Taming Your Temper

And now to help prepare you spiritually for the sermon topic this morning. Watch the screen. Once behind the wheel, a strange phenomenon takes place. Mr. Walker is charged with an overwhelming sense of power. His whole personality changes. Abruptly he becomes an uncontrollable monster, a demon driver. Mr. Walker is now Mr. Wheeler, a motorist. Hey, Jeep! Watch where you're going, stupid! Guess what we're talking about today? Grab your message notes. The Art of Living Well is a series that we started a couple of weeks ago based in the book of Proverbs in the Bible. And today, let's talk about taming my temper.

Anger is a problem in America, and it ticks me off! No, just kidding. But it is a huge problem. Here's some revealing stats on temper. The average woman loses her temper three times a week. The average man loses his temper six times a week. Folks, I just report the facts. I don't make these things up. Single adults express anger twice as often as married adults. Men are more likely to lose their temper at home than outside the home. The most dangerous room during a temper tantrum is your kitchen. You've heard of road rage. Most likely to express road rage are mothers of school-aged children and young adults in their 20s. And there they go now.

Now, the airlines have a new term, air rage. British Airways reports that air rage cases have increased 400% since they began keeping track. Temper is a real issue we need to address. And so let's read the first verse out loud together. This is Proverbs 16:32. Here we go. Let me hear you. "Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city." Now let me tell you a story about exactly that. One day, Alexander the Great, in a fit of rage, hit his favorite general and killed him. And he cried out, "I've conquered the world, but I cannot conquer my own soul." Why is it so hard to conquer your own soul? Why is it easier to accomplish almost any other ambition than to control your own emotions, especially the emotion of anger?

What's the cure for that? Well, if you summarize the many verses in the book of Proverbs about anger, and it's one of the most common themes in the book of Proverbs, you'll find verses on the danger of anger, the roots of anger, and the healing of anger. And so that's the outline for this morning's message. The danger of anger, the roots of anger, and the healing of anger. And once again, the resources that I used to put this together are listed at the end of the notes. Major credit due to pastors Tim Keller, Rick Warren, and many other great pastors and authors. But first, let's dive in.

Proverbs talks a lot about the danger of anger. Anger is an explosive substance. And like any other explosive, it has its uses, but it can also just tear things apart like an explosive. Like first of all, it deteriorates my body. It deteriorates my body, my physical health. Proverbs 14:30 says, "A tranquil heart is life to the body, but passion is rottenness to the bones." All kinds of research shows that anger is harder on your body than anxiety. Anger is harder on your body than stress, than extreme physical exertion. No emotion sets you up for a heart attack. No emotion impacts your body. No emotion disturbs your physical health more than anger.

Second, it damages my community, my relationships, my community. Proverbs 15:18, "A hot-tempered man stirs up dissension, but a patient man calms a quarrel." We saw last week how when you get angry, you hurl words around like weapons, and like a sword, they slash your relationships. Now, there's a principle in this verse when it says that a hot-tempered man stirs up dissension. And it's this, anger is contagious. Would you agree with that? Anger is contagious. If you are angry, other people will get it. If other people are angry, you'll probably pick it up too, right? But you'll never notice that your spouse or a co-worker can come to you and tell you about the things that make them mad and about how somebody hurt them and about how they're so upset about that now. And before too long, you get mad about the same things too.

You want to go strangle the person that's upsetting your friend or your spouse or your co-worker, right? Anger is contagious. And this is especially true in the family. Quick show of hands, how many of you are parents? How many of you are parents here today? Wow, got lots of parents here. When you get angry as a parent, you are modeling for your kids how to get angry, right? Everybody gets angry. Everybody's going to experience anger. Your kids are, you are. But you are modeling for your kids how to be angry. And kids will pick this up because kids learn by example.

Excuse me. It was brought home to us one time. And I told her, Elizabeth was about four years old. And she was playing a house with her little doll. She had a two-story kind of dollhouse and little dolls like this, a mommy doll and a daddy doll and little kid dolls and baby dolls and little baby strollers. And she was playing with them happily. And Lori was in the next room. And she hears Elizabeth slamming a doll into the floor of the house over and over like the doll is stomping around like this. And Elizabeth is having the doll say, "I can't ever find anything in this stupid house. Stupid house, can't ever find anything." And then Lori leans into the room and says, "What's going on?" And Elizabeth brightly says, "I'm pretending to be the mommy."

