To Avoid Conflict, We Need to Submit Our Character to the Lord’s Dealings

Title: To Avoid Conflicts, We Need to Submit Our Character to the Lord’s Dealings

Summary: To avoid conflicts and discredit in ministry, we need to continually submit our mind, character, temperament, and attitudes to the Lord’s dealings. We enter Christian service with patterns from the world that must be broken, cleansed, pruned, and conformed to Jesus Christ. In Matthew 20, the request for privileged positions for two disciples reveals a carnal mentality of power and personal gain; the anger of the others shows the same competitiveness. When those who exercise authority act this way, abuses, corruption, scandals, and inconsistencies arise that obscure the Gospel. The Kingdom must not be run like politics or show business, but according to Christ’s just, loving, and benevolent principles.

When there are people in ministry who have not been sufficiently dealt with by the Holy Spirit and have not been conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, sins, contradictions, conflicts, harm, exploitation of others, and many negative things that are all works of the flesh will inevitably result.

When we work in the Kingdom of God, when we are involved in some kind of ministry, it is so important that we continually submit our mind, our character, our temperament, and our way of being to the Lord’s dealings.

Because when we enter ministry, all of us bring thought patterns, attitudes, and a temperament that come from the world and wage war against the peaceful, loving, and benevolent principles of the Kingdom of God, and we must continually ask the Lord to deal with us—to break us, cleanse us, polish us, perfect us, and prune us, as the Lord Jesus Christ says: the Lord comes and prunes the branches so that we may bear more fruit. These are tremendously powerful principles.

And I believe that unless the Kingdom of God is led by men and women who have been dealt with and crucified, there will always be inconsistencies, difficulties, and conflicts in Christian circles. We see in Matthew 20:20 that the first offender is the mother of these two disciples, who comes before the Lord with a worldly mentality. She is thinking of Jesus as though He were a political candidate, and she sees these two sons of hers, who are very dear to her heart, this way: okay, they are giving this political candidate, who is Jesus Christ, their service and support, so it is important that they receive some benefit from it.

And she wants to make sure that they get ahead of the other disciples by asking the Lord to place them in a position of preference, as is done in the world, where many people line up behind a political candidate so that when the candidate comes to power, they may then receive a job, a position in his administration, money, or whatever it may be. This woman is thinking in terms of the world, not in terms of the Kingdom, and her two sons lend themselves perfectly to their mother’s scheming mentality, allowing themselves to be carried along, very much to their own advantage, by her and her carnal initiatives.

The language she uses is interesting. She says to the Lord Jesus Christ, “Command that my two sons may sit at Your right and at Your left.” It is the language of the world, isn’t it? It is the language of: well, Lord, You have authority, so You can do whatever You please; therefore, simply command it as an executive decision on Your part, regardless of whether it is a just or correct decision or one that accords with the principles of the Kingdom. It is the mentality of power, often the mentality of the abuse of power, which is the mentality we see in the world, where the strong and leaders often do whatever they please, without caring about the well-being of their followers, but simply making decisions just because they can and because that is what they want to do, or because of some personal preference they have, rather than according to objective, benevolent principles that benefit everyone.

So we see this worldly mentality; it is a carnal mentality that has not been dealt with or confronted by the principles of the Kingdom of God, which are completely different. Interestingly, when the other disciples find out what these two are doing with their mother, they also react in a carnal way; they react with anger. Not so much because the principles of the Kingdom are being violated, but because they are trying to take away positions that the others perhaps think they deserve.

So here we see that everyone is actually acting in the flesh, and that is what often happens in ministries, cell groups, and large denominations, and that is what robs the things of the Kingdom of God of credibility, dignity, and grace: the fact that many people in positions of power and authority have not submitted themselves to God’s dealings and are not handling the things of the Kingdom according to the principles of the Kingdom, but are still operating in the flesh.

When the world sees this, it becomes scandalized and says, “Well, there is no difference between the Church and us, so why enter into the Gospel if, in the end, the same things are always done?” Today we see so many Christian ministries displaying financial corruption, abuse of people, arbitrariness in the decisions that are made, and a carnal attitude; there are so many sexual and marital scandals, simply an abuse of the children of God, and principles that do not conform to the principles of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There are so many ministries today in which we pastors present ourselves as though we were movie stars and build followings as though we were political candidates or, yes, simply stars in the world; that is not the way of Jesus Christ. We see Christ acting in a very different way, and that is how we too must conduct ourselves in the Kingdom of God.

When the flesh intervenes in the things of the Kingdom, when the mind that has not been dealt with by God is at work in the affairs of the Kingdom, conflicts will always arise, there will always be problems, and that is what we must try to avoid.

In our next meditation, we will continue discussing this subject of the mentalities that often wage war against the peace of the Kingdom of God. God bless you, and until our next meditation.