Righteousness, Love, and Justice should motivate you!

When you act or respond, let it be motivated by righteousness, love, and justice. Don’t allow your emotions to get the best of you and cause you to burn with unrighteous anger or sinful anger! Lean into living up to God’s standards, plans, and purposes rather than allowing the devil to draw you into sinful anger that is destructive, self-centered, and harmful! Let’s be the dads who choose to seek righteousness, love, and justice and so our responses end up being holy anger!

Rooted in Righteousness and Love:

Holy anger is not a mere emotional outburst. It emerges from a desire to protect what is right and to stand up for justice. Jesus exemplified this when He drove out the merchants from the temple, expressing His anger at their exploitation of people without resorting to violence.

Unlike sinful anger, which can lead to harm, holy anger seeks positive change and restoration. It aims to reconcile rather than retaliate. Nehemiah’s confrontation with Sanballat about rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls illustrates this.

Biblical Scriptures on Righteous Anger:

Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” This verse acknowledges that anger is a natural emotion but emphasizes handling it without sinning.

Psalm 7:11: “God is a righteous judge and a God who feels indignation every day.” This verse portrays God’s righteous anger as a response to sin and injustice.

James 1:19-20: “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” James reminds us to exercise self-control and seek God’s righteousness in our anger.

Topic: HOLY ANGER

Verse: Ephesians 4:26 (NIV)

“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,

Righteousness, Love, and Justice are the right way to demonstrate anger

Today’s Devotional kicks off pointing us to what the Bible means when it commands us to “be angry” as we find in Ephesians how God doesn’t want us to do it wrong and give the devil a foothold. The Bible speaks to us not losing control out of anger and as “fits of rage are clearly condemned as sin.” When you are seeing unrighteousness and injustice, it is ok to get angry, we just need to make sure we express it in the right way, with an overflow of love and truth.

Be The Dads who choose to live righteousness, love, and justice when face with a situation that causes you to get angry. Today’s Devotional uses the example of how “parents who discovered their neighborhood grocer selling cigarettes to their teenage son started a campaign that resulted in a law that holds merchants liable.” It speaks to how “these parents expressed their anger in an appropriate way.”

Don’t allow anger to grieve the Holy Spirit

Today’s Devotional speaks of what misdirected anger looks like. Misdirected anger “results in violence or vengeful activity against others” and “grieves the Holy Spirit.” Today’s Devotional speaks of two examples misdirected anger: “Road rage” and “Abuse”.

First Things First:

Today’s Devotional calls us to be the dads who “avoid grieving the Holy Spirit.” It requires that we have our priorities straight with God in first position, our wives in second, our kids in third, and everything else comes after that. To know best, we need to be the dads who realize and “recognize the importance of prayer and Bible reading.” Let’s be the dads who lean into God so that He can help us deal with anger in the right way. Let’s be the dads who are choosing to “express our anger by righting wrongs, letting God of misdirected anger by giving it up to God!”

“A grudge is like a baby; it has to be nursed if it’s going to survive.”

JOHN ORTBERG