As I said previously, every form of false peace has to do with “keeping the peace”—holding tight to the things we wrongly believe are peace, lest we lose them. This anxiety over the possibility of losing our peace, ironically but predictably enough, destroys our peace: We worry. We fear. We get angry. We strike out against any foe, real and imaginary, which threatens to take our peace away.
There are a lot of worried Christians, fearful Christians, and angry Christians out there. All of them think they have peace; all of them are fighting tooth and nail to cling to their various forms of false peace; all of them are of course alienating their fellow Christians (and pagans; that’s a given) in the process. They produce none of the winsome fruit which makes people ask, “What’s your secret?” People are very happy to let ’em keep their secrets—and themselves—to themselves.
This might be you. It used to be me. I speak from experience: I had no peace. For a long time, I fought off God’s attempts to give it to me, as I was pretty convinced I had it already. But I had no such thing. I had fake peace, and in the process of defending it I produced mostly anger. Less obvious was the fear and worry, but they were still there, and affected me just as much. So I’m pretty good at detecting them in others, ’cause I had ’em in myself.
So that’s the three issues I’m gonna focus on today: Worry, fear, and anger. These are our warning signs that a Christian lacks peace. (And gentility and self-control, but mainly peace.)
Negative emotions.
Each of these things—worry, fear, and anger—are emotions. They’re the knee-jerk emotions people automatically feel towards things which threaten them. They’re part of our naturally occurring defense mechanisms. But like selfishness, which gets twisted into sin, these mechanisms have likewise been twisted into going far beyond God’s original intent, towards evil.
Because they’ve been twisted, there are in fact positive aspects to each of these things. We should feel unease, or worry, when we’re about to do the wrong thing; when we’ve chosen the wrong thing to do, and there’s something at the back of our minds nagging us about it. (Sometimes that’s the Holy Spirit.) We should be afraid, on logical and rational grounds, of things which really could harm us when we’re not careful: The fear of God is a good example. And lastly anger: It’s a natural self-defense mechanism, where when your back is against the wall and you need to fight your way out of a situation—or defend your loved ones—your emotions are so ramped up that you don’t care about your fears and worries anymore; you simply must fight. But in our sin-plagued world, we worry about the wrong things, we cower before irrational fears, and most forms of anger aren’t at all righteous.
Gentleness, or gentility, is the fruit of the Spirit whereby we are in control of our emotions. When we’re gentle like the Spirit wants, we know we’re never to lose our heads when we’re angry, or fearful, or worried. We know all these supposed threats to our peace aren’t really threats—for if it’s true peace, God is in control and has the situation in hand; and if it’s not really peace, we ought to be rid of it anyway.
But when we lack gentility, we don‘t clamp down on our inappropriate emotional reactions. And our worry, fear, and anger tends to be way out of proportion to the perceived threat. We want our foes gone, preferably disgraced, even dead. We want Roman-style peace: Crucify anyone who causes a disturbance. Wipe all your enemies off the face of the earth, and then you’ve no more enemies to fight. That is, until you can find some more enemies. Or make some more.
Angry Christians.
Most of the angry Christians I know get very upset about politics. That’s what triggers their anger most. They figure the direction of our country isn’t going the way it should: It’s headed in too liberal, or too conservative, of a direction. Too many people given rights they don’t deserve, whether it’s the wealthy or the welfare queens. Too many politicians are dirty liars, and why can’t the masses recognize this and stop voting for them? And so their rants usually go, and it doesn’t take much to set ’em off.
As I said, I know from experience. I used to be a political junkie myself. It took very little to make me angry about all the injustice in the world—or at least the things I considered unjust. My anger made me want to fight, want to go to war—with words and political actions, not guns and pointed sticks. But I know plenty of people who’d have no trouble grabbing sticks and guns, if that’s what it takes. If it means a fight, a war, they’re ready.
And war—even a righteous war—is a really obvious antithesis of peace. There should be no such thing as a warmongering Christian. Yet not only do we have such creatures, we have plenty of Christians who defend their itchy trigger fingers. Plenty of men claim God meant for men to fight battles; that he made us wild, adventurous warriors predestined to fight for justice. But when God originally created humans, there was no injustice to fight: Men were meant to care for the world and one another, just as God cares for us. Not battle everyone and everything. That’s Norse theology, not Christian.
