Peace-Maker, Peace-Breaker or a Peace-Faker

Are you a Peace-Maker, Peace-Breaker or a Peace-Faker by Dave Wilson with Linda Parker

Linda serves as the Team Leader for the Missionary Care Team here at Trinity Church. She is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who helps her clients from a Christian perspective. She specializes in Peace-Making which is a biblically based model for conflict resolution.

Matthew 17-19

Peace-Making, Peace-Breaking or Peace-Faking are three words I have learned from Linda about conflict resolution and true humility. You may be familiar with the concept of making peace, but there are two other alternatives that are destructive and damaging to living at peace with one another. Peace-Breaking is when you stand on the side of ‘right’ and attempt to win an argument, while at the same time you lose the relationship. Peace-Faking is when you mistakenly accept an absence of conflict for real peace. Instead of confronting a problem or an offense, you overlook it. The problem is that there is still no real peace, just a calm that may not last.

Matthew 18:15-20 gives us an excellent model for Peace-Making. This process has church discipline applications as well as personal peace-making principles. The first step to peace is to confront the person who has committed an offense. The confrontation should always be with humility and with the purpose of restoring and maintaining the relationship. This should be a private meeting where you agree to never discuss the offense with others. You should make every effort to come to a peaceful resolution without the knowledge of others, but if that does not work then bring along someone else. You should bring someone who is impartial; not someone who will only defend you, but someone who will stand on the side of peace. Remember, your goal is to restore the relationship, not to win the argument. The next steps include official mediation which should be the last resort and should only be done if absolutely necessary for resolution.

Life in Christ demands that we live a life of peace and humility with others and with God Himself. But true peace (just like true love) takes work. A lot of work! And the most difficult part of peace is humility, because it requires that we set aside our rights, our passions and all of our selfish pride for the benefit of making peace. In light of this process, think about the context of the next few verses when Jesus teaches on forgiveness (70x7) and divorce.

What’s Inside of Me?

What’s Inside of Me? by Dave Wilson with Lance Kjeldgaard

Lance and his wife Linda are team leaders for our International Friendship Connection (IFC) here at Trinity Church. They reach out to the international students and scholars who attend some of our local universities. Students leave their home and families from all around the world to come here and study, and IFC becomes a surrogate family who loves and blesses them in the name of the Lord.

Matthew 14-16

Lance and his team works with a crowd very similar to Jesus in these stories. They all come from different cultures with different languages and divergent ways of thinking about spiritual things. Some are seeking a sign or a miracle that proves the existence of God. Others seek truth from their heritage and ancestry by following the faith of their fathers. And still others just want to be a part of the crowd and will never commit to anything. However, there is something that all cultures have in common; and that is a code of morality. In western cultures we deal with ‘guilt’ when we break our moral code. In eastern cultures they consider the ‘shame’ that a breach in the code will bring upon their family. In chapter 15 of Matthew, Jesus helps to identify what actually defiles a person from God’s perspective. What makes them ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’, kosher or treif, halal or haraam.

Jesus is known to break some of the man enhanced laws which define ‘unclean’, like touching a leper. However, it is interesting to note that if an ordinary Jewish man were to touch a leper, he would be considered unclean along with the leper, but when Jesus touched the leper, the leper became clean.

At times we see Jesus interact with crowds and then there are these brief encounters with individuals. With each encounter, something deep within the character and person of Jesus comes out to glorify and reveal the very nature of a loving heavenly Father who can make all things clean.

As Jesus says in Matthew 15:10-20, “…it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person… but what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart; and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality” and the list goes on. As you read this text, think about how the Lord can use us to ‘make things clean’ with our service to each other and to the world around us.