Resolving Conflict

   All of us, whether young or young at heart, married or single, mother or not, will encounter conflict in our lives. The way we handle conflict becomes either an amazing opportunity to give God glory in how it is resolved, or a thorn in our side that we struggle to get right.

Many of the hurts of my past resulted in a great deal of conflict in my life. And all of you have had events in your life, both negative and positive, that have shaped your ability to resolve conflict and more importantly, your willingness to do so.

Proverbs 11:2 says Pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.

What are some of the things in our lives that cause conflict?  There are many, but here are just a few:

• Insecurity – (Whether our own insecurity or someone else’s, it can cause major problems.)
• Misunderstanding  - (Sometimes we simply misunderstand someone’s intention.)
• Satan’s plan of division – (Why wouldn’t he cause conflict & division? He’s masterful at it).
• Exhaustion – (When we are doing too much, too often, and not resting, conflict arises.)

 All of us will face misunderstandings or exhaustion and many have dealt with insecurity, so, what do we do to resolve these conflicts well?

Issue grace.  – Most of us would rather receive grace than issue it. It’s easier for us to see all the reasons why God should give us grace, because our heart is good and we’re good people and we didn’t mean to fail Him – than it is for us to see the good in others and just give them a break.  Maybe they are completely unreasonable. And maybe you are completely right. But it’s so important for us to look at how we can maintain and mend relationships than how we can be right.  (Ephesians 4:3 – Make every effort to keep yourselves united in Spirit, binding yourselves together in peace.)

Take your offense directly to the person. (See Matthew 18:15.) Friends, it is unfair to assume others in our lives know what we are hurt about, when we don’t talk to them about it. And it is even more unfair to discuss it with others when you haven’t discussed it with them. And we do both. Don’t gossip about it. Don’t fester about it. Take it to them in love. And when you take it to them, take it to them in hopes of resolution with a pure heart - not in hopes that you can convince them how right you are.

Speak life over the situation. The power of life and death are in the tongue. (Prov. 18:21)  Most of us are church girls/boys, men/women. We get it. We understand about keeping our tongue in line with God’s word. Yet, we struggle to do so. When we want to resolve conflict, we must speak honor over those we are in relationship with. If you think you can speak negatively about your friend, your brother, your sister, your pastor, your boss, your Bible study leader, and NOT grow division in your heart, you are wrong.  Wouldn’t our lives be so much better if we could just watch our mouths?  Never make light of the king, even in your thoughts. And don’t make fun of the powerful, even in your own bedroom. For a little bird might deliver your message and tell them what you have said. (Ecclesiastes 10:20)

Battle your thoughts.  Philippians 4:8 says to fix our thoughts on whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.  You cannot keep playing in your mind over and over and over what they said, what they did, an expect resolution. You cannot keep negative thoughts from coming into your mind. But it is your choice what you do with them, when they get there.

Friends, we are all armor bearers of something. Whether it’s your spouse, a friendship, your pastor, your boss, a ministry you are passionate about, your kids --- you are championing the cause for something and someone. And as such, you must begin to see yourself as mightily carrying the armor for someone else in your life to complete their mission – just as there are those in your life bearing armor for you.

What’s at stake if we don’t battle well? Rest assured, the conflict will grow. It becomes bigger than it ever needed to be. It shapes us. We become bitter, anger, and offended and no one can stand to be around us, instead of humble and graceful and strong. And we will also be so distracted with the conflict that we don’t focus on fulfilling our purpose. How could we be busy about our Father’s business, when we’re telling anyone who will listen about our conflict?

Let’s decide today that we are going to be problem solvers, not problem seekers. And when conflict does seek us out, we’ll be strong women/men of God who see it for what it is and determine in our hearts that we’ll overcome it with God’s help.

God bless you.

