Being Angry And Doing Angry

Mike Leake

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“Do you do well to be angry?” –Jonah 4:4

I’ve found that those who struggle with the sin of anger tend to almost always answer this question in the affirmative. They feel angry, they have been wronged, their sense of justice is awakened, and they conclude that they ought to be angry.

Jonah was an angry man. And he came to the conclusion that his anger was justified—in fact, he was justified in anger to the point of death.

I share this about Jonah because it’s important to acknowledge this as we enter into Mark 3:1-6. That passage is filled with anger. The Pharisees are angry and Jesus is angry. But they are angry about different things and as we will see their anger leads to different results.

If I’m like Jonah, I will enter into this story and assume that my anger is like that of Jesus—righteous. But in reality it’s more akin to that of the Pharisees. How can I tell which kind of anger I have?

The Anger of the Pharisees

Why are the Pharisees so angry? What do they have against Jesus? Shouldn’t they be rejoicing that a man was healed in one of their services?

They are angry because they believe that Jesus has run roughshod over the Law of God. Somewhere along the way they had come to the conclusion that healing is a “work”. And work shouldn’t be done on the Sabbath. You could heal something that was life threatening, but if it wasn’t life-threatening then your issue could wait until it wasn’t the Sabbath.

The Pharisees, like Jonah, believe that their anger is justified. In their mind they are the ones who are honoring God. He is dangerous.

This blaspheming Sabbath breaker is gaining popularity and if they are about protecting the people, protecting the nation, and protecting themselves, then they need to stop this guy. If Jesus is allowed to keep teaching this stuff and leading people astray then God is going to be displeased with them. They’ll end up in exile. They’ll end up even further harmed by the Romans. This isn’t good. So for the sake of God’s kingdom and the sake of Israel this man must be stopped.

Their anger leads them to self-protection. It leads them to use a suffering and vulnerable man as a pawn to trap what they perceive as a threat. And it ultimately leads them to plot murder on the Sabbath, all in the name of the Lord.

Contrast this with Jesus…

The Anger of Jesus

The anger of Jesus is different than that of the Pharisees. His anger is a heartbroken type of anger. Their hardness of heart, that leads to the ill-treatment of this man, has him angry.

I think Spurgeon says it well:

He was heartbroken because their hearts were so hard. As Manton puts it, “He was softened because of their hardness.” His was not the pitiless flame of wrath which burns in a dry eye; he had tears as well as anger. His thunder-storm brought a shower of pity with it…He was grieved at their hardness because it would injure themselves; their blind enmity vexed him because it was securing their own destruction. He was angry because they were wilfully rejecting the light which would have illuminated them with heavenly brightness, the life which could have quickened them into fulness of joy. They were thus determinedly and resolutely destroying their own souls out of hatred to him, and he was angry more for their sakes than his own. (Spurgeon, Metropolitan Pulpit Sermons volume 32, 183)

His anger isn’t about self-protection. His anger is a compassionate anger.

Notice also what his anger leads to. It leads to action on behalf of another. It’s not mere words. It’s not a raging speech, a torrent of angry tweets, it’s not biting, it’s not shaming, it moves him to act for the sake of the vulnerable.

This, to me, is a good barometer of whether or not my rage is the Jonah and Pharisee type of anger, or the type of anger that was present in Jesus.

  • Is this anger propelling me towards self-protection or to protecting the vulnerable?
  • Is this anger moving me to loving action or simply words?
  • Is this anger motivating me to seek harm upon those I am angry with or am I moved with compassion and grief for them?

Conclusion

Much of what we call righteous anger isn’t really righteous. It’s about righteous things, maybe. But it’s not actually righteous. It’s often mere words and not acting upon behalf of another.

What is my anger leading me to do?

That’s how we can tell if it’s coming from Jesus or our own messed up hearts.

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Photo source: here

How Blood-Earnest Should a Preacher Be?

Mike Leake

hqdefaultC.S. Lewis once spoke about the difficulty of sustaining worship. Worship by it’s very nature is a looking outside of ourselves. As soon as we start thinking about worship we end up not worshipping, this is how Lewis said it:

The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping.

I was thinking about that Lewis quote recently while thinking through this address by John Piper on The Gravity and Gladness of Preaching. Piper is trying to make an argument for a seriousness to our preaching that conveys both the gladness and happiness and joy that we have in Christ but which moves away from frivolity or levity.

I’ve gleaned so much from John Piper over the years. I believe his blood-earnestness in preaching has had such a great impact upon me. The seriousness with which he considers the glory of God is helpful and challenging. And that is, I believe, what Piper is attempting to communicate in this lecture on preaching.

But there is something which I’ve observed among those of us who got our preaching legs while being immersed in the Reformed evangelicalism of Piper. It’s a particular tone, a way of organizing the service, a way of carrying ourselves with “blood-earnestness” but a seriousness that is more of a mask than that which comes from having been through the fire.

