On Christmas morning, my wife sent a text message to me and our children with a link to a YouTube video. The beginning of the video showed images from the first Christmas. The audio that played in the background was from the segment of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” where Linus recited the famous passage from the Gospel of Luke: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them….”
On Friday, April 5, Michael Warren, the 27-year-old son of Rick Warren, a well-known evangelical Christian pastor and author, committed suicide. You may have heard of Rick Warren. He’s the author of the best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, which has been purchased by more than 30 million people worldwide.
If you pay any attention to the news, you know that on Friday morning, December 14, a 20-year-old man shot and killed his mother in her home in Newtown, Connecticut, and then drove her car to a local elementary school and murdered six adults and twenty children. He then turned his gun on himself and committed suicide.
If pride is the mother of all sins, anger is the father. While all sins are born from pride, those same sins are often supported by anger. Pride nurtures sin, and anger defends it.