Overcoming Sin the Gospel Way

I’d like to finish responding to the excellent question on this post:

As I view your above processing and how you are granting others permission to go through the grief process, anger and bitterness are allowed. However, I do not find bitterness the standard process of recovery. Could you post any biblical backing that allows for someone to be bitter and sin not? I do find support for the being angry yet not sinning.

Yesterday we talked about the assumptions behind this question and behind nearly everything Teen Mania teaches. Read it first, if you haven’t already.

First, I should clarify a few things….

I’m not saying that if you aren’t bitter you should become bitter.
I’m not saying that people should stay in a state of bitterness their whole life. I’m also not saying that being bitter is a godly thing.

What I am saying is that if we are bitter, we need to acknowledge it and bring it into the open. We are what we are. Stuffing our emotions or denying them does not change that. God is not afraid of our sin or our pain. He is in the business of healing broken people. We can’t really deal with either our sin or our pain if we try to keep it undercover or if we just try to deal with it ourselves. Refusing to be “led by our emotions” is often just a way of suppressing and denying what we really feel. As we talked about yesterday, God is the only one that can supply grace to overcome, so trying to be spiritual by dealing with it ourselves (even in seemingly Biblical ways) will only lead to more problems. I’d like to look now at 2 passages in the Bible dealing specifically with bitterness, though I think the principle can be applied to many things in our Christian life.

Hebrews 12:15 says, “See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”

Let’s use this verse to compare and contrast 2 different ways of dealing with bitterness.

Acknowledgment vs. Repression – When we discover bitter feelings in our hearts, we can either deny them or get them out in the open. This verse is warning us about holding on to our bitterness and burying it deep within our hearts. When bitterness is underground, unexpressed, it is damaging. You can’t see a root that lives underground. But if you get it out in the open, it can’t survive without the soil and it will die.

Exposing vs. Nourishing – Once the root is buried underground, it won’t grow without the nourishment of water, sunlight and fertilizer. This verse is warning against nursing your bitterness. Nursing bitterness might be taking revenge or just taking joy in your bitter feelings, wallowing in them and causing them to grow. Sometimes exposing our bitterness might be mistaken for nursing it. We expose it by talking about it with safe people and the Lord. We own our feelings. If we want revenge, we own that feeling and ask God for help with it. Again, sometimes these two activities may look very similar on the outside, but it is the heart motive that is a crucial factor. We are not taking joy or pride in our feelings, but we are acknowledging that they are there and praying for healing. In this post, I gave some guidelines about the difference between expressing your anger in either a destructive or healthy ways. I think these would apply to bitterness as well.

Ephesians 4:31 “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.”

It is important to note that chapter 4 comes after chapters 1,2, and 3. In fact, all of Paul’s epistles take a similar form. The first part is an explanation of what God has done for us and the second part is practical applications for living the Christian life. We must not confuse the order. It is the experiential knowledge of what God has done FOR us in Christ that enables us to live the Christian life.

Ephesians 1 and 2 talk about our adoption into God’s family, how He has lavished us with the riches of His grace, how we have been now included although we were formerly excluded. Ephesians 3 has one of the most beautiful descriptions of God’s love, “I pray that you being rooted and grounded in love may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

It would be silly to think that we are capable of following the admonishments of chapter 4 without a heart understanding of the previous 3 chapters. If you truly felt the profound security that comes with total acceptance by God, if you had no question about your belonging with Him, if you were swimming in the vast and endless ocean that is God’s love for you – then how much of a hold do you think bitterness would have on you? It would fall right off. And not by your own effort or by gritting your teeth, but as a natural outflow of the love of God overflowing inside you.

One of the main reasons I encourage people to open acknowledge their anger and bitterness with God and with safe people is that it enables true intimacy. As long as we are hiding, our intimacy with God, and our knowledge of His love for us will be stunted. It is amazing that we can have this so backwards in the Christian life. We are so eager to jump on each other for perceived sins. Are you bitter? Are you in obedience to God? Are you missing your quiet time? Etc. But nobody ever asks, Are you grasping how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is for you? According to the verse above, THAT is how we are filled with all the fullness of God.