Conflicted Part 1: A Matter of Perspective

In this series we look at a Biblical approach to handling one of the most common challenges we face in our lives, conflict. Not just arguments or disagreements, but genuine conflict that can tear relationships apart and break our hearts. The Bible speaks directly to the issue and teaches us how to have peace and make peace in these moments.

This week: Conflict of Perspective

Transcript

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This is honestly my favorite time of year. I love the spring. I love the weather coming alive. I love the joy when you see people. And if you live in this area, I think over the last few days, if you have not made it to a beach, you have sinned. You have not lived up to your calling of living in the south of France. And a couple of days ago, we Catherine and I were like, man, we just have to go out. It was a beautiful afternoon. We headed down toward Lorvato and found a little cafe to sit at and enjoy a beautiful lunch just overlooking the beach. Food was great. Of course, the company was perfect for me with my wife. What a beautiful, beautiful day. And we were getting ready to head back, and even things kept working out as I'm checking and I'm looking. We're coming across, and our bus that would take us right back to our apartment was pulling up. I was like, ah, perfect timing, you know. And so I've got the dog and I'm walking. Catherine's a little bit behind. And all of a sudden, I hear this bottle crash and go everywhere. And it was a bottle similar to this. It was not a full wine bottle, but it was a bottle that somebody unbeknownst to us had left sitting on a corner next to a restaurant on one of the benches there. And Catherine, in her hurry to get to where we were going, and it wasn't very visible. Her bag hit the bottle and it fell and crashed everywhere. That's the first I had heard or seen when I turned around. I didn't know what happened. I didn't know if something had caused her harm. I was concerned. But at the very same moment, the proprietor of the restaurant came out and he was angry at Catherine. She didn't know what to do. She's trying to catch the bus. She has nothing to clean up this class with. What does she do? And I think in his mind, he looked at her and thought, ah, another tourist who's just taking a bottle and throwing it on the ground. Like, what would these people do? And he starts berating her, talking to her, what about the families? This will hurt kids. And she's like, I don't know what to do. She was caught in the middle of this immediate conflict. That really nobody, it was nobody's fault but this bottle. Some bottle caused conflict all of a sudden. It wasn't somebody doing wrong. It wasn't somebody choosing to bring harm. It was conflict based out of a change in circumstance immediately. And the truth is, if you're breathing here tonight, you probably had some kind of conflict in your life recently. Maybe it's not something crazy like that. Maybe it's not something deep and tragic. Maybe it's getting cut off in traffic. Maybe it's someone saying something to you and it just continuing to eat at you. Maybe this low-level tension in your heart. Maybe it's something deeper with your spouse that started small and is now turned into conversation about respect and love and something that happened 10 years ago. It could be with your kids, boss, friend, someone at work. Conflict shows up everywhere. It shows up internally, circumstantially, spiritually, in our lives, culturally, politically, you name it. And if we don't learn to handle it God's way, it will start to eat away at our joy, it'll eat at our relationships, and it'll even eat away at our witness to this world as followers of Christ. And so tonight we're kicking off this short series that we're going to do called Conflicted. It's going to be four parts between now and the end of June. And I believe it's going to help us as people deal with one of the topics that comes up and one of the issues that we face sometimes on a daily basis of conflict with people. The setting we're going to look at tonight is going to come out of the book of Acts. Acts chapter 15. If you have your Bible and you want to access that, let me give you a little background on the book of Acts and where we're at in there. This book was written immediately recording the events immediately after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. And it starts with the day that we celebrate today, Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. And it changing the way people were thinking and doing life. And the early church was exploding with growth. The spirit was moving powerfully, the gospel was spreading like wildfire from Jerusalem, Judea, on out to Samaria, and eventually even to the Gentiles, people that thought were outside of the realm of God's promises and covenant. And one thing that's very obvious from the beginning of this book is a lot of things are changing. And something I know about change, change often causes conflict. And we're going to see that in this book, especially in Acts chapter 15. In this beautiful moment that feels sometimes like chaos, there is a sharp conflict that erupts between the Jewish leaders and Paul and Barnabas. They were standing in the same truth. They were worshiping the same God. They both were coming from facts and things that they believed, but they yet came to two different conclusions. And this is the heart of the type of conflict we're going to talk about tonight. It is a conflict over perspective. We're going to talk in future weeks about conflict when somebody hurts you. We're going to even talk about conflict with God when we don't agree with what God does. We're going to talk about how to pursue restoration and resolution. But tonight we're going to talk about this idea of a conflict of perspective. What is conflict of perspective? It