I don’t know if you’ve noticed but when a seed falls down to the ground and dies ultimately it sprouts and takes root and if it was the seed of a plum tree we can be fairly certain that the thing that’s growing there is going to one day produce, well not apricots, not apples, not pears, we all know it’s going to produce a plum because it’s a plum tree that’s taken root and in fact it’s the root that ultimately produces the fruit.

It’s just one of those basic facts of life that actually we don’t have to think much about; the root produces the fruit and it’s it a bit like that in our hearts. If our hearts take root in goodness then we’ll produce good fruit, in bad things then we’ll produce bad fruit, in sweet things and we’ll produce sweet fruit, in bitter things and we’ll produce bitter fruit. It’s just not rocket science is it?

This week on the program we’re going to take a look at the phenomenon of anger in our society and in our lives, there was a great movie a few years ago called Anger Management. Anger is a real phenomenon in the hearts of so many people, you know how pressure builds up in life and ultimately people explode.

We have at home a pressure cooker and we cook things in it and there’s a vent and if the steam didn’t come out of the vent that pressure cooker would explode and it’s the same with us. So many people are out there venting their anger, it’s in epidemic proportions, you have road rage and supermarket rage and call centre rage. In fact this week’s program was prompted by a real life experience.

At the moment I have a couple of brothers, Greek guys, doing some painting in my old 19th century terrace, it just needed a bit of touching up and they’re doing a much bigger job, in parallel to ours, in one of the wealthiest streets in our country. This place they’re painting is a huge 5 storey mansion; they’re using a special paint that costs wait for it, $1,000.00 a tin. Unbelievable. And the houses in this street are worth between 15 and 25 million, this is where the mega wealthy live. Now lots of people in this fairly narrow street are having building work done and so it’s pretty crowded and so even though they’ve got great views and lots of money and massive mansions, there’s quite a bit of strife in this place.

The painters have been working there now for a few weeks and they were telling me that you wouldn’t believe the arguments raging between the neighbours. The house that they’re working on belongs to a couple who are in their ’70’s and they haven’t talked to their neighbours for 25 years because a 1/4 of a century ago they had an argument about some building works and all the neighbours in this street are fighting with one another. The woman that our painters are working for they’d done some work a few years before and she was very nice and now, all of a sudden everyone’s mean and nasty and horrible.

Now you stand back from that and you think that’s unbelievable, I mean these people have everything in life, there’s nothing they can’t have or buy or own really, everything their heart desires and yet there’s a spirit, well a spirit of anger and bitterness and dissention in this place. Makes you wonder what’s going on there.

I mean these two painters, I’ve used them before, they are lovely people, they do a brilliant job. They’re honest as the day is long, how can this woman be so nasty to them? I tell you what’s happened, anger and bitterness has taken root in her heart, that’s why. You let things get to you and you get angry with people over and over and over again and it’s like, it’s like bitterness takes root in your heart and the root produces the fruit.

God actually talks a lot about anger; you know it’s a word that pops up 376 times in the Bible which makes it one of the leading subjects that God talks about. Anger is something we all have to deal with and it springs up so often out of a root of bitterness. The writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament puts it like this, he says,

“Pursue peace with everyone and holiness because without them you won’t get so much as a glimpse of God. Make sure that no-one misses out on Gods grace so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble because through it so many will be contaminated.”

You see there it is, the root produces the fruit, ‘make sure that no-one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.’ When a root of bitterness takes hold in our hearts it springs up and causes trouble and contaminates everyone around us.

We all have a problem with anger some days, we do, some people more than others but the longer we let it go on the more it takes hold of our hearts and our lives and it produces bitterness and a bitter root produces bitter fruit. A root isn’t something that happens over night, it’s something we cultivate and if we don’t want it to keep growing, we have to stop feeding it. The apostle Paul puts it this way in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 26. He says,

“Be angry but don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger and don’t make room for the devil.”

See he knows, God knows we all get angry from time to time and it’s not a sin. I mean sometimes people do things and it just causes us to get angry because they’ve wronged us. But if we keep it inside, if we let the sun go down on our anger, if we keep it in our hearts and we brood over it and we work it over and over and over in our minds and we plan our revenge, that’s when it grows from a root into fruit.

The right way of handling it is just to get over it, to forgive and to move on and then we won’t be cultivating this root of bitterness which, as sure as God made little green apples, will produce fruit of bitterness because the root produces the fruit. Now this isn’t something we can do on our own, I believe we need an antidote to this venom. It’s something that heals and cleanses and just gives us a fresh perspective.

