Faith Fights: Things Worth Fighting For

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is good to be with you as we really now come to some concluding thoughts about the last series that we’ve been on together,
the faith fights.
And, you know, as we’ve gone throughout these conversations,
it has struck me, Clint,
how many times we’ve said,
you know, no, there are some things worth fighting for,
but,
and then we go on a diatribe about all of those things that aren’t worth fighting for.
And so today we thought it might be wise to go back to that first statement and to consider that,
you know, in a long history of Christianity,
clearly we fought about a lot of things.
And there’s been a lot of things on that list.
Some cases we are rightly ashamed of the things we’ve fought about.
Other things we look back on and say,
yeah, probably wasn’t that important.
But there are some things that we look back upon and we recognize,
know those things were worth fighting for and will continue to be worth fighting for as we move forward.
Not only as individuals seeking to follow Christ,
but as communities seeking to be faithful in the place where we have been put.
So we turn today to things worth fighting for.
And Clint, I wonder what you have to start with us with this morning.
So I’ve lived my entire adult professional life in the church.
I’ve never done anything else.
I’ve never known anything else.
I have no concept of what a “real job” is like out in the “real world.”
And so the lens that I look through has always been church colored.
And I’ve often wondered,
Michael, at the end of some conversation where there’s unhappiness about things,
is there a corollary to this?
At some engineering firm or some computer software company or some educational institution,
is someone coming in because they don’t like the picture that got hung on the wall
or because they don’t appreciate the color that was used to redo the bathroom?
And I’ve just always wondered if that is unique to church
or whether it’s just a product of things that people are invested in and things that people are passionate about.
And in a way,
things that are important to people is that the fertile ground that generates conflict and disagreements.
And, you know, we’ve often come back to the same place in this podcast
as we’ve talked through some of the things Christians have argued about.
Some of those things come from us.
And some of those things are our own preferences and our own biases.
And some of those arguments,
to be honest, are probably not helpful.
Then again,
there are some things that Christians should be willing to stand for.
There are some things certainly worth arguing over,
worth fighting over,
worth standing on.
And I think then discernment becomes,
how do we navigate which is which?
How do we move to an understanding of what it is that we hold central and dear to the faith
and what it is that I personally like a certain way and wouldn’t want to see changed
but isn’t really a kingdom kind of thing?
And it seems to me,
Michael, that part of navigating the faith is within that arena
to try and make sense of what are those things that are worth squabbling over that are worth standing for
and what are the things which we should lighten up and probably take less seriously.
Yeah, if you can buy it on Amazon,
it’s probably not worth fighting for in the church.
You know, I think there’s this reality that the things worth fighting for
have already been fought for at some point.
And I think an example par excellence maybe is the identity of Jesus Christ.
We see for hundreds of years the church fought over who is Jesus really,
because the implications of that are world shaping.
And I mean that historically,
those conversations literally shaped the world that we now live in,
but also it shapes how we view the world in which we live.
If you live in a world in which you believe that we have been made stewards of this good gift
and that we are called to die the death of Christ,
as Paul talks about us being baptized into his death,
and then you truly believe the promise that you live into this new life
and that you should be transformed into that life now and into eternity,
then that has a way of shaping your convictions,
has a way of shaping your ethics,
has a way of shaping the choices that you make in your own life in vocation and family.
And the implications of who Jesus is are significant.
And I think that
there are moments in our lives,
both individually and also societally, culturally,
in which Jesus is put back on trial.
And I don’t mean that in the sense of some of the public discourse that we’ve had over the last 10,
15 years.
What I really mean is there’s moments in which we question,
is this real?
Do we really believe that Jesus Christ lived, died,
was resurrected and ascended?
And if you’re going to be orthodox,
if you’re going to live inside the historic Christian faith,
then your affirmation will be,
even if I don’t completely understand it,
I have faith that it is true.
And if you are in a position where you disagree with that or you don’t understand that
or you want to push back on that,
that’s fine.
But that does move you outside of a historic conversation of what it means to be Christian.
You might be a person who is drawn to Jesus’s teaching.
You might be a person who finds the worshipping practices of the church helpful in some way.
But if you’re going to be Christian,
Clint,
I think at the end of the day,
you would have to be able to stand on some of the things that the church has said,
“This is who Jesus is.”
