When the first Lord of the Rings movie came out--The Fellowship of the Ring--my 12 year old son begged me to take him to see it. So we went; not just once, but twice. Since I’d never read the J. R. Tolkien books, my son had to explain parts of the movie to me as the story unfolded. As I watched, I was struck by how an unlikely group of different individuals was drawn together in a community by a common mission. They called themselves the fellowship of the ring, and they pledged loyalty to each other in their commitment to destroy the ring of power and defeat the evil Dark Lord. It was an odd community composed of humans and elves, hobbits and dwarfs. They had nothing in common but their shared vision for destroying the ring of power and saving middle earth from destruction.
Yet no sooner did the fellowship of the ring begin, when it started to unravel. After all, the individual members of the fellowship under normal circumstances would’ve been enemies. Distrust of each other grew, as the temptation to act selfishly lured various members of the group to act out of self-interest. At one point in the story axes were drawn, arrows aimed, harsh words were spoken, and the fellowship of the ring nearly collapsed. It was clear that the power of evil in the story was focusing all its efforts on destroying the fellowship. If they could be enticed to turn on each other, they’d never be successful in their mission.
As I watched The Fellowship of the Ring, I was reminded of how fragile our relationships with each other really are. Every significant relationship we have is vulnerable. Relationships with our kids, with our spouse, with our friends, with our coworkers, with our neighbors…all of these relationships can become places of conflict and pain. Even churches can be places where relationships go bad, sometimes leading to hurt feelings, divisions, even violence. I have a pastor friend who once asked me my advice, because he thought violence would erupt during the next Sunday’s worship service because of conflict in his church. I was so taken back, I didn’t know exactly how to counsel him.We respond to conflict in our relationships different ways. Some of us avoid and withdraw. This is the person who looks for the closest exit as soon as the signs of a conflict appear on the horizon. This person clams up about their feelings during a conflict, withdrawing into the safety of their own silence. This is the person who’d rather pretend that everything is okay than confront another person.
Others of us tend to explode in conflict. We stew and stew and stew until we finally boil over. When we finally do explode, we might yell or cuss, or throw a dish or put our fist through the wall. Then, after our explosion, we start stewing again, until the next outburst.
Still other people thrive on conflict. These are people who like the rush of being in an argument, so they instigate arguments wherever they go. These are people who like to fight, whether it’s a bar fight or an intense argument with their spouse or even instigating a church split.
We all deal with conflict in different ways. And most of us know that the sign of a healthy relationship is not an absence of conflict, but the ability to resolve conflict in a positive, healthy way. That’s certainly the sign of a healthy marriage. I worry about engaged couples who’ve never had a fight. I once told an engaged couple that I wouldn’t marry them until they had a good fight and learned to resolve the conflict. That’s also the sign of a healthy workplace, a healthy friendship, and even a healthy church.
As a church, we as a leadership team know people are going to have conflict with each other. People are going to fail to meet another member’s expectations. People are going to be disappointed or misunderstood by other members. Members are going to lose their temper at a soccer game with another member. The real test of our congregation’s health is our ability to resolve these conflicts in a healthy, biblical way.
Today we’re going to talk about wising up about conflict. We’ve been in a series called Wise Up About Life through the Old Testament book of Proverbs. We’re going to talk about six steps to wising up about conflict with people. But before we go any further, I want to state that these six steps are more like stages. Relationships with people aren’t like a recipe or a model airplane, where if you just follow the directions or put pin A in slot B, things will all come together. Relationships with people are messy and complex. So think of these six steps as fluid, each merging into the next as part of a process rather than a check list or recipe.
1. Decide to Love (Proverbs 10:12)
Let’s read this proverb together.
"Hatred stirs up dissension, but love covers all wrongs" (10:12 NIV).
Hatred and love are contrasted with each other. The Hebrew word for "hatred" here simply refers to strong dislike for another person. Strong dislike for people stirs up arguments. The more we dislike a person, the more often we’ll tend to have conflict with that person. We often call these personality conflicts, but underneath we have strong dislike.
But love, on the other hand, covers over all wrongs. This is an interesting word, "covers." This Hebrew verb "cover" here comes from the Hebrew word for "forgive." To cover a wrong is to forgive an offense, to let an offense go. This same Proverb is quoted in the New Testament to stress the importance of Christians loving each other. 1 Peter 4:8 says, "Love each other deeply because love covers a multitude of sins." That’s a reference back to this proverb.
So here we find our first step to wise up about conflict. Decide ahead of time to conduct yourself with love.
