Grace is greater Ch.5.

Ch.5. More Freeing Than Your Bitterness
                     Freeing > Your Bitterness

 How difficult is it to push a button on the dishwasher? My vote is “not very,” but that isn’t the point. What made the whole thing ironic is that I was in the middle of writing a sermon on “happiness.” Let me explain.

 My wife and I were on the beach in Destin, Florida . . . without the kids. A recipe for happiness if ever there was one. Paul wrote about finding joy and contentment in God from a prison cell; I wrote about it from the beach. But in my defense it was a crowded beach. We rented a condo for four days and had to check out by 10 a.m. on Friday. Before checkout the renter is asked to do a few things: strip the sheets off the bed, put all the towels in the hallway, take out the trash, and load and start the dishwasher. My wife assigned me dishwasher duty. At about 10:05 a man in his fifties and a couple of women walked into the condo, spotted me, and said, “Ummm, we are here to clean. You were supposed to be out of here by 10.” I apologized, thanked them, and told them we were headed out the door. We grabbed our stuff and made our way from the third-floor condo down to the car.

 Just before we reached it, the guy came out of our room and yelled down to us in the parking lot, “Hey! Thanks a lot for starting the dishwasher. There’s only a few <BEEP> things you’re asked to do and you couldn’t bring yourself to push the <BEEP> button?”

 I had just finished writing a sermon explaining that because we have God, we don’t have to let our circumstances rob us of joy. So you might think I would respond humbly.

 You would be wrong. Instead I thought, Oh, you want to overreact and get sarcastic? I can speak that language. I yelled up at him, “I’m sorry you had to push that button. I’m sure that had to be exhausting,” and then laughed condescendingly. He yelled back at me, with a few more choice words, and I yelled back at him. By now my wife is in the car with the door shut. Finally, he stormed off, still yelling. The last thing I heard is him calling me “a worthless <BEEP> of <BEEP>.”

 I got in the car and slammed the door. At this point I should have held the situation in my hand, taken a look at it, realized it wasn’t sparking joy, and let it go. I should’ve thought to myself, Be joyful always. I should have remembered that love is patient and love is kind. I should have put the car in gear and pulled out as I laughed the whole thing off. That’s what I should have done.

 That’s not what I did. I sat there steaming about how I had been disrespected. I heard my wife say, “Let’s just go.” I might have listened, but this is a woman who paid real money for The Life-Changing Magic of Tyding Up. I said, “Oh, no. That man needs to hear some hard truth.” I got out of the car, but before I could shut the door I heard my wife tell me, “Say a quick prayer on your way up.”

 I started to head up the three flights of stairs to confront Mr. “Can’t push the button on the dishwasher in the condo but has plenty of energy to yell at me from the third-floor balcony.” After the first flight of stairs I felt convicted and embarrassed. By the second floor I was telling God I was sorry, and almost immediately it was impressed upon me that I needed to apologize and give the man a tip for his extra work. I opened my wallet, and all I had was a $100 bill. I thought, Well, apparently giving the man a tip is not what God  wants me to do.

 I walked into the condo, and the second he saw me he started yelling again. I could hear a voice inside of me saying, One more round! But even though I didn’t feel like it, I said, “I want to apologize. I’m sure it’s frustrating to come in and clean up after someone who doesn’t do the little things. I’m sorry. I want to give this to you for the extra work you have to do and as a way to say thank you.” I held out the $100 bill. Almost immediately his eyes welled up with tears. He said, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that,” and began to apologize. Now my eyes were filled with tears.  I think we both wanted to hug it out, but instead we just shook hands.

 I walked back down the steps, not feeling proud of that moment but instead brokenhearted that it had reached the point it did, and wondering in how many similar moments I had missed grace because of my pride. I began repenting of my sin to God.
 How many times had God wanted me to show grace and humility but I was too arrogant and self-righteous? I opened the car door and sat down. I was crying. Well, not crying, just teary-eyed. My wife asked, “What happened?” I told her.  She patted me on the leg and said with a smile, “Oh, it’s so cute. You’re growing up.”

 It was her playful way of letting me know she was proud of me, but the truth is that when it comes to expending grace over the little things, I should’ve grown up a long time ago.

