God Started the Conversation While the Man Was Still Angry

The apology has stopped working, and he knows it, and so does everybody else.

It is not that he does not mean it. He means it completely, every time, and that is part of what makes it worse. He means it in the car afterwards and he means it the next morning and he means it standing in the kitchen not knowing where to put his hands.

He has counted, roughly. He thinks it is eleven or twelve times in the last two years that he has said a version of the same thing to the same people. He has run out of ways to say it that sound like anything.

And he has run out of explanations. He used to have a few. Tired. Provoked. A long week. Some of those were even true. But eleven times is not a run of bad luck, and he stopped believing his own reasons somewhere around the seventh.

What he is left with is a plain fact he does not know what to do with: it keeps winning.

The feeling is not the failure

Start here, because a lot of people carrying this have never been told it.

Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26)

Be ye angry, and sin not. Paul puts those two in the same sentence, which means he does not think they are the same thing.

And Jesus had it:

And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. (Mark 3:5)

That is the word. Anger. It is in the text about Jesus, and the reason given is that He was grieved at what people were being like.

So whatever is going wrong for you, the presence of the feeling is not the thing that is going wrong. That matters, because a person who thinks the feeling itself is the sin ends up fighting the wrong thing and losing twice.

You are not defective for feeling it. Ephesians 4 separates the two in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the separating in a person who has been condemning himself for the wrong half.

God speaks first, and He speaks inside it

Cain is furious. Nothing has happened yet.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. (Genesis 4:6-7, King James Version)

Look at when God turns up. Not afterward. Not once there is something to clean up. He is talking to Cain while Cain is still standing there with his face down.

And He opens with a question. Why art thou wroth? He is not gathering information. He is getting the man to say something out loud from inside it.

The same thing happens with Jonah, who is sulking on a hillside about a whole city being spared.

Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry? (Jonah 4:4)

Same move. A question, put to a man in the middle of it. And Jonah answers Him rudely a few verses later, and God does not walk off. He keeps the conversation going for the rest of the chapter, and the book ends with God still talking to him.

You are allowed to talk to God from inside it, and He starts the conversation. Genesis 4 and Jonah 4 both have Him doing exactly that, and it is His Spirit who makes praying mid-storm feel possible rather than hypocritical.

Paul writes it in the present tense

Here is the passage that should end the shame, and it is written by the man who wrote half the New Testament.

For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I... For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do... O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? (Romans 7:15,19,24)

Every verb is present tense. Not I used to. Not before I understood things. He is describing something ongoing while he writes.

And then, without a gap:

I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord... For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. (Romans 7:25, 8:2)

Notice he does not say the struggle ended that afternoon. He says who the deliverer is and moves to what is now true about him.

You are not further gone than the man who wrote Romans. Romans 7 is present tense on the page, and it is the Holy Spirit named at the top of chapter 8 as the one who does what the effort could not.

What Scripture says grows it

This is the part that rules out a plan.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)

The last one in the list is self-control. And it is on a list of fruit of the Spirit.

Fruit is grown. Nobody manufactures fruit by effort, and a tree does not produce it by concentrating harder. It comes out of what the tree is connected to, over time, and mostly while nobody is watching.

That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a statement about the source, and the source is not you.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. (Zechariah 4:6)

You are not fighting this alone and you never were expected to. Galatians 5 puts self-control on the Spirit's list and not on yours, and He is the one who grows it in somebody who has run out of plans.

What the fight actually is

One more, because it changes the size of the thing.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12)

That does not remove anybody's part in it, and nothing here is going to pretend the choices are not real. What it does say is that the thing being fought is not only a personality trait somebody was dealt.

And Paul's instruction after that verse is not a technique. It is armor that somebody else made, that you put on, and every single piece of it is something God supplies.

You have something in you that this is not stronger than. Ephesians 6 sizes the fight honestly and then names who supplies the equipment, and it is the Holy Spirit named at the end of that same armor list who is the reason the sentence is not a slogan.