Slaying the Giant of Resentment

Message Description: If you wear a wristwatch or a wedding ring, remember how strange it felt the first few times you put it on? Now you don’t even notice it. It’s a lot like resentment, as we’ll learn with Dr. David Jeremiah. He reminds us that we can grow so used to carrying our bitterness, we forget it’s there. But it’s killing us.

God has given to us my friends, this wonderful privilege of forgiveness.
And when we forgive resentment goes away.
And I need to tell you that if you have not ever accepted the forgiveness of Almighty God for your sin, you will have a very difficult time finding within yourself the grace to forgive someone else.
It’s only as we truly understand that we are sinners against Almighty God and that he has in his grace reached down through his son, the Lord Jesus Christ and given us life everlasting and forgiven us of our sin.
As we begin to understand that He has done that for us, then out of that we can do it for others.
But it starts first of all with accepting His forgiveness for your sin and asking him to become your savior.
Nothing is as profound as the word of God.
And now Doctor Jeremiah has a Bible for every member of the family.
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For more information or to order. Go to David Jeremiah dot org slash Bible.
Go for faith to face for greater mightier than ourselves.
Giants, great giants rules but let us not run from the battle, run to victory.
For our God goes before us as a consuming fire that we may fight the giant of fear.
Destroy the giant of discouragement. Be liberated from loneliness. Win over worry.
Guard ourselves from guilt, tame the giant of temptation.
Attack, anger, disarm doubt when we feel overtaken and find freedom in defeating failure.
Our God will slay the giants in the land and bring them down before us through his power.
We shall drive them out and destroy them quickly.
As the Lord has promised us, do not be afraid, our God will be with us.
He will empower us. We can defeat our giants, we can win the battle, we can live victorious through the Bible.
God has promised to provide the tools we need to overcome every fear, every failure, every temptation, every giant remind yourself of God’s promises with turning points.
Giant Slayer scripture cards. Each card features specifically selected verses to help you overcome the giants in your life, full color and bookmark sized.
These powerful reminders can be tucked into your Bible or displayed on your desk as you gear up for battle each day request yours today, Leonard Holt was a paragon of respectability.
He was a middle aged, hard working lab technician who had worked at the same Pennsylvania paper mill for 19 years.
Having been a boy scout leader, an affectionate father, a member of the local fire brigade, a regular churchgoer, he was admired as a model citizen in his community.
That is until the day that image exploded in a well planned hour of bloodshed.
One brisk October morning, a proficient marksman, he stuffed two pistols in his coat pockets and stalked slowly through his shop and began shooting with calculated frenzy all around him.
He filled several co workers with two or three bullets apiece, firing more than 30 shots killing some men he had known for more than 15 years.
Bewilderment swept through the community because no one could understand why he would have done this.
Puzzled policemen and friends finally began to piece together a train of logic behind his brief reign of terror.
You see down deep within the heart of Leonard Holt rumbled. The giant of resentment.
His monk like exterior concealed the seething hatred that was inside the investigation yielded the following facts.
Several victims had been promoted over him while he had remained in the same position.
More than one in his car pool had stopped riding with him to work because of his reckless driving.
The man was brimming with resentment, rage that he could hold no longer.
And beneath his picture in Time magazine, the caption told the story.
There were just three words, responsible, respectable, resentful.
Someone has described resentment as the accumulation of unexpressed anger anger swept under the rug because it is not noticed.
It can often be ignored while all of the time it is building and growing like an invisible tumor.
Author Louis Bs Meads graphically describes the effects of hatred prolonged into resentment.
In these words, he says, we may believe we are at peace while the furies rage within beneath the surface, they are hidden and suppressed.
Our hate opens the subterranean faucets of venom that will eventually infect all of our relationships in ways.
We cannot even predict. My friend, Gary Ingrid tells the story of a man who was bitten by a dog which was later discovered to be rabid.
The man was rushed to the hospital where tests revealed that he had indeed contracted rabies.
At this particular time, medical science had no solution for this problem.