Now, plenty of folks (and in the past, me among them) are quick to point out anger isn’t a sin. After all, in Psalm 4.4 David wrote, “In your anger do not sin.” (Or at least he did in the 1984 edition of the NIV, which Paul still “quotes” in Ephesians 4.26 NIV.) Jesus got angry more than once. The LORD got downright wrathful with the Hebrews a bunch of times. So you can be angry, with righteous anger, and not sin. Right?
Yeah, technically it’s possible. But it’s a lot like saying, “You can smoke marijuana and not get stoned. Right?” Indeed you can. But who does that? Getting stoned is the whole point of marijuana. And biologically, the whole point of anger is to fight—regardless of fear and danger, and thanks to our fallen world, regardless of reason. We fight to defend all sorts of things, including sinful things. The fears and dangers we dismiss are sometimes the fear and danger of falling into sin. We get too angry to care about being careful, lest sin conquer us. (Ge 4.6-7) We let sin win: We have issues to defend, come hell or high water.
But our fruit betrays us. Regardless of how just our cause might be, our actions are rarely loving, patient, good, or self-controlled. They look far more like works of the flesh run wild—followed by plenty of excuses why it was, in just this one instance, okay to behave like a devil.
Anger is dangerous. It’s why “In your anger do not sin” isn’t a justification for anger, but a warning: Nearly every Christian lacks the self-control necessary to wield anger. God can; Jesus did. We suck at it.
And once we commit evil for our cause—because in our anger, we weren’t being careful—we’ve ruined our cause. The ends never justify the means. You cannot base the Kingdom of God on actions which God wholly opposes. It does not work. So in your anger, it might be best to not do anything. Talk it over with God. Have him get the rage out of your system. Have him give you his peace. Then act—but in God’s peace, not in your own anger.
Fearful Christians.
Elsewhere I wrote about the Fear—the meaningless panic we feel when we have the chance to share Jesus, but can’t bring ourselves to do it. That’s an irrational fear: We have no reason, no justification to be afraid. Yet we are.
But here’s the funny bit: When Christians experience the Fear, we frequently claim we do so have a reason for it. The circumstances didn’t look good. The person didn’t look receptive to hear the gospel. There wouldn’t be enough time to adequately share the gospel. There were argumentative skeptics around. Et cetera, ad nauseam.
Of course all these excuses came after the fact. That’s typical human behavior: We’re afraid to do something, but we’d never admit our fears. Especially irrational fears: We know they’re irrational; we know there’s no good excuse for them. And that’s kinda embarrassing. It’s humiliating to tell people, “I know it makes no sense to be afraid to fly. But I just am. So I’m not flying. So there.” Not everyone has the nerve to say such a thing, and risk other people’s lack of sympathy, or ridicule. So we say anything else. Bluntly, we lie.
For many of us, we’re so quick to make excuses, or we’ve given these excuses so often, that we’ve even come to believe these excuses. We’ve learned to lie to ourselves. We’re even pretty good at it. Plenty of us have lied to ourselves so thoroughly, it’ll take quite a bit of therapy to dig out our real motives behind our actions. Any good therapist will know right away there’s an irrational fear at the foundation, but the hard part is getting a person to admit it. People don’t want to tell on themselves. Even to people who are trying to help. Even to themselves.
There’s also the fear that once people know our irrational fears, they’ll take advantage. So we trust no one. Not other Christians. Not even God. Certainly not therapists—after all, what if there’s something really wrong with us?
You can see how this can viciously spiral into a bigger and bigger mess. A life built on lies—including the lies we tell ourselves—tends to do that. And all of this is done to escape irrational fear. There’s no good reason for any of it.
Again, I’m speaking from experience. I spent most of my childhood and youth covering up my out-of-control home life. It embarrassed me. I didn’t want to talk about it, or deal with it, or deal with the ways it bent my own behavior. I excused plenty of my rotten or strange actions with, “Well, that’s just who I am.” Well, it wasn’t how God made me. It was how I had made myself, after fearfully covering up all the embarrassing bits of my life. Took me a while to learn to stop doing that, and to just be honest. (Took a bit longer before I learned to stop horrifying people with my radical honesty. Like I regularly say, humans are creatures of extremes.) But once I stopped trying to hide things, and hide myself, all the fear that I’d be found out vanished. I had peace. And who can take advantage of your honesty once you’ve got rid of all your secrets? Nobody. Not even the devil has figured out how to do that.
This doesn’t mean you’ll be entirely free of irrational fears. (I still have a few of my own.) But it does mean you’ll be in a great place for the Holy Spirit, and fellow Christians, to patiently help you overcome these fears.
Worried Christians.
