(Just joking, everyone. Kind of giving an example of how anger appears. It is heavy, awkward, it wears a frown, it stomps its feet in flower beds, it roars insidiously and speaks harshly at everything it perceives as wrong. It perceives itself as the great corrector -- it feels it knows and no one else does, it feels it is its responsibility to change the world and the only way it can do this is to tell it, loudly, all the things it is doing wrong.) Carnal anger is of the flesh. It, therefore, is one of Satan's tools. It is never justified.

Through the power that the Lord gives to His saved children, when their minds have been transformed by His renewal, we are asked to be aware that we can and do look at the world from different perspectives, from different levels. On one level, the carnal world, filled with Satan's tricks and magic, comes at us from all sides and is reported about on all the channels. We must choose to ignore Satan's constant urging to "follow me." On another level, however, is God's kingdom here on earth, which, through Jesus, dwells within. Jesus also said, "Follow me" and, doing so, by humbling ourselves before Him and totally relinquishing all to Him, we allow God's love to flow into our world, unobstructed.

Of the two levels, which one has more power? Is it the carnal world of flesh that has all power or is it the world of God's kingdom through our deep and humbling relationship with Jesus? Of course, it is through the invincible power of Jesus Christ, Whom we have accepted as our Lord and Savior. It is He that does the work as we merely pray without ceasing to Jesus, and reaffirm our relationship with Him, again and again, which gives us our strength. It is His Holy Spirit whom He gave to the saved which teaches us how to pray without ceasing.

Nothing is done by our will alone. But through the power of Jesus Christ, all things are possible. In truth, it is when we insist on correcting someone NOW, that we are often frustrated until we shake and are red in the face. It is when we might blubber angrily that someone must “wake up and smell the coffee,” that we are trespassing into the flesh and trying to do something by our will alone. Nothing should be done by our will alone. Nothing! It is not that they don't need the truth. They do. We all do. It is that we can't be God's jackhammers, pounding and pounding the truth into people's thick skulls.

Judgment and forcing our will onto people is a nasty combination. It quite effectively draws a huge wedge between them and our Lord and Savior. It doesn't drive them to the Lord. It drives them away from Him because, they may reason, if God is like this, they don't want to know Him. Conviction must be from the Lord's Holy Spirit within. God says that what we do to others, He will do to us, so we want to remember that love is never overbearing. This will assure us that God will help us on our journey to know Him better in a gentle and peaceful way, just as we are helping someone else on their journey in this manner. We must ask ourselves, how do we want to be taught and then proceed to teach in this way. God tends to give us what we give to others so, if not right away, we can count on God eventually teaching us via a gentle conviction that touches the deepest parts of our souls, in a mighty and extremely effective way.

As a saved Christian, we are given opportunity after opportunity to choose love or fear. Am I willing to learn to see things in a new way by giving Him my heart? Until that time, I am subject to frustration and temper tantrums because people don't act the way I expect them to.

If I am attacked, I would ask the Holy Spirit to help me not be tempted by the great deceiver to fall into the trap of anger. Anger does not need to sink, like a stone, to the bottom of my heart and, there, build in intensity over time until I explode for "no reason."

My mind in Christ, constantly praying to Him, will view the world with the unconditional, uncondemning love of the Lord or, not praying to Him, the spiteful, splintering withered view of Satan. We can choose whether to humbly take on the mantle of Christ and allow Him to see through our eyes or allow the ever alert deceiver to use our moments of indecision to swipe at the very framework Christ is building in us. Satan could possibly even cause it to topple as we fly into an uncontrollable rage, repeatedly reviewing the damage that was done to us and eventually building a justification for being angrier and angrier.

Let's choose Jesus, wholeheartedly, before the deceiver has a chance to grab our hearts and minds. If we give it all to Him, just hand Jesus the reigns to our thinking, then there will be fewer and fewer times when our thoughts will gallop uncontrollably into the flesh, bringing with it accusations and the pain associated with that act.

The more I listen to Satan and allow him to manipulate the way I perceive, the less I'm fulfilling my promise to the Lord to follow Him. I'm either humbly following Christ and allowing Him to take my will, or else Satan is influencing my will every moment of the day. The temptation to feel the hair at the nape of the neck rise, to feel the blood start to boil, to feel slighted and hurt, is great. Satan truly smiles when God's children are indecisive about following the Lord. He rubs his hands and snickers, "This is the moment I've been waiting for!" The more we are tempted to look for the myriad reasons to justify our anger, the tighter the noose is being made around our own necks. How do we get out of this mess?

Forgiveness. We must follow Jesus to the cross in these situations and ask God to "forgive them for they know not what they do." It cannot be stated too many times that we cannot do this ourselves. Jesus must do it for us. How can we "forgive them?" They've hurt us immensely. It has to be the Lord. But we must be even the tiniest bit willing to have Him help us.

Why forgive? Those who are inflicting pain and suffering on God's children really don't know what they are doing. If they did know they were falling deeper under the spell of the deceiver, and risking spending an eternity in hell, they wouldn't be doing what they are doing. It is not foolish to understand that people who inflict pain in any way, don't know what they are doing and are at least spiritually ill. Are we going to obey Christ's instructions to pray for those who are ill (whether physically or spiritually) or are we going to build a wall of anger that may be especially hard to tear down later, when our attention is given back to the Lord? It is impossible to pray for someone with whom we are angry. We must go and make amends, then come back to the temple.

One final note on anger. It's not always easy to understand what it is about another person that makes us angry. It could be something entirely different from the incident that triggered the anger. We must realize, Satan is always looking for a way to wiggle into our minds with his temptation, it doesn't matter to him how he gets in, he's just glad to be in control. He is "fulfilled" when we give in to this temptation to be angry.

Our lives are similar to the small boat that carried Jesus, who was napping, and the disciples across the lake. If the wind of temptation picks up and a storm causes the waves to tilt our boat precariously, let's not leave Jesus asleep but awaken Him, that He might calm the storm and seas that rage.

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