Churches in Manchester

“I cannot tell you how many spiritual growth books I have read and discipleship books I have read where it becomes very clear after a couple of chapters, oh, this pattern worked great for this person and now they think that's the way God works in every person's life. Completely ignoring the fact that God made us with a tremendous amount of diversity and different preferences and personalities and experiences and different spiritual gifts. This is one of the reasons why it's so helpful to actually know our spiritual gifts or or give consideration to them because honestly, someone with a spiritual gift of mercy tends to grow differently in their walk with God than someone with a spiritual gift of teaching.”

“And we don't realize we relate to God in different ways. But that's what happens. We we kind of get these preference prisons that we've become trapped in and then we start to project that onto other people and it locks us into oftentimes conflict that did not need to happen. We get locked into these preference prisons because of our past patterns. And where it really bites us is when our preference bumps up against someone else's preference and now we have a preference prison riot. And people don't get along and it's over something that seems so small and you look back on it and go, why did we even fight over that?”

“You know, a lot of the friction that happens between Christians could just be avoided if we just acknowledged God's work in the other person's life. If we just looked at them as a fellow child of God as opposed to an adversary or an enemy and we spent more time thinking about how God is working in their life than how we disagree with whatever the opinion that they have. Preference prison riots, the disagreements that we have, they often involve character assassination of the other person and our our thoughts get consumed by what we don't like about them and and then how maybe they're not even a follower of Christ”

“Our preference prisons often come from past patterns. It's like I found something that worked really well for me and so now I don't ever want it to change. I like it that way all the time. Let's be honest. Anybody have something like that in your life where you're like, this is just the way I like it. Don't change it. I want it done this way, not this way, and I don't can't even tell you why. I just like it that way. This is how I was taught. This is how my old pastor used to do it. This is how my parents did it. This is how we did it growing up. This is the tradition that I grew up with. This is what gave me success in the past”