Hebrews 12:15 Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.

You may be justified in your bitterness, but it still contaminates everything.

You may have every right to not forgive certain people in your life. But you need to know bitterness contaminates everything. It spreads far and wide and deep.

And maybe the most dangerous and destructive thing about bitterness is that it doesn’t remain isolated to the source of bitterness, but spreads to all of your relationships. Left unchecked it will ruin everything that is important to you.

I love what my friends, Mike Foster and Jud Wilhite wrote in Deadly Viper.

You see, when you don’t forgive someone, you let them park in your life forever. These people are like parasites that can suck the life right out of you and allow bitterness to rot you out. If you let these people and their actions haunt your thoughts, emotions, and spirit, you allow them to continually damage not only you, but those around you, too.

Almost everyday I come in contact with people who are allowing unforgiven anger and bitterness from their past to destroy them today. Unknowingly their unwillingness to forgive is impacting their marriage, the way they treat their kids and their attitude toward most everything in life.

I’m not going to pretend like forgiveness is always easy because we all know it isn’t. Some of you have been hurt in ways I can’t imagine.  Someone wounded you, or betrayed you or lied to you or maybe cheated you.  You’re afraid if you let go of the hurt, they get away with something.  And you’re right, to forgive you will pay a high cost.  In fact the only thing that will cost you more than forgiveness  is not forgiving someone.

I know you want to see them hurt back, but that desire is a weight or burden that actually becomes a part of you. You’ll carry that weight from relationship to relationship, from season to season and if you carry that bitterness and anger around long enough it will choke the joy out of your life.

It costs a lot to forgive. But to not forgive will eventually cost you your heart.

Psalm 32:1-5

¹ Oh, what joy for those
whose disobedience is forgiven,
whose sin is put out of sight!
² Yes, what joy for those
whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt,
whose lives are lived in complete honesty!
³ When I refused to confess my sin,
my body wasted away,
and I groaned all day long.
⁴ Day and night your hand of discipline was heavy on me.
My strength evaporated like water in the summer heat.
Interlude

⁵ Finally, I confessed all my sins to you
and stopped trying to hide my guilt.
I said to myself, “I will confess my rebellion to the Lord.”
And you forgave me! All my guilt is gone.

There is so much incredible truth in his words. When it comes to our faults, our failures, our screw ups, the reality is we’re  quick to want to cover up, to want to deny, to want to avoid, to want to blame someone else.  We work really hard to shake off feelings of guilt and shame by minimizing and covering stuff up.

There are a lot of things in our lives we keep silent about. Things we feel ashamed of; family problems, compulsive habits, sexual addiction, and while silence in the moment seems like the best, the safest way to handle it, silence always leads to more pain and guilt festering inside. It always corrodes away our soul. It corrodes away our spirit, and it always, always, always begins to affect other parts of our lives.

You’ll say things like “Well the past is the past.” Listen, you past isn’t your past if it’s still impacting your present.

However, the good news is the very moment humanity fell into sin, God’s plan, God’s passion has been to redeem us and restore us to the life for which we are made.

This act of grace, of forgiveness, of restoration God wants to give, it cannot be forced on you. Like anything from God, it has to be received like a gift, freely, willfully, and intentionally. So how do we do this? How do we receive this gift of grace God wants to give?

In a word, confession.

Confession isn’t doing something about our sin; rather, it means admitting that we can’t do anything about our sin. It’s admitting we need a savior. We need what only Jesus can bring us, which is healing.

I read THIS article on Saturday in Time  about John Edwards. Wow, could there be a more hated dude in America these days? I mean Tiger’s got nothing on this guy. According to Time…

There’s unpopular, there’s widely loathed, there’s despised, and then there’s John Edwards. Americans are a tolerant people, but they have a line, and evidently, when you cheat on your cancer-stricken wife, lie about it to everyone while running for president, and then decline to acknowledge fathering a love child for two years, you’ve crossed it. Given the towering stack of strikes against him, can Edwards resume any kind of public life? Short of curing his wife’s cancer, is there anything he could do to get people to at least tolerate him?

We’re not part of this Jesus community because we’re…

successful

powerful

beautiful

rich

talented.

While those things may be important in your world they don’t mean squat in Jesus’ community. I’m a part of this community because I’m a sinner.

Recovering sinner? Yes

Transformed sinner? Yes

Forgiven sinner? Yes

But still a sinner.

Is there anyone in your life you’ve given up on lately?

We made a pact with each other to be people who are fast to forgive. So much of our emotional volatility comes from relationship gone wrong. In the last couple of years, both of us have dealt with severe betrayal by trusted friends and partners. We were deceived and lied to by these individuals and their actions were reprehensible…

You see, when you don’t forgive someone, you let them park in your life forever. These people are like parasites that can suck the life right out of you and allow bitterness to rot you out. If you let these people and their actions haunt your thoughts, emotions, and spirit, you allow them to continually damage not only you but those around you, too.

