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Fighting – Part 5

December 6, 2018 By admin

A Visit From the Anti-Thief

Have you ever been involved in a friendly basketball game—ten sweaty guys, two teams formed by the time-honored method of “the first five to make free throws”—and, bit by bit, there began to be some tension? This is a self-reffing project, so someone gets fouled on a play; the next time down, he gets back with a little push. A minute later, there’s another elbow, and someone with the ball gives it a sharp one-dribble protest bounce and then a hard look. And then on the next play, suddenly two guys are in a full-fledged fight. Hitting, punching, trying to topple their enemy. And the other eight of you just stand in a little ring, feeling helpless, not knowing what to do.

Maybe you’re in a church board meeting, and there’s an undercurrent of emotion when someone talks about how someone else—three years ago—didn’t do their job right. Or overstepped their authority and made some purchase they shouldn’t have. And you can just sense, even though it isn’t said out loud, that there is some unexploded ordnance still embedded in somebody’s soul.

I heard of a church, likely apocryphal, where one old coot was simply against everything the others wanted. He voted no on all agenda items, including the closing prayer. If Christmas was up for a vote, he would veto it. And one day, someone came to the meeting with good news. So-and-so was willing to donate a thousand-dollar chandelier to the church. Everyone began rejoicing and praising God, until this guy hollered out: “I’m against it. I vote no.”

They all looked at him. Finally the pastor said: “Look, it’s a free chandelier. It’s being donated. We don’t have to pay a red cent for it. Why in the world would you be against that?”

The guy scowled and replied: “First of all, nobody around here knows how to play it. Secondly, nobody around here knows how to even spell it. Thirdly, what this church really needs is more light!”

Our topic in this series has been anger and fighting in the church, and so this brings us to one of Jesus’ most well-known and beloved sayings. It’s right in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, and also in His classic Beatitudes. What should we say and do when two people in front of us begin karate-chopping each other, physically, verbally, or—like enemy submarines—emotionally, underwater where we can’t see the torpedoes?

Here is verse nine of chapter five, which runs exactly twelve words long: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.

It’s fun to read other versions:

Clear Word: Happiness comes from being a peacemaker, for such are God’s children.

Phillips: Happy are those who MAKE peace. We’ll come back to that idea.

Living Bible: Happy are those who strive for peace.

Good News: Happy are those who work for peace.

And what we find in this landmark verse is that God invites us to do more than to simply stand at the free throw line with seven other guys, holding the basketball and waiting while two other people exhaust themselves in a fight. To be a peacemaker means more than to simply not be in the fight yourself.

Have you ever had someone break into your home and rob the place? Perhaps you’ve come out to your car after a late-evening baseball game . . . and you see that your window is broken. And it’s not a case of vandalism: someone has climbed into your car and wrenched out your stereo and your GPS system to sell on the street corner. And it’s a devastating feeling. That was your car, your personal space, your property, your sanctuary where you and your loved ones always enjoyed fellowship and happy times . . . and this alien force has invaded it.

In one of Bill Hybels’ early books, entitled Who You Are (When No One’s Looking), he takes us to a wonderful verse found in John 10:10: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. He taketh thy car stereo and, forsooth, leaveth naught, yea, nothing but a bare hole in thy dash. (That’s my version!) I have come, Jesus says, that they may have life, and have it to the full. “Have it more abundantly,” says the King James.

And Hybels makes this point: “Jesus is not a thief but an anti-thief. He knocks patiently until you open the door, and then He fills up your house with a truckload of life’s most precious commodities.”

Now think about that. I don’t think anyone here is driving a 1971 Datsun B-210, but maybe there was a time in college when you did. And this would be like someone knocking on your car door and saying, “Excuse me, may I come in?” Well, that’s kind of weird, but you scratch your head and look around and say, “Uh, well, okay, I guess so. Just don’t scratch this beautiful vinyl upholstery.” But this Visitor climbs into the passenger seat and miraculously installs a brand new eight-speaker Bose system with a ten-disc changer, Dolby all the way around, bass amp in the trunk, and a leather-bound CD holder that has all of our church’s archived sermons in it plus five CDs of our favorite praise songs. While this Hitchhiker is in there, He somehow also gives you all new leather upholstery, brand new V6 engine, paint job, mag wheels, DVD player, navigation system—the 1971 Datsuns didn’t come with those—spins your odometer back to zero, and even sprays your interior with that new-car-right-out-of-the-showroom fragrance. By the time He’s done, your Datsun is a Lexus. And you see, this visit was from the Anti-Thief who comes in and fills your life with abundance. Instead of that bare, I’ve-been-robbed look that Lenny Briscoe sometimes finds on Law & Order, you come home and find that this friendly Visitor has filled the place you live in with warm and comfortable gifts beyond anything you could imagine.

Well, what does this have to do with “Blessed are the peacemakers”? In the original Greek, this word “peacemakers” comes from eirçnç, which means “peace,” and poieô, for “make.” And the Hebrew word paralleling eirçnç, “peace,” is shalom, which we’ve all heard before as a Jewish greeting. But it carries with it the idea of completeness, of soundness, prosperity, a full life, “condition of well-being.” The Bible tells us to make other people’s lives full, to bless them with hands-on intervention, with an attitude of abundance. So we’re supposed to be at peace (I Thessalonians 5:13), and “follow peace with all men” (Hebrews 12:14). We should pray for peace, work for peace, and do whatever we can in our society to help make it happen.

We’ve spent a whole month here facing up to the reality that even in the Church, sinful humans love to fight. Fighting is in our blood. We keep score. We hold on to grudges. We enjoy drawing blood.

Some of us have had the unfortunate experience of working for various Christian ministries that were at war all the time. Where conflict ruled the place. And I’m ashamed to admit it: it can be a very human temptation to come to board meetings, knowing that an edgy, blood-drawing agenda item was down there at #6 on the list. You have opening prayer, the minutes, the financial report. And all through the mundane items, there is a sinful itch, a little bit of pounding pulse saying, Come on, let’s get to the war zone. This is gonna be good. That person I don’t like is going to get his comeuppance. But this is human nature. The book of James, in the King James, has this great antique line: The lusts that war in your members. So hostility is not an unusual reaction; it simply is a sinful one. Bickering and doing battle are ingrained in the software of the soul; it’s our default mode.

So the Christian is called to exit from that battlefield, but not for the purpose of simply walking to the sidelines. If you’re one of the eight non-fighters in that Saturday night basketball game, God doesn’t call you to just stand there in the key while the fight wears itself out. Notice again from this great verse that Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are the peace-lovers.” That’s not it. God’s command to us is very stark: Blessed are the peace-MAKERS, for they will be called sons of God.

The Adventist Bible commentary reminds us that Jesus came to this world—talk about not staying on the safe sidelines—with a message of peace. He invaded our hostile planet as an ambassador of peace; Romans 5:1 says we have peace with God because of Calvary. He told His disciples, My peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you. Jesus was the Prince of peace.

In this world there are thieves, and there are neutral people, and there are anti-thieves. And here in this wartime scenario, there are fighters, bystanders, and anti-fighters. People who don’t just go into their houses, shut and bar the doors, draw the shades, and turn up the volume on their Enya CD. No, these people of God invade the community where the conflict is happening. They try to draw people together. They come to the board meeting and try to gently probe beneath the surface and fix that underlying scar. They come to church every Sabbath and try to create calm. When someone attacks the pastor—and I’m talking generically here—they look for the good in him. Or they gently ask: “Have you talked to the pastor? That guy is a servant of God, man. I know he would want to fix that problem. I know he would move heaven and earth to resolve that situation, if you’d just make him aware.”

One of the wonderful realities in the body of Christ is that we have a smorgasbord of gifts and talents. What you cannot do, someone else can. The skill that isn’t in your portfolio, someone sitting nearby has. If a child gets hurt at one of our church picnics, I’m helpless to sew sutures or apply a cast, but we have people who are trained in those very skills. They do it all the time.

In this place, there are people who have been dealt a tough financial hand; they sometimes struggle to make ends meet and keep groceries on the table. That’s why we have food bank programs. We have friends sitting right here who need a bit of help driving Joe Camel out of their backyard; well, there are people in our faith community who know how to help with that. A person who can do a parenting seminar provides help for those who would like some additional insight in that area.

And the plain fact is that many of us need real, tangible help in terms of finding peace in our lives. All sin is dysfunction, and if you are locked into a decades-long pattern of negative thoughts, resentful reactions, a payback mentality, you might very well need help from someone else at this church who doesn’t just sit on the sidelines, but who actually wades into the fray and makes peace.

I gave you a series of different renditions of Matthew 5:9; here’s just one more from the Message paraphrase written by Eugene Peterson: You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.

So this is not passive cheering from the sidelines. This is wading into the fray. This is those who know the gospel, who have experienced some transforming by the gospel, who have walked down the forgiveness freeway a few miles reaching out to someone else and saying: “Let me help. I’m the ER doc of hurt feelings.”

There’s a spiritual web site called www.thelivingwordbc.com, and author Ken Trivette, exploring the book of James, helps us with this observation: “A spiritually mature person does not live after his or her own desires. They do not live by the wisdom of the world. They live by an altogether different standard. They don’t cause trouble. They sow peace instead of strife.”

That metaphor takes us back to Matthew 13 where we were a couple weeks ago. An enemy invaded the good guy’s field, with a ski mask over his face. He disabled the alarms, covered up the surveillance cameras, climbed over the fence at midnight, and spent two hours planting weeds everywhere. Here it’s the opposite. These quiet heroes of the kingdom of God go about their lives, sowing seeds of harmony. They quell rebellions instead of fomenting them.

Maybe you read recently about a 54-year-old Quaker named Tom Fox, who didn’t just pray for peace. He was part of a group called CPT: Christian Peacemaker Team, and he spent two years in Iraq, actually living peace, making peace, sowing seeds of peace. He was killed for his efforts not too long ago. And his grieving friends, noticing maybe that Blessed are the peacemakers is immediately followed by Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, issued this spiritual invitation to all of us who are in the grip of a cycle of anger:

“In response to Tom’s passing, we ask that everyone set aside inclinations to vilify or demonize others, no matter what they have done.”

Now, this challenge runs so contrary to our human nature. I mentioned that Bill Hybels book; one chapter earlier he has a passage entitled “Radical Love: Breaking the Hostility Cycle.” Again, hostility is the default setting for most of us. As newborns, almost, we strap on swords and shields from Johnson & Johnson when we’re still in the delivery room. You teachers in our Cradle Roll department can testify what happens when you try to take something from a toddler. Oh, what a look you get. Even one-year-olds are able to shoot daggers at us already. But Christ wants us to do the opposite thing from our fallen inclination. Don’t be a thief; be an antithief. Don’t be a peace-destroyer; be a peacemaker.

