God's Cure for Bitterness

One day a father said to his twelve year old “Son, two weeks from this Saturday, I’m going to take you on a fishing trip.” The boy began to plan for that special day. He got all his fishing gear together and he made a list of the other things that he would need for the trip. He grew more and more excited as he thought about it. He could hardly wait for the big day to arrive. By Friday night, he had all his things packed, ready to go first thing in the morning.

But that evening, the phone rang. It was a friend of his Dad’s, who was the director of a Christian organization. They were having a banquet the next day, but the special speaker had just called to say that he wasn’t going to be able make it. Could the boy’s father take his place? After a few moments of silence, the boy heard his Dad say “Yes, I’ll be there. You can count on me.”

It was only then that the boy realized that, in the rush of his regular work and all his other responsibilities, his father had forgotten all about the fishing trip that he had promised. When the urgent request came from his friend, the father saw that as his greatest priority.

As the boy began to realize that the fishing trip wasn’t going to happen, he found it hard to keep back the tears. He could have reminded his Dad about their plans for the next day, but he decided instead that his Dad was just too busy for him.

With a broken heart, he unpacked all his fishing gear. When he went to bed that night, he didn’t say good-night to his Dad the way he usually did. His father, whose mind was pre-occupied with the extra responsibility he had taken on, didn’t even notice.

Over the next several weeks, the emotional distance between that boy and his father grew greater. Where once there had been warmth, there was now only an awkward coldness in their relationship. The son stopped talking to his Dad, except when it was absolutely necessary.

His marks at school began to deteriorate as he silently nursed the pain of his Dad’s broken promise. He approached his schoolwork with apathy and boredom. He began to hang out with different friends - rebellious kids that his father didn’t really approve of. The boy thought to himself “Why should my Dad care about my friends, when he doesn’t really care about me?”

The father, realizing that something was wrong, tried to build bridges to his son, but the boy rejected all his efforts. He figured that his Dad was just trying to make up for having broken his promise, and he wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easy. He became very ungrateful toward everything his father did.

Something very significant had taken place that night before the fishing trip that never was. A father had forgotten a promise to his son. But his son had let a root of bitterness spring up in his heart toward his Dad, and it was now in the process of spreading its poisonous tentacles into every area of his life.

Bitterness is one of the most devastating sins in the Bible. That’s why…

Ephesians 4:31 Get rid of all bitterness

Hebrews 12:15 See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

Bitterness is so devastating because it eats away like hydrochloric acid at the very core of your soul. It changes your whole personality and colors your outlook on life. You cannot nurture bitterness and keep it concealed. The bitter root will bear bitter fruit. If you are secretly nursing a root of bitterness you may think that you can hide it… live with it… “grin and bear it”… but you cannot.

Slowly but surely, the sharp cutting edge of bitterness will work its way to the surface of your life. That poisonous seed that is growing in your soul will find ways to cut into others.

Chuck Swindoll tells the following story of a man he knew back in the 1950’s:

“During my hitch in the Marine Corps, my wife and I rented a studio apartment in San Francisco from a man who had been crippled by a World War 2 injury. Captured at Wake Island and later confined for years in China, he was left partially paralyzed when an enemy soldier struck him with a rifle butt.

When I visited with this landlord, he’d tell one story after another of how barbarically he had been treated. With vile language and intense emotion, he spoke of the tortures he’d endured and of his utter hatred for the Japanese. Here was a man who had been horribly wronged - without question. The constant misery and pain he lived with could not be measured.

But there was another factor which made his existence even more lamentable. Our landlord had become a bitter man. Even though, at that time, he was 13 years removed from the war… even though he had been safely released from the concentration camp and was now able to carry on physically… even though he and his wife owned a lovely dwelling and had a comfortable income, this crippled man was bound by the grip of bitterness. He was still fighting a battle that should have ended years before. In a very real sense, he was still in prison.

