The roots that are down deep within us can be very, very deep. The root of bitterness is the result of unbelief (Hebrews 12:15). It grows because we go through our circumstances and we evaluate them without faith. Even when we go through the chastening of the Lord, we don’t interpret it correctly. We are scourged by the Lord and we don’t understand it. And so the facts of what happened become distorted in our minds.
And you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by Him; for those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives.” Hebrews 12:5–6.
If someone were to counsel with you about your life, and the Holy Spirit would indicate, “This is not true; this is false,” would you say, “I swear before God, those are the facts!” But you either interpret the facts with faith or you look back upon them with the unbelief that was in your heart at the time and you say, “No, that is not the way it was.” Over the years, I have observed people who have had grievances and then tried to find out what caused those grievances.
And I have found that you can build up a bitterness that is not justified—it is unbelief. If you had had faith at the time, two things could have happened: First, God’s dealings with your own life would have been perfected sooner; and second, you would have had quite a different attitude toward those who seemed to sin against you. Your attitude about the grievances that came from other people would have been entirely different.
Look at things the way God looks at them. I wish all the history books had been written by God instead of by human beings. I can see by the Scriptures that Abraham made mistakes.
When God looks at a man like Abraham, however, the final input is that God looks at his faith; He records that in the ledger and He counts it to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3, 20–22; Galatians 3:6).
God looks at a man who walks with faith and He writes that man’s history a little bit differently than you would. You would be very realistic and say, “The facts are the facts.” But God looks and says, “No, the facts are what I make them. They are what I make them.” Are you thinking, “But that isn’t fair!” Yes it is. He is God. He can do anything He wants to do. He is God. You’re not God; you do not sit in judgment over everything that has happened from the dawn of history until now (Romans 14:7–14). It is not your prerogative to go back and judge Adam and ask, “Did God make him sin, did the devil make him sin, or did Eve make him sin? Who was it?” You will never be able to figure it out. You don’t have the wisdom. Besides that, you weren’t there.
You are not intelligent enough to evaluate all those things. But God is! God looks upon my heart (I Samuel 16:7), and I know that He has written my history differently than I would write it. God grant that I never write an autobiography, and God forgive the men and women of God who have written one. In every case, they have sought to justify themselves or to explain the circumstances of their life. I would never want to do that, but I am very happy that God is keeping a record. He is keeping the books on the things that happen (Malachi 3:16; Revelation 20:12–15). When He looks upon a life, and He has forgiven it, He might even scratch His head and say, “Wait a minute. What are the facts about that man? What was it that he did? What was it? Oh! I buried it in the sea of My forgetfulness (Jeremiah 31:34; Micah 7:19). The only thing that I remember is that he opened his heart to Me, and he believed My Word, and he walked with Me. I count that to him for righteousness.”
Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:6. Even so Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Galatians 3:6.
The final input is: What are you going to do about it? “Oh, I am going to believe that God just forgave me everything and that I have a good clean slate. I don’t have to have any memory of my failures. The blood of Jesus Christ has washed away my sin (I John 1:7–9). Hallelujah!”
“What about your brother?”
“Oh, you should have seen what he did to me!”
The closest you can come to playing God is when you say the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive me my trespasses, O God, as I forgive those who have trespassed against me” (Matthew 6:12).
Maybe they didn’t really trespass against you, but in your mind those are the facts: “They didn’t look at me; they didn’t speak to me. They don’t like me; they don’t want me around. They think I have failed. They have this bad opinion of me.”
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. Ephesians 2:4–9.
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:31–32.
The grace of God has come not only to blot out everything in the past for you, as though it had never been, but maybe God did that for your brother too. If it is good for you, it is good for you to give it to someone else too. Maybe you should look at your brother through the eyes of God and say, “My brother may have sinned against me, but at this particular point, I am not going to judge that. I see that he is trying to walk with God, so I am going to forget everything of the past.”
Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Matthew 18:21–22.
