Earning Respect
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“Sensible people control their temper; they earn respect by overlooking wrongs.”
Proverbs 19:11 NLT
OK, it’s confession time.
Although I seem like a pretty mellow guy, I used to have a bit of a temper. It really made me angry when things didn’t go as I thought they should, or if someone else wasn’t meeting my exacting standards of intelligence, ability to express themselves clearly, or a thousand other things…
Of course, I usually had to let people know what they were doing wrong, and not in a nice way. What I didn’t understand at the time — and what is pointed out in this verse from Proverbs — is that I was losing the respect of others. Nobody wants to be corrected in an unpleasant way.
You can never go back and change the mistakes of the past, but by repenting and never repeating those mistakes you can restore some of that lost respect. While I’m still not perfect — far from it! — I’m a lot better at letting things that used to irritate me slide on by.
We all have changes to make to ourselves during sanctification. Controlling your temper requires a lot of help from the Holy Spirit, but it can be done.