One of the worst things we can do with anger is to deny and repress it. Long-term repressed anger turns into hostility and contaminates everything we do. And there is probably nothing more destructive to personal relationships than unresolved buried anger or hostility.

Even worse, when triggered, it can have fatal results. According to The Bulletin, an Australian magazine, in one year 80 percent of the homicide victims in one state were killed by family members or intimate friends. Most of these fatal attacks were the results of quarrels in everyday situations.

Hostility can show itself in any of a number ways: a negative, critical attitude, nagging, sarcasm, gossip, resentment, hatred, slamming doors, shouting, taking it out on the children, kicking the cat, aggressive driving, childish “I’m hurt!” crying, rebellion, denial of sex in marriage, deviant behavior (prostitutes, for example, are often angry at their fathers or men who abused them), putting people down, constantly running late, passivity, withdrawal, rage, and even criminality—or becoming saccharine sweet in an attempt to deny that they are angry. The list is endless.

Or, as Dr. Cecil Osborne explains in his book, The Art of Understanding Yourself, repressed anger may eventually come out in the “form of some psychosomatic illness: ulcers, asthma, arthritis, colitis, dermatitis, heart ailments or any one of a score of others.”²

Hostility attacks people. Healthy anger is directed against wrong(one word-)doing, is connected with love, and is the right amount of anger for the given situation. A helpful question to ask yourself if you think you might be overreacting is: “Should I be this angry?”

People who overreact to situations often have a lot of repressed anger. The immediate situation which out-of-proportion anger brings out doesn’t cause it, it triggers what is already there.

The Bible also says, “If you are slow to get angry, you are wise. But if you are quick-tempered, you only show foolishness.”³ This isn’t an excuse for denying one’s anger, as denial can be equally foolish and destructive.

Being quick-tempered is usually overreacting, another sign of unresolved anger.

Again, as the Bible reminds us: “So get rid of your feelings of hatred [anger]. Don’t just pretend to be good! Be done with dishonesty.”⁴ Also, “If you are angry, don’t sin by nursing your grudge. Don’t let the sun go down with you still angry—get over it quickly; for when you are angry, you give a mighty foothold to the Devil.”⁵

How then do we resolve anger? We’ll answer this question in tomorrow’s Daily Encounter.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, help me to always be in touch with my true feelings whatever they are, and be honest about them to myself and to you, and learn how to resolve them in healthy and loving ways. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Ephesians 4:26-27 (TLB) (NLT).

2. Cecil Osborne, The Art of Understanding Yourself, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1967, p. 61.

3. Proverbs 14:29 (NLT).

4. 1 Peter 2:1 (TLB) (NLT).

5. Ephesians 4:26-27 (TLB) (NLT).

Your test seems to indicate that you have some buried anger,” said the counselor to his client. “Do you think this could be true?” he asked.

“Me! Angry? Certainly not,” replied the client. “I’ll punch you in the nose for saying that!”

When it comes to anger we all have a tiger of sorts within. At times it provides great courage and motivation. It causes some of us to lash out and hurt others. At other times we are so afraid it will get out of control we bury it so that nobody, including ourselves, will ever know it exists.

Many of us were taught that anger is bad and to show it is immature. The mature person, however, doesn’t deny his anger. He has learned to express it in appropriate ways.

Even though some people never show their anger, everybody gets angry sometimes. Anger is a God-given emotion. Of itself it is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. It’s what we do with it and how we handle it that counts.

In fact, there are many things we ought to be angry about, such as social injustice, child abuse, greed, and even legalistic religion that makes rules more important than people and keeps people in needless bondage.

Jesus was very angry with the religious people of his day for this very reason. When he healed a man on the Sabbath, the Pharisees were so furious they plotted to kill him. To them, religious observances were more important than the needs of people. We read that Jesus “looked around at them in anger…distressed at their stubborn hearts.”²

Think too of Florence Nightingale. She was very angry about the terrible conditions suffered by wounded soldiers in the Crimean War. She used her anger creatively to bring about major changes in nursing care. This is a creative and healthy use of anger.

To be continued.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please help me to so live that I will always recognize and resolve my negative emotions as quickly as possible, and do so in creative and helpful ways—and never ever become bitter or nurse grudges. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Ephesians 4:26-27(TLB)(NLT).

2. Mark 3:5 (NIV).

Melvin McDonald served in the Canadian Navy during World War II. One Monday, the 79-year-old McDonald and his wife showed up at the front desk at police headquarters in Winnipeg. His opening line to the police officer who offered to assist him was, “I got a grenade.” He wasn’t making a threat, mind you—just stating a fact. With that, he took a hand grenade out of a brown paper bag and gave it to the officer.

