Protecting Your Children from Bitterness Against the Church
August 17, 2026
August 17, 2026
Abstract: Daniel Bennett encourages pastors to model gospel love for the church based on Paul’s instructions in Ephesians 4:31–32 by putting off resentment and putting on graciousness. Bennett suggests practical steps for spotting resentment and for cultivating grace in our lives. Rather than pretending that our churches are perfect or that we are perfect, we need to teach our children and model for them what it looks like to love God’s imperfect people in a way that reflects God’s love in Christ.
Early in our ministry, my wife and I made a commitment. Our kids would never hear us say anything negative about anyone in the church. We also vowed to rotate our tires every five thousand miles and floss nightly.
Our intentions were good.
We thought we could protect our kids from bitterness by shielding them from the uglier parts of church life. But the reality of being a pastor made it impossible to hide sin in the church from our children, including their parents’ sometimes sinful responses to hard circumstances. We also failed to rotate our tires regularly, and sadly, some nights we even went to bed without flossing.
We shouldn’t—indeed, we can’t—fool our children into believing the church is full of shiny happy people. A better goal, one that is more realistic and grounded in the gospel, is this: we can help protect our children from bitterness by modeling gospel love for God’s people as we put off resentment and put on graciousness. Using Ephesians 4:31–32 as a guide, we’ll consider practical steps we can take as pastors to identify resentment and cultivate graciousness.
Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.
Our first challenge might be realizing that we are modeling resentment to our children. Perhaps resentment has lingered in our hearts for so long that we’re not aware of its presence. Resentment can vary in intensity, so when it ebbs, we think we’ve eradicated it. Maybe we catalog all the sacrifices we make for the church and conclude that someone who loves the church as much as we do can’t be resentful.
Undiagnosed resentment in our hearts festers, breaking through in unexpected ways, teaching our children that it’s normal to feel aggrieved by Christ’s church. In Ephesians 4:31, Paul helps us identify blind spots to resentment.
One way we spot resentment is in our general demeanor toward people. Paul warns us to put away “bitterness.” Bitterness is a “sharpness” in our hearts, a visceral response of spite or anger.
There are telltale signs of a resentful attitude. We can’t stop thinking about that situation in which we were wronged. We turn it around in our minds like meat on a spit, considering the injustice from various angles. With each rotation, there is a sharp pain and flash of anger.
Another sign of resentment is self-pity. Our eyes fixate not on our abundant riches but on our perceived lack. How hard our lives are compared to others in the church! How unfair that while others go on nice vacations and enjoy holidays, we’re stuck preparing sermons and visiting people in the hospital!
Paul uses two nearly synonymous terms in verse 31: anger and wrath. If there is a difference between the two terms, the first might refer to outward acts and the latter to inward emotions. Both are sinful. We blow up, and everyone within the blast radius feels the heat. Or our anger smolders, and we don’t even consciously realize it is there.
Our family notices. They sense something is off, even if they’re too young to articulate why.
“Dad is . . . ‘frustrated,’” we explain.
But the truth is uglier: Dad is angry.
“Clamor” and “slander” refer to the verbalization of resentment. We come home from a tough day of meetings, and the resentment that has been building all day spews out of our mouths. We rant against “dumb meetings” and “pointless phone calls.” We ascribe sinful motives to those with whom we disagree. Even short, innocuous statements reflect resentment: “Well, that’s Dan for you,” we bemoan. “He’s spiritually immature.”
As we recognize the sin of resentment, we need to confess that it contradicts the truths of the gospel we proclaim. Where our children have seen our resentment, they also need to see our repentance. They’ve heard the tone of annoyance at how hard life is and seen the scowl pass over our face when someone’s name is mentioned. Now our children need to hear us acknowledge our sin and see us model putting off sinful responses of resentment.
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Those who are in Christ don’t just “put off” resentment. They also “put on” graciousness. The hope of Ephesians 4:32 is that being a Christian means growing in graciousness. Let’s consider three practical steps we can take as pastors to help our children see what it looks like to grow in graciousness as we “put on” Christ.
A pastor’s family possesses a unique vantage point. Our daily bread—and warm home and nice clothes and fun vacations—all come from the Lord but directly through the generosity of his people. I’m talking about their tithes and offerings and gifts by which we receive our salaries. Every pastor should celebrate the church’s generosity with his family.
I once made the mistake of mentioning from the pulpit that my daughter was saving for a guinea pig. Within hours, we received three separate offers of gently used guinea pigs. Was this the generosity of God’s people or examples of guinea pig buyer’s remorse? From my perspective, a bit of both. But to our daughter, it was proof that her church loves caring for her. And that is what we and our new guinea pig, Millie, celebrated.
One of two things happens to pastors as we age: we either become more bitter or more gracious.
It’s easy to see how one might become bitter. After decades of ministry, the betrayals have piled up. There are a dozen hard situations our minds could dwell on that remind us of the failures of God’s people.
But bitterness flies in the face of Paul’s instruction. We are to be “tenderhearted” or “compassionate” as we think about the lambs entrusted to us. Year after year, we’ve seen people respond to the gospel! There are thousands of stories of God’s grace we can call to mind. Like the psalmist who begins to recount God’s wondrous deeds, we are forced at some point to simply stop because they are “more than can be told!” (Ps. 40:5). Our children should hear us recounting God’s incredible work among his people far more frequently than bemoaning their faults.
Another way we help our children develop a tender heart toward people in the church is to “contextualize” sin. This doesn’t mean to excuse sin or pretend it doesn’t exist. It means helping them understand why fallen people in a fallen world hurt and hurt others. It means helping them develop hearts of compassion toward fellow sinners, particularly those ensnared by sin’s deceitfulness (2 Tim. 2:25–26). When they see people lash out, we remind them that people usually aren’t upset with Dad. He just happens to be close enough to hurting people to get hit by the shrapnel. In fact, we acknowledge that sometimes Dad may have been the one who inadvertently hurt them! This doesn’t mean sinful responses are validated. It means we’re helping our children see that we should extend to others the same graciousness we ourselves need.
The call to forgive in verse 32 is a call to lavish on others the same grace we ourselves received. Paul lived in awe of God’s graciousness in entrusting a ministry to him. He wasn’t resentful that he was given a difficult ministry but thanked God for his merciful gift of a ministry (1 Tim. 1:12–17).
There are sacrifices pastoral families make. There are late nights and early mornings. There are seasons we labor harder than other people (though fewer than we think). When my eldest daughter got married, she was scandalized when her husband parked halfway back in the parking lot at church. She thought all good Christians had to park as far from the front entrance as possible.
But these “sacrifices” are not loss but gain! Our children need to see us live in awe that God allows us to be pastors. They need to see by our response to hard circumstances that we believe our ministry comes with an eternal reward (1 Pet. 5:4)!
Our children didn’t need us to pretend the church was perfect. They needed us to help protect them from bitterness by modeling gospel love for God’s people as we put off resentment and put on graciousness. Our original plan to never let our children hear us say anything negative about the church was naïve. But by God’s grace, our four children—all in their early to mid-twenties—love the church. God graciously protected them from the “root of bitterness”—not through parents who never struggled with bitterness, but through the same grace of the gospel their parents received (1 John 4:7–8).