DEEP - Week 3
Day 5
“See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no root of bitterness grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” - Hebrews 12:15
It is one thing to forgive someone who hurt us. It can be much harder to admit that we may be offended with God because He allowed something we did not want, did not expect, and still do not understand.
Sometimes God allows circumstances that break our hearts.
Something changes.
Someone betrays us.
Something we expected to happen never happens.
We do not understand.
And an offense begins growing.
We may not call it bitterness toward God.
But something inside us changes.
We become more negative.
Our excitement disappears.
Our hearts become harder.
Our kindness begins fading.
And what is happening inside us begins affecting everyone around us.
That is why we have to fight to keep bitterness from taking root.
The rocky soil teaches us that our roots determine whether we can endure the heat.
And some of the greatest heat we experience comes when life does not make sense.
It is one thing to trust God when everything is going according to our plan.
It is another thing to trust Him when the plan changes.
Sometimes God can even move us through the betrayal of someone else.
We may have stayed somewhere for the rest of our lives.
But that was not God’s plan.
At the time, all we can see is the betrayal.
All we can feel is the pain.
All we can understand is what we lost.
Without a deep root system, that moment can become the place where bitterness begins.
But with roots, we can keep trusting.
We may not understand what God is doing yet.
We may still be brokenhearted.
We may still be confused.
But we do not have to let offense become our identity.
We can say:
God knows what happened.
God knows we do not understand.
God knows we are brokenhearted.
God knows we are confused.
And still, we can come against bitterness.
We can repent of dwelling on the past.
We can renounce jealousy and anger.
We can reject the victim mentality.
We can confront irritability in every form.
Then we can make a decision:
We will trust God to do what we cannot do.
We will do the deep work.
We will trust Him to do the healing.
That does not mean the betrayal suddenly becomes good.
It means bitterness does not get the final word.
Sometimes we will eventually look back and see that what God did turned out more beautifully than we could have hoped.
But we need a root system strong enough to make it through the season before we can see that.
This is where internal transformation happens.
We stop making our greatest goal proving that we were right.
Instead, we make our goal allowing God’s Word to grow.
“We want Your Word to grow more than we want to be right.”
That is deep.
Because bitterness loves being right.
Bitterness keeps the evidence.
Bitterness rehearses the arguments.
Bitterness remembers every detail.
But spiritual depth says, “We release this to God.”
We choose to trust.
We choose to obey.
We choose to serve.
We guard the seed of God’s Word.
And we allow it to break through the hard places beneath the surface.
The secret to endurance is depth.
And sometimes going deeper means trusting God while we are still waiting for Him to make sense of what happened.
WATCH THIS WEEK’S MESSAGE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/live/2mQU5Sn7C-E?si=bWnxBRQpOBziSb7O
