A Root of Bitterness
About this sermon
In “A Root of Bitterness,” Pastor Dean Odle gives a candid, Scripture-centered warning about hidden offense and unforgiveness. Beginning with his own struggle to forgive someone who damaged family relationships, he urges believers to examine themselves honestly rather than cover resentment with religious language. From Psalm 81 and 2 Corinthians 13:5, he argues that spiritual strength depends upon hearing and obeying God, receiving His grace, and confronting sin when the Holy Spirit exposes it.
Chronological teaching outline
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Odle opens by asking God to expose hidden issues of the heart. He stresses that holiness cannot be produced by human strength alone, then admits that a prolonged family conflict has left him carrying unforgiveness. His confession establishes the sermon’s central question: how does a believer forgive when the offender has not repented, apologized, or changed?
Reading Psalm 81:8-16, Odle contrasts listening to God with being surrendered to one’s own desires and counsel. He applies the passage to resentment: wishing judgment on an offender, refusing to pray for that person, or feeling immediate anger at the thought of them can reveal unresolved bitterness. The first response is honest recognition, followed by prayer, blessing, and—when safe and appropriate—an effort toward peace.
Odle turns to Paul’s command to examine oneself and warns that believers often minimize what they do not want to confront. Irritation, rising anger, avoidance, and the inability to desire another person’s good may expose an unforgiving heart. Forgiveness does not require renewed access to an unsafe offender, but it does require releasing vengeance and refusing to nurture hatred.
Hebrews 12 supplies the sermon’s central image. Odle describes offense as a seed watered by repeated thoughts, angry conversations, and imagined retaliation until it becomes a root of bitterness. He argues that unresolved disobedience weakens dependence on grace and can eventually damage conduct, ministry, family relationships, and Christian witness. The warning is therefore communal as well as personal: one neglected wound can trouble and influence many people.
Odle uses Esau’s anger toward Jacob as an example of an offense that shaped later choices and relationships. He acknowledges Jacob’s wrongdoing while insisting that another person’s sin does not justify cultivating hatred. He then broadens the application to inherited hostility and racial resentment, arguing that bitterness can pass through families and communities when old injuries are preserved rather than healed.
From Matthew 24:10-13, Odle warns that widespread offense can produce betrayal, hatred, deception, and a cooling of Christian love. He identifies offense, sexual temptation, and pride as recurring dangers that can reinforce one another. Recalling Jimmy Swaggart’s public fall, he argues that gifting, discipline, and past fruit do not make a minister immune from pride or hidden sin, and that a leader’s collapse can wound many observers.
Odle compares deep offense to an arrow lodged in a wound. Some injuries are not resolved in one prayer, but believers must keep bringing them to God instead of allowing them to fester. He recounts an earlier offense that took years of prayer and blessing to release. Jesus and Stephen become the models: both asked mercy for those harming them, demonstrating forgiveness under extreme injustice.
Reading Matthew 18:21-35, Odle contrasts the king’s cancellation of an unpayable debt with the forgiven servant’s refusal to show mercy over a much smaller debt. He interprets Jesus’ conclusion as a serious warning to professing believers: receiving mercy while withholding it from others places the unforgiving person under judgment. Forgiveness must therefore reach the heart rather than remain a verbal formula.
The sermon closes with practical steps: pray consistently for the offender, ask God not to hold the wrong against them, speak forgiveness until the heart agrees, and measure healing by whether revenge has yielded to a genuine desire for the person’s salvation and good. Odle asks listeners to name those they still resent and pursue forgiveness for as long as necessary, trusting God to supply grace for increasingly difficult times.
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- 0:00:00
jesus name for your anointing god for the anointing of the holy spirit now to touch us and to teach us lord for you to open our hearts and minds god to your word for you to shake us lord for you to shake us and wake us up for you to expose and deal with issues deep in our hearts and minds that you will help us lord to grow and to flourish lord you said that those that will be planted in the house of the lord would flourish in the courts of our god lord you said if your people would hearken unto your voice and listen to your word and do what you say that you are blessed and that you will heal that you will protect that you will deliver that you will be our refuge and our fortress in the storm and so lord we just thank you lord you want us to to pay attention to your word and to examine our hearts so lord we just ask you to help us examine our hearts today in jesus name [Music] amen and amen you may be seated um [Music] got a few things here this morning just to trying to figure out where the lord's going and i think he's showing me but i want you to turn in your bibles to psalm 81 that's where we're going to start this morning i just want to talk a little bit about examining examining your heart and uh [Music] i'm actually going to be honest about some things this morning but i want to read this scripture we're going to go to psalm 81 because you know um i preach a lot about you know obeying god and living a holy life and and you know and all those things are true and biblical and i want to say before we delve into this that i hope that i don't give the idea that i believe that we can do this christian walk and our own strength okay there is individual personal responsibility that we have to be diligent and passionate about the things of god and to go after god um but if you think for one second that you can be holy enough or good enough or moral enough or are powerful enough in what you can do by yourself um then i then you're getting the wrong idea for me because i promise you i want you to know this morning that number one i'm not a perfect man nor am i a sinless man nor do i am a man that doesn't struggle with the same things that everybody else struggles with so i don't ever want to give that impression i need the grace of god i need god to help me live this christian life i need the mercy of god which means i need undeserved at times undeserved forgiveness undeserved help and frankly you know even though i'm the pastor and even though you know i've been in this walk a long time i don't do anything perfectly and god's dealing with me about an issue that's been going
- 0:03:01
