Conflict
- Julie Brennan
- Nov 10, 2024
- 16 min read
Guest Pastor J Cook
November 10, 2024
Listen, watch, or read the transcript below.
Conflict - A Sign of Our Times
Click the arrow to expand and collapse the scripture verse.
Why is anger the normal response?
James 1:1-12
' James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation, because like a flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits. Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. '
James 1:1-12
YOU are the reason you're conflicted. Our flesh is drawn to conflict.
Road Rage
Domestic Violence
We need to self-evaluate what's going on in our lives. We need to humble ourselves.
HUMILITY - resist the devil and he will flee.
Being humble is not about I CAN'T it's I WON'T.
Listen to others instead of being quick to argue.
Seek honest feedback.
Acknowledge your shortcomings
Elevate others
Practice gratitude
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Transcribed by Turbo Scribe
...how many memories of the past. I remember that it used to be that that very table was set out here in the middle, and there were two ominous chairs on each, for the elders. Do you remember that in those days? And one on each side facing out this way.
My brother and I were discussing life during Dan's sermon. And it ends up that Dan stopped his sermon and said, The boys from up here are keeping my words, something they pray. So we walked up there, he made us sit in those elders' chairs, and faced the crowd.
It was something, I didn't say all of them, there were a couple of them. A man comes into a bar, and it's obvious that he's troubled. He has every intention of bringing his sorrows away.
So he's got this look of consternation on him, and it was evident to the bartender that something was wrong. So he came up to him and said, Buddy, is everything okay? The guy said, No, it's not. He said, My wife and I have been fighting, and she told me she was so angry that she wasn't going to talk to me for a month.
The bartender said, Well, there's a positive spin on this. He said, Because you know, it will be the last day of that month. We live in conflicted times, don't we? I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm so relieved that this election thing is over.
I am so tired of hearing how miserable everybody else is, and how terrible things are. It just seems like there's a natural tendency that we're going to complain, and we're going to fight with people. I've never seen our country, I'm 70 years old, and I've never seen our country as divided as it has been in the last year, two years, or whatever you might say.
And so to say that conflict is a part of our lives is absolutely true. You know, you think about the world on the brink of catastrophic power struggles, and foreign affairs, and the threats of nuclear bombs, and the pace of rapid moral decay, economically, we're possibly headed on tough times. We've so sexualized our society that little first and second graders are learning deviant, perverted sexual things.
Something's wrong, terribly wrong with our country, and we need to claim it then. Why is it that it seems like it's normal anymore to be angry? Why is it normal for us to almost be filled with a pessimism that our world is miserable, we live in a miserable nation that's uncaring, and that kind of thing? I don't know why. Why is our world so chaotic? Why does the world seem to be in a ton of war strength? It's kind of struggling in polar opposite directions.
I think it's that same thing that James, the half-brother of Jesus, was addressing. And so if I take any relief, I look back to the church in the first century, the half-brother of Jesus, and I think, boy, it was that way back then too. I don't know why anybody would go to an MMA fight when you can come to church for free and watch people fight.
I mean, sometimes it's even better than... Anyway, James will start us off by asking a perfect question that was good for him in the first century, and it's good for us now. He says, what is causing quarrels among you? He was confused. It's not a political question as much as it is a moral one.
The question is directed at our world. It's addressed to not only the United States, but addressed to our church families and addressed to our marriages and our families. What's the deal? It's important that you know that when we read our text, it's going to be out of James, the fourth chapter, starting at verse 1 and going through verse 12.
At the very beginning, he says, what is causing quarrels and fights among me? It's important to note that in Greek, there was a past tense, what happened, what caused quarrels and fights among me, something in the past, or what is going to cause something in the future. This is a Greek perfect, and in Greek perfect, it means that it started a long time ago, but its impact continues right on through up to today. What is causing the quarreling and the fighting? So in just a moment, we'll go ahead and read God's word together.
Why don't we pray for just a moment and ask God to lead us, Father, not my words, not words that we want to hear, just your words. Father, it sustains, it gives us life, it gives us hope. And so we pray that you would help us to learn today what's important.
I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. What is causing quarrels and fights among you? Don't they come from the evil desires of war within you? You want what you don't have, so you scheme and kill to get it.
You are jealous of what others have, but you can't get it, so you fight and wage war to take away from them. And you don't have what you want because you don't ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong.
