Bible Gateway Blog

By Brant Hansen

Why isn’t righteous anger ever listed among the things that a Spirit-filled life will bring us? If it’s righteous, why is it not akin to the “fruit of the Spirit,” like love, joy, peace, and gentleness? Why is anger in Scripture so consistently lumped in the other lists with things like, say, slander and malice, with no exclusions for the “righteous” variety? (See, for example, Colossians 3:8).

We aren’t to just pretend anger away or feel guilty for the initial emotion of anger. But we are to deal with it, with the goal of eradicating it within us. This, of course, is not easy to do, but it’s not complex to understand, either.

Few ever present the radical implications of what it means to die to ourselves and what it means to practice a lifestyle of forgiveness. “Stepping out of anger,” Dallas Willard says, “means you are surrendering your will to God. It means you have accepted that you don’t have to have your way.”[1] When I’ve read commentaries on Ephesians 4:31, where Paul says to get rid of bitterness, anger, evil speaking, and so on, the commenter very often inserts the word unreasonable before anger. But that’s not in the text, and the commenter doesn’t extend the “unreasonable” standard to anything else on the list. (What about “unreasonable bitterness”?)

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