Is Anger Your Treasure?

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.

The Power of Unforgiveness

When any of us refuse to forgive, remember this:

You could be living in riches and feasting in the mansions of God's grace in kindness toward us but you have chosen to live as a vagrant on the streets of unforgiveness.

Worse yet, you have voluntarily locked yourself into the dungeon of bitterness, and though you hold the key of forgiveness with the power to unlock every door inside, you refuse to suffer your own escape.

You have drank poison in hopes of killing your enemy, ignoring the fact that you have secretly become what you hate.

You have forgotten your own forgiveness, and renounced your inheritance – the inheritance of mercy purchased for us by Christ on the cross. Repent and let it go! Gently lower your burden into the hands pierced for you and pursue peace, that it may find you. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Love stands at the door and He knocks. Will you answer His call?

A New Command - Meditations on Maunday Thursday

“A new command I give you: Love one another.”

These words must have echoed in the apostle’s ears as they sat in the quiet of the upper room. A new command from the Teacher? What would He ask of them? The last time a great prophet gave commandments, the law was born.

But Jesus simply said, “Love one another.”

This was not a new command. Even in the old law, God commanded His people to love their neighbors as themselves, even to the point of loving a foreigner as if he was one of your own, so this concept was not new. But then Jesus added this:

“As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

This is where things get harder. Jesus had just humbled Himself to take on the task of a lowly servant – washing their feet, and He was about to do something far more than that, He was about to love them so much that He would give His life for them.

This means that the command of Christ is that we must serve one another even to the point of death. Our brothers and sisters must be so valuable to us, so lovely in our eyes, that we are willing to die out of our love for them.

This is a high and lofty goal, but it doesn’t work out so easily in real life. We gossip about each other, we say hurtful things, we get insulted and hurt and fight with one another. But Jesus calls us to a higher standard – the competition to lay aside our own ambitions and desires that we may serve people the same way He did.

Imagine if we all humbled ourselves to make our brothers and sisters look better. Imagine if we began thinking of the needs of others as more valuable than our own. Imagine if, when we heard a brother or sister was gossiping about us, we were quick to pray for them and rush to their service. Imagine if we repaid one another’s insults with kindness. What would the church look like then?

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Everyone would know that we were disciples of Jesus if we loved one another like this, and they would be forced to admit that God indeed was among us.

Remember that we will be with one another forever in our Father’s house, so here’s the challenge. Find someone in the church you have had difficulty with in the past. Go serve them, remembering how Christ served you. It will be difficult; your flesh will hate it, but you will be a living example of Jesus Christ, and the power of living like Him is unfathomable.