This week, following the theme for June 25, we’re going to be talking about conflicts and how trying to lead the Christian life is confusing!
Responding to God and relying on Him through faith in Jesus, gives us the peace of having eternal life, and the experience of God’s unconditional love.
That’s all good – very good — but there are what we might call ‘side-effects’. Like all contested choices, choosing to have Jesus as our Lord brings conflicts with those who are NOT making that choice – especially if they feel threatened by it.
Doing right by God is never wrong – but it can SEEM like it at times. Sometimes the results just don’t seem to be playing out right at all. We find ourselves in one of those conflict conundrums, and praying for God’s help. And whether we are right or wrong, whether we are in faith, or in spiritual confusion, one thing our relationship with God secures for us, is that He will hear – and in His time and His way, He will answer. This assuracne comes from Psalm 86:
You, Lord, are forgiving and good, abounding in love to all who call to You. Hear my prayer, Lord; listen to my cry for mercy. When I am in distress, I call to You, because You answer me.
Psalm 86:5-7 NIV
The first conflict situation we hear about is Abraham’s dilemma. He was a man of great faith who listened carefully to God and, unlike most of us, was quick to respond and do what God said. In his younger days, God had told him to leave his relatives and all that was familiar, to become a migrant and find a new land. And without knowing his destination, he went! Abrham and Sarah remained childless but God promised him a descendant — in fact, a tribe of them. But as time went on, he and his wife Sarah were of an age and all thoughts of parenting were long gone.
Sarah sought to remedy this by giving Abraham her maidservant Hagar, as a kind of junior wife, and he had a son by her, Ishmael. But this was not the heir God had planned. Ten years or so later, miraculously, following a visit by the Lord with two angels, Sarah did conceive and Isaac was born.
We join the story when the older boy is getting full of attitude and belittling Sarah’s son and she tells Abraham that this will not do. She tells him he has to put Hagar and Ishmael out of the household and the camp, a divorce in our language, to resolve the copntest of who would be Abraham’s heir. That was a conflict that both confused and upset this good and godly man who wanted to be fair and right to everybody. Let’s hear the story from the Bible in Genesis 21:
On the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast.
But Sarah saw that the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham was mocking, and she said to Abraham, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son, for that woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”
The matter distressed Abraham greatly because it concerned his son. But God said to him, “Do not be so distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”
“I will make the son of the slave into a nation also, because he is your offspring.”
Early the next morning Abraham took some food and a skin of water, set them on Hagar’s shoulders and then sent her off with the boy. She went on her way and wandered in the Desert of Beersheba.
When the water in the skin was gone, she put the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went off and sat down about a bowshot away, for she thought, “I cannot watch the boy die.” And as she sat there, she began to sob.
God heard the boy crying, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What is the matter, Hagar? Do not be afraid; God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Lift the boy up and take him by the hand, for I will make him into a great nation.”
Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. So she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.
God was with the boy as he grew up. He lived in the desert and became an archer. While he was living in the Desert of Paran, his mother got a wife for him from Egypt.
From Genesis 21:8-21
God’s ways are higher, and our fairness and well-meaning is not always God’s way. Abraham’s earlier mistakes in taking God’s promise into his own hands seem to have rebounded on him. Now he clearly hears God again, telling him to listen to Sarah, and he knew what he had to do to secure his family line in the way that God had planned it. Let’s note the application for us here: listen to God (it takes practice) and don’t dismiss what He says as too difficult or impracticable.
Now we are going to jump forward 2,000 or more years to the time of Jesus. We join Him as He is teaching the disciples and other hearers about the conflicts they were experiencing, and which would soon become even more confusing for His followers. Jesus knows how His mission is going to end: painfully, and it would be followed by a time of intense confusion until the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jews of the time mainly understood that the Messiah would usher in a time of peace for Gentile-occupied Palestine.
But Jesus tells them that He has not come to bring political peace but, by contrast, a crisis of conscience over believing in Him.
Quoting Micah 7:6, He explains how it was foretold that His coming would divide families: for and against. Three times He emphasises that believers in Him are not to be constrained by fear bu boldly committed to Him despite being mocked and alienated by others — the meaning of His phrase “Take up your cross”. Let’s hear this in His own words from Matthew 10:
Jesus said: “The student is not above the teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for students to be like their teachers, and servants like their masters. If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household!
“So do not be afraid of them, for there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known.
“What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.
“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
“Whoever acknowledges Me before others, I will also acknowledge before My Father in heaven. But whoever disowns Me before others, I will disown before My Father in heaven.