With every conflict we face a crossroads, a decision of whether to conduct ourselves with love or to conduct ourselves in an unloving way. For the follower of Jesus Christ, the only legitimate option is the path of love. This decision is often a difficult one, a decision that costs us and goes against our natural impulses. But this is the Christian path of growth and maturity, the pathway of love.
Now what exactly is love? By "love" I don’t mean acting as if you like someone you really don’t like. I also don’t mean just letting another person have their way, being a doormat in a relationship. Love is making the decision to act in the best interests of the other person. Love is a decision that puts the needs of the person above our own needs at that moment.
Now what Proverbs doesn’t tell us is that our ability to love in this way can only come from God himself. We wouldn’t even know what this kind of love was apart from Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. When Jesus went to the cross, he put our need for forgiveness above his own need for comfort and life. By willingly going to the cross, Jesus made the decision to do what was in our best interests at great cost to himself. This is why the Bible says, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us" (1 John 3:16).
But even when you’re a Christian and you’ve experienced God’s love, it’s tempting to allow our dislike to dominate our actions when we’re in a conflict. It’s tempting to love people we like, and to withhold love from people we don’t like. That’s certainly a natural response. But when we do that, we’re no different than people who don’t know God. Jesus said, "If you love only those who love you, what good is that? Are not even people who know nothing about God doing that?" (Matthew 5:46).
So whenever we’re facing a conflict--whether with our child, a spouse, a friend, a church member, a boss--we need to decide ahead of time to conduct ourselves with life. In fact, when a person becomes a member of this church, we ask them to agree to a membership commitment that states this expectation up front. We ask our members to make a commitment to treat other church members with love, resolving any conflict in a healthy, biblical way. This is the Christian way, and anything less is sub-Christian.
2. Forgiving Offenses (Proverbs 19:11)
This leads to our second step: Forgive offenses against you.
"A person’s wisdom gives him patience; it is to his glory to overlook an offense" (Prov 19:11 NIV).
This proverb describes the wise person, a man or woman who’s living with the grain of God’s wisdom. The wise person learns to overlook offenses. The word "overlook" here is the same Hebrew word translated "cover" in the previous proverb. To overlook an offense is to forgive that offense. This is describing a kind of emotional toughness that allows insults, hurtful words and sarcasm to bounce off. The decision to love gives the wise person the capacity to forgive.
Now forgiveness is not pretending that the offense never happened. Some people are afraid to confront people who hurt them, and they think keeping their mouth shut is the same as forgiveness. It’s not. For forgiveness to occur, there has to be an acknowledgement that an offense occurred.
Forgiveness is simply the choice to not hold onto an offense. Often we forgive people without ever confronting the person who hurts us If you’re married or have a close friend, you probably do this all the time. I shudder to think what life would be like if my wife called me on the carpet for every little offense I committed. Instead, her love leads her to simply cover it, to let it go, as Prov 19:11 commands.
But other times we do need to confront a person in order to work through the process of forgiveness. When the offense is a pattern of behavior that’s slowly alienating us from the person, we need to confront. Or when the offense is self-destructive or dangerous, like drug or alcohol abuse, we need to confront. Or when we simply can’t seem to let go of the offense, it keeps popping up in our minds again and again, we need to confront. In these cases, we need to confront the person about the offense, but we confront in love in order to work through to forgiveness.
A refusal to forgive a person is unwise because it ends up poisoning our lives with bitterness. According to the Bible, a lack of forgiveness opens our lives to satanic power and chokes off God’s grace. When we refuse to forgive, the person’s offense keeps victimizing us again and again, because we dwell on it continually. Even people who’ve had horrific abuse inflicted upon them can learn the freedom of forgiveness.
3. Open Yourself (Proverbs 27:5-6)
Now let me give you the third step: Open yourself to receive correction.
"Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses" (Prov 27:5-6 NIV).
Direct confrontation is always better than unexpressed love. Love must confront sometimes, and it’s far better to be confronted by someone who cares about you than it is to be flattered by someone who doesn’t care about you. Hidden love is a love that’s too timid and afraid to confront a person.
Whenever we’re in a conflict with another person, we need to open ourselves to correction. In most cases, we’ve done things that contributed to the problem, whether it’s failing to meet an expectation, holding on to the problem for too long, or gossiping to a friend about the problem.
Now opening ourselves to correction is exactly opposite of what we feel like doing in the midst of a conflict. Instead, our temptation is to close ourselves off to the other person, either out of anger or to protect ourselves from further hurt. We tend to rationalize our part in the problem as justified.
