Pray KNCSB

Paraphrasing parts of Colossians 3:1-17

But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath…put on the new self…after the image of God…compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience (bearing with and forgiving one another… put on love… let Christ’s peace rule in your heart… Be thankful… let the word abide in you and abide in the Word, honoring King Jesus with your life.

Anger has no plans of leaving us alone without putting up a fuss. Without a fight we will never put to death anger or wrath. What then is our strategy for defeating anger in our lives?

We must not settle for a strategy based on lies.

The blame game lie: “He made me angry”. It’s true that people hurt us to the point of anger. However, anger does not come into us from the outside, it comes from inside of us. So we can choose our reactions to hurtful things. In responding to angering events we must be Christ like.

The personality lie: “I’m just hot tempered; deal with it.” It’s true that people are more easily angered than others. However, this reality doesn’t excuse angry and hurtful outbursts toward others, friend or fiend. We remember the words of our Master who showed us another way: “bless those who hurt you…”

The helpless lie. “I can’t help it, my feelings take over.” This strategy, like its blame and personality siblings, is also flawed. We can actually do all things in the strength of Christ, including anger busting things. Our lives are hidden in Christ and we have died to the things of this world. We are to put off these things that beset us. We are more than conquerors. We are to be self-controlled.

Last, there is the culture lie. Our culture today encourages the expression of anger. Punch something, yell at your dog, and tell her how you feel, or take it out on a helpless triple cheeseburger with fries. And supersize it, please! Culture in this case must submit to faith. Jesus’ way trumps culture when there is a conflict between culture and biblical truth and ways of relationship. Put away anger. Pure and simple, but never easy!

All these crutches are excuses or lies we tell ourselves to justify behaviors that allow the flesh to gain mastery over us.

Put away anger and wrath, Paul taught in imitation of our Master Teacher. There is a principle here that must guide us: If we’re commanded undress anger from our person, it’s because we’re Spirit-empowered to achieve the command. This is true not only of anger but all the sins that beset us.

I would like here to introduce a concept that might be helpful in doing the hard work of getting rid of anger. There are certain attitudes and behaviors in the Christian life that are just hard to accomplish by trying, even when we try harder in spite of repeated failure. As much as I want to love my enemies, be humble, or stop being angry when hurt, I discover I am not able to love, be humble, or stop being angry. Trying harder would hardly do. Perhaps another approach may get me closer to godliness and self-control. Perhaps training will do what trying cannot do. Let me explain more.

The putting on of the new self is a process (the slow cure) that the Spirit undertakes (It’s called sanctification, the process of making us holy people) in my life to dress me up with the same mind that was in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:1-11)”. Paul encourages me in Colossians 3 to “Put on the new self … after the image of God…  compassion, kindness, humility”, etc…  This process allows kindness, compassion, humility, etc… the antidotes of anger to become permanent residents in me. Through this process, I train to become the kind of person, who automatically responds to anger causing situations with the gentleness and meekness of Christ in me.

This process has a goal: to become conformed to the image of Christ. My goal is not to become more of who I am. God forbid. It is my very self that is in desperate need of becoming new. God transfers his divine nature into me (2 Peter 1:4) to make me like Christ.

Along with the goal the process has three components. First the Spirit is the agent of working on me. No solo work here. Teamwork is a required. The second component is life. The Spirit works through life’s troubles, joys, hurts, and troughs to do his perfecting work in me. Through life events, He turns me into an anger-defeating disciple. The third component is the means of grace. The means of grace enable me to do what I am not able to do in my own strength is called the habits of love. These habits work directly in me to enable me to prevent angry reactions in me

Especially pertinent to overcoming anger automatically, I name solitude and silence. They work in such a way to drive me to surrender whatever anger-responding weapon in my hand or to turn it into a fruit-bearing tool. I’m not sure how this works exactly. It’s a deep work of the Holy Spirit within. I only know, that I am what I am, because of these habits. Being alone with God learning to be silent before him, allowing his presence to wash away my pride, my desire to control others, my tendency for revenge, and my self-justifying actions.

I have learned that in walking with the Master that every life changing action in my life demands the work of God in me and requires my efforts. I am willing to participate in this work of salvation (Philippians 2:12-13). The prize: A closer likeness to Christ that refuses to let anger eat away at my apprenticeship to Jesus.

