So how does that happen? Well it happens when there's bitterness. Bitterness in the heart is a root that grows, and produces its own fruit. Usually when people are bitter they make judgements, and when we make judgements rooted in bitterness - well men, this is what men are like, or this is what my father, this is what people will treat me like - or we make judgements about ourself - well I'll never get anywhere, this is what's happened, this is the kind of person I am - we begin to judge people. We begin to judge ourselves, we begin to judge others. When those judgements start to form in our heart, they're rooted in bitterness, and they create almost like a bitter expectation, that whatever situation I'm in, this is what's going to happen to me. So people brought up in poverty for example, or financial hardship, you often have a real deep root of bitterness, that they'll suffer financial lack; and then every time a little bit of lack comes up, which is normal anyway in life, it just reinforces the pain: yeah, I knew it, you know?
There's this bitter echo from inside them, and bitterness can grow very deep, and it stains us, and affects our relationship. A woman marries a man who's bitter against his mother, and against women. Very soon, she will have a major problem in her marriage. He will defile the marriage by the bitterness. A woman who's bitter against her husband, because of the way her father or some other men treated her, will find herself in the end defiling the husband; and he will begin to take on the very thing she expected, because of the bitterness. Bitterness has a way of defiling and influencing everything around us, so we need to have a sweet spirit. Isn't it interesting, that after all those years of bitterness and defilement, that they've got bitterness in their heart? It's not surprising, after the way they've been treated, that they're bitter - it's not surprising at all. A girl comes up out of a home where she's been sexually abused, why would we think it's a surprise she's bitter? A person comes up, and their father's abandoned them. Why would we be surprised that they're bitter? Of course they're bitter.
A person's gone through injustice and hardship, and bad treatment, of course they're bitter. When you don't have Christ you don't know what to do. You just take it into yourself, and in the end you form judgements, and these roots go down into the heart, but they don't disappear when you get saved. When you got saved, your spirit was saved. Now you have to journey with God, and in order to come into the promises of a great marriage, a great family, great prosperity, we've got to let God work in our heart, to shift those old mindsets, and those old things that would hinder us becoming the people of God. So if God is wanting to shift you, or shift your marriage, or shift the church, He's got to shift us in our heart, shift us in our beliefs, shift us in the way we are. So of course the way He does it, sets up a few things to press on us a bit.
The Bible says that if we judge others - Matthew 7, Verses 2 and 3 - if we judge others, we ourselves will reap with the judgement. So if I judge others in a certain way, very soon I'll find I'll be experiencing those things in my life. You know, you start to find you judge people: oh, that person's such and such a person, this kind of person, pretty soon I'll be finding, I'm reaping that very thing in my life. So the Bible says first of all get the beam out of your own eye, and you can see clearly. Here's the problem with judgement. When you judge a person, that means you look at their behaviour, you look at that person, and then you pass a sentence on it: well this is what I think! Some people just call it - its opinions. But when we have opinions based on appearances, and judgements on appearances, this is what happens is, your eye is so full of blocks, you can't even see anything clearly - so it says first remove the judgements out of your life, the log out of your eye, then you can see clearly to help the other person.