I lost my temper. How did I get there? How did I go from the triumph of delivering the word of life to people on Sunday and on Tuesday blowing my stack, and pounding my hand on the table in a high-heartbeat angry shout at one of my dearest and most treasure friends?
I'm sitting here and I'm trying to figure it out. I'm not geting very far. What I do know is that when the crisis of the moment occured, I failed to put into practice the very things I encouraged others to do on Sunday. I was a hypocrite. I am a hypocrite.
[My friend called. They forgive me. I had called them and they didn't pick up and so I left a message and asked for their forgiveness, I told them how wrong I was and they forgave me. Oh God thank you for Your marvelous grace. Thank You for friends who don't abandon friendship when days are hard.]
Brothers and sisters, please, pray for me. Pray that God would purify my heart with longing for righteousness and not just being right.
3 comments:
I had an incident like that over Christmas that I didn't blog about out of concern for the family members involved. So much collateral damage. You look around at all the trauma and just want to weep. Especially when it involves unbelievers - not merely because of the damage to the witness of Christ, but mostly the difficultly in truly reconciling with someone apart from the blood of Jesus. If one doesn't know divine forgiveness, I'm certain (from first-hand experience) he or she must struggle infinitely harder than those who do.
I'm so glad and thankful your sin was turned to glory though. Thanks for doing the right things when a cooler head prevailed.
I am glad that you confessed your sin, and also correcting your sin by apologizing to the person you wronged. A lot of pastors that I have encountered don't do that, but I am glad that you do, and in confessing and repenting your sin you are glorifying God.
I don't know if this will be as helpful to you as it was to me, but here goes.
I was at a group study one night at NS - JO Sanders I think. I was furiously angry over a child abuse report I had heard on radio news during the commute from work to the church. It showed on my face and someone asked about it in my small group when we broke from lecture for discussion. No question that the anger was sinful - I wanted to burn the offender with cigarette butts and then beat them within an inch of their lives the same way they did the little baby (I did say I knew it was sinful anger, remember?) before I put them to a slow and painful death.
One woman offered a quiet and thoughtful comment saying that she had been told years before that sinful anger generally was the result of one of two causes - either I felt my rights had been stepped on or I was afraid - and in either case, it was sin. After a lot of thought, I realized that she was right - I was afraid that if a Holy God would allow a little innocent baby to suffer in that way, He would allow me or my children to suffer that way too and it wouldn't be something I could control.
While I've never taken this notion to scripture to see if these are the only reasons behind sinful anger, I have noticed, in the years since this comment was made, that my sinful anger always fits into one category or the other. Sometimes it just takes me a few days to understand how.
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