Bitterness

We're in the second Sunday of our series on how God's grace is sufficient to help us overcome all sorts of problems.

My name is Stuart Roberts.

Ordinarily, I'm at the morning service.

I do enjoy coming to the evening service.

Reminded, it's been a while because I hadn't seen those little dividers at the back.

What a great innovation.

So yeah, good to be back.

So my topic is bitterness.

How God's grace is sufficient to help us overcome bitterness.

And I'm going to talk about what bitterness is, and why bitterness is a sin, or at least it can lead us to sin.

And then I'd like to talk about how God's grace we can overcome bitterness, and how I've managed to overcome bitterness in my life.

In fact, it's been very interesting, hasn't it, watching this sermon, the choices that people made.

I was very interested to see that Stephanie chose lust last week.

Very keen to tune in on that.

She did a great job on that.

We've all picked the things we're battled with, and I think of my own battles with bitterness over the last few years, which I'll talk to.

So it's caused me to grapple with what exactly is bitterness.

Well, bitterness is when something happens to us, and it's the negative feelings of anger that boil up within us, and just the general feeling of unpleasantness as our response to whatever bad things that has happened to us.

And when I think of the word bitterness, I think of...

There's an implication that it's chronic in some way.

That for a while there, you might have been annoyed at something, but it's turned into something a lot worse.

In fact, it's almost physically unpleasant.

It's like you've drunk poison, and whereas the instinct should have been to spit it out, you've left it in your system, and it's gotten worse.

In the New Testament, the Greek word for bitterness is pichrea.

It means sharp or cutting.

And it's the word that is used in the Bible to refer to plants that produce fruit that's poisonous or inedible.

And it's a condition that many of us find ourselves in.

So bitterness is unpleasant.

But why is it a sin?

Well, let me answer that question by quoting from Ephesians 4 and verse 31.

And if you look at the videos from this morning's sermons, it was actually quoted there as well.

Ephesians 4, verse 31, St.

Paul tells us, Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, bawling and slander, along with every form of malice.

Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as in Christ, God forgave you.

Basically, when we're bitter with other people, then we get angry with other people.

We want to fight against those people.

We get nasty to those people.

And frankly, that runs counter to what God has called us to do, which is to forgive other people.

So we need to get rid of this sin of bitterness out of our lives.

Now, if you go back a little bit in the New Testament to Romans chapter 3, that famous passage in Romans that starts with those famous words, there's no one righteous, not even one.

Follow down a little bit from there, and there's these words, their mouths, and St.

Paul is quoting from the Psalms, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.

You see, when we get bitter and bitterness gets hold, the result is angry outbursts.

We haven't just kept those feelings to ourselves, we're sending them out outwardly to other people, and the bitterness of the heart becomes the bitterness of the mouth.

Sometimes bitterness is one of those things that you can hide for a while.

I can attest to that myself.

It's interesting, when I was struggling with bitterness a while ago, and I'll share a little bit about that in a moment, a pastor sent me a rebuke, and the rebuke was Hebrews chapter 12, verses 14 and 15.

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy.

Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.

See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God, and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

And notice that word, bitter root, same Greek word, pichrea.

You recall that the word pichrea talks about poisonous fruit.

Well, the roots of that tree are buried.

You can't see it.

But if it grows up, suddenly there's all sorts of trouble.

It defiles the person where the bitter root has taken root, and it can defile other people as well.

That's why we have to get rid of it out of our lives.

I had a serious problem with bitterness a few years ago.

I had lost a lot of things that were important to me, that I spent a lot of time building up.

People had said nasty and untrue things about me.

They were people I could no longer talk to, that I used to have a lot of time for.

I've been let down by people I thought I could trust.

Physically, mentally, spiritually, I was in poor health.

My stress levels were through the roof.

I had a lot of rebuilding to do in my life, and I had no energy to do it with.

And I was better about it.

How do you forgive when you've been hurt badly?

When the bitter root is beginning to take hold?

Well, I think the starting point is forgiveness.

You look at the videos from the talks we had last Sunday, Sister Ruth, Spirit of Santo, took us to Matthew chapter 18 and verse 22.

