Bitterness
Several years ago, after being in the ministry for just a short time, I had a foolish conflict with another pastor. The cause of this conflict is unimportant, but the result of this conflict would plague me for most of a year. Finally, God brought me to a place of seeing just how much damage I was doing to myself, both emotionally and spiritually. I praise the Lord that through His word, I was able to forsake the bitterness that had poisoned my soul. This event caused me to look at bitterness in a new way than I had before. As we explore bitterness for the next few minutes I will use my own example of struggle to try and bring forth some spiritual truths that will help others caught in this battle to free themselves from the poison of bitterness.
Hebrews 12:15 “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;”
I grew up in church and in a good Christian home. Many times I have heard this verse alluded to and preached in one form or another. Yet I failed to make the connection given in this verse to the source of bitterness in our lives. As you look at this verse, you see the opening warning, “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God;” Considering this statement, it is without any reservation that I say that the grace of God has never failed, and will never fail. That is not the basis of this statement. The point of the statement is that you and I can fail of the grace of God. We can fail to possess an adequate amount of God’s grace to face the trials of life. Please understand this does not have anything to do with salvation.
There are two aspects that we will perceive of the grace of God. First, His saving grace. God’s grace is able to save all those who call upon Him without fail, yes His grace was, is and forever will be able to forgive all sin. The other aspect of His grace that is significant is His grace for living. That is to say, the grace that He gives His children to live in this evil world. It is of that latter grace that we are in danger of falling short. James gives an indication of how this happens when he says in James 4:6, “But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.” You see two groups here, the humble, to whom God is bestowing grace, and the proud, whom He is resisting. I think it safe to say that if God is able to bestow more grace upon the humble, than that implies that He in similar fashion resists the proud by withdrawing His grace. Again, not saving grace, but grace for living.
In effect, He says, OK, you think that you are really something, you think that you can handle it on your own. Well, let’s see how you do without my grace to guide you through. God withdraws His grace in from our lives in areas of pride. Now remember the warning of Hebrews, “lest any man fail of the grace of God”. When we become lifted up in pride, God withdraws His grace for living from our lives. Then when an injustice comes into our lives (it may be real or perceived), with the grace of God removed, we fall into bitterness. We are troubled and are in danger of defiling others.
Let’s take a few moments and look at Jonah who I believe was a prime example of the effects of bitterness in the life of a child of God. By chapter four of Jonah, Nineveh has repented, God has forgiven them, and Jonah has rebelled again. Jonah 4:1-3 says, “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.” Here we find the first of five consequences to bitterness in the life of Jonah. The first consequence is that bitterness causes you to despise the forgiveness of God. Jonah couldn’t believe that God would forgive the Ninevites. Some bible doubters wondered if Nineveh even existed. Then in the 1800s, British adventurer Austen Henry Layard rediscovered the lost palace and city across the Tigris River from modern day Mosul in northern Iraq.
Jonah lived during the height of the Assyrian empire. Based on the tablets excavated in Nineveh, the Assyrians were very brutal, ruthless people. They frequently raided the Northern kingdom where Jonah lived, destroying many villages and towns. The Jews hated the Ninevites. Imagine Jonah’s horror when God asked him to take a message to these enemies of goodness. I can’t help but picture in my mind this whole city repenting, and Jonah stomping his feet and yelling at God, “I knew this would happen! I knew that if they heard this message they would all repent and you would forgive them! That’s why I didn’t want to come in the first place!” Imagine the worst civilization today, and one preacher showing up in the heart of their most wicked city with the message of repent or God is going to destroy you. Would you have so much faith in that message that you would say the same thing as Jonah? We criticize Jonah, yet this was a man who believed God. This also was a man who was proud to be part of God’s chosen people. The Jews looked down upon the Assyrian “dogs”; they were better than these uncivilized heathen. Why would God ask Jonah to take a message of repentance to people who obviously deserved to die? Why not just kill them and be done with it? Oh how great is the mercy of our God. Yet in his bitter state, Jonah despised the forgiveness that God was giving to Nineveh.
When I experienced the perceived injustice in my life I began to pray for God to judge the individual that had “wronged” me. I hope that you are more spiritual than I was, but I went so far as to suggest to God what He could do to punish the offender. I look back on this with shame; I was almost like David in his imprecatory Psalms, though operating in the flesh. I did not want God to forgive the offender; I wanted justice for myself. I was proud and wanted God to reinforce that I was right. The biggest problem with this is that when you despise God’s forgiveness for someone else, you mar your own forgiveness from God. Matthew 6:15 says, “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” I place myself under the judgment of God, which means that I have no right to bring my petitions to the throne of God. Psalm 66:18 says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me”. You need to understand that when you are in bitterness, you have cut off your line of communication with God.
