I have some good news and some bad news...

The bad news is I have battled with an infrequent but HOT temper from time to time. Whether I am exhausted and the kids are out of control or I have a lot of stress and my wife hits a hot-button... I can't tell you a formula. I know at the point we had 2 kids with both of us working (to my memory) is when it started. I am sure exhaustion and frustration around life circumstances contributed but I take full ownership of this sin and it is no one's fault but mine.

The irony is I'm known as a patient person to people, even to my wife, and I usually am; and yet, I have had some high-visibility failures in the area of anger/rage also. Well today things were piling up on me and my wife said the wrong thing and I was furiously loud and rude for probably 10 minutes. And really, what she said was way over the line. The trouble is, her and I were talking about different things. The thing she had said was just a sarcastic comment about one topic and the context of what I was talking about(at the time this happened we were talking from different rooms) was related to something entirely different. So, if we had been on the same page this would not have been a hot-button at all.

Well, after a few minutes of that level of anger I apologized. I also apologized to my kids and told them I should have just trusted God with the situation instead of getting so furious. I walked the kids through what had happened and showed them where the failure had occurred so they could learn from it.

My wife and I found out that we had been talking about different things and we both realized the big misunderstanding- geez, I hate that all of that happened over a misunderstanding. She felt terrible that I had thought she would say something like that to me and she felt bad about how horrible I felt for flying into such a rage.

I pretty much cried through our entire worship service at church and felt like the guy in the Bible who "couldn't even look up to heaven but beat his chest and cried, 'God have mercy on me a sinner'."

I went down front for prayer after the service and explained to a man and his wife on our altar team at church both the history of my anger episodes as well as a complete detailed explanation of what happened this morning. They prayed for me and the man said to me, "Brian you have said that you 'have this anger or rage' but you don't. Jesus died on the cross for this and this is crucified. You need to just bury this because the enemy wants you to believe you 'ARE' this way when you aren't. You have confessed this sin to God, your wife, and to us and Jesus died for this sin and crucified it to set you free from this. From today on you must not say you 'have' a problem with anger and rage". Then they prayed for me and asked the Lord to forgive me, help me, and release me from it in Jesus' name. He also told me to learn the discipline of silence- to stop, pause, and ask God for help before I do anything in the future when I am frustrated etc.

It felt good to get prayed for but also the Lord really spoke to me through them- just like the Lord freed me from lust and pornography the fact is I really am free of this anger and rage. I need to trust God with that and accept it and continue to seek the Lord, worship him, and study his word and he will do the work he needs to do in my heart to transform me but the fact is I was freed by Christ.

So, I really want to ask the Lord to bless that couple on the prayer team and thank the Lord for this important word in my life. I will work on this discipline of silence and also learn to walk in acceptance that I am free of this and the enemy cannot drag me down with this.

Christ crucified my sin and disarmed the enemy in my life.

I thought it would be good to blog about a tough area in my life.... and an area I sinned in just today because I don't want to give the impression that just because I have a lot of freedom in another area of sin that I have "arrived". But, what I do commit to do is delight myself in the Lord and seek him. I am absolutely determined to lay down my life for the Lord and I will not accept being bound into this sin when Christ died for it.