And if you can’t,
then I’m not sure that you’re fighting for the same thing anymore.
Is it fair to say,
Michael, that there’s a significant difference between
revisiting
the aspects of the faith versus revisiting the practices of the faith?
It’s one thing to say the church is going to try new music.
It’s one thing to say the church is going to live with a very simple sanctuary
or rent a building instead of buy a building.
To change the practice of the way that we live out the faith is one thing.
But when we say we’re going to come to some different conclusion on the matters of the faith itself, for instance,
you and I may just agree to disagree on lots of things within the church.
But that latitude is not given to us when it comes to Jesus Christ is the Son of God,
fully human,
fully divine.
If I don’t accept that,
that’s not a thing that we both just say,
“Well, you have your opinion and I have mine.”
And that’s fine.
We don’t need to be judgmental about that.
But neither do we need to say,
“That’s a fence that should be moved.”
That is one of the foundational,
fundamental doctrines that the Christian church fought to arrive at
and fought to maintain.
And I think, you know, it largely should not be up to us to think that now we can make that sort of optional.
However, there are lots of other things that you and I would have the latitude to say,
“Well, I like it this way.
Yeah, I probably prefer it this way.” And again,
sorting those out, I think,
is interesting.
I think in large measure we could look to those doctrines that are historical.
You know, for instance, mission.
Doing mission,
reaching out to people with the grace of Jesus Christ who are hurting,
who are poor, who are hungry, that’s not optional.
No church gets to say,
“We’re going to concentrate on worship and fellowship,
but, you know, we’re not really going to do mission.
We’re going to take that money and invest it back in ourselves,
and we’re just really concerned about us.
We’re not too worried about what happens outside of our own circle.” That’s not,
you can’t really be Christian and not be concerned about those in need
because that’s so fundamental.
That is so endemic to what Jesus taught as how Christians are to live
that there’s no way that you can then come back and separate it.
And, you know,
unfortunately,
these are often not the things that cause,
I may be fortunately,
these are often not the things that cause great disagreements in the church,
but there certainly are some fences that we need to leave up.
And, you know,
in this day and age where we sort of like the idea that everybody’s opinion can be valued and equal,
that doesn’t always sit well.
Right.
You know, Clint,
that spurs in mind your conversation about mission,
a conversation that we actually had with a person from the denomination,
and they were talking about how sometimes they run into churches where there’s fights in budgeting
between people who want to save money and people who want to spend it.
And this individual made a comment about,
“I’m sure that’s a reality that you have had as well.”
And we talked about it afterwards and chuckled a little bit,
because what’s interesting about mission as an example is that if you take mission as an idea
and you layer it on top of another organization,
like a country club or a business,
it makes absolutely net zero sense that you take money that you as a group of people are willing to give,
and then you ship it out of your building,
out of your community,
out of your state, even your country,
and it goes to do no earthly good for you.
That makes zero monetary sense.
But what you have to grapple with is the reason why mission is always worth fighting for
is because it’s essential to our identity as Christians.
And it’s essential to our identity because that is the life that Jesus lived and taught,
the one in which he saw those who were broken and wounded,
and he, with a crowd of people thronging around him,
would pause and call to that person and ask,
“What can I do for you?” Time after time in the Gospels,
Jesus makes time for those who no one else will make time for.
And so if we seek to be people who live under the moniker of Christian,
Christ-ian, little Christ,
then we are not living into our identity if we are unwilling to heed the call to serve others in the name of Christ.
If we are unwilling to go out of our way to find those who are not being sought out.
And I think what’s interesting is we oftentimes do get caught into questions of,
“Well, what’s the right amount of money to go to this?” or “What’s the right amount to do this?”
And those quickly become opinion conversations about,
“Well, I think this is a better way to do it than that way.”
What we cannot compromise on is the thing that lies beneath that,
and that is we must be mission people.
Now, exactly how that gets lived out in any particular church family or in your own individual family,
that’s a conversation that reasonable Christians can have,
and they should have.
But,
Clint, if we ever find ourselves in a position where we say,
“Hey, listen,
we could use that money a lot better than fill in the blank,”
we’re now crossing a line out of the identity given to us in Christ.
And I think we are putting ourselves in a position where we do need to have some difficult conversations,
where a fight may be worth having.