Can I just take you back to that earlier quote that we read before from Hebrews chapter 12, verses 14 and 15, where the writer says,

“Pursue peace with everyone.”

In fact that’s an active thing isn’t it? Pursue peace; go out of your way to “Pursue peace and holiness because without out them you won’t get so much as a glimpse of God and make sure that no-one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.”

See the antidote to bitterness that the apostle Paul is pointing to here is Gods grace. What’s grace? Grace is Gods unmerited favour; we’re going to talk about it a bit on the program tomorrow because it’s a really important thing. Gods grace is His unmerited favour, He has every right under the sun to be angry with you and me, a whole bunch more than He ever is and yet He sent His Son Jesus to die on that cross.

This cross is where justice meets love and turns into grace, Gods forgiveness and when we experience that grace, that’s what acts as the antidote to this root of bitterness. Without it it’s inevitable that a root of bitterness will spread out.

Anger is a real problem in this world, it’s running at plague proportions and yet it’s something you don’t hear people talk much about. Psychologists have come up with a term ‘the last straw syndrome’. People seem to do outrageously destructive things. The young teenager who shoots up his high school, the road rage that happens around the place. People are flying off the handle all over the place, it’s an epidemic.

You and I experience anger on a regular basis both when it grips our hearts and when we’re on the receiving end of someone else’s anger. Anger, fury, rage, indignation, a desire to lash out, to hurt others, a deep sense that we’ve been wronged and we have to set it right through revenge. It’s the stuff that wars are made of. So what’s the antidote? How do we deal with it decisively and end the hurt that anger causes?

Well I have to tell you I am an expert in anger management. I’ll tell you why, they say ‘once an alcoholic always an alcoholic’. People who have seemed to have overcome it talk about themselves as being recovering alcoholics, in other words it always stays with them but it’s something that they keep overcoming every day. Well for me it’s the same when it comes to anger.

My big Achilles heel, the deep flaw in my character is this anger thing. Berni’s a Type A achiever type of personality, I set goals, I chase them down, I hit targets, I move onto the next thing. That’s okay, it reflects in everything I do, the way I drive, the way I cook, I’m always planning my time, I’m always being efficient achieving the best that I can. It’s great but it has it’s down sides.

Now no matter what personality types we have each one of us, we expect everyone to be like us, I expect you to be like me and when you drive more slowly than I want you to and when you’re not as efficient as I want you to, I have a tendency to get angry. When you have my sort of personality you can be brutal about all those other people out there who just don’t meet your expectations.

It drives me nuts when the car in front of me drives just slowly enough for me to miss the green traffic light up ahead. Unbelievable, how can they do that? I just want to lean on my horn and shake my fist and find some choice words; it’s the stuff that road rage is made of. My favourite saying used to be ‘it’s so hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkey’s’.

So for the first 30 or 40 years of my life I lived in an almost constant state of anger and rage. So when I talk about dealing with anger and finding an antidote to anger I’m not talking this stuff from a text book, I’m talking from a transformed life. A life that continues to be transformed because I’m kind of like that recovering alcoholic, this is going to be a life long process in me, a process of rehabilitation that God takes me through ’cause that’s how I’m wired.

Now I love a passage out of the New Testament, the Bible, the Book of Hebrews. It talks right into this problem and it’s the place where I discovered the antidote to this venom. We had a quick look at this yesterday on the program, have a listen. It comes from Hebrews chapter 12, verse14, it says,

“Pursue peace with everyone and holiness because without them you won’t get so much as a glimpse of God. Make sure no-one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble because through it so many will be contaminated.”

That root of bitterness is what takes hold of our hearts and our lives when we fail to deal with anger. It’s like biting into a lemon and sucking out the sour juice, have you ever done that? Just thinking about it makes your eyes water doesn’t it? I remember working with a woman and she was a senior manager in Government, very competent woman but she had this, this attitude in life and this look on her face as though just before she walked out of her office she’d bitten into a lemon, she was actually that sort of a person and when a root of bitterness springs up it causes trouble.

When you plant a plum seed eventually it’s going to take root and produce plums, not apricots or nectarines or apples, plums. When we let goodness take root in our hearts it will grow good fruit, when we let bitterness take root in our hearts we’re going to grow bitter fruit. The root produces the fruit and that’s what causes trouble. It doesn’t matter so much what’s going on around us, see we can blame everyone and everything and every circumstance but really it matters on what’s happening in our hearts. That’s what determines the fruit in our lives.

