8 But now you also, put them all aside: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive speech from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, since you laid aside the old self with its evil practices.and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him. Colossians 3:8-10
We might be proud that we aren’t participating in the major sins any more, or have sufficiently sequestered ourselves from the evil world, and this is not a bad thing. Now Paul digs deeper into a more calcified area of our hearts, and that is the problem of anger in all its forms, endemic and expressed. These propensities need to be excised if we are to excel still more.
Let’s look at what Paul urges us to “put aside” or “stop,” that is anger, wrath, and malice, and their manifestations, slander, abusive speech, and lies.
Anger, it seems, is one of the strongest and most visceral of all our passions. It is what kept Moses from entering the Promised Land. Frankly, only the Holy Spirit can manage it.
Anger can quickly come to boil as wrath, or fester as malice, which one of my favorite Bible teachers used to call congealed anger.
If it comes out of our mouths, it can be subtle, uttered with forked tongue (slander, lies), or with both barrels (abusive speech).
The famous line from The Karate Kid, “wax on, wax off” is appropriate here, as we’re commanded to “put on” and “lay aside.” We are in the process of waxing off the impurities to reveal the shiny new people we are!
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