C168 2/22/59
© Project Winsome Publishers, 2000

"HOW TO STOP GOING FROM MAD TO WORSE"
Dr. John Allan Lavender
Eph.4:26-27

If there is one thing that disturbs me more than anything else about the pictures we have of Christ, it's that most of them depict him as a kind of half-man, half-angel, pale, anemic and mildly effeminate. Where the inspiration comes for such pictures I do not know. The Jesus of the New Testament is not sad, somber, or sissified. He was a real man. The blood of real men surged through his veins.

Jesus was anything but a weakling. He had hunks of bone and muscle for hands. With them he swung a hammer and pushed a plane in the carpenter shop of his father. With those hands he helped Andrew and Peter as they tugged at their nets heavy with fish. Those shoulders made strong by lugging the lumber of a carpenter were called upon to bear the weight of a cross, and they did so until weakened from loss of blood and sleep. his splendid body succumbed beneath the load.

He was an outdoors man. Most of his nights were spent beneath the stars and most of his days were spent walking in the sand beside the sea or trudging along the dusty roads which wound throughout his motherland.

He was a fearless man. Wether it be in the midst of a towering storm at sea, in the wilderness alone at night, or on trial for his life before a tribunal of lecherous men, Jesus was unafraid.

He was a man's man. He was every inch a hero. There was nothing pale, prissy, prudish about him. In fact, he was so much of a man that when he stormed into the temple and seized a whip of twisted cords and proceeded to drive out the money-changers, their were none who dared oppose him.

He was a real man. And all of the emotions of real men surged within him, with this one glorious difference: he never let them rule him. He never let them take over the reigns. He always held them in check. He rode the wild horses of human emotion and used their harnessed power for good.

That's important to remember! There are those who would tell us "the religion of Jesus is an opiate, putting the soul to sleep, taking the fight out of men." But that just isn't so. In fact, Jesus went out of his way to pick men of strong emotions. Men who were ambitious. Men who were full of fight. Men whose enthusiasm and zeal sometimes got in their way.

He took those men and redeemed them. He taught them how to harness the wild horses of human emotion and put them to work for the Kingdom of God and good.

Jesus didn't take the fight out of men. He redeemed it. Redirected it. Used it for his cause.

Take this business of anger we're talking about today. There are lots of people who think they must get rid of their temper before they can become Christians. Well, in the words of J. Wallace Hamilton, let me remind you that --
"You will be of little use to God without your temper. He already has too many disciples who won't get mad at anything, not even the liqueur traffic.
Asking God to make you 'a better Christian' by taking away your temper is like trying to make a better watch by leaving out it's works.
God wants us men of temper. He chooses such men. Saul of Tarsus was a man of temper. He was a born fighter. After he met Christ on the Damascus road he was still a fighter, but now for truth and for the Kingdom of God.

When he reached the end of his missionary road he said proudly, 'I have fought a good fight.' In the Army of the Lord Paul was still a warrior with his temper harnessed. He didn't tame his horses. He rode them, rejoicing in their strength."

What Jesus did for Paul he wants to do for you. He wants to take you as you are, and make you what you can become. He wants to grapple with the turbulent passions, stormy emotions, and untamed impulses which surge through your frame. He wants to bring them under tight control. He wants to redeem them. Redirect them. Convert them to constructive and spiritual use.

The Positive Aspect Of Anger -- Creative Strife
You see, there is a positive use of anger. In fact, our text says, "Be angry." There is a place for the right kind of anger properly used. It can become what Cannon Streeter calls "creative strife."

As Dr. Hamilton points out,
"There are no sinful emotions. There are only sinful uses of emotions. There are some people who misuse their God-given powers as a blundering organist might misuse a pipe organ, taking notes intended to produce fine harmony and weaving them into discord."

Anger is such an emotion. Misused, it becomes a warped malignancy. Properly harnessed, it is a powerful energy of the soul. The experience of Jesus recorded in our text is an excellent example of this. Here we have the gentle Jesus, storming into the house of God which men had turned into a dirty, smelly, noisy market-place. Sweeping the moneybags across the floor. Scattering the coins. Overturning the tables. And, as he seizes a whip of twisted cords, his eyes ablaze with anger, his muscles tensed for action, there are none who dared resist him.