It is also important to know that God says in Romans 13 that vengeance belongs to Him alone. As long as you stand in front of the offender ordering God to judge them, God most likely will not. You hinder God from dealing with them because of your own pride. What a shame that our insistence on being right can hinder the work of God and bring sin into our own life.
The second consequence of bitterness is found in verses 4-5 of Jonah chapter number four: “Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry? So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” This consequence is that bitterness causes you to develop a singular focus on your enemy to the neglect of your own need. Imagine the city of Nineveh has repented and God has accepted, but Jonah, filled with his own sense of justice, goes out of the city, sits on the side of a hill and says, “I am going to sit here until God comes to his senses and kills these people!” I imagine that God may have had more things for Jonah to do, yet he was so focused on his enemy that he could not see anything else. Bitterness causes you to be spiritually blind. I remember during those dark days of my life, asking people who knew this other person, how that other person was doing, but only to find out if God had started the judgment yet. I inwardly longed to hear bad things were happening to them. It is amazing as I have met and dealt with others that are in the gall of bitterness just how singularly focused they are. Their whole life seems to pivot on a singular event or relationship. Often the other party is oblivious to this and lives a normal life, while these pine away in sorrow. Someone once said that bitterness is a pill you swallow hoping someone else will die. Yet, it is you who will suffer, ignoring all the good things of your life, laboring under the false pretense that if God did judge them that it would somehow vindicate you and make you feel better. You have succumbed to a lie.
The third consequence of bitterness is found in the next couple of verses. Jonah 4:6-8 “And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.” This consequence is evident to everyone but the infected: pettiness. I have yet to meet a bitter person that isn’t petty. I have been in church my whole life, but I have only seen one church split that was over doctrine. I was recently told that doctrine divides not among churches. No, it is the color of the carpet, the decorations in the bathroom, the plants in the entryway… the list goes on and on and all boils down to one thing, pettiness. Every preacher could give you a number of examples of the petty things people have done to others in the church because of bitterness.
Bitter people do things out of spite. Here sits Jonah, the recipient of God’s mercy, both spiritually and now physically. He is sheltered in his bitterness by a gourd. How thankful he is for the gourd. And yet as God shows a picture of what bitterness really is to Jonah, a worm that eats at your insides until you die, he gets angry at God again. Bitter people frequently get angry at those who try to help them out of the pit they are in. I am justified to feel this way, they say. If you would have suffered what I did you would feel the same way. Can you hear Jonah crying for the gourd, that petty little thing that was given to help him see his folly? It was unsettling to God to hear him cry over a gourd and at the same time wish death upon hundreds of thousands of people. My own pettiness was manifest in the fact that I decided to warn the object of my bitterness in a letter of the impending doom of God upon him. After God showed me my wickedness, I couldn’t believe that I would do such a wicked thing. If you and I received the just reward for our sins, God would strike us down right this minute. Yet we have a compassionate, longsuffering God. He was with me, in bringing me through His word to a place of forgiveness.
The fourth consequence is somewhat prophesied in Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.” While the judgment of those you are bitter against will not bring a tree of life into your heart, the deferred hope of their judgment will make your heart sick, and you will eventually sink into depression just as Jonah did in Jonah 4:9, “And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.” Maybe you have thought the same thing concerning your bitterness: I do well to be angry until I die. Depression is rarely an organic physical problem or one that is unrelated to emotional issues. It is caused most often by sin. Here Jonah looks in the face of God and says in effect I will not get right. Be careful, there is a line you can cross with God. 1 John 5:16, “If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.” When you come to the place that you tell God you will not get right you are in danger of crossing a deadline with God. God is very longsuffering and gives us many opportunities to turn but there is a point in which He stops you from harming others. I praise God that He pulled me out of this mess before I came to this point, but I have met many who did not get right. They fell into depression; the world told them it was because they didn’t like themselves enough. The truth is that many times it is the opposite: they liked themselves too much. They are many times prideful and do not believe that they deserve the treatment that they are receiving from others and God, thus they fall into depression. You can still be salvaged even if you have gotten this far. It is not yet too late for you to be restored to the truth. The answer is not drugs though, the answer is the Bible. In just a few minutes we will address a specific answer for you.
The last consequence is unstated, yet I believe is implied and born out by historical facts. Jonah 4:10-11 says, “Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?” Just a little distance from Nineveh is a mosque that claims to be the burial place of Jonah. The scripture is devoid of a further mention of the life of Jonah. The last time we see him is sitting on the side of the hill in bitterness asking God to kill him for the third time. I believe the last consequence of bitterness is death. First spiritual, than physical. The fact that you are reading this is a sign that you still have a chance to get things right, to avoid this final consequence. But how? The answer to that is found where we started just a few pages back.
