If you ever go into a job interview, headhunters and personnel experts will tell you there is one question you will always be asked and you had better be prepared to answer correctly and it is this one, “How do you measure success?” On one occasion, the disciples came to Jesus, and they asked him this question, “At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’” (Matthew 18:1). The disciples thought the ultimate success would be to be chosen as the greatest in the kingdom. In fact, two of the disciples even asked if they could sit on either side of Jesus in the kingdom. The disciples were waiting with bated breath, but Jesus as he was very capable of doing, did something totally unexpected. He bypassed their question, and he did this. “He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them” (Matthew 18:2). He said to these twelve disciples, these battle-tested harden veterans who had been with him for three years and thought they had it all together and thought they were ready for primetime, “If you want to catch up to me, you’ve got to first catch up to them.”
Topics: Kingdom of God
There is a lot that the Word of God has to say about controlling our anger and our temper. In this series, Seeing Red, we are going to take a look at exactly what Scripture tells us about managing our anger, but maybe not in the way you would expect, because guess who saw red on more than one occasion? Jesus. Jesus got angry, although Jesus never sinned. You see, anger has gotten a bad rap in a way. It is not always wrong to be angry. In fact, sometimes it is wrong not to be angry. So in this study, we are going to learn from Jesus that anger is appropriate when it is expressed at the right time, in the right place, for the right reason.