say they're sorry, right? But you can't waste your life. That's what anger does to us. It makes us waste our lives because of actions of other people. Look what it says now in verse 27.

Ephesians 4:27 It says, "Nor give place to the devil."

Nor give place to the devil. Here's what happens. When we lose that anger and it consumes us, and we lose control over, it's not reasoned anymore, we resist God's Spirit. We hold it back. Because you know what God's Spirit says? Here's what God does to His Spirit. Take a deep breath, sit down, let this go. "No, I will not." Take a deep breath, sit down, talk to Me. God says, "Come talk to Me. Let this go." "No, I can't." So, we resist God. We actually resist Him, and we won't let it go.

Now, that doesn't mean once again that you're justifying the...especially if they've done some terrible sin against you. You're not justifying their sin, you're just saying, "You can't control me because I am a child of God and agape is being developed in me." Think what Jesus Christ would be like. At the second resurrection, and the Roman soldiers who nailed him to that cross, is He waiting to resurrect them so He can run up to them and just, "You're going to be tortured for the next 30 years just because of what you did to me." Is that what He's going to do? Now, they're going to have to say they're sorry to God, right? But He's not angry. He can't be angry. We're all doomed. We're all doomed for what we've done to God. His angry is on the situation. Yes, it's with us. Yes, there are people He puts in the lake of fire. I'm not discounting any of that. But His anger is reasoned. It is not out of control.

Proverbs 19:19. Let's look at this. So much of what we get angry over is so unimportant. I was in Murfreesboro, I brought this up. I was teasing my wife because...you know when you first get married as a man, a lot of times, you know, it's always a test of my manhood, right? Started laughing about how she's asked me a couple times... I take my belt off, and I lay it on the bed. I don't think about it. And I forget about it. So, I went in the other day and it wasn't there. And I went to my drawer I keep my belts in, and it wasn't there. I said, "You know where my belt is?" She said, "Yeah, I put it in the drawer." So, it was in the drawer underneath the drawer. So, I thought, "Aha, she did that on purpose."

So, I was thinking about all the tricks that I was going to play on her. Not because that's bad, because we're over that now, now we're like two little kids. We play tricks on each other. "Okay, so, I'm going to get her now," you know? I thought about putting my belt under her pillow. I actually did. Actually, one of the women in Murfreesboro told me I should do that. That's the truth. But I didn't notice, I didn't do it yet. But anyways, so we don't get mad anymore, we're goofy. You know, we do goofy things. And I found out the reason she didn't put it in my drawer, I had so much stuff stuffed in the drawer, she couldn't get it in there. So, you put it in the drawer underneath it. Oh, yeah, I was going to get myself in real trouble because that belt was going to become this game, right? But, you know, I can think back probably, you know, 43, 44 years ago, I would have been a little upset. How dare you put my belt in a drawer that's not my belt drawer? Now, I wouldn't have yelled or got upset, but I would have been a little huffy, right? Eh, that's not what happened at all. See how we can be. We're so silly. Really, we are silly. We're like children, and we have to grow out of that. I still might do something. I got to think about that for a while. Anyways, let's get back here to...where are we?

Proverbs 19:19 "A man of great wrath will suffer punishment. For if you rescue him, you will have to do it again."

You know, the problem is if we're angry all the time, we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. We're having a conflict with this person, then we have a conflict with this person, we have a conflict with this person, we're always defending ourselves, we're always in a fight, we're always ready to get at some kind of verbal put-downs with somebody else. We can't help it. And we're always thinking about all the past, remembering every time somebody has hurt our feeling over the years, and how that person needs to pay for it. And we just carry it around. It's like a backpack full of rocks. Why are we carrying 100 pounds full of rocks around all the time until it breaks us down? It'll destroy our health, it'll destroy our emotional health, and it will destroy our spiritual health because we're just loading up this backpack full of rocks, and we're carrying it around all the time. And we're doing it to each other, so it's everybody's walking around with a backpack full of rocks.

Righteous anger, remember, always produces a positive result. Best example, I used this example a while back in a sermon, but I'm going to use it again, is there in Mark where the men were testing Jesus, the Pharisees were because He was going to heal a man on the Sabbath, a man in a withered hand. And it says He is angry. You bet He's angry. Why? He has a situation He's angry at. He's angry at those men for being so self-righteous. And He says, "Why wouldn't God heal a man on the Sabbath?" He says, "To make a man whole, he's been suffering. Isn't this what God's all about?" And then, He told the man to stretch out his hand, and He healed it. And they were furious. They were so angry, they decided to go try to kill Him. And this is where I haven't learned to be totally Christ-like yet, because every time I read that, I know what I would have done. I would have had the Pharisees stick out their hands, and I would have withered every one of them. "Go ahead, guys, stick out your hands." "No, they'd have been all marled up," and I said, "There you go, then I had to heal the guy, okay?"

