As I live the last week of my 50’s and consider some of the most significant growth that took place during them, something that happened at the beginning of my 50’s has had powerful effect throughout them: God showed me how to overcome a life-long battle with anger. I grew up in an angry household, my dad was an angry man. His father before him had been an angry man, as had his father. We had a generational curse of anger going in our family. I inherited the anger, too. By the time I was five, I had already learned that when things didn’t go my way the natural response was anger.
While I surrendered my life to Jesus at the age of twelve, my anger problem didn’t go away. Even when I went to seminary and became a pastor, the anger problem persisted. I prayed for God to remove it. I asked God forgiveness over and over again after an outburst of unrighteous anger, and promised not to do it again. Then something big or usually small would happen and I would explode again. While I managed the anger for the most part, it surfaced regularly, and while I never became violent, or hurt anyone, it was a poor testimony and it ate away at me.
In my early 50’s I read a book by Gary Smalley titled Change Your Heart, Change Your Life. The book contained a simple truth: whatever the sin you struggle with in your life has been “written” on your heart. In order to overcome it, you must “overwrite” the sin, with a truth from God that “erases” it. It sounds simple, and easy, and it was. While I could have chosen many verses dealing with anger to overwrite the life-long incidents of anger that were in my heart, I chose the Golden Rule, Luke 7:12: In all things do to others what you would have them do to you. This sums up the Law and the Prophets. I prayed the verse over and over. I asked God to use it to change my heart. When everyday situations came up that moved my heart to its typical anger, I would pray, “God let me do to that person/driver/cashier what I would want to have done to me.” In a matter of days, I noticed a difference. I was in the conscious learned stage, but I was catching the anger sooner, and overwriting it with a call for God to give me the power of His Spirit to do what I would want to have done in the situation.
As the months passed the incidents of anger reduced dramatically. Now, as I near the end of my 60’s, I find most of the time I’m living at the unconscious learned level when it comes to anger. In other words, I don’t have to think about not “blowing up” any more. Yes, occasions still occur when it flares up. In those moments, I go back to the conscious mode of asking God to fill me with the Holy Spirit and to do what I would want to have done to me. But more and more, I have hours of victory and sometimes whole days. That never happened in my teens, twenties, thirties or forties.
What about you? Do you have a signature sin that’s written on or in your heart? Do you confess it, repent of it and promise God you won’t do it again, only to have it show up again in minutes, hours or days? If you do, I recommend the process I mentioned. God’s word is true and His Holy Spirit is powerful. We know that, but sometimes we need to be reminded. I also recommend the Smalley’s book as an excellent resource for helping you overcome whatever it is that is holding you back from living victoriously as a person and leader in Jesus’ name.
Here’s to leading better by addressing any sin that has overwritten your heart–today!