Living Free From Bitterness

Welcome back everyone. This is part eight and the final part of our bitterness series, our bitterness course. And we're going to talk about living free from bitterness. Hallelujah. I encourage you to watch part one through seven before taking this part because it ties everything in. And we're going to talk about how the way out and the freedom on the other side of bitterness is possible and it's available. In part seven, we talked about overcoming bitterness with love, how agape love is the highest mark of a disciple and how every act of love towards someone who hurt you is a declaration that bitterness does not have dominion over you. And today we close this series and I want you to do two things. I want to give you the practical steps to walk through the door of freedom. And I want to show you the promise that is waiting for you on the other side. There are four steps to closing the door that bitterness opened and I want to walk through each one slowly. The first step is this, acknowledging the wound honestly before God, not minimizing it, not spiritualizing it, not minimizing it, not spiritualizing over it before you have actually felt it. Not saying I'm fine. It's fine. It's under the blood without first being honest about what it costs you. Bring him the real pain. He can handle it. He already knows it is there. Honesty with God is not a lack of faith. It is the beginning of healing. The second step is separate the person from the spirit. Separate the person. Ephesians 6, 12 is clear. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. The spirit that used them is the enemy, not them. The person who wounded you is not your enemy. They were an instrument used by a spirit that was after you. And when you separate the two, when you stop seeing the person as the source and start seeing the spirit behind the assignment, it becomes possible to release them without excusing what they did. The third step is to forgive completely. Epi means to send away, to release, to let go completely, to release from the debt, to free yourself from the prison of holding it. You're not letting them off the hook. You are taking yourself off the hook. You're tearing up the legal document the accuser was holding against you. The fourth step is let God heal the root completely. Forgiveness is a decision, but healing is a process. Keep bringing it back to God. Keep surrendering the layers as he reveals them. Do not settle for a surface fix when God wants to go all the way down. This is the posture David carried in Psalms 51. Psalm 51, 10 says, Creating me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. David had sinned deeply. He had caused real harm to real people, and he came before God not with excuses, not just not justification, but with total transparency. Creating me a clean heart, O God, not patch up

what is there, not cover what is broken. Create, start fresh, renew a steadfast spirit within me. The Hebrew word for steadfast here is kan. It means established, firm, rightly prepared. David was asking God not just to forgive what he had done, but to build in him something stable, something right, something that would hold. That is a prayer of someone who is not just looking for relief from consequences. That is a prayer of someone who wants to be made new. The role of daily repentance and surrender in staying free cannot be overstated. Neither can the role of gratitude and worship because a heart full of genuine thanksgiving has very little room for bitterness to grow. And here is the promise I want to leave you with. When God fully heals your heart, and he will, he does not just neutralize the damage, he redeems it. He takes the very category of pain that broke you down and turns you into a minister to people in the exact category. Think about Joseph again. The brothers who sold them into slavery, he ended up being the one who fed them during famine. He ended up being the one who said, you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good, to bring about the saving of many lives. The wound became a well. The betrayal became a platform. The prison became the path to the palace. That is the promise on the other side of your healing. Your wounds do not have to be your identity. They can become your ministry. The places where you were most broken can become the places where you carry the most authority and the most compassion. You will know the healing is complete when you can look at the people who hurt you and people who remind you of them and love them and freely serve them genuinely and minister to them from a place of wholeness instead of wounds. That is the mark of a true disciple. Not just someone who preaches freedom, but someone who has been so thoroughly healed by God that freedom is the most natural thing flowing out of them. That is when the enemy's greatest assignment against your life becomes your greatest ministry. And that is when the world looks at you and knows and says, he or she is different. There is something about them, and I don't understand what It is and that is going to preach the gospel to them. It's going to show them that you understand the cross You have a relationship With the one who died on the cross to save you to lose you from all your bitterness and your bondage and healing It's absolutely possible on the other side of this journey, and I want you guys to leave with this reflection question What practices will I put in place to guard my heart daily and is there a category of person? I still cannot serve freely that tells me there is still healing to receive and as you

Meditate on these questions allow the Lord to reveal deeper things inside of you and remember all eight parts of the courses Every time the enemy tries to accuse you or use someone To try to put a root of bitterness inside of you and release it and I just want to pray for you as we end This course Lord, I thank you that we are have walked the distance higher Bitterness course and now we are at Lord God the end of it where we choose Healing on the other side where we choose Forgiveness and we choose you and we do not choose what the enemy caused us to do father We release it all the way. We acknowledge the wound that it was real and and that it was painful below God We are separating the person from the spirit that used them and we forgive them and we release them onto you And we release ourselves completely from the chains of bitterness in the name of Jesus father I ask you to heal the root of every single bitterness of every single person taking this course father I thank you that they're not just gonna release anything from the surface But deep deep down from within with where the enemy planted and just like David Lord We are asking that you renew a step-by-spirit and you create in us a clean heart in Jesus name Amen, God bless you. And thank you for taking the bitterness course share this with someone You know that is going to benefit from it in Jesus name