Acts - Conflict Conquered

Well, happy Memorial Day.

Hope you're having a good weekend.

I'm sure a lot of us have big plans for tomorrow.

We've got some big things coming up here at his hands, a couple in particular that I want to highlight.

June 29th, we've talked about it.

It's going to be a great Sunday here.

On the 29th, we've got a man named Paul Young that's going to be doing the message.

He wrote a book called The Shack several years ago, back in 2007, sold 10 million copies, and just really started a whole movement and helped a lot of people see God in a completely new way for the very first time.

It's going to be very exciting to have him here.

He's part of a conference that's going to be here that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday called the Beyond an Angry God Conference.

It's the first thing like this we've done, but it's going to have great worship every single night at every single session.

And then Paul and a few other authors will be speaking every single day.

We're excited to be part of it.

You can get tickets online for that, register online.

All the registration is online, but we've got a link on our website, on our app, and then at the Connect Desk, you can get some flyers.

And the first 500 people that do register online also get a free copy of the Beyond an Angry God book before it comes out.

So that's an exciting thing as well.

I want to just take a few seconds and let you know that we've got a few teams that could use a little bit of help.

Our coffee team that provides all the caffeine that we we need.

We run on the Holy Spirit in caffeine here.

That's what we need.

But it's our coffee team and our usher team.

And you know, I was thinking about it this morning that when I have someone come stay in my home, whether it's someone that's there for the very first time or it's family, we want our home to be prepared for that person.

We want to take some time and have everything ready because that's just love.

And that's what we want to have happen every single Sunday morning here.

When people come in, whether it's your first time or whether you've been here a thousand times before, if that's even possible, I haven't done the math, but no matter what, we want you to know that you're loved and we want to be prepared.

And so the coffee team gets here a little early.

They make sure all the coffee's ready to go.

The usher team's here a little early to make sure everyone knows where to go if they have questions.

And that's just loving people as they're being part of this place, being part of our family.

We need about 20 people on those teams combined.

And so if you could help on those teams, if this is your church and you haven't started helping out yet, man, those are great teams.

They make a big impact.

And you don't even have to give up Sundays.

You come a little bit early.

You still get to be part of the worship and everything else.

So sign up at the Connect Desk for that.

Only other thing before we pray and jump into what we're going to talk about is just a big thank you for helping us financially.

We've got four columns at the back of the room that you can give through, as well as our website and our mobile app.

You know, my wife and I give.

And we give for a few different reasons.

Number one, we recognize the practical need.

Uh we can't pay our bills here at the church with hugs and all that kind of stuff.

We could try.

I don't know if it would work, probably not, but there's a practical need.

This is a place just like all of our homes that has bills and has to be maintained.

And then above that, there's the recognition that we believe in the vision of this church.

We're excited about not only where this church has been, where it is, but we're excited about where it's going, and we want to support that.

We want to help that along.

But even above that, there's this thing between us and God.

And we just realize that everything we have, we have because of him.

Everything.

Every day, every moment, every dollar that we have, and we want to honor him with what we have.

And so, no matter no matter what it is that it helps you process that, just know that we trust you.

We don't pass a plate or anything like that, but we trust you to listen to the Holy Spirit and give whatever he leads you to give.

But know that when you do, he will bless you for it.

Because that's our dad.

All right, let's pray.

Jesus, thank you so much for uh for being everything that we need, for being a God that is a refuge, a God that we can run to.

And not run to with dignity, not run to with pride, but we can just abandon all of that and run to you and cry for your help when we need it, and wrap our arms around you and know that we are safe in your love.

Speak through your word this morning, Holy Spirit, speak to all of our hearts, and we ask this all in your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Well, we have been going through the book of Acts for the last month.

It's been really exciting.

Acts is really the gospel of the Holy Spirit.

You've got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are the gospels, and that's the story of God coming to this earth, doing some incredible things, then we get to see the aftermath.

And the book of Acts is the exact same way.

It is the gospel of the Holy Spirit.

God comes to earth in the form of the Holy Spirit, does some amazing things, and we get to see the aftermath.

What happens when God interacts with people?

And it turns out that amazing things happen.

We've seen some incredible things happen so far.

The church has experienced the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit has come in power.

The Holy Spirit's giving people gifts, and they're using those gifts, and people are coming to Jesus by the thousands.

