The Sin of Bitterness

Opening Banter and Program Introduction

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'".

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. Don't forget you can access our old shows on podcast, www .nocompromiseradio, all put together, nocompromiseradio .com, or you can go to iTunes or wherever you want, Facebook, www .nocompromiseradio .com.

News Commentary and a Warning Against Gimmicks

Well, before we get into our topic today, I did find some news of interest on the 115th anniversary of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Used to love that story when I was a kid. A special mass was held at the Sacred Heart Church in Tombstone, Arizona.

Maybe Tombstone Bible Church, I wonder if that exists. The congregation prayed for God to forgive the sins of the Clantons, the Earps, and the others who died in the famous shootout. Quote, anything I can do to promote getting rid of violence I'm going to do, end quote, said the church's pastor, Reverend William Parenteau.

I'm just trying to do my part in my own little way. One tourist who attended the mass said they were real people, they were Americans, they were part of our history, and no one is praying for them. And the commentator on this particular little news blurb said don't miss the Bonnie and Clyde Memorial Mass in Dallas on May 23rd, the anniversary of the duo's bloody death.

It's interesting how people won't do what the Bible says, but they will do what the Bible says not to do. Does that sound right? They won't do what the Bible says, but they will do what the Bible doesn't say.

I think that's right. The other one, news of interest that I found, that was, by the way, from Dallas Morning News. This is from Grand Rapids Press. Nearly 1 ,000 Christian clowns, magicians, and ventriloquists convened last fall in Grand Rapids, Michigan to evangelize children and nursing home residents and attend the 38th Annual Fellowship of Christian Magicians.

They, the audience, love the music and they love the gimmicks and the comedy, said Neil Sambroski, a member of the New York-based Clowns for the Kings. For the King. That's the wonderful thing about clown evangelism.

You can reach a lot of people, a minister can't. We reach children of all ages, Grand Rapids Press. Well, they probably do reach them, but they reach them with gimmicks and comedy and music, according to this guy.

And so what are you gonna reach them with? And if you reach them with music and comedy and videos and Hershey bars, you've gotta keep giving those things out or else there's going to be trouble. It's like Jesus in John chapter six, where the people were quite glad to have him to be the king of bread and give bread all the time and food until the next meal.

But once Jesus started to lay down the demands of discipleship and the cost of following him and how he is the king, not just some kind of food king, not some burger king, but he is the ultimate king over political, over social, over economic, over the will, over the heart.

The people, John 666, didn't follow him anymore. They didn't want that kind of king. And so we don't want to resort to gimmicks. We don't want to resort to something that's dumbed down, lowest common denominator.

And I just thought that was quite crazy, those two situations. Well, that's not my topic today, but since it is my show, I kind of talk about what I want to talk about. The rest of the show, I'd like to talk about the issue of bitterness.

The Meaning of Bitterness and Why It Is Sinful

Bitterness. A while ago, I did a show on feelings, and now one of the particular feelings that I'd like to address is bitterness. The New Testament calls bitterness a very interesting word because it's onomatopoetic.

It sounds like what it is, screech. It sounds just like what it is. Here, the word bitterness is picria, P-I-K-R-I-A. And imagine if you cut open a really ripe lemon or lime, cut it in half and then dig your front teeth into that lime and just kind of force that citrus right up into your gums, and you kind of get that kind of feel.

That's that name, picria, bitterness. And Ephesians 4, verse 31 is something that is clear. Let all bitterness, picria, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and slander be put away from you along with all malice.

So when it comes to the sweet Christian life, we are to embrace that. We wouldn't want to put that away. We would want to put that on. We would want to adorn that. But when it comes to bitterness, the opposite of kindness or sweetness, we're to get rid of that, this pointed, sharp, pungent, bitter taste now in a figurative sense is applied to a painfully angry, embittered person, kind of a brooding, grudge-filled old man, old woman, young man, young woman.

And so today I want to ask you the question, are you a bitter person? Do you hold onto things? And if so, I'm going to encourage you to confess it as sin and ask your great God and Savior Christ Jesus to cleanse you from that sin because He is a just God and a faithful God.

Bitterness talks about smoldering resentment in the scripture, and it's a resentment that people just cannot let go. They like to hold onto it. And the longer people hold onto this resentment, the more rotten, corrupt, corrosive, and rancid it becomes.

