Three Steps toward Surrendering Bitterness

Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says it’s hard to admit when we’re harboring bitterness.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Women often say to me, “I’m hurt. I’m wounded.” But I hardly ever hear a woman say, “I’m a bitter woman.” Why? Because bitterness suggests that I did something wrong. I reacted incorrectly. We have to come to the place where we take personal responsibility.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Choosing Forgiveness, for February 11, 2026. I’m Dannah Gresh.

If you’re walking through the 2026 Bible reading plan with us, today we’re reading Numbers 16–17. 

Nancy is teaching through the book of Ruth. Yesterday, we heard one character say, “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara, which means ‘bitter.’”

Nancy’s going to follow up today and show us how to find freedom from bitterness. But first, let’s hear a real-life story about just that. Many of you know and love Joni Eareckson Tada. She’s such a dear friend of Revive Our Hearts, and we’ve shared her story many times here on the program. Joni had a tragic diving accident in her late teens that left her a quadriplegic, and, much like Naomi, she wasn’t too happy with the Lord. I’ll let her tell you the rest herself.

Joni Eareckson Tada: A bitter root, a real spirit of complaining, began to take hold of my life. Nothing anybody did was good enough. Everything everybody did was wrong, and every hurdle I faced became a reason to feel sorry for myself. Most of all, Jesus, the One I wanted to feel close to, He seemed so far, so removed, so distant.

If I couldn't be healed, then I told my sister Jay the next morning, "I don't want to get out of bed. Just turn on the air conditioner, close the drapes, turn off the lights, shut the door, and leave me alone!" But even in that darkness—weeks I spent in that bed in the dark—I couldn't live with that kind of despair! I couldn't! There had to be something more.

So even then, in that dark bedroom, I would sing to comfort myself. One hymn most often I sang was a plea for help: Oh, Jesus . . .

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
When darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless [oh Jesus, I'm so helpless!], O abide with me.

And with that hymn I prayed, "God, if I'm not gonna die, then You please show me how to live. I cannot do quadriplegic. You show me how to live." It was my first prayer. I mean it was sincere and honest and from the heart. It wasn't long or wordy. It was short and sweet and so sincere.

Those were the days, then, when my sister would come into the bedroom . . . I would ask her to turn on the light, draw the drapes, and get me out of bed (which she happily did). And most often, during those days she would push me into the living room where I sat in front of a music stand much like this one.

She would push me in front of it, lock my wheelchair, plop my Bible on the music stand, put a mouth stick in my teeth, and then I would flip this way and that with my mouth stick, trying to make sense of it all. Of course, I was still interested in healing. I still wanted to know what the Bible had to say about it, and I found out.

In the first chapter of the gospel of Mark, there Jesus is performing all kinds of miracles long, long into the day and even past sunset. And the next morning the crowds returned—more sick, disabled people. Simon and his companions, they quickly go looking for Jesus, but He's nowhere to be found. Jesus had gotten up early that morning and gone to the top of the hill to a solitary place to pray.

Finally, Simon and his companions find Jesus, and they tell Him about all these sick and disabled and diseased people at the bottom of the hill, all looking to be healed. And what does Jesus say to them? In verse 38, He says, "Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come."

I couldn't believe that! I had to read it again. All those sick and disabled people, looking to be healed, and Jesus says, "Let's go someplace else." Uh! How could He turn them away? How could He turn away people like me? And that's when it hit me. It hit me that it's not that Jesus did not care about all those people; it's just that their problems—especially their physical problems—weren't His main focus. The gospel was His focus.

The gospel that says, "Sin kills; hell is real, but God is merciful. His kingdom can change you, and I am your passport." And whenever people missed this, whenever they started coming to Jesus just to get their problems fixed, the Savior would always back away.

No wonder I'd been so depressed! I had mainly been into Jesus to get my problems and pain and paralysis fixed. Yes, Jesus cares about suffering, and He spent most of His time on earth trying to relieve it. But the gospel of Mark showed me His priorities, because the same man that healed blind eyes and withered hands also said, "Gouge out that eye, cut off that hand if it leads you into sin, if it leads you astray."