This is the Divine Avenger striking terror into the hearts of evil men.
"My house shall be called a house of prayer," he cried, "and ye have made it a den of thieves."

Here was righteous indignation, fully angered, divine displeasure sharpened to it's finest point. Here was "clean anger." Constructively, positively, and spiritually dedicated toward the eradication of a terrible evil. And, if you will go back through the arches of history, you will see how, again and again, righteous anger has been the moving force behind many of life's most creative and constructive accomplishments. Getting angry for the right reason can generate creative power. And, "angry people" have often accomplished wonders.

Slavery
Slavery was a deeply entrenched evil until one day Abraham Lincoln saw a slave woman being sold at auction. As he stood there, tall, gaunt, furious, his fingernails biting into his hands, he said,
"That's wrong! If I ever get a chance to hit it, I'll hit it hard."

Chicago's South Side
The social conditions on the south side of Chicago were almost beyond description until the "anger" of Jane Addams was kindled into a holy fire with the result that Hull House, a little island of healing, was erected in the midst of a jungle of asphalt and steel.

England's Prisons
The penal institutions of England and Europe were a stench in the nostrils of God. An oozing scab upon the countenance of society. Vile. Filthy. Vermin-ridden. One day John Howard and his followers got mad. Mad enough to do something about it. Out of his righteous holy indignation came our modern system dedicated to the task of redeeming and rehabilitating those who have lost their way.

If there is one tragic weakness in our world today, it is that good men have lost the capacity for holy anger. Divine dissatisfaction. Righteous indignation. All around us there are monstrous evils perpetrated by greedy men who prey upon men's weaknesses and profit by their vices.

How desperately we need men -- good men, godly men, Christian men, hot-hearted men -- who, burning with the holy fire of a divine indignation, will feel what Jesus felt as he stood in the temple. Men who will rise up as he did, to strike down the evil which has fastened it's tentacles upon our land.

Dr. Hamilton, to whom I am indebted for several helpful ideas, tells of a newspaper columnist, writing of recent clean-up of crime in one of our cities (in which an alerted and fearless press and a small handful of aroused citizens smoked out the racketeers and broke their strangle hold) concluded his column with these words --
"Any group of honest men, can get mad enough, and drive out crime and make an awful lot of trouble for the criminals."
All it takes is a little godly, Christian anger.

There is such a thing as "creative strife." There is positive use for anger. Properly harnessed, handled and used, anger can release untouched reservoirs of creative power which otherwise we would never know.

The Negative Or Destructive Aspect Of Rage
This righteous indignation must never be permitted to turn into destructive rage. For then, we go from mad to worse.

Paul gives us a timely warning in Ephesians when he says --
"Be ye angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil" (Eph.4:26-27).

Here he distinguishes between holy indignation and unholy rage. Paul makes it clear that an angry temper which leads to sin is no longer an expression of Christian character. The Bible is repete with illustrations of the destructive aspect of rage.

Herod
There is the story of Herod, the tyrannical Monarch who was angry because the Magi refused to comply with his deceitful request to bring him word concerning the new born King. So angry, in fact, his fury resulted in a bloody massacre in which all boys under the age of two were ruthlessly killed.

The People of Nazareth
Then there were the people of Nazareth who were so angry with Jesus they tried to throw him headlong over one of the precipitous cliffs which edged their town.

The emotion of anger is destructive when it is allowed to get out of hand. It turns good men into brawling beasts. It turns beauty into ashes. It turns kindness into a dreadful debauch.

Anger As A Virus
Psychiatry has come to recognize that anger is actually a "contagious virus" bringing illness of mind and body to those who come into contact with it.
They point out that when one moves into an "anger-state" violent reactions take place within the body. The heart action is accelerated. The face becomes flushed. The muscles are tensed. The body becomes rigid. The entire system is contaminated just as surely as if a deadly poison were injected into the blood stream by a hypodermic needle.