So this is exactly the opposite of what most of us feel like doing. Pastor Gary and I often laugh at how our responses to criticism are different. When a person criticizes Gary, his reflex reaction is, "You’re right. It’s all my fault." When someone criticizes me, my reflex reaction is, "You’re wrong. It’s all your fault." Now the reality is that neither of our reactions are accurate.
We need to open ourselves up to any part we played in the problem. Picture your life this way. Part of your life is your public self, the things you let other people see. That’s what you’re seeing in my life right now, my public life, what I allow others to see about me. But we also have a private self, that part of us that only we know about. Then there are our blind spots, those parts of our character that others can see, but that we’re blind to. All of us have blind spots. These are things we just don’t see or get, but that others, when they get to know us well, begin to see in us. Finally there’s that part of you that no one knows about except God himself, that part deeply hidden in the recesses of your unconscious.
Whenever we’re in a conflict, our private self or our blind spots often contribute to the problem.
When we open ourselves to receive correction, we grow. Opening ourselves to correction helps us understand more and more about our blind spots, so these areas become part of our conscious knowledge. I can’t change something I don’t see in my life. Opening ourselves to correction gives us integrity, as we learn to conduct ourselves with greater self knowledge.
For example, I’ve learned through the years that I can be a very self-centered person. My natural inclination is to boss people around, to manipulate people to do what I want them to do. But the only reason I know that about myself is because people who care about me have pointed out this blind spot in my life. And even though my first reaction to them was, "You’re wrong," as I reflected on their words, I’ve discovered that this is true about me.
I appreciate the people in my life who love me enough to tell me the truth. They aren’t my critics; they’re my allies. These are the people who I know are in my corner, who have my best interests in mind, but who also aren’t afraid to confront me. Pastor Bruce has functioned in my life in this way through the years, as well as the two other pastors in my accountability group I’ve been in the last ten years.
In the midst of any conflict, we need to open ourselves to correction.
3. Admitting Our Role (Proverbs 28:13)
This brings us to our next action: Admit where you have contributed to the problem.
"He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy" (Prov 28:13 NIV).
The word "conceal" in this verse is that same Hebrew word translated "cover" 10:12 and "overlook" in 19:11. The idea here is that I can’t "cover" or "overlook" my own sins. Only the person I hurt can make the choice to "cover" or "overlook" my offense.
Concealed sin cuts off God’s blessings in my life. Concealed sin hinders my prayer life, it chokes off God’s love, it builds a blockade against God’s presence. I pay a high price for concealed sin. But when we confess and renounce our sins, we discover mercy.
The word for confess simply means agree or acknowledge. Instead of calling it indiscretion, call it gossip. Instead of calling it hormones, call it lust. Instead of calling it mistake, call it a sin.
The word "renounce" means to abandon. Renouncing means we leave that sin behind, we turn away from it in repentance.
This leads to mercy. Now we always find mercy from God when we confess and renounce, but we don’t always find mercy from people. Some people will refuse to forgive us. But we can be assured of God’s mercy, and when we admit our faults, we’re no longer isolated from God’s grace and presence in our lives.
When we honestly admit our faults, we begin to walk in integrity. By admitting our faults, we make ourselves vulnerable to those we’ve hurt. We take what’s in our private self, and we take the risk to make it public. We do this, refusing to justify ourselves or make excuses, simply calling our sin for what it was. This is integrity, where our public self and our private self are in harmony with each other. This kind of integrity opens us up to God’s blessings and grace, filling us with his mercy and compassion.
5. Keeping Anger In Check (Proverbs 29:22)
This brings us to our fifth step: Keep your anger under control when you talk about the issue.
"An angry person stirs up dissention, and a hot tempered person commits many sins" (Prov 29:22 NIV).
In any conflict, anger is like gasoline, and when anger is expressed inappropriately, minor conflicts can become volatile arguments. This proverb is warning us that when we lose our temper, we end up committing more and more sins. We hurl words of abuse and insult on the person. We cut and slash with words of sarcasm. We destroy the person’s reputation with other people, passing our side of the story to anyone who will listen, sometimes under the guise of a prayer request. We might even make up lies about the person to get back at them.
If we want to be wise in conflict, we need to learn to control our anger. That doesn’t mean stuffing the anger down deep inside ourselves so we don’t feel it anymore. After all, anger is simply an emotion, neither good nor bad in itself. According to the Bible, it’s possible to be angry and to express our anger without sinning. In fact, Ephesians 4:26 commands us, "Go ahead and be angry, but don’t sin in the anger." That same verse also commands us to refuse to allow the day to end without dealing with the anger. Unresolved anger is like toxic waste; when we refuse to deal with it, it seeps into every aspect of the relationship, contaminating it.