Now, my wonderful wife Lori, who happens to be sitting in the front pew staring holes into my skull right now, right over here. Now, she's one of the coolest common, calmest, she's way less emotional than I am. Lori, you're my hero, that's for sure. But she has those moments, right? And does Elizabeth pick up on those moments? Of course, instantly and memorizes them. "Can't find anything around here." By the way, I hesitate to add this, but when I told Lori this morning, "You know, I'm going to be telling that story." She goes, "Are you going to tell everybody what happened next?" I said, "I don't remember what happened next." And she said, "Let me remind you." Because she said, "Then I asked Elizabeth, 'Well, where's the daddy?'" And Elizabeth pointed to a doll that was on the little plastic couch and said, "Oh, the daddy's taking a nap." You know, so... They pick it all up.

So here's my question. So why do we do it, right? Why do we scream at our kids? Why do we yell at our spouses? If anger destroys and damages my community and my relationships, why do we do it in the first place? Well, because it works, right? It has effect. For example, perhaps you found yourself this morning getting ready for church. What works? Saying sweetly, "Okay, everybody, let's all get in the car for church." "Everybody, we're going to leave in five minutes, so let's all be in the car. Five minutes. Ready to go, okay?" How does that work? Not too good. How about this? "Get in the car, kids! Now! So we can go learn about the love of Jesus Christ!" Right? They're in the car before you're finished with a sentence.

You think my family's any different than your family? It's this, "Get in the car so I can teach people about the love of Jesus!" "I'm going to be late to tell them about God!" I am not exaggerating much. There is short-term effect. That's why we do it. But in the long run, you lose. And then third, it diminishes my wisdom. And that is my ability to make any wise choices at all. Proverbs 14:17, "A quick-tempered man does foolish things." "Anger just makes us stupid." Kind of like this video caught live on tape and put on YouTube. Of course, you know that sign said, "Do not kick this sign." Probably, right? After you've cooled off when you've been angry, after you cool off and you look back at the things you've done, how you've acted, the things you've said, don't you feel like a fool sometimes? Don't you look back and go, "Man, I was such a fool."

You know why you feel like you were a fool? Because you were a fool! That's the point of this verse. When you get mad, it distorts your view of what's allowable, your view of just reality. And then fourth, it even decreases my willpower. It decreases your ability to make intelligent choices at all. Proverbs 19:19, "A hot-tempered man must pay the penalty." "If you rescue him, you will have to do it again, and again, and again." Why? See, of all the emotions, anger is the one most like an addictive substance. Of all the emotions, anger is the one most like an addictive substance, because anger leads you to denial.

See, you can admit that you're worried. You can admit that you're stressed. You can admit that you're sorrowful. It's much easier to admit anxiety or discouragement or fear or any other emotion, right? It's much easier to say, "I'm afraid of this," or "I feel a little bit discouraged," "I'm a little anxious about flying," or whatever. But anger hides itself, just like an addiction. And so you go into denial, right? "I'm not angry! I'm just sticking up for myself. I'm not angry! I'm just getting something off my chest. I'm not angry. I'm not losing my temper. I'm just an activist. I'm just looking out for justice. I'm just a direct speaker. I'm just saying." And because you deny your anger the more all of these problems show up.

And the more you have anger and the problems that anger brings into your life, the bad health, the broken relationships, and so on, in order to keep up the fiction that you haven't induced these problems yourself, you have to be angrier. In order to stay in denial, you have to get angrier because you have to prove that it's because of everybody else that you've got this problem. "I'm not angry! They're all making me angry!" Anger is addictive, and this is one reason that it is so hard to stop. Check this out. This is a letter to a newspaper columnist. "Dear columnist, you told the mother of a three-year-old who throws tantrums to let him kick the furniture to get the anger out of his system. Well, my younger brother used to kick the furniture when he got mad. He's 32 years old now. He's still kicking the furniture, what's left of it. But he's also kicking his wife, the kids, and anything else that gets in his way. Last weekend, he kicked a television out the window, which was closed at the time."

