People describe him as easy going and they are not wrong from where they stand.
He has not raised his voice since he was about nineteen and he could not tell you the last time he said something cruel. There is no shouting in his house. Anybody visiting would say it is a calm home and they would be reporting accurately.
What he does instead takes about four minutes and empties the room without anybody leaving it.
He goes short. He answers questions with the smallest number of words that are technically an answer. He becomes very busy with something that does not need doing. And the temperature drops, and the other person starts working, and he can watch them working and he does not stop it.
He knows exactly how effective it is. That is the part he has never said out loud to anybody, including her, including the one time she asked him directly whether he knew what he was doing.
The list has quiet items on it
There is a list in Ephesians of things to be put away, and most people hear it as a list about shouting.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice. (Ephesians 4:31, King James Version)
Read the list properly. Clamor is the loud one. Evil speaking is the cruel one.
Bitterness is not loud. Malice is not loud. Neither of them makes any noise at all, and both of them are on the same list, given the same instruction, with no ranking.
Which means a man who has scored himself against the two loud items and passed has been marking his own paper against half the list.
You are not being measured against the loud half only. Ephesians 4 puts bitterness and malice on the same list as clamor, and it is the Holy Spirit, named a few verses earlier as the one not to grieve, who is at work in that whole passage.
The word for what grows underneath
There is a sentence in Hebrews that describes the quiet version, and the picture is agricultural.
Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled. (Hebrews 12:15)
Any root of bitterness springing up.
A root is underground. That is the whole of why the image is chosen. It is not a fire, which everybody sees, and it is not a storm, which arrives and passes.
And read the last clause, because that is the one nobody quotes. Thereby many be defiled. It does not stay with the person who has it.
You are dealing with something described as being under the ground. Hebrews 12 picks a root rather than a flame and names who else it reaches, and it is His Spirit who makes an old agricultural image reach a house with no shouting in it.
The clock in the verse is about storage
The instruction a few verses earlier in Ephesians has a time limit in it, and the limit exists because of what happens to a thing that is kept.
Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26)
Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.
That is a storage rule. It is not about intensity, it is about duration, and a man who goes cold rather than loud is running a very long storage operation by design.
A shouting man discharges it, badly, in about ninety seconds. A cold man keeps it for two days and calls the keeping self-control.
You are running a storage operation rather than exercising control. Ephesians 4 puts the limit on the duration and not on the volume, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a clock in a verse describe something a man has been calling a virtue.
Proverbs says what the wall is like
There is a proverb about what happens between people after this, and the comparison is deliberately heavy.
A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and their contentions are like the bars of a castle. (Proverbs 18:19)
Harder to be won than a strong city.
Cities were taken with armies. The proverb says this is harder than that.
And bars of a castle is a picture of something built to keep people out and to stay shut. It is not a mood, it is architecture.
A man who goes cold is building with those bars, four minutes at a time, and building is a slow process that nobody watches.
You are building with something an old writer compared to a fortified gate. Proverbs 18 picks a construction image and not an emotional one, and it is His Spirit who makes an old comparison reach a man who does not shout.
And Colossians repeats the list with the quiet ones in it
Paul makes the same list again in a different letter, and it is worth seeing that it is not an accident.
But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. (Colossians 3:8)
Malice is on this one too.
Two letters, two lists, and the silent items appear in both of them, next to the loud ones, with no suggestion anywhere that they are the milder version.
Nobody assembling those lists thought the quiet version was the acceptable one.
You are not holding the acceptable version of it. Colossians 3 puts malice on the list again in a second letter, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a repetition across two letters carry the weight it was meant to.
So say the sentence from inside it.
You are not holding the harmless version. Ephesians 4 puts bitterness and malice on the same list as clamor with no ranking between them, and Hebrews 12 describes a root springing up and says thereby many be defiled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes those two weigh something in a foyer on the way out.
And there is no learning to be warmer first. You are running a storage operation rather than exercising control, which is what the clock in Ephesians 4:26 is about, and you are building with something Proverbs compared to the bars of a castle. Christ is in you now, and it is His Spirit rather than a quiet house who makes that a fact to stand on.
Nothing here promises the cold stops. The man in the foyer says he still does it. What is promised is what is written: you are able to give it a name, and a thing with a name is a different object, and it is His Spirit rather than how calm a house sounds who turns saying that out loud into receiving it.
If this is heavier than one person can hold, that is not weakness and it is not a sign of doing it wrong. Say it to somebody today: a doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust. If it goes further than that, call or text the 988 crisis line, and sit down with a person while you do it if there is one nearby.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over this is genuinely yours, given to you and never invented. Ephesians 4 says let all bitterness and malice be put away, so you have standing to speak to something you have been calling self-control. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own opinion, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Ephesians 4:31 and Hebrews 12:15 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not how loud you say it, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Silence I use instead of a raised voice, you are not calm and you were never the harmless version. The Word of God says let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor be put away, and bitterness makes no noise at all.
- Four minutes it takes me to empty a room, you are finished in the name of Jesus. I am named and I am helped, because Hebrews 12 says lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.
- Father, You put the quiet ones on the same list as the shouting and You did it in two different letters. I receive what Your word says over me today, and I am saying this to You from inside it instead of the next morning.
Ephesians 4:31
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