Bitterness

You may be seated. Please turn in the Word of God this evening to Ephesians 4, the fourth chapter of Ephesians. It’s good to see Jeanette Schlimgen in her place playing the instrument. Glad that she’s back there encouraging us in that way. Ephesians 4 is where we’ll be tonight. Let’s read a short portion. We are, in these evenings, giving attention to a topical series, Bible Answers for Inner Battles, and we continue in that vein this evening. Tonight we will be addressing the subject of bitterness. This is another one of the challenges that we may face, whether believers or not—bitterness is something we may feel rise up within us. So we’re in Ephesians 4. I encourage you to join with me in the reading from—well, maybe go back a little further than I was intending. Read from verse 20, just for some context.

Ephesians 4 verse 20. Let us hear the Word of the Lord.

 “You have not so learned Christ, if so be that ye have heard Him and have been taught by Him as the truth is in Jesus, that ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Wherefore, putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil, Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good that he may have to give to him that needeth. Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice, and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.”

Amen.

I trust the Lord will bless the public reading of His Word. What you have heard is the Word of the eternal God, which you are to receive, believe, and obey. And the people of God said, amen.

Let’s pray. Lord, we thank Thee for the blessedness of that position that we may enjoy, knowing our forgiveness, knowing our pardon, knowing the freedom of our sins all being put away. And we rejoice in the means, for it was not some trite plan, but it required the giving up of Thy Son, the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. He came into this world adorned in human flesh, made of a woman—what a thing it is that God would take flesh in order that He might be the sacrifice necessary to put away sin and engage in all the responsibilities of the mediator, living in obedience, paying the price, doing all that’s necessary to reconcile the parties that were at odds. How thankful we are that he was able to represent us and willing to die for us and rejoice in his power over the grave to rise again from the dead.

Tonight, O God, we bless thee. We thank thee for thy plan of salvation. What a wonder that God should ever even think such to condescend and reveal his glory in the salvation of sinners. And we are those who have benefited and rejoice therein. Tonight, Lord, may every believer rejoice—whatever’s going on—that their sins are forgiven: past, present, future, all under the blood of Christ. Though doubts may at times fill our hearts, and sometimes we may wonder, yet by faith we have taken that blood and applied it to the doorpost and lentil of our hearts. And we see in there the remedy, because it did not require strong faith in us in order to see the deliverance of the firstborn. It required simply obedience and the application of blood. And when you see the blood, you pass over. Oh, we bless Thee, Father, for Thy mercy. Tonight, show mercy afresh in our hearts by coming to us, encouraging us, meeting with us, and speaking to us. And if there be one without Christ, saving and showing tender mercy to their blindness and darkened hearts, extend Thy kingdom then, and get glory to Thyself, despite the weakness of the instrument preaching the Word tonight; we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

One of the saddest scenes in Scripture is that scene described for us in the parable our Lord Jesus tells in Luke 15, in which we have the all too frequent reality of the bitterness of an individual who can find no joy in the mercy bestowed upon another. I speak, of course, of that elder brother. And we’re told when his younger brother comes home and finds his way back to his father that the language is told unto us that he was angry and would not go in; he could not see or find in his heart any sense of joy or any response of gratitude that his younger brother had come home. Instead, immediately, he sees all the things that grated upon him or caused him to sense a sense of injustice or wrongness. And really then, this revelation of anger in his heart is an aspect of what we’re dealing with tonight—that of bitterness. You have, of course, them put together, anger, wrath, and bitterness in Ephesians 4.31. And so these are cousins, if you like; they’re related. Often where you find one, you will find the other. But I want to focus on bitterness because anger, of course—and I may get to anger and I may deal with it separately—I have it written down and I may come to it as its own individual subject. But they’re very much akin or alike, or there’s certain overlap in relation to when you think about bitterness and you think and study the subject of anger. However, anger often gets manifested in a way that is outward, and bitterness does too, but it tends to be something that is more within the soul and within the being.

