Overcoming Bitterness

Bitterness is poison. You can't hold hate and love in your heart at the same time. Hate and bitterness is poison and toxic.

Ben Stuart's talk from a few weeks ago is really powerful. It's called "Overcoming Bitterness."

A few main points I got from it:

• A proper understanding of God's sovereignty gives you the power to forgive.
• Forgiveness is making the decision to not hurt them
• The reason why you're so bitter at someone in your past who hurt you is because they had a power over you and you don't like the fact that an evil person did that bad thing which has power over your life.
  
• You keep telling me you got past it but you didn't, your bitterness there is ruining your story now.
• That very act you meant for evil, God meant for good.
• The person who hurt you doesn't run your story, God does.
• I have the resources to forgive you because you don't run my story, God does.
• When I get power, I use it to love. I don't use it to hurt people, that's crazy.
• The powerful God forgives and I can forgive that person.
• You can forgive when you realize you have a loving and sovereign God.
• Forgiveness you can do alone, reconciliation takes two.
• Reconciliation comes when two people can speak grace and love.
• Reconciliation happens when you speak truth, "Your hurt me." "Yes I did." And then you extend grace and I'm sorry and I'm not retaliating. You come to them with grace and truth to reconcile.
• Living a life of grace and truth and I can forgive you because of the Sovereign God working in my life.

This podcast was so good. It's definitely life changing... I definitely learned a lot from this one podcast.

There's only so much you can do to repair a relationship. In AA, they say "clean up your side of the street." That's all we can do sometimes. Like it says in the bullet list, it only takes you to forgive someone. But I know that it has to be honest to let this go. If it's not, it's pointless.

I definitely learned a lot.
Thanks Ben..

God bless,