It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. You can imagine if you put some old meat, uncooked meat in the trash can in your kitchen, day by day by day, it just smells worse and worse. You might want to hope it'll go away, but the more you coddle it and keep it and store it there, it just becomes worse.

Martin Lloyd-Jones said, here's a talking about bitterness, it denotes a sort of persistent sourness and an absence of amiability. It is an unloving condition, which never sees any good in anything, but always contrives to see something wrong or some defect and deficiency.

Because the person himself is jaundice and bitter, everything he looks at is tinged by the same thing. It is like looking through colored spectacles, end quote. That's his commentary on Ephesians 4, page 279.

We know people like that, don't we? We know people like that at home, at school, at work, and sadly, there are people like that in the local church, and I hope you're not one of them. I hope when you're around these kind of people, you kill them with kindness and with sweetness, that you confront them if they need to be confronted.

People always just seeing people wrongly, and the glass is half empty, and we know that that's not right. That's to be gotten rid of, removed, get rid of that. Did you know this? Bitterness is an attribute that is regularly, often, seldom, or never used of God.

Do you ever think God is bitter? The answer is bitterness is never used of God. And for us, as fallen creatures, saved by the grace of God, still with that hangover of sin, we can become bitter for real things, a real grievance, or people can become bitter even if it's a made-up, imagined grievance.

It might not even be true. And so we wanna make sure this is kind of a bitter-free zone. It's Christmas time, it's holiday time. I don't know when the show will be played, but it's the holiday season.

Boy, that irks me when people can't say Merry Christmas. But anyway, it's the holiday season, and now people remember what their uncle did and what their mom did, what their kids did, and they just rehearse these things.

And we don't want you to be a person stuck with the dumbbell of bitterness wrapped around your neck. Let me tell you what Wilson said. Let us suppose that a Christian commits a sin. He tells a lie, for instance.

Now, when he tells this lie, does he feel guilty or does he feel bitter? The answer is guilty. When we sin, we feel guilty. It is straightforward. Now let us suppose that someone told a lie about the same Christian and spread it all over town.

What does he feel now, guilt or bitterness? And so the issue is, as Wilson would rightly describe, guilt is what we feel when we sin, and bitterness is what we could feel when others sin against us. And we have to remember, in this world, whether it's the church, our home, at school, play, work, wherever you are, you live with other sinful people.

Some may be unregenerate and just are sold out to sin, and others might be immature Christians who often stumble, and others might be mature Christians who still deal with sin. And so we wanna make sure we respond properly.

The World’s False Remedies for Bitterness

What is the cure for bitterness? My name's Mike Ebendroth. This is No Compromise Radio Ministry, WVNE 760 here in Worcester, Massachusetts. How do we deal with bitterness? That's the topic today. What is it?

How do we deal with it? Let me tell you first what the world says. How does the world tell you to get over bitterness? Well, they have different options, and they're all pretty much equally bad. One option is just keep it in.

And so go ahead and just nurse that grudge, coddle that grudge, pet that grudge. Just keep it in. And you keep it in, it's not going to get better. When you are bitter on the inside for year after year after year, what happens to you physically?

You can get physically sick, and you have defiled yourself on the inside, and you can have it spill out over to others. Some people say, well, you know, I just can't control my bitterness. Yes, you can if you're a Christian.

When you say can't, you really mean won't, because you have the Spirit of God dwelling within you, you have the scriptures to teach you right and wrong, and you will basically say, I can't, it's I won't.

And so you want to be very, very careful when you say, well, I've tried everything, but nothing has worked. Well, it's obvious you have not tried everything. You have not tried to do things from God's perspective, from God's methodological way, because if you do, God's ways don't fail.

So you can't say it doesn't work, I've tried everything. You haven't tried it in a biblical fashion, because if you did, you would see that God's word is true. The other cure that the world has for bitterness is not just keeping it in, but to let it out.

And you have to go ahead and just vomit forth all the things that you would have kept inside. And so what do you do? You go see the shrink, you go see the psychotherapist, you go see the psychiatrist, and they basically say, you know what, you are sick, and you are bitter towards your father, and you have suppressed it for all these years, and you've kept this poison in on the inside, and so go ahead and let it out.

And you go do horrible things on your father's grave, and you go, if he's dead, you go confront him if he's alive, and off you go. Keep it in or let it out. There's not final solutions to either of those.

They're not biblical at all. Before I give you the biblical perspective, let me just see if you're bitter or not. Let me give you a few questions to ask yourself, to search out in your heart, am I bitter?