And the doctor faced the difficult proposition of telling this man of his condition and informing him that what he had was incurable that it was terminal sir.
He said we will do all we can to make you comfortable, but we cannot give you false hope.
There is nothing we can really do.
My best advice for you is to put your affairs in order as soon as possible.
The dying man sank back into his bed in depression and shock.
But finally, he rallied enough strength to ask for a pen and some paper and he began to work with great energy.
An hour later when the doctor returned.
The man was still writing vigorously and the doctor said to him, well, I’m glad you’ve taken my advice.
You must be working on your will. This ain’t no will doc.
He said this is a list of people I’m gonna bite before I die.
Thank you.
That is indeed what resentment will do to you.
It will turn you into an angry, bitter person.
So let’s take a look at this giant and let’s see if we can figure out first of all who this giant is and then determine a way to do warfare against it.
Well, the word is not actually mentioned in the Bible. You won’t find resentment in your concordances.
There is a phrase in one of Paul’s letters that is actually very close to the word resentment when it is translated in a negative context.
And it’s strange that this word appears in the love chapter of the Bible first Corinthians 13.
Paul describes agape love like this. He says love, thanks, no evil. First Corinthians 13 5.
And the phrase translated thinks no evil or the think part of the phrase is the word.
It’s a Greek word. Say it out loud.
Now, you know Greek and you can tell everybody that you spoke Greek in church today.
Gizo is a word which has to do with bookkeeping.
It means to calculate or to reckon when you place an entry into a ledger, you use that particular term Gizo, the purpose of placing an entry into a ledger is to keep a permanent record of that information.
The word is used elsewhere in the New Testament in a very positive way for all of us who are Christians.
For instance, in Romans chapter four and verse eight, Paul says, blessed is the man to whom the Lord shall not impute there.
It is the word blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not calculate or store up or remember or keep a record of sin.
Second Corinthians 5 19 says the same thing that is God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not imputing trespasses to them, not keeping a record.
Aren’t you glad that God doesn’t keep a record of our sins that He forgives us and he plots our sins out of the book and there’s no record book in heaven where there is a record of all of our sins.
If we have trusted Him to forgive us.
Paul used the word on one occasion in his trial to express his hope that those who had deserted him would not be punished.
He said it this way at my first defense, no one stood with me but all forsook me.
May it not be charged against them, may it not be kept in a record against them?
So the word in the positive sense of the word means to keep a record, to keep track of, to write down in a book as to remember and all of us know that in business, it’s important to keep a permanent record in personal relationships.
Keeping records is not only unnecessary, it is harmful.
Love does not take into account the wrong that is done against us.
Love does not keep a record does not the things that are done to hurt us.
Love looks for a chance to forgive, not a chance to get.
Even the church Father Chris system once said that a wrong done against love is like a spark that falls into the sea and is quenched.
Resentment loves to cultivate the memory of evil, but love forgives and goes on.
Now, you may be surprised to discover that in the Bible, there is a record of someone who resented and it may surprise you to discover that that someone was King David, the man after God’s own heart.
When he was dying, King David brought his son Solomon into the room to give him a word.
And this is what he said in first Kings chapter two verses five and six, listen carefully.
He’s talking to his son now.
And he says moreover, you know also what Joe Ab, the son of Zariah did to me and what he did to the two commanders of the armies of Israel to Abner, the son of n and Amasa, the son of Jeer, whom he killed and shed the blood of war in peace time and put the blood of war on his belt.
That was around his waist and on his sandals that were on his feet.
Therefore, Solomon do according to your wisdom and do not let his gray hair go down to the grave in peace.
I don’t know if you know what’s going on here. But this is really sad.
Here’s something that was done to David and his commanders years and years ago, but he stored it up in his mind.
He kept track of it all of these years.
And while he couldn’t revenge himself in his own lifetime, he brought his son in and corrupted his mind with this revenge and said, whatever you do don’t let that guy die naturally.
You take him out for what he did.
That is an illustration of the kind of anger that becomes resentment in a person’s life.
