Eighteen years ago, I planted a garden for the first and, as it turns out, the last time.
My neighbor at the time, a retired landscaper, offered to till up a corner of my yard with his landscaping equipment. He must have had a lot of faith in my gardening abilities, as evidenced by the twenty by thirty-foot rectangle of freshly tilled soil I discovered in my yard when he was done. Ignorantly, I filled the entire thing with baby vegetable plants.
Shortly after, I discovered that I had little patience for gardening. There were rabbits, squirrels, insects, and birds who took the firstfruits of all my harvest. Beyond that, the weeds were my greatest enemy. No matter how much or how often I weeded, they seemed to grow back twice as thick. Often, I was reminded of the curse of Genesis 3:18. I worked for food but the ground produced weeds. Nature fought back, and I gave up.
_____
Someone asked me recently about guarding your heart against bitterness. “How do you fight bitterness when your life is marked by ongoing physical suffering?” I felt a little sheepish answering because there have been many years where the bitter seed is the one I chose to swallow. I know what it tastes like. I wanted it. Waking up in the middle of the night with pain in my hips, my spine, my hands night after night after night for years on end— it brought a different kind of pain to my heart. “How long, O Lord?” I’ve asked in the dark, my words not so much a desperate plea as much as an angry hiss. I’ve folded my arms across my chest in contempt, knowing the Lord could remove pain, confused as to why He wouldn’t.
Bitterness creeps in, a tiny shoot of self-pity that spreads with dizzying speed. Your heart is quickly wrapped in vines of resentment. Tim Keller worded it like this, “Roots become shoots becomes trees become forests,” and you know how a forest like that blocks every vista of grace or kindness of the Lord.[1] In time, the bitter roots-to-forest progression became too much for me. I couldn’t keep living such a suffocating, self-pitying existence. Pain or no pain, bitterness was not a welcome form of growth.
How do we keep bitterness out of our hearts? When we are tempted to grumble in resentment because of difficult, unchanged circumstances, what is our defense? In the years of walking with pain and suffering, I have learned that while God’s Word is the soil in which my faith must be planted, gratitude is the fence that must guard it.
In Philippians 4, Paul writes to exhort the church to regular rejoicing. Rejoice in the Lord always, he says it twice. Rejoice! Well, that’s a fine command, Paul, but you don’t know how hard it is to rejoice when I’m suffering. I have little reason to sing songs of praise when the pain in my hip is burning like a live coal. But Paul did know. He’d sung hymns to Christ while in shackles in a Colossian prison. That wasn’t all. Philippians is a prison letter, meaning Paul was likely writing while under house arrest in Rome. This, of course, after many beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, sufferings from hunger, thirst, danger, sleeplessness, cold, and anxiety.[2] The call to rejoice, to rejoice always, takes a different tone when it comes from the pen of a man who has suffered so greatly for the name of Jesus Christ. Can’t we, too, rejoice in our own difficulties?
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:4–7)
But it’s hard, right? A suffering heart seems fertile ground for bitterness to put down roots, shoots, trees, forests. The way to fight against its growth is to plant something different instead. Something that protects you from the insidious creep of resentment. What you need to plant is gratitude. A fence of it, all the way around your heart.
On the heels of his call to rejoice, Paul tells us to not to be anxious but to rather to pray about everything with thanksgiving. As a result, your heart will be guarded by the peace of God.[3] The fence is prayer with gratitude. The resulting protection is peace. Paul tells us not to be anxious about anything, but first he tells us why: “the Lord is at hand.” There’s twofold meaning here. First, the Lord is with you. Second, the Lord is coming back to judge and set everything to rights. So, if you’re a Christian who’s suffering, that suffering will one day come to an end.
But Paul’s advice isn’t just to “not be anxious.” He isn’t telling you to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend like all the reasons for anxiety don’t exist. Suffering is real. Pain is present. Enemies exist. Trials are hard. To simply deny their existence will do nothing to stem the flow of sorrows they produce. Rather, Paul says, bring them to God in prayer for help. That’s what supplication is—praying to God for help. What do we do with the sources of our anxieties and trials? Pray. And prayer is never nothing.
But note how Paul tells us to pray: with thanksgiving. This is gratitude, our fence. Praying with a grateful heart will protect your heart from bitterness. You can see this practice in the psalms and in the way God calls His people to remember His past acts of faithfulness in rehearsing and remembering His law.[4] All the exhortations written into the law to rehearse and remember it were there to remind God’s people of who He was and what He had done for them. These days, on this side of the cross, we might word it as “preaching the gospel to yourself.” In remembering Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we are rehearsing truth to jog our hearts’ dull memory. Are you suffering? Remember your suffering Savior! Are you in pain? Remember the promise of the resurrection! Are you anxious about persecution? Remember that they hated Christ and will hate you because you identify with Him. Are you worried about future suffering? Remember that there is glory on the other side of Christ’s return.
What keeps a heart from growing a forest of bitterness? A fence of thankfulness. Prayer with gratitude. Listing all the ways God has carried you through past trials and suffering will squash those self-pitying roots that threaten to grow. This is, for me, a primary reason for keeping a journal. Or perhaps, for you, a running list of answered prayers. Keeping a record of both the trials you’ve endured and the ways God has carried you through those trials will fence your heart with gratitude for His care.
This is how to stop the creep of bitterness. Fence your heart with gratitude, for when you pray in thankfulness, then the beauty of God’s keeping character stamps out every root of bitterness.
Fence your heart with gratitude, for when you pray in thankfulness, then the beauty of God’s keeping character stamps out every root of bitterness. Share on X
[1] Timothy Keller, “The Healing of Anger.”
[2] 2 Corinthians 11:23-27.
[3] Philippians 4:4-7.
[4] See Deuteronomy 11:18-21.
Photo by Evelyn Bertrand on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and is the mother of two sons. She and her husband serve at Grace Bible Fellowship in Sikeston, Missouri where they have served for over twenty years. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence, Everyday Faithfulness, Memorizing Scripture, Known & Loved, Bible Study, and Praying in Pain.