You want only what gives you pleasure. You adulterers, don't you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again, if you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God. Do you think that the scriptures have no meaning when they say that God is passionate and that the spirit he has placed within us should be faithful to him? He gives grace generously, as the scriptures say.
God opposes the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. So humble yourself before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Humble yourself before the Lord, and he will lift you up. Don't speak evil against each other, dear brothers and sisters. If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God's law.
But your job is to obey the law and not to judge whether it applies to you. God alone, who gave God, is the judge. He alone has the power to save and to destroy.
So what right do you have to judge your neighbor? Can you imagine, he's talking to the first century church, the church that probably was in its purest form, the one that was growing by leaps and bounds and seemed to have it all together, and yet, right in the middle of it, you've got James, the half-brother of Jesus, whose ministry was in the greater Jerusalem area. He's saying, what's happening here? Why are you all so dead? Why is it that you seem magnets for conflict? Who's the culprit for the angst in your world today? Different from back then. But we find ourselves many times at odds with people in the church and outside of the church.
And a clue for this is that tiny little word that we've read now 20 times in the first four verses. The little word is, you. You are the reason that you're conflicted.
What does the person on both sides of me say? You're the reason I'm conflicted. You really tick me off. Go ahead, do that again.
Is that all right? I could work up a good mad right now here. My grandmother cooked. She was a lioness.
Stood all four foot ten, probably 100 pounds if she had iron ankle boots. She was a lioness. She was in charge.
It came to a time where we had to move her to a nursing home in Roseville, Illinois. And she was in there for probably a couple of years, wouldn't you say, Jane? Anyway, it happens that she had a roommate. And the roommate had some cognitive problems.
It happened that another little lady with the same problems walked past the door, and she saw this lady's underwear on the bed. And so she comes in, and she says, that's my underwear. And the lady says, no, that's not.
It ended up these two little ladies rolling on a bed full of underwear. Finally, a nurse comes and sees that it's going on and tries to break it up and everything. Jim Oliver, who was the administrator, a good friend of our family, he said, Tilly, why didn't you call your call number some way? So that happened.
She said, at 89, she said, I was kind of in the mood for a good fight. You know, I don't know whether that's the reason for much of the conflict. And we just seem to be inclined toward it.
I mean, those who are inclined toward our natural selves, our fleshly side, seems to be drawn to conflict and to bad things. Nobody goes, and you'll see when you're driving down the highway, all of a sudden the cars are back up, the elevators are back up front. And the reason that it's so clogged up is because everybody is rubbernecking to see how terribly bad it was.
We're drawn to that. You know, in this day and age, it seems like, wait, we've even added new words to our vocabulary. There's rogue rage and drive-by shootings, domestic violence, hate crimes.
We wield these words like a sharp of ax. Did you see in the news recently, and this really shocked me, did you see in the news lately where two world-renowned sketch artists got into a brawl in front of a bunch of people? Turned out all right. It turned out to be a draw.
Just want to make sure you're still here with me. Seriously, many of us find ourselves swimming in a sea of angst, bucking against the waves of turmoil. And we need to take a self-evaluation.
The world can't be all that's wrong with what's happening to you internally. You have control over that. And sometimes we need to get in line with the fact that God made you to have a choice, and you can make the life of me miserable, and all the people around you are untrustworthy and unkind and have big advantages over you, reward with a silver spoon, or you can go ahead and humbly look and say, life is good, and I'm right where God has planted me here today.
The solution is a word called humility. What is humility? It's one's sense of self that is neither undervalued or overimplanted. It's just right.
It's the mediate between self-deprecation and self-elevation. Keep in mind that that word, humility, was one that was looked down on in the culture and society in which it was written. The Greco-Roman antics claimed that it was something that meant, like, to be crushed, to be debased, immoral, perverted, degenerate.
Yet, amidst of all that, you've got a word from God that is saying to them, hey, humble yourself before God. Resist the devil, and he'll flee from you. You do have control.
Many people will say, I just can't help it. Yes, you can. The word is, I won't help it.
It's not, I can't help it. What's some ways that we can just start doing little exercises to help us be more humble? Well, first one is this. Practice really listening to people that you don't agree with.
Listen to them. Question. I don't think I've got a show of hands.
I don't want to see a bloodbath out there. Do you listen to Fox Network, or do you listen to CNN? Neither. Neither.