Signs of Bitterness and the Call to Replace It with Love

First question I would ask you is, do you remember details? Do you remember details? Because bitterness remembers details. You have had millions of conversations in your life. Most of them you have forgotten.

Why can you remember that conversation that was seven years ago in your living room with your spouse, and you know what it was like outside? Do you know who was in the room? Do you know every word? Do you know the inflection of the person's voice?

Why do you know all those things? And the answer is, you have brought them up over and over and over, and you have hit instant replay, you have hit slow motion, you have hit HD, and you keep playing it over and over and over because your memory has been helped, sadly, by review, by constant nursing, constant review.

You remember things. You don't remember things that just happen once and you just drop them, but you remember them when you think about them all the time. Kind of the list maker. It's a cartoon of a wife talking to the marriage counselor regarding the husband, and when do you know, excuse me, and then do you know what he did on her honeymoon just 21 years ago?

That's the idea. And so 1 Corinthians 13, verse five, love does not take into account a wrong suffered. You ought not to keep bringing those things up in your mind. When you do, think about something else.

Did you know you're not able to think about two things simultaneously? That's a gift from God. Oh, you might alt-tab back and forth between two topics, but focus on the good things in life. Let your mind dwell richly on the things of God and the things that are good and lovely in Philippians chapter four, verse eight.

I remember the wonderful illustration of a couple who had been married for 15 years, and they had lots of fights and lots of disagreements, and so they decided, easy for me to say, that for one month, to help their marriage, they would have a fault box.

And so there was a box, and you could put a little note in there about some kind of fault of the spouse or some daily irritation. And so in this particular case, the wife, she did a really good job, and she would put a little note in the box, left the lid off the peanut butter, didn't put socks away, wet towels on the shower floor, et cetera.

After dinner, at the end of the month, they exchanged the boxes. The husband reflected on what he had done wrong. Then the wife opened her box and began reading. Every note was the same. The message on each slip was, I love you.

Now that is 1 Corinthians chapter 13. Does not take into an account a wrong suffered. The text says Ephesians four, let all bitterness be put away from you. It means to be removed, to get rid of, to have nothing more to do with this.

Get rid of every trace, every molecule, all. Just every kind of thing that's there regarding bitterness, shove it aside, discard it. Stop having a scorecard on what people do wrongly. And it's just as bad as wrath and anger and clamor and malice.

Just get rid of it. It is a sin against God. And so we wanna be careful. Some people today will say, well, I'm not really bitter. I've got a list here. I think it's from Wilson. I think it's Doug Wilson's father, Jim Wilson.

It's a list code words. Maybe you say I'm not bitter, but are you some of these? These are code words for bitterness today. Hurt, upset, offended, bothered, annoyed, irritated, resentful, irate, enraged, infuriated, disappointed, disturbed, frustrated, hot under the collar, distressed, bugged.

That would be some code words for bitterness. We wanna get rid of that. Sin is deceitful and so is bitterness. We need to get rid of it, Hebrews 3 says, but encourage one another day after day as long as it's still called today, lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

Sin deceives us along with Satan's propulsion that somehow we have a right to be bitter, that it's a good thing. We're at least not as bitter as the other guy. We don't hold onto our bitterness as long.

And if you're the kind of person who says I'm not bitter, I just get hurt easily, then you need to re-examine yourself. What do we do? How do we get rid of bitterness? Well, if you look outside someday and you see some old tree leaves and you say, well, how do I get rid of those?

In our backyard, we have some trees and most of the leaves have fallen, but there's still a few more on there. Should I get a ladder and climb up and knock those things down? How are they gonna get down?

Well, in the spring, when the new leaves come out, the new growth, the new green growth, they will actually and literally displace the old leaves and the leaves will fall off. And so with biblical theology, for those who are in Christ Jesus and have the Spirit of God dwelling within them, the way to stop a certain sin is to stop that sin and then start doing the positive.

It's called replacement theology. It has nothing to do with end times replacement theology. This is positive behavior, positive obedience by saying no to the one thing, yes to the right thing. What do you tell a thief?

Stop stealing, work. What do you tell a liar, a person who tells lies? Stop lying, tell the truth. And here, Ephesians 4 is clear. Stop being bitter. Then verse 32 says, it's a wonderful picture. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.

That is the recipe. That is the prescription for dealing with bitterness. Lloyd-Jones says, I use a simple illustration. And then he goes on to talk about those dead leaves. He says, in the same way the Christian gets rid of such things, the new qualities develop and the others simply have no room.

