anger

The Angry Man

[352 words] “Make no friendship with a man given to anger, nor go with a wrathful man, lest you learn his ways and entangle yourself in a snare” (Proverbs 22:24-25, ESV). When I was growing up, I had a friend with whom me and a couple of other hung around. He was a good fellow,…

A Real God Can Defend Himself

[469 words] A man named Gideon demolished an altar to Baal. As you can imagine Baal worshipers were not a huge fan of that action. People tend to take slights to their god very personally. Re-member what happen when the Ephesians accused Paul of making life difficult for their idol? They shouted for two hours…

Anger: The Great Destroyer

[204 words] In 1894, the Baltimore Orioles came to Boston to play a baseball game. Boston had one of the finest stadiums ever built in the 19th century. During the game, a fight broke out between two players at third base. The fight be-came a “brou-ha-ha” as both teams left their dugouts to join in…

Israel’s Superman

[249 words] Samson was a real-life superhero, an ancient Israelite Superman. Many people are familiar with his superhuman exploits, about how Samson killed a lion with his bare hands, single-handedly destroyed a thousand-man Philistine army with no weapon other than the jawbone of a donkey, and about how he was a one-man wrecking crew that…

An Angry Death

[500 words] Last month an ugly and tragic incident played out on a racetrack as a young driver named Kevin Ward, Jr. lost his life. This particular driver had apparently been driven into a wall by another driver during the race. Video of the event then shows Ward exiting his car and walking into oncoming…

Do You Have Any Sense?

[131 words] “Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook an offense” (Proverbs 19:11). According to this proverb, someone who has good sense takes a while to get angry, and is quick to overlook someone else’s failures. The question for us is simply this: “Do we have good sense?” …

Someone Get Your Goat?

  [240 words] Hoover Rupert used to say, “The measure of someone is the size of the thing it takes to get his or her goat.” The old phrase “get your goat” refers to the sensitivity of racehorses. According to Dr. Rupert, racehorses are infamously high-strung. Horse trainers learned many years ago that highly sensitive…

Grudges

[172 words] One day a visitor leaned on the fence around the farm while he watched an old farmer plowing with a mule. After a while the visitor said, “I don’t like to tell people how to run their business, but you could save yourself a lot of work by saying ‘Gee’ and ‘Haw” to…

Dealing with a ‘Short Fuse’

[295 words] The apostle Paul reminds us that “no temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13). That certainly applies to the danger of expressing wrath and anger! Anger in itself is not sinful (Eph. 4:26), but how we express it can be! Even Jesus was angry (Mark 3:5),…

Be Angry, And Yet Do Not Sin

  [158 words] It was close to the end of the Broncos/Colts game. Denver’s Von Miller and Colt’s Dwayne Allen were in a discussion when Bronco’s Aquib Talib ran over and jabbed his fingers into Allen’s eye. This action cost the Broncos the game, Peyton Manning was cheated out of the NFL career yardage and…

Move On

Joseph was a good young man. He was seventeen when his own jealous brothers sold him to Ishmaelite traders. He was taken to Egypt —away from his family and his home. This was a traumatic experience. But Joseph did not use what happened to him as an excuse. He did not become bitter. He did…

Self-Control

[196 words] An Old Chinese proverb goes like this: “If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” I’m not sure about the number of days, but the basic idea is certainly true. Any of these sound familiar? “I wish I hadn’t said what I did.” “I…

I’ll Keep On Till They Quit

There once was an older man who went out jogging. He was running around a track that circled the high school football field while the team was conducting their practice. When the football players began running their sprints up and down the field, the man said to himself, “I’ll just keep running until they quit.”…