Elisabeth Elliot: And yet when we become angry, we get very childish at times. We pout. We turn on the silent treatment to our husbands. We go off by ourselves and don't tell anybody where we're going. We just disappear, hoping that they're going to feel sorry that we've left.

Lisa Barry: Does that ring a bell with anyone here today? Anger can make us do so many funny things, can't it? But oftentimes those actions just lead to more games and more hurt and more anger. Today on Gateway To Joy, Elisabeth Elliot talks about what the Bible says about anger and how we should deal with it when it arises. Let's get started.

Elisabeth Elliot: "You are loved with an everlasting love." That's what the Bible says. "And underneath are the everlasting arms." This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot, discussing again today the subject of anger. The Bible says that we are not to give way to anger. "A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man turns away from anger." "In your anger, do not sin," the Bible tells us. "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and evil speaking be put away from you."

These are not little things. When we look at them in the presence of God, we realize that they are sins and they cut straight across His will. People often admit to being angry at God. One woman wrote that she had waited a long time to witness the whole truth of the Gospel to her parents, who were professing Christians. She did a lot of praying, but it didn't go well, so she got mad at God for not helping her more. However, she told me she repented, realizing that it was a prideful attitude.

I heard from a Christian family. One sister had separated herself from the rest, believing that God had told her and her husband to wipe the dust off their feet and have no more dealings with the rest of the family, because she's found something wrong with each one. I couldn't help adding my own little parenthesis there: What else is new? We're going to find something wrong with everybody, aren't we? Because we are sinners. There really isn't anything else to marry or to go to church with or to love. We are sinners and there's something wrong with all of us.

But that family certainly isn't in a special category, do you think? We're all sinners, all of us equally in need of the cleansing blood. Do you remember the old hymn, "What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus."

The mother-in-law of the lady who wrote me the letter has been deeply hurt by her daughter-in-law's action, so she, the mother-in-law, has stopped going to church. Now let's try to fathom what giving up church is supposed to accomplish. Will God be hurt? The Bible tells us that He is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. It also tells us that He sympathizes with our weaknesses. But we have a Savior who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet was without sin. That means that Jesus knows what it is to be tempted to be angry. But He also overcame that temptation.

God is hurt by our sinfulness and stupidity, I'm sure. But He certainly is not surprised. The mother-in-law is wallowing in her self-pity, wanting to be noticed and commiserated with. So she hurts herself by refusing to go to church, a very childish reaction, isn't it? Yet when we become angry, we get very childish at times. We pout. We turn on the silent treatment to our husbands. We go off by ourselves and don't tell anybody where we're going. We just disappear, hoping they're going to feel sorry that we've left.

One of my dear friends, a very close friend of mine, told me that she was quite upset with her husband one time. So she got in the car and she drove around for four hours. She came back, expecting to find a worried husband who would once again receive her with open arms. Guess what? You guessed it. He hadn't even missed her. She didn't accomplish a thing by leaving the house for four hours in a row.

Surely this poor, pitiful, mistaken lady is hurting herself by refusing to go to church. There may be a few people there in the church who will miss her, but the church is going to get along without her. But she's not going to get along without the church. She is not going to make it without fellowship with other Christians.

The Book of James is such a marvelously down-to-earth and practical one. James has something to say on very mundane and ordinary, but well-known, subjects. In his very first chapter, in verse 19 he says, "My dear brothers, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry." Does that characterize you? "Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak"-and I need those injunctions, because I am not quick to listen. I'm quick to speak. I'm slow to listen, quick to speak. I need to reverse that and be quick to listen and slow to speak.

"And slow to become angry, for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires." I know that very many of you with all your heart desire to live a righteous life, yet there is that streak of anger in you that just wells up. One dear lady in the South came to me and she said, "You know, I did not know that I was screaming at my children until they told me. One day they just said, 'Mom, do you know that you're screaming at us?'" She said, "I didn't realize it. I was angry. My natural reaction was to scream."

"Man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent, and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard but doing it, he will be blessed in what he does.

If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: To look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

There is a great deal of anger in the world, and there are some good reasons for anger. I'm sure God is angry at the terrible evil of abortion, for example. These tiny, helpless, speechless creatures, made in the image of God, being formed in the process of being made into the image of God, already His child from the moment of conception-think of 1 1/2 million of those babies. Perhaps the statistics have climbed, and we have the horror of partial-birth abortion. A living child killed at the moment of birth. That's murder. God is righteously angry.

In what way are you being unrighteously angry? Will you surrender that sin to the Lord? "Everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry." The old rule of counting to ten makes a lot of good sense. If you feel that anger rising in you because of something that your child has done, something that was wrong, something that needs punishment, but does not need a mother's anger, that would be the point at which you just stop dead in your tracks, lift up your heart to the Lord and say, "Lord, help me."

Maybe just repeat a Scripture verse. "The Lord God will help me; therefore, shall I not be confounded. Lord, give me wisdom in knowing what to do with this naughty child. Deliver me from letting go in my anger. Help me by Your Holy Spirit to be calm and kind in dealing with this child."

I do believe that the Lord will help you to do things like that. My father had a streak of anger in him. But over the years, we older children in the family-there were six of us, and I'm number two of six-my brother Phil and I, and my brother Dave, the three of us oldest ones, we saw that anger in our father, at times out of control. Once or twice he leaped from the table with such anger at a way a child had been behaving that he threw his chair over backwards and yanked the child out of the highchair to take him to another room for a spanking. Now the child deserved the spanking. The child didn't deserve the father's anger.

But what I wanted to tell you about my wonderful Daddy was that over the years, we saw the grace of God at work in him. That natural tendency to fury, God tempered and took away, because the three younger ones in our family have no recollection of ever seeing that. You fathers, will you trust God to enable you to control that anger? God bless you.

Lisa Barry: Aren't you glad God is interested in helping us in this life? He might have just left us to fend for ourselves, but instead He takes pity on us and knows that we are weak and heavy-laden. If your questioning mind seems to be the thing standing in the way of spiritual growth, then let me suggest Elisabeth Elliot's book, ON ASKING GOD WHY. It won't tell you how to ask God for things, but rather encourage you to wait on God for His perfect timing. If anger is something you struggle with on a regular basis, then I'd encourage you to get a copy of this book for yourself. Just think of how much more intentional your life might be without dragging around all your feelings of anger.

Again, the title is ON ASKING GOD WHY. The cost is $11. You can send that, along with your request, to Gateway To Joy, Box 82500, Lincoln, Nebraska, 68501. Or call 1-800-759-4JOY. That's 1-800-759-4569. Our newly redesigned Web page is accessible at gatewaytojoy.org. Gateway To Joy has been a production of Back to the Bible.

Be with us again tomorrow when Elisabeth talks about justified anger right here on Gateway To Joy.