Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my thirty eighth episode. Tonight I want to present to you a sermon that I delivered live at my church. I’m going to talk about thankfulness and bitterness, and about how these two attitudes contradict each other. The text we are going to use is 2 Corinthians 4. Please enjoy.
None of us are exempt from enduring ups and downs in this life. I am convinced that our reaction to life’s circumstances is a responsibility that each one of us must take ownership of. Sometimes, our surroundings become so crazy – so destabilized – that our reaction becomes the only thing we can control. Your free will and your relationship with God are the only things that cannot be taken from you. These are the only parts of life that truly belong to you. And you might say, “Wait a minute. Am I really free? I didn’t choose for this to happen to me. I didn’t choose to be born here. I didn’t choose to look like this. I didn’t choose to be the victim of oppression or the target of abuse. I didn’t choose to pay for the sins of someone I never knew.”
And you’re right, you didn’t. Evil is alive. Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. Every morning when we wake up we walk out into a world that is a minefield of suffering. One mistake, one wrong step, and everything you love in this life is gone. Ladies and gentlemen, that is the bloody existential condition. Evil is alive. But so is God. Oh, I’m so thankful to say that – so is God. And he’s watching you. He’s watching you to see how you will react to each moment of life. For some of you, your greatest test will come in the form of suffering and grief. But for others, your greatest test will come in the form of success and power. There are many ways that we can react to life but today I want to focus on just two of them. We can focus on these two because I believe they are opposite sides of the same coin. In any given moment you either have one or you have the other. I am talking about thankfulness and bitterness. Thankfulness and bitterness cannot coexist. I want you to listen to me very carefully here: you cannot be thankful and bitter about the same thing at the same time. These two attitudes dispel each other.
When a person betrays you, you can be thankful that God revealed the true nature of that situation – or you can be bitter about how you were unjustly wounded. When you lose your job, you can be thankful for all of the new opportunities that God has in store for you, or you can be bitter about how your plans were terminated against your will. When you are caught up in the throes of addiction, you can be thankful for the ones who care enough to intervene – or you can be bitter about how they won’t accept you just the way you are. When you lose a loved one and you go through the dark valley that is grief – you can be thankful that your loved one is with God, or you can be bitter about the time that was stolen from you.
How many families get together each year in the name of Thanksgiving only to descend into bitter arguments with one another? How many Christians go to the Lord in prayer with the hope of thanking him, only to be dragged down into the pit of bitterness about all of the things that have gone wrong? It is easy to be a victim. Cain was a victim. Cain blamed Abel and he blamed God for his rejection. I want to tell you this morning that if you are feeling like a victim, count your blessings. You may have nothing left – like Job – but if you still draw breath then what you have is an opportunity. An opportunity to be with God and that is the crown jewel of all blessings. The world has enough victims. The world has enough cynics. The world does not have enough Christians.
We are not perfect and we never will be perfect. We are walking around in bodies that are dying a little more each day. You know this. God knows this. But if we will do our best to carefully thank God in our times of weakness, then his strength will shine through us into the world. The Apostle Paul says that light cannot have fellowship with darkness. The light drives off the darkness and in the same way, thankfulness drives off bitterness. I’m not going to pretend that this is easy. You will have moments where it will take unshakable faith to thank God instead of cursing him. The famous pastor Rick Warren says, “Thanking God in the midst of suffering is the deepest form of worship.”
So, we have set the scene for the text that I want to examine with you today. Here’s what we know: evil is alive, but so is God; you are fragile and there are more ways for you to suffer in this life than you can possibly imagine; our free will and our relationship with God are the only two things that truly belong to us; God is watching us to see how we will react in this life; there are many ways to react, but two reactions which cannot coexist are thankfulness and bitterness. Now, I want you to open your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 4. Let’s begin with verse one.
Therefore, since God in his mercy has given us this new way, we never give up. We reject all shameful deeds and underhanded methods. We don’t try to trick anyone or distort the word of God. We tell the truth before God, and all who are honest know this.
These are loaded verses. First, we see that by his mercy God has given us a new way of life. Paul is referring to the New Covenant. He’s saying that there is a right way of thinking about life and a proper mode of being. The postmodern relativists would tell you there is no right way – only what you feel is right. Paul is saying that there is in fact a narrow path and that path is built on truth and truth does not depend on your feelings. He is saying that because God has revealed truth to us by his mercy, we must never give up in our pursuit of it. We don’t sugar coat the word of God. How many times have you been tempted to tell a lie so that you could preserve the peace? Everyone in the west is being suffocated by the snake of political correctness. Everyone feels it and it’s not being stopped. That is because you cannot stop censorial fascist ideologies when you have abandoned the concept of absolute truth.
Paul says, “We tell the truth before God, and all who are honest know this.”Isn’t it interesting that Paul refers to honesty as a necessary precondition for being able to recognize truth? If you are a compulsive liar and if you don’t repent then you run the risk of losing your ability to recognize truth. Every time you tell a lie you open up a little pocket of chaos in your life. Imagine a man who is terrified of being hurt so he portrays himself as some kind of hardened, aggressive person. What happens? He intimidates and scares off all of the gentle, loving people and the only ones left who will have anything to do with him are the other hardened and aggressive people. By broadcasting a false image, this person has surrounded himself with the very people he was terrified of in the first place. The road to love never leads through lies. Verse three.
If the Good News we preach is hidden behind a veil, it is hidden only from people who are perishing. Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe. They are unable to see the glorious light of the Good News. They don’t understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.
Here again we see this dynamic of truth and lies. Christ is the truth and the Good News is about Christ. Satan is the Father of Lies and those who are deceived cannot recognize truth. Therefore they cannot recognize Christ. Does this mean that they are condemned? Not if they turn away from the lies and toward the truth. Jesus says in Matthew 13:15:
For the hearts of these people are hardened, and their ears cannot hear, and they have closed their eyes–so their eyes cannot see, and their ears cannot hear, and their hearts cannot understand, and they cannot turn to me and let me heal them.
The only human beings who cannot be redeemed by Christ are the ones who do not want to be. There is no stain on your life that cannot be cleansed by the blood of Jesus, it is simply a matter of trusting him. Now, here we have an insight into bitterness. There are many things that can harden a person’s heart. Fear, hatred, lust, envy, greed, pride, and bitterness. When you harden your heart you reject the Holy Spirit’s attempt to indwell you. This muddles your compass and destroys your bearing on truth. A hardened, bitter heart will speak lies as if they are no different from any other words. But here’s the rub. You don’t need a hardened heart to tell a lie. Many professing Christians tell lies. You can be in a good place – in right relationship with God, and lie your way into rebellion against him. This is why it is crucially important that we do not lie. If our society collectively rejects truth, the outcome will be absolutely fatal – down to the neighborhood. But bitterness cannot take hold in your heart unless you allow yourself to be deceived by the lies of Satan. Because if you recognized the truth, that Christ died so you might have eternal life, then instead of bitterness you would be overwhelmed with thanksgiving. Verse five.
You see, we don’t go around preaching about ourselves. We preach that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we ourselves are your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.
So, we know that a heart which has been hardened by bitterness is bad. We also know that a callous disregard for the truth can get you there very rapidly. So what is the opposite of a hardened heart? This is a person who is brave enough to love; bold enough to speak the truth; wise enough to listen; kind enough to forgive; and humble enough to thank God every step of the way. A person with these qualities has the light of God shining through them. A person who commits themselves to shining this light in all of the dark places becomes the very resemblance of Jesus Christ. Verse seven.
We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.
Human beings – as a rule – are painfully ignorant, ridden with bias, bent toward evil, and helplessly breakable. And yet we have the capacity to reflect the image of the perfection of Christ into the world. How could we possibly do this apart from God? We can’t. It is a fact of reality that all of us have flaws. You will be much happier and much more productive if you shift your focus away from trying to attain perfection and toward the power that God has given you to fulfill your specific calling in advancing his kingdom. Let me explain this.
Before you were born, God tailored you for a very specific assignment – a mission set aside just for you. There are seven billion people alive on earth right now and not a single one of them is an exact replica of you. I believe with absolute certainty that if you don’t step up to fulfill your God-ordained potential and carry out your mission, no one else will. You are like a key. God has designed you to unlock part of his plan. No one else can fit the lock that is meant for you. And I’m convinced that if you fail to do this you leave a void in the fabric of reality – and chaos rushes in to fill it. If your heart is still beating then your job is not finished. This gives you an incredible responsibility that should scare you to death. So how do you get over that fear? You trust that God is right about all of this and that he is right about you. Who else in your life do you afford this type of trust to? The ones you love. In the same way, you must love God. 1 John 4:18 says:
Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.
If you love God and you trust God then he will give you the courage to be vulnerable. Once you step out and get to work, you won’t feel fear, you’ll feel meaning. That’s because God is with you and he never leaves you. What you do in this life matters, not just for you, but for the entire world. That means you are more valuable than you can possibly imagine. The fact God would trust you with such an opportunity is the hallmark of a love that you can be eternally thankful for. Verse eight.
We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.
When we read these verses we see that even the Apostle Paul had reasons to become bitter and cynical. What is life? If you take God out of the picture and look through the lens of nihilism then life becomes a sick joke. We are conscious beings who have no idea why we are conscious. We don’t want to die and we don’t want to suffer. We stumble around stupidly because we are unable to figure out this world but the two things all of us know with certainty is that all of us will suffer and die. So the two things we want to avoid are the only two things that are guaranteed to us.
But here’s the good news. If you bring God back into that picture, the suffering and death are still there, but the meaning of them has changed. Here’s one way to think about it: Have you ever been at the peak of an intense workout? Your muscles are burning and your heart is racing. Anyone who works out long enough will tell you that they begin to enjoy these sensations. But imagine if there was a disease that caused your muscles to burn and your heart to pound. It would be unbearable. If you just woke up one morning in bed and your muscles were burning and your heart was racing you would call 911. The only reason you don’t call 911 when you feel these exact same sensations during a workout is because you understand why they are there. Life functions in the same exact way. The Bible is the context to the story of your life. If you don’t know your context, then the sensations of this world are going to feel wrong and intolerable. What better way to make someone bitter than to subject them to wrongful and intolerable pain? You must know your context.
This process is exactly what Paul is describing in these verses. Pressed on every side by troubles but not crushed because God we know that you are here. Perplexed by the arbitrary tragedies but not driven to despair because God we know that you are in control and you will work things out for good. Hunted down by Satan and tempted at every turn but steadfast to finish the race because God we know that you give us strength. Just when things are going well we catch a blow that knocks us down but we get right back up because God we know that you are in our corner. Our suffering weighs us down but we carry that cross anyway because God we know that you suffer alongside us. Paul and company knew why they were here in this life and we can also know why we are here – and that will make all the difference. Even the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, said to be the father of nihilism, felt this truth when he said, “A man with a why can bear almost any how.” Verse eleven.
Yes, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus, so that the life of Jesus will be evident in our dying bodies. So we live in the face of death, but this has resulted in eternal life for you.
So we live in the face of death. I think the temptation to be bitter and cynical is founded in this fact. No one really likes to think about death, yet it hangs over our lives in some capacity every single day. I know that I’m not the only one who has thought about the day that the phone is going to start ringing with bad news. We feel that if we prepare ourselves for it then it won’t be as bad. But I don’t think there is any preparing for it. You will always feel like you could have done something different. Like God could have done something different. You will always feel like you didn’t spend enough time with that person. You will always wonder what they would have thought or felt during each moment you live without them. No matter what we do and no matter how we prepare, death always feels foreign to us. Like it’s not supposed to happen. I believe that’s because we are meant for eternal life. When it comes to death, the difference between bitterness and thankfulness is faith. Only when we put our faith in Jesus Christ that he will save us and bring us into eternity are we able to give thanks to God in light of death. Verse thirteen.
