Overcoming Bitterness

Today's program contains portions from the following episodes:

"Bitterness"

"In Spite of a Difficult Family Background"

"The Beauty of Forgiveness"

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Dannah Gresh: Hey there, friend. This month’s theme at Revive Our Hearts is “Overcomers.” We want you to be an overcomer. Scratch that. Jesus wants you to be an overcomer! Today we’ll talk about overcoming bitterness.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m Dannah Gresh, and I once struggled with bitterness . . . but didn’t know it. 

My experience is that lots of us are surprised when we realize bitterness has become a problem in our lives. I find this one just kinda creeps in. (So, stick around. Just in case!)

The dictionary defines bitterness this way: "anger and disappointment at being treated unfairly; resentment."

For the record, it’s okay to feel angry over how someone’s sin impacts your life. In fact, it’s probably inevitable. But that does not mean you have to grow a root of bitterness, as we’ll soon hear from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When I was first putting my notes together for today, I wrote down “bitterness is caused by people or circumstances,” but then I had to go back and correct that. Bitterness is not caused by anything that happens to us. It’s the fruit of our reaction to what happens to us, to hurt, and to loss. 

Dannah: Ah, yes! You’ve probably heard that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. Bitterness isn’t what happens when life gets hard. It results when you invite those angry feelings into your heart to set up residence—to become roots in your belief system. But as I said, that can sneak up on you. It did for Erin Davis. Her dad left her family when she was in middle school. Years down the road, the impact was palpable.

Erin Davis: In Jason and my early married years, I was still having regular panic attacks in the middle of the night because of the abandonment of my father . . . and that was fifteen years after that initial leaving!

Dannah: I can’t wait for you to hear the dramatic transformation in Erin’s life, as well as how I overcame bitterness towards my husband.

Everything Nancy, Erin, and I share today will amalgamate into a freedom call for you to understand and overcome bitterness. Let’s get started.

Kevin Benton was bitter. And if you ask me, he had a good reason.

It was back when he was in college. White students harassed him and the only other African-American living on the floor in his dorm in order to get the two of them to move out. Those students spat on Benton’s door, tore posters off his wall and just made life plain horrible. Sometimes those white students would bang on Benton’s door at four in the morning just to terrify him and his roommate. When Benton reported the bullying, he was laughed at.

It may not surprise you that this young man had trouble sleeping, and then began to suffer panic attacks. Eventually, he was admitted to the hospital. The diagnosis? Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy: a thickening of the muscles of his heart. It’s the leading cause of heart-related death for those under the age of thirty.

But, don’t worry! God was at work.

As Benton lay in that hospital bed, full of bitterness, God sent someone: a janitor. The way Benton remembers it, this man just walked by, grabbed Benton’s hand and prayed aloud for God to heal him. Benton’s heart was changed in that moment. Oh, not the blood pumping organ, his proverbial heart. 

Somehow when that janitor prayed, Benton felt led to forgive those students who had tormented him.

The way CNN reports the story (yeah, I found this article on CNN.com!) Benton walked out of the hospital three days later. And many years later when he was a social worker in Philadelphia he claimed, “If I hadn’t forgiven them, I’d be dead.”

Hmm, could bitterness really do that? Make a healthy young man’s heart sick?

Yup! You might wanna stick around if you’ve got someone you need to forgive. An in-law. A spouse. A frenemy. A co-worker. A former business partner. Or, an old college bully. I’m gonna make sure you know good and well the possible risks of allowing bitterness to fester in your heart. 

In fact, the data that negative mental states cause heart problems is pretty stupendous! You see, when we feel negatively towards someone, our bodies instinctively prepare to fight that person, which leads to changes such as an increase in blood pressure.

Studies have shown that bitter, angry people have higher blood pressure and heart rates and are more likely to die of heart disease and other illnesses. Over time, all those nasty emotions and physical symptoms . . . well, they change you!

Nancy: When Naomi and Ruth come to Bethlehem, Naomi says to the people who knew her years earlier, but who now hardly recognized her, “Is this Naomi?” they said.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, teaching on the topic of bitterness using the Old Testament book of Ruth. Naomi, unlike me, was very aware of what ailed her.

Nancy: She said, “Don’t call me Naomi,” which means pleasant. “Instead, call me Mara,” which means bitter, “because the Almighty God has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:20).