The trouble with resentment is that it does not ever stay the same.
In other words, you don’t deposit an anger in your heart and it just sort of encapsulates and stays there.
Resentment is like a cancer. It grows, it distorts reality. It keeps us chained to the past.
It’s like bad air. It pollutes not just the bitter person but everybody who comes in contact with that person.
There’s a verse of scripture in the book of Hebrews that frighteningly describes what resentment does.
It says, looking carefully, lest anyone fall short of the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble.
And by this many are defiled.
One of the things that people say sometimes is, well, if I want to be bitter, I’m just going to be bitter.
It’s nobody’s business but my own, I’ll just be bitter. But it never is like that.
Is it, bitterness always spreads out to those around the bitter person and it always defile the people it touches, there’s no such thing as individual bitterness.
If you have any relationships with people at all, your resentment and bitterness is coloring those relationships in a negative way.
And research is very clear about the expense of resentment.
Experts agree that it is a very high price that a person pays to carry anger and bitterness in their soul.
The psychological case for forgiveness is overwhelmingly persuasive not to forgive us to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business, not to forgive is to yield yourself to somebody else’s control so that while they may be hundreds of miles away and not even aware of your bitterness, your bitterness toward them in essence, allows that person to control your life and ruin everything that’s going on in your whole relationship.
It extracts the forgiver from someone else’s nightmare.
Forgiveness does not look much like a tool for survival in a bad world, but that is what it is.
Forgiveness will take away the bitterness.
I have a book by Si mcmillan who is a medical doctor called none of these diseases.
And I have referred to that book often in my study.
He says in this book that medical science recognizes that emotions such as fear and sorrow and envy and resentment and hatred are responsible for the majority of the sicknesses today.
And the estimates of experts range from 60% all the way up to 100%.
So when we decide to be resentful, we are jeopardizing our own spiritual health.
But we’re also jeopardizing our physical health.
Dick Ennis in one of his little tracks, tells about an astonished patient who was told by his doctor.
If you don’t cut out your resentments, I may have to cut out part of your intestinal tract. Ok.
The man took the doctor’s advice and he went home and got all of his resentments straightened out and he went back to the doctor and the doctor said that his physical condition had cleared up.
How many times do people get eaten alive by the bitter anger and acid of resentment?
Lewis Meads has written the definitive book on forgiveness in my estimation.
It is a book that I have read several times because it is so wonderfully illustrated.
The book is called Forgive and Forget.
And if you ever see a copy of it in a bookstore or a used bookstore, it’s worth twice whatever they ask for it to get it.
I’ve loaned all of mine out and I have to go buy a new one every once in a while because I don’t get it back.
And, but I forgive the people who don’t bring it back to me in his book, uh Lewis Mead reviews a play which illustrates the power of resentment.
Like no story I have ever read.
Herman Engel was a German general in World War II and was sentenced by the Nuremberg Court to 30 years in prison for atrocities committed by his army.
He survived his sentence and in the play, he was released from prison.
At the time of the play, he is in building a cabin in the woods where he and his wife intend to live out their years incognito forgotten and at peace.
In the story, there’s a man by the name of Mao who is a French journalist and he’s waiting in the wings.
You see Mariel’s whole family was massacred by Ingels troops during the war.
And when the Nuremberg Court had refused to sentence Ingle to death for his war crimes.
Morio had sentenced Engel to death in his own heart and determined to carry out the sentence.
In his first opportunity, his condemnation was kept alive by the hot fire of hate that he kept kindling in his heart.
Now the time had come in the play.
Morio had stoked up the fanatics in the village close to Ingels cabin.
That very night they were going to come up the hill, burn down the cabin and shoot Ingle and his wife to death.
But there were a couple of things that Muriel hadn’t quite figured out.
There were some empty spaces in his understanding of what had actually happened in the war.
So as a journalist, he decided to go up the hill to the cabin where Ingle and his wife were living and ask them some questions the afternoon before they were going to be killed.
So up the hill, he went and he introduced himself and told Ingle who he was.