Encountering Misguided Prophecies: When to Say No to a Thus Saith The Lord

Twenty-three-year-old George Whitefield sat on a ship ready to sail for America from the port of Deal, located approximately 70 miles southeast of London. For some time, he had experienced a compelling call to preach the gospel to colonial America and now the day for his departure had finally arrived. His heart was filled with gratitude, excitement and expectation.

As he waited for the ship's crew to hoist anchor and sail, a letter was delivered to him from John Wesley who had just returned from a failed mission to Georgia. He opened the letter and was stunned by what he read. Wesley wrote that when he saw that the same wind that brought him in was taking Whitefield out, he inquired of the Lord about Whitefield's journey. Wesley emphatically stated that the word God gave him for Whitefield was, "Let him return to London."

Whitefield was shocked and momentarily confused. Wesley was 10 years his senior and had been a mentor to him. He held the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, in very high esteem. However, this word from John contradicted everything he believed about his call to America.

Whitefield went to prayer, and as he prayed, there came to his mind a story from the Old Testament about a "man of God" who lost his life because he listened to the words of an "old prophet" instead of diligently adhering to what God had instructed him.

I Kings 13 tells this story of the unnamed "man of God" whom God instructed to go to Bethel and prophesy against the idolatrous altars that had been established there by King Jeroboam. God also instructed him not to stop to eat or drink but to return directly home to Judah when he had completed his assignment.

Based on this directive from the Lord, he went to Bethel. As he prophesied against the idolatrous altars, they miraculously split apart, and the ashes were poured out on the ground. As he departed Bethel according to the Lord's instructions, an "old prophet," who heard of what had happened, saddled his donkey, caught up with the "man of God" and invited him to his home to eat and drink.

When the "man of God" recounted to the "old prophet" what the Lord had instructed him, the "old prophet" said, "'I am a prophet like you, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the Lord, saying, 'Bring him back with you into your house so that he may eat bread and drink water'" (1 Kings 13:18). The "old prophet," however, was lying.

The "man of God" went back with the "old prophet" in contradiction to the instructions the Lord had given him; and as a result of his disobedience, he lost his life and was not buried in the burial ground of his ancestors.

With this story so vividly impressed on his mind, Whitefield knew what he must do. He sent back a reply to Wesley in which he said, "I cannot return to London." Whitefield said no to Wesley's "thus saith the Lord."

History has demonstrated that Whitefield made the correct decision, for he became the major figure in the Great Awakening that rocked Colonial America and prepared her for statehood. Everywhere he went, great revival followed his preaching.

Because of God's blessing on his labors, he became the most recognizable person in colonial America and Thomas S. Kidd, who teaches history at Baylor University, calls him "America's Spiritual Founding Father."

We can all be thankful that Whitefield said no to Wesley's "thus saith the Lord."
I pray that God will helps us to always take the right decision[s] at all time in Jesus name. Amen...! 

Pasted from: Charisma Magazine.

God bless you.

The Flesh

   If a man or woman does not know himself/herself or who he/she truly is, nine out of ten times, he will take the wrong decision. That is why spiritual knowledge is very crucial.

Who Are You?

   Do you know who you are? Do you know why you do the things that you do? Do you know why you respond to situations the way that you respond? Do you know why you get angry? Do you know why you don’t get angry? Do you know why you make the choices you make? Do you know what motivates your life?

 

If you don’t know who you are, nine out of ten times, you will take the wrong decisions. And if somebody keeps taking the wrong decision, his life can never make any progress.

    As a reminder,  man is - spirit - soul and body.  The body, which is known as the FLESH, is the outer part. Let us use an egg as an illustration; an egg is made up of three parts, the shell, albumen (the white matter) and the yoke. The real life is inside the yoke. But the shell is necessary as a house ,case container for the yoke and the albumen, once you break the shell, the egg is finished you don’t have an egg anymore. Once the shell is broken, the shell has finished its work, it is thrown away, it can’t be used again for the same purpose.

