Overcoming bitterness on this edition of Truth and Love.

I'm Heath Lambert and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face.

Today we're talking about bitterness, and I think what bitterness is is the long-term anger that accrues

in your life when you refuse to forgive someone who has sinned against you. We have talked about

forgiveness a lot on the Truth and Love podcast because it is an element that is so central to

the Christian life. We are as Christians, if there's anything that's true about us, it is

fundamentally that we are forgiven people.

And the Bible teaches us that we are to, out of our own forgiveness, overflow with forgiveness

to others. So it's at the core of who we are, but we also need to be honest that this forgiveness

can be controversial because we can be sinned against in ways that are dramatic and painful.

Really the saddest people I've ever known in my life are the people who have been sinned

against. We can experience the pain and the pressure of a fallen world in a number of ways,

but there are a few things that are as painful as the kind of back-breaking heartache that

comes into your life when someone you know, someone you care about sins against you

maliciously.

And there are people listening to this who have been carrying around pain and heartache for decades because of bad things that have happened to them.

I have known people who are seething with rage decades later about something bad that happened to them.

And when you talk about forgiveness to them, it seems like something it's impossible. It

seems like you're asking them to leap over the moon. And so we believe at ACBC that the Bible doesn't

just tell us what to do. It tells us how to do it. God is so kind that he not only teaches us his

standards, but the Bible is very practical in helping us to reach those standards, give us instructions about how to reach those standards.

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