And so tonight I want to address this because it’s an awful thing to be overcome with bitterness. And it happens. It happens even to those who profess to know the Lord, that they find this characteristic within themselves. And they may try to justify it—and we’ll see that—but it does not belong in the heart of the redeemed. There should be no space given to it where there is the blood of Christ applied. And so I trust that the Lord will help us as we look at it tonight.

Again, taking the same headings that we’ve looked at with regard to other subjects, I think this is the ninth message in this overall theme and subject matter that we’re dealing with over these weeks. But as we look at bitterness then, consider first with me its character, the character of bitterness. Bitterness is distinct from anger generally because it’s not just a passing feeling. It’s not just a flicker of frustration that arises within the heart, but it is a condition that stays within the soul—a disposition of, we might term, settled hostility. It’s often a sin that disguises itself as a form of self-protection, but ultimately it destroys the soul. It’s a form of spiritual suicide, ruining more than you might imagine.

There are a number of ways in which we see it. I want you to consider with me, first of all, that bitterness is a settled hostility. I think this is important to underline, that bitterness is a settled hostility. Again, it doesn’t just flare up momentarily. It is, rather than the match that burns for a little while—might be, that’s how anger sometimes shows itself—it is a fire that refuses to go out. Fuel keeps being added, and it continues to burn within the soul. So whereas anger may erupt, bitterness simmers. And its ability to freeze emotion in time is such that you may talk to someone two or three years after an event in which you already have seen this element and feeling, and two or three years later when it arises in discussion, the same emotion flares up as if it was two or three years prior. It doesn’t diminish; it is sustained within the soul.

The Apostle Paul tells, and you see then the relevance to the church—he is writing to professing believers, “let all bitterness be put away from you.” You have to let this go, this toxic feeling in the soul, bitterness. The Apostle Paul does not treat it as something light or minor. He lists it with other toxic behavior—wrath, anger, clamor, evil speaking. It’s contrasted with a tenderness, unforgiveness, bitterness. Now, maybe you’ve never struggled with it. I would highly doubt that you’ve never struggled with it at all. But I trust that no one here tonight is currently in a condition of bitterness.

Some have described it as being “harbored anger,” the refusal to let go of a real or perceived wrong. The person begins to rehearse the wound or the feeling again, over and over again—replaying the offense, going over it and over in it and over in it, over in their mind or in their hearts or even in speech. The offender, whomever they may be, is always on trial, and the better person is always the judge finding the fault within their mind. Now, if you go over to Hebrews 12—I know we were there this morning—if you go over there just for a moment, you’ll see that there’s a very significant text in relation to this sin that you find there. We’re told in verse 14, of course, in due course, God willing, we’ll get to these verses, but Hebrews 12:14 says, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord; 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.” Lest there be any fornicator or profane person, as Esau, and so on and so forth. He’s warning certain characteristics that might be seen and prove that there is an absence of grace.

And he is warning. Of course, you might say, well, if they have this and there’s an absence of grace, what can be done for them? What the Apostle Paul does is he warns so that should the beginnings of this be found within the soul—which can happen even to the best of believers—should those beginnings be felt or seen within the soul, recognize it for what it is and the danger that it can have upon you and put it away.

You might prove that you’ve fallen from the grace of God, a root of bitterness springing up within you. Notice the metaphor—a root, a root of bitterness. This is the beginning of something, isn’t it? It has the root. Before it produces the rest—the stem or the flower or the fruit or whatever—you have just the root. And that’s what he’s trying to address, that root. When you see the root, when it’s just beginning its life, when you detect it, be on the alert. Roots, of course, grow underground. They’re not easily seen. They quietly do their business, spreading and sometimes invading. And bitterness does the same. The depiction is a correct one. It begins silently with an offense—again, whether great or small, whether real or perceived—and we refuse to deal with it. We let it rest; we think we’re at peace. We may not show any real outward anger; we may not lash out, but it’s there. And it begins to produce a coldness within the soul.

