Disagreeing In Love

Disagreeing In Love By Pastor Rob Ketterling.

Today I want to preach about loving deeply the people we disagree with. Loving deeply the people we disagree with. Whether it's somebody that's in our family, in our church, in our faith, outside of the family of God, there is a lot of people that we can disagree with. And I want to let you know that this message was really birthed out of my private devotion times.

And if you're not familiar with this, we talk about it quite often. We do something here called SOAP. And I will tell you about this over and over again. We ask our church to read two chapters of the Word of God every day. And that stands for the S, you read the Scriptures. You write down what you Observe about it, how you can Apply it to your life, and then Pray about it. And so I do that. As a follower of Jesus Christ, I read those same two chapters with you every day, read them, right down any observations, write down how it applies to me, and I pray about it.

Sometimes in those moments I have something happen where God will just download a sermon to me. And I will tell you I enjoy that, because it makes pastoring easier. Where I'm not planning for a sermon, all of a sudden God downloads it to me. Many times I'll just have a thought, a verse. Sometimes I'll write even the whole sermon in my devotion time. It's a neat thing. But I do have a file that's continually growing of sermons.

This is one of those ones that just in February as we were reading through Mark, as we were reading through Mark, God just had a verse pop to me on loving people that you disagree with. And how many know in the world that we live in, especially with social media, you can have all sorts of people that you disagree with. You can disagree with people you will never meet, and you can hate them deeply through the Internet. What a joy, how many know? It's amazing. How many know you never knew you had an opinion on vaccination as strong as you did until it went viral, and then you found out, ah, you know. Okay, so we need to learn how to love deeply people we disagree with and not hate them.

And it's sad. I mean, with the Internet people can start disagreeing with people and attacking people, and they feel like they are anonymous, like their keyboard makes them anonymous. And how many know that does not make you anonymous? They can still find out who you are. I can tell you this, that you can't hide behind the keyboard. I just want to let you know I had something this last week, and it made it difficult to preach even this weekend. Because just this last weekend through social media I had a disagreement with somebody. I didn't even know they knew who I was, and they started sending things around. And I won't go into any more details with it, and I want to let you know that this sermon in no way is related to that; it goes back to Mark. And if you're wondering when we read this, you can line it up with SOAP, all right? So just let me give this disclaimer: Any names or similarities in this sermon are in no way related to the last week's involvement. All right, how many feel good about that? All right.

Oh, man, there is plenty to be offended on, plenty to be offended on. And I thinks it was the great Charles Schultz, the writer of the Peanuts cartoon strip, that said there is a couple of things we should never talk about: politics and religion, and then he said the Great Pumpkin. But never talk about politics and religion. But I want it to be clear that if we're going to be disciples of Jesus Christ, we are going to have to talk about our faith. You're going to have to talk about your faith. You're going to have to open up your mouth and talk about your faith. And if you don't talk about your faith, I don't think you're being true to the one that has saved you, that has forgiven you. And if you start talking about your faith, you're going to have disagreements with people; little ones, medium sized ones, giant ones. And we should pay attention, because Jesus told us to go in all the world and preach the gospel in Mark 16. We are supposed to go and preach the gospel. John 20:21 says, "As the Father has sent me, I am ending you." Matthew 5:16 says, Let your light so shine before men, that they see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.