I think much more about myself when I should be more mindful of others? I cause pain to those I love. I chicken out when it comes to standing up to those who hurt others. I act stupidly but I blame others. I make a mess in my life by having unhealthy appetites. Why is speaking badly of others so at home on the tip of my tongue? Why is my soul so broken?

Dare I ask it? Why is yours? Neither you nor I are the first to struggle with answers to our experience of pride.

When asked what is wrong with the world, G.K. Chesterton responded with this shortest essay ever written: “I am.”  The reason he was so sure of his response is because of a realistic view of his own sin, which is first and foremost a power inhabiting our physical bodies. Long ago, one of the early Christians told us that sin “tends to make that which is cease to be.”

Jeff Cook sees sin as a parasite in need of a host, which we willingly supply. As a power sin cannot exist on its own. Just like the demons in Jesus’ parable, they take up residence in the house of a willing host.

Early in the life of the church all kinds of saints tried to understand the reality of sin and its manifestations. So they created lists of the most essential elements of sin. One author called these elements “wrong thoughts”. Others prefer to see them as challenges to our faith. Another named them deadly sins. History finally settled on naming seven of them: Pride, envy, sloth, greed, lust, wrath, and gluttony. From these spring all other sins we commit. Rape, violent acts, gossip, adultery, and murder come from anger or wrath or envy or lust. Cheating and hording come from greed. You get the idea.

Why do some call these seven sins the deadly sins? Well, cogitate with me for a moment. For example, a person who is totally possessed by pride, or his heart is strongly grasped by it, will be affected at the deepest levels of his being by his arrogance. Pride’s tentacles extend to all aspects of his life. The way he perceives everything (his whole worldview) is tainted and affected by his high view of himself and low view of others.

Do you own shares in the common stock of pride? Are you a member of the club? Is pride in your life? We all naturally love ourselves; self-love is mandated by our Lord “love your neighbor as yourself.” But when I exaggerate this love of myself or pervert it into contempt for others, I am full of pride. Pride or arrogance is a debilitating, death-thirsty, self-inflicted disease, gone on a rampage in us.

If pride is leprosy, I pronounce myself unclean. Who can deliver me from this deadening sin? Thanks be to God. He owns the business of grave digging and has a monopoly on bringing the dead back to life from the dark tomb of pride.

The proud think they contribute more than they do. They believe they are more important than they really are. Because their own self blinds them, they are unable to recognize the contributions of others. They believe that if they think highly of others somehow they are thinking less of themselves.

One who knows wrote: “Pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul. It induces the Christian to deny that God is his helper and to consider that he himself is the cause of his own virtues” (Evagrius of Ponticus, 345-399 AD). Another, who struggled with pride for a long time wrote: “pride made the soul desert God, to who it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself instead as the source of its own life” (Augustine of Hippo, 354-430 AD).

Jeff Cooke adds: “The more I make my life, my well-being, my enlightenment, and my success primary, the farther I step from reality. Thus the hell-bound do not travel downward; they travel inward, cocooning themselves behind a mass of vanity, personal rights, religiosity, and defensiveness” (The Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes, p. 34).

The elder son in the prodigal son story is the epitomy of this kind of pride. It destroyed his ability to connect with his father, his brother, and even his own soul. Pride is the one sin that makes everyone ill and especially the one who has it.

When you find pride in yourself, or in others, you will also find much private thinking, much time spent alone because of disdain of others, and much lone ranger activity; a tenacious unwillingness to submission to authority of any kind.

Christianity in North America suffers today because millions of individual Christians have decided to go it alone without the church. Believing they are right, they do their own thing without any accountability, any submission to authority, deeming themselves captains of their own souls, masters of their own ships, with the determination to seek their own destinies apart from tradition. Pride moved into their neighborhood, and emerged as a virtue. Jesus and me and a few others and to h… with the rest of you… If an implosion of Christianity were to take place in the West, history will judge pride as the fuse that lit the downward spiral.

The antidote of pride is humility, the subject of the next article. Until next month, think through with Jesus about the damage to your soul that pride is wreaking (read Luke 15:11-32; Luke 16. There are great lessons about pride here). Walk a little with the master immersed in His words in these great texts.  Look full into His wonderful face. The things of pride may grow strangely familiar.