Satan uses conflict to distract us from our mission!
Conflicts will continuously arise. Not might, but will! They exist because we are sinful human beings who live in a broken and sinful world. Let’s be honest, we don’t always agree with ourselves. Have you ever been in conflict with yourself? Sure you have! We all have! We anguish over a choice or a decision. We debate within our own minds the rightness or wrongness of a thought or action. The objective is not to avoid conflict, because that is impossible. Our objective must be understand the proper way of handling conflict. In our verses for today, we learn from the disciples the proper way to deal with conflict when it arises. First, legitimize the conflict. When conflict arises we must work to find whether there is a true issue, or whether we are dealing with raw emotion. In the case of our verses, the Greek Jews felt like they were being cheated during the daily distribution of food. Remember, the first Christians sold what they had and gave it to the church and they lived communally. This was a big issues if it were true. The disciples recognized the issue, but rightly decided that it could not usurp the church’s primary mission that they were called to maintain. So they appointed Spirit-filled men to oversee the distribution of food, while they committed themselves to God’s word and prayer.
Note, they did not give up the primary mission to correct a conflict in a secondary mission. They also, did not treat the secondary issue as though it weren’t important. On the contrary, they prayerfully commissioned 7 men to take responsibility for the secondary mission and to address the conflict in a spirit of truth. What a lesson we can learn from this event. I believe that every time there is conflict Satan looks for an opportunity to get us off focus. It is His desire that we become so absorbed with the conflict they we lose sight of what is true and what is our primary mission. I have talked to way to0 many pastors who admittedly confess that they feel like all they do is “wait tables”. They feel like they simply jump from one conflict to another. We as a Church need to make sure that we keep the primary mission in our sights at all times. We need to deal with conflict from the perspective of our primary mission. We need to address conflict in such a way that Satan isn’t given a crack to slither into, and that the conflict can be addressed in and through the truth of God’s word.
Peace!
Tom
www.firmlyrooted.org
Created 4 months ago