And the problem extends not just between you and the parties that you’re thinking about, but it begins to affect you and God. I may have told this before, but I went to see a couple that I detected were struggling with certain things. They were—this wasn’t here, by the way, so don’t try to, over in your mind, figure out who it is; you don’t know them. But I went to see them because they were struggling with certain things and kept bringing up certain matters. It was not helpful, and there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t change anything. I couldn’t alter the past. What had been done was done—it happened years and years and years prior—and they were troubled by it. And there was a certain individual that they were friends with who was continuing to feed this matter fresh, constantly into their mind. I didn’t really know their friend, the individual who was feeding the issue; I didn’t know them. But I went to see them, recognizing the problem, and I sat with them and began to describe before them how bitterness looks. I will never forget that house visit. As the Lord helped me just describe what bitterness does, it begins with this feeling of animosity, of a wrong—again, perceived or real—within the heart. And the first thing it does is it ruins your fellowship with God. You can’t pray. You may pray, but you can’t pray. You may say words in the form of prayer, but you’re not praying. It ruins your fellowship with God; destroys that. Then it begins to ruin your experience with the Lord’s people. Because you struggle, really, even to talk about things other than this, or it taints your speech and conversation with other people. You always find a way of bringing it up and angling the conversation round to this hurt and this pain, so that you talk about it, you gossip about it, you share about it. And so, eventually, because you constantly talk about it, other people, good people, begin to distance themselves from you. It’s beginning to rot not just your fellowship with God, but your fellowship with the saints. And then from there, it begins to affect your family life too. At first, it’ll be seen within your children; they will grow up, again, because you’re talking about it all the time. It’s always discussed around the table. You always find a way to bring it up. It’s governing your emotions and your feelings in various ways in the home. Your children want to get away, and as soon as they’re old enough, they are gone. They don’t respect you; they want away. And then it begins to affect your marriage—the person who is most committed to you, who’s most resolved to overlook your faults, begins to create a breach there as well. She’s tolerating—perhaps can get to the point where she wants to get away as well—destroy your marriage. Then finally, it will start to manifest in your very health. Your health will deteriorate. It will begin to decline.

What I just told you is a paraphrased version of what I shared with that couple. When I was done, the two of them just looked at one another, because without knowing the person who was feeding them all the stuff, I had painted a portrait of them that was so precise it was almost prophetic. And later I found out more about that person. I could not have been more accurate in my assessment of what had happened in that person’s life. He had no church; no Christian wanted to be around him except for these two individuals, maybe one or two others. The children wanted nothing to do with him. The marriage had come to an end and their health was failing. Exactly what I described. Why? A root of bitterness. Destroyed everything. God’s word warns us about this.

So bitterness is a settled hostility. It is also a defiling influence, a defiling influence. Again, if you think of the language of Hebrews 12:15, it says, “thereby many be defiled.” And I’ve gone over this already in just what I’ve mentioned in the illustration, but bitterness is never content to remain personal. It doesn’t stay; it doesn’t remain within your own being. It spreads like leprosy—the leprosy that we’re warned of in Leviticus, spreading leprosy. One bitter spirit can corrupt a home, a marriage, a church, and beyond. A bitter person does not necessarily attack directly, but they have this resentment within the soul, and often they can portray—unlike maybe the outburst of anger—that someone may show. It pretends to play by the rules, but the way we speak and the way we act, we may pass it on to children, leaders to those under their charge, one Christian to the whole body of the church—a single bitter individual unresolved can sabotage blessing, divide the brethren, and certainly grieve the Spirit. That’s what we have in Ephesians 4:30, “grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” It’s serious.