Isn’t it interesting how bitterness even affects our physical well-being and our countenance and our appearance? You can look at some women today—now, don’t get nervous here—but you can look at some women and just tell that they’re bitter women.

There are lines of hardness and anger and bitterness that for some reason, I think, show themselves on our faces as women more than men do.

Naomi was hardly recognizable. She had been gone ten years, but she was an adult when she left. You would think she would still be recognizable when she got home. But I get the sense here that her bitterness had aged her much more than ten years. Now, she’d been through a lot. She had suffered a lot.

But you know, ultimately, what we have to realize is the outcome of our lives is not determined by what happens to us. Rather, it is determined by how we respond to the things that happen to us.

Naomi had suffered a lot. She had lost her husband. She had lost her sons. She was left alone in the world with just this widowed daughter-in-law. She had suffered.

But the outcome of her life and the state that she was in, the condition she was in when she arrived back in Bethlehem, was not so much because of the loss she had suffered as much as her view of God and how she had responded to those losses.

So I want us to look today at this whole matter of bitterness and how it affects us, how it affects others, and what we can do about it.

Now, often our bitterness is a reaction to people or circumstances that hurt us. When I was first putting my notes together for today, I wrote down “bitterness is caused by people or circumstances,” but then I had to go back and correct that. Bitterness is not caused by anything that happens to us. It’s the fruit of our reaction to what happens to us, to hurt, and to loss. And it does have an enormous effect both on ourselves and on others.

Not only our physical appearance and our health are affected when we become bitter, but our emotional stability. Bitterness puts us in prison, and it causes us to put up barriers and walls in relationships.

As you see Naomi coming back to Bethlehem, she’s not a real endearing woman at this moment. “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara. The Almighty has made my life very bitter.” I mean, she is a whining, complaining woman.

Now, whenever I’ve taught this over the years, invariably, someone will come back and say, “I think you’re being a little too hard on Naomi.”

She was a woman who had suffered a lot. But she was a woman, I believe, who had responded in bitterness, and as a result, she put up barriers and walls in her relationships with other people.

“Don’t get close to me. I’ve been hurt. I’m not willing to risk getting hurt again.” You’ve felt it perhaps when you lost some close friends or they moved away. Did you ever find yourself thinking, I’m just not going to get close to anybody else again. Because as soon as I get close to somebody, they leave.

Bitterness will cause us to put up those kind of walls. Eventually, bitterness overflows. We can’t keep it in ourselves. Eventually it comes out in our words, as it did when Naomi spoke to the townspeople. When we verbalize our bitterness toward God and toward our circumstances, other people become contaminated and poisoned with what’s been eating inside us.

That’s why the writer to the Hebrews says, “See to it that nobody misses the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness, springing up, trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Heb. 12:15, paraphrased).

Naomi comes back to town, and all she can do is talk about how awful God has been to her. Now, most of us wouldn’t say it in those words, but how do we respond when people say, “How are you doing? How's your day?" Are you one of those people who give an "organ recital"? Every organ is mentioned, every pain, every problem.

Now, people don't want to be around that for long. We don't want to be around it. Yet, I find that myself asking as I read this passage. "Am I one of those people who is just is always having a bad day?" That makes people not want to be around us. It contaminates others.

How can we get free from that root of bitterness? Three suggestions here. First, we need to stop looking outward in blame. There’s no one else to blame. We have to stop saying, “I’m this way because so-and-so did such-and-such to me,” or “I wouldn’t be this way if . . . I had not been married to that man, or hadn’t had that parent, or my boss hadn’t done this to me.”

Stop looking outward in blame. Number two, look inward. We need to come to the point where we acknowledge that we really are bitter.

Now that’s hard to say. We don’t mind saying we’ve been hurt, because that suggests that somebody else has done something to hurt us; therefore, we’re a victim. We’re not responsible.

Women often say to me, “I’m hurt. I’m wounded.” But I hardly ever hear a woman say, “I’m a bitter woman.” Why? Because bitterness suggests that I did something wrong. I reacted incorrectly.

We have to come to the place where we take personal responsibility. You know, it’s easy to see this in others. We can often see, “So-and-so is just such a bitter person,” but it is often very hard to see in ourselves.

Don’t you agree? It’s hard to see when we have really become bitter. How can you know if you’re bitter? Well, two questions I think are helpful to ask:

1. Is there any one whom I have not fully forgiven?
2. Is there any person or circumstance in my life that I’ve not yet been able to thank God for?

