“Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor: for we are members of one another. 26.Be ye angry and sin not: let not the sun go down on your wrath. 27. Neither give place to the devil.”
We all have to deal with anger. There is probably more misunderstanding about this emotion than about any other. In our text, Paul assumed that we would be angry about one thing or another. After all, the first emotion that we express is anger. Think about it, when babies are born the first thing that they do is cry. I think that this is because they were taken from a nice comfortable, nourishing womb, where they had a constant supply of sustenance. It is no wonder that they are angry. What Paul wanted to warn against was that anger not take over their lives. There are some people who are angry all of the time. These are not happy people. What can we, or should we, do with anger? The first thing we need to do is to admit that something, or someone, has made us angry. We are so afraid of our anger that we do not want to even admit that it is present. What happens in these cases is that we suppress anger, and it joins all of the other anger in our psyche, and it becomes part of who we are. If we are angry about something, we just need to admit it. We don’t have to act on it, but we do need to admit its presence. The second thing we need to do is to get over it. Paul wrote: “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” What this means is that if we are angry with someone, we should pray about it, give it to the Lord, then go talk to the person that we are angry with. We need to learn to express our anger like Christians. If we hold in that anger that we have toward a person, it will grow and grow until it becomes hatred. We need to remember Paul’s admonition in Ephesians 4:15: “speak the truth in love.” This is why I wrote that we need to pray about the anger and give it to the Lord, then go and talk to the person about it. If we go in a spirit of hostility, we will just start a fight and nothing will be accomplished. The third thing is that we need to realize that when we do not deal immediately with our anger, it just festers and grows and takes over our lives. Think about some of the things that you have been angry about. At first, the anger might have been realistic and justified, but when it was held inside it grew until it was beyond justification. When anger is held in it becomes hatred, and as it piles up, it becomes malice. Malicious people are simply filled with hatred. We see it tragically portrayed in mass murders. People who go on a rampage and kill people are simply eaten up with anger that was not dealt with. I’m not hinting that you might go on a shooting spree, but I am hinting that your anger can make you do and say things that you will regret later. You have probably already experienced what I just wrote. The fourth thing is that we need to realize that the devil is aware of our anger, and it is he who makes it multiply in our lives. Paul wrote: “neither give place to the devil.” This means that if we “let the sun go down on our wrath,” we will make ourselves susceptible to the devil. When we are so angry that we want to do harm to people, say ugly things about and to them, or maliciously spread gossip about them, we have been used of the devil. When we give place to anger, we give place to the devil. He is lurking about in our lives, taking all of the events of our lives and trying to turn them into sin. Remember, anger is not a sin, but when we “give place to the devil,” it becomes sin. Think of all the harm that such anger has done to families, churches, businesses, schools, etc. We do not want to be a part of that. Take Paul’s advice: “Be angry and sin not.” Admit anger, deal with it and, by all means, get over it. Bro. Joe
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AuthorDr. Joe Beauchamp is the author of this blog and website. Categories
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