                             Growing Up

 In Eph.4 Paul writes about the church (the “body of Christ”) being “built up” (v.12). He says we need to “become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ,” (v.13). If we do that, Paul says, “we will no longer be infants,” and instead “we will grow to become in every aspect . . . mature” (vv.14-16).

 In this chapter of the Bible, which is all about growing up and living “a life worthy of the calling you have received” (v.1), we find the major application is letting go of bitterness and offering forgiveness.

“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.        (vv.26-27)

   And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all          bitterness, rage, and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one      another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (vv.30-32)

 Why, when we’re instructed to grow up and become mature in Christ, is the emphasis placed on offering grace and forgiveness?  I think it’s because we’re never more like God than when we forgive. Here in Eph.4, and throughout the Bible, we see a direct connection between the grace God gives us through Jesus and the grace we’re to give to each other.

Spiritually speaking, learning to forgive is growing up.

 In the last chapter we saw that the first step in the journey of giving grace is a willingness to forgive because you have been forgiven. These next three chapters will lay out three significant mile markers on this journey of giving grace.

 In this chapter we will focus on releasing our feelings of anger, bitterness, and rage over to God. In the next chapter we will attach a name and a face to those feelings and be challenged to release the person who hurt us over to God. And then in the final chapter of this section, chapter 7, we will address the possibility of reconciliation. It’s not always possible and sometimes it’s not appropriate, but when forgiveness results in reconciliation it most accurately reflects God’s grace and forgiveness toward us.

 Our emotions can tie us up, hold us down, and have a way of choking our resolve to forgive. They are roadblocks that keep us from moving forward with forgiveness.

 It’s time for some of us to grow up and do what we don’t feel like doing. Instead of making this journey dependent on our emotions, or relying on our own resolve, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to help us clean out our closets and finally get rid of the anger and the bitterness that have piled up and kept us from making progress.

We tend to deal with our hurts and our anger in one of three ways.

1. Repression

 I started thinking about the wounds we receive in life and asked some of my Facebook friends to help me. I asked them to tell me about something they’ve experienced that has been difficult to forgive.

 As I read through their responses, I was amazed how often I read sentences like “I’ve never told anyone this before,” or “I’ve been carrying this weight too long.”

 Too often this is the way we deal with our hurts. Instead of surrendering them to God, we push them down and try to repress our anger. We think we are successfully dealing with our feelings by refusing to let them surface. The definition of repress is “to suppress something by force.” So there’s something that wants to come to the surface, but it’s held down.

 A lot of us were probably taught to deal with our emotions in this way. We don’t let anyone see them. We put them in a closet and we close the door. The problem is when we repress these emotions they don’t go away – they go toxic.

 Have you ever watched Deadliest Catch? Before watching this reality show, I could never understand why Alaskan king crab cost so much. Now I do. Crab fisherman on the Bering Sea stay awake night after night, fighting against forty-foot waves and icy conditions to set seven-hundred-pound crab pots in hopes of putting an expensive dinner on your plate at the local Red Lobster.

 If you’ve seen the show, you know there are plenty of injuries and no doctors. It turns out the Bering Sea is a breeding ground not only for crabs but also infections. In one episode, greenhorn John Walczyk injures his hand. His concerned shipmates do nothing for him other than call him a pansy and give him a hard time. Soon his hand gets infected. If you have a strong stomach, you can check it out online. If not, I’ll describe it this way: the back of his hand and his middle finger were roughly the color of Pepto-Bismol and swollen like a water balloon. A water balloon filled not with water or Pepto-Bismol but with puss. Puss that was oozing out of a hole in the back of his finger. A nurse was called in to look at it and immediately told John to go to a doctor. The wound needed to be opened up, cleaned out, and then closed up so it could heal.

 I’ve never done any crab fishing on the Bering Sea. I wouldn’t spend the money to eat crabs from the Bering Sea. But as pastor I have been called in to talk to countless people who have been hurt deeply and have lived too long with a severe infection. Often I discover the person was wounded earlier in life but ignored their emotions, so healing  did not take place. The infection of bitterness set in and, untreated, has spread.