Now, that’s a tough one. Is there any person or circumstance that, as I think back on it, I’m resenting it rather than able to thank God? Not thanking God for sin, but thanking God that He allowed this to come into my life, and He apparently intended that it should be for my good and His glory and my ultimate blessing.

And then having looked inward to acknowledge the bitterness, I need to accept personal responsibility for my actions and my attitudes. It’s possible that Naomi could not control the fact that her husband took the family to Moab, where all these catastrophes fell upon them.

But she had to come to the point where she was no longer blaming her husband, she wasn’t blaming Moab, she wasn’t blaming the doctor who maybe didn’t know how to take care of her sons so they got sick and died.

I think she had to come to the point where she realized she could not control her circumstances, but she could control her responses. She had to take responsibility for her anger and her blame.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, teaching from the book of Ruth. Check today’s program notes if you want the whole message. They’re at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend.

It might seem harsh to consider taking responsibility for anger when someone has deeply wronged you. But I’ve had a front row seat to see God’s freedom unfold in the lives and hearts of women who have the courage to do that. One of them? My dear friend Erin Davis. If you’ve ever heard her speak, you know she’s joy personified! So it might surprise you to know that circumstances once robbed her of that joy. Let’s listen to her telling Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth how she overcame the effects of bitterness in her life. Here’s Erin.

Erin: My parents split up. They were not getting back together. It changed me; it changed who I was. It took me from this little girl who was safe and secure to a little girl who . . . the world was no longer steady underneath my feet. And then I became a teenager who was still off-kilter, and even a young woman—a young married woman—who was still off-kilter.

In Jason and my early married years, I was still having regular panic attacks in the middle of the night because of the abandonment of my father . . . and that was fifteen years after that initial leaving! But gradually, over time, I learned that it is redeemable.

Somewhere along the line the narrative changed from, “This horrible thing that’s happened to me; I’ll never overcome it!” to “This horrible thing has happened to me . . . and God’s already at work to redeem it!” 

Nancy: So when you say it’s redeemable, that doesn’t mean that God’s going to magically or mystically undo what has been done. He didn’t put your nuclear family back together. That was past that, so in what sense is it redeemable?

Erin: Even now, my father and I barely speak. He lives about a mile from me, as the crow flies, but that relationship remains really, really strained—really, really painful for both of us. The door to reconciliation is always open on my part, and I believe he wants to be reconciled, but he’s just a broken man.

And so, redemption doesn’t mean that we moved on from it and we have a happy, functioning relationship. We don’t; we have a dysfunctional relationship. But the Lord’s helped me have a longer view of redemption. Redemption in this situation didn’t happen in a year, it didn’t happen in ten years, it hasn’t happened in twenty years.

Will it happen in thirty or forty years or even in my lifetime? I don’t know. But the way the Lord has brought redemption is, He’s given me a deep hunger for fatherhood. I think that the Lord created the family as a picture of that relationship. It’s supposed to show us who God can be in a good way. But in my case, it makes me need God desperately! I know how much I need God!

I know that He’s my only hope, because I from a little girl had to navigate life without the person who was supposed to be that for me, and so there’s redemption in that. There’s redemption in not depending on myself, which is similar. I’ve operated “with one leg” all this time. I’ve needed Jesus! And everybody needs Jesus, but I know that. 

There’s redemption, I think, in my own family at home. The Lord has given me the most faithful man! (I’ll cry, thinking about him.) He is so faithful. He’s not going to have an affair and abandon me; he’s not going to abandon my sons. And every day I get to watch this redemptive work in the next generation.

Nancy: He is redeeming and making all things new. And that includes us, right? That relationship hasn’t experienced reconciliation, but you have experienced restoration. And what about the dreams? What happened with them?

Erin: Oh, that’s a great story! I had panic attacks for years in the night; it was our “normal.” It’s funny when something is dysfunctional, but it’s normal to you, you don’t see it as dysfunctional. And so, I’d had those panic attacks for a long time.

I went to visit our shared friend, Dannah Gresh. I said, “I’m so tired, Dannah.”

And she said, “Why?” 

And I said, “Well, I had a panic attack last night.” We were in the Blockbuster parking lot, which tells you how long ago this was. 

She just stopped right where she was and she said, “What is that? What are you talking about?”

And I said, “Oh, I have these panic attacks in the night.” 

Dannah: “What are they? What’s happening?” 

