Anger- In His Image | Crossroads Students

Hey, what's up? I'm Jason, Director of Crossroads Students. The first time I was ever choked out. What did he say? And I mean choked out. I mean out like a light. I was nine years old. I was wrestling with my brother. And if you have siblings, you know how this starts. You always have like the fun and games part of the wrestling where you're just having fun. You're just messing around. And then someone hits someone a little too hard. Someone squeezes a little too tightly. And it goes from a fun and games situation to a life or death situation. And I was in a life or death situation. My brother had me in a choke hold and he was squeezing tighter and tighter. And even up into this point, every time we'd ever wrestle. You never wanted to tap out. But if you tapped out, you admitted I lost. You won and the fight would end. And so I'm like fighting and I'm angry and I'm seething and I'm wrestling. And finally I gave up. I could feel my face go from red to maybe even blue. And I was gasping for air and so I tapped his hand. And instead of letting go, he squeezed tighter. Why? Because he's a jerk to me. And he's bigger and stronger than me. At least he was. I can outbench him now. This is a different story for a different time. My point is he was squeezing tighter and tighter and I passed out. I was choked out. In fact, I remember thinking this is the end. I am dead. And then I woke up some time later. My brother is completely gone.

He just left me. And I had a giant headache. And I've never been more angry in my entire life. I immediately plotted my revenge. Now luckily we had an upstairs bedroom and I don't know how it is in your family. But if you're in the basement, can you kind of tell who's walking around by their foot patterns? Has it ever happened to you? Like you can just kind of tell. Oh, that's mom walking. She has the certain cadence. And so I knew my brother's walking up the stairs foot pattern. It was like bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. And so I was like, okay, got it, got it. We're ready to go. And so I hid at the top of the stairs. And I was, you know, walls right here, stairways here, carpet stairs. And when he went to bum bum bum bum, right before he was at the top, I turned and I punted him down the stairs. This is Sparta! I mean, with everything my nine-year-old body could do, I connected to his chest and he literally flew like a movie all the way from probably the eighth or ninth stair all the way to the bottom platform. Crash! And I felt amazing for like two seconds. And then I thought I literally just killed my older brother. I am going to prison for the rest of my life. I'm like starting to like cry. Like all the emotions flood back. Like anger was no longer kind of in control of me. Like remorse and heartbreak.

And eventually my brother stood up and we never really even forgave each other. We just kind of moved on. We're like, okay, he did something crazy to me. I did something crazy to him. So like we just kind of moved on with our lives. I remember looking back on that moment and thinking, wow, I was kind of scared of how easily and quickly and totally anger controlled me. Have you ever had that? Have you ever felt anger just kind of took the wheel and caused you to do something you didn't want to do? I'm here to tell you we're in a series right now talking about the image of God. And the reason we're talking about that is because God created us in his image, which means you and me are like God, not equal with God, but are like God. We love people and things because God loves. We're created with the capacity to love because God has the capacity to love. Did you know if you just flipped up your Bible and we're just scanning through it and you saw God in the Bible expressing an emotion, good chance the first one you found would be love. There's about 600, 700 examples of God expressing love to his people. Did you also know that the second overwhelmingly popular emotion that God expresses in the Bible is anger? In fact, God talks about anger way more than he talks about his mercy or his grace or his joy or fear of all the emotions out there. Anger is the second most popular emotion that God expresses. I'll give you a great example from the book of Isaiah. Isaiah 13, 13, for I, God is talking, will shake the heavens. The earth will move from its place when the Lord of heaven's armies. displays his wrath in the day of his fierce anger. Does that sound like the God who's like lovey-dovey? It's the same God, but God can both be loving and angry at the same time, and he should be. There's a lot of things messed up in this world

that God, if he was a loving God, he should be angry about it. You and I should experience anger. When you see someone getting picked on, that should make you angry. God gave us the emotion of anger so that we would know what things God loves and what things God hates. Anger is a great emotion. It's a gift for you and me, and it's also one of the things that has caused me to cause pain to the people I love and care about the most. When I look about on my life, the things that I've said that I couldn't even believe that came out of my mouth, the things that I did that I couldn't even believe that I did, like punting my brother in the chest. Sure, it's funny, but like, dude, that could have really hurt him. I was totally consumed by my anger. Those times, anger has always been the one on the wheel. I'm not on the wheel. God isn't in the wheel of my life. Love isn't the overwhelming feeling. No, no, no, no, no. Anger has caused me to do things that I regret, and I bet it's true for your life too. Jesus was angry. Did you know that actually Jesus is God in human form?