Jesus Himself gives us an illustration. Turn the other cheek. Now, there are karate / kung fu schools very near this church, and I don’t think turn the other cheek is part of their sales brochure. By the way, whacking someone’s cheek was a common insult in Jerusalem; it carried more emotional weight than just the sting of the hit. That was the flipping-off expression of the streets. And what is our karate instinct? To hit back, tit for tat. When someone insults us, we immediately think: “Well, but you did such-and-such” . . . even if their misdeed has no connection whatsoever with ours. But Jesus tells us to love peace, to make peace, to turn the other cheek. Accept a second blow. Give someone your coat and your cloak.

Hybels calls these people “radical lovers” and shares this little story: “A friend of mine is a paramedic in Humboldt Park, a Chicago neighborhood notorious for its gangs. ‘You know how it goes,’ he told me. ‘It starts with a little misunderstanding. It escalates when someone gets his feelings hurt and uses a little sarcastic language. His sarcasm provokes a smart-aleck response, which elicits a threat and then a challenge. Now the male bravado and honor get going. And then come the fists and the clubs and the knives and the guns. The blood flows and the flesh tears, and when it’s all over and people are lying in piles, they call us and we come in and pick up the pieces.”

The late Mario Puzo has a fictional tale that maybe you’ve heard before. Somebody shoots Don Vito Corleone. So the Corleones get on the scoreboard by killing Bruno Tattaglia. They hit Michael in the jaw. His family retaliates by gunning down Virgil Sollozzo. The Five Families execute Sonny out by the Jersey tollbooth. So Michael ends up killing Moe Greene and just about everybody in New York City. You get the idea.

And even in our white-collar world, where it’s not blood and shotguns and going to the mattresses, the same is true on an emotional level. Hybels describes our dilemma this way: “I know how it goes. It’s been going that way for thousands of years. Granted, in a ‘sophisticated suburban’ environment most of our hostilities do not end in hand-to-hand combat. They end in cold wars: detachment, distrust, alienation, bitterness, name-calling, mudslinging, separation, isolation and lawsuits. Although we rarely fight with our fists, we can do a great deal of damage without ever soiling our three-piece suits.”

Take a moment and think about your own sphere of relationships. Where is there a broken friendship? Or maybe you have loved ones who have gone through a fracturing, and up until now you’ve been standing on the safety of a distant shore. But could you do what it takes to make a U-turn, to reverse the tide of hatred? Here’s the conclusion Hybels gives: “But the cycle of hostility must be stopped if there is ever going to be relational harmony in this world, and it will take radical, nonretaliatory, second-mile lovers to stop it. Somebody has to absorb an injustice instead of inflicting another one on somebody else; somebody has to pull the plug on continued cruelty. God says, ‘You can do it, if you’re willing to become a radical lover.’”

In our own strength, I think this is pretty near impossible. I know I have a long track record of revenge; it’s hard to go in the opposite direction from our impulses. Only two things can help, really: first of all, to accept that God’s power is sufficient, that all events are under his control, and that He has promised to take care of us. When Peter asked Jesus one day, “How many times do I have to forgive all these idiots around here?” and Jesus said, “Not seven times, but four hundred ninety,” all twelve disciples immediately fell over in a daze and said: “Lord, increase our faith!” Because it takes faith to believe that God won’t let our releasing of resentment cause us to be shortchanged in the end.

And then secondly, we need to grasp the enormity of this campaign we’re in together. Historial Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a fascinating, 800-page book entitled Team of Rivals. In 1860, a young unknown named Abe Lincoln miraculously managed to win the presidential nomination of the brand new Republican Party. There had been four contenders: him, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. Lincoln was easily the least experienced and most unknown and untested in the bunch. Going in to the Chicago convention, his goal had been to be everybody’s second choice. Seward, the overwhelming front-runner, had been a senator and Governor of New York. On the first ballot, needing 233 to win, he got 173½, with Lincoln coming in a surprising second. On the second ballot, as delegates abandoned Bates and Chase; Seward won again, but now just 184½ to 181. On the third and final ballot, the rail-splitting nobody from Illinois got the presidential nomination.

The other three men were absolutely crushed, especially Seward, who had waited his entire life for this moment. Being President had been his destiny, and now a wisecracking, hack lawyer from a hayseed western state had stolen his prize.

Here’s the interesting thing. After winning the Presidency, Lincoln immediately got all three of these men, all of them disappointed, all of them bitter, and persuaded them to be in his White House cabinet. When advisors said to him, “Mr. President, are you nuts? ‘Your team of rivals will devour one another,’” Lincoln told them that the stakes for the nation were simply too high. The country was about to break apart over slavery; the Constitution itself hung in the balance. In his own words, Lincoln admitted that he was going to occupy the most important Presidency since George Washington’s. He had to have the best men there were, the keenest minds, the most talented people, regardless of personal feelings. “These are the very strongest men,” he said. “I have no right to deprive the country of their services.” What hung in the balance was so crucial that he had no choice but to forge a powerful team through reconciliation, putting self aside for the larger good.

Now, what about us? We are Adventist Christians. Some of you have told me recently that you are really starting to care about the success of this place; you’re part of something larger than yourselves. But in the upper room on that dark Thursday night, when Jesus did the unexpected thing, when the King washed the feet of the servants, when the Teacher got on His knees and made Himself lower than the students, eleven men suddenly saw that they were part of something bigger than their feelings. They didn’t have to stop forgiving at seven times, because heaven became a bit more real when they went on to eight, nine, ten, and out to the mythical four hundred and ninety.

Think about your marriage. Can you suddenly pull the plug on the jockeying for advantage, the instinct to justify yourself and treat yourself? How about in our businesses? Don’t just walk away from the tumult; walk into it with a plan for peace and a willingness to give, not just one, but both cheeks to the cause.

I have said to many of you, “Your being here is a truly meaningful thing. You being here makes a difference. Your presence here is a successful gift to God’s cause.” You arrive here with a check made out, and you put it in an envelope and give it to this church. You could buy some very pleasant other things with that money, but you bless all of heaven by giving it instead.

And now comes this question: can we surrender that emotional coat and cloak? Can we turn the other cheek? Can we be nice to that person we frankly don’t like? Oh, man. It’s hard to do, and there’s probably no glory in it, because our treasurer will never know about it and give you a big year-end tax receipt for that gift. This is akin to putting your entire self on the altar of peace-making. But Matthew 5, where this command is found, is the Magna Carta of the kingdom. When we are meek, hungry for righteousness—and especially when we sacrificially make peace—we advance that kingdom. As we say in the Lord’s Prayer, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

We not only pray that prayer, we help Jesus make it come true. Shall we pray?

Jesus, this is a hard invitation. It runs contrary to our instincts and our entrenched life patterns. Thank You for showing us the way. Thank You for giving us Your abundance, and asking us to go out and make peace by spending from Your storehouses. Bless us, please, as we try to advance Your eternal kingdom. In Your name we pray, Amen.

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Read more at the source: Fighting – Part 5

Article excerpt posted on en.intercer.net from Better Sermons.

Fighting – Part 4

December 6, 2018 By admin

The Terminator of Truth

If you come to this church on Sabbath morning but you don’t believe in the validity of the seventh-day Sabbath, what should our board do about that? What if you don’t believe in the virgin birth? Or in the divinity of Jesus? Or the 1844 Sanctuary doctrine? On the one hand, you might say, “Well, people like that wouldn’t even show up here.” But that’s not necessarily true. There have been people who came here for extended periods who weren’t even truly born-again Christians; but they liked the camaraderie, the potlucks, the strong moral foundation here, the community service opportunities this place provided for their children. And all the time, quietly in their hearts, there were things they didn’t believe in concert with their fellow attendees.

I imagine we might all be surprised if every single person here had to write up a full-confession statement of beliefs and then have us post them openly on our web site. Instead of “What We Believe,” we’d have subsections: “What Steve Believes.” “What Nancy Believes.” “What Jose Believes Is Wrong About What Nancy Believes.” And so on. Could the church survive something like that?

A few years ago, when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers beat the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XXXVII, the final score of 48-21 was substantially overshadowed by an off-the-field football player played by an actor named Lester Speight. If you watch on Super Sunday more to enjoy the competition for “Best Commercial,” this one from Reebok was the hands-down winner of the day. Six feet seven inches, 330 pounds, all hard muscle, and the point of the commercial was that some nameless company had hired Terry Tate the Office Linebacker to be its code enforcer. If you used your company laptop to play solitaire, boom! This guy flattened you with a tackle. If you didn’t get back from lunch in exactly thirty minutes, boom! This lightning-fast monster came flying through the air ready to clothesline you into submission. If your fax didn’t have a cover sheet on it, #56 would tear down the hallway, jump across the line of scrimmage, and boom! “You parked in the boss’s spot again! Boom! You spent twenty minutes uploading pictures to Costco’s photo center on company time. Boom! You turned in an expense report without proper documentation—no restaurant receipt from In-n-Out Burger. Boom!

And for 60 bone-crunching seconds, this #56 was just hurtling across your TV screen, with agonizing “thumps” as he tacked the poor people who made little mistakes here and there.

Well, Reebok really scored a touchdown with the ad, and some viewers were searching the Internet afterwards, wondering: “Who is this guy . . . and can I get him to enforce discipline at my company?” I think some pastoral staffs were putting their heads together and asking: “Can we get him here? We’ll put him out in the parking lot and he can stiff-arm all the latecomers into the sanctuary.” Get in there by 11:00 or I’ll put your spine out of line. One of the Reebok actors told the press that this Lester Speight’s football tackles were absolutely real, not staged. In fact, he said: “Man, the guy hit me so hard I was bleeding.”

There was a Leadership cartoon once, and they must have found a relative of Cousin Lester’s to be the enforcer at Sunday School. I mean, this guy was huge. He looked like a Marine drill instructor: butch haircut, square chin, no-nonsense clip-on tie, tattoo of a church steeple on his muscular biceps. And this man has a new, fragile Christian by the neck, lifting him about two feet off the ground, while about eight other people are quaking in their boots in the background. And this Terminator—I mean, Sunday School teacher—is bellowing at the guy: “Sixty-one? Sixty-ONE? What do you mean, there’s sixty-one books in the Bible? Drop and give me twenty!” And the caption reads: “It quickly became clear that retired General George ‘No Surrender’ Summers was the wrong choice to teach the new members class.”

Well, we’re having a bit of fun here, but have you ever been personally tackled over Bible truth and your particular interpretation of it? Have you ever been forced to run fifty laps because of your faith? If you were driving to church this morning, and thinking to yourself that there are 61 books in the Bible, instead of the correct, true, holy answer of 66—which every good Adventist in the world ought to know . . . I mean, come on, people—should I radio ahead and get the CHP (that’s the Christian Highway Patrol) to pull you over at the next intersection and beat the heresy out of you?

I know that many of us who work in the Lord’s vineyard have experienced prickly encounters with someone who was determined to have their say—and maybe their way—over some Bible teaching or doctrinal interpretation. And armed with a stack of quotations and perhaps even DVDs, they seek out dialogue and debate with friends and strangers alike.