   That is the way the body of a human is once this flesh is destroyed, once it is broken, the spirit man and the soul goes out, and we say or hear,  a man is dead. But while the man is alive, his flesh has the capacity to suffocate the spirit-man and suffocate the soul. However, whatever God is going to do in any life, God is going to work through the spirit.

   Therefore, your flesh must be submissive; your flesh must be broken . The resistance and the sinfulness that is in the flesh must be destroyed. When people do terrible things, they smoke, they commit adultery, they tell lies, and they gamble, it is not the devil, it is the flesh. When people gossip, slander, harbour unforgiveness, or are malicious, it is not Satan, it is the flesh.

   There are people whose lives are controlled by the flesh. They never mind their own business, it is not the devil, it is the flesh. There are people who bear grudge, they are so stingy, so selfish, some are so self-centred, and yet some are so proud; for some they crave for recognition and unless you give them, there will be trouble. It is not Lucifer, it is the flesh. If the flesh is what is controlling a life; the person is going to have a hard life. You will be wondering why people don’t like you, you will wonder why wherever you go people seem to resist you, and you will wonder why you pray, and it never get answered. What some people do is that they transfer the responsibility of their personal weakness to a devil. Some transfer it to an invisible and imaginary enemy and some churches encourage them by teaching them to pray: “All the enemies of my life, all the enemies of my progress, all the enemies in the village, all the enemies in Lagos.”

   The bitter truth is, there is no enemy anywhere; you are the enemy of yourself

If you don’t know yourself, you will not face reality, you will keep blaming other peole. It is unfortunate, there are a lot of Christians who blame everybody under the sun but themselves, but in actual fact, they are the problem of themselves.

   Many claim ancestors who are supposed to be sleeping in peace inside the grave are responsible for their problem.  Some will say they are going to break ‘ancestral covenants’.  which they believe are the ones that keep troubling them every time.What has ancestral covenants got to do with you?

   “They say it is something in the village that the ancestors used to worship...  The scriptures say, “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation, old things are passed away.” Whatever your ancestors worshipped, he has died with it. If you chose not to worship that thing, it cannot exercise dominion over you. It can’t.  It is what you surrender yourself to that can have dominion over you. So if you surrender yourself to anger, anger will have dominion over you, if submit yourself to unforgiveness, unforgiveness will have dominion over you. If you submit yourself to adultery, adultery will control your life, when you surrender yourself to drinking; drinking of alcohol will control your life. The bible says, “Whoever you yield your members to, the servant you are” if you submit to a man, then you become the servant of that person... (to be continued)

God bless you.

The Present-Day Christian and His Emotions

 In some Christian circles, repressing or disavowing authentic emotions is considered a virtue or perhaps even a gift of Spirit. Denying anger, ignoring pain, skipping over depression, running from loneliness, and avoiding doubt are not only considered normal but actually virtuous ways of living out one’s spiritual life.

But this is not the model we find in Jesus, who freely expressed his emotions without shame or embarrassment:

• He shed tears (Luke 19:41).
• He was filled with joy (Luke 10:21).
• He felt overwhelmed with grief (Mark 14:34).
• He was angry and distressed (Mark 3:5).
• He was sorrowful and troubled (Matthew 26:37).
• His heart was moved with compassion (Luke 7:13).
• He expressed amazement (Mark 6:6, Luke 7:9).

Jesus was anything but an emotionally frozen Messiah.

In Gethsemane, we see a fully human Jesus—anguished, sorrowful, and spiritually overwhelmed. He is pushed to the extremes of his human limits: “and being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44).

So, we must ask ourselves: Where did we get the idea that acknowledging and expressing authentic emotion is somehow less than spiritual? And why do we believe that we can—or somehow should—grow in spiritual maturity without simultaneously growing in emotional maturity?

And then there’s the example of Job:

After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his

birth. He said:

“May the day of my birth perish,

and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived!’

That day—may it turn to darkness;

may God above not care about it;

may no light shine on it.

May gloom and utter darkness claim it once more. . . .