People are being healed.

But there's conflict too.

It's not all easy, right?

There's persecution.

The leaders of the church are captured and thrown in prison and threatened.

Some of them are even killed.

Stephen, we talked about a few weeks ago, has been killed.

And there's fear.

The church has some obstacles to overcome, but so far, nothing has deterred what God is doing.

Nothing can.

We're blessed on this side of history to know that obviously we're all sitting here this morning.

So we know how the story ends.

The church grows, the church succeeds because the Holy Spirit is all over it.

But so far, all this conflict that's happened, it's all external conflict.

It's all outside forces, other people that are opposed to what God is doing, trying to stop what God is doing.

It's a fruitless endeavor, but people still try.

This morning, though, we get to see what happens when that conflict becomes internal for the very first time.

The church has been in kind of a honeymoon phase at this point.

There's all this conflict, but it's them against the world, and no matter what happens, it just brings them closer together.

They're just more in love with one another.

But we all know, those of us that are married or have been married, that real marriage starts when the honeymoon ends.

And when you realize, oh wow, we are two different people who value different things, and we've got to figure out a way how to work together if we're gonna move forward.

The honeymoon always has to end, but that's okay because that's when real relationship starts.

My wife and I celebrated our nine-year anniversary earlier this week.

I'm sure we're the yeah.

Those of you clapping, I never know if it's because, you know, wow, you can't believe we've made it this far.

Or because you've been married much longer and you're like, oh wow, just wait.

All right, nine years.

Good for you.

You never know.

And we had a pretty awesome honeymoon phase.

We got married young, I was 21, my wife was 20.

We didn't have any money, but we didn't need money, right?

We had love.

You don't need money when you have love.

We had a tiny apartment.

I mean, this thing was was absolutely tiny, but we didn't need space.

We didn't want to be more than two feet away from each other at all times at first.

That's how it goes, right?

You're married a few years, you're like, we need space.

I need, I need space.

Not from you, but just yeah.

And for the first several months, it was just fun.

It was just this honeymoon phase, and it was great.

And it's amazing sometimes the small things that that can end the honeymoon.

The small things that can turn into a conflict, an internal struggle and a fight.

For my wife and I, it was something that that may be honestly one of the most unimportant things that I can imagine in life.

It was a plunger.

That is what ended our honeymoon phase.

I told this story here before, but I think it was like five years ago.

So I guess it's okay to tell it again.

But but basically what happened is when we got married, we moved into our apartment and we did not have a plunger.

No one got us one for our wedding shower.

I don't know why.

I guess no one wants to be the friend that says, You're gonna need this, trust me.

We didn't get a we didn't get a plunger, and so I went to Walmart and I bought one.

I found this this royal blue bellows plunger.

Those are the ones that look like accordions, and I brought it home, and I took it out of the bag to put into the bathroom, and Megan saw me with it, and she looked at me and she had this really weird look on her face, and I just kind of looked at her and said, Well, what's wrong?

And she pointed to the plunger and said, It's ugly.

And see, I hadn't been married more than a few days, and so I wasn't aware, A, that they made cute plungers, B that plungers are supposed to be decorative items.

Maybe you you use them as a centerpiece when you have dinner guests.

I don't know.

You know?

That's my thing, and I'm like, I'm beside myself, I looked at Megan and said, it's a plunger.

Its purpose in life is not to be cute.

No one should ever see this if we do things correctly.

And so we we kind of agreed to disagree, and several months went by.

It turns out it's wintertime, about midnight in Kansas City, Missouri, that's where we live.

Very cold in Kansas City, and our toilet is overflowing.

I run in and I stop the water to it, but obviously there's a clog, something's going on, and I looked at Megan and said, Can you give me the plunger?

And again, she has this weird look on her face.

So I asked her, What's going on?

What's wrong?

And she said, Well, we don't have it anymore.

And I'm confused at this point, I'm like, What could happen to a plunger?

Right?

You buy one plunger, you have it 30 years later.

That's they've only produced like 300 plungers in the last decade.

You don't need to buy new ones.

I said, What happened?

She said, Well, I put it in the trash.

I said, Why?

She said, Well, it was dirty.

And again, I'm I'm it's a plunger, right?

That's its whole purpose in life.

It's supposed to be dirty.