Proverbs chapter 15, verse 15 says this, “All the days of the poor are hard but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.”

In other words how we respond to things, how we react to things depends on what’s going on in our heart and if we’ve allowed a root of bitterness to take hold of our heart, you know when people have hurt us in the past and we’ve missed out on things and all of a sudden we get this bad attitude, this attitude that’s like we’ve bitten into a lemon and we treat everything in the world as though we’ve just bitten into a lemon, it’s going to ruin our lives. But the antidote, the antidote is also a thing of the heart, the antidote is the grace of God.

God has every right to be angry with you and me, well we both turned our backs on Him. In fact the Bible talks a lot about the anger of God and says, ‘look, when you get angry, leave it to Him because He knows how to handle it’ but if we keep living in anger we’re going to end up with a root of bitterness. God handles His anger by a thing called grace, the unmerited favour of God.

Grace by definition is something we don’t deserve, grace is what happened on the cross where Jesus was crucified. The place where Gods justice, the punishment that we deserved, fuses with Gods love because He let His Son take the punishment and it turns into this thing called grace. He forgives us by sacrificing His Son to satisfy His sense of justice and anger, that’s the good news for us, that’s grace; it’s the antidote for bitterness and anger.

Listen again to that passage out of Hebrews,
“Make sure that no-one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.”

When we live in that grace it takes the bitterness away, it tears it out and heals it because when we come to grips with grace, when we come to grips with how much He’s forgiven us and the cost to Him of doing that in His Son, it produces a new root, a root of grace and mercy in our hearts and that starts producing a new fruit. Gods grace is the only antidote to this, this bitterness and this anger that I’ve come across.

Instead of changing the fruit, you see sometimes we try and change the outside, ’cause we can’t we need to change the root. We need to experience and drink in the grace of God and let Him produce a new fruit in our lives.

Now when we’re bringing up children we expect them to have temper tantrums. They’re never fun of course but, but a temper tantrum is part of growing up. It’s part of the process of moving from immaturity to maturity, of discovering how to exercise the responsibilities that come with new freedoms. And that’s why I believe Gods plan is to put children into loving families so that Mum and Dad who are more mature and who love the child, are there to guide the child through that growing process and the love bit helps us to absorb the pain and the inconvenience of the tantrums along the way.

It’s something I think none of us really appreciate until we become parents ourselves. Now temper tantrums are par for the course for a child or for a teenager but what about an adult, what about a person who’d supposed to have matured and learned how to control their emotions? And when you or I have a temper tantrum do we just shrug our shoulders and say ‘oh well’ or is it something we need to deal with?

We’ve all been there haven’t we? We’re all having our little temper tantrums and 99% of the time they’re over silly little things. If we were truly honest with ourselves we’d stand back and say ‘well that was dumb wasn’t it? Why did I bite my wife’s head off over something small? Why did I snap at my husband because of this tiny little thing?’

For me its the fact that I’m a perfectionist, it’s just the way I am, it was the way I was brought up. Our school motto was “Agé quod agis” which means whatever you do, do well or if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. So I always fold and hang the bath towels perfectly, when I’m dusting I pick up things on the shelf and dust under them instead of dusting around them. I’m always on time and normally 5 minutes early, I always put the milk back in exactly the same spot in the fridge not in a different place, the knives in the knife block each one has to be in its place.

When you’re a person like that God is going to make absolutely sure that He puts you in a family and a work place and into a Church where there’s at least 1 person who’s completely at the opposite end of the spectrum. Someone who’s not neat and tidy, someone who’s not always on time, it’s an absolute dead certainty that Gods going to do that. And it doesn’t matter what personality type we are He’s always going to make sure that we rub up against someone who’s different. And that is sometimes going to drive us nuts if we let it.

That’s where so many people have their temper tantrums, right in that place of difference. Instead of standing back and realising those differences we just react like Pavlov’s dogs; stimulus: response, stimulus: response, stimulus: response. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to anger and temper tantrums. Someone does something that flicks our switch off we go with this temper tantrum. I wonder if you can relate to this.

My daughter Melissa works part time on a checkout in a large department store and every time she comes home at least one customer had to have a temper tantrum at the counter over something. Let’s get a revelation today; we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people who are going to do imperfect things.

