Neglect a baby and he will cry. Neglect him a little longer and he will cry louder. Keep on neglecting him and you will actually see the baby ‘get angry’. Babies get angry! How? Why? They can’t reason, so why do they respond as they do?

Teenagers get angry. Do you know why? They don’t even know why. They did not sit down to think about it. But, as they grow up, they are not held on the lap and cuddled and loved as they were when they were smaller. Instead, they are told to go clean their room, wash the car, etc. etc. They are screamed at - and no one feels loved when they are nagged or screamed at. Adults are always getting angry at them and saying things that hurt. And so they learn to give in to anger in a new way and in stronger degrees.

When teen-agers rebel and won’t listen to their parents - the parents actually feel unloved. When kids run away, leave home or even get married - that leaves a love void in the parent’s heart. When kids love to party, drink or take drugs, they don’t think about what it’s doing to their mom or dad. Parents worry about their kids. Fear is a pain. Anxiety is not a part of happiness. The mom feels like her kids don’t care that their actions are actually hurting her. She becomes frustrated - not knowing what to do. She gets angry with that uncaring attitude and that lack of consideration for her feelings. The kid sees the anger and thinks the mom or the dad doesn’t understand them and doesn’t love them. They get angry back.

When wives don’t understand a man and refuse to give him what he wants and needs, the anger comes up inside of him. He feels like she doesn’t care about him and his needs. He feels like she doesn’t love him. When the wife keeps putting him down and blaming him for problems in the marriage or in the home - then the volcano lets loose with it’s scalding words of anger and rage. She didn’t know that she had set the stage for that blow-out over a long period of time.

When a husband won’t show his wife any affection, the love bank inside begins to feel depleted. No one likes to feel unloved. So, they reach out and try to encourage him to talk, to sit and cuddle, to go for a walk - and when he rejects those efforts - boom! - The lady gets angry. When the love need surfaces again and she knows it won’t do any good to try to get him to be romantic and kind, she begins to get angry just thinking about his past rejections. The resentment is a low-grade anger that just seethes inside over a long period of time. Then when he says or does something wrong - Boom! There goes the explosion again.

Down inside there is still a hidden reservoir of love that could come back to the surface again. But, they are afraid of being hurt again and again. They don’t know how to cure you or heal themselves.

If a man had a pet bear who suddenly turned against him, he would be disappointed. But, if the bear was actually knocking him down, clawing his face and biting his legs and arms - don’t you think the man would want to disown that bear? Don’t you think he would want to run from it and get as far away from it as he could? If the man had crawled a hundred yards away and was lying on the ground bleeding and he saw the bear coming his way again - don’t you think he would immediately think up six ways to reject that bear as his friend? If he had a stick he would hit it. If he had a knife he would try to cut it. If he had a gun he would even shoot it, no matter how long it had been his friend.

Just because people’s pain is on the inside and they are not physically bleeding doesn’t mean that we have not hurt them. And when we come back around with our alcoholism and drug addiction - that’s worse than claws or teeth!

A woman who has been happily married for seven years finds out her husband has slept with her best friend. Do you know what kind of a pain that can cause a woman? Do you know how deep that hurt can go? Can she forgive the man. Sure. Most of them do - the first time, but the pain goes on - long after they have said, "I forgive you".

And why not?

Thousands of wives still love their husbands while they are filing for divorce. The divorce wouldn’t hurt so bad if they didn’t love them. But, they just can’t take the pain and the reoccurrence of pain. They have to protect themselves from letting it happen again.

When a wife can’t control the actions of a husband and when parents can’t control the actions of their kids, they try to control the one thing they have left - themselves. They try to protect themselves by putting some distance between themselves and the one who is causing them such disappointment, hurt and pain.

The husband who is kicked out of the house gets angry at the woman who is rejecting him. He is a good husband in 75 ways and she wants to divorce him. He doesn’t think it is right for her to leave him just because of a few nights of adultery with other women. He blinds himself to what’s happening in her and can only see things from his point of view.

The teen-ager, who is kicked out of his own home because he is stealing from his mom to get drugs, thinks that’s the worse thing in the world. He forgets that he also pawned the family VCR and had to be bailed out of jail three times. He forgets about the party that allowed his friends to do $2,000 dollars worth of damage to the living room and furniture. He can’t see the pain that his parents are going through. All he cares about is himself and his pain. And it just gets worse on both sides of the fence.

Angry and bitter people will always find someone to be angry with and bitter against. If someone were to come in and kill everyone you are angry with now - in three weeks you would find someone else to be angry with. If they followed you and killed those people too, in a month you would be angry with someone else. If they did this for the rest of your life - there would always be someone doing you wrong or not caring about your feelings - and you would have more reasons to be angry with someone.

If you want to give yourself a reason not to be happy, then get angry at someone - anyone. If you want to blame someone for your unhappiness - then blame me - blame the mailman - blame seven other people around you.