It's like the one thing in your home that is supposed to be dirty, and that's okay.

You don't throw a plunger away because it's dirty.

And things got kind of heated.

I went on the offensive.

I knew she had it out for that plunger from the very beginning.

I knew that.

You know?

And Megan got defensive.

And I remember at the pinnacle of our fight, she looked at me and said, Well, actually, it's your fault we don't have it.

And I'm like, how is that possible?

And she said, Well, I put it in the trash, but you're the one that puts the trash in the dumpster, so you threw it away.

And that was a great day because number one, I learned two things that day, two very important things.

Number one, we're two different people who value very different things.

She values form over function even with a plunger.

Number two, I learned you cannot win an argument with a woman.

You can't do it.

You can't.

So just stop.

So it was at that moment when she made that comment that I stopped talking, I went to Walmart, I bought the same exact plunger.

Same exact one.

It's awesome.

Haven't seen it in years, but I bought it.

And obviously, we look back at that situation and we laughed.

It didn't take very long for us to look back at that and laugh.

It was silly and ridiculous, but it highlighted that hey, we're two people.

We value very different things.

And if this marriage is gonna work, we're gonna have to figure out plungers and a lot of other things so we can move forward, so we can grow.

And that's relationship.

That is real relationship.

And this morning we get to Acts chapter 15.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

And in Acts 15, the honeymoon phase kind of ends for the church, and they're faced with their first internal conflict, their first internal struggle.

And it all started because of this amazing thing that God did.

Ken talked about it last week.

God brought a lot of Gentiles into the church.

It started with Cornelius and his family and his household, and it basically sparked this flood of Gentiles coming into the church.

Now, at that time, the church had been 100% Jewish.

Christianity began under the umbrella of Judaism.

And so Peter and John went to the temple when they were going to teach.

They still observed all the laws.

But all of a sudden, you have all these Gentiles coming in mass quantities into the church.

And in some areas, there's more Gentiles that are becoming Christians than there are Jews.

And this creates some problems.

Because the Jews and Gentiles don't exactly mix like at all.

They don't mix at all.

They lived completely different lifestyles.

The Jews have one God, and they follow that God by adhering to a very strict moral code.

The Gentiles have too many gods to count.

And compared to the Jews, their moral lifestyle was just unacceptable.

They have these wildly different standards for life.

And on top of that, the Jews just did not even have it in their minds that God would even want the Gentiles to be part of his church.

It's been said before that the Jews saw the Gentiles as straw to be burned, while Jesus saw them as a harvest waiting to be reaped.

So the Jews didn't send missionaries to places where people had never heard about their God.

They didn't think about, hey, how can we make, how can we make our synagogues more accessible to people that don't know who our God is?

That wasn't a part of their thinking.

They were completely fine with them being in and everyone else being out.

That was their identity.

And it was their identity because God had chosen them.

He said, You're my people.

You are my people.

You belong to me.

But over time, the Jews got a little bit confused.

That got twisted.

And not only did they think they belonged to God, but they believed God belonged to them.

And he was to be hoarded, he was to be kept for themselves.

God had other plans.

And so all these Gentiles begin to come into the church, and what happens naturally is that a lot of the Jews see that this is happening, and these people have gifts from the Holy Spirit, so they can't deny that God is doing this.

But what they begin to do is tell these new Gentile Christians, you've got to become Jewish too.

You've got to follow the law.

You've got to start adhering to our customs.

Men, you've got to get circumcised.

And that is a tough pill to swallow for a grown man.

It just is.

And so there's all this confusion.

What's going on here?

How do we do this?

See, in the Jewish people's minds, first you had to convert to Judaism, then you could convert to Christianity.

You had to convert twice.

And Paul is not happy about this at all.

Paul's furious.

He's really the one that is leading the charge with bringing Gentiles into the church.

And when he sees this going on in some of the churches that he started, he's not going to stand for it.

He makes his opinion very, very clear in Galatians chapter 2, verses 4 and 5.

Galatians 2:4

He says, even that question, the question of circumcision, the question of following the law, came up only because of some so-called Christians.

I love that.

He doesn't pull any punches.

False ones, really, who were secretly brought in.

They sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus.

They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations.

But we refused to give in to them even for a single moment.

We wanted to preserve the truth of the gospel message for you.

