What outrages you?

I started my Wake Forest early application today, my dream school. It's known for it's weird questions on it's application, like Look out your front door, describe what you see. What would you change? It really makes ya think.

That's when I came across this question though, What outrages you? I've already thought about it before so it was pretty easy to answer.

There's two things that outrage me. First is a hypocrite. I'd prefer a friend that curses or drinks all the time to someone who claims they never do it and does it occasionally.

In Matthew, Jesus gave us a parable an unmerciful servant. A servant fell on his knees and begged his master for patience and the master took pity on him. That same servant went to one of his servants and choked him and threw him in jail for being unable to pay him. The original master found out and took the servant and said, “Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” then the servant was tortured.

As always, Jesus makes a really good point with this one. What I take from this though, God shows us unconditional love and mercy all the time. We can't accept his graces if we don't show the same grace to others in our lives.

Non-believers claim that Christians are hypocrites as an excuse not to be a Christian themselves, I'd like you to join with me in working to take away that excuse from them.

Secondly is someone with strong opinions that don't expect the opinions of others.

Just think about it for a second, you have strong opinions that you would like others to listen to, but you won't listen to others opinions. That's hypocrisy. Keep this in mind too, Proverbs 18:2 says, "A fool flinds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions."

What is anger without a purpose though? God has a purpose for everything. Anger isn't made to ruin our health and give us headaches and stomach aches, which what is usually does for me if I'm angry enough. Anger is made to teach us a lesson. If it angers us, shouldn't we make sure we don't live the life of a hypocrite and do the same exact thing. That's why I started something for myself. Whenever something makes me angry, I write it down on my list of traits not to have. I'm going to start reading over that list everyonce in a while just to check myself and give it my best to rid of hypocrisy in my life completely.

I like to consider it constructive critisicm. Recognizing the actions of others that upset me and eliminating them from my life to make me a better Christian for God to live through.

So take a few minutes and ask yourself, what makes you angry? Do you do it to others too?