This is why I'm not there yet because that's what my anger would do. That's not what His anger did. Because it was reasoned, it produced something good, even at a cost to Himself. Now, we get long-suffering, we get kindness. Think of all the things we have going here that we've talked about in agape. This is the mind of Christ, "No, I'm not going to wither your hands, although I certainly like to do it. I'm not going to do it, that's not the way to do this. I'll heal you because it's kindness and it's goodness. And I'm going to suffer along with the rest of you. Now, go out and plan to kill Me." Isn't that amazing? This is the standard. How do we respond to righteous anger? Last couple of things here. We have to learn...well, let's go to Proverbs 16.

Proverbs 16:32. "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty. And he who rules his spirit, then he takes the city."

In other words, He says, "If we can learn to control and reason through anger, this is greater than any human accomplishment we can come up with." It's that hard. We can master our jobs, we can master all kinds of playing the piano, we can master all kinds of things. But if we can't do this, this is a greater accomplishment than any of those things we do. And this is why it takes God to help us do it. Let's go back to Ephesians 4 to end what we're going to do here today. Ephesians 4. Here's what Paul says to the church at Ephesus.

Ephesians 4:30-32 "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." You know, God in His very being can grieve because of us. Instead of grieving God, do this. "Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, that means just complaining and griping, evil speaking," because what do we do when we're angry? We go talk about each other. We tear each other down, "be put away from you, with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God and Christ forgave you."

At the core of controlling anger is learning to forgive others. It is learning to pray to God to please help people repent, that they change. It's accepting that sometimes I have to suffer long because this person just doesn't get it. And that doesn't mean they're a bad person or an unconverted person, it means they did something wrong. See, I'm not saying they did something right, they did something wrong. With God's help, I can forgive that. It's not easy. And yet it's what we've been called to do. Anger deceives us as an emotion, and it can be the most destructive force in our lives. One last point I want to bring out. Anger creates other problems in our life.

Now, just one example, in Jonah. Remember Jonah wanted Assyria to be destroyed, and it didn't get destroyed. And Jonah, he got all upset. He got depressed. He got so depressed because what he wanted wasn't happening. And because the people he wanted punished weren't going to be punished, that he's sitting under a tree, God withers the tree, now he's uncomfortable sitting out in the sun, and he says, "God, just let me die. Life isn't even worth living. The Assyrians, these rotten people, You didn't destroy them. You're giving them some mercy, and then the tree dies. I can't imagine anything else in life." Now, you think about that depression he's going through. And what was God's question to him? "Why are you so angry?" We can have a lot of reasons for depression, but one of the reasons we can get depressed sometimes, because we're angry. We let that anger...remember, you release a whole cocktail of chemicals in your system when you're angry. You get stronger when you're angry. You're actually physically stronger. All kinds of things happen when you're angry and a high level of anger until you get to the place where you just lose absolute control then you can do horrendous evil.

But there's a point, you know, you still have some control, but here's all this chemicals going on in your body. You're prepared to fight the bear, right? And we forget sometimes when you come down off of that, or you stay on it all the time, it will create depression, lot of angry people. When they're not angry, they're not at peace. Usually, when they're not angry, they're depressed. It's still on that roller coaster. So, we have to understand the importance of this. God gave us physical bodies connect to a physical brain to teach us things. We learn, "Oh, this level of anger isn't right, and we're losing control of the thoughts." Pray, "Help God bring this down where now I can do something good from this, or I can let it go. And if it comes back, I can reason through it again. And with God's help, I can let it go."

All of us experience it. No matter what our biological disposition, all of us have misused anger. Right? Well, I don't know. I have. All of us have done that, or most of us, maybe somebody hasn't. It's something most of us deal with at one level or another. Not all anger's wrong. When your child's about to run out into the street and you grab him by the hand and say, "I told you not to go in the street. We're going to go inside, and we're going to talk about this, young man," that's okay. Slapping him on the head is not okay. Understand the difference. Now, there may be a punishment of some kind, but there's certain punishments we don't go to. Should not. Why? You're not teaching him how to go out in the street, you're teaching him to be angry, not to do stuff... "Okay, next time I go out in the street, I'll make sure dad doesn't catch me," not a fear of getting hit by a car, which is what you have to teach in them. "Fear that. And I will make you fear that. Not fear me because I don't want you to get hurt. I love you. So, therefore I will punish you to keep you from getting hurt."

That's a different thing. If they can learn that, it's like, "I can trust the old man because at least he's trying not to get me hurt, instead of, "Okay, he's not around, let's go play in the street." It takes the Holy Spirit to help us deal with this at the level of 1 Corinthians 13, to turn this into righteous anger, soothing or grieving the Spirit of God. And it's only then, and tomorrow, what are we celebrating? When God poured out His Holy Spirit on the Church, when He gave us the power to learn to deal with these things through his help. And only then, through God's Spirit, can we fulfill what Paul told us to do, or what James told us to do. James said, "Be angry, and sin not."