Ingle was quite shaken.
And that afternoon, Morio spent grilling the former general about all the village massacres that lay like a forgotten shadow in Ingels past.
But Engel’s feeble humanity confused Morio.
He couldn’t quite figure out what was going on and he was having a hard time putting all the pieces of the terrible story together.
His hatred and his vengeance began to be blurred and the purity of his hate was contaminated by what he saw in this old feeble man.
Toward the end of the afternoon, Muriel blurted out to Ingle that the villagers were going to come that night and kill him.
And he offered to lead Ingle out of the woods and save his life.
Ingle paused and he said, I’ll go with you on one condition and Muriel thought, what is this guy?
Is he mad? What kind of conditions do you give for being saved from being killed?
What condition he said?
And Ingle says, I’ll go with you if you will forgive me, forgive Mario had exterminated engel 1,000 times in ways of hate that played in his mind for 30 years, face to face with this man’s humanity.
Muriel was unsettled in his vengeance. He could save the man’s life.
He would cancel the execution but forgive him never.
And that night, the enraged villagers came with sacks over their heads, burned the cabin and shot Ingle and his wife dead.
Now I ask you, why was forgiving even harder than saving Ingels life?
And here is the core truth.
It was too much for Mario to forgive him because his hatred had become a passion so long indulged in his life that Muriel could not live without his hatred, his soul could no longer be the person that he was without his hatred.
His hate did not belong to him. He belonged to his hate.
And the tragedy was that only forgiveness, the one thing that he could not give to Ingle could set Muriel free, but he could not do it because his hate had become who he was.
Yes, there’s a price to pay for resentment and far too often the bill is not received until emotional bankruptcy has set in.
So while there is still time, if you harbor resentment against someone, if you’re holding a grudge in your heart against a family member or somebody you work with, maybe somebody in this church, maybe somebody on this staff, if you have in your heart, a bitterness and resentment that you have not dealt with.
Why don’t you decide today while there is still time by the grace of God, I am going to deal with this resentment before it deals with me.
You say Pastor Jeremiah, how do we do it? How do we do it?
Let me just give you some ideas. Idea. Number one steps to winning over the giant of resentment.
Think it through, think it through. Do you know why most people harbor resentment against others?
It’s very documented in all of the research that I’ve done.
They do it because it gives them a sense of superiority over the person that they hate.
It makes them feel as if they are the decent one being wrongfully treated by an obviously inferior person.
They enjoy fantasizing their plots of revenge. They spend their days reviewing what was done to them.
Retelling the story every time they get a chance, each time the story is repeated, it is more deeply etched into their mind.
Someone has said that resentment gives us two things, neurotic pleasure and religious pride. Think it through.
Is this what you were doing?
Is it worth it to enjoy this sordid pleasure and risk your own health?
And after you think it through, I want you to do something else.
I want you to write it down. You say, what am I supposed to write down?
I want you to write down why you are filled with resentment.
Oftentimes when talking with people who say they have anger and resentment in their spirit, when you try to ask them why they can’t really crystallize it in any clear definition.
So if you’re filled with resentment, write it down and let me tell you what you’ll discover.
When you write it down on paper and read it out loud, it will sound a lot different than it sounds in the echoes of your mind.
You will discover that what you read out loud is not exactly corresponded with what you have been thinking in your mind and dealing with your heart.
Something happens when you crystallize thinking to words, words are very exact and it is very definite when you get all done and when you get done writing it all out, read it out loud to yourself and then put it away for a few days and come back to it again and you might want to start the little writing experience like this.
I am filled with resentment because, and then write it out.
It’s interesting what happens when you get honest about your feelings.
I always have loved Charlie Shed’s writings on one occasion.
He and his wife had had a big fight and, uh, when he came home, there was a note to him on the refrigerator, it said dear Charlie, I hate you love Martha.
Hm. Be just that honest.
Then number three, after you think it through and write it down I want you to work it out.
Now, stay with me here.
A man who had been married for 50 years to the same woman was asked the secret of their marital bliss.
