Your Hurts: Turning Bitterness into Sweetness

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week.. Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

You have an enemy…and he’s dead set on destroying all you hold dear and keeping you from experiencing abundant life in Christ. What’s more, his approach to disrupting your life and discrediting your faith isn’t general or generic, not a one-size-fits-all. It’s specific. Personalized. Targeted.

So this audiobook is your chance to strike back. With prayer. With a weapon that really works. Each chapter will guide you in crafting prayer strategies that hit the enemy where it hurts, letting him know you’re on to him and that you won’t back down. Because with every new strategy you build, you’re turning the fiercest battles of life into precise strikes against him and his handiwork, each one infused with the power of God’s spirit.

New York Times best-selling author Priscilla Shirer, widely known for her international speaking, teaching, and writing ministries, brings her new role from the 2015 film War Room into the real lives of today’s women, addressing the topics that affect them most: renewing their passion, refocusing their identity, negotiating family strife, dealing with relentless regrets, navigating impossible schedules, succeeding against temptation, weathering their worst fears, uprooting bitterness, and more. Each chapter exposes the enemy’s cruel, crafty intentions in all kinds of these areas then equips and encourages you to write out your own personalized prayer strategies on tear-out sheets you can post and pray over yourself and your loved ones on a regular basis. Fervent is a hands-on, knees-down, don’t-give-up action guide to practical, purposeful praying.

Number nine, your hurts, turning bitterness to forgiveness.
If I were your enemy, I use every opportunity to bring old wounds to mind as well as the people, events and circumstances that cause them.
I try to ensure that your heart was hardened with anger and bitterness shackled through unforgiveness, hollow and dull.
That’s how my prayers felt like they were ricocheting off the walls of a deep empty cave.
And I wasn’t sure why I just knew I was growing really tired of it because once you’ve tasted the bold, intense flavors of fervent prayer, the blandness of living with anything less than pure freedom and intimacy with God is almost more than you can stand.
You miss it. You crave it.
Especially like I said, when you’ve racked your brain and can’t figure out why it’s suddenly mysteriously gone.
Those were some of the spiritual doldrums I was experiencing when a friend mentioned a book on prayer written in the mid seventies and asked if I’d read it based on her description and recommendation, sounded like it might be just what I needed.
So I immediately ordered it and it wasn’t long before God spoke to my heart through a passage of scripture quoted in one of the early chapters of the book.
It’s from Second Corinthians where Paul writes.
Now, if anyone has caused pain, referring to a matter that had grown divisive in the Corinthian church, he was addressing, you should rather turn to forgive.
That’s second Corinthians chapter two verse five and seven, suddenly my heart burned in my chest.
But I kept reading, you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.
So I beg you to affirm your love for him.
For this is why I wrote that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything so that we would not be outwitted by Satan for we are not ignorant of his designs, forgive and comfort, obedience in everything outwitted by Satan, ignorant of his designs.
This simple passage struck me hit me with a deep inner conviction that only God’s spirit can give.
I realize in that moment what I’m about to share with you.
Now, in this chapter, a truth that reinvigorated my prayer life and set me back on track.
It’s this unforgiveness is a strategic design, crafty implemented by your enemy to quote unquote outwit you to cripple your effectiveness and prayer and your power to stand against him victoriously.
Which is why if I were your enemy, I would do everything possible to keep you from, forgive anyone and everyone who’s done you any wrong.
Such was the case with me.
And these verses had brought all the specifics roaring back to my attention, the offender in question, and there was no question in my mind who it was.
Hadn’t done anything particularly brutal to me. Nothing that would alter the whole trajectory of my life or anything.
But it was enough to drive a wedge between the two of us and dig a tender spot in my heart after years of work and prayer and patience and sacrifice.
A few exciting things were beginning to materialize in my personal life and ministry.
The kinds of things that make you smile right before you fall asleep at night.
And then again, first thing in the morning, I’d shared some of these happenings with a few close friends who I thought would celebrate with me.
But this one person’s response had been not rude perhaps, but critical. Far less than supportive and enthusiastic.
And then as days, weeks and months went on, she’d grown rather reclusive and quiet toward me. Distant and disengaged.
I thought maybe I was being a bit overly sensitive, but a few other people had begun to notice it too without my needing to bring it to their attention.
Even they were unnerved by the cold shoulder. She was throwing me.