is when two people or groups look at the exact same situation, the exact same facts, same circumstances, but because they're viewing it through a different lens, they arrive completely at different conclusions. Maybe times can people both make strong biblical sounding cases, but they can feel still still feel like they're standing on opposite sides of the truth. Now, how does this happen in our life? It happens because if you look around this room, you realize very quickly everybody carries their own story. Everybody's walked through this life with different upbringings, different hurts, different personalities, different fears, and different hopes. And this type of conflict is very easy to fall into because we're fallen humans. We're not perfect. Nobody in this room has perfect perspective. Nobody has perfect judgment. Nobody has perfect understanding of everybody else in this room. Nobody has the ability to see things the way God sees them. But sometimes in the midst of this kind of conflict, we think our way is the only way. It's like two people standing on the side of a mountain, different sides of a mountain. One seeds on one side of the mountain gentle, flower-filled slopes, inviting them to say, Come and hike, enjoy. While the one on the other side sees steep, dangerous rock faces and says, Are you crazy? Why would I ever touch that? The truth is they're both right about what they see, but their position shapes their conclusions. Let me make this even more personable and say, why do we, as people, easily fall into this? I think one, it's many times it's because of our past wounds. Things that have hurt us in the past change our perspective. How we look at words, how we look at feelings, how we look at interactions and what gives what we give weight to and what we don't. What about fear? We do it because of fear. Fear of being wrong, maybe fear of losing control, fear of giving up anything because we've been taken advantage of in the past. I think another big reason we fall into these kind of conflicts is pride. We want our way to be the right way. We want people to see things the way we see them. How many times would you say, if you could just see it the way I do? If you could just understand, and we try to make people think like us. I think ultimately though it's limited information, right? We don't have the full story. And then often it's either cultural or generational differences. Something that means something in one culture may not mean the same thing in another culture. I grew up in the south of the United States. And uh one of the things you learned there very quickly, when you talk to someone older than you and they asked and you wanted to answer them, you didn't just say yes or no. You had to attach something to it. And it was either yes, sir, or yes, ma'am. So if somebody said and somebody older, my mom or grandmother or whatever, and they said, uh, you know, do you want lunch? And I said, yeah, they would be like, yeah, what? Yes, ma'am, yes, ma'am, yes, sir. It was just common, it was polite, it was courteous, it was the norm of that culture. Even as you were at my age now, I would still call my mother, yes ma'am, out of respect. Well, when we moved to New York, that was not the culture in New York. But it was still in my vocabulary. And I remember as we began to interact and I would meet people like, you know, it just wasn't even people my old age, it was just adults, women, especially, as I would meet them and they would say, Oh, how are you doing, or would you like to do this? And I would say, yes, ma'am. They would look at me like, what did you just call me? I was like, I just said yes, ma'am. Ma'am, who are you calling? Ma'am, like his whole picture just erupted because the word ma'am to them was derogatory, demeaning, and actually was insulting. I thought I was being polite, and yet they were taking it as insulting. Cultural differences can often create these kinds of conflicts. And this kind of conflict is often most difficult to resolve. Why? Because there's no clear villain here. Nobody is obviously sinning in a black and white way. It's not somebody who cheated on you, stole from you, you know, insulted you straight to your face. And this makes us dig in our heels. It feels like compromising on truth itself if we give up here. But the story we're gonna look at today out of Acts 15, this is what's happening, and thank God the early church did not run from this or respond this way. Instead, they responded as they should. And so before we jump into Acts 15, I'm gonna tell you some of the negative ways that you and I often respond to this kind of conflict. The way maybe I've done it in your life, you'll see it in this way. And these are things we need to be on guard of. The first one is this how do we usually mess this up in unhealthy ways? Is some of us love to cower. We just hide. Conflict comes into our life and we run out the door. We're like, no, thank you. I don't want to deal with this. I'll just create distance in the relationship. I see them coming my way on the street, I go to the other side. No, thank you. We cower, we run away, and it never solves anything and keeps the bitterness below the surface level. Other of us go to the convincing route, right? Let's just, if you'll just listen to me long enough, I can convince you to think the way that I do. This is what I struggle with. I was a debater in high school. I I feel like if you give me enough time, I can make you see things my way. And my wife has proven me over and over again that that's not true. We try to convince, we try to make people look at it just the same way we do, and it's impossible. The third one, probably though, is the most damaging. We start being condescending toward other people. And this one's sneaky. We make the other person try to feel dumb or feel less spiritual even than us. Well, you know, maybe you'd see it my