Yeah, I think it would be impossible to read the Gospel and not feel the weight of the calling to do ministry to those in need,
in addition to caring for the community that surrounds us.
That can’t be an either/or; that must always be both/and.
We must always care about what’s happening inside of our congregations,
but we can never do so at the expense of being aware of our responsibility to reach past our community to those who are in need of help.
And, you know, it’s sort of my contention,
Michael, that the second a church begins to focus inwardly,
it also begins to die.
You know,
we see this a lot in small congregations in the Presbyterian church as the numbers shrink and the budget shrinks.
There’s this almost inevitable temptation to really just begin to focus on us,
quote-unquote.
And as soon as you do that,
you really lose some of the lifeblood of the very thing that makes you church.
You lose the passion of working for justice.
You lose the generosity of saying,
“We’re going to trust God in these moments,
and we’re going to give as we’re called to give.”
And I think that it makes it almost impossible to be the church when our focus is inward and not outward.
Looking outside of ourselves is, in my experience,
fundamental to what it means to be the church.
And I don’t think you can be the church without engaging in it at a significant level.
There’s something about the church’s DNA that when people are called to live into the life of Christ,
that they will consistently live beyond the boundaries that they assume reign them in.
The idea that if we worship together and we fellowship together and we serve together,
we sometimes think, “Well,
what good does that do?”
It does significant good because as we open our communities to others in an inviting way,
others see life and they’re drawn to life.
When we are willing to live at the expense of ourselves so that others might be invited,
suddenly the DNA of the church is such that it will naturally advance in the world.
It will naturally bring honor and glory to God.
There’s several different sort of metaphors that Scripture gives us of that community that’s being faithful in the midst of their own time and place.
I do think it’s worth fighting for, but sadly,
a lot of the conversations that sort of claim that they’re fighting on those grounds are often fighting for other things.
It’s interesting, right?
The idea,
“Well, we should let people have coffee in the sanctuary.”
Well, whether or not you should have coffee in your sanctuary,
I don’t think that’s a theological question.
But I do also really find it unreasonable that you think that letting coffee in the sanctuary is going to somehow be a boon,
an invitational marker that suddenly everybody wants to come to your church,
right?
And oftentimes I do think that we make these things that are small things and we try to connect them to larger things that I don’t know necessarily fits.
I mean, ultimately,
it doesn’t matter the color of the carpet or if there’s food in the sanctuary,
what kind of clothes people are wearing.
A church can be open and welcoming and doing the mission of Christ without these things,
and yet often I think we’re tempted to give these things the label of that more important thing.
And, you know, I suppose we all struggle in the discernment of which is which.
It seems to me, Michael,
that a dangerous thing happens when we decide that some metric,
whether it be a budget number or an attendance number or a membership number,
gets accepted as mission,
as “our mission.” I don’t mean mission in outreach,
I mean our calling as the church.
And when we do that,
when we accommodate those things and we say,
we now,
our main thing is to make people comfortable.
Our main thing is to have children’s ministry.
Our main thing is to get great music that people love.
Well, as soon as we shift our focus from doing what God calls us to do to doing something because people resonate or like it,
then I think we’re off track.
I think we’re setting our course by the wrong star.
And I would argue that I’ve seen many instances in churches where the driving rationale is people like it.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with people liking something.
In fact, that’s a good thing,
but it can’t be a first thing.
A first thing always has to be of God and not of us.
A first thing has to be that this brings glory to God.
And then if people like it,
great.
Maybe we need to learn to like it.
Maybe it’s a thing that is challenging us.
And so when we set,
when we use the results rather than faithfulness to evaluate whether we are succeeding or not,
then I think,
you know,
and not only will it take us the wrong direction,
it will always take us further down that road because once we start off on the path of pleasing ourselves,
that’s never going to end.
We’re going to constantly chase that.
And again, we said it last week pretty strongly,
I think, there is nothing wrong with preferences.
They just can’t be primary.
God’s opinion matters first,
and ours is a very, very distant second.
And when we forget that,
either as individuals or at a congregational level,
then it may not matter how many people are coming because it may not be church that we’re actually doing.
