Emotional Intelligence: Taming Your Anger

I think before we get started in this series called Emotional Intelligence, I have to say that I know that in this auditorium there are people on two extremes of the pendulum when it comes to emotions.

There are some of you here that are super emotional. You are very in touch with your feelings and make most of your decisions based on feelings. Your emotional nature affects the way you worship. It affects the way that you do Valentines Day. You have already bought a Valentine's card, chocolates and can't wait to give that along with a long romantic note. You see chick flicks and cry openly when you watch them. You trust feelings and go by feelings and lead your life often times by feelings.

Then on the other side of the pendulum there are those of you that have a strong distrust of feelings. You suppress your feelings and are much more cerebral in the way that you make decisions. Some people would call you stoic because you don't like to show your emotions. It comes out in the way you worship and comes out in the way you marry. It comes out in the way you express yourself. Anytime someone goes to hug you, it's like hugging a board.

So the question is, which is right? Is it all feelings or is it all brains, head and intellect? What is the right way to operate our lives? Well, I think that in order to find the answer, we have to go to Scripture and look at the way God originally designed us.

We were created in the image of God. The way that we're wired is after the creator himself. God gets angry. Did you know that? God gets sad. God gets happy and excited. He gets impatient. All of those emotions that you and I feel are already in God because God is the author of emotions. Therefore, God has given us emotions. So all the emotions that you feel right now and all the emotions that you've been through this week have been engineered by God.

What is Anger?

Having said that, whatever God creates, he creates good. We can pervert the good that God creates, but he creates it for a purpose. Today we're going to be talking about anger. Anger is not bad or good but neutral. Anger is merely an emotion. It's what happens in our anger that can be good or bad. God gets angry and God does not sin.

Anger is an emotion. What kind of emotion is it? Anger is the strong emotion accompanied by feelings of strong bursts of energy. It can be characterized by great displeasure, indignation, hostility, wrath and sometimes even rage. There have been a lot of characterizations of people that get angry; from blowing their lid off to a big red face or steam coming out of someone's head. What we know is that when you get angry, there is this pent-up energy that wants to explode, you want to do something with that energy. Anger is an emotion that can turn into a constructive force or a destructive force.

For example, let me give you a constructive, positive example of anger. A while back I saw on a television program with reporter, John Quiñones. The program is built around the idea of creating mock scenarios with actors.

In this particular scenario, they hired an actor that was a big man that acted as though he was intimidating a woman on a park bench, while shaking her and verbally abusing her. They were both actors but the people walking by didn't know they were actors. Most people walked by and tried to stay out of their way and did nothing about it. But there was one little lady who walked by that was a lot smaller than the big, strong guy that was intimidating this woman. She walked by, stopped and saw what was going on. She then confronted the big man by saying, "You should leave this woman alone. What are you doing? I'm going to call the police now."

You could tell, as she talked, she was getting more and more angry. Finally, she stood between this big guy and the woman. He towers two or three feet above her, but she's got her finger shaking in his face and saying, "You had better not touch her. I'm going to call the police." She was angry and in her anger, she took action for justice.

Now that's a positive. I'm sure that if she had not become angry, she probably wouldn't have dared to confront this big guy. But there's something about anger that gives you confidence, boldness and bursts of energy to do things that normally you would not do.