A New Heart Attitude - Covenant of Harmony: Matthew 5:17-26 - Matthew: Kingdom of God Revolution

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

So, in a nutshell, there's two ways we can communicate in a conflicted situation.

One is to say, you hurt me, and you did this, and you did that, and that is accusatory, right?

It puts the person on the defensive.

And I message, though, is saying, I felt you're owning the situation.

I felt hurt when you said this.

I felt um abandoned when you took this stand.

In other words, you're owning it as your feelings because here's what it does: it opens up prayerfully, if there's a relationship there, with the other person to realize they hurt you.

At The Road, our mission is to empower people to change the world.

For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We are back now in the book of Matthew, Kingdom Revolution.

We took a segue there for about two months, where we were talking about some different aspects of what God had put on our heart.

But look now back to Matthew 5.

We went through the Sermon on the Mount.

I want to continue there.

And it's pretty interesting in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that Matthew has chosen to place right here, the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus now is making a change from not only the values of the kingdom of God, which we studied, the first part of Matthew 5, the Beatitudes, blessed are those that, but then he now moves into a challenge to the religious systems of Israel.

And it's a challenge to the American church.

It's a challenge to the religious portions of our church that are a part of kind of looking at outward behavior as the main way in which we evaluate whether we're good Christians or not.

We all do it, right?

I mean, we all struggle that our conduct becomes the standard in which we evaluate people or we evaluate whether we're a good church or we're good Christians.

Well, the Pharisees were the most righteous people in the whole world.

I had two pastors from Atlanta hanging around the fire with me this week, friends of my son Isaac.

And we were talking about why was Jesus more attracted to the prostitutes and the sinners and the tax collectors than he was to the Pharisees?

I mean, if you actually looked at proximity of actual religious conduct and values, there was nobody closer to Jesus in proximity than the Sadducees and the Pharisees.

They lived righteous lives outwardly.

But he was attracted rather to this group of people that were way outside the church.

I mean, way outside the temple, way outside the Jewish code.

He's attracted to them more than he was to the Pharisees.

So what I did is I took the fire pit, you know, and we had the fire pit there, and the way my fire pit is, is I have gravel around the fire pit with the chairs and stuff, and then I have bricks that form a circle all the way around to a walkway that goes to my back, and it just says this perfect environment, you guys.

And so I took chairs and I said, here is the fire.

This is Jesus, this is righteous living right here, man, right in the middle.

The Pharisees are super close to Jesus.

And then I took one of the chairs, one of the Adirondack chairs, and I walked out about 20 feet from the circle, and I put one out there.

And I said, What we tend to do in religion is we evaluate whether you're in or you're out.

We do it politically, we do it religiously, you're either in or you're out.

And the way it is is you have this, you have this imaginary code, conscious or unconscious, about how you evaluate people, about whether they're in the circle or not in the circle.

And the Jews were the worst.

They were the worst at this.

And so they had this circle, they had this area, and so Jesus is here in the center, and if we're talking about, let's just say the Ten Commandments.

You couldn't put anybody closer to Jesus and the Ten Commandments than the Pharisees.

But what I did is they took the chair and I turned it around so that the back of the chair is facing Jesus.

And then out here, 20 feet away, I took a chair that's a prostitute that is a tax collector, but I turned it toward the fire.

And the reason Jesus was fascinated by and loved and cared about and had a heart for those outside the circle was because their hearts were turned toward him.

And what happens religiously in our lives sometimes, church, is that we are good at going to church or we have righteous lives that we live, but our hearts are far from him.

And so what Jesus is addressing here in this next part, this new phase of the Sermon on the Mount, is he's addressing these issues of the heart that are related to people, related to heart attitudes toward people.

Because Jesus is the one who has said, All of the commandments are fulfilled, and loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor is yourself.

He's talking about an inward transformation that happens through relationships.

In Matthew 6, 33, which is coming up in the days ahead with us, it says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

And his righteousness means right relationships.

So at the core of being a Jesus follower is having a right relationship with God and a right relationship with people.

So our passage is in Matthew 5, starting at verse 21, and I'm gonna actually read from the message.

So open your Bibles, and I'm not gonna read from the New King James Version, which is what I normally use, but rather I'm gonna read from the message by Eugene Peterson, the late Eugene Peterson.

How many of you write in your Bibles?

How many of you write notes in your Bibles?

Okay, a lot of you.

Good, good.

I took the kids on Thursday night after Sam Bishop, Sam, Samuel just did a fantastic job on the Bible.

Great message, fantastic message.