Now, I don’t want to belabor this point,
but I do think it’s worth noting that in the Reformation,
all of the early reformers wrote extensively about what they saw then,
and which is bore out to be true,
as one of the greatest weaknesses of the Reformation,
was the schisming of the church and the reality that the question of who is the authority to determine what is and isn’t appropriate in the life of a Christian or a worshiping community.
And what they identified very early was that the temptation would be for each and every individual to take it upon themselves to determine what was and wasn’t faithful.
And so what they were concerned about was every Christian becoming their own little pope,
their own little deciding unit,
who would ultimately fracture the church in a thousand million different ways,
as unique as each person themselves.
And they wrote extensively about the significance and importance of church bodies,
of gatherings of Christians,
of leadership structures within the church,
of bodies that would make these decisions on behalf of the whole.
They believed that this was the way that they could account and keep people from schisming off in all of these different ways.
And yet we know both the temptation and reality of how easily that breaking happens.
Now, sometimes it happens in really small ways.
People get upset,
sometimes over an important thing,
sometimes over an unimportant thing,
and they leave the church and they go somewhere else.
Other times, church split.
And then there’s two churches where there was one.
And history has shown that humanity just tends towards this kind of breaking apart and sort of creating new things.
And I think we need to recognize that at the end of the day,
there are sometimes moments in which we do need to stand on theological principle,
on truth.
And in those places,
we do not bend.
But one thing that I think we should be very hesitant to give up and a thing we should always fight for is Christian unity.
Even the Reformers recognizing the separation that was happening in that historical moment,
they spoke very powerfully about how important it is to stay connected whenever possible.
And I do think, Clint,
that we should feel very convicted by our temptation to do things on our own,
to do it our own way.
As Christians, we should always fight for unity of the body.
However we can keep people in that conversation for as long as we possibly can,
I think we have both a theological and practical mandate to do so.
Because it is the people there,
the Holy Spirit through all of these different voices that we get to experience God’s will in leading over time.
And when we so quickly sort of dispense and we all go in our different directions because that’s the easiest way,
I don’t think that’s the best way.
And I think that Christian unity is worth fighting for.
The word community means common unity,
and it’s one of the most difficult concepts in the Christian church.
And there are moments of separation.
You know, if you think through the Scripture,
there are maybe a half dozen instances where I can think of that mostly Paul a few times,
maybe someone else, says, “Okay, these people need to be outside of the fellowship.”
But balance that with the dozens if not hundreds of times that Paul writes to people about not being separated,
but coming back together,
this idea of common oneness.
And that is really hard to do because we are wired to want to have our way and to be surrounded with people like us.
And so when we in the church try to practice this unity,
we often think—and you and I did a sermon on this a while back—we often think of uniformity rather than unity.
So what’s the difference?
Uniformity means we all agree,
we all have similar everything,
that we’re sort of the same.
Unity means whether or not we are the same,
we meet in a common space,
we connect with one another in real ways.
Uniformity is much easier than unity.
Uniformity, when we simply say,
you know, “These people aren’t welcome here,
they don’t agree with us,
they don’t look like us,
they don’t live in the same neighborhoods as us,
they don’t think like…”
Then unity.
Unity is hard.
Unity is difficult work.
And what the gospel teaches is that unity matters so much because at the center of Christian unity is the cross of Jesus Christ.
And people who may have nothing else in common find themselves united with one another at the cross in their faith in Jesus Christ.
And we should take very,
very seriously the task of trying to maintain unity as a witness and in the name of Jesus Christ as a part of our testimony to a world that is fractured,
to a world that is divided,
and to a church that often does that.
And this is not to say there aren’t reasons to leave one church and go to another.
There may be wonderful,
great reasons for that.
There may even be the right reasons.
But we should ask those questions very carefully, very thoughtfully.
And so often we think that the church has to be a place where people agree on things.
And it’s just not the case.
Yeah, it’s hard.
It’s hard to have hardcore Republicans and liberal Democrats sitting together in church.
It’s hard to have, you know,
pro this and con this.
It’s hard to have people with very different opinions about things of the world and of their lives and say,
“We are still brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.”
But I think because it’s hard,
it matters so much.
And I think that churches have to be very,
very careful with separatism,
either separating themselves from others or separating people from their congregations,
because it’s a dangerous road and for the most part, not always,
for the most part,
antithetical to the gospel.
