And if you would, please turn with me in your copy of the Word of God to Genesis chapter 50. I think for the penultimate sermon, I think I will come back again next week and give a sermon on Christian burial. From the end of this passage, I regularly get asked questions about cremation and burial and so forth and so on, and which is the right way. Is there a right way? Does it matter? And I'm pretty sure I will address that next week. Well, I've said it now, so I kind of have to. But this week we're in Genesis 50 and verse 15. And this morning I want to speak to you about a problem that I think is present in a lot more of our lives than we would like to confess, and that is the problem of dealing with bitterness and how not to become a bitter person, how not to let a bitter life make you into a bitter person. Listen carefully, please. This is the Word of God. When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, it may be that Joseph will hit us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him. So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, your father gave this command before he died. Say to Joseph, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you, and now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father. Joseph wept when they spoke to him. His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, Behold, we are your servants. But Joseph said to them, Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive. as they are today. So do not fear, I will provide for you and your little ones.' Thus He comforted them and spoke kindly to them. The grass withers and the flower falls off, but the Word of God endures forever." Well, it was 1921, shortly after the end of the First World War, and David and Sven Flood, a young man and his wife, felt called to go to the mission field, and they and their two-year-old son left America and they went to Africa, to Congo. what came to be known as Zaire, and is now again the Democratic Republic of Congo. And they're one of the first missionaries to go to that land. And they went, and they joined another couple called the Eriksons. And they were actually Swedish. I don't think they left America. I'm getting ahead of myself. But they left Sweden, and they went to the Congo. And they got there. It was tough sledding. They had to hack their way through the jungle to even get to the villages they were targeting. And when they eventually reached the villages after weeks of hard slogging through the jungle machete in hand, Village after village after village angrily refused to listen to them. The chiefs and the witch doctors were concerned that this new God, Jesus, would anger their current gods, and they wouldn't give them a hearing. Eventually, they reached the biggest village in that part of the Congo, nestled at the foot of a mountain, and there they received an even more angry rejection from the chief. They weren't even allowed to set foot inside the village. And so, the two families went up, and they built a small compound, you might say, up on the mountain on the slopes. And there they lived, and there they prayed for these villages. And the only contact they had was a little boy who would go up twice a week and sell them eggs and chickens. And David was amazed to watch Sven's love for this little boy. She would be always sharing the gospel with him, winsomely reaching out to him. And after several years of patiently sharing the gospel with this little boy, David was shocked to see the boy receive Christ as his Savior in their hut. And he'd come back twice a week, and Sven, the lady, would read the Bible to him and pray with him and so forth and so on. He'd go back to the village and back up again. Well, before long, the Eriksons got pretty tired of this. It wasn't a very fruitful field of labor, so they left and went elsewhere in the Congo to minister, and David and Sven were left alone. About that time, Sven fell ill with malaria and became deathly ill, and she also fell pregnant with their second child. David was very concerned that she was not strong enough to bear the baby, and as the pregnancy went on, David watched Sven get weaker and weaker and weaker until eventually another A child was born, this time a little girl, that they called Aenea. And David was very concerned as he watched his wife give birth, and his fears came to fruition. Seventeen days later, his wife died. Well, David was in a bit of a pickle what to do. He stuck there in the side of a mountain with a young child and a baby. And so he knows there's no way of getting this baby through the jungle back to Sweden, so he gives the child up for adoption into the hands of the Erikson family, and they take over the child. And David heads back to Sweden. Not long after that, the natives in the area where the Eriksons were ministering poisoned the Eriksons, and they died too. And little Ania was again an orphan and given up to adoption again, this time by another missionary couple who realized that this place was no place to raise a child, and they took the child back to South Dakota where the man became a pastor and then a seminary professor. and they changed her name to Aggie, and Aggie grew up there and became known as the child without a country because she had lost two parents and had a pretty tough sledding growing up. Well, David Flood went back to Sweden, where he renounced his faith and became an atheist. And he married again, raised four more daughters, and as is often the case in such situations, David turned to the bottle for comfort and became an alcoholic. And we'll leave the story there, but suffice it to say he was famous in the town and in his home as the man who refused to even let the name of God be mentioned in his home. God had abandoned me and my family in the Congo, he said, and now I shall abandon God. And he was lost in a sea of bitterness, bitterness. I wonder this morning, are you lost in a sea of bitterness? It's amazing that can happen to Christians. much more commonly than you might like to admit. People are like the coal mines in central Pennsylvania. They've been on fire for the past sixty years, underground, smoldering away, burning. No flames, no smoke, but they're on fire. And likewise, many Christians' hearts And many of your hearts, you know it and I know it, and if you don't, everybody around you knows it. Your hearts are burning, smoldering with bitterness. Life has made you a bit of a cat. You know, cats are interesting animals. They can taste sour and they can taste bitter, but cats can't taste sweet. They haven't got the taste buds for it. They can taste meat, of course, but not sweet. Now, I've offended all of the baseball lovers in the congregation a week or two ago. I don't want to offend all of the cat lovers here, as mad as you might be, but has life made you a bit of a cat? You can taste sour, and you can taste bitter, but you can't taste sweet. Has life made you a better person? And this morning in our sermon, I want to talk with you about this subject of dealing with betterness. And the tragedy, of course, is that most better people don't realize that they are better. They'll freely admit their life's better, their marriage is better, their children are better, their job is better. But they fail to make the connection that bitter experiences have become a bitter heart and led them to become a bitter person. It doesn't always go together, of course, but so often it does. And maybe you're here this morning and you think your life's bitter, and God says to you this morning in our sermon, actually, it goes a little bit deeper than that. A bitter life has made you into a bitter person, and I want you to address it this morning, God says. I want you to stand beside Joseph and learn from him, because if anybody has a right to be bitter, it's Joseph. His brothers are convinced he's a bitter person. Why? Well, because anyone would become bitter if they experienced what Joseph experienced. His brothers betrayed him, stabbed him in the back, metaphorically, almost actually, and then sold him off to be a slave in Egypt. And then there was Potiphar's wife and the whole mess there and the Me Too affair, and then there was the languishing in jail for years and years and years. And then when there was hope, it was dashed when the cupbearer forgot him for two full years until Pharaoh dreamed a dream. And Joseph's brothers are quite certain that he will treat them the way they would treat him, the way they did treat him. They're quite concerned that Joseph has developed into the worst kind of bitterness, the smiling kind, the cold, calculating kind, that Joseph's been biding his time all these years until daddy pops his clogs. And then when daddy pops his clogs, he's going to let the brothers have it, right and royally, both barrels. They're pretty convinced that life has made him a bit of a Napoleon. I remember Napoleon at the end of one of his battles walking about the battlefield that had become a graveyard, and he said, oh, he said, nothing smells so sweet as the corpse of my enemies. They're quite sure life has made him bitter, that his circumstances have made him learn those two lessons, how to hate, hate those who caused your pain, and how to plot to get your own back. It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him." And so, they come to him with this manipulative apology. Daddy was dying on his deathbed, and before he died, his last words when you were at the restroom, he said, please tell Joseph to forgive the transgression of his brothers. so much easier to have Daddy ask for forgiveness than for you to begin that way. And now then, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your Father. Even their forgiveness is wrapped up with the remembrance that He's God and Daddy's God. And we're your servants. They're trying to atone. We'll do anything you want. We'll be your lackeys. Just forgive us. Don't let your bitterness lead to our death and the death of our children. They're concerned that life has made Joseph a bitter person, pining the smiles. Does life need you a bitter person? I want to think for a moment this morning about how bitterness works in a person's soul. Bitterness is what happens whenever disappointment punctures our hearts. I thought last night, it'll lose. And I was working on my sermon late, and I thought I'd already got Catherine in prayer. I hadn't totally forgotten Mother's Day, but I did think, need to get cards. So I jumped in the car, drove up to Lose to get some cards and some other things. And when I was there, I walked in, and there was this glorious, it was the biggest Mother's Day balloon I've ever seen in my entire life. I thought, I'll get that for Catherine. So I grab it and then walk around the store. And as I'm getting different things and then going to the self-pay checkout, I look up at the glorious balloon, and it was looking a bit flat. I was thinking, oh. It was kind of sagging a bit at the top. I thought, oh. So I pull it down, and I look at it and squeeze it and then, psst! That's not a good sign. So I look, and there's a tear, and quite a large tear, actually. And when I was walking around the store to get some other things, I must have caught on something unbeknownst to me, and it cut it, and it was leaking helium. So I remembered there's another one of those, and I went to get it. And this is like 11 o'clock last night. And as I'm going to get it, another man came in with the same thought. He's holding the balloon. I was really unhappy, because I got another balloon, a smaller balloon, still a nice balloon. I trust Catherine. I'm sorry it's not the biggest balloon in the store, but it was still a nice balloon to wish my wife a happy Mother's Day, right? But disappointment works a bit like that. It punctures our heart. What comes out is not helium. What comes out is faith and hope and love. The little granules of faith, hope, and love are too small to stay inside a punctured heart, and they leak out. The capacity to trust God, to love God, to love other people, to have hope for a bright tomorrow, all of those things leak out of a punctured heart. But the amazing thing is, the heart is empty, becomes empty. Not completely. frustration, the feelings of hatred, futility, and fury, they're big enough to stay in behind the tower. And the heart, empty of faith, hope, and love, becomes filled with these things, fury, futility, frustration, and the feelings of hatred. Bitterness is what happens when we internalize anger at unjust disappointment. It's not fair. It's not right. And we get angry. It's the slow burn anger inside us. As we engage in what David Paulson calls, and he's referring to a phrase in Cry the Beloved Country, which is a novel about racism in Africa, but in that one of the chief protagonists in the book is tempted to engage in a long list of fruitless rememberings. It's a great word. A bitter person, that's what they do. They engage in a long list of fruitless remembrances. They ruminate on their disappointments. They rehearse all of the betrayals, all of the wrongs that have been done to them, all of the wrongs that have been done by them, and how their life just stinks, and they become a bit of a Bradford pair. Do you know what a Bradford pair is? We've got one planted in our neighborhood. It ruins a good walk every spring. The blossoms of a Bradford pear, it looks like a cherry blossom, but it smells like, we'll not talk about that, but it's terrible stench. Dead fish is supposed to be the nearest thing you can talk about it. But it's a rancid flower. And you engage in this long list of fruitless remembrances, and you become a Bradford pear, a soul empty of faith, hope, and love, driven away from God, driven toward the darkness, despair, despondency, bitterness. Has disappointment punctured your heart? Or maybe I should rephrase that. Where has disappointment punctured your heart? Because we live in a fallen world and there's disappointment everywhere, outside of us, inside of us. Disappointment with America, disappointment with our government, disappointment with your teachers at school, disappointment with your parents, disappointment with your children, disappointment with your wife, your husband, and the little fragile foil covering of your heart is so easily punctured, inevitably. Where has disappointment punctured your heart? Is faith, hope, and love leaking out? Fear, frustration, fury flooding in? Are you a bitter person? How can you know? Well, it's simple. Jesus says, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. How do you speak? What are your words like? Are your words sweet or bitter? That's a rule. If you don't know, ask your wife or husband. Bitterness comes out. Bitterness is like a, while the heart's punctured, though, it's under pressure, like a pressure, let me change the illustration. It's under pressure, like a pressure cooker. If you're bitter, you probably get angry a lot. The big things, the big betrayals, the big backstabs in the past, also the little things. A pair of socks left on the bedroom floor 5,032 times. The wife who never initiates intimacy, the husband who never kisses his wife goodbye, never buys me a balloon on Mother's Day. I'm sorry, husband, if I've dropped you in it. Forgive me. I think it was the first Mother's Day balloon I've ever bought, so I'm sorry. As I was carrying it out of the store, actually, before it burst, this woman walked by and goes, wow, that's a big balloon. And I could hear a thousand words of animosity towards her own husband leaking out of her heart as she admired the size of my wife's balloon. your children, those little eye rules of disrespect, your parents controlling you, little things, bitterness. If you're a bitter person, you probably feel frustrated a lot. Everything feels personal. This is what got me, actually. The Lord's really been convicting this sermon for me, but it might not be for any of you, but it's for me this morning. You know, I'm conscious, I get really, it's a small thing. I was out yesterday, I realized my gutter's overflowing as I was writing the sermon, and I've seen all of the leaf gutter guard thing, adverts, I'm envisioning my house rotting. So I get the ladder to go up on the roof to try and clean out the gutters, and, I'm there, and there's that kind of doo-dah, the Y-shaped thing that you put on the end of your ladder so you don't destroy your gutters climbing up to them. It rests on the roof. But trying to get it on, I couldn't get it on. And I couldn't get the wee linchpin through to hold it safely, and I'm trying to get this thing on, it's bucketing with rain, there's lightning flashing overhead, I'm thinking about to get struck, holding this ladder in the sky, I'm going to get struck to death by lightning, you know. But it felt personal, this little Y-shaped thing at the end, it was no longer a piece of aluminum, it was personal, it was resisting me. A little pin impeding it, it won't go on with its anger. And I'm thinking to myself, not for the first time, why do you get so frustrated, Neal, about something so silly? And there's the pressure cooker inside. The little things make you angry a lot because there's a lot more going on in your soul, right? You probably find yourself being impatient a lot. My life is hard enough and you're in my way. Hurry up, child, get out of the house. Have you ever said that to your children? Or feel that inside? My life's hard enough. How dare you drive so slowly in an i40? You probably grumble a lot, criticize a lot. You have that awful blindness that always sees the thorn and never the rose. You're cynical a lot, too. Everybody else, they've got ulterior motives. It's easier for them. Their life's easier for them. And you just, everything, you look through manure-colored glasses. When someone's life's going well, why is their life so easy? They've got a much nicer husband than I have, much nicer wife than I have, much better children. It's so easy for them. If they walked in my shoes for a while, oh, they'd know what life was really like. You probably get callous as well when someone's hurt. You probably don't show much mercy. Secretly, you're glad in your heart. My life's a living hell. And you stubbed your toe, child. Well, good. Pull up your big boy pants and stop your gurning. You can't be kind and bitter at the same time. There's no room. It's like light and darkness. They can't exist in the same place. This room's either light or it's dark, but it can't be both, right? And your heart's like that too. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted. And the reason Joseph can be so kind to his brothers here is he's not let bitterness flood into his heart. It's been driven out. So the kindness can come in. You probably get defensive a lot. Somebody criticizes you, it's just too painful to admit more blame. You're the hardest person to forgive yourself. Your life's full of muck and mess, and it's all your own creation. And then when somebody else dares to criticize you, they're just adding to the list. And you probably medicate a lot too. Alcohol, smoking, kettle cooked chips. A thousand ways that we medicate the pain in our heart to try and anesthetize the bitterness. And when you talk, your words are much better at taking away hope than giving hope. It comes out. Are you a bitter person? The thing about bitterness, though, as well, is it doesn't just come out. It also likes to hide. It disguises itself in the soul. It's like the background music in Lose. It's there in the background. You hear it but never really listen to it. And so, bitterness hides where it hides behind pain. Pain is its own justification. Pain never says to you, are you right to be in pain? Stupid question. Of course, my fingers, I've got a sore finger and I hit it with a nail or a hammer and it's agonizing. Of course I'm right to feel pain, it's agonizing, I don't like it. Bitterness also tends to hide behind self-pity. When you're in pain, any response feels legitimate. I'm not a bitter person, I'm just in pain, can't you see it, right? A person will say. Bitterness also hides behind anger. That's important to realize that. The connection between bitterness and anger. Bitterness is internalized anger. Anger's being called the moral emotion, right? Because anger is that emotion in your heart that screams or whispers, that's wrong. David Paulson says in his wonderful little book, How Good and Angry, it's a wonderful book, Anger, he says, is how we were made to react when something important is not the way it ought to be. Something important is not the way it ought to be, and anger stands up on our soul and says, that's wrong. It tells you what's wrong with the world, what's wrong with your wife, what's wrong with your husband, what's wrong with your children, what's wrong with your parents. What's wrong with your friends or lack of them in the school? What's wrong with your colleagues? What's wrong with your boss? What's wrong with everything? And the thing about an angry person is anger always feels right. Because anger is saying, that's wrong, and you can't say that's wrong unless you are assuming that you're right. And so angry people always assume that they're angry about the right things, and they're angry in the right way. It's an inherently self-righteous emotion, anger is. Are you an angry person? angry at all the wrong things in your life, all the wrong people in your life, all the things that hurt you, all the people that hurt you. And the bitter person internalizes that anger. They entomb it like the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl in layers of concrete and hardness. And inside their concrete little heart, their anger is like a wasp trying to get out of an office, banging itself against the window constantly. And it's not just one wasp, it's a thousand wasps, a swarm of them in your hearts. And bitterness also tends to hide behind hatred. It's one thing to hate the pain, but how quickly that hatred morphs into hatred to the ones who have caused your pain or aren't doing more to take your pain away. And you think, I'm not angry. I'm not bitter. I hate pain. I'm not a pessimist. a realist, and pain feels bad, but you can't see the fact that actually your hatred of the pain is morphed inevitably into hatred of those who have caused the pain. Bitterness comes out, and bitterness likes to hide behind all these things. Are you a bitter person this morning? I rather suspect some of you are. It's written on your face. Someone said to me once, actually, the laughter lines or the frown lines never lie. When you fold your face enough times a certain way, it comes out. It's like Mrs. Twit. You remember Mrs. Twit? It's one of my favorite books, The Twits by Roald Dahl. Her husband was this kind of awful, unkempt man with this kind of huge, again, no offense to those of you with beards, but he had this huge beard that captured all of his food for the past week. And Roald Dahl describes it in the most horrid way. But he goes on to describe his wife. Mrs. Twit was no better than her husband. She did not, of course, have a hairy face. It was a pity she did not have a hairy face because that would have covered some of her fearful ugliness. Take a look at her. Have you ever seen a woman with such an uglier face than that? I doubt it. But the funny thing is that Mrs. Twit wasn't born ugly. She had quite a nice face when she was young. The ugliness had grown upon her year by year as she got older. Why would that happen? I'll tell you why. If a person has an ugly thought, it begins to show on their face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly, you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick out teeth, but if you had good thoughts, they'll shine out of your face like sunbeams and you'll always look lovely. Nothing good shone out of Mrs. Twit's face." Are you internalizing anger this morning? I spent a while talking about that this morning because it's such a sticky thing, such a common thing, and such a sneaky thing that we often don't realize it. The thing about anger, as one author says, a little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. On some of your death certificates, it'll say, so-and-so was killed by heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, alcoholism, But the real reason will be bitterness. It'll kill you. It'll eat out your heart and destroy you. And so, I want to ask you this morning, are you a bitter person? And if you are a bitter person, how can you stop being bitter? How can you let the wasps out of your soul? And Joseph gives us three things. He's a good Presbyterian. First of all, listen now, remember evil is real, deliberate, and personal, or real, intentional, and personal. Better maybe. Evil is real, intentional, and personal. Do not fear," verse 19, "'for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me.'" Now stop there a second. That's huge. So often when people apologize, we will say, but shouldn't say, oh, don't worry, it doesn't matter. It does matter. Evil matters. And minimizing evil does nobody any favors. It doesn't do you any favor. It doesn't do them any favors. You've got to isolate evil in your heart. Don't minimize what was done. It's really wrong. And Joseph says to them, you meant evil against me. You did it. You did it to me, and you meant to do it. Now, he's not saying that bitterly, I understand, sorry. But it's true, right? Grace has changed the nature of juice of soul, but grace has done nothing to change the nature of evil. And you'll not be healed if you try to minimize it. You've got to identify it as evil and call it evil. And what I want you to do this morning and tomorrow and the next day, and it might take a long time because some of you here, because I thought about that this day as the rain was coming down on my head and blessed Ben came out to help me when he realized I was an extremist outside about to have my first heart attack or be struck dead by lightning. Sometimes we wonder, you can feel tremendous frustration and not know where it all comes from. It can build up over years and years and years and years, like the crud on some of your baseboards that never get cleaned, right? And they can be really hard, and you might need help. You might need me or Kyle or Phyllis or one of the elders to help you work through in your heart exactly where does all this bitterness and anger come from. But the first thing you must do is document all of the disappointments that have punctured your soul and label them for what they are. They are real evil. Don't minimize it. Now, this isn't a fruitless remembering. This is a fruitful remembering because you want to isolate them, identify them so you can give them to God. David Paulson says in his book Good and Angry, which is the best book I've ever read on anger. It's tremendous. Angry people, he says, always talk to the wrong person. They talk to themselves, rehearsing the feelings of others. They talk to the people they are mad at, reaming them out for real and imaginary feelings. They talk to people who aren't even involved, gossiping and slandering. But chaotic, sinful, headstrong anger starts to dissolve when you begin to talk to the right person, to your good shepherd who sees, hears, and is mercifully involved in your life. So that's the first thing. Remember, evil is real, intentional, and personal, and it hurts. Real evil has been done against you. Your husband has failed you. Your wife has failed you. Your children have failed you. Your parents have failed you. You were sinners after all, but identify where has life hurt you? How has life hurt you? When has life hurt you? And the list is long. It's like that advert, where does depression hurt? Everywhere. When does depression hurt? Every time. Who does depression hurt? Secondly, remember your pain, first, and the evil. Secondly, remember God. Remember God. Joseph says in verse 19, "'Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?' Seriously, so much of our problems in life would be fixed if we remembered that God is God and we are not. And it's important to remember God because the angry, bitter person, the real target of our anger is God. Nobody is an Arminian in their bitterness. They know God is responsible. And the bitter person wants to usurp God's right as Creator. Maybe you're angry that God didn't make you pretty or handsome or smart or whatever. Why did God make me this way? And I said to you, shall the thing formed, said to him who formed it, why did you make me like this? Who are you, O man, to answer back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, why did you make me like this? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use? When I was a little child in primary school, like first grade, and we did the school nativity play every year, and everybody wanted to be Joseph or Mary. I didn't want to be Mary. I didn't want to be the baby Jesus, but Joseph would have been nice. Even one of the shepherds, me, at one of the trees outside the stable. I mean, it was really, it wasn't a particularly demanding acting part, you know, wear brown trousers and a green t-shirt and stand like this. But I was really upset. I was really upset. That was really bugging me. Like, I wanted to be Joseph, and I'm a tree. But the director decided that was my part. And you've got to remember that God, He looks down from heaven, He sees all of the sons of men. He fashioned you wonderfully in your mother's womb with the particular strengths you have, gifts you have, and weaknesses and liabilities that you have. He understands all of our works. He formed all of our hearts, our personalities. If you're a quiet, retiring person, He made you that way. If you're an extrovert, He made you that way. And that can bring liabilities that we are responsible for, but God made us the way He made us. If you're kind of a naturally retiring person, He made you that way. And hating yourself for the way God made you is really a hatred toward the One who made you, the parents He gave you, the life He gave you. So, the Creator, we also resent God as ruler when we're bitter. Why didn't you do more to help me? Why didn't you stop this? You know, if I were God, I would have done things differently. That's the real question. As one of the Puritans said, when I was a young man, if I had God's power, I would have changed many things in my life. But now that I'm old, if I had His wisdom, I'd leave everything just as it was. We resent God as judge. We want to be judge, jury, and executioner. That's how anger works. And God says, do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law. We judge the God who made His law when we judge other people. We climb above our pay grade. We want to take vengeance. And God says, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. It doesn't belong to you. The bitter man forgets all of that. God is creator, God is ruler, God is judge. And he becomes like Naomi. Remember Naomi coming back from Moab? And Ruth in her train, and people see her, that's Naomi. And she says, don't call me Naomi. The name means pleasantness in the Hebrew. Call me Mara, which means bitterness. Why? For the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. And she had no idea, the word Almighty in Hebrew doesn't just mean God's raw power, it means God's beneficent power who always brings his people home. And where's she going? Home. And where's she going home with? Not empty. She's got Ruth tagging along behind her, the mother of Obed, who's the mother of Jesse, father, and the father of David, the king. So, remember God. I isolate all of the pain in your life, from whether it was something small like being left on the bench as a teenager ten thousand times, which adds up like Chinese border torture, through to the huge, catastrophic abuses you've had in your life, and bring them to the feet of God, the God who creates, the God who rules, the God who judges. then let God be God and take your place beneath Him. And thirdly, remember providence. Evil is real, it's intentional, it's active, but so is God's providence. God's care of you is real and active and intentional and personal. This world, this life isn't just home to all of your frustrations, all of your pains, all of your disappointments. This world is also home to God your heavenly Father who created it and fills it. and surrounds you every moment of your life like the water surrounding the fish. And flying fish and whales and great white sharks can breach the water's surface for a brief moment before they're pulled back into it again. They can escape the touch of the water, but you can't escape the touch of God's providence. It surrounds you constantly. Everything