Oh my goodness, that's when I really got the picture. To me, healing had always been the big deal; freedom from this physical problem had always been the big deal. But to God, my soul was a much bigger deal. That's when I started searching for a different kind of freedom, a deeper kind of healing.

Psalm 139:23: "Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and . . ." [sings] see if there be some wicked way in me. Cleanse me from every sin and set me free. I so want to be free!

And for the last forty-seven years in this wheelchair, that has been my prayer. God has been answering, exposing sin and selfishness in my heart, reminding me of the many times I will fudge the truth or hog the spotlight or allow stiff-necked, stubborn pride to push me away from Him, putting worthless idols before my eyes. God has been answering that prayer, and He has been exposing in my heart the things from which I really do need to be free. And I am so far from being finished. I have such a long, long way to go. God is still searching. God is still testing.

Dannah: That’s Joni Tada sharing about her journey from bitterness to freedom in Christ. To hear more from Joni, visit ReviveOurHearts.com. 

For the past several episodes of Revive Our Hearts, we’ve been in the book of Ruth. And we’ve gotten to know a character in this story named Naomi. Like Joni, Naomi struggled with bitterness. She and her family left Israel during a famine, looking for a better life. But instead, her husband and two sons died in Moab. Following this tragedy, Naomi returned to her homeland along with her daughter-in-law, Ruth. Here’s Nancy to pick up the story. 

Nancy: When Naomi and Ruth come to Bethlehem, Naomi says to the people who knew her years earlier, but who now hardly recognized her, “Is this Naomi?” they said.

She said, “Don’t call me Naomi,” which means pleasant. “instead, call me Mara,” which means bitter, “because the Almighty God has made my life very bitter” (Ruth 1:20).

Isn’t it interesting how bitterness even affects our physical well-being and our countenance and our appearance? You can look at some women today—now, don’t get nervous here—but you can look at some women and just tell that they’re bitter women.

There are lines of hardness and anger and bitterness that for some reason, I think, show themselves on our faces as women more than men do.

Naomi was hardly recognizable. She had been gone ten years, but she was an adult when she left. You would think she would still be recognizable when she got home. But I get the sense here that her bitterness had aged her much more than ten years. Now, she’d been through a lot. She had suffered a lot.

But you know, ultimately, what we have to realize is the outcome of our lives is not determined by what happens to us, by what we go through. Rather, it is determined by how we respond to the things that happen to us.

 

Naomi had suffered a lot. She had lost her husband. She had lost her sons. She was left alone in the world with just this widowed daughter-in-law. She had suffered.

But the outcome of her life and the state that she was in, the condition she was in when she arrived back in Bethlehem, was not so much because of the loss she had suffered as much as her view of God and how she had responded to those losses.

So I want us to look today at this whole matter of bitterness and how it affects us, how it affects others, and what we can do about it.

Now, often our bitterness is a reaction to people or circumstances that hurt us. When I was first putting my notes together for today, I wrote down “bitterness is caused by people or circumstances,” but then I had to go back and correct that. Bitterness is not caused by anything that happens to us. It’s the fruit of our reaction to what happens to us, to hurt, and to loss. And it does have an enormous effect both on ourselves and on others.

Not only our physical appearance and our health are affected when we become bitter, but our emotional stability. Bitterness puts us in prison, and it causes us to put up barriers and walls in relationships.

As you see Naomi coming back to Bethlehem, she’s not a real endearing woman at this moment. “Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara. The Almighty has made my life very bitter.” I mean, she is a whining, complaining woman.

Now, whenever I’ve taught this over the years, invariably, someone will come back and say, “I think you’re being a little too hard on Naomi.”

I'll spare you saying it. I have gone back to this text over and over again through the years, and I keep coming to the same conclusion, based on her words.

She was a woman who had suffered a lot. But she was a woman, I believe, who had responded in bitterness, and as a result, she put up barriers and walls in her relationships with other people.

“Don’t get close to me. I’ve been hurt. I’m not willing to risk getting hurt again.” You’ve felt it perhaps when you lost some close friends or they moved away. Did you ever find yourself thinking, I’m just not going to get close to anybody else again. Because as soon as I get close to somebody, they leave, or I have to move. And, it's not worth the pain.