“Then summoning him, his lord said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you entreated me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow-slave, even as I had mercy on you?’ And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. So shall My heavenly Father also do to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.” Matthew 18:32–35.
How easy it is to build up prejudices, decisions, observations, conclusions, and forget all about what God is really doing, how He is working all things out in His own will (Ephesians 1:11; Philippians 2:13).
It is sometimes difficult to forgive God for what He has done to you, unless you have a right spirit. If you are unforgiving of your brother, you are probably not forgiving God either. If you have judged your brother by the facts of circumstances and happenings, you probably are judging God by the fact that He is scourging you and chastening you, instead of by faith saying, “He scourges every son whom He receives” (Hebrews 12:6). The important thing is not the facts which a carnal human mind insists on interpreting (Romans 8:6–7); it is a heart that is constrained to believe His Word and trust what He is doing in your life (II Timothy 1:12).
Do not excuse yourself by saying, “I have failed because this and that happened to me. They did me a great wrong, they persecuted me, they harassed me. It was a conspiracy; it wasn’t fair.” Forget it. The one who guides your life is the Lord (Romans 8:28–31). The most important thing in the whole world is your faith to walk with Him. There isn’t anything greater than that.
But My righteous one shall live by faith; and if he shrinks back, My soul has no pleasure in him. And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him. Hebrews 10:38; 11:6.
Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Romans 5:1–5.
Forget about the offenses of your brother. Just forget about them and say, “God forgave me and I forgive him. He is my brother.” Then if the brother comes to you and says, “Let’s talk about that problem we had,” you can answer, “What problem?” God will give you the grace not only to forgive, but to forget just the same as He forgives and forgets your sin—to remember it against you no more forever (Jeremiah 31:33–34). God grant that we have an opportunity to stand at the shore of God’s sea of forgetfulness, and to throw all the things in there that need to be thrown in.
“For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” Hebrews 8:12.
“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws upon their heart, and upon their mind I will write them.” He then says, “And their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.” Hebrews 10:16–17.
You might feel, “I don’t know about that. I just don’t like the way God does things.” That’s natural. David was a man after God’s own heart; he was one of the greatest psalm singers in all the history of sacred music. I wonder how many of the Psalms in the Bible he wrote. He was truly a man after God’s own heart (I Samuel 13:14), a man whose heart was fixed on God (Psalm 57:7). But what about David? Well, he loved God. He had many good intentions; he gave himself to them with a real dedication. He may have thought, “I went through all of those years, believing the promises to become king. Now, I have become the king and how wonderful it is. All those years, how faithful I have been! There is nothing in the world wrong with me. I am a man after God’s own heart. How many years did I have to hide out in a cave when Saul was trying to kill me? (I Samuel 22:1.) From the days of my youth, I have gone through things. How many times did I dodge Saul’s spear just in time? (I Samuel 18:10–11; 19:9–10.) I went through all of that, and now I am king. Now I am going to do something special for God. I am going to bring the ark back to Jerusalem. God’s presence will be there and it will be wonderful.”
But on the way up to Jerusalem, they did not carry the ark with staves the way God had instructed Moses to do (Exodus 25:13–15). Instead, they carried it in a new cart pulled by oxen. When Uzzah, one of the drivers, reached out to steady the ark as the cart came to a rough threshing floor, he dropped dead (II Samuel 6:1–7, KJV; I Chronicles 13:1–10, KJV). How did David feel about that? The next verse tells us that he was displeased with God (I Chronicles 13:11, KJV). David was displeased with God. God had blessed and blessed David and he was the king. He had gone through the hard place; he was ready for the blessing. Then all of a sudden, David drew back, and he was a little displeased with God. He didn’t like the way God was doing things.
You may not like the way God does things either. You may not like the way God has done things in your church. Everything that God is trying to do to bring you out of the old level may displease you a little. God has a lot of people in His Kingdom, or on the verge of it, who are not too happy about what He does.
Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Hebrews 12:11, KJV.
