Bitterness and anger can become a habit – an attitude that grips our live. It’s like a venom that pumps through our veins. Fortunately though, there is an antidote. God made certain of that.

Anger is a real problem in this world, it's running at plague proportions and yet it's something you don't hear people talk much about. Psychologists have come up with a term 'the last straw syndrome'; people seem to do outrageously destructive things. The young teenager who shoots up his high school, the road rage that happens around the place, people are flying off the handle all over the place, it's an epidemic.

You and I experience anger on a regular basis, both when it grips our hearts and when we're on the receiving end of someone else's anger. Anger, fury, rage, indignation, a desire to lash out, to hurt others, a deep sense that we've been wronged and we have to set it right through revenge. It's the stuff that wars are made of. So what's the antidote? How do we deal with it decisively and end the hurt that anger causes?

Well I have to tell you I am an expert in anger management, I'll tell you why. They say once an alcoholic always an alcoholic, people who seem to have overcome it talk about themselves as being recovering alcoholics. In other words it always stays with them but it's something that they keep overcoming every day.

Well for me it's the same when it comes to anger. My big Achilles heel, the deep flaw in my character is this anger thing. Berni's a type A achiever type of personality, I set goals, I chase them down, I hit targets, I move on to the next thing, and that's okay, it reflects in everything I do, the way I drive, the way I cook, I'm always planning my time, I'm always being efficient, achieving the best that I can.

It's great but it has its down sides. Now no matter what personality type we have each one of us, we expect everyone to be like us. I expect you to be like me and when you drive more slowly than I want you to and when you're not as efficient as I want you to I have a tendency to get angry. When you have my sort of personality you can be brutal about all those other people out there who just don't meet your expectations.

It drives me nuts when the car in front of me drives just slowly enough for me to miss the green traffic light up ahead. Unbelievable, how can they do that? I just want to lean on my horn and shake my fist and find some choice words. It's the stuff that road rage is made of.

My favourite saying used to be, "it's so hard to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys." So for the first thirty or forty years of my life I lived in an almost constant state of anger and rage. So when I talk about dealing with anger and finding an antidote to anger I'm not talking this stuff from a text book, I'm talking from a transformed life, a life that continues to be transformed because I'm kind of like that recovering alcoholic, this is going to be a lifelong process in me, a process of rehabilitation that God takes me through because that's how I'm wired.

Now I love a passage out of the New Testament of the Bible, the Book of Hebrews, it talks right into this problem and it's the place where I discovered the antidote to this venom. We had a quick look at this yesterday on the program. Have a listen. It comes from Hebrews chapter 12, verse 14:

Pursue peace with everyone and holiness because without them you won't get so much as a glimpse of God. Make sure that no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble because through it so many will be contaminated.

That root of bitterness is what takes hold of our hearts and our lives when we fail to deal with anger. It's like biting into a lemon and sucking out the sour juice, have you ever done that? Just thinking about it makes your eyes water doesn't it? I remember working with a woman and she was a senior manager in government, very competent woman but she had this attitude in life and this look on her face as though just before she walked out of her office she had bitten into a lemon, she was that sort of a person.

When a root of bitterness springs up it causes trouble. When you plant a plum seed eventually it's going to take root and produce plums, not apricots or nectarines or apples but plums. When we let goodness take root in our hearts we're going to grow good fruit. When we let bitterness take root in our hearts we're going to grow bitter fruit. The root produces the fruit and that's what causes trouble.

It doesn't matter so much what's going on around us, see we can blame everyone and everything and every circumstance but really it matters on what's happening in our hearts, that's what determines the fruit in our lives. Proverbs chapter 15, verse 15 says this:

All the days of the poor are hard but a cheerful heart has a continual feast.

In other words how we respond to things, how we react to things depends on what’s going on in our hearts and if we've allowed a root of bitterness to take hold of our heart, you know when people have hurt us in the past or we've missed out on things and all of a sudden we get this bad attitude, this attitude that's like we've bitten into a lemon and we treat everything in the world as though we've just bitten into a lemon it's going to ruin our lives.

But the antidote, the antidote is also a thing of the heart; the antidote is the grace of God. God has every right to be angry with you and me; we both turned our backs on Him. In fact the Bible talks a lot about the anger of God and says, look when you get angry leave it to Him because He knows how to handle it but if we keep living in anger we're going to end up with a root of bitterness.

God handles His anger by a thing called grace, the unmerited favour of God. Grace by definition is something we don't deserve. Grace is what happened on the cross when Jesus was crucified. A place where Gods justice, the punishment that we deserve fuses with God’s love because He let His Son take the punishment and it turns into this thing called grace.

He forgives us by sacrificing His Son to satisfy His sense of justice and anger and that's the good news for us, that's grace, it's the antidote for bitterness and anger. Listen again to that passage out of Hebrews.

Make sure that no one misses out on the grace of God so that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.

When we live in that grace it takes the bitterness away, it tears it out and heals it because when we come to grips with grace, when we come to grips with how much He's forgiven us and the cost to Him of doing that in His Son it produces a new root, a root of grace and mercy in our hearts and that starts producing a new fruit.

God’s grace is the only antidote to this bitterness and this anger that I've come across. Instead of changing the fruit, you see sometimes we try and change the outside, because we can't, we need to change the root, we need to experience and drink in the grace of God and let Him produce a new fruit in our lives.