Bitterness will cause us to put up those kind of walls. Eventually, bitterness overflows. We can’t keep it in ourselves. Eventually it comes out in our words, as it did when Naomi spoke to the townspeople. When we verbalize our bitterness toward God and toward our circumstances, other people become contaminated and poisoned with what’s been eating inside us.

That’s why the writer to the Hebrews says, “See to it that nobody misses the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness, springing up, trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Heb. 12:15, paraphrased).

Naomi comes back to town, and all she can do is talk about how awful God has been to her. Now, most of us wouldn’t say it in those words, but how do we respond when people say, “How are you doing? How's your day?" Are you one of those people who give an "organ recital"? Every organ is aching, every pain, every problem.

Now, people don't want to be around that for long. We don't want to be around it. Yet, I find that myself asking as I ready this passage. "Am I one of those people who is just is always having a bad day?" That makes people not want to be around us. It contaminates others.

How can we get free from that root of bitterness? Three suggestions here. First, we need to stop looking outward in blame. There’s no one else to blame. We have to stop saying, “I’m this way because so-and-so did such-and-such to me,” or “I wouldn’t be this way if . . . I had not been married to that man, or hadn’t had that parent, or my boss hadn’t done this to me.”

Stop looking outward in blame. Number two, look inward. We need to come to the point where we acknowledge that we really are bitter.

Now that’s hard to say. We don’t mind saying we’ve been hurt, because that suggests that somebody else has done something to hurt us; therefore, we’re a victim. We’re not responsible.

Women often say to me, “I’m hurt. I’m wounded.” But I hardly ever hear a woman say, “I’m a bitter woman.” Why? Because bitterness suggests that I did something wrong. I reacted incorrectly.

We have to come to the place where we take personal responsibility. You know, it’s easy to see this in others. We can often see, “So-and-so is just such a bitter person,” but it is often very hard to see in ourselves.

Don’t you agree? It’s hard to see when we have really become bitter. How can you know if you’re bitter? Well, two questions I think are helpful to ask:

1. Is there any one whom I have not fully forgiven? Is there anyone who I haven't released their debt against me.
2. Is there any person or circumstance in my life that I’ve not yet been able to thank God for?

Now, that’s a tough one. Is there any person or circumstance that, as I think back on it, I’m resenting it rather than able to thank God? Not thanking God for sin, but thanking God that He allowed this to come into my life, and He apparently intended that it should be for my good and His glory and my ultimate blessing.

And then having looked inward to acknowledge the bitterness, I need to accept personal responsibility for my actions and my attitudes. It’s possible that Naomi could not control the fact that her husband took the family to Moab, where all these catastrophes fell upon them.

But she had to come to the point where she was no longer blaming her husband, she wasn’t blaming Moab, she wasn’t blaming the doctor who maybe didn’t know how to take care of her sons so they got sick and died.

I think she had to come to the point where she realized she could not control her circumstances, but she could control her responses. She had to take responsibility for her anger and her blame.

We don’t want to look outward. We want to look inward, and most importantly, we need to look upward, to look upward toward God. When we’re hurting and when we’re bitter, isn’t that sometimes the last place we want to look? But it’s the first place we need to look.

What do I do when I look upward? First of all, I confess my bitterness to God as sin. No excuses, no blaming. I repent. I say, “Lord, I am bitter. I have sinned against You in my bitterness. Please forgive me.”

And then to realize as you look upward how much God loves you and that He delights in you. When He was bringing these circumstances into your life, He was not angry at you. He was working on your behalf to show His mercy and His love.

As we look upward and we get to know who God is, I believe we have to come to the place where we trust that God has a purpose in all that we have been through, and we trust Him to know what that purpose is even when we can’t see and we can’t understand it.

Let me read to you some verses in Psalm 119 that have really ministered to my heart along this line. The psalmist is talking about how precious God’s Word is. And it’s easy to say we love God’s Word, but then when we experience affliction, we’re not always so sure that we want to come and look at God’s Word.