What difference does it make? If you want to be unhappy, be unhappy. If you want your unhappiness to be someone else’s fault, then fault anybody you want to. It doesn’t make any difference if they are the cause of your unhappiness or not - if you want to believe they are, then believe it.

Anger doesn’t make you any richer, any smarter, any taller, any shorter, any better looking, any thinner or any other good thing. But, if you want to be angry - be angry.

If you don’t want to be angry - then quit waiting for someone else to be perfect before you can quit being angry. Find out how you can quit being angry while others keep on being just like they are. It’s your mind, your soul, your happiness and your eternal welfare that is at stake. It’s your call. What do you really want?

God is love. If you want to be loved, why wait around for your parents to love you when God is more readily available? With Him in control, He will show you how to get them to love you again. Without Him, you probably don’t stand a chance.

Jesus said, "They that come to me I will in no wise cast out!" He is saying that there is no way that He will reject you if you will just come to Him. If He does not cast you out - He takes you in. He also promises peace and rest. He promises you His love. He promises you joy and joy unspeakable.

We know that the Spirit of God is the Spirit of Love. So when God comes in and begins making a person feel loved, He also begins to take away the strong need to be angry with and against everyone.

The more we learn about the Holy Spirit, the more self control we will have. As we learn that the Holy Spirit always honors all of the principles of the Bible, then we quit judging people, criticizing them and making accusations against them. We learn to accept them as they are without trying to control them or without hating them.

He teaches us to forgive, to overcome evil with good, to return good for evil and to bless those who curse us. That also means that we are to bless those who criticize us and put us down.

When God begins to take away our insecurity and our inferiority, then it doesn’t make any difference to us what people think about us or what they say about us or to us. They can try to put us down, but we know they are merely showing us a form of their own weaknesses and we learn tolerance, forbearance and longsuffering.

When we go back and apologize to everyone that we have gotten angry with or shown our anger to - that process alone begins to break us of the habit of getting angry quickly. Why? Because we get smarter as we go along. We discover that it is easier to control our anger and deal with it ourselves than to suffer the humiliation of going back and making apologies.

When we confess to others that we are struggling with the sin of ‘uncontrolled anger’, it makes us think twice the next time before we lose our self-control. That’s a very effective tool in letting God reshape our lives.

Finally - the greatest help of all lies in the past. Remember anyone and everyone whom you have ever been extremely angry with. Think about them one at a time and remember every detail of what was involved.

When you do that, you will probably begin to feel some of that old anger. Why? Because the scientific doctors have discovered that emotions are actually stored in the brain cells of our memories. If that’s the case, we need to flush out those physical brain cells, by remembering what happened and deliberately adding new feelings to that memory.

So, as you remember what that person did - imagine yourself going up to them and telling them what they did to make you so angry. Tell them that you have decided to follow Jesus and that Jesus is filling you with HIS SPIRIT - AND HIS SPIRIT IS NOT THE SPIRIT OF ANGER, RESENTMENT, BITTERNESS, HATRED OR UNFORGIVENESS. Tell them that you are being filled with the spirit of love and forgiveness and that you freely forgive them for anything they have ever said, thought or done against you.

Begin praying for them. See the cross of Christ suddenly descending where they are - and begin to appeal to Jesus to have mercy on them. Tell Jesus that you are letting go of all your anger. Tell Jesus that you forgive them. Tell Jesus you are willing for Him to save them, if they are willing to repent and be saved. Ask God to bless them if He can, and to forgive you for harboring all of that anger for so long.

See those people bowing down at the cross and confessing their own sins to Christ. See the angels of God coming down and blessing those whom you have been angry with. See them rejoicing because of the results of your prayers. Begin to sing and rejoice with them. Begin to laugh. Nobody can laugh and be angry at the same time. It is impossible.

See yourself being reconciled with them. See them saying they forgive you. Dance around the person with great joy. Put laughter into that memory cell. Put forgiveness there. Put visions of Christ and angels and the cross and anything else that is good and right. See angels putting white robes on them. See whatever you think Jesus wants you to see -but add new feelings and new pictures to the scene - so that you will be able to transform the way you look at the past and the people who have hurt you in the past.

And then - upon every remembrance of them - repeat the forgiveness, add new blessings and pray new prayers for them. Eventually, you won’t be able to find a bit of anger against them within yourself. It will all be gone. And you will be a more peaceful and contented person - long before your circumstances change. I’m telling you the truth. I hope you will believe me and act on what I’ve said.

On top of all that - begin to deal with new angers that come up against people around you. Resentful anger is like a poison. Get it pumped out of you before it kills you. Forgive the new offenders. Bless them. Pray for them. Laugh about what they have said and done. Someone has to sin against you in this life - does it make any difference who it is? Can you make everyone in the world perfect? Can you take hate out of everyone you see? Then, you can’t keep them from being hateful, but you can keep yourself from becoming hateful. That’s the key to life and happiness.

When you cannot control the thoughts, the words and the deeds of others - you can control your own reactions to them.

It is our own reactions which make us either happy or unhappy, peaceful or discontented.