This letter was quoted in a Psychology Today article recently, and the whole gist of the article was, excuse me, the, uh, shouldn't eat so many donuts between services, but the Psychology Today article was talking about how it used to be in the 70s and 80s, the kind of trendy thing to say about anger was, "You just have to vent it, right? Just let it all out. Shout that old Tears for Fear song. Shout, shout, let it all out." That was specifically about that school of thought. John Lennon did a whole CD that came out of this kind of therapy where he had songs, one whole song where he raged about his mother, one whole song where he raged about God, one whole song where he raged about Paul McCartney, you know, it was about all these things, just vent your spleen and then you'll be fine.

But now, this article in Psychology Today says, so many psychologists are saying, "You know what? That's not exactly the right way to handle anger." They're seeing the biblical truth that what you need to do is learn to control your anger because it is an addictive substance. And just like any other addiction, the cure is not to indulge it. The cure is to get control of it. Do you need to let it out? Of course. You can let it out in confession to another person. You can let it out in your relationship with God. You can let it out in constructive ways. But you have to learn to control it.

So that's the danger of anger. However, the Bible also says a lot of positive things about anger. Did you know that? The Bible says God gets angry. The Bible's goal for your life is never some sort of passionless detachment. The Bible never says don't have any emotion, be like, you know, Mr. Spock on Star Trek and be emotionless. Man, the Bible, Jesus who the Bible says was perfect, he got angry. He got angry at the religious hypocrites. He got angry at the money changers of the temple. When he was at Lazarus' tomb, he got angry at death itself. The Bible says God gets angry. He's slow to anger, but he gets angry.

What does God get mad at? He gets angry at injustice. God the Father gets angry at sin. God gets angry at what harms the people that he loves. If you don't get angry about anything, that means you don't love anything. The opposite of love isn't anger. The opposite of love is indifference. Think of how you feel when you see somebody that you love hurt by something or someone. You don't ignore it. You get angry. Anger is an emotion that's given to us by God. It's part of God's nature, and it's supposed to be motivating us to right wrongs. It's supposed to be what motivates us constructively to defend people who need defending, to defend the vulnerable, to defend the defenseless. It's supposed to be about righting injustice. The problem is you and I keep defending the wrong things. We defend our own egos.

And that brings us to the root of anger, the root of anger. Here's a magic question to help you deal with your anger. When you get mad, ask, "Why am I angry? Why are you angry?" You see, there's levels to our anger that you find Proverbs talking about. And level one is just daily frustration, right? Things that bug us daily. The guy tailgating you on your way out of the church parking lot today, right? That's level one daily frustration. That's what Proverbs 29:11 is talking about. A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control. A fool is like Goofy in that cartoon, exploding at the little daily frustrations. Then there's level two, which is longer-term hurt. Things like betrayals, hurts, wounds that we've never forgotten and never forgiven.

Now listen, the more level two things in our hearts, longer-term hurts, the more level one things will bug us. And that's why the Bible says, "A man's wisdom gives impatience. It is to his glory to overlook an offense." And then underneath the whole thing there can be anger toward God himself. That's level three, deeper insecurity, anger against God. Now, stop for just a second because I know you eagerly want to flip over to page two, but I will not let you miss any blanks. I'll tell you when to flip over. Just stop here because I want to just concentrate on these three levels for just a moment. Let's talk about these. Proverbs 19:3, the verse you see at the bottom of the page. What a great verse this is. "A man's own folly ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the Lord." It's possible for your heart to rage against God. How?

See, if you have some ideal view of life, like if only I had these things in my life, then I'd be happy. If I only had a family like that or a job like that or a life like that, then I'd be happy. And of course life never gives us all we think we need to be happy. Then there can be kind of a low level, kind of a bedrock of self-pity. Kind of a bedrock, a low hum level of anger against life for being unfair, or specifically for God for not protecting you more and not giving you the kind of life that you feel like you deserve. And even, as that verse says, even if you mess up your own life, you can still be angry at God about it. Even if other people have messed up your life, God didn't have anything to do about it, but other people have messed up your life, you can still be in rage against God about it.

And again, just look at these levels. If you have level three anger against God or against life, then what that does is that makes it harder to forgive and forget level two wrongs. And the more level two wrongs that you nurse, that can make it harder to overlook daily irritations, level one, because all the daily irritations are like, become proof to you of your basic thesis that your life just stinks and life's unfair and everybody else has it better than you, and it gets to the point where you feel like you're angry all the time. And so what's the cure for this? What's the answer to this build up? How do we heal it? Well, that's the healing of anger that Proverbs talks about. That's on page two.