I have had a few of these encounters along the way, and there’s a question I think it is helpful to ask at a certain point in the summit meeting. “Does this debate at your church help . . . or hurt? Is it unifying or dividing the congregation? Is it causing growth or splintering? Is it leading you to pray for the pastor or talk about him behind his back?” And I will say that sometimes new friends who have been prone to do battle have reflected for a moment, and then admitted that maybe they could do more to help heal wounds of division.

Let me ask today: what does this question of doctrinal warfare mean for us in our daily lives? It appears that the early Christian church had both Terry Tate the Reebok Linebacker and General George the Terminator sitting on the front row. Along with Paul, Silas, Barnabas, and Timothy, people like this were right there with their camcorders getting video clips of the drums in the youth division. People were fighting about doctrines that still had the wet ink on the parchment. Notice what Paul writes in Titus 3:

But avoid quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him. You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned (vv. 9-11).

Now, this is a deep, complicated, gray-area principle. But we do find here that at least under some circumstances, division on Bible teachings is a dangerous and wrong thing to indulge in. If someone is endlessly tackling the saints in the foyer of the church, or coming to prayer meeting wearing a helmet, Paul seems to be suggesting that they be cut from the team.

BUT . . . now let’s hear a warning that sounds to us like it comes from the other team’s huddle. Paul’s writing now to his friend Timothy; this is from 6:3-5. If anyone teaches false doctrine and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between men of corrupt mind.

So you notice the apparent awkward contradiction here. On the one hand, Paul tells us that fighting about church teachings is bad. It’s divisive, it’s harmful, it’s unproductive. On the other hand, adhering to false doctrines, and body-checking people with heresy and dangerous interpretations . . . for sure is wrong. So we have: “Don’t fight about truth. If someone is teaching falsehood, stop him.” Truth is important—but controversy over truth is to be avoided. But how can we know if we’re defending truth? After all, every person sitting here today is convinced that the way they see things is truth, the whole truth, and nothing but truth. If it weren’t truth, we’d change our views. Nobody wants to be in error. So it rings a bit hollow to us when Paul comes along from a dusty 2,000 years ago and says: “Listen, you guys, don’t fight about truth. And I know—so I’ll tell you what truth is.”

But, in a sense, he’s correct. The Bible is written by godly men who wrote under the process of inspiration, Holy Spirit-protected truthfulness. So if something is plainly written by a Paul or a John or an Isaiah, we can take those clear statements as incontrovertible truth.

Let me very humbly share a few principles that help us through this difficult topic. And I say this as a person whose own biblical views have been humbled on more than one occasion. I am less sure about some things today than ten years ago, and more sure about others. But one thing we have to prayerfully attempt to do is to discern, with the Bible and God’s help, the difference between necessary truth and other truth.

For example: the Bible unflinchingly tells us that the doctrine of the Resurrection is absolutely vital. It’s not negotiable; it’s not a bargaining chip. It’s not something the Adventist Church could vote out of its 28 Fundamental Beliefs in a future General Conference. Without the resurrection of Jesus on Sunday morning, and the subsequent resurrection of all of God’s faithful saints, there is no Christian Church. The entire edifice falls if that one doctrine gets a crack in it. First Corinthians 15:3: For what I received, Paul writes, I passed on to you AS OF FIRST IMPORTANCE: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. Then verse 14: If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. Case closed. Every time we pastors sit down with God’s Word and begin to craft a sermon for Easter Sabbath, we realize anew that the Bible explicitly establishes the Resurrection as a linch-pin teaching: without it, we lose the doctrine of forgiveness, of eternal life, of heaven, of the Second Coming, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, of the validity of Old Testament prophecy. Everything falls apart without the Resurrection.

So if a guest speaker came here and attacked that teaching, we would be perfectly within our rights—in fact, we would be morally obligated—to show that person to the door. That teaching could not stay here among us even as a discussion. There are some beliefs that are crucial to the faith.

In an essay entitled Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism, C. S. Lewis lamented a good half-century ago that sometimes priests and preachers who have lost all faith in the truths of the Bible still wear the cassock and the pastor’s hat, come to church, get a paycheck from the diocese, and then fail to support the belief system that is supporting them. He calls this a form of prostitution, which is a colorful but appropriate metaphor. And then adds this lament: “Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the Vicar: he now tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more.” And notice this sad conclusion: “Missionary to the priest of one’s own church is an embarrassing role.”

I’m gratified as I surf different denominational web sites, and as I read the great books of the Church, that very often we find a strong, unifying, faith-building coherence to the various statements of belief. What are the critical things? The same key pillars are affirmed over and over. I most often read about the love and omnipotence and omniscience of God. About the divine authority of the Old and New Testaments. About the perfect sinlessness of Jesus our Savior and Redeemer and His atoning blood which is totally sufficient to save us in heaven. About the Resurrection. The Second Coming. The doctrine of the Church. The importance of Bible baptism. And the triumph of God’s kingdom over the rebellion caused by Satan. Christians everywhere recognize these teachings as crucial to the faith; and thankfully, most believers who embrace the Word of God don’t find it necessary to endlessly debate those points.

So some doctrines do need to be defended. There are some pillars where, if a dissenter wants to endlessly argue against the Body of Christ, he or she eventually needs to be escorted from the Super Bowl gridiron. “Warn him once, warn him twice,” Paul says, and then that’s it.

And of course, this is itself one of the core questions: what is important? What is crucial? What is it that will threaten the Church itself if left to conquer from within? Some people think that jewelry is a very important issue; others don’t see it that way at all. But the question of jewelry has divided and destroyed many churches. Maybe you don’t care about that question in the least, but if we began to perform same-sex marriages here on Sabbath afternoons, you might have something to say about it. This is our dilemma.

In the introduction to his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis shares how he decided which issues to cover. Which “disputed points,” as he put it, was he going to tackle? And he writes this: “One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their disagreements. When two Christians of different denominations start arguing, it is usually not long before one asks whether such-and-such point ‘really matters’ and the other replies: ‘Matter? Why, it’s absolutely essential.’”

What, then, is vital? Obviously, anything that impacts our eternal salvation is important. Anything that casts God’s kingdom in a false light is important. Anything that besmirches the character of God is important.

But some things are not. I have been in Sabbath School classes where the members steered over to some hot political point where the Word of God is eloquently silent! It doesn’t say what we should believe. And yet two sides will get going in heated discussion, and emotions will begin to heat up. After just a few minutes, it sounds like World War III has begun.

The reality is this. The Bible isn’t clear on every question. No one knows the answer to these questions. And I have had to gently come to someone in the parking lot after church and say to them, “Look, let’s not have wars that are unwinnable. First of all, the Bible doesn’t specify. All you had in there were your opinions. We all know what Bible verses are pertinent to the subject; there aren’t going to be any new ones. Secondly, that whole issue only deserves two minutes anyway, especially because it’s unsolvable. It should never get more time than that.” Humble Christians need to agree to not keep snapping our wet towels at our doctrinal adversaries, trying to irritate them into an arm wrestling match.

I have had delightful go-rounds with friends and neighbors over the question of what happens to the soul of a person when they die. They believe the soul goes directly to heaven when you die, and, being a faithful Adventist, I believe in the concept of soul sleep. In both scenarios, it’s either a moment or an apparent moment before you see the face of Jesus. But there is a very real difference of opinion between us.

And so we begin to go at it. I give them Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6. “The dead know not anything.” They hit me with Philippians 1:23: “I desire to depart and be with Christ.” I circle around and come after them with I Thessalonians 4: “The dead in Christ shall rise at the second coming.” They pop me back with II Corinthians 5: “Absent from the body, present with the Lord” and Luke 16: “The rich man and Lazarus.” And after calling it a draw, and getting into it again a month later and calling it a draw, and having a third discussion across the back-yard fence the following Christmas and calling it a draw, I finally come to realize a couple of things.

First of all, the fact that the issue is unresolved doesn’t seem to be threatening our Christianity. This other person is still fully committed to Jesus, and so am I. Secondly, again, we both seem to know all of the Bible verses there are. Unless there is some new Dead Sea scroll discovery that gives us a 67th book of the Bible, we have all the information there is, and still aren’t seeing eye to eye. And I finally come to realize that something in the other person’s past experience makes it hard for him to see this issue in any other way than he does. What seems to me a very coherent and logical and even wise heavenly plan is unsettling to him. A sincere evangelical once said to his Adventist pastor friend across the street, “Sam, when I die I don’t want to just lie there in the dirt; I want to go immediately and be with Jesus.” And who am I to argue with that very good sentiment?

So it is often possible—and wise—that when we dialogue with friends on the other side of the river, we both try hard to rejoice together over the 98% of great Bible truths that we hold in common. There are so many things that we believe in full union; we must ask God to help us try to talk more about those things.

And maybe someone will say to me: “But, Pastor, isn’t it possible that Satan will use the idea of immortal souls to bring about a major deception in the last days?” Yes, that is possible. And all we can do now, while that possible campaign lies in the future, is to love these neighbors of ours and hope that if that day of darkness comes, and lies about God and heaven are sweeping the earth, these new neighborhood friends of ours will remember our visits and gain a new perspective at that time, with the Holy Spirit’s help.

I would like to recommend to you today what the Bible recommends to you today: a gentle andinquiring spirit. We should seek all truth. We should have fellowship Bible studies where we get into the deep and controversial things. It’s a time-honored principle that we shouldn’t air our debates before the general public; that never draws people in. Attack billboards and prophecy brochures that cast aspersions on the beliefs of others are always inappropriate. But here within the family, if we can do so lovingly, sure, let’s study hard. We should explore just as far down the paths of learning as the Holy Spirit enables us to. But as we read from Colossians 3 last week, let’s clothe ourselves with compassion and kindness and humility. Let’s preface our debates with: “I may be wrong. I’m still learning. And isn’t it wonderful that Jesus has saved us and now enables us to study these truths with a perfect absence of fear”?

For many decades our media ministries like the Voice of Prophecy have had to learn the art of presenting all arguments in a gentle frame of humility. There are some evangelical and Catholic-owned radio stations where, if you talk about death and soul sleep and hell in violation of their belief structure, they’ll pull the program. They’ll cancel your contract. So the people involved in scripting those radio messages had to ask God to help them remember that every single day, they were reaching virgin ears who had never heard from the Adventist Church before. They had to build bridges, not blow them up. They wanted to be attractive as well as articulate. As St. Augustine once said: “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”

Let me close with this. All other issues are subservient to the centrality of Jesus. Jesus is everything. Jesus is our all in all. Jesus is our only hope. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. Jesus is the One who is coming again. Let’s place every other issue in its right perspective and place, in the shadow of the life and victory of Jesus.

I believe that all of us who are humbly trying to share Jesus with others are going to win some battles and lose others. There will be those for whom our Bible perspectives will not take hold. The convictions which are so sweet and clear to us will not come into focus in everyone else’s life. And yes, we will stand in frustration on the sidelines as friends we care about go through needless hurt as they battle their own misconceptions.

