beautifully angry thoughts

What do you hate? That question has come to me as one that can help someone define their calling ... either vocationally, what they will do as a career, or as a primary ministry area they'll pursue for a period. Example: I know a nurse who was in our church during UF days, now she's going to be trained as a biblical counselor she writes:

I'm hoping to eventually work with kids and families dealing with chronic illnesses- more specifically cancer and AIDS. In Nashville I worked on the Oncology/Bone Marrow Transplant unit and saw that those kids and families have to go through a lot- physically and emotionally- and a lot of the emotional stuff gets lost in the shuffle. I kind of felt that I wanted to minister to their spirits as well as their bodies.

I think another way of saying that could be: "I hate to see the emotional trauma lost in the shuffle when a family is dealing with these horrible physical trials."

Another person may say: "When i see the results of sin causing the destruction of the body it makes me angry. So angry that i want to learn how to do something to reverse/stop/slow down the spread of that destruction.

There's a song on the recent U2 album called Miracle Drug. Bono says: “We all went to the same school and just as we were leaving, a fellow called Christopher Nolan arrived. He had been deprived of oxygen for two hours when he was born, so he was paraplegic. But his mother believed he could understand what was going on and used to teach him at home. Eventually, they discovered a drug that allowed him to move one muscle in his neck. So they attached this unicorn device to his forehead and he learned to type. And out of him came all these poems that he’d been storing up in his head. Then he put out a collection called Dam-Burst of Dreams, which won a load of awards and he went off to university and became a genius. All because of a mother’s love and a medical breakthrough.”

In addition to the beautiful story as it already stands, Bono makes this amazing connection (i think) between the work of science and medicine and Jesus' command to "give a cup of cold water in my name".

Beneath the noise
Below the din
I hear a voice
It’s whispering
In science and in medicine
“I was a stranger
You took me in”

"In science and in medicine, i was a stranger you took me in."
There is one mother in Ireland who is glad that some scientists and doctors were beautifully angry about her boy being unable to communicate. And in serving the least of these, we serve Jesus.

anger....for parents

You will be provoked.
You can’t avoid it: “Stumbling blocks are sure to
come” (Luke 17:1). When your child mocks or defies
you as a parent, you don’t simply observe in a
detached way, “Oh, that’s interesting. Now, I believe
I’m hearing and seeing something that perhaps fits
the category of ‘sin’. Why, yes indeed, as I think about
it, that pattern of words seems inconsistent with obedient
respect. Hmm, I wonder how I ought to handle
it?” Oh no! You are made to react emotionally. A child
is not supposed to mock his parents! The offense rightly
pushes a button and arouses something in you.
Now, that anger easily becomes sinful, but it needn’t.
It can be bridled: “Let’s deal with this.” The anger provides
energy to name clearly what was wrong, to discipline
the child, to talk with him, comfort him, and
give love to him. Anger is sinful and destructive if
punitive, righteous and loving if disciplinary.

vigilantes of love

“Anger is the emotion that has been given by
God to attack problems…. The energies of anger
[must be] productively released under control toward
a problem. [Anger] must be directed toward destroying
the problem, not toward destroying the person….
Anger, like a good horse, must be bridled.” Jay Adams

justice & our children

Coronary Christians
We need to be more like the heart and less like adrenaline | by John Piper

February is Black History Month and National Heart Month. Feb. 24 is the 195th anniversary of England's abolition of the slave trade. Both the month and the day are worth remembering by American Christians weary of fighting racial injustice and abortion. They call us to be coronary Christians, not adrenal Christians.

Not that adrenaline is bad. It gets me through lots of Sundays. But it lets you down on Mondays. The heart is another kind of friend. It just keeps on serving—through good days and bad days, happy and sad, high and low, appreciated and unappreciated. It never lets me down. It never says, "I don't like your attitude, Piper, I'm taking a day off." It just keeps humbly lubb-dubbing along.

Coronary Christians are like the heart in the causes they serve. Adrenal Christians are like adrenaline—a spurt of energy and then fatigue. What we need in the cause of racial justice and justice for the unborn is coronary Christians. Marathoners, not just sprinters. People who find the pace to finish the race.

This is what I preached last month on our "Racial Harmony Sunday" and our "Sanctity of Life Sunday." O, for coronary Christians! Christians committed to great causes, not great comforts. I pleaded with the saints to dream a dream bigger than themselves and their families and their churches. I tried to un-deify the American family and say that our children are not our cause; they are given to us to train for the great causes of mercy and justice in a prejudiced, pain-filled, and perishing world.

My blood was boiling on this issue of rugged, never-say-die, Christian commitment to great causes because I've been brimming these days with the life of William Wilberforce. Now there was a coronary Christian in the cause of racial justice. He was deeply Christian, vibrantly evangelical, and passionately political in the House of Commons over the long haul in the fight against the African slave trade. On Oct. 28, 1787, he wrote in his diary at the age of 28, "God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of [Morals]." Battle after battle in Parliament he was defeated, because "The Trade" was so much woven into the financial interests of the nation. But he never gave up and never sat down. He was coronary, not adrenal.