They are pushed out and they are pushed off. And so we wanna be, first of all, kind to one another, to be compassionate and tenderhearted. How can you be bitter and compassionate and tenderhearted at the same time?

You can't, you have this tender heart on the inside. And basically when Paul says, be kind to one another, he's saying literally in the Greek, become that, become that kind of person. You're in Christ, in Ephesians chapter one, God the Father has chosen you, the Son has died for you, the Spirit of God has sealed you to the day of redemption, and now act like who you are, that is a Christian.

So be kind to one another. And that's a word usually used of God, normally used of God. Bitterness is never used of God, but being kind is. Become kind, cultivate kindness. Kindness, one man says, smooths the path of life.

Actually, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, love is what? Kind, be on the lookout to help. Instead of nursing that grudge, give assistance, give aid. Not only that, be tenderhearted. Ephesians 4 .32 goes on to say, become tenderhearted.

Literally it means be deeply moved in your bosom, in your gut, in your splint, in the bowels of your body, as it were, in the inner resources, inner recesses. It was used of one man to describe healthy function of the intestines.

What do we mean by this now? Well, it's taken a figurative term for not some kind of bad issue, but to feel for others to the point of doing something about it. 1 Peter 3 .8, be kindhearted. He goes on to say, forgive each other.

Show me a bitter person, I'll show you somebody who has not thought about forgiveness properly. Ephesians 4 .32, forgiving one another. Literally the word is gracing one another. Modeled after God's grace of forgiveness, you grace them too.

They didn't deserve it, they didn't earn it, they shouldn't receive it, but you give them grace anyway. And you, like God, say, I will not remember your sins, Isaiah chapter 45. I'm not gonna bring it up to myself, I'm not gonna bring it up to God, I'm not gonna bring it up to anybody else.

I will forget. By the way, when Joseph had a firstborn, he named him Manasseh, because God had made him forget all his trouble. Manasseh means one who causes to forget. And so that young boy caused Joseph to forget all those trials.

And you were able to do that. You were able to forgive like God has forgiven because you have the Spirit of God within you, just as God has forgiven you. General Oglethorpe once said to Wesley, I never forgive and I never forget.

Wesley said, then, sir, I hope you never sin. Forgiveness costs. It costs Christ everything as he died as our substitute on Calvary and received the wrath of God poured out upon him, was raised from the dead.

It does cost, but we have been great recipients of grace and we want to then grace other people. Martin Luther was dreaming and he was dreaming that Satan was attacking him. And in the dream, the devil unrolled a long scroll containing a list of Luther's sins and held it against Luther.

One reaching the end of the scroll, Luther asked the devil, is that all? No, came the reply. And a second scroll was thrust in front of him and then a third. But now the devil had no more. You've forgotten something, Luther exclaimed triumphantly.

Quickly write in each of them, the blood of Jesus Christ, God's son, cleanses us from all sins. That's exactly true. And when you are a forgiver, when you're tenderhearted, when you're compassionate and kind, when you are not bitter, you are an imitator of God.

And that's what Ephesians 5, one says, therefore be imitators of God as beloved children. As God is holy, you are to be holy. The Holy One has called you, so therefore 1 Peter 1 says, be holy in all your behavior.

If you say that you're bitter and you think it's a good thing and you love to nurse bitterness around Christmas time and the holidays or any other time, you need to repent. And you need to have the peace of Christ rule in your hearts and you need to be thankful.

And you need to do what Ephesians 5, two says, walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. People say they're bitter and somehow they think it's righteous.

We realize that bitterness is ultimately anger against God. God, you could have put them in my life at a later time. You could have kept them out of my life. You could have kept them from sinning against me.

Did you know all bitterness basically sins against God because every sin is against God ultimately, but also it strikes on God's sovereign hand, on his providential hand. You have no right to be angry about other people's sin to the point where you are bitter.

You can be righteously angry, but your righteous anger should then be righteous forgiveness. And so you wanna be careful. Proverbs 22 says, watch out who you hang out with. And so here's my good news for today.

You don't have to be bitter any longer. And if you're a Christian, you can learn to forgive and act like Jesus Christ with tenderness, compassion and long suffering for the glory of God. Don't be bitter, be forgiving.

This is Mike Abendroth, nocompromiseradio .com.

Station Identification and Legal Disclaimer

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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