Disagree Agreeably

You wake up in the morning all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed because you had a great evening last night and you are anticipating a wonderful day today.

You get up, do that bathroom thing, have breakfast, and get your Bible to spend some time alone with God. Or you do that bathroom thing and grab your Bible before breakfast so that that fast thing will influence how you spend your time with God.

Here’s what you’re doing with God. You are meeting with him because you love him and want to spend time with the one you love. You are reading/learning about him, studying him, talking with him, worshipping him, delighting in him, and adoring him. That’s what you’re doing.

What is happening to you is that he is giving you himself, remaking you, changing you from the inside out, giving you his desires, his loves, his delights, his perspective, his loves, his thoughts, motives, his heart, and his humility. He is making you into a Christ-ian.

When you come away from meeting with God, your life will be in line with his life. Your life. This means that when you interact with your fellow man, you will be able to love your neighbor as you love yourself. You will be able to let love cover a multitude of sins. You will be able to forgive, give grace, show mercy, be kind, compassionate. You will reflect the glory of God on everyone, even those who aren’t very nice to you.

When you are walking with God, your goal for everyone you meet will be to help them draw closer to God. Even the non-Christians you come in contact with should want what you have because you love them in the way Christ loved his church. You want everyone to think of themselves, of you, and most importantly of God, more highly than they did before they met you.

You thought I were going to talk about disagreeing?

I am. This is all to be done in the context of disagreeing with other folks. If you love them, you will come up with a different approach than the one that won’t let you lose. When you have Jesus’ heart, how you disagree with others will be very different from the way someone who wants what they want.

Remember the context of your life is to be like Christ.

So, someone says or does something you don’t agree with, what do you do? Well, it depends. This requires the wisdom of God, so pray and ask God to continue to guide you in this.

You’ll remember that your first goal is to glorify God in this new situation. This means that your goal is to help the person you’re disagreeing with to be closer to God after the discussion than he was before the discussion. The thing you’re disagreeing over is secondary to the glory of God.

Here are several options:

• You can let the other person be wrong. Life probably won’t end just because they think the sky is pink instead of blue like you “know” it is. Also, remember, you could be wrong.

Remember that I mentioned humility earlier. That’s going to be something you need a lot of if you are to disagree agreeably. 

• You can humble yourself and “be wrong.” Suppose your wife wants you to use the proper fork at dinner and you think it’s a bunch of silliness. What’s wrong with being wrong? Just do it her way. You love her, don’t you? She loves you, doesn’t she? So, use the correct fork for her sake and for God’s glory.
• Or let’s say it is something that you disagree with that you think (know) you’ve been wronged. Your brother put his fence 20 feet into your property, for example. When Paul was talking to the Corinthians about taking one another to court he said, “why not rather be wronged?” (1 Cor 6:7). You can let yourself be wronged.
• If you’ve been sinned against, you can go to the person and kindly and sweetly talk it over with her. The goal is to win (restore – Gal 6:1) her to Christ, to yourself, and to everyone around her. It is not to be right, or vindicated, or get revenge, or something else. You want to win your sister. Jesus said, “Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother” (Mt 18:15).
• But what if that doesn’t produce good results? And what I mean by “good results” is that the person won’t confess their sins or make things right. There are two options open to you:
• You can let love cover a multitude of sins (1 Pet 4:8). What this means is you should act and think like the sin hadn’t occurred at all. You are, for all practical purposes forgiving her. You are imitating God when the Bible says, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Ps 130:3). God doesn’t make a big deal about all of your sins, so you should treat your friend this way. 
• You can ask two or three others to either bear witness to what she did (i.e. they actually witnessed the sin), or they can determine whether the thing you alleged that she did or said was actually sin or not. If it wasn’t sin, you need to let the issue drop (Mt 18:16).
• If this tack doesn’t show the winning results, you can take your friend to the whole church and let them tell her that she is in sin and needs to repent (Mt 18:17).

You need to know that if you aren’t willing to do B or C, you absolutely must do A. You spent a considerable amount of time with God and you must obey him. He tells us how to disagree and if we won’t do it his way, we are in sin.

That “confront” thing

Some folks advise people to confront others when they sin. I have some serious problems with this kind of talk and its consequent fruit.

First, you aren’t your friend’s Holy Spirit. God didn’t put us into one another’s life to “fix” each other. You are told to love your neighbor, not fix your neighbor. Consequently, Christians don’t get to confront anyone with anything (I know that’s a little overstated, but more on that in a moment).

Second, when you think it is your ministry to your spouse or anyone else to confront them about their sin, it leads you to do it in a way that is arrogant and proud. It is exactly what Jesus was warning against when he said, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Mt 7:1). When you have an eye out for the other’s sin, you almost always have a plank in your own eye, even if the plank is your judgmental attitude. Notice that context of Matthew 7:1.

The person who is taking specks out of people’s eyes does it in a very different way that the one who confronts another.

Third, the only time in the Bible where anyone “confronts” others is when someone confronts their enemy (e.g. Ps 17:13; Job 30:27; 2 Sam 22:6; Mt 21: 23; Lk 20:1, etc.). The word itself is a word of war. It is a taunt, a jibe, an insult and it carries with it an “in your face” quality that Christians shouldn’t have for or toward one another.

So, get rid of the idea that you are going to confront anyone.

There is a proper context for confronting, but it isn’t your home or with your Christian friends.

I hope this helps.

Image by Bessi from Pixabay