Christ is Love, not anger

You were warned in the description that sometimes I would give my musings on Christianity. Let's start with the fact that I am a Christian. I believe in God with all my heart and that Jesus is God; they are one and the same. I also believe that the Bible is the only true guidance in how we should live our lives and in what we should do. A pastor, preacher, priest, or whatever your religion designates a leader in your church can help you understand the Bible, but only what is in the Bible is truth and not anything that one of those men might take upon himself. In this regard, I try to read my Bible every day in hopes that I will gain some new englightenment about how to live my life or what it is I'm supposed to do to be someone that pleases God.

I wasn't always this way. I was raised in a church, I went to church when I was a teenager in high school, and I dabbled in church a little bit after I left home as an adult for a couple of years. Pretty quickly though, I just left church behind. I still believed in God, but I didn't give God the praise or worship He deserved for a very long time. I came back to God and the church almost 3 years ago now. It took me almost a year of being back in church to actually let God back into my life. I still make mistakes every day, and there are times when I wonder why God still loves me, but I know He does.

One of the things that has always been a problem in my life is anger, and I'm not talking about, the kind of anger where you give someone a stern look to let them know they've displeased, but pure anger that will just well up inside of me until it has to be released because of some wrong inflicted on me; sometimes even imagined wrongs because I'm the only one that really sees or feels them. When I was a kid, this would come out in temper tantrums. I see this in my granddaughter. When I was in junior high school, it would express itself in fights - I was kind of a skinny kid all through junior high and high school, and in junior high I got picked on a lot by people I didn't even really know; I would take it for a while, but eventually someone would push that one step too far. The worst part was when I was really starting to get angry, I would start to cry (my mom shared this trait as well), which would generally encourage people picking on me to tease me even more because they thought they had really hurt me. What they never realized until the first punch was that I wasn't sad, I was angry. As I got into high schoo, I put away the fighting, which was good; it helped that most people matured enough to stop picking on each other or just formed cliques where people like me never really saw those people who used to pick on me. As I moved into adult hood I even tried to get past my anger and the only physical reaction by this point became me yelling at whoever or whatever made me mad. I went to a therapist one time for what I considered my anger issues. What I learned from the therapist was that what I was doing was natural - people would do things that hurt me and made me angry and I would react angrily to it. In the world of psychiatry, it's good to express your anger, so what I was doing was normal.

I still express my anger by yelling today, though I do my best to try to take a moment or two and just not get angry. It doesn't work well all the time, and my children and wife are the only people who even realize or have really seen this side of me in years. That part is a shame. The truth of anger though is that it is not really normal or good in the way we express or use it, especially not as Christians. Christ is love and that's what he wanted us to understand through His examples over and over again. He never got angry at those who persecuted Him; He actually felt pity for them in my understanding of what I read in the Bible. He never hated anyone, He only felt love for everyone He ever met including those who persecuted Him. In fact the last words he speaks before He dies on the cross are words of forgiveness. This is what we should be striving for in our own lives is a place where we do our best to live our lives the same way. We'll never truly achieve this peace here on earth, but we should be looking for it.

The worst thing about anger is that most of the time unless you do like I did in junior high and punch someone, the people you're angry at aren't really bothered by your anger. This is why we react by screaming or being violent in our anger, so the people who hurt us can be hurt too. What a ridiculous sentiment to be remembered by. The one example that even comes close to showing Jesus angry, identifies it not as anger, but as zeal for the temple, His Father's house. Even here, Jesus does not react angrily, although I'm sure some would disagree. The text shows that he made a cord to whip people who were selling the animals for sacrifice our of the courtyad. He overturned tables that the moneychangers using, but through it all, I see no mention of anger or even of Him trying to hurt anyone. He could have called down the full power of God on them to punish them. He could have gotten a stick and beat them with it. He could have gotten a real whip like He was eventually beaten with, but He used a cord that He made, so while I imagine it probably stung, I doubt it left any real pain or hurt. Even in this Jesus showed mercy, and He deserved to be angry and to punish people, to judge them. Christ is love because everything He did, He did out of love for us, to try to show us the way we should act towards one another.

The other thing that stands out about anger is that anger is a judgement by you upon someone. If you are angry with people, it is because you have decided that they deserve for you to be angry with them. They have done something that deserves this punishment. Consider parents with their children. Why do parents get angry with their children? Generally, it's because the child has done something that the parent has defined as wrong, possibly even after the child has been told several times not to do it. The parent then judges that the child deserves to be punished by spanking, scolding, grounding, whatever. Yes, the parent still loves the child, but there are times where it is anger that is driving the punishment and not love. I've been angry with my children (especially my daughter as she could attest) at times because I didn't know what else to do. It showed a lack of wisdom on my part to allow the anger to determine the punishment whether than to put the anger aside and use wisdom in determining the punishment. I have even made people angry before with something I've done. The anger is usually a judgement upon my action; sometimes I didn't even realize what I was doing would make someone angry, it just kind of was some stupid thing I did without thinking or considering how someone else would take it.

At the end of the day, anger never solved anything for me. Every fight I ever got into in junior high school, never really made those kids stop picking on me. Every time I've yelled, it never changed anything. In fact, every time I've been angry, the only person who has ever been hurt by it has been me. What has changed things has been stopping and listening, using wisdom, and showing love. In every instance when I've been angry with someone that mattered in my life, it was after the anger subsided and I applied wisdom and spoke calmly and rationally that things were resolved. Granted it is difficult to do this with younger children, but it does work. Sometimes children (and even adults) need a spanking, a scolding, or to be put in time out, but it will always bear the best results when it is done out of love.

One day, I'm going to get to Heaven. When I get there I will be judged for my time here on earth. Nothing I can do will ever change that judgement. Christ is the only one who can change that judgement by his death, burial, and resurrection. He changes it by his forgiveness of my sins and my anger. I imagine if God wasn't perfect, we would all be dead and this world would have been destroyed at Eden when Adam and Eve first sinned and in doing so, showed their disobedience of God. God loves us though, and he has put his anger aside for now, even when He corrects us now along the way, He does it in love and wisdom. One day, God will truly judge the world though, and on that day we will see His anger for the first time ever. If we want the forgiveness of God, we need to be more like Him and do as He said and judge not lest we be judged. We need to put our anger away and speak things to others in wisdom. When someone hurts us, we need to explain that to them, and if we are the other side, we need to listen with wisdom as well. God examines what's in our hearts and not what we do each day, no action I take will ever save me from God's judgement, only God's actions in Christ can do that. Love God as He loves you, not because you deserved to be loved by Him with all of the bad stuff you've done, but because He has chosen to love you out of His great mercy.

The worst part of all of this is you have groups of people out there who will tell you that they speak on behalf of God, that they are Christians. If you read your Bible, you will find quickly the truth. Anyone who professes that God hates anyone is a liar and does not speak on behalf of God. Whether they are Christian or not, I'll leave for God to decide. The Bible clearly tells us that God loves everyone of us, and in fact, if you look at the actions of Christ, He loves the sinner all the more because if we weren't all sinners, Christ would never have had to die for our sins and for us. Let your anger pass, and learn to love and be wise. There are many points in our grand history that might have been different if people would do this.

Thanks for reading, and God bless you.