All of us know a little about being hurt. People have failed us. They have struck out against us. They snipe at us and do all they can to hurt us. The ability to hound you is so much more prevalent because of social media. A person you could have just separated from follows you, trolls you, intending to harm you. If you are not careful, you will fall into what Adrian Rogers called “The Blight of Bitterness” in one of his sermons. Read the following extract.

Notice what happens when we get this bitterness in our hearts. Look if you will in verse 15, “Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.” First of all, if you get bitter, it’s going to trouble you. And then you’re going to defile other people. Let’s just talk about the personal problems of bitterness. If you have bitterness and you don’t deal with, and, folks, I’ve been in the ministry long enough to know that there’re a lot of people who have bitterness. Some of them may be deacons; some of them may be this man, the letter that I just read. Years and years ago, I got hold of a book called None of These Diseases. It was written by a doctor, a medical doctor, Dr. S. I. McMillan. And he talks about the emotional and physical illness that we have because we don’t deal with sin. And he talks about sometimes how the emotional illness causes physical illness. And here’s what he said in this book. “There are more than fifty different diseases that can be triggered, brought on, by our emotions.” And he talks about how bitterness and anger can cause us to be troubled physically. And he quotes, and I’m writing, “The famous physiologist, John Hunter, knew what anger could do in his heart.” And then he quotes John Hunter as saying, “The first scoundrel that gets me angry will kill me.” “Sometimes later at a medical meeting, a speaker made assertions that incensed Hunter. As he stood up and bitterly attacked the speaker, his anger caused such contraction of the blood vessels in his heart that he fell dead.” This man knew that he had a heart condition. He knew that if he got excessively angry, it would kill him. And yet, bitterness put him in the grave. Now, you can be sick and not be bitter. If you’re sick it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re bitter. But I doubt, very seriously, that if you have bitterness in your heart for a prolonged period that you can go without getting sick someway. It will sicken your body.

But not only will it sicken your body, bitterness will sicken your mind. Not only will you have physical trouble, but you’re going to have emotional trouble. And Dr. McMillan went on to say this and I want to quote, quote, “The moment I start hating a man, I become his slave. I can’t enjoy my work anymore because he controls my thought. My resentments produce too much stress hormones in my body and I become fatigued after only a few hours of work. The work I formerly enjoyed is now a drudgery. Even vacations cease to give me pleasure. It may be a luxurious car that I drive along a lake, fringed with the autumn beauty of maple, oak and birch. As far as my experience of pleasure is concerned, I might as well be driving a wagon in mud and rain. The man I hate hounds me wherever I go. I can’t escape his tyrannical grasp on my mind. When the waiter serves me porterhouse steak with French fries, asparagus, crisp salad and strawberry shortcake, smothered with ice cream, it might as well be stale bread and water. My teeth chew the food and swallow it, but the man I hate will not permit me to enjoy it. King Solomon must have had a similar experience for he wrote, quote ‘Better a dish of vegetable with love than the best beef served with hatred.’ ” Then Dr. McMillan goes on to say, “The man I hate may be many miles from my bedroom, but more cruel than any slave driver, he whips my thoughts into such a frenzy that my inner-spring mattress becomes a rack of torture. The lowliest of serfs can sleep, but not I. I really must acknowledge the fact that I am a slave to every man on whom I pour the vials of my wrath.” “I am a slave to every man upon whom I pour the vials of my wrath.” The man who wrote me this letter is a slave the man that he hates. He’s a man consumed with bitterness. Not only will there be physical trouble and not only will there be emotional, but there will be spiritual trouble. Look in verse 14, he says, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” Now, if, if you have this bitterness that takes away your peace, it’s also going to take away your holiness. Peace and holiness are linked together. You cannot be right with God and be bitter toward any brother or any sister. And so he says, “Lest you be troubled …” Look at it, he says, deal with this “lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you.” It will trouble you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. But not only will it trouble you, it will defile many. It would be bad enough if bitter people could only torment themselves. But bitterness defiles other people. Notice, again, the last part of verse 15, “… and … many be defiled.” There is not only that personal trouble, there’s that social defilement.

