It's Allowed to Be Angry With God, and Here's How to Pray

The anger is already praying itself

You do not need to find the right opening line. You already have one, and it is not thank you. It is closer to how could you let this happen, or where were you, or why him and not her, or why now, of all the times you needed something to go right. You have not said it out loud in those words yet, not to God, because it feels like the one thing prayer is not allowed to hold. So you sit there with your hands folded and your jaw tight and say nothing, which is its own kind of prayer, just not an honest one.

We want to say something plain before anything else: this is allowed. Not encouraged as a permanent address, not the whole of prayer, but allowed. You have not committed some quiet blasphemy by feeling it. Scripture does not flinch from anger, and it does not ask you to pretend it away before you're permitted to speak.

God asked the question first

Long before anyone wrote a rule about anger, there is a story about the first person to feel it in the Bible, and how God responded.

As time passed, Cain brought an offering to the LORD from the fruit of the ground. Abel also brought some of the firstborn of his flock and of its fat. The LORD respected Abel and his offering, but he didn't respect Cain and his offering. Cain was very angry, and the expression on his face fell. The LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why has the expression of your face fallen? If you do well, won't it be lifted up? If you don't do well, sin crouches at the door. Its desire is for you, but you are to rule over it." Cain said to Abel, his brother, "Let's go into the field." While they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and killed him.

Genesis 4:3–8

Notice the order. Cain is angry first. God does not open with a rebuke for the feeling. God opens with a question, an invitation to say what's going on. What comes next in the story is terrible, and it is Cain's own choosing, not the anger itself. The warning is about what waits at the door if the anger is left to sit unspoken and untended. It is not a warning against feeling it in the first place.

That question is still open. Why are you angry. You are allowed to answer it, to God, honestly.

Be angry, and don't sin

There is a phrase for this, sitting inside a longer passage about how people who belong to each other should live.

Therefore, putting away falsehood, speak truth each one with his neighbour, for we are members of one another. "Be angry, and don't sin." Don't let the sun go down on your wrath, and don't give place to the devil. Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, producing with his hands something that is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need. Let no corrupt speech proceed out of your mouth, but only what is good for building others up as the need may be, that it may give grace to those who hear. Don't grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander be put away from you, with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you.

Ephesians 4:25–32

This was written to a church, people who were supposed to be family to one another and kept treating each other like strangers, sometimes worse. Paul is not telling them anger will never happen among people who love each other. He assumes it will. What he asks is what they do with the day it happens: don't let it go underground, don't let it sit in the dark until it curdles into something meaner than the original hurt.

That is worth carrying into a prayer, not because your relationship with God is identical to a church argument in Ephesus, but because the same danger applies. The problem was never going to be the anger itself. The problem is what happens to anger that has nowhere honest to go.

What the quiet is for

There is a shorter instruction, from a psalm, about what to do with strong feeling at the end of a hard day.

Stand in awe, and don't sin. Search your own heart on your bed, and be still. Selah. Offer the sacrifices of righteousness. Put your trust in the LORD.

Psalm 4:4–5

This was written by someone under real pressure, people working against him, and the counsel is not to perform calm he doesn't feel. It is to be still long enough to search what is actually in his own heart, and say that, before anything else gets offered. Not a tidied version. The true one.

You do not need a devotional voice for this. You need the true state of the thing, named, in the quiet, before God, at the end of the day it happened on.

Words for tonight, not a script

You don't need a formula. You need permission to say plain things, the way plain things get said elsewhere in Scripture when the stakes are high and there's no time for careful phrasing.

On me, my lord, on me be the blame! Please let your servant speak in your ears. Hear the words of your servant.

1 Samuel 25:23–35

Abigail is not talking to God here. She is talking a furious man down from a decision he cannot undo, and she does it by speaking plainly and fast, not by managing her tone until it sounds acceptable. That is the shape worth borrowing. Say the plain thing. Not the polished thing.

Tonight, that might sound like: this hurt, and I don't understand it. Or: I am angry about what happened, and I still don't know what to do with that. Or, simplest of all: I am angry, and I am still here.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Staying in the room, even furious, is not nothing.

If the anger is about real harm

Not all anger is the same weight, and it matters to say that plainly. If what you're carrying is irritation, a grudge, a small wound picked at until it's bigger than it was, then the counsel to be slow to anger, to overlook an offence, to rule your own spirit, is worth sitting with.

He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a quick temper displays folly.

Proverbs 14:29

But if what happened to you was real harm, an abuse, a betrayal, an injustice that cost you something you cannot get back, your anger is not the same category of thing, and it should not be managed down as though it were. Scripture never asks you to treat what was done to you and your grief over it as morally equal. Naming that difference honestly, to God, is not the opposite of faith. It may be closer to the beginning of it.

If you want somewhere to put words to what happened, in more detail than we've room for here, you can start one at /pray, or look through what others are sitting with at /prayers.

One sentence for tonight

You do not need to resolve the anger before you pray. You need one honest sentence. Something like: God, I am angry about this, and I am telling you instead of burying it. Say that much. That is a real prayer, and it is allowed to be the whole of it tonight.