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when you put first things first, second things are increased, not decreased.
It’s because if we don’t grow in these little moments, we won’t grow when the harder times come.
Understand that conflict is one way God works in our lives
Godly conflict is an act of compassion!
Identify what drives ungodly conflict in your life
Recognize your default strategy in conflict
Engage in specific and intelligent spiritual warfare
Consider the other person
Make a plan to approach the person
Own whatever personal sin you have brought to the situation.
Name the problem.
Explore possible solutions.
Implement the agreed-upon solution.
Evaluate your implementation.
If you get stuck and things don’t improve, be willing to get outside help.
No one ever said that conflict would be fun! But the Christian life is not always fun. That is not the most important thing to God. He is committed to something much bigger. His kingdom plan involves a total restoration of what he has made. He will settle for nothing less in his creation than to see that all things ultimately bring him glory. He will be the center of everything at the end of the age, and when that happens we will be most satisfied. Right now, he is using conflict to work out this comprehensive plan in you.
That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected), he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along—illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation—he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him in situations where he will have to be very
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He intends to come and live in it Himself.
We are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse God’s mercy for ourselves. There is no hint of exceptions and God means what he says.
Practicing forgiveness is something we must do daily in the same way we ask for the daily provision of food. It is a part of everyday life, not something reserved for life’s “big” sins and events.
Forgiveness is not practiced because we fail to understand what it is,
This story reveals explosive truths about the nature of forgiveness, but it also gives us a glimpse of the motive that should drive our desire to forgive.
You promise that you will not bring up the debt to use it as leverage.
You promise that you will not bring up the offense to others and slander the person who sinned against you.
you promise not to dwell on the offense yourself.
When you fail to forgive someone, you break these three promises. Rather than canceling the debt, you keep the person’s indebtedness before him, others, and yourself. Your desire to make the person pay for what he has done outweighs your desire to forgive.
No matter how you spin it, forgiveness is costly. Regardless of how big or small the offense, canceling a debt and absorbing the cost is going to hurt.
A failure to forgive someone will change you
Forgiveness is an event and a process
Even if I have forgiven you for something you have done in the past, I need to be careful that I don’t slip into bitterness some time in the future. I need to keep practicing forgiveness every time I see you or think of you.
Because even if you have forgiven someone for an offense, you will be tempted to think about it the next time you see her, or the next time she sins against you. Without realizing it, you will pile that sin on top of the old sins. This makes it harder and harder to forgive someone.
Forgiveness is not f...
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This is why forgiveness is both a past event and an ongoing process into the future. It is a past promise you keep in the future.
Forgiveness has a vertical and a horizontal dimension
Forgiveness does not mean peace at all costs
Real love demands pursuit.
Your attempt to love a habitually abusive, unrepentant person sometimes involves confrontation and possibly separation.
If there truly was a sin committed, it has to be specifically acknowledged by the person who sinned. That person then needs to ask forgiveness for the specific sin. The offended person must then choose to forgive or not.
It is one thing to gain clarity on what forgiveness is and isn’t; it is quite another to actually practice it.
It is always harder to live in the middle of something than it is to live at the beginning or the end.
People in the middle usually discover that more work is involved than they ever expected. It is hard to hold onto the dream, and very often expectation becomes the desire to simply survive. Amidst the hard work, it is difficult to keep your standards high and your hope alive. You are tempted to settle and compromise. In the middle, thankfulness often degrades into complaint, and hope decays into resignation. It is hard to live in the middle of something, but that is exactly where all of our relationships take place.
The problem with relationships is that they all take place right smack-dab in the middle of something, and that something is the story of redemption, God’s plan to turn everything in our lives into instruments of Christlike change and growth.
And the reason for all of this is that our relationships are lived between the already and the not yet
Our relationships will never work according to our plan
This means that God will take us where we have not planned to go in order to produce in us what we could not achieve on our own.
Our relationships will never live up to our expectations
Our dreams tend to forget that our relationships are being lived out in the middle of the already and the not yet. This side of eternity, none of us get to be with the person of our dreams and none of us are ready to be the person of someone else’s dreams! We are all flawed people living in a fallen world, but with a faithful God. And at some point in every relationship, we are required to accept graciously who the other person is, even as we humbly admit who we are.
Our relationships will always grapple with some kind of difficulty
Our relationships will always need to improve
Because our relationships are always lived out in the middle of some kind of difficulty, good relationships demand character.