Yet one may come to church week after week after week, and it goes unaddressed because they manage to contain it in some fashion to a degree sufficiently so that it does not warrant someone going to them to begin a process of discipline. Bitterness is also a heart without grace. It is a settled hostility, a defiling influence, and a heart without grace. We’re warned again of that in Hebrews 12, lest any man fail of the grace of God. As it continues, as it’s allowed to flourish within the soul, it will prove that there’s no grace there at all. Now again, the best of believers may struggle with a moment or even a little period of bitterness. We feel it; we sense it—a wrong that is done, again, real or perceived. But the heart that has experienced grace cannot stay in that frame of bitterness. But what bitterness does within the soul, it moves a heart from a state of merely being hurt to a state of being hardened. The true believer, however, by God’s grace, will eventually fall back on the things he knows to be true. We’ll deal with some of this, but just to mention it at this point—understanding the doctrine of divine providence—we come back and recognize God is in control. We also recognize there will be a future judgment; there will be an eschatological righting of all wrongs. The danger of allowing it to fester is that it begins to overtake and overrule. And again, you prove that you never had the real root of the gospel in your heart at all, because you cannot be bitter and gracious at the same time. You cannot meditate on the mercy of Christ and cherish a grudge—one will drive out the other. This is the saddest thing about it. You know when someone is bitter that they are not in the shadow of Calvary. They cannot be. Being there at the cross, oh how! There’s something about that tree, where our Lord Jesus died. It’s like that tree that Moses was told to apply to the bitter waters, sweeten them. That’s what happens when we get before the cross and properly and considerably meditate upon the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ. It turns bitter waters sweet.

So this is some of the character, and there may be others that we would consider—but just a settled hostility, a defiling influence, and a heart without grace. That’s where it can get to.

But the causes—what are the causes for bitterness? Why would this happen? It doesn’t just arrive out of nowhere. There are reasons why someone may fall into this state and condition, even within the church, as we have said. So usually the path is one of pain, one of injustice. Something has happened in your life, and because of the way things have fallen out, you cannot agree or feel that there was a rightness in what happened, and you become bitter. It doesn’t tend to happen overnight; we allow it to build in the heart. We feed it. The thought that produces bitterness—we are all subject to—but allowing bitterness to inhabit the soul, lay its foundation, erect its walls, and construct an entire home in which to live permanently is something we permit and, by what we do and think, encourage.

It comes in various forms. Bitterness—look at the various ways it gets expressed. We might talk about natural bitterness, just using these general terms to describe some of the ways in which you might see it. Natural bitterness is when you see a person whose entire disposition has a tendency to this spirit. Now, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child that I could describe as being bitter. They may exist out there, but I’ve not seen it. So it tends to be, even if we see a disposition in someone and you have that image in your mind of someone that seems to be perpetually unhappy. There was an older gentleman when we were children, playing soccer around the neighborhood; and of course you kick the ball, and sometimes it lands in someone’s yard, and you’re scaling fences to go and get it, and all the rest of it. And usually that’s just part—as long as you’re not damaging anything. If you come in, you open the gate or whatever, and you close the gate behind you, so on and so forth—hopefully no one is too upset. But every neighborhood, or at least most neighborhoods, usually have someone who will not tolerate any of this at all. And there was an individual in our neighborhood, his first name was Gordon, and all the children in that area designated him Grumpy Gordon. That was his name; that’s how he was known, because he never smiled, he never had anything positive to say, there was no encouragement. Anytime you saw him appear out of his house, it was to scold and berate. And so that’s how we remembered him. Well, I’m sure at some point in his life he was a happy-go-lucky little child, doing the very things that he had come to despise in others. You see, these people—a certain disposition governs their entire spirit. There’s not only what we might title natural bitterness, but a provoked bitterness. This arises from suffering, again, often justified as we look at it from a human perspective. There’s unprovoked bitterness as well—that’s not what the individual feels, but any impartial individual looking on, knowing the details, will say, “This was unprovoked. I can’t even see why you would feel the way you feel. You have no warrant to feel this way.” Again, you see the difference between, you know, something that happened—let’s say, to Joseph, where you can see why he might feel wronged—and someone who, just because of their inflated pride and sense of what they have, has this unprovoked bitterness. There’s malicious bitterness, a form of bitterness that is not contained at all; it weaponizes every opportunity to destroy or sabotage another party. There’s discriminatory bitterness also—this is the kind of bitterness that is directed toward a people group, an entire people group—a kind of bigotry. And I’m not going to name cultures and places. Certainly, I come from a land where you can see this kind of discriminatory bitterness. That hatred for a whole swath of people, just a generalization, no sense of individual merit—just having this bitterness toward them all. And there are very few cultures without that, very few. The vast majority of nations have a history that makes them or leads them to this kind of bitterness toward other nationalities or people groups within their own very nation. That’s the kind of bitterness, by the way—it’s very easy to hand on from one generation to the next.