Um but then I took my Bible and I had all the kids come around me and I opened it up and I said, look at all this messy writing on the sides.

That's the kind of Bibles I want you guys to have.

I want you to be underlining stuff.

I want you to be putting notes on the side.

I have often said that a person with a messy Bible usually doesn't have a messy life.

But right over, I have these, I have these um headings.

Okay, so I'm gonna look at the New King James Version, how it does it.

My headings in the New King James Version would say adultery in the heart.

It will start Matthew 5, verse 21.

Matthew 5:21

Murder begins in the heart.

Maybe some of you have that.

Murder begins in the heart.

Mine says murder in the message.

But here's what I want you to write on the side: breaking the power of anger.

I want you to write that.

That's what Jesus is talking about here.

He's talking about in verses 21.

21 through 26, breaking the power of anger.

Anyone struggle with anger in here?

The rest of you are liars if you didn't raise your hand.

Okay, we all struggle with anger, right?

So Jesus is addressing the heart issues of anger.

Breaking the power of anger.

Now look at verses 27 through 32.

I want you to write on the side, breaking the power of lust.

No man struggles with this area.

Breaking the power of lust.

Write that down.

We're not going to cover all this today.

I'm just giving you a heads up.

Okay, verses 33 through 37, I want you to write, breaking the power of posing.

Breaking the power of being a poser.

Some of you are big time posers.

And by the way, because I've got a PhD in it, I know you.

I know who you are, so quit doing it.

Because I already know you're a poser.

Alright, breaking the power of posing.

We'll cover that later.

And then verses 38 through 48 put breaking the power of retaliation.

Breaking the power of retaliation.

So today we're going to cover breaking the power of anger.

And then in the weeks ahead, we'll cover some of it.

Some of them will be together.

They won't be each one cherry-picked, but we'll just move through this chapter.

Because here's what Jesus is saying.

He's saying, look, you guys, I want your heart.

And it's all about people.

It's how you treat people.

It's how we interact with people.

It's how we treat our kids.

It's a code of honor.

What's the code of honor that you live by?

Well, because of things that have happened in my life where a code of honor was majorly broken, I came away with a broken heart and determined that I was going to do everything in my power to build a church where we talk about stuff, where we can be authentic, where we can be real.

We don't have to agree on everything.

It's okay to not agree with me as a senior pastor on everything.

You don't have to.

I don't care.

We have some basic tenets that we believe about the kingdom and about Jesus and the cross and the resurrection and scripture.

Yes, we probably should agree on those.

But there's so many other things that we can disagree, and it's okay.

It's okay in this church to disagree.

It's okay to disagree politically, it's okay to disagree on economics.

It's okay to disagree with how you raise your kids.

We're not pressing any particular perspective except go to the word and be a man and woman of God and pursue the kingdom first in your life.

So, because of that, this passage became very, very important to me.

So let me read it and I'm gonna read it.

You may want to just you can try to follow it with your Bible because the message is a little bit different, but it's so beautiful the way Eugene Peterson translated this.

Verse 21.

You're familiar with the command of the ancients, do not murder.

I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder.

Carelessly call a brother idiot, and you just might find yourself hauled into court.

Thoughtlessly yell stupid at a sister, and you're on the brink of hellfire.

The simple moral fact is that words kill.

And they do, men and women.

Words really matter.

How you use your words.

And I have been convicted of this so many times because I get paid to use words, and I haven't been very good at it at times.

So if you hang out in this church very long, you'll hear me apologize, usually because I got an elbow in the rib late at night from my wife.

This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters.

If you enter your place of worship and about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you.

Abandon your offering, leave immediately.

Go to this friend and make things right.

Then and only then come back and work things out with God.

Now that's interesting, isn't it?

Because he's saying that you really have to prioritize a faith that really works with people even before you say you have a faith in God.

That's a radical statement.

The Pharisees were freaking out over this because they believed actually the opposite.

So it didn't matter how you treated people, didn't matter how you treated someone who was a sinner.

What mattered is that you did all the ordinances of the temple.

Verse 25.

Or say you're out on the street and an old enemy accosts you.

Don't lose a minute.

Make the first move.

And I've got that underlined in my own.

Make the first move.

I say it all the time to my kids.

I say it all the time to people in conflicted situations.

You make the first move.

Make things right with him.

After all, if you leave the first move to him, knowing his track record, you're likely to end up in court.

Maybe even jail.

If that happens, you won't get out without a stiff fine.

