Bitterness
Bitterness is secret hatred.
Someone who just lets it all hang out, has a lot of trouble with anger. Everyone knows that. Anger is the most open and obvious form of hatred. You may blow up at people and blast them. But that may help to not hold grudges. We don’t want to justify anger, and those who tend to blow up at others need to work at controlling it. But we should be angry with bitterness much more than we are angry at people, and here is why.
It's such a horrible, cancerous thing that can totally destroy people. Many people have become really screwed up inside because they could not even admit to themselves the hatred that they felt toward certain people (and maybe toward God himself). Because they could not admit to it, they could never deal with it.
This is one of the most deadly things about bitterness. Because it is hidden, it just grows and grows without ever being dealt with. By its very nature, it often stays hidden even from the consciousness of the person who is experiencing it; and efforts to point it out are almost always met with denials. It takes real humility to even consider that you might be guilty of bitterness.
It is quite a voyage of discovery when we start trying to delve into our own minds in order to learn the secrets behind why we do things. Bitterness often relates to having been corrected in the past. If we are each honest and will think back to past corrections, we should be able to see the truth in this.
"Bitterness" may not always the right word for it; but at least there is a "hurt" that accompanies almost all criticism, and this hurt forms the basis for a potential for bitterness.
This bitterness thing can rewrite all of the past, so that the person or persons who criticised the bitter person suddenly becomes, not a loving guide, but a cruel monster. Even others who have not been known for being disciplinarians can start taking on the characteristics of a monster in the minds of those harbour bitterness.
Discipline, by its very nature, "hurts" us at times. Imperfect leaders are apt to be impatient or to exaggerate our sins, thus hurting us even more than is absolutely necessary. But I think it is important to keep our mental and spiritual slate clean by confessing these hurts to God, and, if necessary, to those who are disciplining us, so that we do not continue to carry them around, only to have them explode eventually.
The reaction of a bitter person is usually far out of proportion to the whole event which supposedly triggered the hurt. This means that these people have harboured bad spirits for a long time. They will probably argue that they feared expressing their disagreements at the time. But fear is no excuse for them not dealing with their own problem of bitterness. And it is not a valid excuse for you or I either.
What is more likely is that these people have abandoned their secret relationship with God. Without that, it is impossible to rise above bitterness, pride or any other sin for that matter.
When they leave God out of the picture, their world is then reduced to petty politics, personalities, arguments over opinion issues, and selfish ambitions. There is hardly any mention of God, if he is mentioned at all.
Some go so far as to ridicule the idea of anyone even knowing what God's will is, and they will tell you that most of the evil in the world came from those who believed they were doing God's will. Is it any wonder that they lose the ability to deal with sin in their own lives?
We have this idea that one should accept the discipline without complaining about it. After all we learn through experience that no matter how nicely a criticism is made, it's still going to hurt, so there's no point arguing that the critic didn't go about it in the right way. But I think it's vital that we at least confess these hurts to God: not murmuring to God about the critic, but genuinely praying to God that we will not allow these hurts to cause bitterness between us and those who correct us.
Someone who just lets it all hang out, has a lot of trouble with anger. Everyone knows that. Anger is the most open and obvious form of hatred. You may blow up at people and blast them. But that may help to not hold grudges. We don’t want to justify anger, and those who tend to blow up at others need to work at controlling it. But we should be angry with bitterness much more than we are angry at people, and here is why.
It's such a horrible, cancerous thing that can totally destroy people. Many people have become really screwed up inside because they could not even admit to themselves the hatred that they felt toward certain people (and maybe toward God himself). Because they could not admit to it, they could never deal with it.
This is one of the most deadly things about bitterness. Because it is hidden, it just grows and grows without ever being dealt with. By its very nature, it often stays hidden even from the consciousness of the person who is experiencing it; and efforts to point it out are almost always met with denials. It takes real humility to even consider that you might be guilty of bitterness.
It is quite a voyage of discovery when we start trying to delve into our own minds in order to learn the secrets behind why we do things. Bitterness often relates to having been corrected in the past. If we are each honest and will think back to past corrections, we should be able to see the truth in this.
"Bitterness" may not always the right word for it; but at least there is a "hurt" that accompanies almost all criticism, and this hurt forms the basis for a potential for bitterness.
This bitterness thing can rewrite all of the past, so that the person or persons who criticised the bitter person suddenly becomes, not a loving guide, but a cruel monster. Even others who have not been known for being disciplinarians can start taking on the characteristics of a monster in the minds of those harbour bitterness.
Discipline, by its very nature, "hurts" us at times. Imperfect leaders are apt to be impatient or to exaggerate our sins, thus hurting us even more than is absolutely necessary. But I think it is important to keep our mental and spiritual slate clean by confessing these hurts to God, and, if necessary, to those who are disciplining us, so that we do not continue to carry them around, only to have them explode eventually.
The reaction of a bitter person is usually far out of proportion to the whole event which supposedly triggered the hurt. This means that these people have harboured bad spirits for a long time. They will probably argue that they feared expressing their disagreements at the time. But fear is no excuse for them not dealing with their own problem of bitterness. And it is not a valid excuse for you or I either.
What is more likely is that these people have abandoned their secret relationship with God. Without that, it is impossible to rise above bitterness, pride or any other sin for that matter.
When they leave God out of the picture, their world is then reduced to petty politics, personalities, arguments over opinion issues, and selfish ambitions. There is hardly any mention of God, if he is mentioned at all.
Some go so far as to ridicule the idea of anyone even knowing what God's will is, and they will tell you that most of the evil in the world came from those who believed they were doing God's will. Is it any wonder that they lose the ability to deal with sin in their own lives?
We have this idea that one should accept the discipline without complaining about it. After all we learn through experience that no matter how nicely a criticism is made, it's still going to hurt, so there's no point arguing that the critic didn't go about it in the right way. But I think it's vital that we at least confess these hurts to God: not murmuring to God about the critic, but genuinely praying to God that we will not allow these hurts to cause bitterness between us and those who correct us.