Yeah, it has been striking to me how when you do have people of such radical differences,
you have to find strong connections in the gospel itself.
Because when you go back to coffee time,
you’re not able to just pick up the conversations that you would have at the coffee shop with the people that you largely agree with.
And if you don’t agree,
you like fighting with each other over the same thing.
You tread the same ground just from different directions.
And in church,
we aren’t gathering to simply regurgitate the conversations of the day,
of the news of people that we like to listen to.
We don’t come together merely for the entertainment of our time together.
We come together because we believe there’s something substantial that happens when you gather under the cross of Christ.
And I think I have seen some glimpses of what happens when you’re willing to submit to the difficult longevity of the process.
It has a way of shaping you when you realize that there are good people trying to follow Jesus who are in almost every other respect different than you.
And as you get an opportunity to see that,
it is a blessing because it reminds you that the God who has saved you is far larger than the God that we often imagine.
We often consider Christ from some metaphor or image or song or picture,
or we get some idea of who Jesus is,
and we’re tempted to never have that picture expanded.
And if the gospels tell us anything,
is that there’s four gospels to describe one person,
and they admit to being tiny accounts just enough so that we can believe.
If we were to truly understand how great the one under whose cross we gather,
we would know how important it is that we continue to gather there with these people so different from ourselves.
Because only Jesus has dominion over all.
Only Jesus is Lord of all.
And so I think there’s this wonderful discipleship that happens as we gather,
as we seek to learn and grow,
as we find moments in which we say,
I’m uncomfortable with that thing that was just preached,
or I’m uncomfortable with that Bible study conversation.
That gives us an opportunity to allow Christ to work within us.
And maybe we do end up on the other side saying,
you know, I don’t know that that is true or I disagree.
But yet there’s something that happens in our spirits,
a kind of humility that’s fostered when we’re willing to recognize that Jesus Christ is larger than the small boxes we tend to put him in.
It’s been about 20 years ago,
and I’ve thought about it many times since.
I’ve probably told it in a sermon as well,
but on a mission trip with a youth group,
we were helping to deliver food in New York City.
And I was assigned to ride in a van with one of their delivery drivers,
a young black man named Kenyeni.
And Kenyeni and I drove into some,
you know,
not high class.
We were not in the high rent districts of New York City.
And we would,
in this old van,
pull up to these stoplights or intersections.
And I noticed several times there would be groups of young kids,
and they would look over and see us,
and then they would say things to each other,
and they would sort of all break up in smaller groups going different directions.
And I said something about the attention we were getting,
and Kenyeni said they think we’re police officers.
And I mean,
there’s nothing about me that,
you know, and I said, well, why in the world would they think that we’re police officers?
And he said,
because around here, that’s the only time you’d see a black guy and a white guy in a car together.
And I think about what that means, Michael,
that in large portions of the world,
the world cannot make room for a black man and a white man sitting in a vehicle together.
And yet somehow in the church,
a white guy from Iowa and a young black man from New York City can,
because of Jesus Christ,
go to deliver meals to the hungry and the sick and the needy.
And, you know, the church hasn’t always gotten that right.
Sometimes the church has said there’s not room here for these people and those people.
We can’t make room for them, whoever them was.
And when we do that, we’re missing,
we are missing the core of the gospel.
The world will always get that wrong.
The world will always follow the temptation to divide and to be different.
And we stand somewhere else in the church,
and that is worth fighting over.
We’ve had some battles over that in the church,
and it is worth fighting over.
If you ever belong to a church that tells you there isn’t room for fill in the blank,
be very careful,
because I would argue that that church is struggling to understand the call to unity we have in Jesus Christ.
And it doesn’t mean that everybody is going to be officers and pastors,
but it does mean that all are welcome.
And when we make a conscious commitment that despite our differences,
we are going to come week after week and relate to one another and deal with one another and listen to one another and learn from one another,
then I think we’re enacting something of the grace of Jesus Christ.
And I don’t think we can be church without that.
You know, some of these things,
in fact, I would say all of these things that we’re talking about are probably the most natural understanding of what’s worth fighting for.
When you’re fighting for something,
you’re generally fighting against someone else,
right?
And so my next thing here is admittedly different than that, because really,
I think another thing worth fighting for isn’t so much a thing we fight against another person,
but rather that we fight with ourself over.