Now I find that interesting because it seems like Jesus is actually saying, kind of almost selfishly, look, if you know somebody's got an issue with you, and it almost seems like here he's talking about business, kind of a business transaction where things aren't right, you should make the first move to save your company, to save your finances.

So he's saying it that way.

I'm gonna say it more from the perspective of just issues that come up in conflicted relationships that we all have.

So now look at the covenant of harmony.

And this is this was developed the very, very early days of the road, five years ago.

And I call it, we call it the covenant of harmony.

I might call it sometimes a code of honor.

It's how we honor people at the road.

And we don't do it perfectly.

I'm sure there's conflicted relationships here within our body that I don't know anything about, that people are not talking about.

It's just the way it is.

There's no perfect world, there's no perfect church.

But our attempt is to remind us from time to time of how important this is.

Now, all of our staff, all of our paid staff at the road have to sign the covenant of harmony that they will follow what you have in your hand.

We used to do it for all the members, but we realized as the church got bigger that we were so variegated in the maturity levels that we didn't have enough time to go through this with everybody, so you don't have to sign it.

But it is, it is a verbal and a relational commitment that we make.

And I'm, by the way, I'm not going to run around and dictate this, but if you come to me, if you come to one of our staff about a conflicted relationship, we will encourage you, we always encourage you in these areas.

And it doesn't work perfectly, but it's certainly biblical.

And so that's all we're attempting to do here.

So let's read it together, and then I'll talk about it.

As believers in Jesus, we represent Christ and His church as such.

We abide by biblical principles regarding interpersonal relationships, how and what we communicate with others.

At the road at Chapel Hills, we desire to guard harmony in all relationships.

The Bible gives us guidelines to safeguard relationships.

Now turn to Matthew 18.

Matthew 18 is the other passage that parallels Matthew 5, verse 15.

Matthew 5:15

I'll read again from the message.

If a fellow believer hurts you, go and tell him, work it out between the two of you.

And I would say parenthetically, don't tell all your friends about it.

If he listens, you've made a friend.

If he won't listen, take one or two others along so that the presence of witnesses will keep things honest and try again.

If he still won't listen, tell the church.

If he won't listen to the church, you'll have to start over from scratch, confront him with the need for repentance and offer again God's forgiving love.

You know, we've had dozens and dozens of these situations at the road through the years, and up to now, except in one case, everybody's repented.

Isn't that awesome?

They've said, man, I blew it mad.

And most of the time it's like, I didn't even know.

I didn't know I had done that.

I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't mean for you to take it that way, and they said they were sorry, and so it was it um it was done.

And um, but it's not always worked that way in one case, but uh all the other cases it has.

So most people are repentant.

I think most people in this church care.

And so it's been fun, it's actually been super fun to watch God um bring great great unity within our body.

So in Matthew 18, 15 through 17, it says that if I question the conduct of another, or if I hear of accusations that may be shared with me or others regarding a fellow brother or sister, no matter his or her position, I will go first to that specific person to discuss this matter with him or her before going to any other individual.

If there is a clear rejection of a genuine attempt to offer spiritual correction or admonition, I will further follow the Matthew 18, 15 through 17 pattern and take with me another brother or sister to mediate the situation carefully, refusing to allow the matter to become a potential source of dissension.

Now look at Proverbs 6.

This is great.

So that's the middle of your Bible.

We were sharing with young people on Thursday.

If you just open up your, if you have a new, if you have an old and new testament Bible, if you open up, it's usually going to end up in Proverbs, Psalms of Proverbs when you open it, and we always say, go to the right or go to the left.

So just go back to Proverbs in the middle of your Bible, um, chapter six, or Proverbs 6, not a chapter.

The sixth Proverb, verses 16 through 19.

Here are six things that God hates, and one more that he loaths with a passion.

Eyes that are arrogant, a tongue that lies, hands that murder the innocent, a heart that hatches evil plots, feet that race down a wicked track, a mouth that lies under oath, and a troublemaker in the family.

God hates that.

So, how do we do this?

How do we do this?

Sounds great, right?

This is the principle.

Now, practical.

Turn over your card.

Seven practical ways of resolving conflicts.

We're kind of blessed.

Let me just say this, that we have an all-staff training day.

We have all-staff training days once a month.

Anybody can come.

This last one I did it on the values of the kingdom as a staff team.

We had a really big turnout, which is great.

You're always welcome.

Any of you that are not even on staff, you can come.

It's always the first Tuesday of every month in the chapel.

So first Tuesday every month, we uh I train or vents, or one of us trains, but a lot of times it's me training on a particular area.

And we're gonna be dealing with this this next Tuesday, November 5th.