The shocked constable kept his head. He did, however, call the bomb squad immediately. Then things really started to happen. Most of the main floor of the Public Safety Building was evacuated, the fire department was put on alert, and the bomb squad showed up with all its sophisticated paraphernalia.

The grenade was still primed with explosive, and its fuse was intact. “I’ve had it in the house all these years,” the veteran said. “I used to have it on a stand.” His nephew had suggested it ought to be turned over to the police.

An embarrassed McDonald apologized for all the commotion he caused. It was only a keepsake from a training exercise in Scotland in the early 1940s.²

A very unhealthy way, one of the worst, to live is by burying and denying unresolved anger, hurts, bitterness, etc., from the past. These are the supercharged, repressed, negative emotions that, like an old live hand grenade, when triggered can cause an emotional explosion and severely damage or destroy close relationships. On the other hand, if these emotions stay buried and get triggered, they can cause an implosion and destroy a person’s health and well-being.

Like all of God’s directives, it is not without good reason that the Bible advises us to get rid of these destructive emotions. And we don’t get rid of them by burying them and denying their existence. It is imperative that they are recognized, expressed in creative rather than destructive ways, and resolved.

In the next three Daily Encounters we’ll talk about “Taming Your Anger” to further show the importance of resolving buried emotions and explain how to resolve them.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you for your Word that admonishes us to, ‘Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.’ Please help me to recognize any of these destructive emotions and attitudes in me and show me how to resolve and get rid of them forever. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

Note: For further help read “Taming Your Anger” at: http://tinyurl.com/b439f.

1. Ephesians 4:31 (NIV).

2. Chad J Hedgepath. Cited on KneEmail, http://www.oakhillcoc.org.

Some people you meet are very warm, genuine and connected. Others seem to be cold and distant. Their life seems rather flat line, dull, and even boring. I’m not talking about times of sickness, sadness or sorrow but this is how they are pretty much most of the time.

Why are some people like the latter group? One of a number of reasons is because they are repressed in their emotional life. Chances are that they grew up with a sense that emotions—especially negative emotions—were not acceptable, so they learned early in life to bury and deny them. Or they may have been hurt deeply as a child and found that they had to stuff their emotions in order to survive. It may sound crude but it is a fact of life that the stuff we stuff stuffs up our lives. This can cause all sorts of emotional, physical, relational and/or spiritual problems.

Emotions are God-given and are a vital part of a healthy, mature life. We are not talking about emotionalism which is a cover of true emotions. We are talking about being connected to our inner self and being in touch with all of our God-given emotions. If my emotions are buried and I am disconnected from them and my inner self, I cannot be truly connected to anyone else or to God at any kind of intimate level. At best, my relationships will be very shallow.

Furthermore, when emotions are repressed, instead of life being wonder-full, it may be wonder-empty. As such I will characteristically be bored with life.

If one’s life is wonder-empty, how do we overcome? How do we get connected to our inner self? In younger days my emotions were very much buried. I was doing all the right things outwardly but inwardly I felt very empty and, among other things, was disconnected to my emotion of wonder. Much of this was caused by growing up in a very dysfunctional family. I was taught that you couldn’t trust your emotions, but my life was so empty that I got down on my knees and asked God to give me my emotions back anyhow. Whew, God answered in a way that was the exact opposite of what I expected. My world fell apart. I was rejected by the most important person in my life and felt torn apart. But this was the beginning of getting in touch with all my emotions and my inner-self and learning to live and love again.

It took a long time and a lot of counseling but I can truly say that life for me has never been better. I am physically healthier than I was at half my age and my life is filled with love, loving relationships, and fulfillment.

Apparently Renoir, the famous artist, kept painting in his older years even though he was in great physical pain. In relating to Renoir’s suffering his friend, Matisse, said to him, “Why do you keep painting when you are in so much pain?” to which Renoir replied, “The pain passes but the beauty remains!” And so it is with us, if we commit and trust our life to God and ask him to confront us with our reality so that we become fully connected to our inner self, we may go through some very painful experiences (that are often needed to break through our defenses) but, in time, our pain will pass but the beauty of our life will last forever.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, in keeping with your desire please help me to be connected to my inner self and always be honest with myself and with you and thus grow up into the fullness of my salvation. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Psalm 51:6 (NASB).

Truth. Perhaps the most powerful principle in the world. Without access to it there is no freedom, no deliverance, no inner healing, and no eternal life.

On the other hand, denial is one of the most destructive habits or sins we can commit. For instance, to the degree that I have not found freedom in any area of my life I am still in denial. There is some truth I am avoiding. Denial is a killer of close relationships, a destroyer of families and individual lives, and causes many and varied physical, emotional and spiritual ills.