First, you gotta admit it, right? The key to being angry well, to being angry smart, is that you have to own your own anger. You have to admit your anger and you have to be open to critique. Proverbs 10:8. The wise are glad to be instructed, but babbling fools fall flat on their faces. You admit it so that you can be instructed and then you delay it. Jot that down. Delay it. You know, one of the great remedies for unwise anger is delay. Thomas Jefferson said, "When angry, count to 10 before you speak. If very angry, 100." I love that quote. The problem is, when I'm angry, words come so easily. You ever notice that? Man, when I'm angry, I'm brilliant, you know? It can be so hard to make conversations sometimes, so hard to figure out how to make small talk, but when I'm mad, man, I'm a wordsmith.

I can think of the most sarcastic things to say, "Oh, that's clever. I can't let that go unsaid. That's brilliant. You know, I just got to say it out loud." But look at this next verse, Proverbs 12:16. In fact, read this out loud with me. "A fool shows his annoyance at once, but a prudent man overlooks an insult." How many of you have learned the hard way, "When you're angry, do not leave a phone message"? Right? Have you learned this the hard way? When angry, do not send email. When angry, do not post on Facebook, do not say something on Twitter, right? Because then it's trapped for all time in that amber, you know? You got to relax and give it some delay.

Our family life, I feel like, was really changed when we read a book by a researcher named John Gottman, and he studied conflict in relationships, and he coined a term, "flooded." And flooded is what you feel when you are flushed with hormones in an argument, right? You can feel it. The adrenaline, your face gets flushed, and your blood pressure goes up, and your heart starts pumping, and that's literally your body is flooding you with all these fight-or-flight hormones that kick in. And Gottman says that research shows that when you are flooded, you literally cannot learn anything. They've done brain scans. When you're flooded with all these hormones, the part of your brain that can comprehend new facts is basically shut down. So it's literally pointless to have a conversation, because when you're flooded, you cannot take in new information. You just can't physically do it.

And so the only wise thing to do when flooded is to take a break and get unflooded. And we've begun, in fact, for years now, we've used this term in our family with our kids and with each other, "You know, I'm just flooded right now. I've got to take a break because I'm flooded. I can't talk about this right now." Or, "Honey, you seem really flooded right now. Maybe you should take a little break." And I want to really recommend this term to you too because it's a non-judgmental term. It's not like the alternatives like, "Wow, you are really out of control right now. You are not handling this well." Those are all judgmental ways to say the same thing. But flooded isn't judgmental. It's just a statement of fact. "Wow, you got all the flooding going on. Yeah, you're right. I feel flooded right now." This has led to a lot of success in our family to just delay it, delay it.

Because once you delay it, then you can analyze it, analyze your anger. Proverbs says, "He who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding." When you are a man of understanding, you'll have a cool spirit. And so you analyze it. Here's a great verse about this. Proverbs 24:29. "Do not say, 'I'll do to him as he has done to me. I will pay that man back for what he did.'" Let me ask you a question. Who is this person in this verse talking to? "I'll do to him as he did to me." Who is this person talking to? Himself, right? That's self-talk. He's muttering to himself, "I'm going to do to him." And here's the implication of this verse. What makes you angriest is not necessarily what happened to you. It's what you tell yourself about what happened to you.

It's what you tell yourself that it means. Let me repeat that. What makes you angriest is not what happened to you. It's what you tell yourself about what happened to you. When you assign meaning to something that somebody's doing, when you say to yourself, "That means that people don't respect me as usual." "Oh, this means that people don't like me. That means that I am never included just as I suspected." So you analyze what you are saying to yourself, what you are muttering to yourself about your anger. Again, whenever you get angry, say to yourself, "What am I defending?" If anger is meant to be a good thing to defend the defenseless, ask, "What am I defending here?" And so often, what I'm defending is me, my reputation, my honor, my feelings.

Now let me just give you a recent example that's, I think, very common. I was driving to work the other day earlier this week, and the first thing on the agenda was an 8.45 a.m. staff meeting that I was supposed to lead. And I get a late start to begin with, my own fault, and then I end up driving my son to school, which I'd been doing when my wife was in India, but I hadn't planned on doing that day because my wife had just returned from India the previous night. And so I figured, "She's back. She can instantly plug back into everything she was doing before." Right? Seems reasonable. So stupid, right? Unreasonable expectation. But at the last minute, she says, "Oh, I can't really do it. I don't feel good. Can you take him?" Okay.