Yet you and I are God’s steadfast ambassadors. I can only hope and pray that somehow, despite those flashes of helpless pain, these friends of ours will at least hold on to the hand of Jesus. That they will discover, even if childlike, even if imperfect, even if prodigal son-like, the thing that Acts 16:31 talks about: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. And I pray that our time with these precious souls, the gifts of connection that the Holy Spirit creates for us—as He did for Philip and the Ethiopian ruler so long ago—will be positive, healing blessings. I’d like to save everybody I can, and make the others happy. Shall we pray?

Lord, we are acutely aware today of our inexperience, our lack of wisdom. Sometimes we battle enthusiastically over things we know so little about. Help us to lower our voices and raise our level of compassion. Help us to defend our Bibles and not our opinions. And please make us the most diligent to share a friend named Jesus, the one doctrine that ensures salvation. In His name we pray, Amen.

______________________________

Read more at the source: Fighting – Part 4

Article excerpt posted on en.intercer.net from Better Sermons.

Fighting – Part 3

December 6, 2018 By admin

Doomed Divisiveness

A Christian math teacher once had a young man come up to him during a break in their college algebra class. And he said with a very happy look on his face, “I won $600 at such-and-such casino the other night.” Early in the semester, when the professor talked about the practical reality of negative integers, he had mentioned that visitors to Las Vegas probably know a lot about negative numbers, so this student was proud to be the exception to the rule.

When the teacher asked him the secret of his success, he replied, “Well, I always play the same game and just stay with the same tactic all the time. I don’t deviate from it.” He didn’t seem to know much about finely-tuned computer strategies or card-counting, so the teacher decided that he must have just been very lucky. But then he said, “And I played that same way all last summer, lots of times, and I’m up something like $1,600.”

Well, Las Vegas pros say there’s nothing more irritating than people who play like morons, making all the wrong moves and still constantly winning in spite of themselves. But the Christian teacher said to him, very gently, “You know that in the long run, the fixed percentages in those games are going to finally eat you up. The downhill slope at a gambling casino is something you simply are not going to beat over a lifetime.” Everybody who knows anything just hooted when William Bennett, author of the famous Book of Virtues, claimed that he had played high-stakes slot machines for decades and broken even the entire time. That simply is not possible mathematically.

Let me quickly abandon this particular motif, and come instead to a spiritual reality that is more fixed in concrete than the 5.39% you buck if you sit down at a roulette wheel or the 17% you go up against if you spend an afternoon at Santa Anita Racetrack. Our Bible subject today is the question of fighting: arguing, debating, holding grudges, criticizing others, bickering over theology, fomenting dissension over music and worship styles. And the hard reality is that criticizing other people is a mathematically doomed delusion. It simply isn’t going to work. If you want to change things and improve the world by criticizing and stirring up conflict, you’re going to end up disappointed.

There’s a wrenching Old Testament story we find in the book of Numbers, and I remember reading this as a boy in those old Bible Story books by Uncle Arthur. Three men named Korah, Dathan, and Abiram developed a critical spirit there among the children of Israel. This was at Kadesh, just on the borders of Canaan, after the 12 spies had brought back the discouraging report about giants in the land, and after Israel had faltered in their faith. Instead of going right now into Canaan and taking over in victory, the Israelite “grasshoppers” were going to wander in the wilderness for an extra forty years. So it’s understandable that people were out of sorts and looking for scapegoats, and these three men, the Bible says in chapter 16, “became insolent.” They were openly critical of Moses and Aaron and very vocal in causing the entire community to become embroiled in anger and dispute.

In this particular case, God didn’t wait around to let the roulette wheel of time prove that their critical natures were a fatal plague. If you read the story—and don’t let your children hear this at a tender age—God actually opened up the earth and just swallowed up these three families, along with their tents and toys and tricycles. It’s interesting that God says to the rest of the people, right before this “Big Gulp” punishment, “Move away from the tents of Koran, Dathan, and Abiram.” He knew that this infection of rampant criticism was a deadly thing, and He didn’t want to destroy innocent life along with the guilty.

But what if God had simply permitted this strife to play itself out over five or ten years. Would things have improved in the ways these three malcontents wanted? Would the Children of Israel have been blessed by their verbal barbs? And here in this 21st century, are there churches where the members can hold onto a pattern of criticism and cynicism, and still point to vibrant growth and lots of baptisms and people beating down the doors to join that church?

A lot of you here today aren’t old enough to have experienced the fascinating cesspool our nation knows as Watergate. A year or so ago, Jon Stewart or one of the late-night comics was trying to get some laughs out of the latest scandal, which he called: “Dick-Cheney-shooting-a-guy-in-the-face-gate,” but this was nothing compared to the several years where conflict seemed to rule in Washington, D.C. Historian Richard Reeves wrote a book entitled Richard Nixon: Alone in the White House, which was crafted out of a whole slew of new material: tapes and notes and papers from presidential aides like H. R. Haldeman. Reeves describes a Nixon alumni reunion that happened back on May 17, 2000, something like six years after Nixon passed away. A lot of the Watergate figures were also dead by then, including Haldeman, but a good number of people who served from ‘68 until August 9, 1974 got together and reminisced and remembered. Many of them still had those old Nixon-style flag pins in their blazers. Nixon’s grandson, Christopher Cox, led the group in saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

And as Reeves tells the story, a lot of these people, a quarter of a century later, were still almost in a daze, going around saying to each other, “What happened? How did this thing fall apart on us the way it did?”

You look at the numbers. In 1972, Richard Nixon won reelection over George McGovern, beating him by 18 million votes. Five hundred twenty electoral votes to 17. He beat him 49 states to one. The whole nation was red except for Massachusetts. Even San Francisco voted Republican. And less than two years later Nixon was quitting in disgrace, waving to the staff outside the White House and getting on Air Force One to fly back to California.

What happened? One of the Watergate men was named Elliott Richardson, a man who died just a few months before this reunion. He had been Nixon’s attorney general, but had resigned in protest after refusing to obey Nixon’s order that he fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor, which led to something called the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.” And Richardson had said to this biographer: “Nixon wanted to be the Architect of his Times.”

But then you read the book. And on page after page, chapter after chapter, there are stories of tragedy. Here and there is greatness. There are moments of rare courage; Nixon was a consummate statesman in many ways, a brilliant, incisive thinker. He mastered the issues. In addition, he could be tender, noble, self-sacrificing, courageous. He had greatness in him. He actually had an amazing ability to gently comfort a hurting person, to be personal and warm. He once had a secretary who just couldn’t spell a certain word, and he finally went out of his way to always bypass that word and use other language, just to not keep embarrassing her.

BUT . . . most of this book is a long, sad chronicle of bitterness. Of fighting. Of quarreling and dissension, the splits and the schisms and the splashes of anger.

In the intro to the book, Reeves writes this: “Nixon’s inaugural address, lifted stylistically from Kennedy’s 1961 speech, was built on a sign held up by a young girl in Ohio as he campaigned there: ‘Bring us together.’ But Nixon could not do that. He saw people as groups, to be united and divided toward political ends. The architecture of his politics, like that of his foreign policy, was always based on manipulating groups and interests, balancing them or setting them against one another, whichever suited his purposes or the moment or the times.”

In ‘72, which was that historic election year, Nixon was masterful at visiting both Moscow and Beijing, pitting Russia and China against each other instead of against the U.S. And since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, he achieved breakthrough arms and trade agreements with both superpowers by driving wedges between two countries that had been longtime Communist allies.

Back to Richard Reeves’ intro: “Nixon glorified in cultural warfare, dividing the nation geographically, generationally, racially, religiously. He believed that was what all politicians did. His ‘silent majority,’ a resentful populist center of working and middle-class Christians, loved him not for himself but for his enemies.”

It’s kind of sad that the last line of this postmortem mentions Christians as being a key part of this angry, restless, ready-to-hate constituency. And even today, so many people in the secular world look into our parking lots, and read how Christians are always marching, always suing each other, always engaging in the politics of personal destruction. Does that kind of ongoing civil war get those onlookers to come in here and visit us? Not too much.

Well, what does the Bible say for us on this subject? I guess there must have been a lot of Nixon posters and a lot of anti-Nixon posters in the ancient streets of Colosse, because this is what Paul writes to all of the new Christians there: Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity (Colossians 3:12-14).

It’s interesting that the Bible says to clothe ourselves with compassion. I can look around this morning and see the outfits that you took pains to wear to church today. We all put on these items of apparel and then we walk into God’s house. And what would it be like if we made a decision, there in our own homes on Sabbath morning, before hitting the freeways: “I’m going to clothe myself with an attitude of compassion. I’m going to put on a coat of kindness, a flannel shirt of forgiveness, a poncho of patience”?

I know we have all had the experience of having to go out into a cold world and perform some act of service, some deed of Christian love. We don’t feel like it. Our house is warm and cozy; there are wonderful things on television. But we have this divine appointment. So I imagine you do what I do too. As I get to my parking spot, I have to simply put on an emotional coat of enthusiasm. I have to say, “I love people. I love sharing these ideas. I love the witnessing opportunities. I love serving. And for the next couple of hours, even though it’s raining, I am going to look like I am the happiest, most fulfilled, most aren’t-we-having fun guy these people have ever met.”

And the Bible is true. We can decide to have different thoughts. We can put on a coat of forgiveness, or forbearance, of remembering that Calvary is more important than the fact that you like a different kind of music than others seated in the same Christian sanctuary as you, or that you don’t like the necktie the preacher is wearing.

I know this diagnosis in Colossians 3 is easy to read, but really hard to do. I know that. Paul says: “Bear with one another.” Well, I don’t want to. “Forgive each other; forgive those grievances.” But my grievances are really justified and documented and well-rehearsed. Someone read in Matthew 19: “Love your neighbor.” And he responded: “Good luck. I’d like to see you love MY neighbor.” There’s a classic line about American legend Will Rogers: “He never met a man he didn’t like.” And someone replied: “I’ll bet Will Rogers never met so-and-so.”

But we face the hardness of this invitation, the seeming impossibility of this wardrobe of chosen charity, with two truths. First of all, we have to. That’s it! We have to put on this necktie of love . . . why? Because the Bible tells us we have to.

In his book, Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness, Jerry Cook tells about a scenario where three ladies were all employees of his church. Choir leader, secretary, office assistant, whatever. And for some reason, they weren’t getting along. The office politics between the three of them had just gotten toxic, and the entire church staff knew it.

And finally Cook called them in and said this: “Look, this has to be fixed. I don’t really care what the issues are, frankly, who’s right and who’s wrong. But the simple fact is that the Bible commands you to work it out. It’s not an option; it’s not a recommendation. You’re commanded to forgive each other, love each other, bury the hatchet, sacrifice the grudge, whatever. And that’s a command as binding as ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”

So what happened? Cook told them, “You can take my office. Go in there and put your cards on the table and work this out. Compromise, discuss, dialogue, whatever it takes. But I want all three of you, individually, to give me a phone call tonight and tell me this thing is all wrapped up.” And then he went out and went golfing. He spent the afternoon whacking a little white ball all over the yard, knowing that the mighty enforcing power of the Word of God was going to get this thing done. That night he got three phone calls. “Are we good now?” “Yes, Pastor Cook.” “Okay, thanks a lot.” That was it.