Well, he said, it’s kind of like this.
When the wife and I got married, we made an agreement that whenever she was bothered about something, she would just tell me off and get it out of her system.
And if I ever got mad at her about something, I would take a walk.
He said, I guess you can attribute our marital success to the fact that I have largely led an outdoor life.
Thank God.
I’m not suggesting that you can overpower anger with exercise.
Please don’t think I’m becoming psychological here.
But there is some evidence that exercise is helpful in dealing with strong emotions and exercise, takes the edge off of anger and gives it an outlet and keeps it from building up a backlog of pressure.
Just put it in there and think it through number four, you need to talk it over and I want to tell you who to talk it over with.
I don’t know your friends. The only one I know that you know is the Lord God himself.
So I’m going to recommend that you talk it over with Him, that you take it to the Lord in prayer.
Maybe you should read to the Lord, what you wrote down on your paper.
Maybe you should say Lord God. I want to tell you why I am filled with resentment.
Here’s the reason and read what you put down on paper you say.
Do you actually say stuff like that to Almighty God? Absolutely. Don’t you think he already knows it?
I mean, it’s not going to be any big surprise, but it’s going to be very helpful to you to express to him what you really feel in your heart and began to deal with the issue of forgiveness in Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 15 that we referred to earlier in the front part of the verse, there’s a very interesting reference to the grace of God.
It says, looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God.
How many of you know that when you have resentment in your heart, the one thing you need more than anything else to deal with it is grace.
You need God’s grace. You need to come to God and ask Him for the grace that He alone can give you to enable you to deal with that, which has been done to hurt you.
When you sit down deep in the grace of God who has forgiven you every sin you have ever committed when you began to ponder what God has done for you, when you consider His grace in your behalf, and you begin to enumerate all the things that God has done in forgiving you and you take a bath in the grace of God.
All of a sudden, you begin to have the power inwardly to deal with the resentments that have built up in your heart.
You see, we forgive other people with the forgiveness wherewith we ourselves have been forgiven.
That’s the message of the word of God we can forgive because God has forgiven us.
If you have not accepted the forgiveness of Almighty God for your sin, then it will be very hard for you to forgive someone else.
But if you’re a Christian here today, and almighty God has forgiven you for all of your sin, out of the reservoir of His forgiveness for you.
There is always enough forgiveness to reach out to the people who have harmed you in any way.
So you begin to talk it over with the Lord and as you talk it over with the Lord, you begin to tell him how grateful you are for his forgiving you.
And you begin to understand that his forgiveness of you is the grace that he imparts to you to forgive others as well.
And then finally, when you’ve talked it over with the Lord, you give it up, you give it up, you don’t hang on to it.
You give it up. two little boys were quarreling one day they had this big fight, Johnny and Bobby.
Johnny said I ain’t never playing with him anymore. I’m so mad at him.
I don’t ever want to see his face again.
The next morning, he got up, got his baseball glove and put his hat on was going out the door and, and his mother who remembered what he had said the day before she said, Johnny, I can’t believe it.
You’re going to play with Bobby. I thought you said you were never play with him again.
He said, oh, me and Bobby’s good, forgets that’s what we need to be, isn’t it?
We need to be good for Getters.
We carry grudges because we determined to Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross was once reminded of an especially cruel thing that someone had done to her years before, but she didn’t seem to recall it.
And her friend said, don’t you remember it? Clara Barton said, no, I distinctly remember forgetting it.
Hm. Did you know that the only part of the Lord’s prayer that is repeated is the part about forgiveness?
Did you know that forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and clear at the end as an addendum to the prayer is this statement from Matthew that says, if you forgive men, their trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive men, their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.
God’s method of giving up our resentments is through forgiveness.
The Bible tells us that we’re to love our enemies and bless those that curse us and do good to those that hate us and pray for those that spitefully use us and persecute us.
And then it says, if we do this, we will demonstrate that we are truly the Children of Almighty God like father, like son, because God has forgiven us all of these things that are listed in this verse.