that you are, everything that you do, everything that has been done by you can only come to you, Christian, if it can penetrate the shield of God's loving kindness. Many are the sorrows of the wicked, but he who trusts the Lord, loving kindness shall surround him." God's providence is real. You might not be in control of your life, but that is not to say your life is out of control. It's active, it's personal, and the controller of your life is not the fat controller in Thomas the Tank Engine, it's not fate, it's not luck, it's the kind hand of the Lord who is your shepherd, whose goodness faileth never. The Lord is my shepherd, therefore I shall not want is the sense of the Hebrew, we said last week, I think. Your Father is your Shepherd. All things, all things come from Him. All things come through Him. All things lead back to Him. They come from Him. It's providence. And we let the wasps out of our heart when we bring all of our disappointments, and we say, Father, this came from You and through You and to You. Now, God is not the author or the approver of sin, but Jesus on His way to the cross was delivered over. By who? By Judas for money, and by Herod and the Jews for jealousy, and by the Romans for fear. And the same words used, paradidomi, delivered over, delivered over, delivered over. And if Jesus only thought about the bitterness of man delivering him over, well, there's no salvation there, is there? But the same words also used of the Father. How shall He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, not also with Him give us all things? And you let the wasps out of your heart when you take each and every disappointment by the scruff of the neck to the cross of Christ, and you say, my Father delivered this over into my life and delivered me over to this disappointment. No matter how painful it is, no matter how big it is, no matter how small it is, you bring it to the providence of God and say, it is the Lord, let Him do as seems fit in His sight, and you let the wasps out. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters." Back to front, I think. But He's leading you somewhere that's better than here. That's where hope springs eternal in the Christian soul. My Father is my shepherd. He's led me from the past to the present and to the future, and there are better days ahead when my shepherd will wipe away all of my tears. And bitterness can only thrive in a soul who willfully forgets that. And the problem, if you have this morning, the problem I have whenever we are bitter and angry, is we allow our soul to be infested by a thousand unprayed-through fears and frustrations. We hold them up and suck them in. We keep the wasps in. We refuse to bring them to our Good Shepherd and say, Father, I trust You despite all these things. I trust You even because of all these things, because even though they feel bitter and painful, I know that You are my Father, and while I'm disappointed, You are training me in the school of disappointment for better things. I'm asking You to trust. It's not, faith is not the irrational leap into a fantasy world where pain doesn't matter anymore. No, faith is the rational leap into the real world where all of our pains, all of our disappointments, all of our frustrations are overruled by the kind hand of our heavenly Father and for our good. And you're going to have to do that day after day after day because the wasps like to return, and often we leave the window open because we want them to return, because we like feeling sorry for ourselves. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light, said no idol to any soul ever. But Jesus says, come to me. So back to Aggie. What happened to Aggie? So Aggie, in God's providence, happened to marry this pastor, who became a seminary professor. And at the seminary professor near Seattle, there was a large Swedish population in God's providence. And one day, she went out to get her mailbox, opened the mailbox, and there was a missionary magazine from a Swedish missionary society in her mailbox. Strange. Opened it up. She couldn't read a word of Swedish, but flicked through the pictures, and she came to this picture of a mountain and a hut and a grave. Oh, strange. And there's the picture, and it zoomed in on the cross on the grave. And on that cross, it said, Sven, flood. Interesting. So she went to the seminary that day and met one of the professors who spoke fluent Swedish and said, what's this about? And he goes, oh, OK. It's about this missionary, I don't know, 50 years ago. No, a long time ago. Less than that. 20 years ago. I don't know. I can't remember. Anyway, about this missionary who lived. He and his wife went to this place. Terrible, very unfruitful. Only one guy was saved. And then the mother died, and the father left, and the daughter was given over to adoption. But the child, he was saved, grew up in the town, and eventually persuaded the chief to let him build a school. And in that school, he taught the gospel, and revival broke out among the students, and the students all turned to Christ. And before it was all said and done, the village turned to Christ, and the chief turned to Christ, and there were 600 Christians there. So Aggie heard that, and she immediately spoke to her husband, and they arranged a trip to go to Sweden to try and find her father. She didn't know any of the story. She got to Sweden, found the Flood family name, and found the family, found