Make No Room for Bitterness in Your Marriage

Over the course of the last decade, I’ve counseled thousands of people and marriages. Marital issues always proved to be a bit tricky, because the goals that each spouse wanted to accomplish in counseling was different. Most often, wives want to work on communication and husbands want to work on practical behavioral changes; none of which are wrong, but those goals are not addressing a root problem that quite honestly many marriages have at the core…….and that is bitterness.

Bitterness eats away at the marriage. It is a relational cancer and it usually exists because of real or perceived hurt within the marriage. Most common marital counseling advice would direct the couple to finding common ground that they can work from., read some books, take the 5 love languages test, take the enneagram, etc. None of these tips or tricks are bad, but unless bitterness is dealt with, these directional points are just delaying the inevitable.

Dealing with bitterness in your marriage starts with understanding that you aren’t bitter just at your spouse, but you are bitter at God. Bitterness is an attempt to take control away from God in your marriage. It says, “I don’t want to submit to God in everything, because I was hurt by my spouse, so now I’m going to punish them with silence and aggression”

This may be a hard word for some, but if we call ourselves believers in Christ and we’ve allowed bitterness to reign in our marriage….I would say that you’ve lost sight of what the gospel is all about. The gospel is about sacrificial love, not selfish love. The gospel is about pursuing love, not isolating love. The gospel is about unconditional love, not conditional and contractual love. Read this in the book of Hosea and John 3:16. See this love modeled for us in Jesus.

No marriage is without dysfunction and to strive for a marriage that is perfect is a waste of energy. But a marriage where each spouse sacrificially pursues one another, confesses sin regularly to each other, prays together, reads scripture together and is quick to reconciliation is a marriage that is not leaving room for bitterness.

Bitterness is not dealt with quickly and the longer it remains in your marriage the more quickly your marriage will die. Bitterness says you are out of alignment with God and need reorienting back to Christ. You cannot hope to forgive your spouse, on your own, heal from the hurt they caused without a new and transformed heart that only Christ can give you through the Holy Spirit.

I ask and pray that today you would consider killing your bitterness by humbling yourself before Christ.

“God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” James 4:6

In Him

Christian Bringolf MA LMHC