With Father’s Day comes a bunch of memories of my dad. He has now been gone for nearly eleven years. Although he was by no means perfect, the work of God in his life was evident. Dad was a first-generation Christ follower which simply means he didn’t grow up in a godly home. Because of this, there was some consequences of his past that he carried into his new faith.
One of those struggles was his anger. Dad was born in 1927, the era of the Great Depression. He was raised as the sixth child of seven. His life was hard, and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade to work so he could assist in supporting their family. He and mom married when he as just nineteen. He secured an assembly job at General Motors in Flint, Michigan. It was here, as a pre-believer, he got in some serious trouble. As I mentioned, he had a quick temper. I don’t know all the details, but a foreman was hassling him one day, and Dad lost it. He picked up the nearest weapon he could find and began to beat the man. Fortunately, he had grabbed a thick piece of rubber tubing and not something more substantial. Even so, the man was severely injured. Had the same thing happened today, Dad would have probably done time in prison.
Obviously, he lost his job. But more serious was the reputation that followed him. This “hot head” was rejected by some employers that didn’t want to deal with him. It was soon after this event that Dad accepted salvation by faith in Jesus. Although this transformed his life and eternity, there were still times he struggled to control his anger. I can only remember witnessing one time when Dad really lost it. However, I know it was an area of his life in which he was constantly needing to allow God to work.
Anger is like any other sin. We will never be rid of the temptation, but we need to learn how to deal with it. The Apostle Paul puts it like this in Ephesians 4:26-27, “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,27 and do not give the devil a foothold. We need to hear three important truths from this command. First, anger is something that is part of the sin nature, and we are going to experience it in this life. Second, when we experience it, we need to react in a godly manner. Finally, it is evident that Satan knows the destructive power of anger and will aggressively use it against you.
The solution to responding negatively in our anger is to remember a discussion we had two weeks ago. It is a matter of control. You may feel that your angry responses are simply a consequence of your personality. This may be true; however, we need to be reminded that as men redeemed by Jesus, we are a NEW creation! The old is gone and the new has come. This means there is a new controlling factor in our lives; the Holy Spirit now lives in us. When we respond in anger, we need to do all we can to redeem the situation. When others are harmed physically, emotionally, or spiritually by our outburst, we need to seek their forgiveness. We then must look for those areas that trigger our angry responses. Ask our Lord to help you identify them in your life. They are often words or events that spark a level of fear in our lives, so we fight back. When we find them, turn them over to the control of God’s Spirit. The more we practice this process, the greater our level of success in defeating the destructive purpose Satan has.
What we cannot do, is simply ignore and accept our angry responses as “just who we are”. The consequences include the damage to people we care about and an open door for Satan to get into other areas of our lives.