Sermon Tone Analysis

If you have never seen or heard of one of these before it sounds crazy.

A room dedicated to be able to just smash things to get out some of the anger and stress that you may have been dealing with.

Anger and stress is a major problem in our society.

According to a Gallup poll, 77% of people in America said that they experience anger and stress on a regular basis.

There’s just so much tension, so much conflict in our world.

You may have tension at home, tension at your work place.

Conflict with a friend, Conflict with family.

And on a grander scale there’s racial tension, and political tension, and economic tension and…traffic.

There’s all these polarizing, hot button issues, that can really get people heated and ready to go to war in an instant.

As I was browsing articles preparing for the sermon, I came to the conclusion that in general our personal anger comes from one of two places.

It’s relationships and or circumstances.

There is someone that said something, or thinks something, or did something that you don’t think it right so you become angry at them.

Or there is some situation that you are going through that is frustrating.

Our natural fleshly reaction is to lash out in anger, to unleash our wrath upon all those in our path, and we end up doing things or saying things that we will regret or maybe we should regret later.

If you are hear this morning and there is something that has your skin boiling, I’m sure it can be tied to either a specific person or a situation.

As a follower of Christ, we need to know how to bridle our anger and deal with our conflicts in a godly way.

We are continuing our series living our best life in which we are learning from the book of James what it means for us to live our best life as a follower of Jesus Christ.

James writes in

Introduction

As we continue in the book of James and learning how to live our best life as a follower of God.

Up to this point, James has talked about how our faith should affect how we handle trials and temptations.

And now, James touches on another area in our life that should be transformed by our commitment to following Christ.

Conflict and anger.

At first glance, it seems that these verses are kind of randomly placed in this chapter, but after thinking about it.

The placement makes perfect sense.

It’s when we are going through a trial or difficult time that we are to most tempted to lash out at others and at God. Remember the people that James were writing to were those that had to flee their home due to persecution.

Many of them could have been struggling finding places to live, and jobs to provide for themselves and their families.

You can imagine that the tension was high.

It seems that they may have been quarrelling with each other.

I can just imagine the wife who was upset at her husband because the new place they moved to didn’t have such and such that her old house had.

Some of them were probably angry with God about there current current circumstances maybe thinking that if they would not have chosen to follow Jesus they could still be home.

These people were going through it.

And James tells them to first count it all joy,

and then he says don’t be angry as he transitions into how to hear and apply God’s word.

I know that there are some very frustrating situations going on in people’s lives in this room.

I know that many of you probably have legitimate reasons to be angry, but we must know how to deal with that emotion in the correct way.

This morning’s message is Living your best life is Controlling your temper, not reacting in anger.

Transition: First, Let’s look at the right response

James 1:

I. Right Reaction

So after reminding his readers that they are the first fruits of God’s creation, he tells them how they should respond to the things and people that are frustrating them.

Transition: First, he says they need to be quick to hear

A. Quick to hear

Now some of us may feel like we do all of this

Now some of us might have the idea of quick to hear wrong.

Some of you are trying to listen quickly, meaning you are trying to get the other person to talk quickly, so that you can go ahead and give your response, but that is not at all what this means.

Being quick to hear has the idea of listening intently.

Its saying that we are to be eager to hear what the other party has to say.

As I just said, I think a lot of the time we are listening so that we can respond, not listening so that we can learn.

When we are truly quick to hear, we may learn things about the person that we are in conflict with that we didn’t know before.

They may drop some truth or wisdom on us that we needed to hear.

So really, listening is beneficial to us.

But it also shows the other person that you genuinely care about their concern.

Often, the fact that the other person knows that you want to hear their concern can diffuse the situation.

Transition: Next, he says we need to be slow to speak.

B. Slow to speak

This phrase is pretty self-explanatory.

We need to learn how to keep our big mouths shut.

The language has the idea of someone who may have a mental disability so it takes them a while to process information before they speak.

So essentially, its saying “Think before you speak”.

The problem is that most of us aren’t struggling with a mental disability so we speak without taking the time to process information.

It doesn’t help that we live in a culture that really celebrates the quick comebacks.

We live in a culture that encourages us to just speak our mind.

It doesn’t matter if what you say is good, bad, brings peace or stirs up strife, as long as you think its true.

Say whatever you feel.

It celebrates tirades, and cussin people out, and “Giiiirl, yo told her” I know none of ya’ll do that, but that’s often how people express frustrations.

Listen to the local hiphop station for five minutes and you’ll hear it.

The message of many of the songs is I do whatever I want, I saw whatever I want, if you don’t like it then - forget you to put it in nicer terms.

As people of God, we can’t buy into that.

We can’t celebrate that, and we definitely don’t need to do that.

A verse that many of us have heard, but maybe you need to commit to memory is

The mouth is a dangerous weapon, and that’s why James warns us that we should use it cautiously.

We can either intensify as situation or diffuse a situation depending on our speech.

Transition: The right reaction is being quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

C. Slow to anger

Really this is a summation of being quick to listen and slow to speak.

We should not be the people that are flying off the handle, always on edge, ready to blow our top the moment something makes us upset.

There are probably certain things that people do or say that immediately get you triggered, but we can’t allow those things to cause us to overreact.

We instead need to have patience and be longsuffering.

But notice this, the Bible does not tell us that we cannot be angry.

Anger itself is not wrong.The Bible speaks about God’s anger all the time.

Most of you have probably heard how Jesus was angry in the temple and turned over the tables and drove out the moneychangers.

Anger is a natural emotion that all of us experience and it is not sin, but our motivations for anger and our expression of anger can be wrong.

There is a such thing as righteous anger, but we need to understand when it is ok for us to be angry and when it is not.

This can be a tough question to answer, but I think that James gives us a general guideline in

Verse 20 tells us a good reason why

The anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God, and we can infer from that statement that the godly anger does produce the righteousness of God.

The test of whether or not our anger is righteous is where does it comes from and what is produced.

Again, this is why its good for us to be slow to anger.

We need to stop and think, what am I going to accomplish by being angry?

You see much of our anger that we deal with is centered in pride and entitlement.

“I can’t believe they said that to me, Don’t they know who I am?” “I’m a good person, I don’t deserve to be in this situation” “This person is driving, so slow in the fast lane, I’ve got somewhere to be…” Got some of ya’ll there.

Most of the time when we blow up in anger, it’s not because we are trying to produce righteousness in ourselves or in others.

It’s because we want them to know who we are, what we deserve, how we’ve been inconvenienced and that nobody is going to tell me anything.

We want to intimidate people and show them that you can’t mess with me because I mean business.

It’s all about us, and lifting up ourselves.

The Bible says in

If we are angry, it should be because there is something that is happening that is unjust, unrighteous, or something that takes glory away from God.

In other words, its good for us to be angry at things that make God angry.

This includes when people openly oppose God like David’s anger with Goliath.