His bitterness manifested itself by intense prejudice, an acrid tongue, and an “everyone’s out to get me” attitude. He was far more miserable by 1957 than he had been in 1944. His unforgiving spirit refused to be soothed, refused to be healed, refused to forget.”

In the latest issue of National Geographic, there is an article on life in the rain forest canopy. Way up there, in the tops of the trees, specially adapted plants called bromeliads grow on the branches and leaves of the bigger trees. Little bits of wind-blown soil and dust collect in the crooks and crevices of the tree limbs, providing a place for the bromeliads to take root. As their tiny root structures begins to spread, they in turn capture more dust and dirt, providing more soil, and so on. Pretty soon, the tree is festooned with bromeliads growing all over it.

The root of bitterness always begins to grow in the soil of pain. Every one of us has a dark corner of our lives where there are memories of deep emotional, or perhaps even physical hurts. These hurts come from times when we have been sinned against, or when we have sinned ourselves. The result is pain. That’s the soil where bitterness takes root. And as this poisonous plant grows in the dark, it begins to spread it root system into other areas of our lives, feeding on more pain and other hurts until it completely suffocates us in its deadly embrace.

There are a number of ways that we fertilize the soil in which bitterness grows. Recently, I was driving down Ocean Ave. when I witnessed a near accident. A car, driven by a person whose gender I will not mention, swerved suddenly, almost colliding with a pick up truck in the next lane. I watched as the pick-up driver began to gesture wildly and honk his horn furiously. He pulled his truck behind the car and began to follow the car dangerously, even when the car turned into a side street. With screeching tires, the truck followed. One can only imagine the confrontation that took place when the car stopped and the driver got out. That truck driver wanted to get back at the other driver for having cut him off.

When someone wrongs you, the immediate temptation is to get revenge. You know the saying: “Don’t get mad; get even.” In our dealings with people, when we are wronged, we often try to get revenge by giving the guilty person the silent treatment. We treat them as a non-person. We ignore them, pointedly. Or perhaps we try to do damage to them by talking behind their back, by becoming critical of them, by throwing spitballs at their reputation.

When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter, who was in a very unspiritual frame of mind that day, tried to get revenge by hauling out his sword. I guess you could say that he wasn’t trying to bust people’s chops as much as he was trying to chop people’s busts. At any rate, he missed. Instead of cutting off one guy’s head, he only got his ear.

We meet a very different Peter in the book of Acts, where he was wrongfully put in jail at least three times. On none of those occasions did Peter retaliate.

Revenge is good fertilizer for your bitterness garden, but it’s expensive. It takes a toll physically, psychologically, and spiritually. If, when you are wronged, you demand a pound of flesh, you’d better watch out. The pound of flesh may be your own.

Doctors will be the first to tell you about the high cost of getting even. They see a constant stream of people whose physical condition is a direct result of their emotional hostility, their bitterness.

Dr. S. I. McMillen, who authored the book None of These Diseases, tells the anecdote about the man who happened to mention to his son that he had to run over to the doctor’s office to pick up some medicine for his wife’s colitis. The boy replied “Oh yeah? So who’s Mom been colliding with now?”

When we are nursing bitterness, we are literally destroying ourselves.

Another good fertilizer for bitterness is a temporal value system. If you regard things as more important than people, you will become a bitter person in short order. Because most of the causes of bitterness are temporal.

One of the most common causes of family feuds is when a family sits down to divide up the estate of a dead relative. Whole families have been divided by the bitterness which can arise out of these sessions when the people involved are focusing on material things as being more important than relationships. A sister may not talk to a sister for years because one of them got the mother’s silver tea service that the other one thought she deserved.

I want you to know that times haven’t changed, and people haven’t changed in this regard. In Luke 12, Jesus was teaching thousands of people - so many that they began to trample one another. Jesus was teaching his disciples some pretty heavy stuff - he was warning them about the spiritual hypocrisy of the Pharisees and so forth.