To put this another way, the blood-earnestness that accompanies powerful preaching doesn’t come from a fixation on blood-earnestness. That’s why I think of that Lewis quote. If we fixate upon the tone of the service—stamping out laughter and mirth—making sure we have the proper atmosphere of being around the holy, we’ll never arrive at anything more than contrived stillness. Because when you focus upon being blood-earnest you’re no longer really preaching.

When he was laboring to discern whether or not he was called to the ministry, John Newton, put together some of his thoughts upon preaching:

I do not think either sourness or gloominess become a preacher…True gravity is far from these and is a temperament of behavior arising from a fixed persuasion of the presence of God, the value of souls, the shortness of time, the influence of example, the love of mankind and the vastness and reality of eternal things, all impressed upon the mind together. (Newton, 180)

I’m not saying that Newton and Piper are necessarily disagreeing. But what I am saying is that Piper’s disciples would do well to hear this word of Newton. We don’t arrive at gladness or gravity by making either of them our goal in preaching. They arise from other things.

Focus upon the glory of Christ, aim to love your people and to honor Christ while doing so, and you’ll have plenty of experiences where the Spirit rests upon your congregation in such a way that a holy hush falls upon them. That is Newton’s point.

Dig deep in Jesus and the atmosphere will take care of itself.

A New Project

Mike Leake

Trauma2TraumaLogo2023 small versionI am excited today to launch a new project with my friend Dave Pittman.

Survivors and pastors may speak with the same native tongue but we often aren’t speaking the same language. Often we struggle to hear beyond our own trauma, as well as acknowledge it’s role in the life of another. So, Dave and I hope to translate for one another.

We believe that most of what happens on social media and in real life is that two people aren’t having conversations but rather one trauma response is talking to another trauma response. And we seldom acknowledge this. We need a new way to converse to bridge the gap between pastors and survivors.

Today we posted our first article. A fair amount of it was a cut and paste job from something I wrote here last year. But it lays the foundation for what we hope to accomplish in the coming days.

Check it out:

https://trauma2trauma.org/f/what-is-trauma-2-trauma

Worship Is the Fuel For Helping

Mike Leake

grave-clothes“How’d you keep from quitting?”

That’s the question that I would love to ask the prophet Isaiah. I’ve always wondered how he kept from being bitter and jaded. Deep discouragement has to accompany years of seemingly fruitless ministry.

I’ve had seasons which felt like nobody is listening but I’ve never been there. I’ve also wondered how in the world did Isaiah remain faithful to the message. Did he ever flirt with the idea of tweaking it a bit to make it more palatable to his countrymen? Did he ever think that maybe a different tone would turn the burnt stump into a mighty oak of ministry? I bet this guy had to hate going to the monthly meeting with area pastors…”how many did you baptize this month, Isaiah?”

But Isaiah remained a faithful prophet of God for a very lengthy ministry. And he wasn’t just really good at one thing. He wasn’t only one of those preachers that was amazing at beating you up and bringing a flood of conviction. He was also one of those preachers who helped you heal. Likewise, he wasn’t just filled with syrup and sugar. His words could lay you bare and have you snot-crying without a moments notice. That’s really what the gospel does, though. It breaks when we need broken and heals when we need healed. Isaiah was that type of gospel minister.

And that blows me away. Because it had to have been tempting for Isaiah to either compromise the message in order to at least gain a couple friends. Or perhaps to go all 2pac and take a me against the world posture. But he doesn’t do that. He’s balanced. And he does this for 50 plus years. How?

I’ve long thought that something is happening in Isaiah’s vision of God in chapter six which answers our question. So, I was encouraged to read a little section in Diane Langberg’s Suffering and the Heart of God, where she makes a similar connection.

How Can We Keep Going?

She refers to advocacy work to walking among the catacombs and then asks, “How can you and I persevere, living and working among the tombs, in the places of death?”

Her answer is that worship is the fuel that keeps us going. And it is what causes us to respond with compassion instead of bitterness. I love how she says this:

We cannot walk among the traumatized and the suffering with humility, patience, compassion, and comfort in a way that honors the Man of Sorrows until we have truly seen ourselves before him. (Langberg, 72)

Langberg goes on to say that without the Isaiah 6 experience of life-changing worship, “we will respond with pride and superiority, impatient that people are not better yet, intolerant of their repetitions and prolonged fear.”

The task of working with the traumatized isn’t an easy one. It’s in the category of raising the dead to life and so our only hope is the resurrection. This is the picture:

The traumatized are buried under layers of fear, self-protection, previous traumas, depression, layers of their own sin, and the litter of others’ sins against them. (Langberg, 73)

If we don’t begin this work, repentant and on our knees, we’ll bring our shovels and thrust even more piles of dirt upon the traumatized. But worship opens us up to being involved in the process of sprinkling beauty over ashes and slowly but certainly unraveling grave clothes.

It’s good work, but it’s tough work. Worship alone will sustain us and give us the strength to help rather than hurt.