A Retailer Who Understands Dads

I am tired of the way men and fathers are often portrayed in television commercials, movies, and television shows.  Dad's are seen as bumbling idiots who need to be saved by their wives and their children.  So how refreshing to see a retailer who understands that kids need a mom and dad, and need heroes to admire and emulate.  It is great to see a company who realizes that its bad for business to alienate men by making fun of them.  General Mills, the makers of Cherios, produced the following commercial and I, for one, am grateful for their portrayal of a dad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GYxH2-WeZY

Blessings,
Dr. Paul

How Much Lower Can We Sink?

When it comes to values in America today, our moral compass is pretty fouled up, and its not getting any better.  Over the last few days I have been pretty disgusted with how some in our society treat those who serve and protect us.  Here in Philly, a fast moving row home fire killed 4 children.  A tragic and sad event for the parents, family, neighbors, and friends of those who died.  As a parent, my heart goes out to them, I can only imagine the depth of their grief.  Next thing you know, large groups of residents from the area are protesting in front of ladder 4, and Engine 40, the first trucks on the scene. Crazy rumors are running through the neighborhood accusing the fire department of taking 30 minutes to respond.  I can understand people's grief, but I can't understand blaming the men who responded and put their lives on the line to extinguish that fire and try to save those kids.  If there is one thing that gets to a firefighter, its not being able to save the life of a child.  If people want to be angry, go to City Council and let them know how upset they are with the reduction in the number of fire houses and firefighters in the city.  Don't go after the guys who came when you called 911.
The other incident involves the murder of rookie Jersey City police officer Melvin Santiago.  He was ambushed by a man who said he wanted to kill a cop and be famous.  He waited for the first officer to arrive, and then opened fire on officer Santiago.  He was killed in an exchange of gun fire with other officers.  The killer's widow was interviewed by a local TV news station and said her husband should have killed more officers.  And then some in the community set up a memorial for the murderer.
So I ask, has our sense of community morality sunk so low that we memorialize cop killers and threaten firefighters?  God help us all.
Blessings,
Dr. Paul

Dad

I have been thinking a lot about my dad lately, and not just because tomorrow is Father's Day.  It has been a year and a half since he went home to be with the Lord.  In many ways it still seems hard to wrap my head around the fact that he is not here anymore.  I am grateful to have had a good relationship with him, unlike many people I counsel.  It was not a perfect relationship, especially in the later years he could be stubborn, and as his illness progressed he became increasingly depressed. His disease turned the last years of his life into a long goodbye.  But I still felt his love and support and for that I am very grateful.
One thing that I still admire is that he was as good a father as he was, considering that his father walked out on his family when my dad was teenager.  Apparently my grandfather decided he was finished being a husband and father, and never returned.  In fact, he broke off all communication with his family and my dad read about his death in the newspaper!  I can't imagine how that impacted his life as a kid, but maybe that is why he put such effort into spending time with me and being there for me.  And why he always seemed to have a heart for kids, especially the down and out ones, children living in poverty, and even the troubled kids he met during his time as a Philly police officer.
But today I find myself realizing how much I miss him.  The man who taught me so much about what it means to be a man. A man of faith, a man of family, a man of integrity.  The man who taught me how to ride a bike, to shoot a gun, to hunt and fish, to care for animals, especially dogs, to tune up a car and change the oil, to be generous toward others, and most important, the man who led me to faith in Christ.  And I think I figured out why I am missing him today, a year and a half later.  When dad was here, I always knew I had him to fall back on.  If something broke, he knew how to fix it, or who to call to get it fixed.  If I needed advice, I could call on him for it.  If I needed someone to pray for me, and put all my cards on the table about it, he would hear me out and pray for me.  Its like in the fire service when you advance a hose line into a burning building, you always have another firefighter with you who has your back.  In the air force you always have a "wing man," another pilot in his plane to support you.  In the army, soldiers talk about having each other's "6," another way of saying "I have your back."
But he's not here any more, he is with the Lord.  I know the Lord is with me, and I have a great family. God is faithful, and I know my family are there for me as I am there for them.  But it feels at times like I am flying solo without my most experienced wing man, advancing the hose line without that trusted back-up who has seen it all and has the charred helmet and well worn gear that says, "been there, done that." There's a hole there, an empty spot, a voice no longer heard.
Now that Dad is not here, and my children are adults, I am in the role my dad played in my adult life.  Whoa, not sure I am ready for that yet!  And so on this second Father's Day without him, I am grateful for the years we had, that he is with the Lord and no longer suffering, and hoping I can continue to follow his example.  Love you Dad.
Blessings,
Dr. Paul,