I certainly don’t agree with everything that M. Scott Peck says but I do agree with the following statement of his: “Emotional sickness is avoiding reality [truth] at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost.” That’s just rephrasing what Jesus said: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

The following prayer by Billy Joe Vaughn sums it up very well in the following suggested prayer for today:

“Dear God, grant me the ability to reject the things about me that are not true, the humility to accept the things that are, and the discernment to know the difference. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Jesus in John 8:32 (NIV).

In one church where I was teaching I stated that it was okay to be angry. One lady was absolutely amazed. She could hardly believe her ears. She told me that she had been taught all her life that Christians never get angry. So she had reasoned in her mind: “Christians never get angry. I’m always angry. Therefore I can never be a Christian!”

That night she was freed from 20 years of anguish and received assurance of her salvation. She was indeed a Christian because she had received Jesus as her Savior. But she had never understood that anger is amoral; that is, of itself it is neither right nor wrong. It’s what we do with it and how we handle it that matters. The Bible actually teaches, “Be angry—sin not.”

Anger itself (not rage, hostility, or bitterness) is a God-given emotion. Its purpose is to fight evil and right wrongs—to bring about change for good where change is needed. This is how Florence Nightingale used her anger. She was angry at the way wounded soldiers were being treated, or rather, being mistreated, so she did something about it. We are meant to use our anger in the same way.

The reality is that everybody gets angry at one time or another. Some people bury and deny theirs while others lash out and hurt others. Neither of these is healthy, right, nor Christian.

When expressing anger, we need to own it as our own, and remember that the biblical principle is to speak the truth in love. One way to do this is to say something like, “I know my feelings are my responsibility, but I feel angry and need to talk to you about such and such.”

Never say to a person, “You make me angry” This is because nobody can make me angry without my permission. All others can do is trigger my anger, but the anger is mine. And it is always my responsibility to handle and express it in helpful and not in hurtful ways.

Unfortunately, however, when we have a lot of bottled-up anger or anger from the past that has never been faced and resolved, our “anger button” can get triggered very easily and we then overreact. What the other person does to me is their issue; how I feel and react is always my issue and my responsibility. To the degree that I overreact that is always my problem.

One of the great needs (at least in our Western society) is to learn to identify our feelings—positive and negative—to be honest about them, and learn how to handle them in creative, rather than destructive, ways. Until we do this, we have little chance of developing wholesome and intimate relationships.

As the Bible teaches, “If you are angry, don’t sin by nursing your grudge. Don’t let the sun go down with you still angry—get over it quickly, for when you are angry [and don't resolve it] you give a mighty foothold to the devil.”²

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you for the gift of feelings. Please help me to be in touch with all of mine, be honest with them, and when expressing them, help me to always speak the truth in love.³ Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

For more on anger, click on “Taming Your Anger” at: www.actsweb.org/articles.

1. Ephesians 4:26 (NIV).

2. Ephesians 4:25-27 (TLB), (NLT)

3. Ephesians 4:15 (NIV)

Beliefs are remarkably powerful in that they are to our lives what a rudder is to a ship. That is, they control the direction and destiny of our lives. Furthermore, while we don’t always live the life we profess, we always live the life we believe. Simply put, if I believe I am a failure, I will set myself up to fail. If I believe I am a successful person, I will succeed, and so on.

Another critical point to remember about beliefs is that while we may begin with healthy beliefs but if we fail to live up to them, we will experience cognitive dissonance; that is, mental disharmony that is caused by guilt. Because of this discomfort, the danger is that we may change our beliefs to match our lifestyle. And then, instead of living the life we believe, we end up unhappily believing the life we live—a dangerous and self-destructive path to follow.

The good news about beliefs is that we get to choose them. In so doing we choose the direction and destiny of our life. Thus we need to choose our beliefs carefully and base them on reality and not on that which is convenient, or on false teaching or faulty perceptions from the past. We need to base them on God’s Word and his principles for successful daily living.

For some in difficult circumstances it may be difficult to believe in God and that he has a specific purpose for your life. Nevertheless, we still believe in God by choice as exemplified by a World War II prisoner of war who wrote on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany: “I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining; I believe in love, even when I feel it not; I believe in God even when he is silent.”

Another powerful thing about beliefs is that they determine not only the destiny of our present life, but also our relationship to God and our destiny for the life to come. God’s Word, the Bible, says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son [Jesus Christ], that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”² Also, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved [for the life to come].”³ And again, “To all who received him [Christ], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”⁴

Remember, too, that beliefs are only wishes until we act on them!

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please give me the wisdom to choose my beliefs carefully—beliefs that are in harmony with your Word, the Bible. And give me the courage to always live in accordance with these beliefs and never change them to match a less than wholesome lifestyle. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Timothy 1:18-19 (NIV).

