Hebrews 12:14-15 — Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled;
I am constantly checking myself for bitterness. How about you? How about those who are near and dear to you?
I have tended to be rather passive about bitterness – try to keep the peace and live right, and expect that no root of bitterness will spring up to trouble me. I had something of awake up call over the past few days, and realized that this text doesn’t say “lest any root of bitterness springing up in you trouble you” it says “any root”. It might be a root in someone else!
As Christians it seems we have two responsibilities when it comes to bitterness. The first is to make sure that neither we nor those we love have a conflict with anyone else. I used to be confused about two passages in Matthew:
Did you get that? If your brother has anything against you, or if your brother (or sister, I’m sure) has upset you — either way it’s the Christian’s job to effect a reconciliation. I get it now. It’s my job to try to fix what’s broken because otherwise bitterness will be planted and take root.
My other Christian responsibility is to make sure that neither I nor anyone I love has anything against God. Moses gives as one reason for the covenant between God and Israel: “lest there should be among you man, or woman, or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood;” It’s a warning against the twin evils of idolatry and apostasy. We need to be encouraging each other not to put anything ahead of God in our lives, and not simply to slip away. It’s an easy path to go down — something goes wrong in our life, we wonder why God let it happen, we decide He should have stopped it … We skip church, nobody comes to get us and we never come back, the root of bitterness is planted. We need to go and love those in danger of falling away so that nobody fails of the grace of God, no root of bitterness springs up to trouble us, and no one is thereby defiled.