You know, bitterness, it causes a chain reaction. Put your marker there in Hebrews chapter 12 and turn to Ephesians chapter 4 and let me show you something here in Ephesians chapter 4. Begin in verse 26. By the way, it would do you good to turn to this one now. Just turn to it. Ephesians chapter 4 verse 26, “Be angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” Now, what does it mean to be angry and sin not? Is it a sin to get angry? Not always. The Bible says Jesus was moved with anger; he never sinned. The sin is when you get angry at the wrong thing. The way to be angry and to sin not is only to be angry at sin and then to be angry in the right way. But if you’re angry in the wrong way, the Bible calls that “wrath,” and you let the sun set upon your wrath, that’s just a euphemism for saying you harbor hostility. You let this anger internalize until it becomes bitterness. You go to bed with it. You let the sun set upon it. You don’t deal with it as you ought to deal with it when it happens, as it happens. You don’t deal with it. You don’t keep a short account. You let the sun go down upon your wrath. Then what happens is this, if you’ll go on down to verse 31, you’ll see what happens. He says, “Let all bitterness …,” Now, remember, we’re on the subject of bitterness. “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Now, here is a classic chain reaction. I want you to see what stubborn anger gets a foothold in your life. When you are angry sinfully, you let the sun go down upon your wrath, you have the wrong kind of anger and you don’t deal with that wrong kind of anger, then it turns to bitterness. And let’s just look at this chain reaction. Let’s look at this progression. First of all, there’s that bitterness. You’re wounded. It may have been intentional. It may not have been intentional. It may have been imagined. It may have been God’s chastisement, but you are wounded and you take it in, you don’t deal with it. Then that bitterness turns to wrath. Now, look in verse 31 and look at it carefully. He mentions wrath next in this chain reaction. Now, the word “wrath,” the very word itself has the idea of heat. It, it has the idea of getting hot. When a, when a person gets angry and bitter, then they begin to do what we would call a slow burn. There’s that inside heat that comes. Then the next thing that comes is anger. Now, you see, the bitterness becomes wrath, that slow burn, think of that slow burn as some rags that are smoking there in a closet and the closet door is closed. And then something happens. The closet door is opened. And the oxygen gets to those burning rags and they burst into flame. That’s the anger. The wrath is the internal thing. But the anger is the external thing. The Greek word for anger speaks of that which is out ward and that which is active. These smoldering rags burst into flame. It can happen at any time. You wonder what gets in to people. Sometimes you see people fly into a rage, you say, “What got into you?” Nothing got into them; something is coming out of them. It’s been in there. They’ve had this bitterness that has turned to wrath that turns to anger when the right situation comes. And then what’s the next word in this list? It is clamor. First bitterness, then wrath, then anger and then clamor. Do you know what the word clamor means? It speaks of noise. It speaks of loudness. It speaks of vocalizing what is in your heart. Do you ever notice that people when they get angry get clamorous? And you say to them, “You don’t have to shout.” They say, “I’m not shouting.” They are shouting. They don’t even know they’re shouting. They begin to get very vocal and they begin to argue. They may be to cry, and when they hear themselves doing this, they feed on that because the, the bitterness turns to wrath. The wrath bursts into the flames of anger. And then that turns into clamor. Now, look at the next word, evil speaking. When you begin to cry or shout or get clamorous and you hear yourself, you begin to say things that you really don’t mean. You begin to speak evil. You will say things to a wife or husband like, “I’m sorry I ever married you.” “I’m sorry I ever met you.” You may say to your children, “You will never amount to anything. I’m so ashamed of you.” You may say to a friend, “I hate you.” You may say to somebody, “I wish you were dead.” You, and the devil will say, “Yes. And tell him this. Tell him that.” And you’ll get on a roll. And you begin with your tongue to assassinate. That’s called evil speaking. We’re amazed sometimes at what will come out of our mouth when we get into this chain reaction, first of all, of bitterness, then wrath, then anger, then clamor, and then evil speaking. And the devil’s not finished with us yet. And look at the next word. It’s malice. The word malice here has the idea of, of hurting somebody. It has the idea of a desire to injure the other person. You may slap a child. You may hit a wife. You may drive your car into somebody’s other car. You may take a gun and harm somebody because there is coming up out of you this volcano of evil that began when you got hurt and you let the sun go down upon your wrath. You got angry and you sinned. You internalized it and that bitterness became wrath. That wrath became anger. That anger became clamor. That clamor became evil speaking. And that evil speaking became malice. And old smutty face, the devil, is sitting over in the corner laughing at you.

Down in your heart, beneath the ground, there’s been a root of bitterness and now it springs up, troubling you and many be defiled.

See also

Bitterness