And so then I hit traffic on the way to his school, and I very unwisely zoomed around a pileup in my lane into the oncoming lane of traffic, which was empty. I haven't told my wife about this until right now, and she cannot do anything because we're in public. But—and so then I dropped David off at school, and then I'm coming to church, and I come across traffic on Highway 1. And I'm getting more and more upset. I'm marinating in my frustration. I'm getting angrier. I'm thinking to myself, "I need to get to the staff meeting so I can tell my staff about Jesus!" You know? And suddenly I stop and go, "Well, Renee, you are getting really flooded here, right? You're flooded."

And I ask myself this question because, of course, it was on my mind because I was writing my sermon this week on anger. And so I ask, "All right, what is it I'm defending here?" And I instantly realize, "Well, I'm defending me and my reputation." I was angry because I hadn't left enough time to get to work, and so I was afraid that I was going to look like an idiot coming in late to my own staff meeting. And I was imagining people looking at me judgmentally, "Oh, there he is telling us to come in on time, and he's coming late." And so because I didn't plan well enough, I was mad at all the other drivers and my wife and the traffic engineers and the highway construction people. And I was blaming it all on them, but what was I really defending? I was defending me. So stupid, right? But what happened was I analyzed it like this, and I'm telling you, by the time I got to work, and I wasn't even late for the staff meeting, I came in right on time.

But by the time I got to work, I wasn't angry anymore because I went, "Oh, this is about me. It's not about anything else. It's about me defending myself. That's dumb." When you analyze your anger with that question, what it does is it makes it so much more handleable. Now that stuck in traffic is probably a common example. On a much deeper level, you might have heard of Dr. Ben Carson. He overcame poverty, overcame racism. To become a world-renowned neurosurgeon, he's director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. He talks a lot about his faith in Christ. Now, when he was a young man, he had an incredibly violent temper. He got into fights. One time, he tried to hit his own mother with a hammer. He went after people with baseball bats, ice picks, and it all culminated one day when, in high school, this happened.

And here's Dr. Carson on video himself to tell the story. Another youngster angered me, and I had a large camping knife, and I tried to stab him in the abdomen. Unfortunately, he had a large metal belt buckle under his clothing, and a knife blade struck with such force that it broke, and he fled in terror. But I was more terrified as I recognized that I was trying to kill somebody over nothing. This was after I had turned my grades around. I was an A student at that time. I realized at that moment that with a temper like that, my options were three—reform school, jail, or the grave. None of those options appealed to me. So I just blocked myself off from the bathroom, and I started praying. I said, "Lord, I can't deal with this temper." I picked up my Bible, and I started reading from the book of Proverbs. That was the first day that I started doing it, and I've been doing it every day since then.

Because it had all these verses in it about anger, and it seemed like they were all applicable to me. While I was there, I had a revelation, and that revelation was that the reason I was always angry is because I was always in the center of the equation. I said, "Just step out of the center of the equation, and then everything won't be directed at you, and then you won't be angry. Also, you'll be able to look at things from other people's points of view." Also, where I lived, it was sort of like a macho thing. You get angry, you kick down the wall and punch in the window, and it makes you into a big man. But I came to understand that when you react like that, it actually is a sign of weakness because it means that other people and the environment can control you. I decided that I didn't want to be that easily controlled. I've never had another problem with temper since that day.

Isn't that a fascinating testimony? Talking about being the center of the universe, and that's why you get angry. Because when you're at the center of your world, then everything is ultimately directed at you. The question is, how do you step out of what he called the center of the equation? Well, there's really only one way to do that, and that is to allow the only one who belongs in the center to become the center when God becomes the center. And that's when, number four, you can transform it. You can allow your anger to be transformed in so many ways. I mean, at the most basic level, it's just the way you express it. The Bible says a gentle answer turns away wrath. You ever notice when you're angry, your volume goes up. But if you turn down the volume, it helps to turn down the anger.

