‘Uprooting Anger’ is a title that should be in every counselor’s toolkit. It covers ground familiar to most biblical counselors, but let me be clear: Unlike many of the counseling books published today, which are solid but tend to repeat the same information derived from Adams and Powlison and Mack, Jones communicates the basics of biblical counseling in a fresh way.

This is my go-to book when counseling anger issues.

Anger is something we all deal with, but few of us would acknowledge that we have an anger problem. “I’m just irritated,” we say. “Let me vent for a minute, then I’ll be fine. After all, what they did to me was wrong, and it’s important to for me to be honest with myself as I process this.”

If you’ve ever heard this in the counseling room—or said something like it yourself—then Uprooting Anger is for you.

In ten balanced chapters, pastor, seminary professor, and counselor Robert D. Jones defines anger biblically, challenges the counselee’s view of himself, draws out the heart issues, and lays out the path to repentance.

(Stick to the end for a free study guide, including counseling homework assignments.)

Key Takeaways: A Biblical Counselor’s Cheat-Sheet for Dealing with Anger

Definition: “Our anger is our whole-personed active response of negative moral judgment against perceived evil” (p. 15).

Obstacle: Angry people are self-deceived, so counselors must help remove the veil of self-deception. Jones does this, in part, by providing three biblical criteria. Righteous anger:

1. Reacts against actual sin
2. Focuses on God and his concerns, not on me and mine
3. Is accompanied by other godly qualities (p. 29)

This study begins to expose the angry person’s sinful anger to themselves, which is the first step in leading them to repentance.

Response: Jones notes that the proper response to this awareness is repentance, “not only of the anger itself, which we now discover to have been sinful anger, but also of our self-deceived justification of it in the name of ‘righteous’ anger” (p. 39).

Getting to the heart: The angry person must understand why they are angry. Statements like, “All I want…” or “If only I had…” (p. 45) are good indicators of what they are coveting (treasuring, worshipping, desiring, etc.) in their heart. Sometimes this is a sinful object, but I’ve found that more often anger arises because “it is possible to desire a good or legitimate object too much” (p. 51).

Why we fail to change: Too often our focus is, Stop ______ [bad thing], do _____ [good thing] instead.

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