The Disease of Resentment
by Anonymous

Resentment is the painful replay of a past experience we have regarded as wrong, insulting, or injurious, that repeatedly provokes strong negative emotions and thoughts. While experiencing strong emotions is not in itself wrong, to cherish and nurture those emotions and harmful thoughts is to allow Satan to infect us with a serious spiritual disease.

The disease of resentment attacks the very core of our belief about God, and other people, as well as ourselves. We become angry with God for letting it happen to us, and in resentment of Him, we feel free to do what we want to do, ignoring what He says we should do. Our resentment becomes justification for our sinful response to the one who hurt us, as well as everyone else we meet in life who treats us in a similar fashion under similar circumstances. This can lead to the resentment of whole groups of people, like everyone of a certain race, gender, class or sect. To say we "have issues" with certain kinds of people is to admit we have active resentments contaminating our perceptions and actions. We can even find abuse in others when none has actually occurred, and wrongfully judge them.

Beginning with a victim mentality, we become perpetrators ourselves, and hate ourselves for how we act as much as we hate ourselves for the way our abusers made us feel. This is a hard thing, but though we may not have been responsible for what was done to us, we are responsible for what we do with it.
We must surrender our wounded and bitter attitude to the Spirit of Christ.

Satan is busy exploiting the situalion. He is the real abuser. By choosing to believe his lie about themselves those who abused us were, in fact, allowing Satan to act out through them. His desire is that we too would choose to believe his lie of being independently operated, thus allowing him to extend his control to us and making us instruments of his evil as well. And if we fall for his deception, we ourselves become actively opposed to God and His purposes for others. By allowing our wills to be at the service of Satan, our own identity as a Christ person is corrupted by shame, and we lose our resolve to stand up for others in their time of need, by being preoccupied with ourselves, our rights and our needs.

Many of us are involved in twelve step recovery programs, because compulsive behavior problems like alcoholism, food, sex or drug addiction, and the like, could all be traced back to our efforts to medicate the pain in our lives from the festering wounds of resentment. Our compulsive behavior was a symptom of spiritual disease. We have had to actively work the twelve steps to recover.

When we were still in our resentments, we had to resist Satan’s lie that we were autonomous selves and could therefore control our own lives our own way. "Our own way" was really Satan’s way. We had to find the humility to admit we were powerless over our compulsive behaviors and that our lives were unmanageable. This is step one.

Appealing to our resentments, Satan was making persuasive arguments that the same God who let evil happen to us in the past, could not be relied upon to help us now with our pre-sent problems. We had better stay with "our own way." To this we answered that we had come to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. This is step two.

Because of the distorted view of reality our resentments had caused, Satan began lying about what God was really like, that God was cruel and vindictive, or that He didn’t care about us, never liked us anyway, or was too busy to help us, or that God’s way was a desert, barren of any real enjoyment. To this we answered that though we probably did not really understand God or His ways very well, His Spirit had born witness to our spirits that He was good. So we turned our will and our lives over to God as we were just beginning to understand Him, and left it to Him to reveal His true nature to us. This is step three. He is God; He does not jump through our hoops! But we have found that He does nothing out of any other motive than the goodness of His nature. Whatever He gives, He gives from His goodness. Whatever He takes away, He takes away out of His goodness. His yes or no comes from His goodness. Though His ways are often baffling or challenging, He has proven to us, over and over, that He is absolutely worthy of our trust.

Step four says that we "made a searching and fearless inventory of our-selves." This is where the opportunity for spiritual healing begins, and where few Christians, or pagans for that mat-ter, are willing to go. Many of those who have done a thorough job with this step recommend that we start with a resentment list with the offender’s name, the offense, what area of our life or identity was harmed, and then what we did to retaliate or compensate for the offense. It is in the areas of retaliation or compensation that our real character defects begin to come to light. Because we were wronged by others, in our ‘ justifiable resentment" we are "allowed" to be vengeful, cruel, judgmental, rage filled, slandering, dishonest, distrustful, minimizing, cheating, slothful, lustful, glutinous, self pitying, narcissistic, greedy, whining, ungrateful, back stabbing, devious, cowardly, unmerciful, irresponsible, violent, unforgiving, and etc. If you see what I mean, behavior we would not tolerate in others for its obvious evil, we insist upon for our-selves as a right!

This is precisely why resentment is such a sticky problem. It allows the most outrageous collection of sins to congregate and propagate in us. No wonder we feel ashamed of ourselves, or try to deaden that shame and pain with denial and medications of all sorts. No wonder we feel hopeless.

The only way I know to remove resentment in me, is to face my own negative, to let God show me what my sin has done to my life and the lives of those I have injured. When first con-fronted about my need to face my negative, I balked. My first line of defense was denial, minimization, deflection and rationalization, various ways of lying to myself and to others about the real me. When those who loved me pressed me further, I became aware of cold terror. I was terrified of exposure and rejection. I was terrified of any kind of accountability, honesty, and responsibility for my own life. I was afraid of the work it might take, and the sacrifices it might cost me to recover. And most of all, I was afraid I would find a thoroughly corrupted, evil John who was beyond all hope of changing.

Before I could go any further, I had to make a list of everything that scared me about each of these categories, without censoring myself. Some of my fears made me feel ashamed and embarrassed, but I wrote them down. After three days, and a six page list of fears, and a lot of hopeless feelings about myself, my friends who loved me said it was time to write the Spirit answer to all my fears. Before I was half way through the first page, the answers came like a flood of refreshment, and I knew l could continue on through the valley of the shadow of death, to face my own evil because Christ was walking it out as me.

If it had been important to face my fears without censoring them, it was now important to ask God to reveal my evil deeds, with all the painful feelings and detailed memories that I hated to see, without trying to escape the pain. About this time, I was also asked to write my testimony for the Intercessor. In my heart I knew this had to be different than my public testimonies of the past. This time, I was to write a history of my life blaming no one but myself for what I did.

As you read this, you may be thinking that this was a dangerous thing to do because it could open me up to the condemnation of the devil. In a way, you are right; I was not only condemned, but God let me experience what Paul said when he wrote "my sin slew me." Satan poured it on and I screamed and cried and I knew I deserved it. My cherished image of myself that pleased only my vanity died. Any foolish delusion that any good could possibly come from me died. But something else was dying too, the idea that there was ever such a thing as a John Shank who could ever be the originator of either good or evil. Only God is good. Only Satan is evil. John Shank is only a vessel who can express the nature of the goodness of Christ or the evil of Satan. I have no real nature in that sense at all. In the sin of unbelief, I do Satan’s evil; in right believing, I do the righteousness of Christ, who is joined to me in my spirit and now lives His life out through me, as me.

My painful memories of abuse from others are no longer resentments. They are being transformed from the fuel that once burned the engines of sin and addiction, into a treasure of experience, a capacity that enables me to identify with the suffering of others from simple rapport to aggressive intercession. I am now seeing that my pain is no longer mine, but for others. My pain at the hands of others is forgiven, the pain I caused others is forgiven by God, but remains with me to remind me what evil I am capable of if I choose unbelief.

If we enter into the death of Christ, we will also enter into His resurrection, and come to know the immeasurable goodness of God.