But it goes further than that. The Bible says if your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he's thirsty, give him water to drink. Now, lots of cultures in the world had wisdom literature, proverbial type sayings, but there is nothing in any other culture's wisdom literature like this. Because this isn't just saying, "Forgive your enemies." This is saying, "Redeem your enemies. Bless your enemies." And of course, this is exactly what God did for us on the cross. What did Jesus Christ do with anger? It's a great place where anger met. And what did he do with it? Well, he took our anger against him, literally people spitting at him and mocking him and crucifying him, our anger against him, which he did not deserve, and he took the righteous wrath of God against our sin, which we did deserve, and on the cross, he forgave the sin so he could love the sinner. Just amazing.

And if you realize what Jesus did for you on the cross, then you can do the same thing for other people when they wrong you. Now, healing of deep hurts and forgiving this kind of things that people have done against you, that is a huge topic which we've addressed separately in sermons that you can access for free on the website if you want to plunge into the topic of forgiveness. But while we're still on the related topic of anger, let me just say this. It's all about what fills you up. I mean, look at this water bottle that Mark graciously brought up to me. It's full of beautiful, clear water that you can see through almost as if there was nothing in it, right? It's just beautiful. But some of you are like water bottles that are filled to the brim with brackish, kind of briny, muddy water, because you're filled to the brim with tension and stress and anger and hurt, because you've been rehearsing your anger against life's unfairness to you and you haven't been forgiving other people in those long-term hurts and those daily frustrations affect you too, so that when anything jostles you, that's what spills out.

You know, you're just sort of angry all the time. And by the way, our society contributes to this. There are people who make money off of your outrage. There are authors, there are talk show hosts, there are TV show hosts who want you to get outraged all the time to the level where you're almost addicted to their show because you need to get more outraged again. Remember, anger is addictive. It's just like pornography. It's addictive. And you can plug in some people are like porn addicts, only they're outrage addicts. And they're going to listen to and watch and read or read blogs or whatever on the internet. They're going to keep their outrage stoked. And so you're going around angry all the time. And so that's what spills out of you when other people irritate you or jostle you.

And God says, here's what to do. You confess that. You pour it all out before me in confession. You find a trusted confidant to confess it to and then you allow him to fill you up with pure water again. How? When you think about what he did for you on the cross, when you think about it, is grace that you're just alive? When you think about all the gifts that he's poured out on you, maybe not all the gifts that you wanted, but think of all the gifts that you have living in a beautiful place and people who love you. And you allow all those things, things that are excellent, pure, praiseworthy to fill you up. And then when you're jostled, those are the things that that spill out.

That's what the Bible says. The fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace and patience. You need patience? Well, it's a fruit of the Spirit. That means the more God fills you with his Spirit, the more patient you're going to be. Because when the world jostles you, that's what's going to spill out because Jesus deals with our root problems. In fact, just flip in your notes back to page one, the bottom of it where it says the roots of anger. Look, when you internalize what Jesus Christ did for you, it's going to handle all these things. The level one hurt, your anger at God. Jesus deals with that when you realize how much God forgives you and loves you. Then the level three anger goes down. Then move up to level two hurt. You may have been betrayed, but when you realize how much Jesus forgives you, then you start being able to forgive others because that's what you're filled with.

And then move all the way up to level one, frustration. He wants to replace that with his peace, the peace that comes from knowing that he's sovereign and he will work things out. And so the key question back on page two is, "What fills me up?" Because that's your choice. You can choose daily, daily. It has to be a daily choice. You can choose to be filled up with God's pure spirit of love and peace and goodness and loveliness and excellence. Or you can choose to be filled up with outrage and hurt and anger and bitterness. It's your choice. So what's filling you right now? And, you know, I don't want to just talk about this. I want to do it. So let's get filled up with God's peace.

Would you bow your heads in a word of prayer with me? With our heads bowed, I'm actually going to ask the band to come back. I'm going to ask Christi to sing a song for you that I just want you to listen to and allow God to fill you with his peace. But as they get ready, let me pray for you. Heavenly Father, there are many people here this morning who are struggling with this. Some of us need to go home and apologize to somebody and say, "I've been out of control at times and I want to change. I ask you to pray that I'll be able to change." God, help us to do that. Some of us in these moments want to say, "For the first time, Jesus, come into my life and be my Savior. I need you to save me from this." But most of all, God, I pray that you would help this not to be a try-harder message. Help us to rest, to relax, to turn over to you all of our worries and anxieties, to empty ourselves of all of that stuff inside and to let ourselves be filled up with the pure water of the Spirit of God, the grace of God available through Jesus Christ our Lord. It's in his name we pray. Amen.