The Angry Deacon
Several years ago during a business meeting at a southern church a deacon became angry when his authority and leadership were questioned. He demanded to be heard. His face was livid with rage. His fists were clenched. His voice was almost guttural. He pounded the pulpit and, in harsh grating tones, shouted --
"I'm going to have my way or die trying!"
And he did. The words had hardly tumbled from his lips when a massive cerebral hemorrhage sent him to the grave.

Anger reduced to uncontrolled rage always leads from mad to worse. It is power converted into poison. And the product is utterly devastating.

The Bible says --
"He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit than he who taketh a city."

How To Harness Our Anger
How are we going to harness this wild horse? This powerful emotion? May I make four suggestions.

Discover The Real Cause
To begin with, it helps to ask,
"What is the real cause of my temper, my unholy anger?"
All too often the thing which sets us off is merely the straw which breaks the camel's back. It is not the real cause which lies much deeper.

Someone has said --
"You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him angry."
There is a sense in which that is true. There is also a sense in which it is not true. Most of our anger is but the accumulation of a multitude of minor irritations. If we are able to succeed in harnessing it, we must painstakingly discover, attack and master each separate irritation until we get down to the basic irritation which is the real cause of our angry outburst.

Impose Creative Uses
Secondly, remember that since anger is an emotional explosion, it must be counter-balanced with emotional control. That is, a competitive emotion must be started up. Joy must be set up to counter-balance the emotion of displeasure. Patience must be established to counteract the emotion of impatience. Love and goodwill must be activated as an answer to bitterness and recrimination.

Pray
Third, heed the admonition of our Lord who said, "Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you." In so doing we wash out the resentment and hostility and guilt which are the inevitable aftermath of unharnessed rage.

Surrender
Finally, and most important of all, we must surrender the reins of this wild, undisciplined, primitive passion to the strong hands of our Savior who is competent to control it.

Christianity is not an opiate. It does not put the soul to sleep and take the fight out of people. Jesus deliberately picked men whose emotions ran deep. He wanted people of temper. He wanted men of fashion. He wanted men who are capable of torrential emotion. Such stormy souls are also of tremendous discipleship.

Margritte Wilkison put it this way --
"The white sheep are placed,
Feed in quiet places;
Their fleece are like silver
That the moon has known.
But the black sheep have vigor,
In their ugly faces.
And the best of all shepherds,
Wants them for his own."

You say you have a temper and would like to be rid of it so you can be a Christian? Well, remember, as I have said, you will be of little use to God without your temper. He already has too many disciples who have lost their capacity for clean anger and holy indignation.

Jesus wants you with your temper. He wants to bridle it. Harness it. Channel it. He wants to use it in the building of his Kingdom.

Henry Drummond, author of the famous book on love entitled The Greatest Thing In The Worldtells the story of a conversation he had with a driver of a stage coach.

It was back in the horse-and-buggy days, and as the great preacher rode up beside the driver, he engaged him in conversation. He learned to his amazement that the driver had once been a prominent professional man. But, because he could not control his anger he had been reduced to the level of a common laborer. He appealed to Dr. Drummand for help. After making a few suggestions similar to these I have made to you this morning, the preacher asked the driver this question --
"Friend, if your team of horses were running away with you, even after you used every means within your power to hold them, what would you do if you suddenly learned there was a person sitting beside you who knew exactly how to control your team of horses and save you from disaster?" "Sir," the driver replied quickly, "I'd hand over the reins to him."

Then, Dr. Drummond told him about Jesus Christ who was able to save unto the uttermost. Who was able to control the wild horses of our unruly emotions. Who will help us avoid disaster if we will just "hand over the reins" to him.

Does that mean Jesus will make us weak-kneed, spineless, indifferent jellyfish? No! It means that even as a giant hydro-electric dam harnesses the power of a raging river and turns it into a positive resource, so too, our Lord will redeem the vast, often misused energy of our soul and redirect it into the work of his Kingdom.

I, for one, could use a bit of that clean anger properly harnessed and directed. How about you? Then, join me right now as we turn over the reigns to him who doeth all things well.