on for almost a year where i think now you know i'm having to admit to myself that i have unforgiveness and bitterness towards somebody and it's dragging me down and it's dragging me down spiritually and it's dragging me down mentally and emotionally and i have to deal with it i just don't sometimes it's hard to deal with it's just hard to to dig down there and admit okay i really don't like this person i really despise them i really don't want to be around them don't want to talk to them don't even want to hear their voice [Music] and it's caused the relationships in my family to be severed and it's caused a lot of a lot of pain and a lot of issues this last year but you know i have to say that even even pastor dean [Music] sometimes buries things and denies things and and washes over things but the bottom line is that's that's what it is and i think there's i think there's a root of bitterness and unforgiveness in me and i'm really trying to figure out how to deal with it because really standing here right now i still don't like this person i still don't want to be around them um i don't want to hear their voice don't want to see them there's only a few words i want to hear out of them and that's i'm sorry please forgive me and i won't do that anymore you know what i mean but they're not doing that so what do i do you know what i'm saying but i want to show you something here psalm 81 [Music] is it okay for the pastor to confess he's human okay um but we're not going to read the whole thing you can read the whole thing later but i want to skip down to verse verse 8 and this is the lord speaking here and uh speaking to his people and he says hear o my people he said and i will testify unto you o israel if you will hearken unto me there shall no strange god be in you neither shall you worship any strange god i am the lord thy god which brought you out of the land of egypt open thy mouth wide and i will fill it he says but my people would not hearken to my voice and israel would none of me so i gave them up unto their own hearts lust and they walked in their own counsels and then listen to how god speaks through the prophet here he goes oh that my people had hearkened unto me and israel had walked in my ways i should soon have subdued their enemies and turned my hand against their adversaries the haters of the lord should have been should have submitted themselves unto him but their time should have endured forever he said he he should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat and with honey and out out of the rock should i have satisfied you so the lord says here oh that my people would have hearkened unto me he said i would have subdued their enemies think about that you know the key to walking with god is is listening amen
- 0:06:02
listening and obeying now whenever you see something going wrong in your life whenever you see yourself struggling with something and you pray about it and you pray about it and you pray and you ask god and it but yet it doesn't seem to get better it doesn't seem to change uh you may even go through a deliverance and and you may see a change in other areas but you don't see a change in that area this is something that's interesting let's back up i want you to see this it says because my people verse 11 but he said but because my people wouldn't listen to my voice look at verse 12. so i gave them up to their own lust their own desires and they walk to their own counsels see that's what happens when we don't listen and i want to talk to you this morning a little bit about examining your heart about forgiveness about forgiveness and unforgiveness i think sometimes you know we think that uh that we don't have it and yet there are people that if we think about them our blood pressure goes up a few notches our blood pressure goes up a few notches and and really we start thinking about how you know there are bad things we'd like to happen to them or maybe we don't go so far as to thinking how we want bad things to happen to them but then we go and we start going well you know they really deserve god's judgment oh be careful there you know god should judge them for what they did to me really when we start listen when we start desiring god's judgment and discipline on somebody else guess what it won't be long for it's on you and it's hard to really want god to have mercy on somebody who's mean and nasty and offensive and grates on you and pushes you but how many of you know we all have those people right and i want to say this i'm sitting yesterday i'm sitting in the in the wedding and it was a beautiful wedding and then it was very christian very spiritual it was a good you know it was a good wedding but i'm just sitting there and god's dealing with me before the wedding even about some things and dealing with me about you know you you you you don't really talk about love too much loving your enemies blessing those that curse you doing good to those who despitefully use you you don't bless them you don't pray for them there's people that that i've realized that deep in my heart that i don't even want to pray for not people down there's been times god's told me not to pray for people because he's done with him he's good he doesn't want me fooling with it but there's people i'm supposed to be blessing and praying for and i noticed
- 0:09:02
that over this past it's been about 10 months but every time i i'd normally used to pray for that person all the time that i have the problem with i don't pray for them anymore you know because deep down i don't want god to bless them i want god to smack them all right and and i'm sitting here going you know what it's ruining a relationship with someone in my family between me and them this other person and i got to figure out how to let this go i got to figure out how to forgive them and bless them even if they don't change because they're still probably going to be nasty because it's just i don't know this person just they don't even know how to be i mean they're supposed to be a christian but they don't even know how to act but you know in my older days i'd want to smack them right but that didn't answer anything anyway right so what do we do we examine our hearts let's go go go with me to uh second uh corinthians chapter 13. and i want to say this i mean this has affected me so bad that there have been times i don't even want to get up to preach because i just don't i i'm just having such an inward struggle over this second corinthians chapter 13. i want you to see this because i talked about you know examining your heart and you know here's the thing about examining your heart examining your heart and then being and being honest how many of you know that we are not honest with ourselves i guarantee you this morning and i think the lord wanted me to share this because i think the lord's going to point out some people to you that you really have an issue with that you have christianized this thing glossed it over and said no i really don't but i really don't but i really don't but but when they speak they irritate you or when you think about them they irritate you okay this is a sign that you probably need some forgiveness issues to go on you need to start praying for them diligently blessing them and really desiring good things to happen to them and then maybe even not in all situations but maybe even trying to work it out with them in some way okay i know there's some people we can't we just gotta leave alone but we still have to forgive them i use the example a lot of times you know a woman that's that's been raped she doesn't have to hang out with her rapists but she does have to forgive him right i mean he may never repent he may never say he's sorry he may never
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