Let go of Bitterness

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CURRENT RADIO SERIES Living in Hope   CURRENT TV SERIES Unchained

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.   --Ephesians 4:31 One of God’s clear commands is to put away any bitterness from our lives. Why is this so important? Bitterness and resentment chain us to the past. Bitterness produces an emotional and spiritual bondage that will keep you from moving forward in your life. It’s like carrying around excess baggage! The emotional baggage of bitterness will slow you down and keep you from becoming the person that God intends for you to be. And yet so many people are chained to the past…they’re slaves to something that happened many years ago. And as a result, they can’t get past it and they can’t get on with their lives. Now, I’m not saying that we all don’t have things in our past that still hurt…wounds that take a long time to heal. But what I am saying is that we don’t have to let those dark spaces in the past determine how we act, think, and feel now and in the future! As a believer, you can tap into God’s power to leave what happened in your past…in the past. And through His power, you can cut those chains of bitterness that keep you in bondage. If bitterness has a hold on your heart today, ask God to help you put it away…for good. Bitterness is emotional baggage that will keep you from becoming the person God intends you to be. Grateful Sinners by Dr. Paul Chappell “And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.” Luke 17:15–16 Animosity between the Jews and Samaritans at the time of Christ was a deep-seated contempt bordering on hatred that stretched back hundreds of years. The Samaritans resented the way the Jews viewed them, and the Jews looked down on the Samaritans because of their heritage. Jewish people would walk miles out of their way to avoid going through a Samaritan town. Yet when Jesus healed the ten lepers, the one who returned to give thanks was a member of this despised group. This man had no hesitation about bowing down before a Jewish rabbi named Jesus and expressing his gratitude for the life-saving healing he had received. He didn’t care about the divisions or the ancient arguments over where and how to worship God—he was just grateful for what had happened to him. Too many times we forget that before our salvation, we were the enemies of God. We tend to be pretty impressed by ourselves, but God is not. The very best that we are able to do on our own is disgustingly filthy in His eyes because it is measured against His perfect holiness. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Isaiah 64:6). In order to have the proper gratitude to God for His salvation, we must never forget that we were once wretched sinners with no hope apart from His grace. Today’s Growth Principle:  If we forget where we were and where we were headed before God saved us, we will not be as grateful as we should be.