Monday, May 30, 2016

Is Anger Your Treasure?

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It feels good to be angry.

It’s a rush of energy: the confidence that you are right, letting someone know your displeasure, and the momentary satisfaction that revenge provides.

It feels good, but we don’t stop to think about the cost. What we think in private and the way we look at the world when no one is watching affects the core of our being.

I remember holding a grudge for years. It felt good to unleash on the person in my mind in battles I always won, and it felt good to shun them in public for what they had done to me, but it was affecting me to the core. My curses affected me more than it did them – my anger led me to a great dissatisfaction with life and opened the door for more and more sin.

Jesus said that the eye is the lamp of the body, and if your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body is full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22-23).

In this context, if all you view is revenge and anger, and you’re the person who wants to give people what they deserve, it will cause your whole life to be full of darkness and in the end it will kill you. Jesus was betrayed by such a man – he was full of secret cursing and bitterness, and it ended up costing him his soul. Psalm 109 speaks of him in this way:

He loved to curse; let curses come upon him!
He did not delight in blessing; may it be far from him!
He clothed himself with cursing as his coat;
may it soak into his body like water, like oil into his bones!

What you treasure up in your heart will come out in your life. People like those in Psalm 109 can only hide their wickedness for so long before it destroys them. But it need not end that way for us. Jesus took the curse for all our cursing when He died on the cross. He paid for our sinful anger, and if we repent and turn to Him we will be saved from it!

Once we are saved, we can look to His example on the cross, He responded to cursing and bitterness by saying, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

He forgave when they cursed. He returned their cursing for a blessing, and now He is forever blessed. If we follow His example and delight in blessing rather than cursing – in patience and longsuffering rather than anger, then we too will be blessed. After all, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Brothers and sisters, let us not be angry. Instead, let us return evil for good. In Jesus we were blessed in order to be a blessing to others –yes, even our enemies.

I resolve here not to cover myself in cursing any more. I resolve to speak what is good and true and loving in the example of my Lord, that I may know Him better.