On Feb. 24, 1807, at 4:00 a.m., 20 years later, the decisive vote was cast (Ayes, 283, Noes, 16) and the slave trade became illegal. The House rose almost to a man and turned toward Wilberforce in a burst of parliamentary cheers, while the little man with the curved spine sat, head bowed, tears streaming down his face (John Pollock, Wilberforce, p. 211).

The coronary Christian, William Wilberforce, never gave up. There were keys to his relentlessness. The greatness and the certainty of the rightness of the cause sustained him. Abolishing the slave trade was "the grand object of my Parliamentary existence."

"Before this great cause," he wrote in 1796, "all others dwindle in my eyes, and I must say that the certainty that I am right here, adds greatly to the complacency with which I exert myself in asserting it. If it please God to honor me so far, may I be the instrument of stopping such a course of wickedness and cruelty as never before disgraced a Christian country" (Pollock, p. 143).

He saw that adrenal spurts would never prevail: "I daily become more sensible that my work must be affected by constant and regular exertions rather than by sudden and violent ones" (Pollock, p. 116). He had learned the secret of being strengthened, not stopped, by opposition. One of his adversaries said, "He is blessed with a very sufficient quantity of that Enthusiastic spirit, which is so far from yielding that it grows more vigorous from blows" (Pollock, p. 105). In other words, knock him down, and he gets up stronger. Most of all, the secret of his coronary commitment to the great cause was his radical allegiance to Jesus Christ.

He prayed—and may this prayer rouse many coronary lovers of Christ to fight racism and abortion (and heart disease!) with unwavering perseverance—"[May God] enable me to have a single eye and a simple heart, desiring to please God, to do good to my fellow creatures and to testify my gratitude to my adorable Redeemer" (Pollock, p. 210). •
Copyright © 2002 WORLD Magazine
February 23, 2002, Vol. 17, No. 7

anger, sinful and righteous

We often fail to see that God’s anger and love
are entirely consistent with each other as different
expressions of His goodness and glory. The two work
together: “Jesus burned with anger against the
wrongs He met with in His journey through human
life, as truly as He melted with pity at the sight of the
world’s misery: and it was out of these two emotions
that His actual mercy proceeded.” warkield You can’t understand
God’s love if you don’t understand His anger.
Because He loves, He’s angry at what harms.
But notice the way God’s children experience His
anger: His anger is expressed on their behalf as
supremely tender love! As we will see, the Bible is
consistent about this truth. Yet anger is by definition
against things, with an intent to destroy, so how can
God’s wrath become something God’s children love
and trust rather than something they fear or dislike?
In what way is God’s anger an expression of how He
is for us, rather than the expression of how He is
against us?
Powlison

Second, in love, God’s anger works to disarm the power
of your sin. His anger at sin is again expressed for your
well-being. In the present, He deals continually with
indwelling sinfulness itself. (Awork that will be completed when we see Jesus return on
the day of wrath. See, for example, Philippians 1:6; 1 Thessalonians
5:23; 1 John 3:2.)
The Holy Spirit, who
pours out God’s love within you, is a burning fire of
anger against evil, not to destroy you but to make you
new. In steadfast love, He remakes us, not by tolerating
our sin, but by hating our sin in a way that we
learn to love! The process is not always pleasant
because suffering, reproof, guilt, and owning up don’t
feel good. But deliverance, mercy, encouragement….

Who is the angriest person in the Bible? Satan.
His anger, also, does not turn away. He has “great
wrath,” being a “murderer from the beginning” even
until now. (revlation and john 8)Satan’s anger springs from malice and
the desire to hurt people. His anger, the paradigm of
all sinful anger, is the antithesis of God’s. Satan’s hostility
aims to make things wrong, in service to his own
cravings. This also tells us something very important.
Anger can be utterly wrong, bad, inappropriate, ugly,
a completely destructive response. Such anger summarizes
the very essence of evil: “I want my way and
not God’s, and because I can’t have my way, I rage.” Sinful anger usurps God and does harm; godly anger loves, enthroning God and doing good to people.--powlison


RP:That is a huge idea: my anger is either reflecting God or Satan. When my anger is turned on someone for malice and to hurt them… I am the tool of the other side. I’m in the employ of Voldemort, The Dark Side, Saruman, Satan!
Memories of Bilbo’s face when he almost stole the ring from Frodo.
Harry’s thoughts of hatred and wanting to kill Dumbledore in Order of Phoenix.
That is gripping for me to be in the employ of those who I truly hate.

bb warfield on anger of jesus in mark 3

What is meant is, not that his anger was modified by grief, his reprobation of the hardness of their hearts was mingled with a sort of sympathy for men sunk in such a miserable condition. What is meant is simply that the spectacle of their hardness of heart produced in Jesus the deepest dissatisfaction, which passed into angry resentment. The hardness of the Jews’ heart, vividly realized, hurt Jesus; and his anger rose in repulsion of the cause of his pain. There are two movements of feeling brought before us here. There is pain which the gross manifestation of the hardness of heart of the Jews inflicted on Jesus. Bb Warfield