And this is what I mean.
I think that there’s always merit as people of faith in fighting within our own souls to practice humility.
I can’t think of a spiritual practice which is more challenging than the practice of humility.
There are some things like forgiveness that’s unbelievably difficult,
peace in the midst of anxiety and fear.
These things are unbelievably hard.
But as you consider what it means to be Christian,
time and time and time again,
the church has been embarrassed by scandals of all kinds of leaders making horrible,
moral choices,
lapses in character.
So many times in which the church has proclaimed from the mountaintop,
this is the truth of the gospel.
And just 20 or 30 years later,
those words come back to bite us.
And I think we would all do well to fight within our own temptations to be prideful and to take our own opinion as truth.
I think we would all do well to fight for humility,
to recognize that the gospel is far more expansive than just our own vision of it.
Our own vision of it is unbelievably important.
We should have a voice in a community of Christians where we are representing what we have known and can see of the gospel.
But what we can see is just a tiny sliver of who Jesus really is.
And I think that many of the fights that we find ourselves engaging with others in could be radically transformed if we would first fight within ourselves to continue to practice spirits that are marked with humility,
an honest reflection of our own failings and our own lack of perspective,
our own biases.
If we could only do some of that self-work,
I think a lot of the fights we found ourselves in with others would be radically transformed
by the grace that we recognized in the humility within ourselves.
I think that it is a difficult litmus test when we’re upset to ask ourselves some honest questions about why am I upset?
Is this a Jesus thing or is this a personal thing?
Is this something that matters in the scope of the gospel or is this some preference that I have that I don’t like?
Is this something that is harmful to the church or is this just something I don’t like?
And I think as we are willing to engage those kingdom questions,
not just the personal questions,
because we live in a world that advertises to us and sells us stuff and convinces us constantly that my opinion matters.
That’s what I need to spew on Facebook and put on Twitter.
And the church teaches us something different,
that the way of Christ is first and I’m second.
Maybe even third.
Maybe God neighbor me.
I’m second at best, let’s say that.
And that is different.
That’s a different way to experience life.
It’s a different way to live, literally.
It’s a new way of living.
And so I think in those moments when we feel frustrated,
it’s important but difficult to say what’s going on here.
Rather than assume that default “is with the other person,” to be willing to say,
“Where am I in this?
Why do I think this is important enough to raise a stink over or make an issue of?”
And I think as we do that,
we’ll find that many of those things that we think initially might be a big deal,
ultimately we’re able and willing to go,
“Yeah, that’s probably not worth what I thought it was.”
There’s a great story about a Catholic cardinal who was retiring and at the celebration a reporter supposedly asked him,
“After this lifetime of serving the faith,
what have you learned?”
And the cardinal reportedly said,
“I’ve learned two things.
There is a God and I’m not Him.”
And, you know,
simply enough, if we keep those two things straight,
it will help us a great deal.
And, you know,
none of us stand on the personal authority to supersede the call to be gracious.
And in some ways,
I think that’s the opportunity that the faith offers us is the opportunity for one moment in our life
and one place and one practice to be disabused of the idea that we have to carry the entire universe, that our opinions,
our preferences don’t need to be the thing that rule the day.
And these things, if we’re honest,
become prisons for us.
We become imprisoned by the stuff that we like and we would prefer and we want and we toil and we strive and we fight
to make a world that looks exactly like the one that we want.
And then we get there and at the end we realize there never was a there there,
that those weren’t the things that matter and last.
The gold that Jesus talked about versus the wood that will be burned,
right?
There’s a sense in which I think the faith allows us to measure the things worth fighting for by definition.
That’s what it’s intended to do.
It’s always supposed to draw us closer to the center of all things and draw us away from the temptations to over focus on ourselves.
And yet that is the part of the faith I think that most of us struggle with the most.
Most of us would really prefer to be comfortable in worship every week.
Most of us would prefer the Bible study to be done in the way that we like with our Bible study devotional,
with our Bible translation.
We’re so transformed in our imaginations by the culture that surrounds us,
I think that the gospel should in some way seem foreign to us all of the time.
Because Jesus indeed proclaimed that this new kingdom is being brought to bear and so therefore it has a foreignness to it.
