Killing the Sin of Anger

Jonathan Edwards on replacing anger in our hearts with divine love and humility:

“First, Consider frequently your own failings, by which you have given both God and man occasion to be displeased with you.  All your lifetime you have come short of God’s requirements, and thus justly incurred his dreadful wrath; and constantly you have occasion to pray God that he will not be angry with you, but will shew you mercy.  And your failings have also been numerous toward your fellow-men, and have often given them occasion to be angry with you.  Your faults are as great, perhaps, as theirs:  and this thought should lead you not to spend so much of your time in fretting at the motes in their eyes, but rather to occupy it in pulling the beams out of your own…If others, then, provoke us, instead of being angry with them, let our first thoughts be turned to ourselves, and let it put us on self-reflection, and lead us to inquire whether we have not been guilty of the very same things that excite our anger, or even of worse.  Thus, thinking of our own failings and errors would tend to keep us from undue anger with others.”

– Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits, 201