Photo by paul morris on Unsplash
My hope is this article leads you
to peace. We need more peace and joy and hope in this life, and Christ died so
we might receive the abundance of His grace to the ends of peace, joy, and hope.
I wonder if you are like me, a bit
sick and tired of the constant wars being waged in the world, whether through
media, or social media, or the factions and infighting that occurs because
people have not yet learned that there is more to life than being right.
When we insist on being right,
we are plain wrong.
we are plain wrong.
When another person insists on
being right and we disagree with them, they cannot be anything else but plain
wrong.
Can we therefore not see how
deranged of mind and heart we are when we polarise into our view and cannot legitimise
another person’s view.
What is it that causes this desire
in people to raise what they think are important issues, that inevitably draw
out opposition, that causes relationships to disintegrate? What causes us to
fight to win? A lack of repentance.
A heart that doesn’t repent,
doesn’t know how to receive or give love.
doesn’t know how to receive or give love.
The evidence of a regenerate heart —
one that is being transformed
into the likeness of Christ —
is the fruit of repentance,
which operates in
the context of relationships.
one that is being transformed
into the likeness of Christ —
is the fruit of repentance,
which operates in
the context of relationships.
What this means is we cannot insist
on being right about anything to the extent we are willing to hurt people to
win a point. Truth without grace is not love, for we are called by Christ, His
final command, to love one another.
Period.
The regenerate heart has gone the
journey to the end of the self in finding Christ has been there all along ready
to pick up the pieces of a shattered life that has no answers as to the meaning
of life.
When we find Christ,
we can find Him saying to us,
“Finally, you arrive at
and can accept My truth.”
we can find Him saying to us,
“Finally, you arrive at
and can accept My truth.”
The regenerate heart, therefore,
has come to the knowledge of God’s majestic truth; we are ruined, and our
relationships become destitute, without God.
God’s truth is Sovereign;
our truth is deception.
our truth is deception.
The issues are now secondary. The
differences of opinion we have are of far less importance than are other people
who hold those opinions. James 4:1 says, “What
causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from the desires that
battle within you?”
We must be careful, because the
desires in us that are not satisfied too easily become demands, and when those
demands aren’t met we begin to judge people who disagree and then punish them
with our anger. It isn’t getting us anywhere.
More and more in our world we are
coming face-to-face with the horrible reality that even the people we love have
different viewpoints, disagreeable perceptions, and to us, can seem to be
deceived, all the while they are thinking the same about us. It is giving us
nowhere.
Don’t we recognise it is the enemy’s idea
to create walls of division between us?
to create walls of division between us?
***
Maturity suggests that we can love people
at the same time as we disagree with them.
at the same time as we disagree with them.
We don’t understand them,
but we choose to accept them.
but we choose to accept them.
Love lives in the awkward reality that accepts
we cannot control others and what they think.
we cannot control others and what they think.
Love lets others be, and does not
force a viewpoint, or manipulate with pressure. Love can certainly communicate
what we think and feel, but remember love does it in such a way as to hold the
other person’s viewpoint as precious to them. We respect their right to hold a
view, just like we hope they respect our right to hold our view, without being
hurt if they cannot respect us.
Do you have any desire to live at
peace in a troubled world? Then you must understand how peace is won, first and
foremost, in your troubled soul. First. The person who can take responsibility
for their individual peace has some control over living at peace in this troubled
world.
It doesn’t mean in our search for
peace that we cannot advocate for the things that are important to us. We just
need to re-sort our priorities, and be willing to put every human being we come
into contact with as a higher priority than the issues. I think you’ll find it’s
the Jesus way.
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