Dealing With Anger and Hurt feelings: 5 Steps to Overcoming Offense
In order to be effective in your Christian walk, you will need to make the decision to not allow yourself to become offended. Umbrage is one of Satan’s best tools to keep Christians out of the will of God.
When you let yourself become offended, you are no longer walking in love and your faith becomes ineffective. In the scriptures we find that faith works by love and without faith it is impossible to please God.
Everyone has opportunities to be offended. Because we all have all perceive life differently, an incident that will irk one person will not necessarily bother someone else.
What do you do when someone has done something that hurts you or makes you angry?
1. Take the situation to God. Acknowledge that you are upset by what they did. Ask God to help you walk in love and see the situation through His eyes.
2. Think about what is upsetting you and write down what you learned. Let’s say for example that you made an investment based on the confident advice of a well meaning friend and because of it, you lost thousands of dollars. In your journal you might write, “I learned that before I make an investment, I need to pray and seek God and do my own research.”
3. Forgive the person(s) who slighted you. Pray for them and ask God to bless them and give them wisdom concerning every area of their life. Do this every time you are tempted to think bad thoughts about them.
4. Refuse to allow negative thoughts to stay in your mind. After praying for the person, focus your attention on something else. One thing that works well is to speak positive things out of your mouth. You can’t have negative thoughts while you’re speaking positive things.
5. Unless you are in counseling, do not rehearse the problem to other people. This only makes it worse. Every time you talk about it, the memory of what happened will resurface and you will have to start the healing process all over again.
Giving in to offense causes you to make unwise decisions. The pastor says something you do not like so you leave the church, your mother made you mad so you don’t talk to her for 6 months, your spouse made a thoughtless remark about your weight so you eat a whole box of chocolates, you were abused by a relative and you use it as an excuse to stay terminally depressed.
Not giving in to offense does not mean you do not feel hurt. It simply means you will not allow yourself to dwell on the hurt and let it keep you from living a happy, fulfilled life. Determine today that you will walk in love and not allow strife to steal your destiny.
