Helping our People Live and Thrive in the TENSIONWe are living in times of tension and this tension often spills over into the life of our Churches. If our people are not prepared to handle it, biblically, it has the potential of destroying the testimony of the Church, or at the very least, making us an ineffective voice in our world today. I recently read a article entitled “What to Do When you Can’t Agree with the People you Love” by Jennifer Dukes Lee. I would highly recommend that you look it up to get the full context of what she is saying regarding finding unity in the midst of a sharp divide. I will just give you some highlights: We have to love “us” more than we hate what is differentStatistically speaking, we are collectively “different.” If our people had to pick sides, in many churches half of them would be standing on one side of the issues and half would be standing on the other side. That certainly does not lead us to the type of unity that Jesus prayed that His followers would have in John 17. “Imagine three cardboard boxes. People are putting everyone into one of three boxes. The first box is labeled: “heartless, bigoted conservative.” The second box is labeled: “whiny, bleeding-heart liberal.” The third box sits in the middle, a little higher than the other two, and it is labeled: “I’m right.”If you want to help our people live and thrive in the tension of these days, we must help them learn to do four things:
- Throw Away the Boxes – Putting people in boxes or labeling them is easier than doing the nuanced work of trying to understand someone else’s point of view, but the extra effort is worth it! By and large, our people, our nation and our world are too complicated for boxes.
- Resist the Urge to Be Right – Jesus called us to have love and unity so that the world would know we were His disciples and believe the message we were proclaiming about Him. We were never called upon to be right in order to be more effective in reaching the world.
- Before you speak, THINK – I’m sure we’ve all seen this acronym, and maybe even taught it, but do we actually follow it:
T – Is it True? H – Is it Helpful? I – Is it Inspiring? N – Is it Necessary? K – Is it Kind? “Death and life are in the power of the tongue…” we are told in Proverbs 18:21, surely it’s worth an extra effort to think through things before we say, write or post something.
- Use the Micah Filter – This minor prophet speaks to all of us in Micah 6:8 “…the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
“This is our chance, as the people of Jesus, to show what it looks like to be civil in tone, humble in posture, and gracious in attitude. I’m not saying that we have to be so ‘open-minded’ that our brains fall out. Goodness, each of us can stand for whatever we stand for, and do what we believe is right! But, please, Be Kind.”Let me leave you with a phrase that has stuck with me from the book “Messy Grace” that I read, and thoroughly enjoyed, this past summer: “Love is living the tension between Grace and Truth.”
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11 a.m. 
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