 In each of these conversations I think of the verse we keep coming back to: “See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many” (Heb.12:15 NIV 1984). Repressing anger leads to bitterness that can lead to missing out on the grace of God. If there is any hope for healing, we have to stop repressing our feelings, hold them up and examine them one piece at a time, and decide if we want to keep them or let them go.

 How can we tell if we have repressed anger or bitterness from wounds we received? Look for these warning signs.

 One is if we have become disproportionately angry over little things. The anger we’ve allowed to pile up in our closet eventually forces down the door and begins to spill out. We find ourselves feeling irritable and angry over small things. We – and those around us – see our constant irritability or our angry outbursts and think, Where did that come from?

 It’s the guy at the hotel waiting for the elevator that isn’t arriving quickly enough. So he’s violently pushing the arrow button as his face turns increasingly red. He starts demanding, “Where is the elevator!?” Often this guy is not just angry with the elevator. There’s something under the surface. That’s the thing about suppressing our anger; eventually it’s going to come up. Perhaps you’ve experienced this. Someone cuts you off in traffic and disproportionate anger comes exploding out of you. Or you find yourself yelling at your kid because of a split milk. A lot of anger over a little thing might reveal repressed bitterness that has turned toxic and is seeping out.

 Another indication is if we complain about everything. People who repress resentment over hurts they’ve received tend to see everything through a negative lens. They constantly complain about teachers, coworkers, neighbors, relatives, servers, and other drivers. They can find the negative in anything. Instead of seeing the world through the lens of grace, they see the world through the lens of bitterness. It can end up defining them and that type of negativity has a way of becoming self-fulfilling.

 Another sign we may have repressed anger is if we’re overly sensitive and defensive. In fact, you might be feeling a bit defensive right now reading this chapter. Wait, it sounds like you’re describing me. But I’m not overly sensitive and defensive! Right. . . .

 You might say, “I’m not overly sensitive and defensive. I know that, because no one has ever told me I’m overly sensitive or defensive.” Do you know why no one has ever told you you’re overly sensitive and defensive? It’s because you’re overly sensitive and defensive. They don’t want to tell you because they don’t want you to become angry. So they do their best to avoid you.

 Your coworkers quickly walk past your office and pretend to be on their cell phone. Your kids come in the door from school and spend the evening in their rooms in hopes of not setting you off. Your spouse is curled up in a fetal position in the corner of the house hoping to go unnoticed and scared that you might erupt.

 You may think you’ve kept these emotions contained in the closet, but if you find that you get disproportionately upset, have a tendency to complain, or respond defensively, then maybe some of that bitterness, rage, and anger are spilling out.

2. Rehearsal

 Have you ever had a favorite movie you kept saved on your DVR so you could watch it again and again? Maybe you watch Elf every Christmas season, or Hoosiers every basketball season, or Revenge of the Nerds every . . . nerd season?

 What we intentionally do with our favorite movies we often unintentionally do with our least favorite memories. We keep the moment of betrayal or the hateful words or the unfair treatment cued up and ready to play. You don’t repress what happened to you, you rehearse it. Rehash it. Replay it. Again and again. And it turns your hurt into resentment. You think that if you don’t, you’re letting the person get away with what they did – bur really you’re just letting them continue to hurt you. You stop any healing that may have started by tearing off the scab and watching it bleed. 

 Remember what Paul wrote in Eph. 4:26-27: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.” The anger we hold on to give the devil a foothold in our lives. The word foothold captures the idea of an opportunity. Another way to think of it is, “Do not give the devil a staging ground.” The idea is that when we repress or rehearse anger, we are giving the devil a place to establish a base camp from which he is able to carry out his missions. Unresolved anger is an open door the devil can walk through and use to gain access to the rest of the rooms in our house.

 All kinds of health issues are connected to chronic anger, like heart disease, stroke, blood pressure, arthritis, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems, ulcers, lupus, skin problems, and sleep problems. Bitterness can create new health problems or exacerbate existing ones. The truth is these emotions not only mess with our minds but can actually threaten our lives. It’s been said that not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die, and that may be more true than we think.

