Key points
1Anger is a universal human emotion no one has to be taught.
Pastor Pat opens with a personal story of road rage in Chicago traffic, then points out no parent has to teach a toddler how to throw a fit — anger shows up in all of us from childhood. Quotes from Ambrose Bierce, Bruce Lee, and Eleanor Roosevelt reinforce how universally people struggle to control it.
2Psalm 137 shows a real victim's anger boiling over into a cry for vengeance.
Pastor Pat walks through the psalm's background — a Jewish man enslaved in Babylon after watching Jerusalem besieged, its people starving and slaughtered. The psalm moves from tears of sadness (putting away the harps) to outright rage at Babylon and Edom, climaxing in the brutal verse 9, which Pastor Pat reads not as churchy poetry but as the raw cry of an abused survivor.
Your anger, our anger can become our prison or our passport
Illustration
Account of Jewish women resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, drawn from a book the preacher recently read, used to contextualize the Psalmist's rage
3The safest place to pour out even our ugliest emotions is in prayer to God.
Building off the shocking honesty of Psalm 137, Pastor Pat says if people remember nothing else, they should remember this — God can handle our rawest anger when it's brought to Him directly rather than acted out.
4Acknowledge your anger instead of repressing it.
Pastor Pat names this as the first of five principles: pretending anger isn't there only guarantees it will surface later, usually in an ugly way.
The safest place to pour out your emotions is in prayer to God
5Identify whether your anger is valid or invalid.
Some anger is righteous — Pastor Pat points to his work against human trafficking and the reality of children dying from treatable diseases as examples of anger that can drive real change. But he contrasts that with his own story of losing his temper at a lawnmower in front of his kids, admitting most anger is over invalid, small things, and quotes Aristotle on how hard it is to be angry at the right person, time, and for the right reason.
A story from life
Preacher describes working with the local vice squad and making a documentary on human trafficking, recounting how the stories provoked valid anger
A story from life
Preacher tells of losing his temper in front of his children on the way to school and giving them a sermonette on self-control
A story from life
Preacher recounts throwing his demon-possessed lawnmower in the backyard while his kids watched, hours after preaching self-control to them
6Restrain your immediate response.
Pastor Pat teaches that you either own your anger or it owns you, and urges people to step away and cool down before speaking or acting. He reads Proverbs 29:11, Proverbs 25:28, and Psalm 4:4 to show that unrestrained anger leaves us defenseless, like a city without walls.
You will own your anger or your anger will own you
7Do not hold on to anger — it was meant to be a visitor, not a resident.
Pastor Pat warns that storytelling and ruminating over a wrong keeps the anger tank filling until it explodes into bitterness. He shares a friend's practice of writing down the hurt and burning the paper as an act of giving it to God, and tells the story of a friend whose daughter was murdered who still has to do this repeatedly, citing Ephesians 4:26 and Romans 8:28.
If you don't control your anger, your anger will control you
Anger was meant to be a visitor, not a resident
A story from life
Preacher shares a conversation with his friend Bob, who challenged him to repent of storytelling about a recent personal injustice
8Admit your failures when your anger gets the better of you.
No one but Jesus has ever handled anger perfectly, so Pastor Pat calls people to simply say I am sorry rather than protect their pride or position. He tells how he got on his knees before his kids after throwing the lawnmower and apologized, showing that admitting failure is a position of power, not weakness.
bitterness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies
A story from life
A friend whose daughter was murdered by her boyfriend describes writing down his anger, giving it to God, and burning the paper each anniversary to prevent bitterness
A story from life
Preacher recounts a road-rage encounter on Cermak Drive in Chicago and getting revenge on the box-truck driver
Application
Pastor Pat frames the response as refusing to let anger become a resident in your life when it was only ever meant to be a visitor.
Acknowledge your anger honestly
Stop repressing or pretending it isn't there; name it as a real, human emotion before God rather than pushing it down.
Sort valid anger from invalid anger
Pause and ask whether this is a genuine injustice worth acting on or something small, like Pastor Pat's lawnmower outburst, that doesn't deserve the reaction it's getting.
Restrain your immediate response
Step away, cool down, and give yourself time before you speak or act so you don't say or do something you'll regret.
Stop the storytelling and let it go
Instead of ruminating on the wrong day after day, give it to God, write it down and hand it over (even burn the paper as a symbol), and choose gratitude instead.
Say I am sorry when you fail
When your anger gets the better of you, admit it to whoever was affected rather than protecting your pride or position; this is a position of power, not weakness.
Take it into your week
Rewind AI contributed study material from the sermon transcript; church-authored wording and verified sermon quotes keep their own source. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI
