If you don’t feel like you are growing in the faith, please don’t blame your church first.

One of the marks of immaturity is to blame others for your lack of progress.  Renewal simply cannot come primarily through other people.  It first begins with your engagement with God in private.

But why do so many people blame their church when they are not growing in their faith?

Bitterness.

The writer of Hebrews tells us that those who let bitterness spring up in their lives are those who “miss the grace of God.”  They literally are incapable of experiencing God’s daily sustaining grace.  Because to receive grace our hearts must say, “I don’t deserve.”  But in bitterness our hearts are saying, “I deserve:”

• “I deserve to be well thought of.”
• “I deserve more money.”
• “I deserve good relationships.”
• “I deserve to be happy.”

And when we are bitter we rarely think of ourselves as bitter.  We think of ourselves as right. “We are right to feel this way because the other person behaved so badly.”  The power of this thinking is that there is a seed of truth that has sprung up into a huge lie; bitterness masquerades as righteousness.

And we can easily see how this plays out in churches.  If we are harboring bitterness towards other church members or it’s leadership then we don’t think we are bitter, we think we’re right.  And so we blame the church.  But the tragedy here is that the individual is the one “missing the grace of God,” not the church.

And we can see how this causes so much trouble.  The individual needs to be called out because they are blinded to their sin by their perceived goodness.  Rebuking violations to God’s law is easy, but asking someone to forsake their self-righteousness and their “I deserve” attitude is quite another.  But only here can the grace of God be rediscovered.