Steps to Overcoming Anger

One of the best books on Anger is Uprooting Anger by Robert D. Jones.  I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants a solidly biblical answer to the problem of anger.  In chapter 5 of his book he outlines a number of steps to overcoming anger.  Here is a condensed version of his steps.
1.  Repent of evil desires that produce your angry behavior and and receive God's forgiving, enabling grace.  As we have demonstrated, the problem you have with anger is not with the people and situations around you, it is a problem rooted in the depths of who you are, your heart.
2.  Own responsibility for your angry behavior and identify it as evil before God and man.  Don't shift the blame to others, own it, see yourself for who you are, a self-centered, selfish person who demands that you get your own way.  Don't make excuses, see it for what it is.
3.  Confess and renounce your angry behavior before God and others.  Start with God (Psalm 51:4) and then go to those who have been on the receiving end of your anger (Matthew 7:3-5).  Remember the promise of 1 John 1:9 that if we confess our sin He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
4.  Believe anew in Christ and His gospel promises to angry people.  Jesus died for hotheaded sinners like you, and the same grace enabled Christ to die for your sins also can empower you to get a handle on your anger.
5.  Commit yourself to taking active, concrete steps to replace your angry behavior with Christlike words and actions. God's word is full of verses to help you take these steps:
For self-control look to Proverbs 16:32, 25:28, 29:11, Galations 5:23, for godly speaking look to Proverbs 10:19-21, 31-32, 12:18, 15:1, Ephesians 4:25-32, for peace making look to Matthew 5:9, 23-26, 18:15-17, 21-35, Luke 17:3-4,  Romans 12:18, 14:19, 2 Timothy 2:22.
6. Establish and carry out a workable temptation plan.  Here Jones makes three addition helpful suggestions.  First, avoid unnecessary occasions that tempt you to show anger.  Second, remove yourself, as quickly as possible, from explosive situations.  And third, in the midst of temptation, ask Christ for strength and give thought to verses which you have committed to memory that can help you combat the temptation.
7. Continue to prayerfully study Scripture and Scripture based resources, on relevant topics.  Two suggestions are Ken Sande's The Peacemaker, and Wayne Mack's Your Family, God's Way.

I have only provided a brief recounting of these steps and have added some comments about each one.  I encourage you to get a copy of Jones' book and read about them in more detail.

Blessings,
Dr. Paul

Taking Responsibility for Your Anger

I want to continue by looking some more at what I am calling destructive anger and how to avoid falling into it.  My last post was a recap of the message from Sunday so be sure to look at it first if you weren't present.  One of the most subtle problems in helping people get a handle on their anger is how we often shift the blame away from ourselves when we lose control of our anger.  Did you ever find yourself saying any of the following?
"He/she/they made me so angry."
"I have the same anger as my mom/dad."
"You really know how to push my buttons."
"Whenever the PMS hits, I start freaking out."
"It's the booze that makes me this way."
"If only he/she/ they didn't ___________, I never would have blown up."

What do you see in common with each of those statements?  Each one makes it seem like I am a passive responder to what others are doing to me.  They turn me into a victim, or someone who is helpless when it comes to my anger.  But as we saw in the prior post, the Bible says we are active in choosing to respond in anger.  It isn't some uncontrollable emotion or force that is caused by those around me.  That is blame shifting.  It's turning the people around you into scapegoats for a problem that lies within your heart.

The main point of our first post is that anger is a problem of your heart, not of the people and situations around you.  Once you understand this truth, the next step is to become aware of how you blame shift and start taking responsibility for how you chose to respond.  Remember what James tells us in 4:1-3:
What causes fights and quarrels among you?  Don't they come from your desires that battle within you?  You want something but don't get it.  You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want.  You quarrel and fight.  You do not have, because you do not ask God.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.  
Notice how James puts the responsibility squarely on you.  It is "your desires"  that battle "within you."  "You want… you kill and covet, you quarrel and fight, you do not ask God, you ask with wrong motives, your pleasures."  Who's to blame for your outbursts of anger?  YOU ARE!

I also get the sense from these verses that the angry person is very arrogant, full of themselves.  And so James shifts from the horizontal dimension of how I relate to others to the vertical dimension of how I relate to God.  It starts in verse 3 and continues through verse 10.  Read through them and ask yourself these questions:
Is God my friend, and how close am I to Him?
Am I living with a spirit of envy or contentment?
Do I grieve over my anger and how it has hurt others?
Have I asked God to forgive me for my destructive anger?
If not, how is pride keeping me from seeking His grace and submitting to His authority?
As James implores us, take time now to seek the Lord, acknowledge your responsibility for your anger, seek His forgiveness, and commit to submitting yourself to Him.

Blessings,
Dr. Paul

Understanding Anger

For those of you at Davisville Church this morning, I promised to give you some of the main points and passages from today's message on anger.  My apologies to the first service for running long!  I will also be sharing in the coming days and weeks additional application points you can use to move your anger from destructive to constructive.  I purposely did not include this in today's message because it is vital to understand that you have to deal with it in your heart, and it really boils down to being an issue of worship.  If you don't get this, then any additional practical applications will leave you frustrated and defeated.

