Welcome to the Feminet Podcast. This is Nancy Wilson. Thanks so much for joining me today.

The topic today is bitterness, that insidious resentment that can fester and nest in our hearts

and surprisingly go undetected for a long time.

But what is resentment and what is bitterness and what company do they keep?

Often resentment is the sinful reaction in the human heart when we are injured or insulted.

We become irritated, annoyed, angry, and we draw our skirts away

from the person who brought the offense or the injury. This is an attempt to get even or to show

them. This is returning evil for evil. And if the resentment settles into our hearts, if we bury it

away in the cellar of our hearts,

it can ripen into a deep bitterness. What kind of company does bitterness keep? Well, Ephesians 431 says,

let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice? Did you see that?

The companions to bitterness are wrath, anger, clamor, evil speaking, and malice. So if left unchecked

and allowed to fester, bitterness is inevitably going to spring out,

and the fruit will not be the fruit of the spirit, but rather those listed in Galatians 5 is the

works of the flesh. Let me just read those, starting at verse 19. Now the works of the flesh are

evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness,

idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions,

dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like,

of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you

in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

I doubt that any of those wicked works arose from anything other than the soil in which

bitterness was planted. Bitterness and resentment bear very

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