But we continue to preach because we have the same kind of faith the psalmist had when he said, “I believed in God, so I spoke.” We know that God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to himself together with you. All of this is for your benefit. And as God’s grace reaches more and more people, there will be great thanksgiving, and God will receive more and more glory.
Do you want to make the world a better place? Tell them about Jesus. Tell them about the cross. It is no accident that Paul says when more people know God’s grace there will be great thanksgiving. I remember what it was like to feel the sands of time whittling away at my mortality. How could I have enough days to love as much as I wanted to love? You blink your eyes and ten years are gone. Every day I see people who are crushed by anxiety because they are trying to fit infinite aspirations into a finite lifespan. We all do this. If you want proof, ask yourself this question: When is a good day to watch your loved ones die? When is the day coming when you will have spent enough time with them? The truth is, that day is not coming. That day will never come because you have an eternal spirit that is bound to a mortal body. The only way that you can be set free of that anxiety is by living your life in light of eternity by trusting God. My favorite verse in all of Scripture is John 10:10 where Jesus says,
The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.
Can you have a rich and satisfying life without Jesus? Some say you can. I say, they have not yet experienced the fullness of life, no no. I say it’s easy to mistake naivete for security. I say it’s perfectly easy to stroll through life in blissful ignorance until you encounter something or someone that causes you to touch the evil that is inside of you. Then the bottom falls out from everything you thought you knew and you descend into chaos. That is the thief stealing, killing, and destroying the hollow edifice of meaning that you labored so hard to construct without God. Don’t build your life on the foundation of yourself. Build your life on the cornerstone that is Jesus and you will weather the storms that are coming. Verse sixteen.
That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
There is something interesting to think about when it comes to the nature of time. Every one of us has experienced a moment where we wished time would stop and we wondered why it had to go by so fast. Every one of us has also experienced a moment where it seemed like God’s greatest mercy was that time kept going. How many of you have had food poisoning? When I had food poisoning, every hour felt like a week. Right now, there is someone somewhere who is experiencing their highest peak in this life. And right now, there is also someone who is experiencing their darkest valley. The fact that God does not allow us to stop time is evidence of his love and his fairness. Ask yourself: Would you have the strength to resist the temptation to freeze time during the best years of your life, even if you knew the expense of doing so was to freeze someone else in their agony? We can be thankful to God every day that he remains sovereign over time.
Before I close I want to read to you Psalm 100 – it is a psalm of thanksgiving.
Shout with joy to the Lord, all the earth! Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before him, singing with joy. Acknowledge that the Lord is God! He made us, and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving; go into his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.
What I want you to take away from this sermon is that thankfulness and bitterness are attitudes that contradict each other. If you are overcome by a sense of bitterness, or if bitterness keeps making its way into your life, I have some advice for you. First, it is common for people who struggle with bitterness to put on a face of happiness for those around them. I’m going to ask you not to do this. The reason is that it’s actually impossible to conceal your bitterness without constantly focusing on it. Instead of concealing it, I want you to shift your focus away from the reasons you have for being bitter and toward the blessings in your life. Focus on the good things and be thankful for them. You will see that this thankfulness – if it’s genuine – will drive off your bitterness.
Now, it’s possible that you don’t have many things to be thankful for. God knows that many people have very, very hard lives. If this is the case for you, I want you to focus on the future God has built for you. C.S. Lewis pointed out a common mistake that Christians make when they think about heaven. When it comes to heaven, many Christians look back into their past and pull out their best memory – the highest point in their life – and then they graft that image onto what they think heaven will be like. The reality is, when it comes to heaven the best point in your life simply can’t compare. Heaven will be infinitely better than the highest experience you’ve had in this life. God is not going to reconstruct your past, he has built a future for you and he has paid for that future on the cross. That is a sacrifice that all of us can be thankful for.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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