Responding To Conflict – Part 2 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

Subscribe to Time With God podcast

See more of John North’s Devotions

Transcript

Good morning,

I hope your day has started well, and we want to keep it going the best way possible by putting God right at front and center. As you build your life around God. God gets involved in your life. And so if you want God involved in your life, you must take time to spend time with Him each day and listen to what he has to say in His word and build your life around his view of the world and his way of acting.

And so we are looking this week at one of the most practical topics we could possibly look at, and that is how to respond to conflict in a godly way. We’ve seen that we start off with this foundational confidence that even when there’s conflict, God has allowed it in my life, and He’s going to bring some good out of it if I respond to it in a godly way, trusting Him. God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose.

With that confidence, then I have to face the reality that sometimes conflict is a necessary part of life. The apostle Paul had this experience, you remember that.

The first people to trust in Jesus were all Jews, and they thought that you had to be a Jew to really be accepted by God. And the message that Jesus had brought was, no, it’s not just for Jews, it’s for anyone who will put their trust in what God has done for them at the cross. And so the apostle Paul had been building a new church in Galatia, and Peter came to visit.

And Peter accepted this total grace that was offered to everyone by Jesus. But when some Jews came from Jerusalem, Peter kind of felt nervous and tense about their expectation that he shouldn’t be hanging out with non-Jews and eating with them and being comfortable with them. And so to protect the truth of the gospel, the apostle Paul had to confront Peter, and this is what Paul writes:

Hope 103.2 is proudly supported by

But when Cephas, that’s Peter, came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. For prior to the coming of certain men from James in Jerusalem, he used to eat with the Gentiles, that’s non-Jews. But when those people came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision, those Jews. And the rest of the Jews joined him in hypocrisy with the result that even Barnabas was carried away by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in the presence of all, if you, being a Jew, live like the Gentiles and not like the Jews, how is it that you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? We are Jews by nature and not sinners from among the Gentiles. Nevertheless, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, that is the Jewish laws, but is justified through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by faith in Christ, not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law, nobody will be justified.

Well, there are times when you have to be willing to stand up to someone and you have to think about what is at stake.

Because you have to choose your battles in your relationships with people, and there are so many conflicts that come not because there’s something important to have conflict about. Someone has said our temper is what gets most of us into trouble, and our pride is what keeps us there, isn’t that right?

In spite of this, though, there are some things which we must stand up for. And the great truths about who God is, what God is like. The authority of His word in our lives and especially the truth of the gospel revealed in the Bible. These are things we must stand up for and be willing even to have conflict over.

I’m John North.