Philip Yancey passes along a story told by Walter Wink in his book, Engaging the Powers. Ten years after World War II ended, two peacemaker brokers tried to get some Polish Christians and some German Christians together, hoping to mend fences and get these fellow believers reunited. And they asked the Poles: “Could you possibly forgive these guys? The Germans are truly sorry, truly repentant, for what happened to your relatives. Can you reconcile?”

And to a man, the Polish Christians said: “There’s just no way. No way in the world. Every stone in Warsaw is soaked in Polish blood. We cannot forgive! Sorry, there’s just no chance.”

Well, that kind of fizzled out the meeting, but they finished the gathering and all stood up to leave. They held hands and said the Lord’s Prayer together. And when they got to the part, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” the main protestor who had so vehemently said, “No way,” stopped the prayer. And with a pale face, he suddenly said, “I guess we have to forgive. We have no choice but to forgive. It’s not an option. In our own power, true, there’s no way. But we couldn’t say the ‘Our Father’ if we failed to obey what it says here.” Christian willpower is really just giving our will over to God and accepting His power. And that’s what these fragile believers did.

Eighteen months later the two groups met, they reconciled, and they formed a Christian alliance that is still going strong. Why? Because the Bible commanded that they do it. The hardness of the challenge was overcome by the reality that this was the kingdom rule.

But let me make the second point, going back to what we already said. If we choose a life of criticism and conflict and dissension, especially here at the church, the plain truth is that we’re choosing a life that is already a proven failure. It’s a fact: the politics of division and strife, and the spiritual life of division and strife, are doomed approaches. They simply are not going to work.

Again, these many Nixon biographies make that point well. The tactics of division did work, after a fashion and for a while. There’s a famous story where a young, fiery speechwriter named Pat Buchanan helped his boss engineer a political strategy regarding race and busing and affirmative action. “Mr. President, let’s frame our arguments this way, making these A-B-C points. Our silent-majority people will really respond to that.” And someone in the White House pointed out that the policies Buchanan was advocating were bound to divide the nation right in half. This was going to be a red-blue chasm a long time before that became a popular metaphor. And Buchanan just gave the critic a smile and said: “If we cut the country in half, I guarantee you our side’ll get the bigger half.” And maybe you can win one or two elections that way. But can you really create a generation of peace like that? Can you forge a lasting prosperity for all Americans? Can you grow your political party long-term by calling a lot of other people “them” all the time?

Two former participants in the Religious Right later left that movement and wrote a confessional tell-all book entitled Blinded By Might. In it, Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas address the tendency of Christians, especially in our most caustic, argumentative, condemning moments, to invade the world of politics and expect national parties to do the things we almost demand that they do. “Adopt our planks into your platform or we’ll bolt the party; we’ll vote with our feet.” And when one prominent media Christian made those kinds of threats, a senior party chairperson quietly responded: “Jim, political parties win through communication, not through excommunication.”

I don’t know how often you get to the book of Titus, which is a small three-chapter letter from Paul. But the new Christians in Crete—of course, everybody Paul wrote to was always a new Christian—had fallen almost immediately into the failed trap of “Us vs. Them.” Some believed that all new converts needed to keep the entire Jewish law, including circumcision . . . which was keeping a lot of people out of the baptismal tank. The Democrats in the church said, no, we don’t agree. There were some Christians who were clinging to old Jewish myths and what they called “genealogies,” which were probably mythical stories attached to Old Testament history. Other Christians were ready to chuck all of that stuff. And finally Paul gives them, and us, this warning: But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law. And notice this. Why? Because these are unprofitable and useless.

And that’s it. You can have this fight, but it’s a useless fight. It’s like trying to make a living and support your family playing roulette forty hours a week. The Bible tells us in scarlet letters: these discussions are doomed. These tactics are terminal terrain. They simply are not going to work or bear fruit. If you want to kill ten prayer meetings in a row debating these points, yes, you can sure do it. But at the end of the day, things won’t be better; they’ll be worse.

If it feels like my Nixon stories have picked on just one political party today, I can quickly balance the scales. A Democratic political operative named Bob Shrum has been around for a long time. Every four years the top candidates always vie to land him on their team. “Get Shrum; he’s a veteran.” But the fact is that this guy has headed up something like seven consecutive losing candidacies. He has a lot of experience, and all of it is on the deck of the Titanic. Whatever he suggests never wins.

And in our own spiritual lives, as we try to foster an atmosphere of love and unity here at this church, why should we hitch our wagons to a mental attitude that we already know going in is a falling star? Many decades the great Dale Carnegie penned his classic bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And in his very first chapter, he says this about the temptation to criticize other people: “Criticism is futile.” Let me repeat that. “Criticism is futile.” Why? He tells us. “It puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.” And then for more than 200 pages, with story after story, he tells high-profile anecdotes about people who wanted other people to change. Who wanted other people to do things differently. Who wanted to effect a shift in policy. So they criticized their opponents. Did it work? Did the people change? Did the atmosphere change? Did the policies change? Almost never. You aren’t going to get what you want out of that other person if you shout at them or embarrass them. It . . . will . . . not . . . work. It simply is not a battle tactic that brings the desired results. It’s a fixed reality that criticism and controversy are failed weapons.

In his recent book, When the Enemy Strikes, Pastor Charles Stanley points out that Satan doesn’t hit us with any new temptations. The Bible tells us, Every temptation is common to man. There’s nothing really inventive here; Lucifer has been employing the same old strategies since Eden. Why? Because they always work. And often he gets us to do something that we already know is a failed, fallen idea with grief at the end of it.

So we all know what it feels like to know these realities, and then still do the hopeless thing because of our natures. Richard Nixon honestly wanted to be a unifying, courageous leader. He wanted to “bring us together.” He once was talking with a friend about the man he was Vice President to, Dwight Eisenhower. And he reminisced by saying: “Everybody loved Ike. But the reverse of that was that Ike loved everybody. Ike didn’t hate anybody. He was puzzled by that sort of thing. He didn’t think of people who disagreed with him as being the ‘enemy.’ He just thought: ‘They don’t agree with me.’”

So how can we come to this church and “be like Ike”? Well, we have this Bible mandate: clothe ourselves with a determined attitude of kindness. Of forgiving. Of not arguing. Of wrapping up all of our relationships in love. If we tear off our necktie of charity one Sabbath, that’s all right. Put it back on. Ask forgiveness. Start again. Ask forgiveness. Start again. Take the larger view. Seek God’s help.

And once in a while, look in instead of out. What is our emotional wardrobe here on Sabbath mornings? Do we come here ready to fight or to forgive? To embrace or arm-wrestle? Again, Nixon got to the White House in 1969, really determined to do good things for the country he loved so much. He had bright visions for the nation. This Richard Reeves tells how Nixon was a loner; he would go off by himself to a secluded office overlooking the Rose Garden and fill a yellow legal pad with memos: “From RN . . . to RN.” He would write encouraging notes to himself, as he looked into the mirror and reflected on what America needed from its Chief Executive. He’d been in power for 17 days when he wrote this: “Most powerful office. Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone. Need to BE good to DO good. The nation must be better in spirit at the end of term. Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration.”

And we look back now from the safe pedestal of the future and sympathize. It’s a tragedy that President Nixon reflected and saw the high bar. He read the Magna Carta of Colossians chapter three. But in his own power, he just could not get over that bar. Not by himself. He couldn’t get over hating, attacking, dividing. His adversaries were doing it to him, and he soon resolved to get even and do it back to them. He finally said to his friend Bob Dole: “I just get up in the morning to confound my enemies.” And after five-and-a-half years, the failed infrastructure of “enemies lists” and revenge and IRS audits brought the presidency of this lonely, embittered, brilliant man to an end.

Well, that’s history. But we can learn from history and the pages of God’s Word. How the God of all peace and all peacemakers must look down in despair when you and I deliberately steer into the low road of controversy! His own divine yellow legal pad is filled with hopeful achievements for His church and His people. God has kingdom plans for this church right here. Plans for peace and for unity and for the kind of growth that happen when there is peace and unity. But He needs for me and for you to do this hard but proven thing. Clothe ourselves in kindness. Bear with one another. Turn the other cheek. Bear with one another. Forgive.

It sounds like a broken record, but it happens to be playing the one song that works. Shall we pray?

Lord, You’ve given us the power of choice, and each day of our lives we need to choose to wear the wardrobe of a peace-filled, unity-seeking life. Help us to come to this holy place and build bridges of understanding. Help us to see the big picture, and to prepare now for the harmony that defines heaven. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

______________________________

Read more at the source: Fighting – Part 3

Article excerpt posted on en.intercer.net from Better Sermons.

Fighting – Part 2

December 6, 2018 By admin

An Enemy Has Done This

A short story from many years ago tells about a man who moved into a new neighborhood. I don’t know why he did it, or what motivated him, but he began to quietly move behind the scenes and create division. He did something surreptitious that made Neighbor A angry at Neighbor B. He set up a smoke screen that caused Neighbor C to decide Neighbor D was a liar. He stole things from Neighbor E and somehow planted Neighbor F’s fingerprints on the screen door. For about six months he just laced the community Kool-Aid with poison, and before one year was out the whole town was completely dysfunctional. Everybody hated everybody. They had to change the locks on their doors; they sabotaged each other’s garage sales. It was a mess.

And the entire time, nobody realized that this newcomer was the straw that was stirring the drink of distrust. This twisted visitor just sat back in his lawn chair, watching the emotional carnage and smiling to himself, just as an arsonist sets a fire and then from a safe distance enjoys the blaze and the roar of the fire trucks and the angry smoke and futile spray of the hoses.

The Voice of Prophecy radio ministry once received a tear-stained prayer request from a distraught mother. It was just three lines long, and you could almost see her frustration in the handwriting. She said this: “My son seems to delight in conflict. He’s always trying to get people upset.”

Last week we talked about the stark reality that a lot of the battles in this world happen in churches. It’s been that way for two thousand years: people have fought about church teachings, about policies, about worship styles. And they’ve fought over the simple fact that other people, unlikable, unlovable, unsaveable people, are sitting two pews over.

In addition to that, it does often look like we like fighting. We enjoy the conflict. We go out of our way to indulge in it; in fact, we might be addicted to it.

Most of you know where the famous “Love Chapter” is found in the Bible: I Corinthians 13. And here’s a verse that really condemns some of our attitudes: Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. I mentioned last Sabbath how in the political world, both sides seem to enjoy the other side’s mistakes and misfired shotguns. There was discord between two American speed skaters in the last winter Olympic Games, and the news stories seemed to always lead with the latest gossip: who snubbed who. Who refused to shake hands. Who called the other a traitor or a spoilsport.