The psalmist says, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word” (Psalm 119:67 NASB). He’s saying, “Lord, You had a purpose in this affliction. You were using it to teach me, to give me a heart and a hunger for Your Word and for obedience that I might not have ever had if I had not been afflicted.”

He goes on to say, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I may learn Your statutes” (Psalm 119:71 NASB). He’s saying this is a teaching opportunity. These are pop quizzes. These are midterms. These are final exams, these afflictions.

And it’s good for me to have these tests. It’s one thing when you can look back and see what the purposes of God were, but can you say those words when you are right smack dab in the middle of the test? “It’s good for me to be afflicted, because that’s how I learn Your laws, how I learn Your ways.”

He goes on to say, “I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are righteous, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me” (Psalm 119:75 NASB). In faithfulness You have afflicted me.

I’ve heard so many women share precious stories of how God has used affliction as a teaching tool in their lives. I remember one woman sharing with me just a week or so ago some painful family issues she had walked through—issues with her marriage, with her parents, with her children.

She said, “I've been so lonely this past year. It's been so hard. But it's been so good. I think if I’d not had these circumstances, particularly in my marriage this year, I don’t think I ever would have gotten alone with God, with His Word, with my heart humbled before Him to receive what it was that He wanted to teach me about His heart and His ways.”

The truth is, if you and I are being afflicted in any measure, it is because of the goodness and the faithfulness of God. “It is good for me to be afflicted.” And the freedom from bitterness will come as we agree with this truth. “I know, O Lord, that Your judgments are righteous, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me.”

And then as we accept God’s purposes, we can also realize that He has a provision of grace for every need.

A woman stopped me the other day and told me about another desperate set of circumstances going on in her life. Then she said through tears, "God has been so faithful to me. God has been faithful to my family throughout this. God does have a provision of grace for every need."

It’s so important that we surrender our rights—surrender the right to be angry, to be bitter, to be loved, to have an easy life, to have things go our way.

If you don’t lay down your rights, you’re going to live as a bitter, angry, blaming, miserable woman. But you don’t have to live that way. Freedom comes when we lay down our rights. And then we replace bitterness with forgiveness, with love, and with giving of thanks.

That’s what Paul says in Ephesians chapter 4:

Get rid of all bitterness and rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice, and instead be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as God, for Christ’s sake, forgave you. (Eph. 4:31 paraphrased)

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will be back to lead us in prayer. If the Lord has used today’s program to expose bitterness in your spirit and point you toward freedom, I hope you won’t just go back to life as usual. Instead, would you pause and talk to the Lord about what’s going on in your heart? He’s the One who’s able to set you free.

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When you do, we’d love to send you Ruth: Experiencing a Life Restored as our “thank you” gift. To donate and request your copy of this six-week Bible study, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Is there such a thing as chance? Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says no way! God’s providence is a much more beautiful reality. We’ll talk about that tomorrow. Now, here’s Nancy to pray.

Nancy: Let's bow our hearts before the Lord. As we are in the Lord's presence, how many of you would be honest enough to say, "There is some root of bitterness that's been hanging on in my heart" Some one or some thing or some set of circumstances I've been resenting? As you've been talking, Nancy, I realize there is some root of bitterness in my heart that hasn't thoroughly been dealt with."

Could you be honest enought to lift your hand and say, "That's true in my life. There's some bitterness there"? There are a number of us. All of us in some time in the past have had that trouble us.

Could I just encourage you right now to let it go? Let it go. Let go of your rights—your right to be angry, the right to be bitter. You say, "Lord, I don't understand why this circumstance or this situation or this person has come into my life, but I release it all to You." Ask God's forgiveness for your bitterness, for your anger, perhaps for having blamed Him.

Tell God that you trust His purposes; that He has a plan that He is fulfilling. Would you surrender your rights to God? Surrender yourself to Him, and ask Him to replace the bitterness with forgiveness, with love, with humility and with giving of thanks.

Thank You, Father, that we truly can be free from all bitterness. And may we take seriously the challenge of Your Word to put it away, to get rid of it—to get rid of it all, not holding onto any of it. May You cleanse our hearts and set us free to love and to give You thanks. For Jesus' sake we pray it. 

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.

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