Is it really healthy to be angry and sin not? I’m starting to wonder how much damage that adage has caused over the centuries.

I’m pretty sure the elderly folk at church waved this passage in front of me during my turbulent twos (which my parents claim lasted for ten years). For most of my life, I thought ‘be angry and sin not’ meant Christians couldn’t get angry. And since I got angry a lot, I figured I wasn’t a very good Christian. During my childhood, and even my years of parenting young ones, no one had heard of emotional intelligence. We didn’t know about a lot of things back before the Information Age.

But now we know better, so doing better presents a better option. While echoes of the Bible verse still linger in my head as I feel my temper rising, a recent look at Ephesians 4:26 has made me study the passage more closely. Whoever thinks Christians can’t get angry probably hasn’t spent much time reading the Bible. After all, God created us in his image, and he gets angry a lot.

This leads us to rethink the adage or the custom of Christians not getting angry. Ok, maybe I’m the only Christian who grew up thinking anger is a bad emotion. Unfortunately, I think the devil enjoys watching us suppress our emotions (especially the ones we need to deal with in healthy ways). Listen to today’s podcast and let me know what you think!

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive at Work and Life by Susan David, PhD.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Besser van der Kolk, M.D.

Examples of God getting angry: Exodus 4:14, Exodus 15:7, Exodus 32:10-12, and Leviticus 26.

Join me next week as I continue this series on anger and share some guidelines for getting angry.

Is it a sin for Christians to get angry? #anger #christians
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