If only my anguish could be weighed

and all my misery be placed on the scales!

It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—no

wonder my words have been impetuous.

The arrows of the Almighty are in me,

my spirit drinks in their poison;

God’s terrors are marshaled against me.”

(Job 3:1—5a; 6:1—4)

Job was one of the richest men in the world in his day. In contemporary terms, his assets would have included a fleet of Rolls-Royces, private airplanes, yachts, thriving global companies, and significant real estate holdings. “He was the greatest man among all the people of the East” (Job 1:3). After a series of natural disasters, however, something unthinkable happens—Job is reduced to poverty and his ten children are killed in a terrible natural disaster. When he attempts to get on his feet, he is infected with “sore boils” from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Physically, it looks like he is about to die at any moment. His wife’s compassionate counsel? “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9).

Job finds himself alone, isolated, and living outside the city walls in the garbage dump. As the text indicates, Job is very angry. But there is a lesson for us even in Job’s anger. Here is how author Philip Yancey describes it:

One bold message in the Book of Job is that you can say anything to God. Throw at him your grief, your anger, your doubt, your bitterness, your betrayal, your disappointment—he can absorb them all. As often as not, spiritual giants of the Bible are shown contendingwith God. They prefer to go away limping, like Jacob, rather than to shut God out. In this respect, the Bible prefigures a tenet of modern psychology: you can’t really deny your feelings or make them disappear, so you might as well express them. God can deal with every human response save one. He cannot abide the response I fall back on instinctively: an attempt to ignore him or treat him as though he does not exist. That response never once occurred to Job.”

In the same way, God invites us to feel our emotions, experiencing them without self-condemnation, and exploring them in his loving presence.

Question to Consider

In what ways do you tend to suppress or deny difficult emotions—anger, sadness, fear—rather than admit them to yourself and God?

Prayer

Father, the idea of being emotionally transparent with you—especially when my emotions are raw—is very difficult. In fact, it almost seems disrespectful. Thank you, Lord, that you love all of me—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that your love is without conditions. In Jesus’ name, amen.

________

Adapted from Emotionally Healthy Relationships Day by Day: A 40-Day Journey to Deeply Change Your Relationships by Peter Scazzero. 

In this groundbreaking devotional book, Peter Scazzero reintroduces and expands upon the ancient spiritual discipline of the Daily Office. The basic premise is simple: Christians need to intentionally stop to be with God twice each day to create a continual and easy familiarity with God’s presence for the rest of the day.

Stray Blessed.

Manipulated by a Curse

   Different from the instance of Saul who was plotting to plant his daughter in the life of David, like a timed device, for future detonation with maximum devastation, the forces that manipulate into disaster do not always reside in a person; they sometimes reside in a curse. 

That is our next story, about an elderly priest who worked so hard all his life yet in the evening of his days was mis-‘led’ to join a promising but doomed political party; a step that became the irreparable mistake that suddenly cost him everything, according to a strange and ancient pattern that had followed his ancestors in the past 150 years.

26 And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth, unto thine own fields; for thou art worthy of death: but I will not at this time put thee to death, because thou barest the ark of the Lord GOD before David my father, and because thou hast been afflicted in all wherein my father was afflicted.

27 So Solomon thrust out Abiathar from being priest unto the LORD; that he might fulfil the word of the LORD, which he spake concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh (1 Kings 2:26-27).

According to the passage, Abiathar’s sudden loss of his priestly office was the result of an ancient curse that was pronounced in Shiloh against his ancestors.  That story is told in 1 Samuel chapter 1 – chapter 5.  Abiathar’s great-great grandfather was the high priest Eli, who had two very irreverent sons that abused the worshippers that came to the house of God. They brazenly stole from the offerings of the men and mindlessly slept with the female parishioners, right in the sanctuary. Displeased by their conduct, God sent warnings, but those wicked associate-priests seemed too drunk to care, forcing God to declare that He would cast them out of the office, kill them all in one day, and  make the surviving other descendants to never see old age or enjoy the fruit of their labour (1 Samuel 2:29-36; 3:12-14).