the four daughters, and they said, listen, your father is a bitter, angry man. He's had a stroke. He's bedbound. He's an alcoholic. If you even mention the name of God to him, he loses temper. So she went into the bedroom, and there's liquor bottles all over the floor, and the old man's lying in bed. And she walked in and said, Papa. And he rolled over and said, Ania. And she went and hugged him, and he said, oh, I never wanted to give you up. And she hugged him, and she began telling him about the story. And he said, don't talk to me about God. God abandoned us in the Congo. And she said, no, daddy, remember that little boy who was converted? Yes. He went to the town, and he told, he built a school, and he was older, and shared the gospel. And the whole town, 600 men and women, boys and girls, and the chief turned to Christ. Your life wasn't a waste. God didn't abandon you. And she said she felt her father just relax in her arms. All the wasps came out of his heart. and he died a few weeks later at peace in the arms of Jesus. Well, the story doesn't even end there, right? So fast forward to Aeneas' 25-year wedding anniversary. Her husband and she go to London, and there's a big mission conference there they want to attend, and they go to a mission conference, and there's a missionary from The Congo, he's the superintendent of the church in Congo, has come to share. There's now 110,000 people in the Congo who believe in Jesus, and there's a thriving church, and it's a great story. At the end, Agi and Nia goes up to the superintendent and says, do you know David and Sven Flood? And he said, do I know them? They're the most revered names in all the Congo. They were the first ones to bring the gospel to our land with any success. And Aggie said, well, I always heard the story of the little boy who was converted and went down to the village. And the superintendent said, ma'am, I am that little boy. I'm the little boy who brought the eggs and the chickens to your parents, and God saved me. And through this work, God brought the gospel all across the land. And so some years after that, they went to the Congo and went to that place, and he preached. He visited her mother's grave, and they went down into the village, and the superintendent, the little boy, the chicken seller, preached a sermon that day from John 12, 24. I tell you the truth. Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed, but if it dies, it produces many seeds. And Jesus is here this morning and He's saying, listen, some of you here, your bitterness is killing you, literally killing you. Let it go. I know there's all the sins others have committed, all the sins you've committed, it's all a mess. Jesus has been punished. He's borne the sorrows of it away. He's been pierced through for it. He's died for it. Come to me, Jesus says. Let the wasps out of your heart. They want blood. Let them drink themselves full at my cross. Want to sting someone? Let them sink their stings into me, Jesus says. Let the bitterness come out and let me come in. The sweetness, the kindness, the love of the gospel. It'll take years to put the pieces back together again, but let's begin the work now. Let's put your bitterness to death before your bitterness kills you. Come to me. Stop carrying burdens I never designed you to carry. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. Take my yoke upon you. Acknowledge my lordship, that I've brought you here for a purpose, a good purpose. You might not see it, even in this life, but there's a purpose. The God of David and Sven flood is your God and your shepherd. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. I am meek and lowly of heart, and you will find rest for your souls." And there's a part of your heart, no, no, I want to hold on to the bitterness. Like when your husband says to you, what's wrong? Nothing. And everybody knows everything is wrong, but no, nothing. And you want to say, no, I'm not bitter, I'm not angry, and you want to hold on to it. Jesus says, how's that working for you? No, not very well, is it? Let it go and come to me, and let me wipe all of the tears from your eyes, and let my tears begin to dissolve the concrete encasements around your heart, and let the wasps go free. Acknowledge the evil was real. Acknowledge my God, my Father, is even more real, is the God over all things, and submit to His providence, His active, personal, intentional care for your soul. Look over your shoulder. Goodness and mercy are following you. Let's pray together. Father in heaven, pray this morning, O God, for your people gathered here. that You would begin to let the wasps out of our heart. And pray, Father, O God, for maybe some here who are not yet Christians, Lord, that they would look to Jesus and know the same joy and gladness we know, that You would heal the bitterness of their heart and bring them to Christ as the atoning sacrifice for all of their sins. And Lord Jesus, bring sweetness, bring tenderness, bring kindness. We're tired of the bitterness, anger, wrath, malice, and clamor. Help us to be kind, tenderhearted, forgiving one another even as God and Christ has forgiven us, and to be imitators of God as beloved children. For unhappy children are unworthy imitators of the happy God. May the joy of heaven fill our souls this day as we repent from our bitterness, our lack of faith, our lack of hope, our lack of love, and our self-pity. We offer these prayers in Jesus' name.