Lay Aside the Weight of Irritability

Here's a word I need to hear...often: "Lay Aside the Weight of Irritability" by Jon Bloom. Perhaps you need it too.

A few excerpts:

We like to blame our irritability on someone or something else. We try to convince ourselves (and them) that they make us irritated. If they were different, we wouldn’t be irritated. Or we blame it on being tired, ill, or stressed. But Paul diagnoses irritability as a heart disease; a failure to love: “Love . . . is not irritable” (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). 

… 

Our irritability never has its roots in the soils of righteousness. It springs out of the soil of selfishness and springs up fast, like the sin-weed that it is. We get irritated or easily provoked, not when God’s righteousness or justice is scorned, but when something we want is being denied, delayed, or disrupted. It works like this:

…

After giving some examples of the real roots of our irritability, Bloom goes on to suggest a practical strategy for laying it aside using the acronym "S.T.O.P."

Laying aside irritability, let us run the race set before us, looking to Jesus.