Anger
Practice the put off/put on principle – Ephesians 4:31-32, “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”
If you are going to get long term victory over anger you must put the right practices in its place so that it has no room to come back in. to illustrate this I want you to consider this drawing, here you have the negative actions listed in Ephesians 4:31, bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour (repeated loud outbursts), evil speaking (talking bad about someone or something, and malice (intent to do harm).
In order to put these things off you are to put in their place what is listed in verse 32. Kindness, tenderheartedness and forgiveness. Let’s talk about his issue of forgiveness for just a moment so that you understand forgiveness as God does.
There are basically 3 options for forgiveness that are practiced.
One is logical forgiveness, this means that you forgive because it makes sense to forgive. It would be bad for you if you didn’t forgive and thus the reasonable thing to do is let it go and move on. The problem with this is that eventually it doesn’t make sense any more. This is what Peter was questioning when He asked Jesus how often should I forgive my brother, is seven times enough? Jesus blew Peter’s mind when He said, seven times seventy. Let’s be honest tonight the idea of forgiving someone seven times for the same offence is far more than what most of us would be willing to do. I think the rule in America is three strikes your out. There does come a point where forgiveness doesn’t make logical sense.
The second type of forgiveness is emotional forgiveness, that is I feel like forgiving. I don’t feel like being angry any more so I am going to just let it go and forgive. The issue here is that feelings also change. This is why I heard a man say once that when his wife got angry at him she became historical, she brought up everything he had ever done. She felt like forgiving him at the time but she didn’t feel like it at that time. Emotional forgiveness doesn’t work any better than logical forgiveness.
The only type of forgiveness that actually works is spiritual forgiveness and that is what Paul was speaking about in Ephesians 4:32. He said there forgive even as God for Christ sake has forgiven you. Notice that God’s forgiveness is not based upon his thinking or feelings, it is based upon the action of Jesus Christ dying on the cross to pay for sin. It is a legislative forgiveness. It counts the payment of Christ sufficient to cover any offense. When a person comes to God and asks forgiveness He doesn’t have to think about it, He doesn’t weigh how He feels about them or what they have done, He has already made up His mind that He will extend forgiveness to everyone for everything based upon the fixed and never changing basis of Christ dying on the cross to pay the penalty of sin.