If the Bible is right, the source of bitterness is a failure of the grace of God, and that failure is caused by God’s grace being withdrawn from the proud. It only stands to reason that you must humble yourself to receive the grace of God to cover this sin. James 4:7-9 gives a three step process to humbling one’s self. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness.” The first step in the process of humbling yourself is to submit to God your thinking and feelings. Surrender your right to feel anger and bitterness, admit that your thinking has not solved the problem. Your thinking and feelings have magnified the problem and must be surrendered to His thinking and feelings. 2 Corinthians 2:10-11 says, “To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also: for if I forgave any thing, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the person of Christ; Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices.” Paul implies here that the only way to forgive anyone is to do so through yielding your thinking and feelings to Christ. You may have tried to forgive the person in the past; it could be that you even have punished yourself for not being a good enough Christian to stop feeling and thinking the way you do about them. The answer is that you cannot do it through your own power. As Paul looked on those who had wronged him (and they were many) he pictured Jesus on the cross. As He was on the cross, He was looking down through time and saw every sin that would be committed, and His choice on the cross was to forgive each and every one of them, even the ones that would be committed against you. Paul chose to stop going by his own thinking and feelings and make a conscience choice to go by Christ’s. Forgiveness is a choice, not a feeling. This choice begins with the first step of humbling yourself and submitting your thinking and feelings to God. Submit your wounded heart and spirit, and it will amaze you how quickly He can heal it.
The second step in this humbling process is that of resisting the Devil and drawing nigh to God. The act of resisting is summed up in the act of drawing nigh. You cannot resist the Devil by your own power, but as you draw nigh to God, the Devil must flee. One of my favorite illustrations of the Father’s response to us is the prodigal son. I have heard it said it is just as far back to the house as it was when you left. This may be true, but it is not as far back to the Father. The Bible tells us that the Father was watching and when he saw His son a great way off He ran to meet him. James reinforces this thought when he says draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you. Every step you take toward God is equal to two. The blessed thing about the story is that the son was in the Fathers embrace long before he reached the house; it was the Father that ultimately brought the son back to the house.
The Bible tells us that the Devil is limited in where he can go, and what he can do by the Father. The Devil must keep a certain distance from God, as you draw nigh to Him, the Devil must flee. How do you draw nigh to God? The answer is basic: through prayer, Bible reading, and church attendance. You may say you have been doing those things and it hasn’t worked. No, you have been doing those things while filled with pride and being resisted by the Father. You may have been doing the right things, but with the wrong spirit, God was pushing you away. Once you come in a humbled spirit, you will find the Father responds differently to you. Look at these verses: Psalm 34:18 “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” Psalm 51:17 “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” Isaiah 57:15 “For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” Humility is precious in the sight of God, He wants to receive you but you must come on His terms.
The third step in humbling yourself is what is listed in the last of James 4:8-9 “Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness.” To humble yourself and receive the grace of God back on your life, you must confess that you have been in sin. God is not as concerned with the offence as your response to it. You have sinned; you have been in unforgiveness and bitterness. It must be confessed for what it is: SIN. We have a tendency to justify and rename sin to make it sound more acceptable, but God will have none of it. If you want healing, you must call it what God does, and you must be sorry for it. Not sorry for what it has done to you, but sorry for what you have done to a just, holy, and righteous God.
Let’s take a minute to address those who have possibly slipped as far into bitterness as depression. The Bible answer for you is to begin to look for things to praise God for. Start by setting your expectations in God instead of man as David said in Psalm 62:5, “My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.” Then apply Isaiah 61:3 “To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.” Praise to God raises the spirit of man. Begin to make lists of things that you can see and think of to praise God for. Do so audibly, the Devil does not like to hear the praises of God, but the habit of praising God with your mouth will draw you up out of depression.
Back to James, I love verse ten of James 4 which says, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.” He will lift you up out of pride, bitterness, depression, you name it, He will lift you up when you follow the Biblical recipe for humility.
One last thing that I wish to address is what happened to me when I finally gave the issue of my bitterness over to God. Suddenly it dawned on me how sinful I had been, I remembered the prayers and wishes for God to judge the other individual. I was crushed by this. I began to beg God to forgive them as well, not to judge them. My heart became heavy, I sought their forgiveness for holding bitterness against them. To this day I pray for them frequently, that God would bless them. When your heart is right, you will not desire the judgment of God upon others; you will desire them to receive the same mercy that you received undeservingly. What joy it is to pray for God to bless others rather than curse them. This must have been how the author felt when he wrote in Psalm 133:1 “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” Please, I ask you to heed the warning of the Scriptures as to the destructive nature of bitterness! If you are ensnared by it, follow these Biblical steps to overcome this trap of the Devil. You are not ignorant of his devises. Peace and joy await you when you humble yourself.
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