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From Eugene Peterson, Living the Message (San Francisco: Harper Publications, 1996), May 30th
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ANGER IS OUR SIXTH SENSE
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“Go ahead and be angry.  You do well to be angry–but don’t use your anger as a fuel for revenge.  And don’t stay angry.  Don’t go to bed angry. Don’t give the Devil that kind of foothold in your life.”  Ephesians 4:26-27
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Anger is  most useful as a diagnostic tool.  When anger erupts in us, it is a signal that something is wrong.  Something isn’t working right. There is evil or incompetence or stupidity lurking about.  Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighborhood.  Diagnostically it is virtually infallible, and we learn to trust it.  Anger is infused by a moral/spiritual intensity that carries conviction: when we are angry, we know we are onto something that matters, that really counts.  When God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry?” Jonah shot back,  “I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” [Jonah 4:9]
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What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside us or inside us.  We usually began by assuming that the wrong is outside us–our spouse or our child or out God has done something wrong and we are angry.  That is what Jonah did, and he quarreled with God.  But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us–wrong information, inadequate understanding, underdeveloped heart.  If we admit and face that, we are pulled out of our quarrel with God into something large and vocational in God.