We all know not to worry. Jesus spelled it out on the Sermon on the Mount:
That’s why I tell you all: Don’t worry your minds over what you’ll eat or drink, or your body over what you’ll wear. Aren’t the mind and body meant for better things than food and clothes? Take a good look at the wild birds, which neither sow nor harvest nor bundle crops into barns: Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you better than they are? Who among you, from pure worry, can add half a meter to their length? Look closely, you who worry about clothing, at the wild lily, at how it grows, doesn’t tire, and doesn’t spin thread—I tell you not even Solomon, in all the finery he wore, was like one of them. If God dresses grass like this—today growing in the field, tomorrow tossed in the oven—isn’t far more coming to you tiny-faithed people? So don’t worry!—saying “What’ll we eat?” or “What’ll we drink?” or “What’ll we wear?” Pagans chase these things. Your heavenly Father has already known you all need all these things. First pursue God’s Kingdom and its justice, and you’ll all receive all these things. So don’t worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow will worry about itself, and today has enough evil as it is. —Jesus, Matthew 6.25-34 KWL
But it doesn’t matter what Jesus said: We worry. About the very things he told us not to worry about: About food. About clothes. About money. About bills. About dreaded responsibilities. About our families. About our personal security. About national security. About anything and everything.
The reason Jesus told us not to worry is because worry won’t solve a single problem. Some of these things are totally out of our control. Food and clothes aren’t all that hard to get ahold of. Money is trickier, but stressing over money isn’t gonna make more of it appear. Safety and security is, for the most part, an illusion: You can do everything right, and disasters happen anyway. And drudgery can’t be avoided.
If your peace is based on avoiding worries, sometimes this is the most dangerous fake peace of all. It’s the reason why so many members of my family are alcoholics. They started drinking because they figured, “Taking a break from all my worries sure would help a lot.” But they didn’t stop. And the same is true of most addicts—whether they avoid worries by overdoing it on work, on hobbies, on sex, on excitement, or on drugs and alcohol. Plenty of Christians even pursue greater and greater spiritual experiences (although they’re not actually spiritual; they don‘t know the difference between spiritual and emotional, so what they’re really pursuing are greater emotional experiences) because they’re trying to dodge worry instead of dealing with the problems which worry them. And if you threaten to take away their fake peace—namely the thing which they’re addicted to—they will fight you. Violently. Like a demon fights for its possessee.
The worried Christian doesn’t always go the addiction route. Some of them get prescriptions: They take stress-relief pills, which numb the worrying part of their brains. Now, I can understand taking medication if you physically can’t stop worrying—if there’s no form of self-discipline which can keep you from doing it, and if you don‘t get medication you’re gonna die. But Americans are in the bad habit of seeking quick fixes, and meds are just another one.
God’s solution is self-control. Accept the things you can’t change: There’s no point in worrying about the things which only God can control. So when you can’t control them, you can still control yourself. You can choose to not worry, and stop. You can devote your attention to the things you can change, or the things God permits us to change. If irrational fears keep you away from changing things, you can ask God for courage. But stick to the few things God has made us responsible for—like seeking the Kingdom.
Trying to conquer these things? Get help.
If worry, fear, and anger are serious issues for you—and they are for lots of people—you can’t tackle them alone. You need help. Not just God’s help: You need another Christian’s help.
Find a fellow Christian who has a better handle on these things than you. Someone who really has a better handle, and not just some hypocrite who looks like they have their act together. Hypocrites don’t produce much spiritual fruit, so look for fruit.
Twelve-step groups are a great source for such Christians. A lot of these groups specialize in drug and alcohol addiction, but there are plenty of groups, like Al-Anon or Celebrate Recovery, which help people who are fearful or worried. And of course an anger management group will help you when you’re angry.
If worry, fear, and anger aren’t serious issues… well, maybe they aren’t, and maybe they are. Go get a second opinion. (Preferably from someone who won’t at all be intimidated by you if you are the angry sort.) But if they aren’t, you may not need a 12-step group, but you should have another Christian in your life who can keep you accountable when you slip into anger, fear, or worry. If you don’t, get one. If you can’t—or you just can’t be honest with them—then you do have a serious issue, and do need to get serious about it.
But don’t fool yourself. Everybody has these problems, to one degree or another. You do too. You have worries; you have fears; you get angry. It’s common human behavior. The point is you don’t have to live in those states—and you never have to defend God’s peace by feeling those ways or resorting to those things. God’s peace can’t be achieved by anything in this world, (Jn 14.27) and only God can take it away—but he doesn’t want to. Pursue that peace. Fight the fake kinds.