One thing you can count on is that He scourges every son whom He receives (Hebrews 12:5–6). The way you receive that scourging determines your future. If you rebel against His dealings, or you become displeased and bitter in your spirit over what He orders for your life, you lock yourself into a prison. And you will stay there until you overcome that bitterness in your spirit, because the chastening of the Lord was for a purpose: for your spirit to become a partaker of His righteousness (Hebrews 12:10–11). If you don’t become a partaker of His righteousness, but you persist in a human perverse reaction to His chastening, He will deal with you until you react by accepting His righteousness in it. There is no other answer. You will go through it. It has a purpose. When you go through the dealings of the Lord, say, like Job, “When He hath tried me, I shall come forth as pure gold” (Job 23:10). Let there be a determination in your heart that God will do the work in your spirit through what He subjects you to.
Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Thy word. It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Thy statutes. The law of Thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Psalm 119:67, 71–72.
David was displeased with God; he had a grievance. It seems that no man ever drops out of his walk with God without having legitimate grievances. However, if you were to make a list of grievances, you might find that I may have more of them than you do. But I intend to keep submitting to the Lord. Here is a promise He gave me many years ago: “I will perfect that which concerneth you” (Psalm 138:8).
I know that He is going to do it. He will perfect that which concerns me. That promise is so real to my heart.
For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. Philippians 1:6.
You may feel, “Well, that’s all right for you, but I am displeased.”
One thing about throwing rocks at God is that they always come back down, and nobody will be hurt but you. You may throw one right straight up, but it will always come back down.
What did David do when Uzzah died? He was displeased with God, so he said, “Let’s forget this whole thing. I want out of this. I am not going to go on with this anymore. This is a justifiable grievance and I am through. We will just put the ark over here at the house of Obed-edom and go home. We can get along without the ark. I’ll go back to being the king. After all, God anointed me to be a king so I can be a ing.” But after a while, the rumors began to come back to David, “Do you know what God is doing? He has blessed old Obed-edom.” Obed-edom had received the presence of the Lord, and he was blessed.
Then David became angry because of the Lord’s outburst against Uzza; and he called that place Perez-uzza to this day. And David was afraid of God that day, saying, “How can I bring the ark of God home to me?” So David did not take the ark with him to the city of David, but took it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. Thus the ark of God remained with the family of Obed-edom in his house three months; and the Lord blessed the family of Obed-edom with all that he had. I Chronicles 13:11–14.
Remember the story of the old man who took in an abandoned baby he found on his doorstep? Years later, when the one who abandoned the girl came back to claim her, the old man said, “When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to him who takes it in.” That saying is true. Turn away the blessing and put it at the house of Obed-edom, and you will walk away unblessed; but God will bless Obed-edom.
One thing that God wants in the churches is shepherds after His own heart (Jeremiah 3:15). He wants shepherds and He wants sheep. He wants the compassion of the Lord to flow between them (John 21:15–17).
One of the best things you can do about this is to search your heart for any bitterness which may be there. Get rid of it, or sooner or later it will catch up with you. You will realize that you got locked in to your bitterness because somewhere back there you turned from fixing your eyes upon the Lord and the Word that He had given you and you began to interpret everything by the circumstances and the apparent facts of the situation. It is possible for people to have heard a Word from the Lord, and turn away-not because the Word was not true, but because they did not have a fixed focus on that Word. They were looking at something else.
Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance, and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary and lose heart. Hebrews 12:1–3.
The real battle is a battle over the Word. You may be saying in your heart, “I have listened to the Word, and I believe the Word! I believe all of it.”
Yes, but have you been faithful to that Word?
“No, some things happened and I withdrew.”
What were you?
“Well, I was a Church at Study teacher. I was an elder. I was very busy doing this and that.”
What are you now?
“Oh, I’m nothing. I withdrew. I had my grievances.”
But when God looks at you He will ask, “What did you do with the Word that I made real to your heart?”
“Well, some bad things happened to me.”
