“As you were preaching about justice, I felt an anger rise up in me of how I had been taken advantage of both by humans and demons,” a participant told me.

My heart was warmed. That lengthy message was the culmination of years of study, and my participant had long struggled to find anger for the trauma forced upon them. “If that’s all the fruit that comes from that message, then preaching it was worth it,” I smiled.

I find that people struggle to find anger for their trauma for two primary reasons:

1. The demons have used their trauma to take away their self-worth, causing them to believe that they’re not important enough to be angry over.
2. Their Christian upbringing has taught them the value and importance of forgiveness and peace, but has altered such practices to be void of anger.

Peace that hasn’t dealt with the depth of one’s pain is a peace that is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14; 8:11). When your pain is emotional, there should be some anger buried somewhere in the story. The fact that you have to forgive someone means something happened that was not right. It implies that injustice has happened. Some level of anger should be expected.

But on the flip side, you need to “be angry and do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26). Jesus, for example, funneled his anger in a prophetic and righteous way. More often than not, he channeled it toward oppressive religious leaders. God-in-flesh could not stand seeing his words in the Scriptures twisted against the poor. It made him very angry. But being sinless (2 Corinthians 5:21), he didn’t let this anger lead him to partner with Satan in any way. Like the Psalms, we need to be able to express all of our emotions to God and then let God heal us.

This is not typically the case with the majority of us, which is why we need to quickly deal with our anger before the sun goes down each day (Ephesians 4:26). Most of us are prone to anger. We get stuck there, and we don’t come out. In time, our anger turns to bitterness, rage, unforgiveness, and murder. Instead of taking our anger to the Holy Spirit to mold it into something prophetic and healing, we take it before demons who turn us into hateful people.

All of this being said, while it’s true that I more often have to teach people to stop being angry, every once in a while I have to teach people to find their hidden anger so that we can deal with it appropriately.