Let me take you back to the very public, front-of-the-church fight we lamented over last Sabbath. An Emmanual Baptist Church—fictional name—had the senior pastor and the head deacon come to blows right in front of the Communion table. But let’s hit the pause button on our DVD players and ask this question: “Wait a second. Who wants this fight to happen? Who is enjoying this?” And of course, the answer is Satan. When we fight, he’s in delight. When we experience fireworks in our marriages, he and his imps set off a few of their own in celebration.

I want to take you to a New Testament parable this morning. And it’s simply amazing to me how powerful and how relevant the truths always are that we find in these rural fisherman-and-seed-planting stories Jesus used to tell. But in Matthew 13 there’s a little tale about a farmer and all his hired hands who have a field they’ve nicely plowed up and sowed with good seed. This is high-grade durum wheat: the primo good stuff. And then one morning the boss and all his help wake up, chug out there on their John Deeres, and lo and behold, there’s weeds coming up with the wheat. And I mean, bunches of weeds, not just a sprig here and there. There’s a whole Lord of the Rings Fangorn Forest of evil out there in the back forty, and the farm hands are up to their hips in the stuff.

And it’s very telling, the words Jesus puts in the mouth of this gentleman farmer. Five King James words: An enemy hath done this.

So what’s going on here? These weeds didn’t get there by themselves. This discord, this battle, this assault on the peace and tranquility of Happy Hollow Farm isn’t just a random accident. An enemy came along at midnight to put those weeds there.

And it’s the same when you and I fight. It’s the same when an Adventist church is scorched with internal dissent. It’s the same when you and I deliberately climb into the ring of combat. There’s an enemy who wants us in there. An enemy who wants us to receive and give body blows and black eyes. Every time we fight, we play right into his hands.

Now, here’s a P.S. This isn’t to say that all arguments and board meeting debates in the world are Lucifer’s fault, and that we can just go around saying, “Well, the devil made me do it.” Sometimes we get into a pattern of blaming all things on the demon of discouragement and the demon of delinquency and the demon of daiquiris and doughnuts. We have friction in our families or in the workplace, and we pin the blame on the demon of attack e-mails. And that’s not fair or realistic. We’re responsible for our behavior in life, and we’re also responsible to resist the devil so that he’ll flee from us, as promised in James 4:7. But it’s clearly written down in the Christian farm almanac that if we don’t put up some fences and post a guard out in the field, Satan absolutely is going to come in at midnight with a weed-planting machine.

Let me give you the rest of the story of that mom who wrote about the sparring and scrapping of her kid. I said the note was about three lines long and I just gave you two of them. Again: “My son seems to delight in conflict. Always trying to get people upset.” And I think to myself, kind of instinctively, “Well, somebody should give him a good thumping. Stupid kid.” Well, maybe so, but here’s the rest of the sad, cryptic note: “He’s 11, has been sexually molested, in counseling for over two years.”

So that’s the whole story. This kid fights. He loves to fight. He’s addicted to fighting. Something sick, something hurt inside of him, compensates for his own heartache by getting someone else to share his pain. And we see right here a demonic power standing behind the curtain. Why does this boy like fighting? Partly because Satan set it up and sowed the seeds of conflict.

In his book, The Nature of Christ, Roy Adams addresses two theological issues that, for whatever reason, seem to trouble our denomination more than others. One of them is, like the title says, dealing with the issue of the inward human nature of Jesus Christ while He was on this earth. The question is this: did Jesus have a holy, sinless, unfallen nature, like Adam before he sinned? Or did He have a sinful, fallen, skewing-toward-evil nature like everyone here in the church this morning?

In recent years there have been books published on both sides, magazine articles on both sides, forum gatherings on both sides. But the discussion and the debate has been going on for many decades now. It was hot in the beginning; it’s hot now. It was unsettled then; it’s still unsettled now.

The second related theological debate addressed in Dr. Adams’ book has to do with what is sometimes called “final generation” perfection. Will a last group of Christians, just before the second coming of Jesus, have such a close walk with the Lord, such an Enoch experience, that they themselves are completely sinless? Again, there have been books and compilations and discussion and maybe even some rock-throwings. “More heat than light,” as we say, with many, many column inches of space used up in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the church paper.

And the reality is this. These two questions simply cannot be solved or resolved. The Bible has verses that hint one way or another. You can look for your chosen POV, your point of view, and maybe find it if you look just on one side of the river. And I will say that entire schools of theology, with many attending perspectives, do flow from these streams right here, so the conclusions might be rather weighty. If you believe that Jesus had a sinful, craven nature just like we do, and that He lived in perfect obedience for 33 years, and He’s our example in all things, then it follows that you are perhaps going to teach the possibility of our reaching perfection as well in the last days. But in many years, decades, even more than a century now, people have gone round and round, sometimes very angrily fighting and accusing and casting aspersions regarding these extra-biblical questions that simply cannot be analyzed in a test tube. It can’t be done.

And here’s what Dr. Adams finally concludes, when all is said and done: “Clearly, the controversy that has consumed the church is completely unwarranted. We have wasted valuable time. And we have discouraged many. If the hand of the devil is not in this, then he is not alive.”

That’s quite an eye-opener, isn’t it? You know, the next time you or I are tempted to put on our boxing gloves and fight with someone else in this church, whether it’s about some Bible theory we have, or just the fact that we don’t like them, let’s do something. Just outside the boxing ring, there’s a shadow. Can you just barely make it out? Right there beyond the square of canvas is a shadowy figure. Lucifer is there as a cheerleader. When our friends cheer our pugilistic exploits, can we hear the faint voice of Lucifer’s angels in there too, saying go! go! go! Because Satan and his army celebrates when we get into the ring. And it doesn’t matter to them whether or not we win the debate. They don’t care about that at all. When we fight, whether we win or lose, Satan wins. It’s just like all the big Las Vegas hotel casinos covering bets on the Super Bowl. It’s New England by seven, but they cover both sides, Patriots and Giants, and take their ten percent cut, their vigorish, no matter what happens on the football field.

There’s a caveat I want to add to our study today. Here it is. There are times when it may be appropriate to fight. It isn’t always a sin to be angry. Temporarily, that is. There are abuses that should make us mad and injustices that ought to create righteous indignation within us. Jesus saw the desecration, the selfishness, the materialism that was ruining the temple, His Father’s house, and it made Him angry. He was so righteously mad that He physically threatened the money tycoons with a whip.

Jesus was in the church one Sabbath and there was a man with a withered hand. And standing all around were Pharisees and rulers; they loved the rules and the hierarchy and the status they got from being “Lords of the Sabbath” more than they cared about the suffering of their fellow human beings. And the Bible says in Mark 3 that Jesus “looked around at them in anger and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts.” “You guys are killing Me. You care about these 613 laws; you care about keeping your robes clean on the Sabbath day. You care about your own sheep—since it’s a precious financial investment to you—and you rescue it from pain if it falls into a ditch on the Sabbath day. But right here, your own suffering fellow human . . . you don’t care about him at all. You’re killing Me.” And then, with holy anger written on His face, Jesus broke the Sabbath—from their perspective—and made that man well.

So it is not wrong to fight against evil. It’s not wrong to be angry at the right moment. But here’s what the Apostle Paul writes to his combative friends in Ephesus: In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold (27, 27).

So if there’s a scandal here in the church, or where you work, it ought to make you angry. But let’s be cosmically aware that the devil is standing in the shadows. He planted those seeds of dissension, and he and his fallen farm hands are eager to water and fertilize their poisonous crops.

In his latest book, When the Enemy Strikes, by Charles Stanley, he points to this reality: “The devil is a master at causing misunderstandings.” Doesn’t that underscore exactly what we’ve been saying? He doesn’t show his cards, but he’s just in the background, stirring the drink, fomenting anger.

C. S. Lewis’ classic, The Screwtape Letters, is an imagined correspondence between a senior devil and a junior imp in training, who still has training wheels on his bike. And here’s how Screwtape advises his protege, Wormwood, to quietly work on his assigned man as he walks into this very church building on a given Sabbath morning: “When he gets to his pew,” the older, wiser demon suggests, “and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbors. Make his mind flit to and fro between the expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew.”

Lewis goes on to observe, as a devil, that most of us—it doesn’t matter what we say—believe inside that we are pretty wonderful people. The church is lucky to have us here. The people in the next pew are, in any great number of ways, inferior to us. We do accept Calvary salvation, but we just very barely need it. Not like those publicans and sinners sitting at the next table during potluck. That is our default attitude.

We mentioned last week that the cosmic, worldwide, continent-spanning church is a wonderful thing, a triumphant thing, an undefeatable thing. But here in this place, we have real flesh-and-blood people sitting five feet away whose actions disappoint us. People come late and leave early. They skip out on just being here and they skip out on the things they’re supposed to do while they are here. And Satan’s forces are sitting on our shoulder all the time, saying, “Look at that! Unbelievable! How you put up with them is a galactic mystery.”

Have you ever felt like your mind was almost haunted with that certain someone, that sparring partner? Have you ever mentally boxed with them while standing in the shower and then some more in your car on the way to work? You see, those thoughts aren’t just growing in your mind like innocent weeds. Somebody planted them there with purpose and malice aforethought.

So what can we do? If Satan is a practiced and invisible weed-planter, what hope is there for us?

Well, first of all, being Bible-studying, church-attending Christians takes away his invisibility. We know of his existence. We acknowledge it, and we confess his superiority to us. But we also fall to our knees at Calvary and ask Jesus for divine power and protection during the midnight planting season.

There’s a cute story in President Jimmy Carter’s spiritual book, Living Faith. Back in 1987, he was trying to write another book, entitled Everything to Gain, with a co-author, and the two of them simply were not seeing eye to eye. About 97% of the time, they shared similar perspectives, but on the other three percent, they just could not get on to the same page and the atmosphere there in the writing laboratory became rather frosty. It looked like they might have to call in the United Nations in order to get this dumb book finished. Unfortunately, the person he was co-writing the book with was named Rosalynn Carter. His own wife! Again, on about three percent of the manuscript she didn’t think he was getting it right, and he absolutely knew, as the commander in chief of the Carter household, that her feminine instincts were all messed up. It was literally to the point where it was about to threaten their marriage . . . and that’s no way for born-again, evangelical, Christian ex-presidents to sell a lot of books.

Finally, speaking of unsolvable conflicts, their editor said: “Look, you guys. Don’t kill each other. This is a good book just the way it is. On the three percent of the book where you just can’t seem to get on the same page, we’ll mark your paragraphs, Mr. President, with a ‘J,’ and yours, Mrs. Carter, with an ‘R.’” And that fixed it.

But there were still times when little things threatened to undo the harmony of their home down in Plains, Georgia. These were both strong-willed, successful, driven people, both used to the spotlight and to getting their own way. And one day, President Carter decided he really wanted for things to be better. He didn’t want to sense Lucifer in the shadows, hiding right behind the Secret Service, causing havoc in their marriage. So, with this Bible verse from Ephesians in his mind, he went down to his workshop and carved a little handmade plaque out of walnut, with this inscription on it: Each evening, forever, this is good for an apology—or forgiveness—as you desire. Jimmy.