What difference does it make what happened? A Word from God, a commission from Him, is the only thing that you have to remember. Anyplace where you have deviated from that, you should repent. Get rid of any bitterness in your heart, and come back to the Word (Psalm 119:57–59; Revelation 2:4–5).
“Well, I used to prophesy and I had a lot of revelation. I was a real prophet of the Lord.”
What made it stop? God didn’t dry it up. You are the one who did it by your bitterness, evaluating your circumstances with unbelief. That root of bitterness can be so deep that it becomes the one thing in your life that destroys you and many about you.
See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled. Hebrews 12:15.
How many who read this are thinking, “I will take this Word from here. I’ll take heed to it; I’ll believe what you say. I will get back to the Word, back to the anointing.”
“ ‘And I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart.’ ” Jeremiah 24:7.
This thing of forgiving your brother is very important (Matthew 6:14–15). There are people who have grievances against me that may be justifiable grievances. I could have grievances against maybe those same ones that could be justified also. But I don’t care what a man has done or what he is doing. I want to look away from those things and say, “What did God say over that man?” That’s where my faith will be.
“Do not judge lest you be judged yourselves. For in the way you Judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it shall be measured to you. And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Matthew 7:1–5.
Judge not. If you try to judge me when I am floundering because I am under the dealings of the Lord, you would be making a big mistake because you could not see at all what was really happening or evaluate it correctly. There have been times when I have seemed to fail people miserably. But nobody knew that I was on the brink of death, fighting for existence. In their minds, I was anointed to be something that I wasn’t being to them. Like David, I was hiding in a cave, to survive (I Samuel 22:1). I was in the midst of many things. You may have judged me for it, but you will have to see what God has done in me now. You will have to totally reject that evaluation and bitterness and judgment that you have built up through the years.
I don’t want to see you or to know you either by the facts of the past. I want to know each one by the faith that he has before God now. That is the only way God will know you too. You have some changing to do. You may still have the same nature that you had when God started dealing with you, so you will have to become a partaker of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4; Ephesians 4:22–24).
It may not be easy. When you come back to the Lord, He will say, “Oh, my son is back again.” Then He will pick up the whip and start right in on you. “Crack!” But this time you are going to submit, because this is evidence that you are a son—He scourges every son whom He receives (Hebrews 12:6).
Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you. James 4:7–10.
You will have an opportunity, if you are not going to believe His Word, to turn away from it (Hebrews 11:15). There must be that occasion, because those who are going to be the sons are those who will be led by the Spirit (Romans 8:14). And you will not be led by the Spirit unless there is a willingness to do His will and a renouncing of your own will (John 6:38; 7:17; Mark 14:36; Hebrews 10:7). Without that, you will never reach mature sonship—it won’t be there.
Do you realize what this message is really saying? It may seem to have hit a little hard. It is a time for us to just open our hearts and say, “Lord, not only forgive me, but help me to forgive my brother. Help me to bury it all in the sea of forgetfulness (Micah 7:19), and be ready to go on and build upon the Word of God, just the way You spoke it at the beginning.” There is nothing wrong with that vision, and God hasn’t changed. His counsels are forever (Psalm 33:11). He says, “I am the Lord, I change not” (Malachi 3:6).
My focus right now is, “Lord, deal with me that I have a right spirit before You” (Psalm 51:10). That’s where I am and I think you ought to be there too. In these days to come, we will be tested beyond measure if we have not fixed our eyes upon Jesus, “the author and the finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).
For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction which came to us in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves in order that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead; who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us. II Corinthians 1:8–10.
This Word has to become a personal thing with us. Are you thinking, “Tell me what to do. Is there one simple thing I can do? Do I have to go back and make right all the words that I have said and the rebellion that I have had against God?”
