Headed for Trouble?

Has someone ever said or done something to you for which you found it difficult to forgive them?  Every time their very name is brought up, even if it was years ago, it still brings butterflies to your stomach. When you think of them, your heart rate increases. And you can feel your blood pressure rising when you think of what they said or did. It’s as though you were reliving it again, just thinking about it!

If so, it may be that you are in the bonds of bitterness.

 

Which is a shame, because bitterness doesn’t even touch the person you are bitter toward, but it sure will harm you, no exceptions. Like Frankenstein, bitterness is a monster, which turns on its creator, and causes internal damage beyond compare…an internal poison eating it’s way out!

 

The other person continues their life, and may be happy and content, and never even think about you, but because you hold bitterness for them, they continue to control your life.

 

Bitterness defined is anger, hurt, or resentment because of one's bad experiences or a sense of unjust treatment.  What leads us to feel this way?  Sometimes its, not doing something you want, something someone says, you become jealous of others of what they have or the way they look, even the way your family is (neglect, abuse) and comparing.

 

The bible is very clear; if you do not take care of bitterness it will lead to harmful relational, spiritual and possibly physical circumstances.  What happens when things happen in our lives and bitterness sets in?   It becomes our foundation for our decisions, actions, and reactions.

 

• Parents tell you to do something – you want to do the opposite!
• Outburst of wrath and anger!

 

Scripture says a lot about bitterness:

 

Ephesians 4:31 - Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice

 

• Bitterness here reflects a smoldering resentment, a brooding grudge-filled attitude.  It is the spirit of irritability that keeps a person in perpetual (never ending) animosity (strong hostility), making him sour and venomous.
• These sins listed here are sins committed against each other.

 

Proverbs 14:10 - The heart knows his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy.

 

• One’s inner pain (bitterness) and joy cannot be fully experienced by anyone else.  They are individual, private feelings in one’s own soul.

 

Prov. 27:19 says, “As in water face reflects face, so a man’s heart reveals the man.”

 

Just as water, like a mirror, reflects a person’s face, so a person’s heart or mind reflects what he is really like. 

 

What does your heart reveal about you ------- if we were to take your heart and were able to see your motives and your desires what would that look like…. (love, kindness – hurt, bitterness)

 

John MacArthur says that, Scripture makes it very, very clear that where there is a lack of forgiveness, there will develop bitterness and out of bitterness come hatred and couple with hatred comes anger and the end of hatred and anger and bitterness is the pursuit of vengeance.

 

Retaliation is sought and retaliation is never satisfied and vengeance is never really appeased and consequently people live with the bitterness and it is deeper and deeper as they live with it longer.  An unforgiving attitude, a bitterness that runs deep, a desire for vengeance that comes out of vindictiveness or hate, or anger, will do several things.

 

• Number one, it imprisons people in their past. This is the price of an unforgiving heart. It imprisons people in their past. As long as people will not forgive, as long as people will not put the past in the past, but continue to seek an unfulfilled level of vengeance, they are shackled to their past.
  

• Another way to look at it is, if you don’t forgive things that have happened in the past, you continue to pick at an open sore, you keep it from healing, you enlarge it, you sentence yourself to the future feeling worse than you felt in the past when it happened.
  

• This un-forgiveness then produces bitterness. It becomes an infection and it is malignant, it harasses, it creates distorted memories, which create a distorted view of life.

• Anger becomes out of control. Emotions become unchecked. People entertain ideas about revenge, every conversation becomes a forum for slandering the people who have supposedly harmed you so profoundly. Every conversation becomes an opportunity for defamation, exaggeration and outright lies.

 

On the other hand, forgiveness frees a person from both of these categories of tragedy. Forgiveness frees you to enjoy all relationships and to live with peace and tranquility in your own heart. Forgiveness is a very freeing reality.

 

Forgiveness is a marvelous, virtuous, liberating, loving attitude and act. It makes sense to forgive. It is healthy. It is wholesome. It is sensible. It is freeing. It brings peace. It engenders love. That is why Proverbs 19:11 says, “A man’s foolishness is not to forgive. It is folly.”