We express our anger appropriately by talking about it. Instead of shouting or cussing, instead of throwing things and punching the wall, we express it with appropriate words. Some people need to find professional help or a conflict management group to help them learn to control their anger in conflict.
6. Correct Carefully (Proverbs 9:7-9)
Now everything up to this point in the process has focused on our responsibilities in the relationship. Deciding to conduct myself with love, forgiving offenses against me, opening myself to correction, admitting where I have been at fault, and keeping my anger under control.
What about the other person? After all, it’s likely the other person is at fault too. What about him being loving, her forgiving me, him opening himself to correction, and her admitting her faults? What about that person keeping their anger under control? Well the reality is that you have absolutely no control over how the other person acts in a conflict. You can’t make the other person love or force the other person to be open to correction. I can’t coerce a person into admitting their faults or coax a person to keep their anger in check. All I can control is my response.
But there is one last step to take, and it’s this: Correct others carefully.
"Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult; whoever rebukes a wicked person invites abuse. Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you; rebuke a wise person and he will love you. Instruct a wise person and he will be wiser still; teach a righteous person and he will add to his learning" (Prov 9:7-9 NIV).
The "mocker" in this section is a person who’s simply not open to correction. A mocker is a person who has a constant smirk on his face, someone who scoffs at people who want to live with the grain of God’s wisdom. This is a person who ridicules people who try to embrace God’s principles for life. Proverbs tells us, "Don’t bother with this person." Love this person yes, pray for them yes, but don’t try to bring correction because it won’t do any good and only opens you up to get hurt again.
Instead, focus your efforts on correcting people who are open, people who want to live with the grain of God’s wisdom. But even with open people, we’re only in a position to do this, after we’ve taken the previous five steps. This is what Jesus meant when he said, "Don’t try to take the speck of sawdust out of your friend’s eye until you’ve taken the log out of your own eye." In other words, look at yourself first, and only after you’ve done self evaluation, are you ready to bring correction to others. This applies to parents with their kids, spouses, friends, church members, bosses, virtually every kind of relationship you can imagine.
Now when we correct people we need to carefully balance grace giving with truth telling. Grace giving is extending compassion and mercy to people when we confront them. Grace giving comes when we’re willing to forgive, when we avoid name calling and sarcasm. Grace giving means giving the other person the benefit of the doubt rather than assuming that they have impure motives.
But truth telling is also important. Truth telling is being open and honest with what the other person has done and how their actions have affected us. Truth telling refuses to minimize the issue, but it also doesn’t blow the issue out of proportion. Truth telling is also being honest with your emotions, taking the risk to share what’s going on in your heart.
Some people are strong in truth telling but weak in grace giving. These are people who tell it like it is, but they do it with the subtlety of a professional wrestler. These are people who see the situation, and who aren’t afraid to confront, but who haven’t yet learned to love and show compassion. People weak in grace giving often refuse to forgive.
Other people are strong in grace giving but weak in truth telling. These are people who hate conflict and avoid it at all costs. They’d rather pretend that everything is fine, to keep overlooking obvious sins that need to be confronted. But these are people who often explode when the pressure keeps building. Or they simply avoid the relationship entirely, divorcing the spouse, refusing to return a friend’s phone calls, or looking for another church rather than resolving the issue.
Clearly we need to balance grace giving and truth telling when we confront people. To the extent that we keep these two aspects of confrontation in balance, to that extent we’ll be like Jesus himself when we confront a person.
Conclusion
We need to wise up about conflict in our lives. We do this by deciding to love, forgiving offenses against us, opening ourselves to correction, admitting where we’ve been wrong, keeping our anger under control, and only then offering correction carefully.
Conflict is nothing new. Since the entrance of sin into the world people have struggled to get along with each other, from Cain and Abel in the Old Testament to the apostles Peter and Paul in the New Testament. From marriage conflict to the LA riots, from bar fights to school shootings, from lost friendships to divided churches, conflict is a fact of life.
In fact, if it makes you feel any better, the New Testament church was filled with conflict. Behind all 21 letters we have in the New Testament is a church conflict, followers of Jesus Christ struggling to get along with each other. Yet despite all the conflicts that the early Christians struggled with in their relationships with each other, most of them were able to apply these biblical principles. So much so, that it wasn’t the early church’s programs or preachers that got the attention of the pagan world. Instead the non-Christian world saw their relationships, they said, "Look how they love each other," and it was this very reality that persuaded many that the good news of Jesus Christ was true.
No wonder Jesus himself said, "By this will all people know you are my followers, if you love each other" (John 13:35).