2. John 3:16 (NIV).

3. Acts 16:31 (NIV).

4. John 1:12 (NIV).

NOTE: Today’s Daily Encounter is also adapted from “The Power of Belief” by Dick Innes at http://tinyurl.com/79peh.

Last Sunday our pastor told an interesting story and, had it not been serious, it would have been funny. He told about a fellow in a support group who for months on end kept praying about a personal problem but never did anything about it. Week after week he would pray with seemingly great conviction, “Oh God, clean the cobwebs out of my life…clean the cobwebs out of my life!”

Finally, in utter frustration the leader of the group broke into the man’s prayer and prayed rather boisterously, “Oh God, KILL THE _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SPIDER!”

I can identify with this leader in that I, too, know of people who have been confessing the same sin and/or problem for years, asking God for deliverance but never doing anything about it. True, God feeds the sparrows but as the old saying goes, he doesn’t throw the food into their nests.

If we are struggling with a besetting sin or bad habit, what can we do about it? Certainly pray and ask God for deliverance but also pray that he will show us the root cause of our problem because, more often than not, our repetitive failures are the fruit of a deeper root. God not only wants to deliver us from habitual sins but also free us from the deeper root cause. Also, we need to ask God to lead us to the help we need to overcome whether it be an AA Group, some other kind of recovery group, a counselor, a pastor or whatever help we need. And then we need to do something about finding that help. As we do our part, God will do his, but he won’t do for us what we can and are able to do for ourselves. For us to do less is an avoidance of personal responsibility.

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, thank you that you have already done for me what I couldn’t do for myself in that you gave your Son, Jesus, to die for and free me from a life of sin and failure. Please help me to see the root cause of my besetting sin or problem [name it] and help me to find the help I need to overcome. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Hebrews 12:1-2 (NKJV).

A Daily Encounter reader writes, “I have been fighting with a lust demon for years. I have asked GOD to relieve me of this demon but I keep slipping back and doing the same thing all over again. I have just rededicated my life to God and am on my church’s outreach team. I want this demon of Satan out of my body never to return. Will you pray for me?”

Hello, Jim (name changed), Thank you for being honest and sharing your struggle with lust. To resolve any problem it is imperative to understand the root cause of the problem. Let me assure you that lust, as with anger, is NOT a demon. If I am wrongfully angry, that is my problem and when I fail to resolve it, I give the foothold to the enemy.

It’s the same with lust. Lust is a struggle most red-blooded men struggle with at one time or another. Severe lust, however, is usually a symptom of repressed love or unmet love needs. As long as you blame the problem on anything outside of yourself, you will never overcome it because lust is a problem within. I don’t know who told you it was a demon but I challenge this person to find anywhere in the Bible where it says there is “a demon of lust.”

Sure, Satan is the originator of all sin and does tempt us, but most of us don’t need the devil or a demon to make, or even cause, us to lust. We can do it all by ourselves because we are all sinners.

So how do you overcome? First and foremost, you need not only confess your lust to God, but also ask him to confront you with the real cause of your lust … to show you the root cause of the problem … and then to lead you to the help you need to overcome. Only by facing the truth will you be set free.

Remember too, as David wrote in the Psalms, “The Lord is near to all who call on him; to all who call on him in truth.”²

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, whenever I have any problem that I can’t resolve, please help me to see the root cause of it and help me to find the support I need to overcome. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. Ephesians 4:26-27 (TLB).

2. Psalm 145:18 (NIV).

Finally, I said to her as kindly as I could, “Florence (not her real name), if I have to tell you what a gentleman I am, you can be pretty sure I’m not. If I have to tell you how humble I am, you know I’ve already lost it. And if I have to keep telling you how honest I am ….”

Wow, she got really mad at me and stormed out of the room—which proved my point. Actually, she came back and we remained friends.

It’s amazing the lies we tell ourselves and the amount of denial we are in—in order to avoid facing the painful reality of the truth.

Jeffrey Gitomer agrees. He said, “My experience has shown me that if you have to say what you are, you probably aren’t. Think about that for a moment. ‘I’m honest,’ ‘I’m ethical,’ even ‘I’m the boss,’ or ‘I’m in charge,’ usually indicates just the opposite.”

What freedom and release we find when we have the courage to admit our faults, sins, and problems—not as a means to put ourselves down—but as a means to quit the merry-go-round trap of denial, and grow in love and maturity. It’s amazing what being honest and becoming real will do for improving our relationships—both with God and others! Denial is a mask to hide behind but masks can’t relate. Only real people can. Furthermore, only God can help us to the degree that we are honest with ourselves and with him. It’s the only way to live life to the full!

Suggested prayer: “Dear God, please help me to be open-faced, honest and real—with myself, others, and above all with you. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus’ name, amen.”

1. John 1:47 (NIV).