way if you were just walking a little closer with God. Or maybe if you had prayed about it a little bit more, you would see things the way I do. We start to attack their character and cut them down. And then finally, we try to coerce the people when we have this kind of conflict. We use leverage like guilt trips, silent treatment, emotional pressure, financial control, or even our own presence to control whether uh there will have be peace in this situation. The truth is none of these work. They may feel good in the moment, but they leave behind a trail of hurt and distance. So let's look at Acts 15 and see the better way forward. We're gonna start in chapter uh 15, verses 1 and 2. I'm gonna read a couple verses and then we'll talk about it and move forward because this is just a linear picture of conflict toward resolution over perspective. Acts 15, 1 and 2 starts this way. Now, certain people came down from Judea and were teaching the believers. All right, these were new Gentile believers, people that had been outside of the Jewish faith. Unless you are circumcised according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved. That's different than what they had heard. They had heard only Jesus. This brought Paul and Barnabas into a sharp dispute and debated with them. And so here's what happened: Paul and Barnabas were appointed to go to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about the question. Those last three words. They were appointed to go talk to the apostles and the elders. What? Not about the other people, not about just, you know, they said this, we said that, about the question. And the first thing that you and I do when we face conflict like this is to identify the issue clearly. What are we talking about? I think back to the moment when the bottle broke and there's conversations and and anger going on, and afterwards I it was kind of funny because Catherine said the only positive that came out of that was I was able to argue in French the whole time. She was able to stay in French, but that the true culprit was what? The bottle. That somebody needed a we need to figure out how to clean this bottle up. That was the issue. And we get caught up sometimes in looking at circumstances and trying to blame somebody, then to identify the issue. They named this core issue, which was simply this: what must the Gentiles do to be saved? And that's what they started talking about. This echoes other passages in the Bible like Proverbs 18, 13, that says this, to answer before listening, that is folly and shame. To answer before listening is folly and shame. So what do we do? Clarify the topic. That's the tool we use. Clarify the topic of the argument and stay committed to that boundary in the argument. Stop and ask, what exactly are we disagreeing about right now? What is it? What's going on? I'm not really mad at you, I'm mad at the circumstance. Which brings us to the second point that we see in verse 3 and 4, the second step that they took here in this moment of conflict. Says, then the church said them, talking about Paul and Barnabas on their way. Now, and as they travel through Phoenicia and Samaria, which are the two areas where the Gentiles are becoming believers, they're actually traveling through and seeing the people that is causing this issue and this conflict. And they were told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news made all the believers what? Very glad. They came to Jerusalem. They were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders to whom they reported everything God had done through them. The second main point that we hold on to here is the idea that we should get back to our last common ground. You see what it did here? It said, everybody, all the believers were glad. The news made all the believers glad. They got back to something they could agree on. Somebody was over here and somebody was here, but they got back to the point of their last agreement. We're happy that God is doing something. We're happy to see that God is changing lives. This common ground can sometimes be way back. With a husband and wife, we may have to go back to this idea, you know what, we love each other. We do. We love each other. We want our marriage to succeed. With friends, we may have to go back to, I believe the best about you. I believe that you wouldn't intentionally try to hurt me. We can get back to that point. In Acts 15, before diving into the disagreement, they actually shared their common ground together. You know, Philippians 2 2 urges us to be this be like-minded, having the same love, being in one spirit and of one mind. It's a beautiful place to go back to in a moment of perspective conflict. You know what? Let's try to find out where we can be like-minded, show the same love and be of one spirit and one mind. And then maybe I can see how you got here, and you can see how I got here. And we can have an actual conversation about it. Which brings us to the next point. It's when they started talking about it. Verse 5 and 6 say this. Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees, which were the ones who wanted all the laws to be upheld, stood up and said, The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses. And then the debate didn't start. What does it say? The apostles and elders met to consider this. Now, what normally happens when somebody makes a bold statement that is in contradiction to your statement, what happens? We start attacking each other. How dare you! Listen to that. Listen to this. And this brings us to the main point number three, the main step is to start to attack the issue, not the person. You've probably heard this many times when it comes to conflict resolution, but it is deeply true. You will never get conflict resolved if you attack the person over the issue. It's just not going to happen. The easy thing to do, though, is to attack the other person. It's our default mode. Somebody pushes you, you push back. Somebody says their opinion you disagree with, you have to state your opinion just as boldly. And that's our default mode, as I said. Bringing up past events that discourage people. We start with holding love and respect and trying to damage them. We're attacking the other never brings peace. It just creates more animosity. And then scripture backs this up as well. Ephesians 4.15 tells you to do this. Speak the truth in what? Love. It's okay to speak truth, but do it in love. Let that be the motivation. James 1.19, be this, be quick to listen, slow to speak, and even slower to become angry. Because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. And then in John, Jesus himself told us that a gentle answer turns away wrath. Those are the parts that, you know, this is where it starts to get a little hard because we in conflict we want to start drawing lines and creating boundaries and showing who's right and wrong and creating disparity. And Jesus is saying here, no, have a gentle answer. Be quick to listen. You know, speak the truth in love. And so how do we do this? The main tool here is to be honest without being dishonoring. You can speak truth without dishonoring the other person. And we see this happening here now in the next step. Acts 15, 7 gets into the meat of it. They're actually now dealing with the heart of it. And it says this after much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them. Just remember who Peter is. He's one of the disciples. He's in a unique position. He was one of Jesus' closest friends. And we're going to see that he has a unique perspective on this as he speaks. He says, Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my own lips, Peter's lips, the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, show that he accepted them by giving the Spirit to them just as He did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for He purified their hearts by faith. Now, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No, we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are. If you know the story of Peter here, he is staunchly Jewish. He's taking a nap on a roof. Jesus pops to him in a dream and says, Go talk to Cornelius, this Gentile, and sit at his table and eat all the food that you've never eaten in your life. Go have some bacon. And he's like, I can't do it. And Jesus says, No, go, go. And Jesus, Peter goes into this Gentile's house and sees this man and his family come to faith and receive the Holy Spirit, and it changes Peter's perspective. It widens it. And he's somebody here who in this moment had had a foot in both camps. He understood the law and Moses and had lived by it his whole life. And he understood grace and salvation through Christ alone. And God had changed him and helped him become a new person and understanding that, which brings us to the fourth point here is to find an authority that you both can respect for wisdom. Peter was that authority. Peter was somebody who had experience in both. He wasn't just for one and against the other. He understood the perspective that both people were coming from. The best way to build toward resolution in this kind of conflict is an injection of wisdom. Wisdom. Something beyond you. Something that you and I have not thought of before. If you and I are in conflict, we need to find somebody who understands this better than both you and I do combined. Wisdom. This is when we need this in this moment when we come to this standstill. Wisdom brings healing. Wisdom expands perspective. This is backed up by Scripture, Proverbs 11, for a lack of guidance a nation falls, but victory is won through many advisors. Psalms 15, plans fail for the lack of counsel, but with many advisors they succeed. And the tool is simply this: be willing to ask for help. Be willing to seek out help. To inject wisdom into the process. And so then what comes of this? Verse 19 through 21 brings us full circle here. It starts with James speaking. James was the elder and the head of the church in Jerusalem, and the one who was eventually going to okay whatever decision came out of this. And here's what he said: it is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead, we should write to them, telling them these specific things abstain from food, from polluted by idols, sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals, and from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest days, and it is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath. He's basically saying, all right, let's, we've got to come to a conclusion. And they wrote a letter and he said, these are the only things we're going to require. And there were reasons where we won't have to get into every reason they chose these four. But the end of a conflict is not when you finally both get tired of arguing and decide to talk about something else. Instead, it's this and it's point five. It's to determine an action plan of resolution, to actually choose to move forward. Not just to say, well, we just have to agree to disagree. That doesn't end an argument. It does for that moment, but it doesn't move forward. Instead, it's determine an action plan for resolution. They lay this out, and this idea, this concept that came out of Acts 15, it shapes the rest of the book of Acts and how the gospel is spread throughout the Gentile world. Free of restraint. It goes like wildfire. Churches are started and it moves forward because they handled conflict wisely here and came up with a way to move forward and not just say we're going to agree to disagree and stop. And the truth is, in our life, it's easier to stop dealing with a person, dealing with the problem, than it is to make peace and to pursue peace. But if you're a follower of Christ in here tonight, I want to tell you there's a command for us to follow