Are you hot-tempered?

Proverbs 29:22 (LB)

A hot-tempered man starts fights and gets into all kinds of trouble.

Also: 

Hot tempers cause arguments.  Proverbs 15:18 (GN)

Anger causes mistakes.  Proverbs 14:29 (LB)

People with hot tempers do foolish things.  Proverbs 14:17 (GN)

I have been lucky in my life in that I have not had to face extreme, irrational anger very much.  Yet one incident where I did face such anger many years ago still disturbs me.  One of my sons had a paper route.  One freezing cold morning when he opened a customer’s mailbox to deposit the paper (back in the days before the US Post Office put a stop to using mailboxes as depositories for newspapers) the lid of that customer’s mailbox snapped off.  The mailbox was a cheap metal box where the extreme cold had frozen the hinge and it broke finally when opened.  Well, the customer called my son and cursed him out for breaking his mailbox.  When my son told me about this, I called this customer basically to tell him that cursing at a 14-year old boy was not a proper thing to do.  Well, this person started cursing me out and by the time I hung up the phone I must have heard several dozen of the foulest words one ever could hear.  I truly felt like I had been cursed by the devil himself.  His anger and rage were so severe that I feared for the safety of my family and so I called the police to issue a report.  The police told me that this man had a record of recurrent arrests and jail terms for fighting and drunkenness.  It took a lot of courage for me to go to this man’s house to offer pay for his broken mailbox.  He was not at home so I left the money in an envelope along with a letter where I used several verses of Scripture that spoke of anger like the ones above.  I fully expected this man to confront me about this but he never did.  I never talked to him again as apparently he left town.  The uncontrolled rage of this man reverberates in my mind still today. 

 

Jesus confronted demon-possessed people (Matthew 8:28-34; Mark 9:14-29; Luke 4:31-35) where He dealt with extreme foul language and anger.  Such foul language and anger have consequences — review the verses from Proverbs above.  Have you experienced this in your life?  Have you been the recipient of such anger or have you been the angry one?  In either case, the Bible is true --- anger produces arguments, mistakes, troubles, and all kinds of foolish things.  Jesus removed the source of anger and evil in these Biblical examples and He can do the same for you if this is a problem you face.  He can also remove this problem for a loved one in your life if you continue to pray for that person and for the Lord’s intervention.  Help them to see their foolishness demonstrated through their anger.  Help them to transform the anger response into a wise/intelligent response.