Neither. You know what? I had a tendency for a long time I would watch Fox. Anyway, it was more conservative.
It lined up with what I always, but it lined up a lot of times with what I believed more than CNN that seemed to be way too literal. You know what I found myself doing? Instead of listening sometimes when I was on CNN, I still today have Fox Radio on moving over here. But the bad thing is a lot of times you hear people that already agree with what you wanted to hear.
You don't listen sometimes to a world that might have other ideas. You know, we almost offer the thought that we're right. Politically, we're right culturally, societally, and we might be.
But we also know the one that's right all the time is God. There have been times where I've been out of line and out of touch with what he wanted me to practice listening to people. See if they have anything that is worthwhile to say.
Try and understand. I find myself when I'm listening to CNN sometimes I'll get a confession that I'll be listening and they sound so stupid to me. I mean, I will shout at my TV.
You are full of bull loaning. The truth, you know, I'm not listening to what they say and I'm not here to lift them up at all. I'm just saying that I think our world would be better.
Your marriage would be better. Our church families would be better if they would learn to truly listen to one another. Even if we're at odds, listen to one another.
Number two, seek honest feedback. My mother, bless her heart, the last ten years or so of her life she was in Jacksonville and she'd take a course every Sunday listening to J-Hour. That's what they called me.
My folks wouldn't correct anybody. They called me Jay, even though that's what I preferred. It's J-Hour.
And every Sunday after church, mom would come out and she'd say, that was the best sermon I ever heard in my life, Jay. Well, that was sweet, though I didn't believe her. I mean, come on.
You strike out every now and then. You think that you're going to communicate, but maybe you're not going to. And mom's praise like that was not honest feedback.
It was because I was her son that she was proud of me. I'm thankful for that. But nonetheless, mom gave me a feedback that really wasn't as helpful.
On the other hand, there's a woman in my life, Janie Cook. That's a whole different story. If I make the mistake of saying, J-Hour, go, she'll tell me.
And you know there are some times I didn't catch it, but she's not being mean. She just knows that it's important for me to know the truth about how things went, and she'll try as tactfully as she can, but she'll tell me, Janie, you probably should have not mentioned this or should have not done that. Honest evaluation.
There are people in your life that will tell you nothing but what you want to hear. Those are not your friends. Those are people that I can tell you in the long run will compliment you and agree with you to your deficit in life.
They'll lead you down a miserable path. There are people who can love you enough to take the risk of being honest with you. Listen to those people.
Listen to them. You'll know whether they're doing it aimless or whether they're doing it because they care about you. Listen and seek God's feedback.
Third, acknowledge your limitations and shortcomings. We teach our children and grandchildren that they are exceptional. Have you noticed this? That they can be anything.
The baseline that we tell our kids and our grandkids. You can be anything that you want to be in the world. Just set your mind to it.
Do you really believe that? My grandson, Lincoln, is kind of short. He's laid back, just easy going. He's not aggressive at all.
He joined this year's basketball team. Now unless Jamie and I are willing to go ahead and go through the whole season and watch our grandson sit on the bench, the truth be known, he's never, he's never, trust me, listen and years from now you can say that J. Seth Cooke said that. He's never going to join the NBA.
I don't care how much he tries, how hard he tries. You know, we offer all sorts of exceptions. Our kids are faster, stronger, more agile than anybody on their team.
Even though the superintendent's kid gets more playing time. Our kids are more handsome, are more beautiful than most. They're smarter than other people.
You know what? The worst thing that a kid can do is bring home a report card that has C's on it. Now, when I was a kid, A was excellent, B was good, C was average, D was fair. F was a failure.
I don't know whether you do E's or F's. But that was the way it broke down. God forbid that your child or your grandchild did something average, normal.
That's a sign. We believe that they're capable of much, much more. Is that what real life is like? That we're all going to, just because we love them and adore them and want to encourage them, that we're going to tell them that they can do and be anything.
I'm not trying to brag or anything. That's not what I am. When I was here at Ashland, there was the Ashland Junior 9 band.
David Drago was the old principal and the band director. I was the first chair. I just thought we needed him.
I mean, I was ahead of Rick Briggs and Boots Gardner and all of them. I was the virtuoso. In the middle of the year, Dad decided to move us up to St. Joe, Michigan, a much, much larger town, much, much larger school.