So I guessed it really was as obvious as I thought it wasn’t all in my head and none of us could understand exactly what her problem was.
I actually thought I was handling it the best way I knew how mostly by trying my best to be where she wasn’t as often as possible.
But on those occasions when keeping a safe distance wasn’t possible.
That’s when I could tell this whole thing was becoming a bigger deal to me than I was letting on.
A lot of emotion would bubble to the surface when she was around.
I was stewing the feelings inside when I thought of her or saw her weren’t doing me any good.
And even though I tried to push them out of my mind, fairly justified that I’d done nothing wrong to cause this kind of reaction from someone.
Still, the blockage kept showing up with this person’s name on it and it wouldn’t go away.
Then came second Corinthians chapter two verse five through seven, forgive, comfort, obedience, outwitted designs, God.
And I, we went round and round while I debated with him and without him, the necessity of this bit of conviction because maybe, maybe if forgiveness had been the only thing on the table, I might have been willing to oblige a bit easier.
I did. In fact, at his insistence, forgive her in my mind, at least set her free from the debt.
I thought she owed me for making me feel so awful and so uneasy.
For so long, I thought the Lord seeing my sincerity and drawing up an internal declaration of forgiveness toward her might cut me some slack and just forget the other part.
You know, that part about offering comfort to her.
But under the circumstances, under the specifics of his conviction, I knew he wanted more.
He wanted me to show comfort to this one who had offended me.
This was the only way I could be quote unquote, obedient in everything in this thing and I knew it.
So my flesh didn’t want to give this person the time of day, much less the dignity of a response.
But my resistance to what God’s word and command were saying, clued me in beyond any doubt that I’d allowed a root of bitterness to spring up within my heart.
And it was choking out some stuff I missed and that really mattered to me.
And this was the part that was by demonic design.
So finally, one sunny day, I took my forgiveness over to her house in the form of a little meal, I’d prepared, we talked, we ate together and touched by a measure of kindness for me that could only come from the Holy Spirit.
I promise you. She melted into tears in my presence. You know what I found out that day?
This will surprise you. I think it surprised me even while I’d been the one growing hurt and angry by her attitude.
By the minute, she’d been quietly struggling within her own heart over all of this discord too.
She told me how she’d been wrestling with insecurities and other issues enough that she was actually losing sleep and appetite.
Plus the sense of isolation, she’d been increasingly feeling when others who’d been a tad cold toward her, in response to her treatment of me had become a heavy burden on her shoulders.
I began to realize what Paul meant in that passage from Second Corinthians two.
When he said that excessive sorrow can overwhelm but now through forgiveness and a simple act of kindness, the ice was breaking along with the enemy’s design.
Not only his design to ruin a friendship, but also to ruin my prayer life in the process.
The next time I hit my knees, the echo of that long lonely cavern gave way to the floodgates of God’s grace pouring out over me in a fresh fantastic way no longer outwitted by the devil.
Forgiveness instead because forgiveness matters. I know this personal example I’ve shared is a light one, especially when compared to the deeply wounding life altering offense or abuse, you may have suffered.
Trust me. I could have called up other more difficult illustrations from my own life too.
But even this low level infraction makes a point and speaks to a purpose that applies to every offense that comes against us.
Your enemy wants you long term angry and he can use even the lightest defense to do it.
He wants you to be a bitter woman behind that beautiful face.
He wants your heart coated with the calluses of resentment crippled by offenses from your past.
Unforgiveness is his design to outwit you to keep you not only bruised and bleeding but unable to experience any power in your prayers or intimacy with your father.
Nobody needs to tell you how bad you’re hurting from the injustices in your life.
Even people who’ve suffered similar abuses or offenses as yours could never completely understand how your own rejections feel.
Yours are personal and private and seemingly impossible to forgive but forgive anyway.
Not because it’s easy, but because your enemy gets exactly what he wants from you. Otherwise forgive anyway.
Not lightly and quickly but ferociously and fervently, not only for the other person, but mostly for you.
So you can be free and full and whole and complete.
Sit down here with me for a minute where we can almost clasp each other’s hands across the table and listen to me closely.
If you feel utterly hopeless and intolerably resistant toward forgiving this person or these people who’ve offended, you don’t consider yourself a random victim.
The devil is behind this. He has ridden the coattails of your anger right into the depths of your soul where he has carefully calculated your demise.
He’s been strategizing how to suck all the power out of your prayer life out of your whole life.