 An article in the New York Times declared, “Researchers have gathered a wealth of data largely suggesting that chronic anger is so damaging to the body that it ranks with – or even exceeds – cigarette smoking, obesity, and a high-fat diet as a powerful risk factor for early death.”1 In a study at the University of Michigan, a group of women were tested to determine which were harboring long-term bitterness. Then all the women were tracked for eighteen years, and the outcome was startling: women with suppressed anger were three times more likely to have died during the study than those who didn’t have that kind of bitter hostility.2
                              footnotes
  1 Natalie Angier, “If anger Ruins Your Day, It Can Shrink Your Life,”  New York Times, Dec.13, 1990, 
    http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/13/health/if-anger-ruins-your-
    day-it-can-shrink-your-life.html?pagewanted=all.
  2 Natalie Angier, “Chronic Anger May Lead to Early Death,” 
    Chicago Tribune, Dec.20, 1990, http://articles. chicagotribune.com/
    1990-12-20/news/9004150151_1_chronic-anger-early-mortality-hostile.

 Rehearsed anger can also lead to relationship problems. Bitterness can destroy any chance we have at intimacy in marriage. Our unresolved anger toward a parent can cause us to have misplaced anger toward our spouse, or anger toward our spouse can lead to misplaced anger at our job. This is called transference. I think the devil came up with transference. He loves to use our anger to wreak havoc in our relationships. Or it may not be misplaced anger, it may simply be that you don’t  have  the  emotional energy you need for your relation-
ships because you drained it all to nurse your resentment toward someone who’s not even a part of your life anymore.

 Rehearsed anger also does damage spiritually. In the passage in Ephesians about not sinning in our anger and getting rid of our bitterness, we’re warned, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit” (Eph. 4:30). Why would the Holy Spirit be grieved because of anger in our hearts? Because our hearts are his home.

 This morning my wife called me in distress. Apparently she found mouse poop in the pantry. She is not afraid of mice. Rather, I feel confident that mice are afraid of her. These mice undoubtedly quickly realized they had the wrong address. But anyone whose recreational reading includes books like The Life-Changing Magic of Tyding Up is going to have a problem with mouse poop. Now, my wife would not have found it trau-
matizing to find mouse poop in your pantry. She was grieved – and no, that’s not too strong a word – because there was mouse poop in her pantry.

 The Holy Spirit has made his home in your heart. He is working to help grow us up. He is working to grow his fruit in our lives. Gal. 5 tells us the kind of fruit the Holy Spirit wants to grow in our hearts: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (vv.22-23). But if we keep rehearsing anger, the weeds of bitterness and rage begin to grow and choke out the fruit that the Holy Spirit wants to produce in our lives.

3. Release

 I know on the surface Paul’s direction to “get rid of it” doesn’t seem helpful. Obviously if it was just a matter of getting rid of it, we would have done that a long time ago. I don’t think Paul is trying to be dismissive or simplistic but rather wants us to understand that this is the only option.

 We can repress or rehearse our anger, or we can take the third option: we can release it. We’ll delve deeper into this in the next chapter, but for now let me assure you that releasing it does not make light of what happened to you. It doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the offense or the severity of your pain. Saying “release it” may sound simple, but releasing it is extremely difficult. In fact, it might even be impossible on your own.

 For some of you, if I were sitting across the table right now and we were having this conversation, this would be the time when you might look at me with a clenched jaw and gritted teeth and tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I don’t know what you’ve had to go through. Saying “release it” sounds fine as a general concept to dealing with anger, but when “release it” gets applied to a person’s specific situation, it’s easy to dismiss as simplistic and unrealistic.

 So let’s look at a case study in the Bible – a man named Stephen. He was an early church leader at a time when there was a lot of opposition to speaking Jesus. In Acts 7 Stephen tells a huge crowd about who Jesus is and he did for them. Here’s how they responded.
  
   At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city     and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. (vv.57-58)

 How would you react when a group of hate-filled people starts throwing rocks at you, knowing they’ll continue until you’re dead? Here’s what Stephen did:

   While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, “Lord Jesus,receive my spirit.” Then he fell on his knees and cried        out, “Lord do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he fell asleep. (vv.59-60)
    
 Stephen prayed that God would offer his murderers grace and forgiveness. Where do you think he learned to pray like that?

 When Jesus was crucified, he prayed from the cross for those who were killing him, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). Jesus prayed that God would offer his murderers grace and forgiveness.

I wonder some things when I read all this. 