And you know what happened? The unthinkable. Number one didn't make the band in St. Joe, Michigan. There were others there that were better than me.
I was relieved to tell you the truth because I hated the animals. But it's important to notice that we lead our kids down a primrose path. We're not careful.
Read the news of Arlington, Washington, Lee High School this year. There were actually 117 valedictorians out of a class of 457. At Long Beach Polytech in California, there were 30.
Some schools, including North Hills High School outside of Pittsburgh and high schools in Miami, there are none. They didn't want to make some of the others that hadn't worked as hard and weren't smart feel depressed. So what do they do? They go ahead and compromise everything.
It used to mean that it was a good thing, but it was really, when we were in Little League and in high school sports, what was the honorable mention type of thing? Sportsmanship trophy. That's wonderful that they were good sports. They were good sports about being losers.
And the truth is that instead of doing that anymore, we have everybody get a trophy. Everybody's a winner. Nobody is a loser anymore.
And that is not the life that we live in. It should be that we realize that for some, they're more talented. Humble people realize that there are some that just quite honestly, in certain areas of life are better.
Or we need to elevate others. Being polite and courteous means considering how others are feeling. A humble person is very good at doing that.
When you practice good manners, you're showing others that you're considerate of their feelings and respectful. You know who suffers the most from pride because of neglect? Kids. There used to be a thing called manners.
And it's something that's pretty rare these days. Some examples of manners and what manners was, manners was recognizing someone older, someone more infirm, and actually trying to help accommodate. You said yes, sir, and no, ma'am.
You gave up your seat if another person came into the room. You opened the door if somebody came behind and said, excuse me, please, thank you. I know that makes me impatient.
But the truth is we lost something there. We've lost our ability to go ahead and lift other people, elevate them, let them see how important they are to us. If you examine the common denominator, it had to do with exhibiting humility, putting others first.
If you want to be humble, there's a lot more opportunities. To go ahead and help others, elevate other people, to know that that's all right. Not only is it all right, it's preferable to do that.
I practice gratitude. Gratitude is an attitude that demands our acknowledgement of being blessed by God and others in our circumstances. Let me tell you, when Jamie and I were married 51 years ago, it was in Bloomfield, Iowa, that brand new little church building that they came up with a brilliant idea on the first day of September that they were going to have this new building that didn't have any windows, period, and the air conditioner wasn't working.
Just got into it. I still got a picture of my aunt, Lydia, and she has her dress zipped now halfway down her back there, and her petticoat and everything showing that she wasn't going to be willing to go ahead and make a big spot in here. Damn, I should have gotten a replacement.
I could get married. Anyway, we were about ready to open up a few gifts, as was the custom, and Aunt Hilda was desperately wanting us to open hers, so we did. We immediately opened it.
Now, I'm telling you, there are ugly pictures in your life, and then there was Aunt Hilda's ugly picture. It was just two panda bears that were eating some kind of vegetation on this board, cardboard thing, and the colors were putrid and everything about it, and at the moment, oh, and that wonderful Aunt Hilda got us this wonderful panda bear thing. You know, we went home immediately and put it in the back of our closet, and we feel that sometime during the next year it was raptured into heaven.
Here's the thing. Didn't we write Aunt Hilda and say thank you? Yes, we did. You bet we did.
We were glad that she at least thought it up. Her tastes and ours were obviously different. What she found as valuable we didn't, but we knew that she tried somehow to go ahead and gift us with something that meant a lot to her.
As a result of that, we were willing to show gratitude, even though it didn't meet the standards of what our expectations might be. The late Alex Haley, the author of the famous book Roots, had a picture in his office showing a turtle sitting on top of a fence post. The picture was there to remind him of a lesson he learned long ago.
He said, if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know that he had some help getting there. Alex said, anytime I started thinking, wow, look at what I've done. Isn't it marvelous how successful I've been? He said, I look at that picture and I remember how this turtle, me, got up on the post.
Amen. Don't be selfish. Don't try to impress others.
Be humble. Think of others as better than yourselves. Don't look out only for your own interest, but take an interest in others too.
That's right. Thank you, Father, that we live in a world of possibilities to show love to another life in our world, to show peace to a world that's struggling in conflict. Help us to come out and be a different type of people, to show the world what it means to truly love one another, and to seek others to make a difference in our lives.
We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.
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