Do you remember the old story about the woman who went to her pastor and said, “Forgive me for my gossip.” He ripped open a pillow, and let the wind scatter all the feathers. Then he said, “Can you pick up all those feathers? Now you know what forgiveness is.” None of us can do it; none of us can take back all the words said in rebellion and bitterness. But we can come to a moment of faith in which we say, “Oh God, forgive me. My big sin was that I have sinned against Your Word. Help me to turn my focus once and for all from the things that made me like that. And let me so fix my focus on You and on Your Word that I will never be guilty of that again. From this time on, I will have a right spirit.”
A right spirit is always based on a faith in God’s Word that refuses to negatively analyze things that are contrary and opposing you, and the adversaries that come against you. His Word is the important thing.
That Word is what keeps a man’s spirit right even while he is in an Egyptian dungeon as Joseph was (Genesis 39:20–23; Psalm 105:17–19). His brothers had wanted to kill him, but instead they sold him to a company of traders for a few silver coins (Genesis 37:18–28). Years later, because he had not allowed a bitterness to build up, Joseph was able to say to his brothers, “You may have meant evil against me but God meant it for good.”
“And as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” Genesis 50:20.
That is what you can do. Say, “I am not going to bitterly evaluate what is happening to me. I know God has His hand on my life. So, from now on, I am not turning my heart away from what God has said over me, over my brother, or over my church.” You personally decide, once and for all, “I am through evaluating things with my carnal mind that leads me to a bitterness of spirit. I am going to view things as God sees them!”
As you read this Word, open your heart and declare, “This will be the turning point of my heart. This will be the end of my bitterness! I am going to get to the depth of it! From now on, my focus will be: What has the Lord said?”
Some of you ought to repent over that sensitivity that has misinterpreted things that have happened all round about you, a sensitivity of the flesh. It wasn’t a discernment or a sensitivity that came from God, or you wouldn’t have been provoked by it, you wouldn’t have been upset and bitter because of it (James 3:14–15). Some of you ought to say, “God, forgive me for being so oversensitive, and help me to become a person focused on the Lord. Forgive me for my reacting wrongly to these things.”
You don’t know what is in the heart of your brother! You can’t know; you are not able to interpret it correctly. You will have to be as forgiving to him as you want God to be forgiving to you (Matthew 6:14–15).
You will find that if you determine not only to forgive, but to forget, you will have the mind and thinking of Christ. The mind of Christ is not remembering your brother’s offenses and forgetting yours! The mind of Christ is forgetting them all.
Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?”
Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a certain king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. And when he had begun to settle them, there was brought to him one who owed him ten thousand talents. But since he did not have the means to repay, his lord commanded him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and repayment to be made. The slave therefore falling down, prostrated himself before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything.’ And the lord of that slave felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt.
“But that slave went out and found one of his fellowslaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay back what you owe.’ So his fellow-slave fell down and began to entreat him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you.’
“He was unwilling however, but went and threw him in prison until he should pay back what was owed. So when his fellow-slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their lord all that had happened. Then summoning him, his lord said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you entreated me. Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow-slave, even as I had mercy on you?’ And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. So shall My heavenly Father also do to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.” Matthew 18:21–35.
If you want the mind of Christ, you will be determined, “I am not going to think anymore with memories of bitterness, memories that have evaluated things on a carnal, human plane. I am going to set my heart upon God who will write the past according to the rules of faith, not according to anything else.”
For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Romans 8:5–8.
The mark of religious people in the days of Christ was that they were easily offended, and they retaliated. But the mark of the Christians in the early Church was that they had love.
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:34–35.
In I Corinthians 13, we read that love takes no account of any wrong done to it, never writes it down: … it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered. I Corinthians 13:5. God help us—we need that whole new way of thinking. We loose ourselves from the places where our wrong thinking has locked us in and we grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard lest, being carried away by the error of unprincipled men, you fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. II Peter 3:17–18.
We turn our hearts to the Word, to a new day in the Scriptures, and a fresh day in the prophecies that have come over us (I Timothy 1:18; 4:13–15). We turn our hearts to fresh days of commission and the compassion of Christ in our hearts by which we forsake not His commission: Tend My sheep (John 21:15–17).