The disciples had come to Jesus and said, how many times should I forgive my brother?

Up to seven times?

You recall that the Hebrew law, I think, was three times, and you cut someone off.

Up to seven times.

The assumption was that that's extra generosity.

And what was Jesus' reply?

Not seven times, but seventy times seven, or seventy-seven, whatever the number is.

It's a heck of a lot more than seven.

If we're servants of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we take our faith seriously, then this is a starting point for what we're doing.

But I concede, sometimes it's what our pastor calls graduate Christianity that we're dealing with here.

So my advice to people is to start small.

I remember one of the first prayers I prayed when I tried to deal with the subject of forgiveness.

And it went something like this.

Dear God, please forgive that person.

They were too dumb and stupid to know what they were doing.

I admit.

Charitable, a little bit ungenerous.

But I think I can say I was on the train, the forgiveness train.

The last tatty seat in the economy class section of that terrible train that goes from city to Melbourne, but I was on the train.

And after a few prayers like that, I realized I've done a few dumb and stupid things in my time.

So, I think probably many of you would agree that you've done some stupid and dumb things in your time.

And when we do stupid and dumb things, we need forgiveness.

And you can go from there.

Sometimes things are so messed up that you can't actually go and talk to the person and even try and sort out the mess.

And that was the situation I was in.

But I put my forgiveness into God's hands.

We'll see what you want to do with that, Father.

And at that point, we trust that God knows what He's doing and that He can deal justly and take away our bitterness in the process.

And that brings me to another kind of bitterness we can offer and experience.

We can be bitter at God as well.

I want to pause at this point and say, make a prophecy.

One of these days, something's going to hit you badly.

You're like being knocked over with a train or a Greyhound bus.

Why can I say that?

Because we don't live in heaven yet.

With great tribulation, we have to enter the kingdom of heaven, is what Paul taught the folks in Acts.

The train may have even left the station for you right now, but it's coming.

And some of you younger folks may not have yet been kicked in the guts like that.

Unfortunately, that day is coming.

It happened to everyone.

I was thinking about this during the week.

The most powerful person in our country is our Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.

He is a man I respect a lot.

Albo's career had gone from strength to strength.

He had gone from that council house in Camperdown.

By the time he was in his early thirties, he was the member for Grayndler.

By 2001, he was on the front bench.

For the labour team.

By 2007, he was a minister.

And by 2013, he's a contender for the labour leadership.

And on New Year's Day 2019, his wife comes to him and says, our marriage is over.

And Albo has spoken public about this.

I didn't see this coming.

It was the blow.

I didn't want to come.

There you go.

The most powerful person in our country, at least now he is, and this great blow happened to him.

2019, later that year, we had a federal election.

In fact, it was only five months later, and suddenly, Labour lost an election they should have won.

And not only is Albo dealing with that problem, he's got to take on federal Labour and rebuild it.

Now, I could relate to that.

I'd been kicked in the guts in a similar way, but I was just trying to build a company with a few people in it.

He was trying to rebuild the entire federal opposition.

And you know what happened next.

Three years later, he's our Prime Minister.

Imagine if Albaugh had responded in bitterness to what had happened to him.

Then who knows, maybe Scott Morrison is still our Prime Minister, and you can make your own opinion about whether that would be a good thing.

The point is he didn't respond in bitterness.

But let's take it back to the Bible.

The Bible talks a lot about people's bitterness, and particularly bitterness against God.

I bring you back to Job.

You remember Job?

He had all these things come at him at once in a serious way.

In fact, it was worse than...

It was probably the worst kind of train you could have been hit with.

All three of his children were dead, and he was in terrible physical health.

And he cries out, Chapter 7 and Verse 11 of Job, Therefore I will not keep silent.

I will speak out of the anguish of my spirit.

I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

He's bitter at God.

Go back a little bit further in the Old Testament to that wonderful Book of Ruth, eighth book of the Bible.

If you haven't read it, I commend it to you.

It tells the story of a woman called Naomi.

She's left the Promised Land.

She's gone off to Moab, but she's come back having lost her husband and her two children.

