I realised that my anger created restlessness, brooding, inner disputes, and made prayer nearly impossible. But the most disturbing anger was the anger at myself for not responding properly, for not knowing how to express my disagreement, for external obedience while remaining rebellious from within, and for letting small and seemingly insignificant events have so much power over my emotional life. In summary: passive aggressive behaviour. – Henri Nouwen
Anger is like fire. Under control, it can bring much-needed warmth to a cold environment or form a backfire to stop the spread of a raging wildfire. But out of control, the smallest of sparks can ignite an inferno that races to consume and destroy.
Controlling anger is not, as we might often assume, merely the exercise of withholding caustic words or violent deeds. Containing the anger within the confines of the body does not bring it under control – it suppresses. Compresses. Distresses.
Left in this state, we smolder. And the resulting pressure requires release. It will either build a backdraft that explodes when someone or something opens the door, or it will seep out at regular intervals in a period – or even a lifetime – of passive aggression.
Some of us, without even knowing, live in a perpetual state of anger – like the coal fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that has been burning underground since 1962. And in this state, everyone – and everything – agitates us. Or, more destructively, we find ourselves wondering we explode at the slightest provocation.
Today, we will take a fresh look at unsettled anger – how to determine if we need to extinguish it, or build a good fire that helps others. And, in most cases, we learn how to avoid creating the drought conditions in the soul that allow it to burn uncontrollably in the first place.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
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Read 1 John 1. How does this passage relate to today’s podcast and help you examine your inward life as it pertains to anger? Where do you see the ministry of reconciliation to God and others? How does hypocrisy sneak into our lives to prevent us from seeing how our refusal to reconcile warps our view of the divine?
Books to Read
Unoffendable by Brant Hansen
To have faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. C.S. Lewis
Is it a sin to….. fill in the blank. Yes, or no!!
The formulation of such questions and the hands-on-hips scrutiny that awaits their answers disclose an underlying, dualistic paradigm that we might call religious meritocracy.
Do the right thing – earn your way to heaven. If, then. Yes, no.
Religious meritocracy produces, as its logical conclusion, rigid boundaries with which to declare judgement, excluding those on the outside and self-righteously promoting those on the inside to elevated status. Everything becomes about the boundaries, where all troops are amassed. And yet, in so doing, the interior state becomes entirely devoid of the life with which the boundaries were intended to cradle.
It’s easy to fall prey to this paradigm if you take only a cursory glance at sacred Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. The law given to Moses and the message preached by prophets often center on those deeds that, if committed, warrant punishment. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Or else.
And yet, as we will see in today’s episode, the sacred rarely emerges from cursory glances, just as the breathtaking experiences of vacation in a beautiful country does not come by walking its borders heal-to-toe all the way around and then returning home.
Today, we cross the threshold of the borders outlined by the letter of the law and go deep into the interior – to the breathtaking Spirit of the Law – that brings life and love to otherwise dead religion.
Source Scripture
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras
The Awestruck Podcast musical playlist
(Apple I Spotify)
Read Romans 8-13. Compare Paul’s explanation of what it means to live by the Spirit and his religious establishment’s failed attempts to find the kingdom of heaven because of their focus on the letter of the law.
Read Luke 24:13-35. Note the reaction of the two men walking back to Emmaus on the Sunday following the crucifixion when a stranger explains everything from the law and the prophets.
Related Quotes
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.– G.K. Chesterton
The left hemisphere [of the brain] prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world. Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people. Ian McGilchrist
It is in our nature to be connected with each other. Interwoven. Interdependent. Interlocked in love and community.
And yet this is not our reality. Instead, we are alienated. Separated. Resentful. Mistrustful. In fear and paranoia, we depersonalize. Criticize. Exploit. Avoid.
In this increasingly diseased state, lacking the restorative powers of wholesome social community, the suffering caused by our isolation intensifies – due to our isolation.
It’s time to reverse the trend. To heal the wounds. To cure the disease.
Today, in our look back at the previous six episodes, we will surface their underlying theme of creating community and reversing the curse of isolation and the catastrophic toll it has taken from on of us.
Source Scripture
Matthew 5:10-12; Luke 6:22-23,26
Matthew 5:13; Mark 9:49-50; Luke 14:34-35
Matthew 5:14-16; Mark 4:21; Luke 8:16; 11:33
Connect
Twitter: @AwestruckPod
Email: info@awestruckpodcast.com
Extras