And in the dreams I was never being chased; nobody was ever trying to hurt me. I was totally alone. It was abandonment that I was afraid of. 

Dannah said, “Erin, that is not what God wants for you!”

And I said, “Well, I know; I’ve prayed about it, but they’re not going away.” 

She called some friends that next day and we met in her basement, and we actually walked through the process that you take women through in the book Lies Women Believe and in Lies Young Women Believe. We would pray, and we would ask the Lord to identify a lie.

And the lies were things like: “Everyone leaves,” or “I can’t trust anybody with my heart, or it will be crushed!” And then we would pray again, and we would ask the Lord to reveal truth, and He would reveal things like: “[Surely] I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). “I am with you always, [even] to the [very] end of the age” (Matt. 28:20).

Nancy: So truth to counter the lies.

Erin: Truth to counter the lies. Where the lie was, “I can’t reveal my heart or it will be crushed.” The truth is, “They’re going to know you are Christians by your love” (see John 13:35). Those biblical truths. And we prayed, and she wanted to talk about my dad, and honestly I was like, “Uhh, I’ve talked about this. I don’t want to talk about it any more!”

But the Lord used her to expose that, yes, those abandonment fears were there. They were deep. And they weren’t true! So I drove home from Pennsylvania, stayed the night alone in a hotel for the first night nightmare-free in I don’t know how long! And I don’t have them anymore! I haven’t had them for a long time. It was the truth that reversed the power of those lies in my heart.

Nancy: Wow! And that’s all part of God writing your story. And what I love, Erin, as I listen to this is thinking of how many women with that background would become a statistic. And that story of the brokenness and dysfunction in their family of origin would become their identity.

And yet, not only has God rescued and redeemed you from having that identity, He’s now using your identity in Christ to give you a ministry into the lives of your own children, the women that you’re ministering to through Revive Our Hearts, through your local church. 

I mean, you could just be so resentful. You could say, “This man messed up my life!” You could have lived a life of bitterness, but God has delivered you from that. He’s protected you. He brought Jason into your life. He’s written your story, and now He’s writing other people’s stories through your story.

Erin: Yeah. There’s that passage that says, “Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story, those He has rescued from the pit!” (see Ps. 107:2) And He has rescued me from the pit, and I will spend my life telling—not my story—but the gospel story.

Just last week I was teaching in Minneapolis, and there was a woman there so broken because her husband had left their family, and she had five little kids. She was just so broken, and I held her face in my hands, and I said, “Your children will not get through this unscathed; that is not the hope. But there will be redemption, because I am your daughters in twenty years.”

Dannah: Brokenness and bitterness do not have to become your identity! 

I often pray with women the way I prayed with Erin. There’s one common denominator to every woman who overcomes: forgiveness. We all have someone that’s hurt us and forgiveness, well, it’s one of the options in the fork in the road at the end of hard times. Take one road and you’ll end up bitter. But take the other, and you’ll need to enter through the door of forgiveness, but you won't end up bitter, but you’ll end up better!

A few years ago, Nancy and I flew to South Africa to encourage Revive Our Hearts listeners there. I got to tell them a little bit about my forgiveness journey. Check it out. 

Dannah (in South Africa): You know what I encourage women when I’m praying with them through forgiveness, no matter who it is? I tell them—this is the word I use—“Girl, we’ve got to vomit it all out.”

That’s not a very pretty picture, is it? Not very lady like at all, as I stand here up in my dress. But it’s got to get out of you. Forgiveness is getting it out of you. If you’re going to cancel the debt, you’ve got to get it out.

And so I say, “Listen, I just want you to take a minute, and you’re going to say: ‘I choose to forgive ____ (and you plop in the name).’ And then whatever God’s Spirit, whatever memory God’s Spirit brings to your mind, just say it out loud: ‘I forgive them for abandoning me. I forgive them for embarrassing me. I forgive them for that night in May of 2006 when I expected them to come and get me and pick me up after school, and they didn’t come for three hours because they forgot me.’ And you just get as real as you can.”

And I sit there, as if I’m spiritually holding a can for them as they pour it all out. And then I say, “All right, sweet girl, that was good! I’m taking the trash out. The work is done.”

But you cannot minimize the pain. You have to use the real words.

Forgiveness is not forgetting. I don’t know about you, but like God, I do not have a sea of forgetfulness. Do you have one?

