Love as North Star: Go Toward in Conflict

Pharisees, have your theological conversations. Disagree with each other. Contend for your side passionately, but at the end of the day, you cannot jettison the love of God and the love of neighbor. You must hold on that as your highest loves. And that is the goal you must set when you find yourself in conflict. So that's the big picture. That's the big challenge. Let me just give you one practical way to begin to step toward that. [00:33:06] (39 seconds)  #LoveOverDoctrine

Most of us have a cell phone. I treat my cell phone as an it. I just want it to do what I want it to do when I want it to do it. The problem with humanity right now is we tend to love things and use people. And when we start treating others as it, they become a means to our end. We can then easily move into manipulation and move towards contempt. That was the pathway that the pharisees were on with Jesus. [00:38:04] (33 seconds)  #PeopleNotObjects

Why is it a good practice to go toward those in conflict that we would maybe rather avoid? Well, first of all, that practice, that first faithful step enables us to break what most of us struggle with and that is avoidance. In the Colossian Forum work, we offer a well researched survey that helps organizations discern their conflict culture. We believe that every organization, every family has a conflict culture. The question is what kind of culture do you have And how does it compare to the way of Jesus? [00:34:58] (40 seconds)  #ConflictCultureCheck

As Christ followers, our North Star is love God and love neighbor. You see when it when conflict shows up on our front porch, you know what that experience is like. You know how it impacts you mentally and spiritually and even physically. It's difficult to know in the middle of conflict what to say, what to do. There's confusion. There's a sense of unbalance. But the North Star can be a very practical help for us when we find ourselves in the midst of disagreement. [00:28:37] (36 seconds)  #LoveIsOurNorthStar

Now, I want to invite you again not to do this in any heroic fashion. This is a way to begin to get us into action because it's as we get to in action that we begin to learn the next thing that we need to see and learn that God has for us. And so let's not try to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Let's do this reliant on God and with the resources of heaven. Let's do this in community as well as we all take on this work together. [00:40:08] (30 seconds)  #SmallFaithfulSteps

That word tested is almost used always in Matthew in an adversarial way. The Pharisees are looking to set a trap. They're trying to get Jesus to take some kind of theological or doctrinal misstep so that they can play gotcha. So that they can discredit him in the eyes of others. The pharisees have a goal and it's simply this, they want to win and they want Jesus to lose. And oftentimes when we engage in conflict, that's likely part of our goal as well, although we may express it in different ways. [00:23:38] (46 seconds)  #BewareWinningAtAllCosts

Some of us when we think about this tend to go one or two ways I think. We either take no action until we have it all figured out, which in my experience gets me nowhere because I never figure it all out before I take a step. Or we get far too heroic and right away we go after the biggest challenge in our life and we try to practice at that level. I want to invite you to think of right now a next staple step in a situation where you're experienced division, disagreement, differences, and conflict. [00:33:52] (39 seconds)  #TakeTheNextFaithfulStep

So the North Star can really help us orient ourselves towards love God, love neighbor when we feel that heat and pressure and anxiety of conflict. Now let's talk just a moment about love. Because I think you would agree that love in our culture is a very squishy word. It's like playing catch with jello. You just can't quite get a hold of it. Love in the New Testament has a definite shape and we could look at a number of different places but one place I would just point you to, one again that you likely know well is Galatians five. [00:31:07] (40 seconds)  #LoveHasShape