What are the causes? What are the causes? Why does this arise? Why do we see these various manifestations of bitterness? Well, let me give you three things. First, unresolved anger. Unresolved anger. We are told in Ephesians 4 in relation to this in verse 26, “be angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath, neither give place to the devil.” Here is one of the chief culprits. Bitterness is anger that has overstayed its welcome. That initial feeling of injustice—or that which was wrong—that rises within the soul begins to stay. Wrath is held on to past sundown. That match that was lit—to use that depiction—has started a fire that you’re adding continually fuel to. Instead of extinguishing it, you allow it to continue to burn. You store it up and allow it to live. And there it burns slowly, corrupting everything it touches. It might be referred to as residual anger. Residual anger—it’s anger that’s held onto. You’re told, “Don’t let the sun go down upon your [wrath].” Don’t let it live on. Deal with it. But we allow it to live on. And before we know it, it’s turned into this, which we describe as bitterness. Now again, often it’s because of a real injury—you know the feeling, you’ve really been injured—and that feeling arises within you, the wrongness of it. And you have had to— and I trust all believers here have known victory over this—like you’ve felt it rise up, and then you’ve fallen on your knees, and you’ve wrestled with it before God, and you’ve handed it over to Him, and you’ve left it there, and you’ve walked away having committed it to God. You’re not letting it live. So unresolved anger is one of the causes.

Unmet expectations—this is something that has come up in other messages as well. Sometimes bitterness doesn’t come from what others did, but from what they may not have done, or our expectations of what they should have done—a spouse who failed to live up to our hopes; a child who fails to live up to our aspirations; a promotion that never came; a prayer that, in our eyes, went unanswered or not answered in the way we might have desired. It is then an unfulfilled hope. Scripture recognizes this within our experience on this earth—Proverbs 13:12, “hope deferred maketh the heart sick”—on my expectations. So we had something we were expecting to occur and so longing for it to be a certain way, and it doesn’t; and then bitterness sets in. Christian, you have to guard yourself against this. You have to see it rising up—you have to, “this is dangerous how I’m feeling right now and I need to extinguish it.” Then there’s unconfessed pride. Unresolved anger, unmet expectations, unconfessed pride. Bitterness is a form of contention—even if it’s not expressed as aggressively as anger, it’s a form of contention. It’s contention within the heart, and again, it usually spills out into conversation beyond yourself. And only by pride cometh contention. Only by pride. And so pride has a big part in relation to this. Our bitterness tends to masquerade as moral conviction about what is right and what is wrong. But beneath the surface, there is a swollen pride. We think that something happened that shouldn’t have happened. And we’re beyond upset; now we’re bitter. I know of an individual who was—again, it was not here in this church—there was an election of elders being held within the congregation, and this individual’s name was forward for it. Now, I don’t know all the particulars; I don’t know all the details. All I know is that the oversight stepped in and prevented his name from going forward. And maybe the oversight mishandled it. I don’t know; I wasn’t there. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn’t quite deal with it in the right way. It’s quite possible they’re not beyond getting something wrong. But this man was beyond angry about what happened. I became aware of what had happened probably close to ten years after the event itself—maybe eight or so—and he was as full of rage then as if it had happened the day before. And I didn’t know anything about the oversight, didn’t know them, don’t know anything about them, didn’t know anything about the particulars—whatever; I wasn’t defending them. But I’m hearing this man tell me of the details, and when I walked away, I thought to myself, for that congregation, that was a dodged bullet. A man of that character has no business being in leadership, ever. Now maybe he was wrong, truly. Then you ask yourself, did the event make his character or reveal his character? I suggest it revealed it. It revealed it. And had he gotten into some position of responsibility within that church, something else would have happened, and you would have been dealing with that same spirit. Only now he has power to wreck more havoc. Bitterness. Pride. Believing our expectations are just, our judgments are righteous. How dare they? So those are the causes: unresolved anger, unmet expectations, unconfessed pride.