At the department store, on the road, at work, at home, at Church, everywhere we go and we can either have temper tantrums or decide, you know something I actually want to have some peace in my life. I want to enjoy my life and you know something; other people’s failures are not going to rob me of that peace. Other people falling short of my expectations are not going to rob me of that peace. You know something we want everyone to be just like us, we want everyone to see the world just the way we see the world and it’s never going to be like that.

There’s a wonderful little proverb, if you want to read it it’s in the Old Testament, Proverbs chapter 29, verse 22,

“An angry man stirs up dissension and a hot tempered one commits many sins.”
“An angry man stirs up dissension and a hot tempered one commits many sins.”

If we have a bit of a temper maybe today’s the day where we need to admit that and it’s time to deal with it, it’s time to get things into perspective. You see, those little things that we get upset about, 99.9% of them just don’t matter, really they don’t. I need this perhaps even more than you do. Temper tantrums are a sure sign that we need to do some growing up.

I’ll tell you something; God wants 3 things for our lives, a deep relationship with Him, the deep joy that comes from that relationship and for that relationship to bear good fruit in our lives, fruit that other people can be blessed through. It’s how He works, that’s how Gods economy runs and temper tantrums are a sure sign we haven’t come to grips with the main currency of that economy, the currency of grace.

There’s another proverb, Proverbs chapter 16, verse 32,
“Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper than one who takes a city.”

Isn’t that an interesting way of putting it because a warrior, the man who takes the city is someone who takes things by force through fighting and Gods saying here a patient person is better than a warrior, patience is better than taking things by force, patience is better than a temper tantrum. When we control our aggression we can be such a great influence for God in the lives of other people because they see something that they want, a peace, a quiet contentment, a joy that replaces the outbursts and that’s a beautiful thing. Humility, a grace, a sweet fragrance of God himself.

We do, we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people, fact of life, full stop, end of story, never going to change this side of eternity. People are always going to be different to us, people are always going to have weaknesses that rub us the wrong way and we have a choice. Either behaving like an immature adolescent and throwing our little temper tantrums or deciding, you know something I’m just not going to go around that mountain anymore.

“Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper than one who takes a city.”
“An angry man stirs up dissension and a hot tempered one commits many sins.”

I’m not going there anymore; it is time to flick the switch and say, ‘God I just don’t want to go there anymore.’ Can I tell you? Sometimes it is so hard just to shut up and not say anything. Sometimes we have to bite our lips so hard that they bleed. But when we draw close to God we let Him change us on the inside as we come to grips with His grace and we do away with the little temper tantrums.

Self control and patience are hard things to learn and there’s only one way of learning them, the hard way but there are fruits of the spirit of God that grow in us as we draw close to Him and co-operate with Him and lay down our right to perfection, and lay down our right to everything we expect of other people. God wants us to have peace

When you get a group of people together there seems to be, well two sorts of people there. First there’s the person who talks all the time, never shuts up and the other is the person who almost never says anything in the group. Somehow it seems that not many people seem to get the balance right, the balance between talking and listening and often the people who are really quiet in the group can be quite vocal even aggressive in a one on one situation.

Well take for instance when someone provokes us, you know when they do something and you can feel your blood boiling and you go all red in the face, right at that moment it’s so easy to spit out something venomous, words we can’t take back, words that damage a relationship. Sometimes when we’re provoked we can be a bit quick on the draw when it comes to responding.

I want to share a story with you, I remember once as a consultant, I used to run an IT consulting firm with some partners before I became a Christian. Quite a few years ago now I was being mucked around by a large and important client of a particular ethnic heritage. I was dealing with him for months trying to kick off a project that meant a lot of money for our firm, it was a large global organisation and after months of investing time and effort with the people and with their management they pulled the plug on the project.

I remember I was sitting in my office and I received an email from one of our consultants working with me on this particular project, explaining that the client had decided not to go ahead. I just blew my stack, I couldn’t believe that they had wasted so much of our time and resources and it wasn’t fair and we were losing all this revenue and I tell you, I am not afraid to admit, I had a few choice sentiments that I almost expressed in a reply to that email to my fellow consultant. I even typed this angry venomous email.

I was just about to send it and I thought better of it and instead I erased all of that and I sent a fairly benign email. Well it’s just as well because I hit the ‘reply to all’ button on the email and the email ended up not only with my fellow consultant but also with the client. Gulp! Can you imagine, my thoughts of anger had been included in this vitriolic angry email, what would have happened?

