Do you ever find yourself keeping track of all your rights that have been violated?

Nancy DeMoss Walgamuth says, you need to watch out for bitterness.

If you don't lay down your rights, you're going to live as a bitter, angry, blaming, miserable woman.

But you don't have to live that way.

Freedom comes when we lay down our rights.

And then when we replace bitterness with forgiveness, with love, and with giving effects. This is the Revive Our Hearts

podcast with Nancy DeMoss Walgamuth, author of Choosing Forgiveness, for January 26, 2021, I'm Danegresh.

Bitterness will poison your relationships, your emotions, and even your physical appearance. Nancy's been giving us insight into the life of Naomi, a biblical character who was marked by bitterness. It's part of a series called Ruth, the transforming power of redeeming love. If you're just tuning in now, you can find the rest of the series on the Revive Our Hearts app

or over at Revive Our Hearts.com. But now, let's hear from Nancy. Well, we finally come to the end of

chapter one of the book of Ruth. But before we wrap up chapter one, I want us to just go back and

contemplate for a few more moments, this whole matter of bitterness.

When Naomi and Ruth come to Bethlehem,

Naomi says to the people who knew her years earlier,

but who now hardly recognized her, is this Naomi, they said?

She said, don't call me Naomi, which means pleasant. Instead, call me Mara, which means bitter,

because the Almighty God has made my life very bitter. Isn't it interesting how bitterness even

affects our physical well-being and our countenance and our appearance? You can look at some

women today, I don't get nervous here, but you can look at some women

and just tell that they're bitter women.

There are lines of hardness and anger and bitterness that for some reason I think show themselves

more on our faces as women than men do.

She was hardly recognizable. She'd been

...