He gave it to her and said: “Just present this any time, no limits, no expiration dates, any time you think we need it.” And he writes in his book: “Boy, she sure has.” He got to know that piece of wood pretty good . . . and see, that is a biblical, heaven-blessed way of thwarting the weed-planting enemy who camps out in our backyards.

There are two other victory principles I want for us to embrace this morning. Here’s the first one. If the devil wants to plant seeds, let’s invite the other Farmer—the one who moonlights as a Carpenter—to nurture His crops in our minds and hearts instead. There’s a verse in First Corinthians 2 that says this: But we have the mind of Christ.

That sounds like an impossible goal, but Paul, the chief of sinners, says it’s what we need to desire and that it can actually happen. But how? How do we get the mind of Christ? We get it by reading His book and singing His songs. Every morning when I go for my jog, I have my little I-Pod, and I have to make a decision: what will I put into my mind for the next 30 minutes. I have the Bible on CD, and I have I Could Sing of Your Love Forever . . . and I have all of my pop albums from the 70s and 80s. What will I hear today?

How else do we get the mind of Christ? We get it by conversing with Him in prayer and going to the House where He and His Father dwell. And while we’re here in this building, we try to stay away from Screwtape’s suggestion that we focus on that aggravating person two pews over. There’s one thing I can promise you—speaking of fighting. If Jesus and Satan do battle, Jesus is always going to win. But we have to invite Him to be the planter and gladiator in our lives, and I don’t say that to be cute. Do we really feed on Him and on His thoughts? Do we set the alarm, not just during the frantic workweek, but also on the Sabbath day, so that we will actually get out of bed, get in the car, and come here to the church where the mind of Christ is what is presented during this hour?

Do we have lifestyles that are conducive to His thoughts growing and taking root inside of us? Some of you sitting here today go to the trouble of canceling other appointments and moving things around so that once a week you can get together with church friends and study the Bible. You have other things to do; you have bills to pay and aggravations of your own to deal with. But week by week, you get the mind of Christ in 60-minute doses. And I know it works because I can see the new look of peace on your faces. I see it. I experience it.

And then let’s remember that we can either advance Lucifer’s kingdom by fighting or advance Christ’s eternal kingdom by being peacemakers. There is such a thing as walking away from combat. It is possible. And every time we do that, every time we make a conscious decision with Christ’s help to turn the other cheek or bite back an angry word, we take a brick out of Satan’s castle, and we strengthen God’s government instead.

Remember again the cosmic war theater where we are all players. Every holy act, every forgiving act, every angry word not said, every grudge deliberately sacrificed is a small but critical part of the foundation of God’s kingdom. We are here today in enemy-occupied territory; God and His ancient enemy are literally battling over every square inch of this city and this spiritual community. And every soft answer we give is wonderfully amplified into a shout of victory for the hosts of heaven.

Shall we pray?

Lord, you know all of the hidden desires of our heart. We’re here because we do want to bless Your kingdom and move this world toward it. But we also love the combat, the verbal skirmishes that just feel so good and which feed our fallen appetite for satisfaction. Please give us today a sense of which of those two battling desires is the lasting, eternal, heaven-blessed one. And give us the power to seek every day to find and love the mind of Christ. We pray in His transforming name, Amen.

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Read more at the source: Fighting – Part 2

Article excerpt posted on en.intercer.net from Better Sermons.

Fighting – Part 1

December 6, 2018 By admin

The Right Fist of Fellowship

I want to tell you about a cartoon that would be funnier if it weren’t so poignant. A church congregation has pews set so that people all have their backs to one another. And the pastor is saying to them, “It’s come to my attention that there’s been a minor split in the church.” Another one, by a Larry Thomas, will make you laugh until you can hear a pin drop, as the saying goes. A secretary comes in to see the senior pastor, and informs him, “The good news is, we’re adding new members. The bad news is, they’re the people who caused all the conflict over at First Church.”

Would we be glad for all the renegades from some other church—people who are mad at their pastor, people disgruntled over the music, people up in arms over some theological debate point—to come here to our church? Especially if they got to our parking lot in armored tanks? Because now the feud at “First Church” will be the feud at OUR church.

We have all heard heart-rending stories of Adventist churches that were riven by controversy. There is sometimes an infamous “gang of five” who create havoc, to the point where even non-members living in the area know who is in that gang and what the issues of contention are. There are churches where the associate pastor loaths the senior pastor. Sometimes at conference meetings, people will drive long miles for the purpose of torpedoing a pastor they have come to despise.

So let’s ask today: why are “feudin’ and fightin’” a seemingly unavoidable part of the faith? Why do Christians bicker and beat up on each other. We see in our Bibles that Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, gives us this quiet admonition in Matthew 5:9: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. And we could forgive atheists and backsliders for looking through our stained glass windows and maybe deciding that Jesus must have been an only child.

Well, God’s word has both bad news and good news for us. First of all, the bad—it’s been like this ever since Bible times. Strife has been going on in God’s church for 2000 years now. If you scan through Galatians, the first couple chapters, it is striking how quickly the church descended into turmoil. Many soon abandoned the gospel of grace, Paul laments, and defected to a “different” gospel. Some people were almost deliberately throwing others into confusion, perverting the Calvary story. In chapter two, there is a battle over “false brothers infiltrating the church in order to spy on the ‘freedoms’” the Christians had in Jesus. It was a fever-pitch battle between legalism and grace; some saints wanted to insist that all new believers adopt the entire Mosaic code of conduct, including circumcision. Instead of being the Christian Coalition, they were actually known as the Circumcision Group. That is an awkward title to put on your website.

Notice what Paul writes beginning with verse 11 of chapter two: When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. So we have here a controversy of theology that Paul feels compelled to address right out in the open, dressing down his co-worker, Peter, by name.

So this is the bad news. The good news is that the Bible has ample counsel on this topic of church conflict! The reality that people quarrel and fight is plainly acknowledged many times in the New Testament. The Bible opens up its transcripts, letting us read both the smooth and the rough.

The book of James is, according to scholars, likely the first New Testament epistle except for this letter from Paul to the Christians in Galatia. And here the brother of Jesus addresses the fact that war has broken out in the infant church—probably around 50 or 60 A.D. Already the Adventists and Methodists can’t get along!

Notice in 4:1: What causes fights and quarrels among you? That is a question for the ages, isn’t it? And if James really wrote this by 60 A.D., Christians have been looking for the answer to that question for something like 1,950 years now. Interestingly, James gives the answer to his own question:

Don’t [quarrels] come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. Other versions add: “Your tempers and passions (Clear Word). “An army of evil desires within you” (Living Bible). In the original Greek we have a couple of words here: polemoi means “quarrels” or “feuds”; machai gives the idea of “contentions.” Notice this same passage from Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase:

The Church of Me

Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way, and fight for it deep inside yourselves. You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it. You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it.

Now, don’t think we are murderers and thieves here at this church, but we do want to have our own way!

I have to confess that, in my years as a pastor, I’m always aware that I’m battling a clock on Sabbath morning. Often members will make it plain that they want church to be done by noon. Sometimes at 12:05, you can go out into the parking lot and it is already empty. People clear out in a hurry. Anyway, the pastor is always acutely aware of the time. I can be sitting on the platform, behind the pulpit, waiting to preach . . . while someone, let’s say, comes up and does the offering appeal. To me, an offering appeal should take about ninety seconds, and this particular person might go on for five minutes. And inside, I’ll be saying, Come on, move it along here. Hurry up. A person gets up to do the Scripture reading, and begin by saying, “Before I share from God’s Word, just a little story comes to my mind.” Oh no. The most challenging is probably “Sharing Time.” People meander around on all sorts of trivial topics; sometimes the same longwinded person stands up twice in one morning to share from their endless storehouse of sillinesses.

And all the while, the selfish part of your pastor’s heart is thinking to itself, Please sit down. Please shut up . . . so that I can finally get up . . . and go for 35 minutes. My own ramblings are wonderful, you see. For all of us, our own voices are music to our ears.

Haven’t we all thought to ourselves: “What a wonderful church this would be if everyone would just do everything my way”? The Adventist Bible Commentary for this passage in James observes that we have a “self-interest that constantly seeks for recognition and satisfaction.”

Let me ask today: what kinds of church wars are there?

Well, there can always be conflict over worship style—especially music. Many churches have done battle over whether there should be guitars, drums, and PowerPoint lyrics.

There might be personality conflicts involving long-running irritations. There have been times when I sensed an unwarranted prickliness between two people, and someone has quietly confided in me, “Pastor, there’s a history there.” Oh.

Sometimes fights are caused by hurt feelings or bruised egos. My spouse has sometimes said to me, “Honey, you tease too much.” Humor can be a very tricky, sensitive thing—and people can leave the church feeling hurt.

The bloodiest battles, though, are invariably fought over doctrinal disagreements, especially on what are considered “salvific” issues. Teachings where someone is convinced that salvation is at stake. In terms of praise music, for example, this would be where someone thought that the style of music was actually “sinful.” This would be more than “I want my way”; it would be: “This is the Lord’s way.”

There was a moment of notoriety at a recent Adventist General Conference session. A leading conservative scholar had written a book dealing with the growth of contemporary music in the denomination, and he felt strongly that the devil was causing this dangerous drift toward secularism. At the GC session, though, he encountered a group of people who were playing the very kind of music he was sure was a problem. As I heard the story, he took it upon himself to go around back and pull the electrical cord out of the wall. That took care of all the guitars and the singers and the syncopation. But, you see, he honestly felt that lives were at stake.

There was a church story a few years ago about a denomination that was grappling with a very explosive theological issue. And one of the concerned spokespersons said, in essence, “If the church is determined to go down this road of heresy, then it will be time for some of us to ‘walk the plank.’” We’ll get into the issue of fighting over truth in a later message, but I can say that there have been a few times where I heard music in church that was so loud, so deafening, so completely unintelligible in terms of a praise message getting through . . . I myself might have been tempted to go and look for the electrical plug in the back. So it’s a temptation we can all understand.

Now, there are always disagreements that are innocent; after all, we are in a family here! All families have their routine squabbles and tugs of war. I think I’ve seen just about every kid in our church family cry or bump their egos on something. But the essential core of church conflict—whether expressed in the elegant, archaic tone of the King James Version, or with the cutting-edge language of a new CD-ROM Bible—is the same problem: WE ARE SINNERS! Fighting is a sin, fueled by sin . . . especially nurtured fighting. It’s a sin that gets us coming and going. We have desires that battle within us, and they are wrong desires. So we’re willing to, and locked into, committing the sin of doing battle with one another.

Notice what Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians; this is from chapter three. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Now, we all know that babies just get milk at first. We don’t feed our infants burritos and peanut brittle just yet. Like Paul says, they’re not ready for it yet. But he continues:

Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men?

And I admit it—the first time I read this, I was really surprised. Worldly? What image pops into your mind with the word worldly? From an Adventist background, we probably think about someone who dabbles in alcohol, goes to a lot of R-rated movies, wears lots and lots of jewelry, skips church to watch football, and goes on an occasional junket to Las Vegas. That’s “worldly.” But Paul writes here that the sin of quarreling is really the epitome of worldliness.