Now you might say, ‘Berni, why are you sharing this stuff with us?’ It’s simple because we all go through situations day by day by day that make us angry. People, organisations, circumstances drive us insane and we want to explode. Just the other day I was staying at a place and the houses were fairly close together and it was a little holiday place and a neighbour, a few doors down, had their music on really loud, I mean really loud. Couldn’t sit in our lounge room and just talk so I just went down and asked them if they wouldn’t mind turning it down. Well, you should have heard what came out of that guy’s mouth.

Just a simple thing, their music was too loud and obviously they’d never been taught to take other people into account and the vitriol, the words, the venom that came out of his mouth and now he just ignores me and I just asked him to turn it down and I thought, ‘hang on, you’re missing something. You were the guy who was doing the wrong thing’ and you know what I wanted to do? I just wanted to explode at him, I just wanted to tell him what I really thought, I wanted to teach him a lesson, I wanted to teach him some manners. You know the feeling don’t you? And then he ignores me, he was the one that did wrong.

Now I’m really glad that I went through that experience and as hard as it was, can I tell you? Every fibre of my being wanted to tell this guy what I thought, as hard as that was I didn’t say anything because exploding is never a good look, never but this feeling of anger is something we all experience. Some people more than others, some people are like on a hair trigger, anything will set them off, anger and tantrums are an ugly thing.

We’re talking about anger management on the program this week and there’s some really great practical input from Gods word that I want to share with you today. Comes from James in the New Testament chapter 1, verse 19. It says this,

“My dear brothers take note of this, everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because a mans anger doesn’t bring about the righteous life that God desires. Therefore get rid of all the moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you which can save you.”

Isn’t this really practical, it’s special? God’s solution to this whole anger thing, “Be slow to speak and slow to become angry.”

Slow down! Every time someone does something that annoys us we don’t have to react this instant. We don’t have to rip their heads off; we don’t have to send an angry email. Maybe this is where the advice comes from ‘count to ten’ you know.

Interesting, throughout the Bible 9 times you’ll find these words or ones very similar,
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger abounding in steadfast love.”

I’ll read it to you again; this comes from Psalm 103, verse 8.
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

What a great concept, firstly He’s compassionate and gracious, He’s slow to anger. Just hold on for a minute, cut this person some slack, this man who wouldn’t turn his music down. If I’m behaving like God I’m going to be slow to anger and the abounding and steadfast love bit, you know what I’ve decided to do? I’ve decided to pray for this guy regularly ’cause that’s what Jesus says, “Pray for your enemies“.

And be slow to speak. Just don’t say anything, don’t defend or assert or criticize or judge or belittle or shout or scream or anything. Don’t! Be slow to speak. Now that’s not easy, it begins with a change of heart, it begins by deciding that my anger is my problem. It begins by me resigning from the position of ‘tin pot little god at the centre of the universe’. It begins by deciding the world doesn’t owe me anything.

Being slow to anger and slow to respond and when we do respond, what should we say? I love this, this bit from Proverbs chapter 15, verse 1.
“A gentle answer turns away wrath but a hard word stirs up anger.”

You know when someone’s done us wrong the last thing we want to do is give them a gently answer, it just so cuts across the grain. We want to get recompense but Gods wisdom is that, ‘a gentle answer turns away wrath but a harsh word stirs up even more anger’. This is Gods wisdom and it’s really hard, it goes against the grain to bite our lip when someone else does something wrong.

It’s so hard sometimes to respond in love, I find it hard. Each time becomes a little easier, each time heals a relationship, each time people notice and one day the relationship can be so strong that we have the ability to influence this person who hurt us with the love and the mercy and the grace of God.

It’s hard to deal with anger but there’s a right way and the wrong way.

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious; slow to anger abounding in steadfast love.”

Anger is one of those basic facts of life and in many respects it’s a natural reaction to a whole range of situations. Sometimes we think that anger in and of itself is wrong, well that’s not so. See God gets angry so either God is a sinner or anger itself is not a sin. Hmm, makes you think doesn’t it? I passionately believe that Jesus Christ came and died for my sins and yours and that He was and is utterly perfect. A perfect sacrifice to pay for our sins.

And yet when He went to the temple in Jerusalem and saw that they had turned it into a bizarre He was angry, He made a whip and turned over the tables and drove the traders out of the temple with that whip. Of course God is a loving God but God is also a god of anger and ultimately, of punishment. So is anger right or wrong in our lives and what do we do with that anger?