Shortly after God had announced His verdict against that household, the first phase of the curse came into effect, and all sons plus father and daughter-in-law died in one day. It was the unforgettable inauguration of worrisome multiple deaths (1 Samuel 4:18-22).  About 80 years later, the next recorded phase occurred.  In their priests-village of Nob, they often received visitors.  One day, however, the active curse manipulated or ‘invited’ some wrong visitors.  David had been there to seek the Lord.  Coincidentally, another man was also at that sacred place on a ‘personal retreat,’ but apparently planted there by the curse that had ripened for another season of bloody harvest.  That other visitor, Mr Doeg the Edomite, a chief pastor of the king’s flock, witnessed the priests serve hollowed bread and protection to David.   Promptly, Doeg ingratiatingly and deviously reported their care to King Saul who had been seeking David’s head.  The consequence was the massacre of eighty-five priests with their wives and children, along with their livestock, on allegations of conspiracy with David to undermine the regime (1 Samuel 22:6-22).

We might blame the massacre on the bloodiness of the demonized King Saul; we might blame it on the restless lips of Doeg the gossip, but realising that the sad event was in continuing fulfilment of the pronouncement that had been made years earlier in Shiloh, we can only say that Doeg was planted there that day by the curse that had been seeking expression and merely found ready vessels in the duo of Doeg the gossip and Saul the demented sanguinary despot.

Now Doeg the Edomite, Saul's chief herdsman, was there that day, having been detained before the Lord (1 Samuel 21:7, NLT).

Did Doeg know that a Curse might have led him there that day; that he had merely been responding to a mystical impulse that found him in that place at that time to see those things that he was further ‘compelled’ to report?  Would he ever have agreed that the steps of a wicked man are ‘ordered’ by the devil (Psalms 37:23)?  Can a curse manipulate even the choices of a person?  Did an unseen hand coordinate the visit of David to coincide with the ‘retreat’ of Busybody Doeg, so as to bring about the subsequent disaster of over three hundred and fifty deaths?

The Bible states that Doeg at the tabernacle had been “DETAINED before the Lord.”  What does that mean?  Detained, held back, super-ordinarily restrained from departing, until David would be on the scene so that Doeg could see what to report?  Can a curse instigate a people against a person?  Can it also inspire the kind of rumours that are spread about someone?  Should we then entirely blame the impetuous lips or also diagnose the manipulating curse?

Several years after Abiathar as a little lad had escaped Saul’s massacre in Nob, that priest of God felt verily ‘led’ (or mis-‘led’) to join the new political party of Adonijah the surviving eldest son of David.  The reverend priest probably had a dream or some strong ‘ministration’ that urged him to take the step.  Only too late did he realize and regret the ‘lying spirit’ that had assumed the voice of Jehovah and urged him on in his fatal path.  He joined the masses to endorse Adonijah, only to discover that the incumbent king’s electoral-collegiate preference lay in Solomon.  Others paid with their life for the error; he escaped again with the skin of his teeth, but he lost all that he had spent years labouring with David to build up. 

The Scripture interprets Abiathar’s sudden political, social and religious disaster as a fulfilment of the word of God that had been spoken in Shiloh 150 years before.  In other words, all the events that lined up to that priest’s abrupt sack: his ‘righteous’ persuasions to endorse the wrong political candidate, the ‘friends’ and ‘worshippers’ who had ‘genuinely’ and ‘caringly’ persuaded him with the idea, the subsequent ‘ungrateful’ actions of the young and purportedly ‘wise’ Solomon, etc., had been remote-controlled by a slithering Curse that the respected priest never perceived.

Again, sometimes it is helpful to look beyond the hands that perform the act, as there might have been primary hands unseen, manipulating the secondary hands we see.

God helps us all to overcome in Jesus Name. Amen!

Stray Blessed.