Now, it’s true: the world fights and scraps like this all the time. I’m amused by the fact that I seem to get political mail and spam from both sides of the aisle. Fundraising letters with donkeys and elephants on them . . . both arriving in the same mailbox. And they all have the exact same tone. No one ever talks about their own positive dreams, their lofty goals for America. It’s always: Crisis! Scandal! Look at what they are trying to do to our country! We must stop them! Your urgently needed gift of $25 will send a clear message, etc. One side talks about “George W. Bush and his right-wing agenda.” The other side counters with sinister predictions about “Teddy Kennedy and his liberal friends.”

And when we fight like the world fights, we are being like the world. We’re being worldly.

Question: what does the world say to me when a neighbor of mine deserves to be sued? As a Christian, I might think there is a higher court than the one downtown, but the world says no. There’s no higher court beyond this one. This is it! You better sue! God’s people might sense a higher cause, a more important heavenly reality, but the world doesn’t see that. This is the cause. This is the moment. You deserve justice right here and now. Go for a big settlement. As a person who reads the Bible, I might have hope that there is an eternal life beyond this one, and that what happens here today isn’t that big a deal. But the world doesn’t accept that. This is the life! This is the moment! You have a right to be compensated for your bruised feelings. Call Jacoby & Myers today!

And when we take a here-and-now mindset into battle, seeking revenge because we’re not sure God ever will get revenge for us, we are being worldly. If you’ll forgive the metaphor, it’s a kind of Seinfeld-ish “Creed of Constanza,” where George says to his enemy: “This isn’t over. You have my ten dollars, but this isn’t over. I’ll get even. I’ll get my money back somehow. I’ll devote my life to it.”

Political commentator George Will is a huge baseball fan. In baseball, it’s a “cardinal” rule that if an opposing pitcher hits someone on your team, you absolutely are going to pay them back. There’s not a chance in the world that you would let a thing like that slide. St. Louis’ Tony LaRussa, who was still managing the Oakland A’s at the time, carefully explains the math of it all. You actually have to hit, in retaliation, the same kind of player they hit. If they hit your superstar, you hit their superstar. If they hit your little shortstop rookie, you plunk their little shortstop rookie. The scales must balance out exactly.

Now, here’s the dilemma. Let’s say it’s a close game, and they plunk your guy. It’s the eighth inning; you’re up two to one. LaRussa will actually say to the injured batter, “Look, no question they took a shot at you. But the game’s too close. We can’t take a chance giving them a free runner on base. So we’ll postpone revenge; I promise you we’ll get them tomorrow.”

And I was wondering: what if this is the last game of the season between these two teams? Does someone on the team keep track, so that the following spring, they can check their clipboard and then say to the manager, “Uh, skipper, this is the Yankees, remember? We owe these guys one bop on the shoulder and a whack in a third baseman’s kneecap”? I’m kidding a little bit, but this is how the secular world sees things.

So what about our title? Extending the Right FIST of Fellowship? Sometimes there are wars where the battleground is the church parking lot, the choir leader is a commando, the deacons are drill instructors and demolition leaders, the parishioners are privates, and the pastor is a renegade general.

In their book, The Body, which is a detailed theological study about the church, Chuck Colson and his writing partner, Ellen Santilli Vaughn, tell about a church with the hopefully fictional name, Emmanuel Baptist Church. They get a new senior pastor named Waite. And, no pun intended, he couldn’t “wait” to begin making the rounds, pastoral “visits,” with a little black book. He solicited “dirt” on all the members; he got people to confide in him about all their fellow Christians’ problems. Soon he had so much scuttlebutt, he had to trade in his little black gossip book for a much bigger one.

And then he went to work, using all this juice to intimidate and blackmail people into submission. Colson writes: “The pastor’s talent for getting his own way was as large as the appointment book. One of his pastoral conferences could reduce the most disagreeable church member to sulking silence.” Let’s remember that line from the book of James: Quarrels come about because you want your own way. And here at this church it was following that blueprint with diabolical precision.

Soon the church was split right down the middle. Those who liked the new general—I mean, pastor—were sitting on the right. His enemies all sat on the left. (I hope that’s not the seating plan here at our church.) The deacons were trying to hang in there in the middle, front row. And the organist was trying to be like Switzerland and stay out of it, playing “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” as often as possible.

Finally, one Sunday morning, war broke out. True story—it was Communion Sunday, with the bread and wine in place, and the pastor and his head deacon actually came to blows. They began flailing away at each other in front of the whole church. Two tenors and a baritone jumped over the choir loft rail and joined the melee. The deacon broke his hand in two places; the pastor had two front teeth knocked loose and had a hard time eating corn on the cob at church potlucks for the next couple of years.

And finally the cops showed up. Somebody had actually dialed 911, and patrol cars came squealing in to a church parking lot to restore order. They suggested that some of the combatants might need medical care; before driving away they actually confiscated somebody’s potential weapons of mass destruction—a pair of knitting needles. After the court trial was finished, these warring parties drove away from the county courthouse with bumper stickers on their cars which read: “Christ is with us at Emmanuel Baptist Church.”

One very troubling dilemma is that the church often accepts warfare and tension and strife and division as simply being the political status quo. “There’s nothing we can do,” they say. Sometimes a local church or conference church institution goes for months or even years ripped with controversy and strife and a simmering resentment. That’s the daily atmosphere. And when anyone tries to gently inform leadership that it simply isn’t a tenable situation, the answer comes back: Live with it. There’s nothing that can be done; the powers that are there are in fixed positions. Bear it if you can—otherwise get out.

This last week as I was thinking about that, I seemed to recall that Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had some material about the church and protecting the harmony of the church. So I found the book on a shelf and flipped it open. And without even turning a single page, this is the very first paragraph I saw:

In his helpful book, The Purpose-Driven Life, Pastor rick Warren makes this observation: “God is very clear that we are to confront those who cause division among Christians. They may get mad and leave your group or church if you confront them about their divisive actions, but the fellowship of the church is more important than any individual.”

He then quotes Titus 3:10: Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him. I had to smile when I read the same verse in the King James; notice the unique spelling: A man that is a heretick after the first and second admonition reject. And the Greek word, hairetikos, means “factious” or, a bit more familiar, “contentious.” The Adventist commentary adds this tidbit: “The factious man maintains opinions that are contrary to the established gospel; if these contrary opinions are actively promoted, schism develops, and church members, both old and new, are unsettled in the faith.”

Dr. Tony Evans, pastor of a large, successful church in Texas, writes this in his bestseller, The Victorious Christian Life: “When renegade church members bring the infection of discord, disunity, or immorality, the right cells automatically go to work to fight the disease.” Wouldn’t you like to be one of those who has that kind of healing influence?

Back in Rick Warren’s book, he mentions a small-group sign-up pledge that people often choose to sign. And notice how these nine promises could be effective at helping to eliminate strife and battles in our church:

Small Group Covenant

We will:
1. Share true feelings (authenticity)
2. Encourage each other (mutuality)
3. Support each other (sympathy)
4. Forgive each other (mercy)
5. Speak the truth in love (honesty)
6. Admit our weaknesses (humility)
7. Respect our differences (courtesy)
8. Not gossip (confidentiality)
9. Make group a priority (frequency)

I’d like to invite you to consider possible ways where we have come up short on any of these nine principles. And also reflect on the larger reality that our quarrels are actually sin. The stakes are higher than just a broken nose or loose teeth: if we are soldiers, then Lucifer is a general. And the entire Body of Christ loses when we engage in conflict.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes about the very cosmic nature of God’s dealings with us. His plans for His church are so sweeping, so grand, so kingdom-glorious. His entire divine, galactic purpose is to remake each of us in the image of His Son Jesus.

And every time we obey, every time we step outside our natural selves and love someone, every time we go against our human Sabbath morning instincts and drive to this place we’re participating in a most glorious and eternal triumph.

You know, Jesus’ final prayer before Calvary was this one in the book of John: May they be one, Father, as we are one. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that You have sent Me. That gives us a picture of the cosmic stakes.

Let me close with a down-to-earth illustration. Many of us like going to a major league baseball game and seeing them win. That’s a lot of fun: the strobe lights, the scoreboard flashing, the players shaking hands on the field. Many stadiums shoot off fireworks; at Dodger Stadium the PA belts out I Love L.A. by Randy Newman. But let me up the ante about three times.

This would be even better: to see our favorite team go all the way and win a World Series Game Seven. But even more, let’s say that we are on the team. We’ve prepared for a lifetime to be a part of this organization, to play major league baseball. All our lives we’ve trained and worked for this opportunity. So now we cooperate, we work with our 24 teammates, we follow instructions, we strive for total teamwork and team spirit. We want this Dream Season to end with champagne. Well, okay, Martinelli’s.

But let me add just one more layer. All baseball championships last just one season. The following year our triumphant franchise is just another one of thirty teams. It’s a very temporary glory. But what if you could strive, together with your baseball family, for a championship that was eternal? A victory that never expires? That would be worth all sacrifices, wouldn’t it?

Many of you can remember sports blowups where players, despite this cosmic possibility, simply could not get along with someone else. Milton Bradley vs. Jeff Kent. Don Sutton vs. Steve Garvey. Twenty years ago these two Dodger superstars just couldn’t be on the same team; they actually came to blows and gave each other black eyes. Dennis Rodman and . . . everybody in the world.

But think right now about the galactic Body of Christ. The worldwide Church and all that it means in this dying world.

And then: our church here. Think of this history of this congregation: our lows and our highs, our challenges and triumphs. Blessing people. Changing lives. Bringing people together. Feeding them with Bible truth and potluck food. Some of you found your life partners here. Your families started here. This has been a home for many people; it has its mark in our community.

So stack up your sometimes hurt feelings, your sometimes rigid opinions, against all that this church can be as a blessing and as a force for Jesus Christ. In other words, don’t let this church be invisible to you; don’t lose sight of it. Don’t allow it to be just an occasional pawn on your chessboard.

In his classic book, Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis carries on imaginary conversations between two devils in hell. Uncle Screwtape is writing to his nephew, Wormwood, who is a junior demon in training. And these two imps from the dark side, who should be in terrified awe at the global significance, the cosmic power, of God’s Church, aren’t that duly impressed. Here’s what the older devil writes:

“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy.” Notice this, though: “But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans.”

Dear God, don’t let that be our fate. Don’t let us lose sight of the eternal significance of what we are involved as a part of God’s Church. For two thousand years, God has called us to live by higher cosmic principles: not to deny our feelings, but to prioritize them by this loftier calling.

Shall we pray?

Father, we reflect today on how You sent Your own Son—contrary to a Father’s instinct – for the higher calling of salvation. Jesus prayed for His own enemies—contrary to instinct. He died for people who hated Him—contrary to instinct. He forgave His tormenters—contrary to instinct. Help us today to glimpse the cosmic victory we’re commissioned to participate in, and to embrace the harmony that it requires of us. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

______________________________

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