We started off by making the point that everyone deals with anger.  No one is immune from it.  Why?  Because we are made in the image of God, and God gets angry.  His anger is always about the right things, and His displays of it are always appropriate for the situation.  Anger is so difficult to deal with because it is one of those human experiences that can be like God and yet so different from Him.   Anger done right can be a powerfully redemptive experience that reflects the nature and face of God.  But anger done wrong is a powerfully destructive experience that reflects the nature and face of Satan.

Proverbs 14:29.  Notice it does not say that the persons without anger has great understanding, but the person who is slow to anger. Scripture never tells us that the goal is to be without anger.  BB Warfield:  “It would be impossible for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong indifferent and unmoved. " Best example of someone who gets angry but does not sin is Jesus. 

So what is your definition of anger?  How you define it says a lot about you and how you deal with it.  Most people in our society describe it as a force or something in us that blows up because of the people and situations that provoke us.  We need to get in touch with it and let it out.  But if this is true it leaves us without hope.  If anger is caused by people and situations around me which cause this volcano eruption displeasure, then it is completely beyond my control. 

Proverbs 16:32 and 19:11 make it clear that you can control your anger.  You do it at work or you get fired.  Here is my definition of anger:  Anger is an active response of the heart to something I am against, that displeases me, that matters, and is wrong. 

Let's look at destructive anger.  The person with destructive anger lives in a very small world.  All they see is increasingly about themselves.  The kingdom of me is all that exists.  The world becomes the size of my own self-interest.  

There are three ways that the practice of anger goes band:  

1.  We reach when we shouldn't.

2.  We have legitimate anger, it is rightly aroused, but is wrongly expressed.  

3.  Absent anger, we don't react when we should, you are complacent, indifferent. 

There are three characteristics of constructive or redemptive anger:  

1.  It reacts against actual sin.  

2.  It focuses on God and not myself.  It is concern with God's kingdom, rights, and concerns, not my kingdom, my rights and my concerns.  

3.  It is always accompanied by other godly qualities and expresses itself in godly ways, Ephesians 4:28-30.  

David Powlisons 7 Questions to evaluate your anger:

1.  Do you get angry about the right things?

2.  Do you express your anger in the right way?

3.  How long does your anger last?

4.  How controlled is your anger?

5.  What motivates your anger?

6. Is your anger "primed and ready" to respond to another person's habitual sins?

7.  What is the effect of your anger?

How do we move from destructive anger to redemptive, constructive anger?  Repentance and faith.  Anger management is not enough because it doesn't go deep enough to deal with the source of my anger which is my heart.  

Proverbs 4:20, Mark 7:20-23, James 4:1-2.

Repentance is when you humble yourself, admit you have a problem with anger, and confess your sin to God.  And then you turn to Him in faith and this becomes a matter of your worship.  Who are you worshipping, you or God.  James 3:9-10.  Here you see anger and worship in the same verse!  Notice how the same mouth expresses worship to God and curses other people.  And James says it is not to be this way. 

Changing the content of the things we worship is the one hope for overcoming anger.  Earlier I said that the angry person lives as if the kingdom of me is all that exists.  The world becomes the size of my own self interest.  The second step to overcoming destructive anger is to have a bigger vision than your irritants, seeing that you are on a bigger stage.  Believing that it is someone else’s world and someone else’s kingdom is the one thing which can begin to re-align your whole life when it comes to anger.  Worships calls us into the bigger world-view in which our struggle with anger finds its only true resolution.

You see this in Psalm 73 with a person who starts out very angry and bitter at those he feels are getting away with sin.  Look at how he describes himself in verses 3-5 and then see how he starts to change in verses 16-17.  You see him describe his anger in past in verses 21-22 and then how it changed in verses 23-24.  

Part of this bigger view involves living with the realization that our Holy God is angry at sin and as you and I sin daily, we experience His grace every day.  We deserve nothing less than Hell, but the wrath that you and I should receive from Him on a daily basis was directed toward someone else.  It was directed toward Christ on the cross. God’s wrath was poured out on Him to the point where God the Father turned His back on His Son.  It led Jesus to cry out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!” And as Christ hung on the cross as an innocent man, enduring the taunts, the abuse, the pain and the agony, what did He do?  Did He cry out for retribution? No!  He cried out “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” 

The cross is the ultimate example of redemptive anger being displayed, and provides our ultimate source of hope and help for moving from destructive to constructive anger as we turn to Christ in repentance and faith, and we seek His spirit to work on our self-centered, angry, bitter hearts.  Take some time in Psalm 51 as you seek His forgiveness and ask for him to transform your heart of anger.  

Stop back later this week as we talk about how to make this transition more of a reality in your life.

Blessings,

Dr. Paul