We come then to the cure. How do we deal with this? Well, it can be dealt with. That’s the relief. We’re not dealing here with something—you say it’s incurable. No, it is; it can be cured. It can be dealt with. Praise God, it can be. And some of you may have known it. You may have been overcome by this at some point in your life. And you cast your mind back—and if you start to assess what was the chief sin in your heart at that time, you might even now say it was bitterness. The remedy, as always, is found in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, redeeming, sanctifying, liberating grace of God through the person and work of our Savior. Again, some bitterness is provoked, born from real wounds, real wrongs, but some of it not. It arises not from what was done, but from what was denied—a closed door, a silent heaven, a blessing withheld—and so our heart then sours, not just against man, but often then against God.

So, how do we cure it? What would God’s words say to us? Well, I would suggest, first of all, confession. Confession. There needs to be confession—owning the sin without excuse. He that covereth his sins shall not prosper, but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13.) The bitterness is a sin. There it is. Let all bitterness be put away from you. Get rid of this. It doesn’t belong in the believer’s heart. It doesn’t belong in any man’s heart, for that matter, but especially in those who have received grace from God through Christ. Again, it hides. Christians are so adept at this. They may even be more adept than the unbeliever. Few people, like ordinary people in the world, think as much about right and wrong and justice as Christians—Christians rightly taught God’s Word, rightly informed from God’s Word. They have an ability to understand rightness and wrongness in a way and then weaponize it and twist it and turn it to a certain shade or light in order to defend themselves and their sin. But there has to be confession. You have a responsibility even if, even if what they did, what provoked this whole matter was wrong. You have a responsibility. Bring it before God and confess it. “Lord, I am bitter. I feel this bitterness in my heart. How dare I? Dear God, I confess it. Dear God, deliver me from it. Fill my heart with the love of God.” Again, it may seem surprising. But I think a lot of bitterness arises and is born from things like comparison, discontentment, and even envy. And what’s coming in there is pride. So it’s not just the fruit of pain—it’s the fruit of unbelief, the fruit of ingratitude, the fruit of rebellion. It has to be confessed, beloved; it has to be. You have to give it up, or it will fester—it will grow. You need to weep over it, name it, and bring it to the friend of sinners. That older son, that elder brother—standing there, never miss, never miss—he’s being invited in. He’s being invited in. He’s not being told he can’t participate. He’s not being kept out in the field, away from the celebration. He’s being invited in. The Lord invites even the bitter to come in, to celebrate the gospel.

