Always there

The story of Jonah is a powerful tool to help us understand the will of God in our lives. In Jonah 1:1, God tells Jonah to, "go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before Me." The Bible then says Jonah, "got up and went in the opposite direction" because of one word: bitterness. Jonah felt bitterness towards the people God was calling him to love.  One of the things that gets in the way of us loving people one at a time is when we have these unresolved feelings of bitterness, prejudice, or anger. In Ephesians 4 we learn that God calls us to get rid of all anger and bitterness because these things grieve the Holy Spirit. These emotions block us from being able to fulfill God's plan and purpose in our lives because bitterness has the ability to blind us to what God wants to do in and through us. This week's challenge is to focus on what God has done for you rather than what someone has done to you. This is how we can begin the difficult task of uprooting bitterness in our hearts. Every time you start to think about what someone did to you and those feelings of resentment and bitterness arise, stop and instead think about what God has done for you through Jesus. The more we focus on what He's done for us, the more grace and compassion we have for people who've done things to us.