Confronting Your Emotions and Facing Your Mistakes

Dave and I have an eight-year-old granddaughter who’s just like me. I mean, she has a mouth. And so it’s an issue her parents are helping her work out. Well, my daughter is always sending me texts about how her kids are doing, and one morning when she was having a hard time with her daughter at home, she told her, “You need to stop being disrespectful.” And my granddaughter said, “Well, you need to stop making me mad.”

The funny thing is, when she came home from school that day, she’d had some sort of lesson about self-control and she told my daughter, “Do you know what everybody’s problem is? It’s their mouth.” But it didn’t even occur to her that she needed help in that area herself.

Now, it’s easy to laugh about stuff like that when you’re talking about an eight-year-old. But if you and I will be honest with ourselves, there are some behavioral issues we have to work out too.

Taking an Inventory of Your Attitude

I think one of the smartest things you can do is take a regular inventory of your attitude. For example, what kind of attitude do you have when you don’t get your way? Or when someone else gets what you want? Or when somebody tries to correct you?

The Bible says that our trials bring out endurance, steadfastness and patience in us (see James 1:2-3). But the first things they generally bring out are impatience, jealousy and anger. Thankfully, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we have everything we need to live above our emotions.

You see, when we’re born again, God gives us all the fruit of the Spirit, including love, peace, patience and self-control. We just need to learn how to use them.