Another cure is faith. Faith, if confession is owning the sin without excuse, faith is entrusting the offense or the outcome to God. We’re memorizing it in Romans 12—it was our text for this morning in our class—verse 19, “dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves; vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.” Again, Joseph—so helpful in this matter—“Ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good.” What was he doing? Faith there was the cure for Joseph: his meditation upon God who is sovereign, his commitment to God who had given to him promises, revealed to him prophecies. And though the Word of God, we’re told, tried him, yet he kept coming back to God. Faith kept rising up to the point that he was able to declare and make a sermon of his pain. “Ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good.” Are there exceptions to that? Other times when we get to say that applied to Joseph but not to me—God has made a mistake here. Are you willing to charge God in such a way? It cannot be. So faith ends the cure. When bitterness arises from injury, faith says God is the judge—He will repay. I trust Him. When your bitterness stems from disappointment, then again faith rises up and says, God is wise; He has chosen this path. I embrace it. It’s faith. Now, you may not understand it—you’re not told that you have to understand it; you submit to it. That’s how Joseph could say what he said—“God meant it unto good.” That’s how David could say what he said in relation to Saul: “The Lord shall avenge me of thee,” 1 Samuel 24:12. “The Lord shall avenge me of thee.” And that’s what kept our Lord, our Savior, in his time of trial—committing himself to Him that judgeth righteously, 1 Peter 2:23. Committing himself—what is that? It’s an act of faith. Your Lord exercised faith in the moment of the injustice of His experience. Your bitterness will not die until you abandon the works of the flesh for the fruit of the Spirit. You have to abandon the works of the flesh for the fruit of the Spirit. So you have to see that what is being produced in you is works of the flesh. And if you want the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, faith is in there—if you want to believe, give up the works of the flesh, plead for the foot of the Spirit in your life—it will occur.

I remember my pastor telling me of an incident in which a young man came before the mission board, believing that God had opened a door for him in a particular field of service—a particular mission field, foreign. And he presented his case before the mission board. And the mission board—I don’t know their reasons, but the mission board assessed the whole matter. It may have been danger, cost, timing, the individual—I don’t know; I have no idea. But he came to the mission board saying that “God hath opened to me a door.” And when the mission board said no, his response was, “You have closed the door that God hath opened.” And my pastor, relaying the story to me, says, “Scripture makes it plain. When God opens a door, no man can shut it. If it’s really of God, if it’s really of God, it cannot be shut.” When the call came to Calgary, and there were churches in Ulster that, of course, needed a pastor as well, and I was asked by oversight in the presbytery over there about whether I believed that God, the call, had already come from Calgary, and whether I believed that God would have me there, so that we didn’t waste the time of other churches in Ulster. And I told the brethren there, I said, “I feel reluctant to say what God’s will is right now. I’m just, I’m sitting back and just watching, see what God will do.” And something came around, and I said something—I know that there’s great need here in Ulster, I get that. I know there’s great need here in Ulster. And I very intentionally put this before the brethren there. In my heart, if you had said to me, “Where do you think you’re meant to be? Like you, where do you feel you’re meant to be?” I would have said Calgary, without hesitation. But I wanted to see how God would open the door. I did not want to go based on how I felt. I wanted that to be absolutely clear. And I said to those men—I told them—I said, “If you men believe that the need in Ulster is of such a nature that I should not go to North America, I will submit and I will stay here.” And the moderator at that time said, “All that matters here is the will of God.” And that was all that was said. And I was content with that. Why did I say that? Why did I put— I essentially put my future, knowing in my heart of hearts where I felt I was meant to be, I put my future in the hands of other men. I said what I told you. Because, again, it’s another test. If this is of God, if this is of God, nothing can stop it. He will make a way. Faith, beloved, rises up, trusts God. You think your life has been ruined by another’s sin. Let faith rise and know God is in control. “God meant it unto good.” There’s also forgiveness. I must be very quick here—Forgiveness. You have it here in the context. Verse 32 of Ephesians 4, “Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Now, it would be implied in this that if there are those in the church who are bitter, that perhaps they’ve been wronged. So, forgive is the message. Forgive one another. Our Lord Jesus tells us, “if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” It could not be more plain. Now, there’s much in the subject of forgiveness that I cannot address here and now, but bitterness often creates an excuse so that we refuse to forgive. And yet forgiveness, if you have built that up—if bitterness has come in, laid the foundation, built up the walls, constructed an entire place in which to dwell—forgiveness is what destroys it, pulls down that habitation in which bitterness lives. And you must get to that place. Maybe the offender is unrepentant; still, there has to be that frame, that spirit, that attitude of forgiveness within the soul. You may not forget. It doesn’t excuse. It doesn’t make light. But you release the whole matter. I cannot hold this. Be willing to forgive.