in the midst of this. We can't just sit back and fold our arms and say, ah, too bad. Agree to disagree. Let's just avoid each other. Matthew 5.9 says, Blessed are the who, the peacemakers. Romans 12.18, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Second Corinthians, aim for restoration. Encourage one another. Be of one mind. Live in peace. And the tool that we have to hold on here is every conflict has a resolution. But maybe not a fairy tale ending, like what we want. And everybody lived happily ever after. Sometimes it's going to have to change the way you think. Sometimes the other person, most likely both, as we come to a point of compromise. What's going to change? How are we going to move forward? Create a plan. Sometimes the healthiest resolution is not just ending the relationship and saying I'm done. It's taking the time to work through the hard work of finding a path forward. I can say in my life over the years, some of my strongest relationships today are when that went through some of the toughest conflict during times of our life. Because as we struggled with different perspectives and struggled with hurt, we didn't intentionally cause each other, we grew deeper in relationship as we built something instead of stepping back and running away from it. Sounds great. There's 5.3 to follow. Just go check them off. Right? Go home, boom, boom, boom. I wish it was that easy. But the truth is when the bottle breaks, when something comes into your life, when they cut you off in traffic, when somebody says something that you take the wrong way, or you see something and you think you know the whole story and you take it the wrong way, we still respond in a negative way. And why do we keep doing this? I think there's three reasons you and I struggle with this plan that we see laid out here in Acts 5. And the first thing is this we universalize the particular. We see them do it once, and we think, oh, that's who they always are. We see somebody get angry in a moment of desperation or a moment of challenge in their life, and we think, this person is just an angry person now. We universalize the particular moment in their life. And we think because it happened once, it's always going to be that way. And that's what we do next is we freeze the present. We think, well, they did this to me, so we can't do anything else until this is dealt with. And we just freeze the present and say, we can't continue forward until they do this, they do that, they change this. And then ultimately we forget the plot, the plot of the story. And what is the plot of the story? It's restoration, forgiveness, and hope. Thank God, literally, that he did not leave us in our rebellion. That when we openly went into war and conflict with him and chose sin over God's presence and God's promises, he didn't say, I guess we're just gonna have to agree to disagree. See ya. No. He pursued peace, he pursued restoration. He came, he dealt with us, he didn't run from us, he came to be a part of us. That's the plot, hope, restoration. He wants to bring restoration to your life and to the relationships. Which brings us to the question of the day. Would you stop arguing over issues and instead choose to start having conversations for rest for resolution? It's much easier to argue, right? Just keep going back and forth, back and forth. If you've had one of these cycles in your life, how many times have you argued about the same thing over and over again? You say something, the other person says something, and it's just a cycle that never moves forward. That's arguing. Instead, if the next time that starts happening, what if you said, hey, why don't we stop and actually figure out how we can get past this? Move forward. Because the truth is nobody really wins an argument. But everyone can win when we decide to resolve conflict. Think about the relationships in your life right now that carry some weight of unresolved conflict. Maybe it's a marriage that's slowly dying under the layers of bitterness. Maybe it's a friendship that has faded because neither of you are willing to humble yourself. Maybe it's a family member you haven't spoken to in years because of past hurt. You won't face a coworker you employ in the hallway, a fellow faith family member who you just have a different perspective with and don't want to get into it again. Unresolved conflict, listen to this, is a silent killer. It will kill your peace, harden your heart, and create these invisible walls that keep people out, even the people you once loved dearly. It turns joy into resentment, trust into suspicion, unity into division, and over time it doesn't just damage relationships, it damages you and me. And that's the hard part. It robs us of the abundant life Jesus promised. But there is beauty on the other side. There's something holy and powerful about two people choosing humility over being right. There is healing when we attack the issue instead of the person. There is freedom when we can find common ground again, and there is life-giving unity when we make a plan and move forward. Just like the church in Acts 15, after all the debate, after all the tension, they walked away stronger, encouraged, and more effective for the gospel, and the same can happen for you. So today I want to challenge you. Don't leave this conflict buried any longer. And for some of you, that's a scary thought. It's been buried a long time. Like, I don't want to dig this up again. Well, guess what? It's still there. Just because you buried it, just because you covered it up with layers of time and absence does not mean that the pain is still not there. Don't let another day, week, month, or even year go by that the weight that you carry that weight on your soul. Choose the hard but beautiful path of restoration. Reach out, have the conversation, invite wise counsel, and make a plan for restoration. Let's pray together.