Turn Down the Outrage

Turn Down the Outrage

By Robb Hadley

Scott Slayton, a Baptist preacher in Alabama, writes: "We have become a people who are addicted to outrage. Every day, we pick up our phones and are immediately bombarded with a thousand headlines yelling, 'here's something for you to be angry about!’  Like pigs going back m:o the s1op, every day we fall for the controversy de jour and work ourselves into a tizzv over something said or done by one we don't even know."

Maybe it's not your phone which proclaims the outrage, perhaps it is your news network. Whatever the source, there are plenty of outrage machines for people of every political stripe.

My point is not that there is a shortage of the outrageous. My point is that outrage has spilled into every corner of our lives. We are tempted to live for it, to search for it, to proclaim it. Loudly.

There is a problem in that for the Christian. We have something far more important to proclaim: the only thing that can fix broken humanity and our broken world. The wise man wrote: "With his mouth the godless man destroys his neighbor, But through knowledge the righteous will be delivered" (Proverbs 11.9).

It is hard to share the Gospel at the top of your lungs!