So in several weeks, November 5th, and we have Jerry Whites.

Jerry is a great guy.

He was involved, he's been involved in my life with being a he's a professional mediator.

So he's gonna be teaching on mediation uh starting at 10:30.

It's 10:30 to noon on November the 5th at the chapel.

So I want you guys to know about that.

So here's seven practical ways of resolving conflicts.

Number one, meet face to face.

So don't tell everybody that you're meeting face to face.

Unless you're saying, I've got some issues, I'm I need prayer as I go into this situation.

You don't have to give them the name, but some people do that.

I'm meeting with so-and-so.

Pray for me.

It's like almost like you're trying to build this army of people that support you over something, but rather just say, hey, and guys that are my intercessors, my personal intercessors, some of you in this church are.

You've got numerous times from me, I'm in a I'm in a conflicted situation, I need wisdom, I need prayer, but I don't give you any more information than that.

And so um, meet one-on-one.

Number two, we will not use email or texting for resolving conflicts.

Now, let me just say that.

Let me say this about that.

There's nothing wrong with texting someone real quickly because you had to, you know, you got you left the meeting, you had to go, but you were convicted on your way to work or something.

He said, I'm so sorry I said this.

Nothing wrong with that.

I would just say though.

That follows that up.

Follow that up with one-on-one and put your arm around the person and say, Man, I did not mean to say that.

I know I took it the wrong way, and I'm so sorry, and apologize.

And if it's just so much better to do it that way.

And by the way, let me say this: there's an advantage to being in this church also.

We're getting healthier marriages, it seems like.

Because many of you have said, Man, I after I did that, I realized I never do that with my husband or I never do that with my wife.

I'm going to start doing that.

And many of you have talked about how important that's been in your relationship with your spouse that you guys are following actually the biblical mandate to work through your anger this way.

Number three, we will not write a letter unless the person reads it during a face-to-face meeting.

So I know that that's a that's a popular way to deal with things.

I can tell you I've been the recipient of some letters through the years.

What do you do with a letter, man?

Will you write another letter?

You know, I'm reading this letter and it's like slamming me.

Just I'm getting slammed and everything.

I'm like, okay, great.

I remember one time I was with a counselor and I got this letter.

Here's where I got the letter.

I got the letter, which was probably 150-word letter, because I had because I'd given a gift to someone to the Broadmoor, my money, gave them a really nice gift to spend a night at the Broadmoor because of feeling bad about something in the past and asking for forgiveness, and I and I had already face to face asked for forgiveness.

Then I sent him a gift, and then I just get slammed with the gift back in there.

So I go to my counselor and said, dude, what do I do with this?

And he says, burn it.

So that's what I did.

So it was beautiful.

I still remember that.

It was a great feeling.

I mean, really, there's there's only so much you can do in some cases, right?

And then you gotta just move on.

Not everybody's gonna be that happy about you humbling yourself and asking for forgiveness.

So that's what you do, and that's you're responsible before God first, right?

So sometimes people do not, they're still bitter, and they can be bitter.

It's okay, let them be bitter.

But you don't have to kiss up too far.

I'm just saying that what the scripture says, you do your best, and if that person still isn't gonna receive that, then really you just have to move on.

And so that's what I did, and I'm having thought about it till today, about that letter until I read this, but I know that we did the best we could, Liz and I did.

Number four, we will use I messages, not you messages in communication.

Now, I'm I'm gonna encourage Jerry to cover this on November 5th because there's just so much here.

Number four is like loaded.

There's a lot to that.

How many are familiar with I and you messages?

Raise your hand if you're familiar with that form of communication.

Okay, that means over half of you are not.

So, in a nutshell, there's two ways we can communicate in a conflicted situation.

One is to is to say, you hurt me, and you did this, and you did that, and that is accusatory, right?

It puts the person on the defensive.

Not any person that I know of that's worth their salt as far as self-respect doesn't feel a bit self-defensive if someone says you did this and accuses you.

An I message, though, is saying, I felt you're owning the situation.

I felt hurt when you said this.

I felt abandoned when you took this stand.

In other words, you're owning it as your feelings because here's what it does: it opens up prayerfully, if there's a relationship there, with the other person to realize they hurt you.

But you're owning your own feelings.

You're owning, they may not at all have meant the way you took it.

And so it gives them the opportunity, a bridge is being built for there to be reconciliation.

Isn't that awesome?

So whoever came up with this in the counseling psychology world some 40 years ago, because I remember my mom teaching this in her parenting classes when I was a little kid.

I learned about I and you messages, man, since I was like five.