Well, well let’s take a look at the anatomy of anger today. Basically it goes something like this; I’ve been wronged by someone, I therefore feel angry, they owe me some recompense so I’m going to respond in anger to obtain vengeance. That’s kind of the cycle and in a sense, anger comes out of our sense of justice.

Of course, as we’ve seen on the program this week we can have quite a distorted sense of justice sometimes. We can be touchy or selfish and throw tantrums and so even though actually sometimes we haven’t been wronged, people just fall short of our expectations or, or we’re being selfish and we feel wronged and then anger, justice and vengeance take hold in our hearts.

Sometimes people do things that are clearly wrong and we’re angry, okay how do we respond? The other day on the program we read this passage from the New Testament book of Ephesians, chapter 4, verse 26. It says,

“Be angry but don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger and don’t make room for the devil.”

In other words, sometimes we get angry, God knows that. The question is whether we dwell on it and let it fester over night and tomorrow and the next day and over and over and over and in doing so, whether we make room for the devil to distort our sense of justice and then this root of bitterness takes hold in our lives OR whether, like God, we’re “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”

See, anger itself isn’t a sin, God is angry with those who turn their backs on Him. You see that over and over and over again throughout the Bible. Let me read you just one example of Gods anger, this is about Israel, Gods chosen people and it comes from the book of Judges chapter 2, verse 12.

“Israel forsook the Lord, the God of their fathers, who brought them out of Egypt. They followed and they worshipped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the Lord to anger because they forsook Him and they served Baal and the other gods. In His anger against Israel the Lord handed them over to the raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them just as He had sworn to them. They were in great distress.”

See, this is Gods response to His people forsaking Him but it’s a right response. God never gets angry without just cause and this anger of God against Israel comes from Gods sense of justice. He had a relationship with Israel, they were His people, He was their God and He said,

“I’m a jealous God; you will have no other Gods before Me. You will worship me and me alone.”

And of course Israel turns away from God and does these horrible things and they experience Gods anger and yet the wonder of God is that He’s slow to anger and ready to forgive.

You know ultimately, when you and I harden our hearts against Him and our ways against Him, like Israel we will experience His anger. So how do we make sense of all of this? God gets angry but we shouldn’t? Remember anger has its roots in our sense of justice, that much we get from God because we’re made in His image. And of course, as I said, God never gets angry without just cause the problem is, we can’t say the same thing about us. Our justice gyroscope is so often out of balance and then, when we do experience anger we want to wallow in it and work it over and over in our heads and seek revenge and in doing that we make room for the devil.

Anger is a natural reaction and in some cases it’s the right reaction the problem is, when you or I are the injured party our sense of justice is questionable at best and whacky at worst. So what do we do? How do we handle it when we feel that we’ve been wronged and we want revenge? We want recompense, we want justice to be done, how do we handle that? Well, God tells us in Romans chapter 12 beginning at verse 17 have a listen, he says,

“Don’t repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what’s right in the eyes of everybody. If its possible, as far as it depends on you live at peace with everyone. Don’t take revenge my friends but leave room for Gods wrath for it is written, “It is mine to avenge and I will repay,” says the Lord. To the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry feed him, if he’s thirsty give him something to drink. In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.”

In other words leave the ‘justice’ thing to God, leave the satisfaction, the recompense, the vengeance as God puts it, to God because His sense of justice is so much better than ours and in any case who knows what He’s up to in that persons life? Only He does. When someone hurts us our initial reaction may well be anger, the same anger that God feels when He sees injustice.

The thing that’s wrong is for us to repay that evil with another evil, 2 wrongs maketh not a right and Gods saying here, ‘don’t take revenge but leave room for Gods wrath.’ Leave room for God to act ’cause Gods justice is so much better than ours, instead bless your enemy. If they’re hungry feed them, if they’re thirsty give them something to drink, show them grace.

Now we may never see the justice but then that’s why Jesus died for you and me, that was so unjust but on that cross justice meets love and its called grace. Grace has been shown to us through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on that cross, a grace He now calls us to show to others.

Yes, you and I will experience anger from time to time but we’re not to repay evil with evil, leave that bit to God. Forgive, forget, live life to the full and bless people, even the people that hurt us, with the grace that God has shown to us. You know something, I don’t think that’s too bad a plan, what do you think?