He’s likely the same one who started the whole mess to begin with.
The same one who stirred up enough sin in another person to tempt them into doing whatever they did to you, to saying whatever they said to you into feeling however they felt about you.
Perhaps how they still feel about you even now or even if he didn’t start it, he’s the same enemy who jumped onto the bandwagon of a bad situation in your life.
Hoping to make sure it didn’t merely affect your finances or your job or the status of a friendship, but instead pierced deeply into your heart where he could keep twisting it, inflaming it where almost any memory or passing thought of it could poke at you.
Pick at you, draw blood, inflict new damage, make no mistake.
It is his doing by specific design hurting you once wasn’t enough.
Those times when the original incidents happened, times when you were mistreated or betrayed or belittled.
No, that level of pain just wasn’t quite enough for him. He wanted more. He wanted permanent loss, personality change.
He wanted to redefine how you thought about God about yourself, about others, even about those people who truly love you and intend only good things for you.
He wanted you fixated and patterned in your thinking so that few things would seem more dear or desirable to you than paying them back, getting your revenge.
He wants you sobbing or better yet just seething the kind of emotion that doesn’t come out in crying and visible reactions, but instead just cooks inside you where the heat has no place to escape where the tears pull up and stagnate, creating a Petri dish of toxic emotions that you’re forced to keep breathing.
He wants you baking in unforgiveness until your spiritual life is hard and crisp around the edges, lifeless comatose.
But Jesus, he wants you free. That’s what he created you for. Forgive us our debts.
He taught us to pray as we also have forgiven our debtors.
That’s from Matthew 6 12, followed a couple of verses later by this corollary statement for if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
That’s verse 14 might want to go back and listen to those verses again carefully.
Despite how familiar they may be to you.
These words of Jesus suggest a connection between the way we handle others offenses against us and the way God handles our offenses against him.
Now, the whole council of scripture affirms that our salvation, our eternal security with God is based solely on the work of Jesus on the cross, no action or inaction on our part, such as struggling to forgive someone who’s wounded.
You can sever the covenant of grace he’s made with us.
But something at least happens to our experience with the Father when we persist in holding other sins against them.
Unforgiveness puts us in prime position for demonic influence and activity to take advantage of us.
See the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18 21 through 35 for one descriptive example and anything that dampens or deadens the freedom that God’s mercy is meant to give us.
Can it really be worth holding on to listen.
God knows how to deal with sin, our sin, their sin.
When you choose to forgive someone, you’re not wiping their actions away as if the bad things didn’t happen, giving people a free pass from the harm they’ve caused.
You’re just sparing yourself the burden of working two extra jobs being judge and jury for how justices met it out in this situation.
Why not let someone relieve you of the pressure, someone who actually knows what he’s doing and someone who’s just waiting right now to talk with you about it.
His forgiveness. My friend is freedom.
Yes, his forgiveness, his forgiveness of you is what makes your forgiveness possible toward others realize you are lying back already in a vast blue ocean of forgiveness.
Same as me, same as all of us who’ve been redeemed through the blood of Jesus.
So there’s more than enough of his forgiveness splashing around you to extinguish all the flames of rage, hatred, bitterness, or animosity your enemy may have ignited within you.
Remembering what Christ redemption has done for you will make you eager to do it for another.
You were dead in your trespasses and sins.
But God being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, made us alive together with Christ.
Ephesians chapter two. Verse 14 through five, start from that point and then you can much more determinedly give mercy to others because it’s so lavishly given to you genuine freedom and renewed fervency are waiting for you on the other side of forgiveness and the forgiveness you don’t have any desire to give right now can be amazingly enabled through prayer.
When galvanized with the living truth of God’s word.
Fervent prayer is the bucket that can dip down into the reserves of God’s strength and pull up all the resolve you need for releasing other people from what they owe you.
He can produce the healing we so desperately need before we continue down the same old broken roads that only end up hurting other people, Children, grandchildren, people who had nothing to do with this matter at all, except to be within proximity of our resentful responses.
Prayer gets at the truth, the truth of what happened. Yes.
If that’s really what took place, then yes, the real facts and details don’t change as you get real with God in prayer, but get ready for some other pieces of information to bubble up to the surface as well as the spirit and the scripture come together in agreement on how you need to handle things.
The enemy of course, will want you to balk at this part.