And if that doesn't make it clear exactly how Paul felt, Galatians 5.12 takes it a step further.

He says, why don't these agitators, obsessive as they are about circumcision, go all the way and castrate themselves?

Diplomacy was Paul's thing.

He was a very diplomatic.

How do I defuse this situation?

Castration.

That's what I'll bring up.

There you go.

It's always awkward to talk about on a stage.

But anyway, Paul is very clear in his stance.

His solution is for the Gentiles to keep doing what they're doing, and for the Jews just to go away.

Go away, leave them alone.

And it's not surprising that his position doesn't bring resolution to the issue.

And so Paul and Barnabas and the leaders of the early church in these Gentile areas travel, make this incredibly long journey to Jerusalem to get this matter resolved.

They're going to go to the leaders of the church in Jerusalem.

They're going to bring up this situation and say, hey, make a decision so we can take this back to our churches.

And before we get into what actually happens in Acts 15, I want to pause here for a second because this is important.

Paul, Barnabas, these leaders in the early church, the leaders in Jerusalem as well, understood that this conflict had to be resolved.

They're not pretending like it's just going to go away.

They're not waiting for the conflict just to sort of sort itself out.

They understand that this conflict has to be met head-on.

It has to be dealt with proactively and aggressively.

And sometimes in life, one of the hardest things to do is just face conflict.

To just deal with it.

It is so much easier, and oftentimes it seems like it would be so much better to simply avoid it.

We see conflict so often as something we avoid at all costs, but man, the ability to handle conflict and the ability to deal with it correctly is a skill that will bring us as much success in our marriages, in our jobs, in our relationships, in our spiritual lives as anything.

They dealt with the conflict directly and head on.

They dealt with it like Jesus would.

In John chapter 18, Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.

John 18 · chapter mention

And he's about to be arrested.

He knows what's going to happen.

In John 18, 4, it says Jesus fully realized all that was going to happen to him.

So he stepped forward to meet them, to meet the men who were coming to arrest him.

I know I've shared that in here before.

The first time I read that and saw that, that Jesus fully realized the torture, the humiliation, the cross, the death, everything.

Totally understood what was about to happen.

And what does he do?

He stands up and he goes out to meet them.

He faces conflict head on.

I got chills when I realized that for the first time.

I'm like, that's my Jesus.

That's amazing.

And Jesus met that conflict, and his solution was love.

He didn't go to these soldiers to fight them.

He could have.

He didn't go to get in an argument with them.

The only thing he even does to any of the soldiers that show up is heal one of them.

But Jesus faced conflict head on.

That's what Paul and Barnabas are going to do.

Conflict is just not something to be avoided.

We can try to avoid conflict in our lives, we can try to skirt around it.

We can try to pretend like things will just work themselves out.

But God wants to fill us with His Holy Spirit and give us the ability to face any conflict that comes our way and get past it and handle it.

And handle it with love.

He started several companies.

One of them is MollyMade.

You might be familiar with MollyMade.

See the cars that drive around.

But he's got several companies that he runs.

And he's kind of known as someone who has this amazing ability to keep several different companies going at one time and for all of them to be doing well.

And he was asked what his secret was.

How do you do this?

How do you manage all these different companies?

And he said, Well, I have one rule.

And that rule is that anyone who works for me cannot come to me with the problem they have with someone else until they've gone to that person first.

In other words, he says, if you want to work for me and be successful, you cannot avoid conflict.

You cannot avoid conflict with someone and come to me to deal with it for you.

You have to deal with it head on.

He's just taking a page right out of the Bible.

In Matthew 18, Jesus said, if another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense.

If the other person listens and confesses that you have won that person back, but if you are unsuccessful, take one or two others with you and go back again, so that everything you say may be confirmed by two or three witnesses.

If the person still refuses to listen, take your case to the church.

Then if he or she won't accept the church's decision, treat that person as a pagan or a corrupt tax collector.

So Jesus says, if you have conflict in your life, deal with it.

And if that doesn't fix it, deal with it again.

And if that still doesn't fix it, deal with it one more time.

But he says, hey, when you see conflict come up, go to it.

Handle it directly.

And I don't know what kind of conflict we're all going through this morning, but I imagine there is some.

Either in marriage, in your workplace, for our students, it might be school, it might be decisions that you're making.

