Understanding Bitterness

Welcome to the Bitterness Course, an eight-part series that the Lord gave me and instructed me to teach and share with you all. And this teaching is so near and dear to my heart and I cannot wait to share what the Lord has revealed to me about bitterness, the root of bitterness, the root of offense, how to release bitterness, how to be set free and delivered from bitterness, just like he set me free by delivering me and healing me from bitterness. And I cannot wait to hear about the testimonies that are going to come forth from this teaching and what God's going to do in your lives through this teaching. So before we start with part one of the teaching, let me just start with prayer. Father, in the name of Jesus, Lord, I just thank you for every word that is going to come out of my mouth. I pray that the viewer that is watching on the other side of this camera to receive every single thing that you have for them, Lord, and may this teaching just help them and heal them from every offense and every bitterness. In the name of Jesus. Amen. So part one is about understanding bitterness and recognizing the root before it spreads. That is what we're going to talk about in part one. And we're going to start in Hebrews chapter 12, verse 15. And it says, see to it that no one falls short of the grace of God, that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. This is where we begin today with the very foundation of everything we are going to cover in this series. And before we can talk about forgiveness, before we can talk about freedom, we have to understand what we are actually dealing with. And the writer of Hebrews gives us the clearest picture. He does not say a feeling of bitterness. He does not say a mood of bitterness. He says a root. The Greek word here is Riza Pikrias. Riza means root, the underground source, the hidden foundation. Pikrias comes from a word that means to cut, to prick, to pierce. So what the writer is describing is not just a surface emotion that comes and goes. It is a root that pierces and spreads beneath the surface long before it ever shows above ground. By the time bitterness becomes visible in someone's behavior, in the way that they speak, the way they pull back, the way they react, it has already begun growing underground for a very long time. And that is what makes it so dangerous. You do not always know it is there. It starts as unresolved hurt and offense that was never brought to God.

A wound that was carried alone, buried, or explained away. Think about it. Have you ever had something that was so deep that happened to you? A wound, an unresolved problem and trauma that you just buried and you never brought it to God. You never brought it back up. Well, when that happens, over time, that unresolved wound does not just stay a wound. It becomes a root. And that root begins to spread. Think about what a root system does underground. It reaches into everything. It starts spreading and it touches everything. That is what bitterness is doing. That is what a wound does when you keep it hidden. It starts branching out into everything. It wraps itself around what is nearby. It draws from the soil of every experience, every relationship, every moment of hurt that follows. And Hebrew tells us exactly what that root begins to defile. It defiles your relationships, your ministry, the way you see people, the way you interpret their intentions towards you. The scripture says this. This root causes trouble and defiles many. Not just you. It defiles many. The people around you are being shaped by what is growing inside of you. What you have not yet dealt with. The things that are just springing from your heart that you haven't dealt with is reaching other people. We see this so clearly in the life of Naomi in the book of Ruth. Naomi lost her husband. She lost both of her sons. She was left in a foreign land with nothing but grief and two daughters-in-law. And when she finally returned to Bethlehem, the woman of the city came out to greet her and said,

Is this Naomi? And Naomi said, Do not call me Naomi. Call me Mara. And Mara means bitter. And she says, Call me Mara because the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. That's why she said to call her Mara. Naomi had so much pain that she changed her name to match what she was feeling. Now, was her grief real? Absolutely. Did she have every reason to feel the weight of what she had lost? Yes. She lost her husband and her sons. But here is what we need to see. Naomi's bitterness was shaping how she saw God, how she saw her future, and how she saw herself. So much so that she changed her name to Mara. She could not see the redemption that was already being prepared for her. She could not see that Ruth, the very one walking beside her, was part of a plan that would restore everything. Bitterness does that. And now was your vision, and so all you can see is the wound. Now here is the other thing. passage that we cannot miss. The writer uses the word Episcopuntes. It means to watch carefully, to oversee, to guard diligently. It is the language of a watchman. God is not calling us to be passive about what grows in our hearts. He's calling us to be watchmen over our own inner lives. He doesn't want us to assume we are fine because we haven't exploited on anyone. We don't wait for us to explode on someone to just think that we're fine. No, when we're feeling these things that are happening within us, we are supposed to release it to the Lord. We're supposed to guard our hearts like watchmen watches all throughout the night. We're supposed to watch our hearts and guard our hearts and make sure that things are being released from our hearts. We don't just wait to explode on

someone because when we do that, we tell ourselves it's not bitterness. It's just discernment. It's just caution. It's just self-protection. A watchman does not wait until the enemy is already inside the gate. A watchman is stationed on the wall watching from a distance, catching things before they come in. That is the posture God is calling every one of us to when it comes to our hearts. The first step to walking free from bitterness is the willingness to see it honestly, to stop calling it something else and let God search you all the way down. When you let God search you all the way down, you don't deceive yourself. When you're trying to call it discernment, trying to call it protecting yourself because you don't want to talk about it, because you put a wall, that is you allowing the enemy to do exactly what he wanted to do in the first place, which is to create that root of bitterness, to plant that root of bitterness from beneath you, from deep inside of you and you don't even know that this offense, this trauma, this thing that happened has already caused a root, has already implanted inside of you and now it's branching out to other people. It's branching out to things in your life. It's branching out to the way that you take care of your children. It's branching out to the way that you're talking to your husband. It's branching out to the way that you're being a sister in Christ, a brother in Christ. It's branching out to the way that you're treating your parents. It's branching out to even being happy for people when someone is going through something good and it's time for you to rejoice with them. It doesn't allow you to rejoice with others. It allows you to look at them and be envious and that's what bitterness does. It literally causes so much things from inside of you and these are the things that the Lord has healed me from and I did not realize that I was bitter and God revealed it to me that I was bitter and when he revealed this to me I took it to the secret place and I did exactly what the enemy does not want you to do which is express it to the Lord and release it to the Lord but first God had to deal with me for me to understand where was this bitterness springing from and so I want you to take this question with you for part one. If I ask God to search my heart right now is there a root he would show me that I

have been calling something else? Is there something that happened? Think about a root. Think about a situation. Ask God to reveal it to you. Think about if God was revealing something to you what would it be that you have been calling something else? That you have been calling discernment? That you have been calling protecting yourself but really and truly it's a root of bitterness that has taken root inside of your heart and before I leave you today I'm gonna go ahead and pray. Lord I ask Lord that you search the way that you only can search and every viewer that is taking this course right now show them every root of bitterness that has been growing underneath the surface Lord. Thank you that you're gonna reveal the ones that they have justified the bitterness they have named something else than the bitterness that they have been too afraid to look at. Father I thank you that they're not gonna look like Naomi any longer. They're not going to define themselves by losses unable to see what you are already doing. Father allow them to be able to see themselves as a watchman to become a watchman over their own heart not a passive observer uproot what the enemy has planted and give them the courage to face what you find in them in Jesus name amen and I will catch you in part two of the bitterness course. God bless you in Jesus name.