What God was really looking for all the time was your faith in His Word. He wanted you to evaluate things by His Word instead of by circumstances. Your failures came because you didn’t have faith. So the thing for you to do is to set your heart on His Word. Repent for your unbelief of His Word. That covers it all. Embrace that Word. The change comes because you believe His Word. You determine in your mind that from henceforth and forever, there shall be no rule of evaluation but, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Read the first Psalm. The first verse speaks about the wicked man sitting in the seat of the scornful, standing in the way of sinners. He walks in the counsel of the ungodly. Why? All of that is carnal, human thinking. But what man is it that God blesses so that he brings forth his fruit in season, and in whatever he does, he prospers? (Verse 3.) He is the man who meditates on the Word! (Verse 2.) He lives in the Word and he lives by the Word and therefore God blesses him. That man is like a tree planted by the rivers of living waters; everything that he does is going to prosper. But the ungodly are not so! They shall be blown away like the chaff, for the ungodly shall not stand in the presence of the righteous (verses 4–6).
When Job was a man perfect in all of his ways before the Lord, just what was he doing? He was building an altar, making sacrifices for sin (Job 1:1–5). Yet, he knew his own heart; he knew his ways were perfect before the Lord. Who was he repenting for? Who was he making sacrifices for? It was for his children (Job 1:5). He said, “Perhaps they may have cursed God in their heart. Maybe there is something that they don’t understand, and in their hearts they are evaluating it.”
All the way through the book of Job, the test on Job is: Evaluate what is happening to you by this man’s thought or that man’s thought. He heard many opinions, but Job said, “When He has tried me, I will come forth as pure gold” (Job 23:10). Do you see the difference? Do you see also that you not only forgive those who have trespassed against you, but as Job did, you come before the altars of the Lord, and you intercede for them too (Job 42:7–10). You believe, “God, I know You have forgiven me. My way may be perfect, but I am interceding with repentance for my brother, for my sister, for those who have sinned against me. I not only forgive them but I become active to pray for them.”
You’ll find that everyone who has become bitter and then recovered out of the snare of the devil did so because there were those who interceded for them.
And have mercy on some, who are doubting; save others, snatching them out of the fire; and on some have mercy with fear, hating even the garment polluted by the flesh. Jude 22–23.
But refuse foolish and ignorant speculations, knowing that they produce quarrels. And the Lord’s bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged, with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. II Timothy 2:23–26.
If any one sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this. I John 5:16.
At Shiloh, we had a casualty list—not to blame them, but to pray for them. We refused to accept any casualty as being a thing of finality. We prayed and have seen several come back. The psalmist said, “Lord, if Thou should mark offenses who should stand? But with Thee there is plenteous mercy” (Psalm 130:3–4). Not only do we take this for ourselves but we shall pray for one another until this is the spirit that fills the whole Body.
Lord, hear my voice! Let Thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If Thou, Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared. Psalm 130:2–4.
This is a hard-hitting Word that puts your hand to the plow and you are not going to look back (Luke 9:62). Remember Lot’s wife, and refuse to allow yourself to look back (Genesis 19:26; Luke 17:28–33). Instead, set your heart upon the Kingdom and upon the Lord, and go forward. Allow nothing to distract you on the right hand or on the left, but determine to go forward. This is the goal and objective that God has for you—that the day of fruitfulness will come.
Although the Lord has given you bread of privation and water of oppression, He, your Teacher will no longer hide Himself, but your eyes will behold your Teacher. And your ears will hear a word behind you, “This is the way, walk in it,” whenever you turn to the right or to the left. Isaiah 30:20–21.
The readout of the human computer of unbelief is bitterness. The readout of faith from God’s computer is righteousness.
The interpretations of the carnal mind is death; the interpretations of faith in the Word is life.
One good thing about being chastened by God is that you know He has not disowned you.
A right spirit refuses a negative analysis of circumstances.
The faith in the Word is the key of a right spirit and the antidote for bitterness.