In this war against sin, you must not be satisfied to simply stop sinning. As you work with your kids, with yourself, and with your spouse, identifying your heart’s idols can help you to understand why you become so irritable, why you raise your voice. Identifying the idols of the heart is when the tide starts to turn. It’s not enough to memorize some verses about anger and self-control. Go after the heart! There are heart issues behind all that anger. When someone is in a rage at home or in public, you can be sure that someone else has threatened one of his or her idols—and war is about to break out!

Anger, irritability, and verbal outbursts are indicative of heart issues gone awry. When you react to someone else, what is it that you are protecting? What is it that you must have? Husbands, doesn’t the Bible say that our wives should respect us? Yes. But if you go around with the old “respect me” chip on your shoulder, constantly telling yourself, “My wife must respect me,” you will inevitably be hypervigilant and hypersensitive; you will be perpetually angry, doggedly policing your wife’s behavior, because for you, respect is not just something that God commands your wife to do, but something that you think you must have in order to be happy.

So many times, the conflicts that you’re having can be traced back to your own desires, as we see in James 4:1–3. You think, “I must be respected,” or “I must be . . . whatever,” and it causes war between you and anyone who gets in the way of that desire. Then you cry out to God in prayer, and still don’t receive because you ask amiss: “God, change her. God, you know I need respect. God, you know how important that is. Get her, God. You go.” But God won’t answer a prayer like that. He’s more likely standing there with a two-by-four, wanting to smack you in the head and say, “Shut up and love her—stop worshiping yourself and thinking you are so important.”