Now I don't do it very well, but I'm still learning.

Liz would be the first to tell you that I still need to grow in that.

She's actually better at it than me because she learned it later and me.

I just thought I knew it, and so I didn't do it.

But to be able to say, I felt hurt when you is a great skill.

I would just say, look up IU messages, just do a Google search, and there's there's great trainings out there to show you how to effectively use that.

But I'm gonna encourage Jerry to talk about that on Tuesday.

Again, that's Tuesday, November 5th at the chapel if you'd like to be a part of that.

Number five, we'll be willing to admit our error and contribution to a problem before speaking the truth about a conflict.

So, what we mean by that is to say, and Liz is always taught this too, to say, I know you didn't mean to insinuate this, or I know you didn't mean to hurt me, but I felt, and then you you share it.

So you take responsibility for the hurt you felt rather than blaming them for the hurt you felt.

Does that make sense?

So you're taking the humble road first, and always the hope, the hope is that that other other individual will say, Man, I didn't mean that, or I'm so sorry.

It was a bad day for me.

I was angry at work about something, and I took it out on you.

Please forgive me.

And it gives them the chance to ask for forgiveness.

Number six, we will choose to let the unity of love be our highest goal, not being right.

Now, this is really hard for men, and women too, but I mean it's really hard for men that we've got to be right, you know, and I'm just gonna say that in my opinion, sometimes right from your view is not the same right as my view.

So if we make the unity of love our highest goal, then we can have a relationship of reconciliation with each other that's beautiful.

And usually the relationship continuing to move on into the future means that we work all the right stuff out.

But if you have to be right right now while that person's hurt, sometimes becomes a huge roadblock and it can actually become a stronghold of the enemy.

And then number seven, we will forgive the other person even if all the issues are not completely worked out.

So, you know, my my perspective on all of this, church, is you you to be free.

I want you to walk in freedom.

I want you to walk in joy.

And um, man, there's a lot of people in this city that don't like me.

And I'm okay with that.

As far as I know, up to this day, I've done everything in my part to reconcile, to ask for forgiveness, and do things like that with people throughout who have issues with Steve Holt.

You know, I've been here 25 years.

There's gonna be a few.

I've taken some stands that have uh, you know, put me on the wrong side of certain people's view.

I'm okay with that.

You know, but I want to walk in freedom, right?

I want to walk in joy.

I want to be able to walk into any store, any church, any organization with my head up, knowing that I represent Christ there, and nobody's got anything on me.

And so I want to encourage you that way.

And if people have got stuff on you, do your part.

Be the first one out of the chute to work that out.

And then, you know, at that point, you've got to leave the consequences and the ramifications of that in the hands of that person and their relationship with God or lack of a relationship with God.

It's but you've done your best.

Does that make sense?

So that's what the that's what the covenant of harmony is.

It's a covenant of hope, it's a code of honor, it's honoring people.

And you know what's helped me more than anything else in the whole covenant of harmony thing is to say that we at the road want to pull out the gold out of every person and look past the dirt.

I'm gonna look past the dirt to see the gold.

And what we do in most religious organizations is we look at the dirt and we miss the gold.

I'm mining for gold around here.

How about you?

I want gold, and I'm telling you, every one of you guys know in this room that we come with baggage, right?

We all come with stuff.

Some of us come out of sexual abuse, some of us come out of abortion situations, some of us come out of divorces.

You know, everybody's carrying some pain, and so there's some dirt.

So we make a choice in all of our relationships up the road.

Are we gonna look for the gold or look for the dirt?

Because we're gonna see the dirt.

The dirt is going to show up.

And many times we don't see the gold.

Let's dig for the gold.

And let's overlook the dirt.

Be unoffendable.

Try to be an unoffendable person by looking for gold in every person, keeping a smile on your face, and sometimes people are gonna say stuff, it's gonna hurt your feelings, you're gonna that you're gonna rub you the wrong way, and you've got to forgive that.

Right?

And that's what the covenant of harmony is.

And then sometimes you actually need to meet and you need to talk about it.

And I've found over the years that oftentimes the very people that I have a conflict with that we go and talk about it become some of my closest friends later.

Because here's what happens when you do that, whether that person's willing to admit it at the time, a lot of times they won't admit it, but they trust you.

They trust you because they know you didn't talk to somebody else.

They know you didn't sit and gossip, but you actually came to them and you love them enough to pull out the goal by caring enough to say, I want to hear your side, and I'm so sorry, but I was hurt.

And uh, let's work it out because we've been given the ministry of reconciliation.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

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Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.