"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?"
Dissension among the Christian body of believers is as much an epidemic in the church today as it was when James penned these words roughly 2,000 years ago. Thousands of churches have split over the years and across the globe because of our inability to come together and resolve our differences, and we are suffering the consequences of those actions today as relative truth, post-modernistic thinking, political correctness, and personal preference have become the philosophical pillars of our culture. In most cases, dissension within the church walls falls into the category of superficiality through debating issues that are not pillars of our theology. We focus ridiculous amounts of time and energy debating preaching styles, song choices and dress codes for Sunday worship that are not doctrinal issues of great concern, while Biblical counseling, mentoring and discipleship, and caring for the homeless, widows and orphans (to name a few) are treated as peripheral areas of concern that are not as important in comparison. How can this be? Have we truly forgotten who we are in Christ and the purpose for which He died?
Quarreling and fighting breeds contempt for one another. Like cancer, it eats away at the core of our faith community and suffocates our spirit of giving and sharing with selfish ambition and idolatrous passions of the flesh. It prioritizes me-centered attitudes that seek personal fulfillment over communal benefit. Simply put, it draws us away from the reality that God sanctifies us through the interpersonal relationships we have with our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. But rather than patiently seeking wisdom and discernment from the Lord in times of debate and working through differences of opinion, we often pull away from the community at large, recruit like-minded others who will support our selfish ambitions, and come full circle to leverage our desires as an ultimatum rather than a humble consideration to pray about. There is nothing wrong with differences of opinion though. Diversity ensures that we represent all angles of a debate, but it must be presented with common courtesy and respect for all individuals voicing their opinion.
It must be noted that if we are to quarrel, let it be concerning areas of great consequence where the Word of God is being twisted and disregarded as absolute truth. For if we believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), and we testify that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1), then why do we question the authority of Scripture and easily stray from the path of righteousness? Conversely, why do we focus so much attention on extra-biblical rules that are man-made, not God-mandated (i.e. dress codes, etc.)? In many ways, we have lost our spiritual compass. And until we wake up and realize how fractured we are as the faith majority in our country, minority agendas that oppose Biblical truth will continue to gain strength and acceptance within the culture despite our overwhelming population of Christians.
Yet even today, we have succumbed to not only focusing far too much attention on the peripheral aspects of Scripture, we have even begun to boldly refute portions of Scripture and justify sin. Look no further than the hottest topics of debate in our culture today (homosexuality, same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia, etc.) as proof that even Christians are incredibly confused on what Scripture clearly states as right and wrong. We cannot allow naive ignorance to define who we are though. We must take a stand for absolute truth, but it must be as a unified church and not fractured by foolish quarreling and fighting. We cannot allow secular thinking and justification of sin based on feelings and emotion to guide our theology either, regardless of how logical it sounds or how much sense it appears to make on the surface. Truth is truth and sin is sin, and we have a responsibility to not only know the difference but to defend truth in the face of persecution.
The solution to our quarreling and fighting attitudes is simply love and forgiveness. For love focuses our attention on Jesus and the sacrifice He made on our behalf, while forgiveness heals wounds that unhealthy conflict resolution creates. If we focus our attention on coming together on doctrinal truth (i.e. Eph. 2:8-9, Heb. 4:12, 2 Tim. 3:16, etc.), the peripheral differences of opinion that continually plague our unity are put into perspective so that we can reconcile and restore our relationships to one another in submission to Christ. Yes, we will certainly continue to agree to disagree on interpretive grey areas of Scripture (i.e. rapture, tribulation, Christ's return etc.), which are completely acceptable because Scripture does not clearly define the answer to some questions. But where Scripture is black and white, we must fall in line under its authority and obey its commands rather than quarrel, fight and fracture the body. There is no excuse for not standing united on doctrine regardless of denomination because the Word is absolute truth. And if we call ourselves Christians then we better take that identity very seriously, because Jesus died in order that we would have the opportunity to stand for righteousness and choose love and forgiveness over frivolous quarreling and fighting within the church.
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