No Venting Allowed

 

A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  Proverbs 15:1 

I will never forget seeing a video on Christian Marriage.  Paul Tripp was teaching and he had a glass of water with a layer of dirt settled on the bottom of the glass.  When he shook the glass all of the water became dirty, too wet for mud, but real unappealing to look at, and as he shook it it spilled over the top of the glass.   

He compared that glass to our hearts.  When life is going along smoothly and all is well the junk in our hearts settles to the bottom and there’s no evidence that it is there.  When a little trouble or a trial comes along the heart shakes with our emotions and out of the overflow of that heart we hear what’s really in there.   

I recently heard a person say that the person they are when they are upset is not who they “really are”.  They see themselves more clearly as the gentle person who responds well when life is rolling along without any real pressing problems.  The scriptures are pretty clear that, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil,  for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.  Luke 6:45 (emphasis mine). Whenever we have bad stuff coming out it is because it is already in there ready to overflow when the emotions are spilling out.  

All of this has recently come to mind because I got into a discussion about “venting”.  I have been trying to see if I could find what the Bible says about just calling up a girlfriend and unloading all that unsettled dirt from the bottom of our hearts that spills over when the right buttons are pushed.  Is it a Biblical concept to vent?  The woman I was speaking to works with some difficult clients and we were discussing if they would “need” to vent.  She wondered about “pouring out their complaints.”   

So I looked it up. 

Not surprisingly, “vent” is not in the Bible. The dictionary.com definition of vent is “to relieve by giving expression to something”.  I see it as the spewing of emotion to get it off our chests without any real goal, except relief of feelings.  There are words like complain, grumble, and murmur.  None of those seemed like positive forms of venting.   

Job talked a  lot about complaining but in the end God asks him, “Will you even put me in the wrong?  Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?  Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?”  Job 40:8-9  God proceeds to point out to Job that He is the One that Job is complaining about.  After this confrontation with God Job says, “”I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?  Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”  Job 42:2   

In other instances in the Bible we see people crying out in anguish – it is hard to tell if it was before God or just to each other.  This happened with David and his men when they returned to Ziklag in 1 Samuel 31 to find it burned and their women and children dragged off.  After they “raised their voices and wept” David prayed and God told him what they needed to do.  This was not really anger as much as grief.   

Grumbling and murmuring are definite “no-nos” in the scriptures.  Jesus, Paul, and Isaiah all condemned grumbling but James probably says it the most clearly, in James 5:9, “Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged; behold, the Judge is standing at the door.”   

So, if we call our girlfriends to complain are we grumbling?  If so, James says we should not be doing that.   

Next  I found “pouring out our complaints.”  This is apparently acceptable if the one we pour them out to is God.  Psalms 64:1, 68:2, 102:1, 142:2,  and Lamentations 2:19 all address pouring out our complaint to God as an acceptable practice.  When people made “complaints” and they were not to God it was usually referred to in negative tones ( Job 7:11 and Acts 6:1, 18:4) .   

There is one other place that I found  the word complaint.  It is in Colossians 3.  Not only does this verse not give us license to “vent” it says to forgive the person we want to complain about.  Colossians 3:12-13 say, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”   

I do not believe that this means that we are never to discuss our problems with other people with a friend.  What I do think it means is that the goal of those conversations should not be to “vent” but to look for ways to reconcile with the person.  If all we do is pour out our complaints about people we need to examine our motives.  Do we want to turn the person we’re talking to against them because we are angry with them?  Are we hoping to keep them out of ministry or a job for some reason?  What is our motive in complaining about them?  It would seem that reconciliation is the only legitimate reason (Matthew 18:15). 

The last one I’ll bring up is from Lamentations 3:39 and it raises a lot of questions.   “Why should a living man complain, a man, about the punishment of his sins?”  Has our complaint arisen because of some sin we have committed against another person?  Sometimes in our own way we want something that someone else has or we feel intimidated or threatened by the position of another, we want them to lose status so we “vent” or “complain” to someone else.  Is our complaint the result of our sin of pride or selfishness?  Perhaps we are envying or coveting?   

If our own sinful behavior has brought on the problem, how can we complain when God gives us a wakeup call?  Then we need to remember Romans 2:4, “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” 

My final take on this is that there is need to have a trusted confidant to hear our complaint so we can determine what the Biblical response should be.  This  might be considered bearing one another’s burdens .  God always works for our good and it would seem that venting is not His idea of good for us.   

It would appear to me that Biblically speaking there is no venting allowed.