Maybe the conflict is with yourself.

That's the strangest and most difficult kind, right?

In Romans 7, Paul wrote, I don't really understand myself.

For I want to do what's right, but I don't do it.

Instead, I do what I hate.

That whole section of Romans has always stood out to me because I understand that.

I don't get why I am the way that I am.

God, why can't I seem to move past this?

Why do I keep doing this over and over again?

Why do I keep bringing up the plunger over and over again in all these fights?

I'm joking, I don't, I'm not that dumb.

But I don't get myself sometimes.

And so there's an internal conflict and an internal struggle.

When I'm having conflict with myself, what do I do?

Do I just pretend that it goes away?

And Jesus would say, No.

Deal with it, face it head on.

The same is true in our spiritual lives.

In Genesis chapter 4, Cain was walking a really dangerous line with sin and temptation.

Genesis 4 · chapter mention

And God told him to face it head on.

Why are you so angry?

The Lord asked Cain.

Why do you look so dejected?

You will be accepted if you do what's right.

But if you refuse to do what's right, then watch out.

Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you.

But you must subdue it and be its master.

So he says, Hey, Satan is going to bring conflict your way.

Temptation is going to come.

You can't run from it.

You can't avoid it.

You need to subdue it and be its master.

Now, things did not work out very well for Cain.

None of us have the ability to subdue Satan, to beat sin.

But here's the thing: we have Jesus.

And Jesus has already subdued Satan.

And that's something that I forget so often.

Satan is fighting us with a charade.

He has already been defeated.

So when he comes to you with temptation, when there's a conflict spiritually, he's already lost.

And through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can subdue temptation.

We can have complete and total victory over sin.

Because the Holy Spirit has already won that battle.

But what we can't do is avoid conflict.

There's this really incredible business book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

And I've never read it, but there's a there's this thing in it that uh that my friend showed me.

His name's Steve, and it blew my mind.

He said, hey, look, these five things you have to have if you're gonna have results.

Well, results is one of the five.

So these four things you have to have if you're gonna get to results: trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability.

Steve was showing this to us who are on the full-time team here several years ago, saying, hey, you need to become a good team.

And he noticed that we like to avoid conflict with one another.

Just let that person deal with what they deal with, I'll deal with what I deal with, and we won't fight about it if we have disagreements.

And he said, no, no, conflict is a good thing.

I'd never heard that before.

He said, conflict's a good thing, because if you can't have conflict, you really can't know how committed the other people are.

And if you don't have commitment, you can't have accountability.

And if you don't have those things, you'll never see the results.

Paul was living his life with this result in mind.

He writes that he had his eye on the prize.

And in Colossians, he goes into more detail.

In Colossians 1:28, he says, so we tell others about Christ, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all the wisdom God has given us.

Colossians 1:28

We want to present them to God, perfect in their relationship with Christ.

I love that.

I was praying with Cindy and Tim a few minutes ago, and Tim mentioned not wanting people just get to heaven by the skin of their teeth, and that's what Paul's saying.

He's like, I don't want people just to barely get there with you, Jesus.

I want them to be able to be presented to you as complete, as mature.

That's what I'm striving for.

And he says, that's why I work and struggle so hard.

Struggle, there's conflict, depending on Christ's mighty power that works within me.

Depending on the Holy Spirit.

And so, no matter what conflict you're dealing with this morning, the challenge is for our eyes to be on the result.

What is that result in your life that you can't take your eyes off of?

Maybe it's a healthy marriage, maybe it's saving the marriage that you're in.

Maybe it's finding someone to marry, maybe it's getting a promotion, maybe it's getting a job.

Maybe it's something in a relationship with God.

You want to go to a place with God you've never been before.

But if your eye is on a result that is important to you, and here's the thing: if it's important to you, guess what?

It's important to God.

He's your dad and he loves you.

But if your eye is on that result, you will overcome any conflict that comes your way.

Because you've got to get to that result.

You've got to experience that.

And Paul understood that.

Jesus understood that.

The leaders of the early church understood that.

So when conflict shows up, they don't back away, they don't avoid it, they go right at it.

As bold as Paul is, his solution of the Jews just going away isn't the solution that the church goes with.

He's not the one that figures that out.

That actually belonged to James.

James was the leader of the early church.

And so when we get to Acts 15, James is the one that's in charge in Jerusalem.