 First, I wonder if Stephen was close to the cross when Jesus died and heard him, or if maybe John told Stephen about what Jesus prayed.

 Second, I wonder if Jesus and Stephen both prayed that God would forgive their murderers, instead of just offering forgiveness themselves, because ultimately what matters most, what people need most, is God’s forgiveness, not ours.

 Third, I wonder if maybe Jesus, and especially Stephen, prayed God would forgive them because in that moment they didn’t have forgiveness to give. I said forgiveness isn’t simple; it’s difficult and maybe even impossible on our own. Perhaps Stephen couldn’t muster up the grace to say, “I forgive you” to the men who were killing him, so instead he prayed that God would, which is what they really needed anyway.

 When we live in grace, releasing doesn’t mean giving up, it means giving it to God. When I say “release it” I’m not saying to let it go into some mystical abyss of bad feelings. It’s not that you randomly or arbitrary release it. No, you release it to God. You decide to let him carry the weight of what was done to you. You decide to trust him to deal with the other person. You loosen your grip from the pain of what was done to you and you place it in God’s hands.

 Prayer is what makes forgiveness possible – what makes the impossible possible. Jesus and Stephen didn’t look their murderers in the eye and say, “I forgive you.” They looked up to heaven and said, “God, forgive them.” And maybe if you’ve struggled to forgive, this is a good place to start. Perhaps the first step isn’t to go to the person and say, “I forgive you,” but to pray and ask God to do what you haven’t been able to do.

 I mentioned asking Facebook friends to share their stories of being wounded. I was inspired by so many of them. As I read their stories I was humbled by how many times I have held tightly to my anger and refused to release it to God. Here’s a comment that I hope will help you believe that you can do this:

 We had been married for almost thirteen years when his company relocated us to Baltimore, MD. I gave up my family,  friends, career, and church home of more than twenty years    . . . I knew when I arrived in Baltimore that something felt  different . . . Five months after our move I learned he had been using online pornography and that the problem went      back months earlier and had become a serious addiction. I immediately prayed God would give me the words to say to    him without allowing my anger and hurt in this betrayal to take hold, but my husband’s response to me was callous and  indifferent. I would learn in the months to follow that is a typical response for a Sexual Anorexic Sex Addict.

The problem was me, because he didn’t have a problem.

  I sought out counseling and we attended a Weekend to Remember marriage conference, but his heart was hardened.

 Six months later he left me and filed for divorce. The harder  I prayed, the more God would reveal my husband’s broken-
ness to me. The more I could understand his brokenness, the easier it was to forgive him. When I cried out, “I gave up    everything for him and he doesn’t care about me at all,” God whispered, I know exactly how you feel. My husband wasn’t just leaving me; he was running away from God. I was told  along the way that his salvation should be more important to me than saving our marriage, so I started to pray that way.

 Several months into our separation I learned of another betrayal and lie, so I called to confront him. I prayed that      God would lead me in this conversation and that my words  would honor God above all else. Rather than confront him I found myself forgiving him for what he was doing to my life.    . . .

   I continue to pray that God will pursue my ex-husband and the day will come when he truly puts Jesus on the throne of  his heart. I am free of bitterness and anger by the grace of God.

 You may be thinking this woman’s testimony ins’t overly dramatic. In fact, parts of it may seem familiar, if not from your own life then perhaps the life of someone you know. And the ending wasn’t especially inspiring. They didn’t get back together. He didn’t repent of his sin or make things right with God. In many ways her circumstances didn’t change. If anything the hurt that was done to her not only continued but intensified. And yet she still feels free of bitterness and anger.

 What strikes me about this woman’s story is that she mentions praying for her unfaithful husband five times in only seven short paragraphs. Prayer is what makes forgiveness possible.

 She offers forgiveness when he has done nothing to deserve it and hasn’t bothered to ask for it. This step of forgiveness is not dependent upon the person who hurt you to do something or say anything. It’s between you and God. You release the pain to him. If this woman could do it while having her life torn apart by her husband, if Stephen could do it while being stoned to death by his enemies, and if Jesus could do it while being nailed to a tree, then you can do it too. If you ask God, he will give you the grace you need. Take your anger and rage to him in prayer. Prayer is the release valve for your feelings of bitterness and anger.