When we forgive others who have done those things to us, we demonstrate that we belong to Him.
We have the traits of the father in us.
And it’s the only way you can explain some of the forgiveness that I’ve heard about people who have been abused and hurt and wounded and sinned against.
And yet when they bathe in the wonderful grace and forgiveness of almighty God, they find the reservoir of strength that comes from him.
And as he, as their father has forgiven them, they become like their father as his child and they forgive others.
That’s how you get rid of resentment.
Be kind one to another, tender hearted forgiving one another.
Even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you. Do you see it?
All of us have read some of the stories about Corey.
I was in uh her homeland several years ago and saw the place where she grew up.
I’ve always been interested in her life.
She was a great woman after she was released from prison where she and her sister had been in Ravens Brook.
Her sister actually died in that prison. Her father died in another concentration camp.
And when she got out of the Nazi prison.
She determined that she was going to travel all over Germany and that her main mission for the rest of her life was going to be to preach forgiveness because she knew that Germany was filled with many Jewish people who had been so brutally damaged that they would end up continuing the damage through their own hatred of those who had hurt them.
And so she went preaching forgiveness everywhere she went. That was her only message.
She said that one Sunday morning, she was in Munich and a man came forward to greet her and she recognized him immediately.
She remembered how she and the other women prisoners were forced to take showers while this man who had come up to her after the service had ogled and taunted her in her naked helplessness.
The man standing before her had also taken great joy in his cruelty of Betsy, Corey 10 boom’s sister.
He spoke. He said it is wonderful that Jesus forgives all our sins.
Just as you say, you mentioned, Ravens Brook. I was a guard there.
But since then, I have become a Christian.
I know that God has forgiven me, but I would like to hear it from you as well.
Will you forgive me?
And Corey said she stood there paralyzed. She couldn’t forgive.
Betsy had died at the hands of this man. She herself had been humiliated.
At the same time, she said I was so ashamed that I could preach so fervently about forgiveness.
And immediately after my sermon, be confronted with something I couldn’t forgive.
And so she said, I did what only I could ever do in a situation like that.
She said, I looked up to heaven to Almighty God.
And I said, oh God, forgive me because I can’t forgive.
And she said, immediately, she began to feel the sense of God’s forgiveness of her.
And she said, I don’t even remember how it happened.
But I felt my hand go up to reach out to the hand of this man.
And I reached out and shook his hand and I said, you are forgiven.
And immediately the S S general was set free.
And Corey said, but that’s not all I felt the burden lifted off of me and I was set free.
God has given to us my friends this wonderful privilege of forgiveness.
And when we forgive resentment goes away, and I need to tell you that if you have not ever accepted the forgiveness of Almighty God for your sin, you will have a very difficult time finding within yourself, the grace to forgive someone else.
It’s only as we truly understand that we are sinners against Almighty God and that He has in his grace reached down through his son, the Lord Jesus Christ and given us life everlasting and forgiven us of our sin.
As we begin to understand that He has done that for us.
Then out of that, we can do it for others.
But it starts, first of all with accepting his forgiveness for your sin and asking him to become your savior.
Now, my friend, if you’re in doubt as to whether or not you have offended God, let me just assure you that your unwillingness to let him rule over your life is an affront to him because he created you and he loves you and he has paid a dear price for you.
You know, sometimes I think we don’t understand that our active or passive rebellion against God is a great sin in God’s eyes.
But when we come to him and submit to him and ask God to forgive us.
He does it freely unconditionally eternally.
And then out of that forgiveness, we can deal with the resentments we face in our own lives, which Giant is intimidating.
You perhaps fear has your number. Maybe loneliness. Has you locked out?
The reality is that you never walk alone and never have to live defeated.
You can overcome, debilitating sin and temptation slaying the giants in your life is designed to help you stand against the giants that seek to destroy.
You remind yourself of God’s promises with turning points.
Giant Slayer scripture cards, each card features specifically selected verses to help you overcome the giants in your life.
Learn to recognize and banish giants from the promised land of your life and walk in victory.
Request yours today?