Proverbs 29:11 (NIV), "A fool gives full
vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control."
You need to understand that you have an unlimited
supply of anger. There is a myth out
there psychologists teach us "You've got this bucket full of anger in your
life and if you'll just dump out the bucket it will be all empty and everything
will be all right and fantastic and happy."
Some psychologists teach you to do this thing called
ventilation. If I just kind of
spiritually vomit, then I feel a whole lot better, I've got it all out. Once you empty your bucket you'll be OK. There's a whole therapy about this called
Primal scream. If I can just scream out
my anger then all the things that were done wrong to me growing up will be
fine.
There's only one problem with that. It doesn't work. Why?
Because you don't have a bucket of anger in your life, you've got a
factory. This factory has this incessant
ability to produce more and more anger.
Study after study and the Bible teaches real clearly that aggression
causes more aggression. Anger causes
more anger. Outbursts lead to other
outbursts. As a parent, if I outburst
against my kid, what am I modeling for them?
Outbursts. It just comes back to
you.
The fact is we are all irritated by different
things. For example: When somebody in your family makes you late,
does that make you angry? When somebody
makes you wait, does that irritate you?
When somebody in your family doesn't remember what you told them?
We all respond to different irritations in different
ways. When we're irritated some of us
blow up, and some of us clam up. Some of
us are mountains of Vesuvius and some of us stuff it down. Some of us are skunks and some of us are
turtles. The skunk, when he gets angry,
he lets everybody know it. The turtle
just pulls back into his shell, harbors it there.
Just a thought from the front porch…
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