Peacemaking: An Inside Job

After a few moments Covey could take it no longer. He turned to the man and said, ‘Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?’

It brought the man back to consciousness of the situation Covey goes on to say, which caused the father to say, ‘Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital an hour ago where their mother died. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.’ Covey goes onto say that he saw and experienced the situation from an entirely different perspective after than and sought to help the man.

I think this is what Jesus is getting at in our main text this morning. And to me I think that Covey took the log out of his own eye as he tried to make peace on that noisy subway car.

As we work at and toward peacemaking, it requires us to examine our two by fours: our attitudes, our mindset, our prejudices as we begin to try and make peace with another person or group of people.

This important introspection; this critical part of the inside out process of peacemaking, is part of a process called ‘The Four G’s’ by Peacemaker Ministries.

The first ‘G’ is (Slide 9) Glorify God

In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul addresses the issue of conflict when it comes to personal and sensitive issues. In Paul’s writing it deals with an issue, I think we would have trouble relating to these days, the eating of meat that offered to idols. (For us today the equivalent would be something like drinking or not drinking alcohol.)

In the midst of his discussion, Paul drops this important point of reference, chapter 10 verse 31, ‘Whatever you eat or drink or whatever you do, you must do all for the glory of God.’

This is a valuable and necessary point of reference because it forces us to examine our motives as to the disagreement or conflict and as to our motive in the peacemaking process. In other words, if we truly seek to glorify God, then we must slow down and prayerfully examine our attitudes and actions and seek to bring them in line with what Christ would have us say and do. We are going to ask ourselves, ‘How am I going to honor God in this situation? How am I going to seek the well being of others so they do not get hung up on this issue as well?’

(Slide 9a) The next ‘G’ is Get the Log Out of Your Own Eye.

Ken Sande writes, ‘There are generally two kinds of "logs" you need to look for when dealing with conflict. First, you need to ask whether you have had a critical, negative, or overly sensitive attitude that has led to unnecessary conflict. One of the best ways to do this is to spend some time meditating on Philippians 4:2-9, which describes the kind of attitude Christians should have even when they are involved in a conflict.’

Here is what Philippians 4:2-9 says, ‘And now I want to plead with those two women, Euodia and Syntyche. Please, because you belong to the Lord, settle your disagreement. 3 And I ask you, my true teammate, to help these women, for they worked hard with me in telling others the Good News. And they worked with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are written in the Book of Life.