When you are angry

I have just finished reading Wayne Mack's book Anger and Stress Management and I highly recommend it. If you struggle with anger or want to ministers to others who do, this is a must read! After dealing with sinful anger in our lives and then teaching us how we can use anger as a God-given emotion to deal with problems biblically today, his fourth chapter in the book encourages us to ask so that we can "be angry and sin not" (Ephesians 4:26). His counsel is to ask six questions when you realize that you are becoming angry so that you can turn anger from something destructive to something constructive. Here are the six set of questions.

• What is happening?
• What are my thoughts about what is happening? Am I interpreting what is happening or not happening through a biblical grid or am I leaning to my own understanding?
• What do I want that I'm not getting or what I am I getting that I don't want? What compelling desires of mine are driving me, ruling me, demanding to be fulfilled? What compelling desires of mine are being thwarted? What desires of mine have become demands?
• Right now, what am I being tempted to do? (Possible answers: yell, withdraw, give someone a piece of my mind, pout and sulk, run away or quit, brood or fret, be irritable, malicious, stubborn or uncooperative, take alcohol or drugs, get revenge or be overbearing?"
• How do my thoughts and intentions and potential response to the circumstances I'm confronting line up with Scripture? What would be the biblical, God-honoring response to this situation?
• What will I choose to do at this time? Will I choose to obey God or self? Will I do God's will and please Him or will I do my will and please myself?

"Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you." Ephesians 4:31-32, ESV