And he's best known as being Jesus' brother.

A lot of pressure there.

My little brother's here from out of town this morning.

He didn't quite grow up with that much pressure, you know.

Just got to live up to Jesus.

What is that even like?

When James was an adult and Jesus began his ministry, Jesus left home and began teaching and telling other people who he was.

James did not follow.

He wasn't a disciple of Jesus.

In fact, on one occasion, he tried to stop Jesus from teaching.

And you can understand why.

You can imagine the kind of strain it would have put on Jesus' family as he's going around, he's causing all this kind of controversy.

He's turning their whole world upside down, the attention that they must have gotten as his family.

So James and some of the other brothers go to him one day and say, Stop, stop what you're doing.

And Jesus says, I can't.

Because my eye is on the result.

I'm working to save everyone from the consequences of sin.

So I'm sorry that there's conflict between the two of us, but I can't stop.

I won't.

After Jesus' death and resurrection, James becomes a follower of Jesus and obviously a passionate one.

He's the leader of the early church.

And we don't know how that happened.

We know in 1 Corinthians, after he was resurrected, it says, then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles.

We get to see what happened with the apostles.

We have no idea what took place between Jesus and James.

It's a private moment between brothers, but it must have been powerful.

It must have been personal.

So James is the leader of the church.

He's had this amazing experience with Jesus.

And this problem, this Jews versus Gentiles problem, and how is all this going to work out comes to James and he can see both sides of it.

He was very well respected among the Jews, but he understood that Jesus was not coming, so things would just be done like they had always been done before.

It was a new covenant, it was new wine.

So James comes up with this solution through the Holy Spirit, through the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

And it's an amazing one.

We see it in Acts chapter 15, starting in verse 13.

Acts 15 · chapter mention

It says, When they had finished, James stood and said, Brothers, listen to me.

Peter has told you about the time God first visited the Gentiles and took and to take from them a people for himself.

And this conversion of Gentiles is exactly what the prophets predicted, as it is written, afterward I will return and restore the fallen house of David.

I will rebuild its ruins and restore it, so that the rest of humanity might seek the Lord, including the Gentiles, all those I have called to be mine.

And stop for a second and just realize that God has called you to be your, to be His.

He has called you by name to be His.

That's oh, okay.

Sorry.

I love you, Jesus.

The Lord has spoken, He who made these things known so long ago.

And so my judgment is that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.

Instead, we should write and tell them to abstain from eating food offered to idols, from sexual immorality, from eating the meat of strangled animals, and from consuming blood.

For these laws of Moses have been preached in Jewish synagogues and every city on every Sabbath for many generations.

So James finds this compromise.

To the Jews, he says, Hey, you need to love the Gentiles.

Don't put a burden on them that you yourselves have never been able to carry.

You need to love them and not make it too hard for them.

But then he says to the Gentiles, hey, you've got to live right.

Your life has to reflect a change.

You have to live in a way that shows people you are a new creation.

Your old life is gone.

And he says to all of them, hey, if you will love and live right, there will be peace.

There will be unity.

James valued unity above all else.

Jesus had said in Matthew chapter 5, God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

James was a peacemaker.

So this conflict comes to him, and what does he value?

He values the same thing that God values family.

Being together, being united by a love for Jesus.

No matter what the differences are, no matter what the backgrounds are, he says, if you love Jesus and you're willing to love one another and live right, we'll have unity.

And this decision is wildly successful.

In fact, Paul takes the decision back to the church that this is going on.

And he reads it, and in verse 31, it says, There was great joy throughout the church that day as they read this encouraging message.

One translation says that the Gentiles were comforted by this message, especially the men.

That's right.

I know.

Alright, I'll stop that.

James valued unity.

And if he hadn't, the church that day would have split in two.

We would have had the Jewish church and the Gentile church.

And obviously, we're 2,000 years later, so we know that there's been one or a thousand church splits in the last few millennia.

But I have to stop for just a second and talk about us as a church.

I've been a part of this church for seven years, a little bit over that, and I love this church.

And one of the things that blows me away about his hands is that in seven years, I've never seen a power struggle.

I've never seen politics.

I've never seen a rift that's torn us apart as a church ever.

And I think that's for a few reasons.

I think, on one hand, there's no platform available here.