As I was looking at Nancy’s notes on this, she wrote the sweetest thing about this, and I love it. She wrote, 

If we forget all wrongs committed against us and all the pain we have experienced, we would not be merciful or empathic towards those who are also experiencing that pain. 

You see, we don’t have to forget. And remembering, if it is covered in and clothed in forgiveness, gives us mercy and empathy to help those who are still working out the forgiveness.

Isn’t that beautiful?

Another thing forgiveness is not is this: A single event—I sure wish it was. I sure wish I could say, “I choose to forgive ____ (fill in the blank)” and it was just done. But more often than not, I have found that the enemy says, “Eh, you’re not . . . you didn’t really, did you? Why would you? Look what they did today!” And he stirs up . . .

So what I choose to do is I remember. I chose forgiveness, and I’m choosing it right now. I might not yet feel it, but I will one day in the future, and it’s going to feel great!

The Lord brought up to my mind, as I was preparing these notes for you, the fact that I have recently been struggling (not recently recently, like today, but not too far long ago) with bitterness in my marriage. And I didn’t even know, really, what bitterness was. I didn’t understand it. I just knew that there was a piece of pain that wasn’t fixed from something old.

That word bitterness kept running through my mind. And I thought, I don’t think I’m a bitter person. That sounds so awful. Please tell me, Lord, that I’m not bitter. But I had my ear tuned to that word for the Lord to teach me.

I heard a message from a pastor who said, “Let me tell you how bitterness shows up: It shows up as a lack of compassion and kindness.”

And I realized when it comes to the big things, I’m good at forgiving. But when it comes to my husband leaving his socks in the middle of the living room floor, I have no compassion. I become very angry and unkind. And the Lord was showing me that I was covered in bitterness.

Here’s the irony: It was a little remnant from a painful period that we walked through where we both needed to extend a lot of forgiveness to one another. During that period of time, I walked around with a little Rolodex book of Bible verses. As the Lord would give me instruction on how to respond to my husband and how to pray for him as he was working things out with the Lord, I was working things out with the Lord.

The very first Bible verse in that stack was Hebrews 12:15. I was praying it for Bob because him being so sinful and all . . . (laughter) It says, “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble and by it you will become defiled.”

Imagine my shock when the Lord said, “Girl, you weren’t praying that for him! You were praying that for you! It was you I didn’t want to fall from My grace. It was you I didn’t want to fall into bitterness. And here you are! What are you going to do about it?”

You know what I said? I said out loud, “I chose forgiveness, and I’m re-choosing it right now. I don’t know how it works, but, Lord, teach me.”

Dannah: Lord teach me. What a good prayer to pray. I shared that message a few years ago at a women’s Revive Our Hearts conference in Pretoria, South Africa. Afterwards, the altar was flooded, because we all have someone we need to forgive.

If you need a little more courage to do that, you can listen to the whole message that I shared. You can find a link in the show notes. What about you? If you’re holding onto bitterness, the way out—the way to overcome it—is through forgiveness. Maybe you need to choose forgiveness right now, too. It’s almost cliche, but it’s so true: when you forgive someone else, you’re releasing a prisoner, and that prisoner is you! 

Remember, forgiveness doesn’t mean you’re saying that what someone has done to you is right. It’s just choosing not to hold on to the hurt, not to be angry about it. They’re still responsible for their sin against you. It’s possible that the authorities might even need to be involved. But you don’t have to stay captive to bitterness.

All this month we’ve been talking about how you can be an overcomer. Did you know that Jesus challenged early, New Testament-era Christians to overcome? He did! And he mentioned it in the letters He wrote to several churches. We find those letters in the opening chapters of the last book in the Bible, Revelation. 

This month we want to send you a copy of a booklet that serves as a sort of study guide for those letters to the churches of Revelation. It’s called Overcomers, and it’s based on the teaching of Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth on those churches. You can get your copy when you make a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts. 

The simplest way to do that is probably online, at ReviveOurHearts.com. Just click or tap where you see the word “Donate.” If you’d rather call us, you can dial 1-800-569-5959. 

Well, next weekend is Labor Day weekend. Labor Day is a holiday that was instituted in honor of labor unions. We’re not going to be talking about labor unions next week, but we are going to talk about labor. Work. It’s important, isn’t it? And its opposite, laziness, is something we need to avoid. I hope you’ll join us for that!

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh, hoping you’ll overcome bitterness. Choose forgiveness. We’ll see you next time, for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Revive Our Hearts Weekend is calling you to true freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

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