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn ‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’
“Anyone who loves their father or more than Me is not worthy of Me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
“Whoever does not take up their cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for My sake will find it.”
Matthew 10:24-39
Now we go forward in the story again, probably about 25 years. The apostles have been joined by Paul, whose mission has been specifically to plant churches, moving through Greek-speaking regions and then in the centre of the empire, Rome itself. This is where some of his most incisive and clear teaching was forged, and after years of difficult and dangerous travel, rejection, imprisonment and every kind of conflict to confuse a Christian, Rome was where he was put to death.
In Romans 6, part of his teaching for Christians in Rome, and his crowning theological treatise, Paul tackles a frequent question about the free gift of forgiveness in Jesus, and the term he uses is God’s grace.
God’s grace in Jesus is a gift, a spiritual restart, that takes us from a life of selfish and independent sin — he calls this the old self — into God’s new life, a new spiritual freedom which we experience in Christ Jesus. It’s the freedom of not being constantly drawn to sin, as Paul explains:
What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning, so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death? We were therefore buried with Him, through baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we will certainly also be united with Him in a resurrection like His.
For we know that our old self was crucified with Him, so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin – because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Romans 6:1-11
Paul puts it in graphic language. Our old life was put to death with Christ on the Cross. At that point its power over us was broken. But as Christ rose from the dead into new life, so we are raised from the death of the old self and the old life, into this new life free of sin where Jesus is Lord.
But this, strangely, is where the ‘Conflicts that Confuse the Contemporary Christian’ are most evident. If God’s grace that comes to us through Jesus is a ‘free pass’ or a ‘get out of jail card’, surely then it doesn’t matter if we continue to sin. Can’t we just keep doing what brings us selfish pleasure without being concerned about the cost, because we can rely on God continuing to forgive us? Paul points out the big flaw in this apparent logic.
In giving our hearts and lives to Jesus, we have given over the old life, the old self that wants to sin, to be crucified with him. So, we are not ruled by that old person and old habits any more. The new, recreated person lives in close relationship with Jesus. And what Jesus wants, is what we want. Jesus wants new life for us — in partnership and being helped by Him.
Living in partnership with Him and acting in our own independence are opposites!
Let’s be clear, the new life with Jesus is not about austerity. It’s not about punishing the flesh, nor is it about becoming religious and ‘churchy’. Jesus doesn’t want any of those things. It’s about us living, growing and maturing spiritually in Him as we grow in His life and His love and His priorities.
Once we understand the nature of the conflict, it isn’t really a conflict any more.
Remember the bit about partnership? We can say a firm ‘No’ to what does not belong, an echo of the old life perhaps, and say ‘Yes’ to Jesus prompting us to keep fellowship with Him.
The Conflicts that Confuse Contemporary Christians are mainly thoughts and desires and wrong perceptions the devil uses to confuse us. The battle happens in our thoughts and our will, and it’s what the devil does. But we don’t need to be confused or deceived because we don’t NEED to entertain those thoughts. We can banish them in the authority of Jesus who is now our Lord.
So, we learn first from Abraham, who counted doing what is right by God above what seemed to be right to him, and then from Jesus teaching that being a disciple of his would put us on a difficult road, but we are not to be anxious about the bumps and bangs along the way. And we know that it works — we can take Paul at his word as someone who spoke out of both experience and a deep spiritual awareness.
We will be confronted by difficulties, conflicts and our thoughts bombarded with doubts and fears, but we have a new way of life, not on our own, but one where Jesus is actively directing and helping us.
Living aware of His Holy Spirit in us Is like Jesus being present in whatever situation we find ourselves. That’s how, as Christians together with Jesus, we can stand up against conflicts, recognise the confusion for what it is, and let Jesus show us how we win through — by sharing the victory He has already won.
PRAYER
O God our Father, I thank you for your Son Jesus and for His sacrifice in shedding His blood for me on the Cross — so that in Him I could know freedom from sin and condemnation and confusion.
I receive Jesus Christ as my Saviour again now. I invite You, Jesus, to be Lord of my life and I respond to Your call to me to be a worshipper, a witness and a worker with you on Your mission.
I recognise that the true path will often present difficulties, and that obedience has a cost.
I trust in your foresight and providential care as I depend on You and seek to live by Your guidance, by the leading of your Spirit. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.
May you know Jesus’ clear leading and freedom from confusion , holding on to God’s peace in Jesus’ words to you: Do not be afraid!”
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• See also this week’s Bible study on the above passages, a verse-by-verse treatment with short reflections and discussion starters