There's no one that gets a little more famous every Sunday except for Jesus.

No one's name goes on the front of the building, no one has a title.

There's no one trying to get Twitter followers or anything like that.

The only person we want to have more followers every Sunday is Jesus.

That is it.

And it will always be like that.

Always.

And that's a very good thing.

But I think even more than that, the reason that that's how this place is is because God has blessed us with you, with people that understand love and unity.

Because I know we come from very different backgrounds.

Very, very different backgrounds.

And we all have very different strengths, very different tendencies.

I know some incredible leaders in this church who could start their own thing and it be wildly successful and go in a very different direction than the direction we're going in now.

I know a lot of people like that.

And I see those people put that stuff aside for the purpose of going together in the same direction.

And that's exactly what Paul did because we knew what his stance was when he went to Jerusalem.

And that is not the decision that was made, but he went with it.

He delivered that letter.

He didn't say, well, hey, if that's what's going to happen, I'm done.

And because he was willing to put his strong opinion aside for the sake of going in the same direction, the church was healed.

It's the difference between having a bunch of horses and having a chariot.

There's a reason in the Old Testament when they would talk about a war that the Israelites were about to face.

That they would number the chariots that the opposing force had.

A chariot was a sign of strength.

Because if you get a bunch of war horses and they're all going in the same direction for the same purpose, that is a powerful thing.

That is something I feel like we have been blessed with at this church.

Amazing people, strong people that could all go in different directions and do fine, but together going in one direction, there is no limit what God can do.

There's just no limit to that.

And I'm excited to see what he's going to do.

And I know that there's big things on the horizon soon.

I know we're going places as a church we've never been before.

I can't wait for that.

But I can't wait for it because I know that we're going to go there together.

And there will be conflict.

There'll be lots of it because Satan's a jerk.

But there won't be one bit of trouble that he stirs up.

I don't care if it's financial trouble.

I don't care if we have a roof that needs replaced.

It's expensive.

Who cares?

Our dad can handle it.

It doesn't matter what conflict, what trouble Satan brings our way, if we are a group of people who love Jesus, willing to love one another and live right, willing to stand side by side and go in the same direction, there's no limit.

And I'll tell you why.

As we wrap up and worship team, if you want to come back up, it's because we have an incredible result in our eyesight.

We exist as a church to love people to Jesus.

Not to tell people about Jesus, not just to point to Jesus, but we exist to love people to Jesus.

This is a place where people need to come and get love, grow love, and give love.

And it's funny, sometimes love in religion gets talked about like it's the easy thing.

Like, yeah, yeah, love.

When are we gonna get past love?

Never.

There will never be a Sunday that we don't talk and remind one another that we are loved by God.

It will never ever happen.

Because love's not the easy thing.

The law, that's the easy stuff.

What's easier?

Not having an affair with your wife or loving your wife the way Christ loves the church.

Which one's easier?

It's the law.

Love's the thing that we need encouraged about, spurred on about.

We need to help each other with.

So we have this incredible vision, this thing that's a result that we're working toward, and that is every single person, every single human being that lives within a reasonable distance of this place, walking around every day of their life, knowing that they're the loved son or daughter of God.

That is what we're working toward.

Every single person.

And whatever conflict Satan brings our way, who cares?

We'll just be a chariot that storms right through it.

Because that's important.

We'll finish with one verse.

Romans 8 37.

Paul wrote, in all these things, all these conflicts, all these struggles, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

In other words, whatever your struggle is in life right now, whatever you're afraid about, worried about, anxious about, it's already been won.

It's done.

It's already been won.

Just be excited about how it's going to happen, but know that it's going to happen.

Jesus has already won that struggle for you.

Whatever struggles we face as a church, they've already been won.

It's done.

We are more than conquerors because we have Jesus and He has won.

Let's pray together.

Jesus, thank you so much.

Thank you so much for the love that you have given to each of us.

Thank you, God, for a family that loves one another like this family does.

Jesus, I pray that you fill all of us with a boldness and a courage to face whatever conflict life throws our way, head on, to stand up and walk toward it like you did, Jesus.

To walk toward it with love, to have our eyes on the results that we're living for, and to know that you're with us every step of the way.

It's through your spirit that we're going to be victorious over everything, Jesus.

And we thank you for that.

We love you.

Amen.