Overcoming Bitterness With Love

Welcome back to the bitterness course. We're in part seven and we are gonna talk about overcoming bitterness with love. My favorite part of the course. It's been such a journey with this bitterness course. It's truly blessed me and I hope it's blessing you as you're taking it. If you have not taken part one all the way to part six, I encourage you to. We are going to talk about how love is the greatest commandment and why the enemy attacks it. In part six, we talked about surrendering pain to God, how forgiveness is a decision, but healing is a process, and how carrying pain shapes us in ways we do not always recognize. Today, I want to show you what God is building in you through all of this because this is not just about getting free from bitterness. It is about walking in the very thing the enemy has been trying to cut you off from a long time. Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself. In John 13, 35, he said, by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Not your title, not your gifts, but love. How you love. Not how many years you have been saved or how many nights you have pressed to in prayer.

The mark Jesus said the world would recognize on his people is love. The Greek word he used here is agape. Not affection, not sentiment, not a feeling that comes and goes. Agape is a covenant love. A love rooted in will and in choice. A love that moves. The Greek word he used is agape. Not affection, not sentiment, not a feeling that comes and goes. Agape is covenant love. A love rooted in will and in choice. A love that moves not because it feels like it, but because it has decided to. Love is the highest mark of a disciple. It is the thing that makes our ministry credible and our witness powerful. And the enemy knows that. Which is why one of his most sophisticated strategies is to attack your prayer life directly or your Bible reading directly. It is to use offense and bitterness to cut you off from your capacity to love. Let's go back to Rachel and Miriam from part two. Once Rachel began walking in bitterness toward Miriam, she could not love correctly anymore. She started interpreting everything through the lens of her wound. She started ministering out of a place of self-protection

instead of wholeness. She started seeing potential betrayals everywhere. And what looked like discernment from the outside was actually bitterness, filtering her vision. The enemy used Miriam to get Rachel into offense, and now Rachel was disqualifying herself from the greatest commandment. Not because she chose to stop loving, but because she never realized she had picked up something that was making it impossible to love the right way. We see a powerful contrast in the life of David. David had every reason to walk in bitterness toward Saul. Saul tried to kill him repeatedly. Saul drove him from his home, from his calling, from his family, but twice, twice, David had the opportunity to take Saul's life, and he refused. In 1 Samuel 24, David cut a corner of Saul's robe and immediately felt convicted in his heart. He said to his men, the Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my master. The Lord's anointed to stretch out my hand against him. David chose love, covenant love, even when justice would have looked the other way. And here is what preserved David. It preserved his capacity to lead, to intercede, to be a man after God's own heart. Bitterness toward Saul would have locked David in the same spirit that tormented Saul. Love, agape, chosen, deliberate love kept David free.

Romans 12 21 says, do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with God. The practical ways we overcome bitterness with love are these. We bless instead of curse. We pray for the person instead of rehearsing what they did. We serve where we want to withhold. We show kindness where we want to keep score, not because they deserve it, but because we refuse to let bitterness determine how we love. Every act of love towards someone who hurt you is a declaration that bitterness does not have dominion over you. And it is a demonstration to the watching world that something in you is different, something they cannot explain on their own. And that difference is Christ himself. You look like Jesus. You sound like Jesus. You talk like Jesus. You walk like Jesus. You forgive like Jesus. And you love like Jesus. When you love like Jesus, that is the biggest weapon that you can use against the enemy. Self-sacrificial love, that agape love, just like our Lord and Savior. And this is what the Lord has done in me

and I know he's gonna do in you. He's going to turn any feeling, any root of bitterness into love so that now when you see a person who's hurt you, you can love them. person offends you, you don't have to hold on to the offense that becomes the root. You can love them. When a person has offended you in the past, now you can go back and think about it or talk about it and not feel hurt and anger because you have dealt with that unresolved anger, because the enemy now cannot use how he was accusing you the same way anymore. You are accusing him back with the cross and the cross is love. The cross is what Jesus did for us and what he did for us on that cross shows us just how much God so loved the world and love is the biggest, greatest weapon. This is what I want you to take away and reflect. Is there someone I have been withholding love from and how can I take one practical step toward loving them in a way that overcomes what the enemy intended? Think about this and really answer it and let me pray for you. Lord, thank you that you're restoring the capacity for every single person that's taking this course to love. Heal every place where bitterness has filtered how they see people. Father, let them be like David, someone who chose covenant love. Justice would have permitted something else. Father, I thank you that they're going to refuse to let the enemy to use them, Lord God, to use them the way he's been using them and that's to not love, Lord. Thank you that they're going to become, to be just like you. Become just like you. Be like you are, Lord, self-sacrificing, agape, a love that is a decision, not just a feeling. Let the love be the evidence that you live inside of them and that the enemy's assignment against them has failed. In Jesus' name, amen, and I will catch you in part eight of our bitterness course.

In Jesus' name, God bless you.