Husbands, love your wives, and do not be bitter toward them.
Love, and the thing that kills it in a husband’s mouth.
Week 4 of 4
Not bitter
The opposite of this love is not hatred only. It is a slow bitterness.
Husbands, love your wives, and don’t be bitter against them.
Colossians 3:19
Colossians puts the command in one line and then forbids the rot that replaces it. Do not be bitter against them. Bitterness is love that has curdled: the sigh, the joke at her expense, the record of her failures you rehearse when you are alone. Christ does not keep that record against his church. A husband who does is no longer imitating the cross. He is imitating the accuser.
Scripture
Formal study reading, written for this series
Formal study reading, written for this series
Put on compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving, as the Lord forgave you.
The clothes of a man who has been forgiven.
Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus.
Rights are the raw material of bitterness.
NASB, the Amplified, and the ESV open on Bible Hub. The Legacy Standard Bible opens on its own reader. Close, Expanded, and Easy on this page are original study readings. WEB is the World English Bible, public domain.
Bitterness is a christological failure
Pikraino is to make sharp, the way a plant turns bitter. Paul is not only forbidding explosions. He is forbidding the slow poison. A husband can avoid adultery and still marinate in contempt. Colossians 3 has just told the church to put away anger, wrath, malice, and slander. The marriage line is that command with her name on it.
The only way out is the forgiveness you have already received. “As the Lord forgave you” is not a suggestion to forget every fact. It is a refusal to stand over her as her judge when Christ has refused to stand over you as yours. Philippians 2 takes the last prop away: the mind of Christ counts her interests, and then goes down.
In the house
Find the record. It may be a joke you repeat, a story you tell other men, a silence you use as punishment. Burn the speech even if you keep the memory. Wisdom remembers patterns. Bitterness prosecutes them.
If harm is real — betrayal, danger, a pattern that needs counsel — love does not mean pretending. It means you will not become her accuser in the place of her brother in Christ. Get help. Do not get even.
Seven days
At the table
- 1What story about your wife do you enjoy telling because it makes you the reasonable one?
- 2Where has disappointment become a right to punish?
- 3What would forgiveness look like if it did not mean lying about the past?
- 4Whose mind are you actually wearing when you are alone with her faults?
Your note
Stays on this device. No account.
A prayer
Father, you did not keep the record against me. Do not let me keep one against my wife. Sour the bitterness, not the marriage. Clothe me with the patience you spent on me. Give me the mind of Christ, who did not grasp, and who does not sneer at the people he bought. Amen.