Almost everyday I come in contact with people who are allowing unforgiven anger and bitterness from their past to destroy them today. Unknowingly their unwillingness to forgive is impacting their marriage, the way they treat their kids and their attitude toward most everything in life.

I’m not going to pretend like forgiveness is always easy because we all know it isn’t. Some of you have been hurt in ways I can’t imagine.  Someone wounded you, or betrayed you or lied to you or maybe cheated you.  You’re afraid if you let go of the hurt, they get away with something.  And you’re right, to forgive you will pay a high cost.  In fact the only thing that will cost you more than forgiveness  is not forgiving someone.

I know you want to see them hurt back but that desire is a weight or burden that actually  becomes a part of you. You’ll  carry that weight from relationship to relationship from season to season and if you carry that bitterness and anger around long enough it will choke the joy out of your life. It will cost you your heart. So be fast to forgive.

How are we doing with this? Are you fast to forgive?

I don’t know what it is about this guy, but it seems we all love to hate him. And I will agree there seems to be a lot to hate.

A seemingly arrogant spirit.

Possible murder.

Blown talent.

Crook.

But why do I LOVE to hate him?

Is it about revenge?

Does it make me feel better about myself?

Does focusing on immorality around me allow me to ignore the immorality in me?

The thing I tend to forget is Scripture is full of people like David and Moses who committed murder and embodied so many other character defects. And yet, God used them. Not only did he use them, they would become the heroes of our faith. The truth is many of the individuals God used throughout Scripture would have NO chance of ever being hired in any of our churches today.

Why don’t we have more leaders in our faith and in churches who have had moral and ethical failures?

Because we love to shoot our own. We love to hate people that have screwed up. We love the sensational scandal.

But let me say this. Giving up on OJ. Giving up on Ted Haggard. Giving up on Brad Johnson.  Giving up on the hundreds of Christian leaders who fall every year is not a statement on them. It’s a statement on our belief in God’s redeeming work.

Do you believe God can redeem OJ’s life? Let me ask a more probing question. Do you really WANT God to redeem OJ’s life?

Maybe the reason we don’t have more OJ’s and David’s and Moses’s leading in our churches today is because as a Christian community we’ve slammed the door on God’s redeeming work in the lives of people who have screwed up.

We’ve stopped looking into the eyes of the fallen and speaking redeeming, loving words. We’ve stopped telling them here is who you can become.

Old habits can change.

Old patterns can be rewired.

You can become the person God had in mind when he thought you into existence.

So who do you love to hate? Who have you given up on? Who needs you to believe in them again?

I meet people all the time that have been hurt by the church. I understand. I’ve wrestled with a love/hate relationship with the church most of my life. I read these words the other day and they really challenged me.

“When we have been wounded by the Church, our temptation is to reject it. But when we reject the Church it becomes very hard for us to keep in touch with the living Christ. When we say, “I love Jesus, but I hate the Church,” we end up losing not only the Church but Jesus too.

The challenge is to forgive the Church.

This challenge is especially great because the Church seldom asks us for forgiveness, at least not officially. But the Church as an often fallible human organization needs our forgiveness, while the Church as the living Christ among us continues to offer us forgiveness.

It is important to think about the Church not as “over there” but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer.”

- Henry Nouwen

What do you think? As part of the church what can we do to help those that have been wounded by our actions? For those of you that have been hurt, what do you think about forgiving?

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I hate bermuda grass. I hate it with a passion. I’ve tried everything to get the stuff out of my yard, but to no avail, it continues to spread.

Bermuda grass roots run far and wide and deep. I read the other day they can go as deep as six feet! Leave this stuff unchecked and it will ruin everything important to your lawn. It will consume your flowers, choke out the good grass, and literally take over.

Hebrews 12:15 “Look after each other so that none of you fails to receive the grace of God. Watch out that no poisonous root of bitterness grows up to trouble you, corrupting many.”

It’s so easy for bitterness to take root isn’t it?

• It might have happened in your first marriage
• Maybe you feel like your parents had a favorite
• A business deal might have gone wrong.
• A friend purposefully tried to hurt you

The list could go on and on.

Yesterday in the Baggage series we talked about the important work of forgiveness. We said forgiveness is never easy or cheap. It will always cost you something.  And while forgiveness does not mean condoning or excusing, it does mean you let go of your right to hurt them back.

You need to know that bitterness contaminates everything. It spreads far and wide and deep. Bitterness doesn’t isolate to the source of bitterness, but rather spreads to all of your relationships. Left unchecked it will ruin everything important to you. It will consume your thoughts, choke out your love and literally take over your life.

How have you dealt with the roots of bitterness in your heart?

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