But then there was a lull in the action and Jesus must have paused to catch his breath. At that moment, someone yelled out a question from the crowd. Now I want you to visualize this. What would you say, if you had a chance to ask Jesus any question in front of thousands of people? Do you know what this guy said? He said “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”

People haven’t changed! Focusing on the temporal value of things instead of the eternal value of people provides good, rich soil in which bitterness will grow.

Well let’s get to talking about God’s cure for bitterness. How can you nip this thing in the bud? How can you keep it from taking over your life?

A few weeks ago, my in-laws came to visit us from Buffalo. It was just before we were going to go up to Montreal to visit my side of the family. On the day their visit ended, we left together; they to Buffalo, we to Montreal. We drove our cars together across the Throg’s Neck Bridge. But that is where our paths separated. They had to take the Cross Bronx, heading west. We had to take the Bruckner, heading north. The road divided there, just over the bridge. We each made our choice, and for a moment, we drove side by side together, waving. But then our paths separated and we ended up in cities hundreds of miles apart.

Remember the story of the boy and his father and the fishing trip? There was a point in that story at which that boy came to a similar fork in the road in his relationship with his Dad. At the end of one road was forgiveness and reconciliation and deeper fellowship with his father. At the end of the other road was resentment and alienation and bitterness.

The point at which the boy faced that choice was the moment that he realized that his Dad had broken his promise to him. At that instant, he knew he had been wronged. That was the crucial moment in the story. That was the decision point. The outcome of his whole life was determined by the choice he made at that moment.

Sooner or later, we all come to that point in our relationship with others. We come to the point where, realizing we have been wronged, we have to choose what our reaction will be.

Behavioral psychologists talk about stimulus and response. In their experiments with animals, they have found that, given a particular stimulus, you can predict what the response will be.

Now I want you to know that most people believe that that’s how people work. They believe that the stimulus determines the response; that there are no alternatives. According to this view, that boy was not responsible for his reaction to his father - his Dad was entirely at fault. The father’s broken promise made that boy rebel and withdraw his affection. This is the prevailing psychology of today. “He made me do it. I had no choice but to get angry at him. I am the way I am because of my upbringing, because of my environment, because of what people have done to me. It’s simply stimulus and response”

There are millions of people who are living miserable lives today, attempting to blame their bitterness and alienation on what somebody else did to them.

But the Word of God sees it differently. The Bible says that at that moment of an offence, at that key point, there is a moment of decision. There is a gap between stimulus and response. What we do with that gap will determine the quality of our lives. We are responsible for our reactions. That’s what makes us different from the animals.

And the Bible says something more. It says that God stands in the gap between stimulus and response holding out a gift for us to take. That gift is grace. God’s grace is there for us in the gap to give us the ability to make the right choice, to make the right response.

Hebrews 12:15 See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

When you are in the gap between stimulus and response, when somebody has wronged you and you’re hurting, don’t miss the grace of God. He’s holding it out for you to take. He’s giving it to you so that you will have the power to forgive that person who hurt you so badly. He’s giving you his grace so that your response will bring healing and wholeness to you and to that person, and in the process, bring glory to God.

When God allows someone to offend you, He is doing something very significant in your life. He is entrusting to you the responsibility of demonstrating Christ’s love and forgiveness to the person who hurt you. Your response to that person may be the one thing that brings him face to face with Jesus Christ. No wonder God wants to give you His grace for a mission like that!

But if you miss the grace of God - if you refuse it, the serpent seed of bitterness will germinate and begin to grow. You may be able to hide it at first, but it will creep through your life, day by day growing stronger and more resistant, until it ruins you. And it won’t just ruin you. The Bible warns us about bitterness because it causes trouble and defiles other people as well.

There’s something else you need to know… God gives his grace to the person who has been wronged, to enable him to respond in a forgiving way to the offender. But supposing there are other people who learn of that offence second-hand? They haven’t been wronged themselves, but they learn that a friend or a family member has.

