Two Resentments, One Root

I have been confessing two resentments, and I have been treating them as two problems. They are not. They are one heart wearing two faces.

The first was resentment of the faithful: the people who seem to have it dialed in, and the jealousy and self-pity that rises in me at the sight of them. The second was resentment of authority: the program handed to me, the leaders I am asked to submit to, and the pride that bristles at being told how to walk. Different triggers, different villains in my telling. But underneath, the same two lies.

Scripture has a name for what grows out of them. “See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no ‘root of bitterness’ springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled” (Hebrews 12:15). Notice what the root grows from: failing to obtain the grace of God. Bitterness takes hold where grace has not been received. That is where both of my resentments come from, and it is where the cure will come from too.

The two lies

The first lie is pride: the quiet conviction that I belong at the center. When I resent the faithful, pride says I should be better than they are, and it galls me that I am not. When I resent the program, pride says I should arrive at obedience by my own road, and I will not be told. Same self, same throne. Only the circumstance changes which way it faces.

The second lie is scarcity. Resentment always assumes the pie is fixed and someone else is taking my slice. Their flourishing must cost me something, so I begrudge it. The authority over my path must be taking something from me, so I guard against it. Both assume that grace is a limited quantity and I am losing the competition for it.

But grace is not a pie. That is the whole thing. The faithfulness I envy in another man is not subtracted from a pile I could have drawn from; it is evidence that the pile is bottomless. The trellis I am asked to grow on is not a cage around a scarce freedom; it is a place to meet a God who gives without running dry. Scarcity is a lie told to a people who have been handed everything.

Finishing the sentence

When I started this series I leaned on one command: “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” I kept stopping there, because that is where my attention goes, on the thing I am supposed to get rid of. But Paul does not stop there. The sentence keeps going:

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. (Ephesians 4:32)

There is the cure for a scarcity heart, and it is not a technique. It is a memory. As God in Christ forgave you. I cannot stand stunned at the lavishness of my own pardon and still begrudge another man his progress. I cannot really see how freely I was received and still insist on arriving by my own road to prove I did not need receiving. The man who knows he was forgiven everything has nothing left to hoard and nothing left to prove. Scarcity becomes impossible in a heart that has done the math on grace.

Out of the cell

I said at the start of all this that bitterness is a prison: that when I sit in it I am sidelined from the very faithfulness I claim to want, and that the longer I sit, the heavier the door. I still believe that is the truest thing I can say about resentment. It is a cell.

But it is a cell the Lord commanded me to leave, which means it is a cell he gives me the grace to leave. He would not have told me to put bitterness away if he had not also made a way out, and the way out is not willpower against the feeling. It is turning to look, again, at how I was forgiven, until the sight of it crowds the resentment out. Gratitude is not something I manufacture to feel better. It is what is left standing when I finally see clearly.

Two resentments. One root. One grace lavish enough to pull it up.