All that's left with her is Ruth, who is her daughter-in-law.

She's coming back to Bethlehem, having been wiped out, basically.

And Ruth tells us, and the women explained as she's coming to Bethlehem, can this be Naomi?

Don't call me Naomi, she told them.

Call me Mara.

And Naomi, we learned from the footnote, is Hebrew.

It means pleasant.

Mara is Hebrew for bitterness.

Septuagint picks up the same word, and they use that same word, pichrea, that I talked about before.

Call me Mara, says poor Naomi, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter.

I went away full, but the Lord brought me back empty.

Why call me Naomi?

The Lord has afflicted me.

The Almighty has brought misfortune on me.

Being bitter at God is sin.

I think at that point, we are in danger of committing at least the sin of ingratitude, not to mention the sin of disrespecting the Almighty.

If you read the Book of Ruth, you'll see how God is already at work when Naomi is speaking those words.

She has her faithful daughter-in-law with her, so she's not completely alone.

Gets back to Bethlehem, suddenly there's ample bread, thanks to Ruth's diligence out in the fields, the fact that the famines ended in Bethlehem, and then there's Boaz's kindness.

Before too long, it's only a couple of chapters later.

Ruth has a husband, and she's presenting her mother-in-law Naomi with a son, and it is said of this son at the end of the book, he shall be your story of life and a nourisher of your old age.

Suddenly Naomi is Naomi and not Mara anymore.

I think when we're in danger of being bitter at God, we need to remind ourselves that God's got more on his plate than just dealing with us, and I don't mean that he's got too much on his plate.

Just God doesn't need to tell us what he's up to.

And think of that story.

It wasn't just Naomi that the Almighty was looking after.

He had to provide a husband for Ruth, and he was setting it up so that that relationship would produce King David, and ultimately our Lord Jesus Christ.

God's got the big picture in mind.

As I like to say, he's moving the pieces of the chessboard around, and you never know where that's going to land.

We just heard that tonight from Sarah's testimony.

In fact, I was tempted not to get up in prison, because I thought she'd done a better job than me.

How God has moved the pieces of the chessboard around.

But imagine if at that point of that injury, that Sarah had succumbed to bitterness at that point.

Maybe the good stuff that was coming next wouldn't have come around.

See, there's a lot of stuff that God doesn't tell us about what's going on in our lives, but he does tell us this.

Romans chapter eight and verse 28, we heard it before.

And we know that in all things, God's works for the good of those who love him and who have been called according to his purpose.

It's true, isn't it?

Well, if we believe that, we should put away bitterness out of our lives, if we're bitter at other people or bitter at God.

Let me encourage you in closing with this story.

In my bitterness, I was slugging through the working week, coming to this church on Sundays.

We were having a baptism.

We didn't have this wonderful building in those days that was still going up in 2019.

So we had to go to Richard and Karen's place.

Those lucky people have a pool to do a baptism.

And the young lady who was being baptized that night, that afternoon, gave her testimony.

She described some of the challenges that she had been through in her young life.

And then she expressed the confidence that she had in her Lord and Saviour.

I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, Stuart, how about we do a switch?

You can take her place.

You can watch her family disintegrate before she's even finished high school, and deal with that.

And let's see, Stuart, if you're praising Jesus like she is.

I said, that's OK, God, we'll keep it the way it is.

Because it was a reminder to me, when the train hits you, we can hit you at foot 19 or 49 or 79.

But we know that God's provision is what we need at that time, and I was thankful for that.

And it's interesting.

I was standing next to a lady who I'm now married to.

We were sneaking off to go to another church that night to get away from the prying eyes of the people of NorthernLife Church.

And not long after that, we were married.

So I guess that was God's provision for me at that time.

So are you going to put away bitterness out of your life?

Is what I would say.

Knowing that God is for you, and therefore, no one can be against you.

Bitter roots in your life didn't do me any favours, and I assure you it won't do you any favours.

Let's pray.

Grace's father, if there is roots of bitterness growing up in any here tonight, may you remind those people that your grace is sufficient for them, and your power is made perfect in their weakness.

Bless us for the rest of our service tonight.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

‍