He’s been banking on keeping these solutions hidden from you and convincing you that anger and bitterness are the most productive, protective ways of managing the situation and yet honest prayer conducted with an open heart and an open copy of God’s word will be sure to present you with truth like the truth.
I got that day from Second Corinthians, forgive and comfort is the Lord possibly asking you to comfort your offender as well.
Maybe, maybe not. There’s no one answer for this.
I’m certainly not saying that a gesture of goodwill is always necessary or even possible.
And the truth is we’re never guaranteed a positive response when we do yet. Your willingness, your obedience.
If it’s what the Lord is asking you to do to go to express kindness, to smile, to nod, to be generous and show concern is a tremendous test of Godly surrender and humility.
It’s a way of finding out if the forgiveness you claim to feel towards someone contains roots that run deeper than the roots of resentment did best of all it brands you as a woman who is in no way going to be outwitted by Satan or ignorant of his designs.
If we want to be women of serious fervent prayer, the scripture will always lead us here to forgiveness in some form, in some fashion.
Forgiveness is God’s command. And it also comes with a promise that he will provide us the companion power to pull it off.
Don’t expect any other solution to work or to change anything except for the worst and don’t expect to experience freedom peace or rest from your anger until you do call to prayer.
God’s word is what you and I are going to be taking into our prayer strategy.
A strategy that yes, possibly holds the potential of benefiting your offender.
And yet it absolutely ensures a benefit for you. Freedom, Galatians 51.
It was for freedom that Christ set us free.
I’ve quoted this verse before in the book, but it’s worth repeating often in all kinds of contexts.
So why don’t you underline it sometime? So I won’t need to say it again.
This verse has followed me around through life from my teenage and college years till now.
And it has formed sort of an immovable object that Satan is forever forced to work around to get to my heart here.
Just one more time for good measure. It was for freedom that Christ set us free.
The Bible says for freedom, he wants us free.
Think back to everything you know about Jesus and the many demonstrations of his love toward the hurting and mistreated to the point of being mistreated himself again and again up to and including his brutal torture and murder.
Why? Because the spirit of the Lord is upon me, he said to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.
To set free, those who are oppressed, Luke 4 18 to set us free to fan fresh air into the stagnant rooms of your heart to sweeten the taste in your mouth where bitterness and unforgiveness have soured your appetite for spiritual things to set you free.
There’s nothing bad in your life. The devil won’t try to make worse.
But Proverbs 11 17 says, the merciful man does himself good, the merciful woman too.
So upon these truths, craft a prayer strategy of freedom and forgiveness.
Mark 11 25 whenever you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anyone so that your father who is in heaven will also forgive you.
Your transgressions. Ephesians 4 31 through 32. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander.
Be put away from you along with all malice, be kind to one another, tenderhearted forgiving each other.
Just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Romans 12, 19 through 21.
Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God for it is written.
Vengeance is mine. I will repay says the Lord.
But if your enemy is hungry, feed him and if he is thirsty, give him a drink for in so doing you will keep burning coals on his head.
Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good Ephesians 4 26 through 27.
Do not let the sun go down on your anger and do not give the devil an opportunity.
Hebrews 12, 14 through 15, strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord see to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.
And by it many become defiled.
Matthew 5 44 through 45 love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father, who is in heaven.
Colossians 3 12 through 13.
As those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other.
Whoever has a complaint against anyone just as the Lord forgave you.
So also should you Luke 17 4, if he sins against you seven times a day and returns to you seven times saying I repent, forgive him first John 2 12 because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus.
The father’s shoulders are broad enough for you to cry on strong enough to absorb with compassion, whatever you need to vent to him from the depths of your broken heart.
But they are also able to lift you from the quicksand of old hearts and wounds, setting your feet upon a rock and putting a new song on your lips.
Like Psalm 40 verse two through three says a song of praise. Thank him for championing your freedom.
Even at the cost of your comfort, repentance, ask the Lord to forgive you for harboring unforgiveness in your heart.
Confess any hatred, any bitterness, any harmful actions made in anger toward others as you sense God’s forgiveness to you for your sin, extend it to them for theirs, asking record the name of the person or persons who’ve hurt you and then speak their names out loud while asking for a heart that can genuinely forgive and release them from the debt you feel they owe.
Yes, commit to responding actively in any way God’s spirit might urge you to do so.
I sense courage coming from your prayer closet and the sweet smell of forgiveness and freedom.