Let’s just start again shall we?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

***

Maturity suggests that we can love people
at the same time as we disagree with them.

We don’t understand them,
but we choose to accept them.

Love lives in the awkward reality that accepts
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.