Those people on the sidelines are in great spiritual danger. They are in danger of taking up that offence on behalf of the person who was wronged. But they themselves have not received the grace of God to properly respond to that offence. They have interjected themselves into that situation.

There are people like this in every church. They are very quick to take up offences on behalf of someone else. They are like those listening posts that we used to have on the borders of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Their ears are tuned to the frequency of friction. They’re quick to pick up on offences.

These people who pick up offences cloak themselves in unselfishness. They believe that they are acting in defence of the person who was wronged. They believe that they are acting out of a loving concern for that person. They almost begin a crusade on his behalf. They take matters into their own hands and they try to right the wrong that was done.

But when you go to the person who was wronged, when you talk to the “victim”, you know what you usually find? You find: a) that he isn’t even aware that he has been wronged, or b) that he’s dealt with it by the grace of God, and there’s no problem. As far as he’s concerned, it’s over and done with.

But you go back to the person who’s taken up the offence, and you find that now it’s very hard for them to be reconciled. They are implacable. They’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to this issue and they’re just not willing to let it die. A person like that usually ends up becoming a divisive influence in a church. Bitterness takes root in their lives, all because they took up an offence that belonged to somebody else.

Beware of taking up offences for other people. You’ll be treading into territory where the grace of God is necessary survival gear. Except that there won’t be any grace there for you.

If you, from your lofty perch on the sidelines, perceive that somebody has been wronged, the best thing to do is to keep silent about it, and pray that God would grant his grace to the parties involved. Don’t try to do the work of the Holy Spirit for him. You’ll just make a mess.

But what if somebody comes to you to tell you about some wrong that has been done to them by a third person? What should you say? Don’t say “I’ll talk to so and so about it for you.” Then, you’ll be taking up the offence for that person. You don’t have the grace to be able to do that. And don’t smother them with sympathy, because you’ll only affirm them in the unspiritual response they’ve chosen.

The best thing for you to say to your friend would be “The most important thing for you to do is for you to go to that person and talk to him about it. The matter is between the two of you. For me to hear your complaint would be a violation of the Biblical process of resolving offences given to us in Matthew 18. It would also put me in jeopardy of taking up your offence. If the person who offended you won’t listen to you when you go, then I would be willing to go with you the second time. But In the meantime, I cannot become a sounding board to listen to your frustrations over what he did to you.”

If more people would follow this pattern, we would have far less conflict and gossiping and bitterness in the church.

If you’re going to prevent the poison root of bitterness from growing in your life, you are going to need to realize four things:

1. God allows you to experience offences for a specific reason. You may think that the offender is acting independently, but in reality, God raised him up in your life for a specific purpose. Remember the story of Joseph? His brothers hurt him deeply. They sold him into slavery. They completely rejected him, their own brother. They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. And Joseph didn’t become bitter about it, but sought to serve God through it.

2. You need to thank God in advance for the blessing he plans to bring through each offence. This really takes faith! You may not feel very thankful when somebody hurts you, but thank God anyway. Giving thanks is an act of the will, not a function of your feelings. When you dedicate your life to God, he puts a protective wall around it. Nothing can touch you except what God permits. If God allows someone to hurt you, He allows it for a purpose, and that purpose is for your ultimate good. That’s why you can give thanks.

3. You need to discern how God wants to develop your character by allowing you to experience this offence. When you react negatively to an offender, it just reveals that there are certain things that are lacking in your life - things like love, patience, humility, meekness, and self-control. The only way that God can help you to develop these character qualities is to give you an opportunity to practice them! Practice makes perfect.

4. You can expect a certain amount of suffering in your life simply because you are a Christian. You might think that because you are a Christian, you won’t have to suffer, but the Bible says “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12). Suffering is part of the job description for a follower of Jesus Christ. Yet we can count it an honor to suffer for the sake of Jesus Christ, and we can thank him for the privilege.