Fourthly, another cure is love. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good,” Romans 12:21. “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” our Lord Jesus teaches us. Love your enemies. Love your enemies, oh—you know, that text is fine until it needs to be applied, right? It’s like we can quote it—love your enemies. Three words so simple to retain in our minds—so challenging to apply in the moment when it is necessary. Love your enemies. Have people wronged you? Don’t get bitter—love them. Oh, how hard that is.

Finally, contentment. Contentment—receiving the Lord’s portion in your life without complaint. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” (1 Timothy 6), “the LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him.” (Lamentations 3), “fret not thyself because of evildoers.” The Psalmist goes on to say, “trust in the LORD and do good. Fret not yourself because of evildoers, trust in the LORD, there’s faith, and do good.” Love. So what do you do then? My time is gone. What do you do when there’s a whole dispute over family inheritance? Oh, the warfare and bitterness over family inheritance—it will never end. What do you do when a parent—maybe said and did things they ought not to have done? What do you do when an authority figure makes a decision that has ramifications in your life that you don’t like? When people are trying to push you out of your job? When you’re overlooked for a position that by any reasonable expectation you should be the one put there and nepotism perhaps has taken it from you? What do you do if he, she has broken off the engagement? What do you do when she’s left you and taken your children from you? What do you do? I know what the tendency is. It’s bitterness. You know it as well as I do, and you’ve seen it. And I exhort you with all my being, “Don’t go down that path.” I may not get this right—I’m just recalling it now. Was it Jay Adams said something about bitterness? Being the poison that we drink ourselves, expecting it to do harm to others? Such a pointless, fruitless endeavor, yet oh, how easily we justify it. Oh, for a sweet contentment—a contentment about our lot—I often smirk when I, I don’t listen to him much these days, but I used to listen to him when I would have the Christian radio station on and Calgary driving around. Around the afternoon, Dave Ramsey would be on. People would call up and they would say in this way, “How are you doing?” And his response always, “You know it better than I deserve.” I hear that, and so often in my mind I think, oh, the believers really believe that. Really. It’s a good response. It’s a biblical response. If you’re in Christ, if your sins are forgiven; if you know your name is written in heaven; if you know that you’re rightly related to God, you’re a child of God, adopted into the family of God, and you will never be in the burnings of God’s hell—then most certainly whatever your lot is, it is better than you deserve. You’re a sinner. The sins you have committed against a thrice holy God are infinitely worse than anything you have ever experienced. And I say that not to make light—please do not misunderstand my remarks as making light of legitimate pain. There are experiences in this life where it is very hard when someone’s sitting in front of you telling their story, for even the hearer of the story not to feel a rising up of passion for the wrongness of what has been done. But none of that takes away from what we have said: confess bitterness; believe God; exercise faith in trusting the offense or the outcome to God; forgive; love; and resign yourself to a frame of contentment. May the Lord help us.

Let’s bow together in prayer. Let me say to you, if you are struggling—maybe with what we have dealt with tonight—and you do need pastoral counsel and encouragement, and maybe you need to just have someone that you can be open and honest with, and try to get some counsel to help you think and get out of the mire of where your mind perhaps presently is, please feel at liberty to let me know. I’ll open God’s Word as best I can and try to counsel, but go to the Lord and take what you’ve heard tonight and put it into action by God’s grace.

Lord, we pray that Thou would help us give grace to live in a constant condition, state of contentment and joy. Let thy peace that passeth understanding keep our hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Let our minds then turn onto those things that are pure and true, and so on. Oh, that we might meditate regularly upon the wrongness that came upon our Lord Jesus Christ, the only man who was truly innocent and yet became a curse for us. May the innocence and submission of our Lord Jesus Christ help us in the wrongs and hurts that we experience. Give grace, then, and help us with this. Remember us as we enter into this week. Equip us for every task. Help us to be diligent in our business, fruitful in our calling, empowered by the Spirit to do Thy will. May the grace of our Lord Jesus, the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Spirit be the portion of every child of God, now and evermore.

Amen.