And so I understand it's super difficult to think about having a relationship with an invisible God, and I think God knew that too, and so he sent his son Jesus to be 100% man and 100% God. He's a real person that really exists 2,000 years ago, and I believe that Jesus came and showed us how to have anger and all the emotions and honor God at the same time, not regret our decisions. Great example is in Mark. What's happening, the context of this story is there was this group of people called the Pharisees who really didn't like Jesus at all. They didn't like the idea of God becoming a human form, and they didn't understand that God was trying to show an act of love to them, and all they wanted to do is follow a whole bunch of list of rules that they felt like were more important than God himself. And so these Pharisees came up to Jesus and they brought him somebody who had a broken, messed up hand that was messed up for a long time, and they're like, Jesus, it's Sunday and you're supposed to rest on Sundays, and so you can't heal this guy, right? Look how Jesus responds in Mark. Mark 3, 5, Jesus, he looked around at them angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts. And then he said to the man, hold out your hand. And so when the man held out his hand, it was restored.

This guy got healed by Jesus on the Sabbath. He got healed. His hand was literally healed. Don't you think everybody would be so excited about this? Look how terrible anger happened in the hearts of the Pharisees. At once, the Pharisees went away and met with the supporters of Herod to plot how to kill Jesus. Jesus was angry at the hard hearts of the Pharisees that caused him to do an amazing act of love for this person who was hurt and needed help. The Pharisees were angry at Jesus not being who they thought he should be, and it caused them to go plot to see how they could kill Jesus. Isn't that incredible? Anger, every single time it shows up in our life, it's an opportunity for us to be like God. We can express our anger like God. You and I can be more like God if we are angry and choose to love others instead of hate them, build resentment on them, or plot to kill them. James has been super helpful in my journey of battling anger. I don't know about you guys, but I've been angry for a long time. I was born a ginger and I grew up a ginger and I got an anger issue. I was so quick to anger my whole life.

I really was. And maybe you are too. Maybe you don't struggle with anger at all, but maybe you are angry. I think it's totally normal to be angry because somebody bullied you. I think it's totally normal to be angry because you didn't get invited to that thing that everybody else got invited to. I think it's totally normal to be angry when somebody else takes credit for the thing that you worked really hard on. Those are normal in every opportunity. You and I have an opportunity to look like Jesus, to look like God. James says this, be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger. And then he goes on and he says, the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Your and my anger is almost. never going to lead us to a loving act. We've got to include God in that. We absolutely have to include God in that. Paul writes this letter to the Ephesians. It's a church in the city of Ephesus, and he's trying to help them understand how to deal with this anger. And this is what he says, Ephesians 4, 26, in your anger, do not sin. A different translation says this, and I actually love this. It's so helpful. Don't sin by letting anger control you.

Don't let the sun go down while you're still angry, for anger gives a foothold to the devil. So you have an opportunity. Every single time you get angry, you have an opportunity. Am I going to look more like God? Or am I going to look more like the devil? Am I going to do something that God would do if he was angry about this thing? Or am I going to do something that the devil would do to hurt the people around us? Man, the worst things I've ever done have been in anger, where I felt like I lost control and I just let anger rule my life, rule my decisions. And it's caused me to hurt people. And I've had to go back to those people and say, I had to go back to my wife and say, I am so sorry. I said that horrible, hurtful thing. And I let anger control me and I messed up. Can, is there any way we can repair this relationship? Is there any way that I could tell you, like, that is not actually how I feel. I didn't even mean it. I was just angry. It is a good thing to be angry at the right things and express it in the right way. It is a terrible thing to be angry at the wrong things and express it in a hurtful way. God was angry a lot. And he always, that anger resulted in a giant act of love toward his people. In fact, the whole reason I believe that God sent Jesus into the world is because God is angry at the sin in the world and how it enslaves his people, how it traps his people, how it separates himself from his people. So he sent Jesus to fix that. It was love and anger that sent Jesus to the cross, not angry at the sinners, but anger at the things that were keeping us from a relationship with God.

God loves you. And he's angry about the same things that you're angry about. There's injustices in those world. There's hurtful things that people have said. And you and I have an opportunity every single time we're angry to look more like Jesus or to look more like the opposite of him. And that's not what I want for you. If you and I are going to live our lives and be angry for the right reasons in the right places, for the right times, we have got to learn to control our anger.