Archived Daily Manna | Rejoice Fellowship | A mission to release people to rejoice in the world.

Message: In Part 1, we discussed the repeated times where Christ tells us that mercy will come to the merciful, and that God will “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Today, we will discuss a difficulty we have in following Christ’s will for us: anger. Truly forgiving someone who has injured us is one of the hardest things we can do. Anger and hatred are powerful and intransigent. If we have been wronged, even if we can calm our anger, thinking back to the incident may make us angry all over again. We don’t want to see them forgiven; we want to be vindicated. We want to see them judged and punished. We may know, in our mind, that Christ told us to “cast out the beam in our own eye” rather than to criticize our neighbor for the splinter in his eye; for it is easier to see faults in others than in ourselves. We may also remember the exhortation, “judge not, lest ye be judged.” But although knowledge of these rules is critical, in practical terms our emotions can remain obdurate, unmoved by remembering these rules. If God is Your Copilot, Switch Seats So how can we overcome these powerful emotional forces within us? For always, anger and hatred damage us; often, much more than they damage their object. The key to this, as with all things, is that we must try. If we cannot bear to forgive someone in our hearts, the secret is the power of prayer. We *can* force ourselves to pray for a person we hate — even if we must start by only saying the words, without truly meaning them. God loves all his people, and we can pray that the object of our anger is God’s beautiful child, someone God loves as much as us, someone God hopes to redeem. If our enemy has taken money from us, we can pray that God will grant him riches — even if we’re just saying the words, “going through the motions.” If she has stolen our husband, we can pray that God give her sexual satisfaction and a happy home life; if he is arrogant, we can pray that God give him honor and glory among men. It hurts a bit to pray for an enemy’s worldly success, even in silence, but it will begin to erode our own feeling of injury. We can then pray that we forgive the person and try to say, in our prayers, all the things that might underlie the person’s wrongdoing. We can say all the things that caused the person to act as he did. Behind the terrible thing that he or she did to us, there is always pain, and loneliness, and insecurity, and fear; even if we cannot see it, God can. If we can manage to do this, day after day, night after night, the Holy Spirit will work a miracle in our hearts. It is guaranteed. We will eventually take the very power of God into our lives and, one day, find that we have forgiven our enemy. We will also find that, in forgiving another, our own lives will be blessed. Anger erodes a person’s health, physical and mental. It eats up our positive energy that we need to handle the problems in our lives. Being rid of toxic anger will help us sleep, help us work, and help us to love our family and friends. And, amazingly, it will do us no actual harm! We do not have to approve of somebody’s actions to forgive them. We do not have to change our morals or ethics; all we have to do is stop judging them. Learning not to judge lifts a burden from our souls.