It should always illustrate and remind us that though there is a God,
we’re not Him.
It seems to me that on the day we have to answer for our lives there would be two mistakes that we could make.
And the first would be to say that I didn’t fight for anything.
I didn’t find anything worth fighting for.
I didn’t stand up and make a stand for anything because I wasn’t sure that it needed it.
And the second mistake would be,
no I fought for things but they were the wrong things.
I battled over stuff that ultimately didn’t matter very much.
And I think if we can try to keep our life between those two mistakes,
if we can understand that there may be a time that lines have to be drawn.
But even when we draw them,
we draw them as Christians.
We draw them as people of love and grace and kindness and forgiveness.
And we may have to say, look,
as Martin Luther did,
I stand here and I can stand nowhere else.
I can do no other than make this stand.
And there will be times for that in our life.
There should be times for that in our life.
But on the other hand,
to make sure that when we are in the midst of one,
that it really is something worth it.
That it’s something that matters,
not just to us,
but to the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
And you’re 100% right,
Michael.
That demands humility.
It demands discernment.
It demands caution.
I think that as we’ve gone through this series of podcasts,
you know, and you think about what the church has fought over throughout its 2,000-year history,
many of those battles could not have been pleasing to God.
There’s simply no way that God is glorified by some of the fights that we’ve had within churches.
And yet in other times,
it was right.
We did the right thing.
And so trying to sort out when it is time and what is worthy of our energy to fight the battle and what the battle is.
I mean, that’s the core.
That’s at the heart of it.
You know,
I was reflecting,
as you said that,
Clint, on this bygone era when I would go stand in a bookstore.
But imagine with me that was a thing that we did anymore,
either have bookstores or go out in public.
And, you know, you imagine you go stand in the Christian section and how many of those books are written directly to address one of the fights that we’ve talked about in this series.
And I’m not going to give a percentage because I would,
by definition, be wrong, but it would be a scarily high percentage of books that are written to address
the fights that we have in churches,
whether worship or morality or practices.
We spend so much time.
We spill so much ink.
We spend so much energy fighting these fights because I think at our core,
they’re distractions from the thing that really gnaws at us.
And that is the reality that we are people who need saving.
We’re people who need transformation by the gospel.
St.
Augustine said it by saying that there’s this unstable part of us that can only be stabilized in God.
And I think the deep wisdom and truth of that is we find the need to stop fighting needless battles
when the battle within our own hearts is finally quelled.
When we find some measure of peace within ourselves,
we’re far less likely to draw lines on a matter that isn’t a gospel line.
And we’re far quicker to reach out in love,
care, compassion in the way of Christ if we have experienced that peace ourselves.
And ultimately, I think that’s the lesson that Jesus taught when he said don’t go be looking to remove specs from other people’s eye when you have a plank in your own.
That ultimately is always wisdom to start within your own soul, to cultivate,
to reflect upon, to invite the work of the Holy Spirit there.
And it is from that vantage that you will find these other fights will become more clear.
Where do we need to engage and where can we pull back?
I imagine that if we were to do that,
many of those books written would no longer have need to exist.
If we could do that difficult work of opening ourselves to the grace that we know that we need,
and that fight would cease,
I wonder if a lot of these other fights might fade with it.
It is fascinating to read the Gospels and realize that the only people Jesus fought with were the people who were convinced they were right.
And whenever we are convinced that we are right,
that should give us a moment of pause.
I think that that is a telling reality,
that it was only those who knew they were right that also thought Jesus was wrong.
And that should give us warning, I think.
Well, friends, as we’ve covered this ground,
we know that we’ve left things out.
We know that we may not have spent as much time in a place where you would have liked,
but we hope there was something in it that encouraged you.
We also hope there was something in it that challenged you.
I think that all of us would do well to check up on ourselves every now and then and ask the question,
“Have I made the main thing the main thing,
or have I given into my own preference and opinion?”
And I hope that you’ve found both of those in our conversations thus far.
If there’s more conversation that you would like to have,
if you’ve got a question or thoughts or comments,
either leave them on the video today or give us a call,
send us an email at the church.
We would love to engage with you.
But friends, we’re glad that you’ve joined us for this journey,
and we hope there’s been something for you in it.
Appreciate your time.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
We will see you next week.