Welcome with Meekness, Care, and Power

Can you remember a time when you had a disagreement with members of your family about how to best help someone or some group who needed assistance? It might have been another family member who was going through a difficult time or a group of people that have been suffering due to circumstances beyond their control.

However, the disagreement between you all may have come from differing reasons why the needy people are in the situation that caused their hardship, or because they cannot all agree on the best way to provide them with assistance. They get lost in the details of the why and the what to do, through endless debate and even heated arguments.
That problematic process within the family often ends up blocking the critical help that is necessary to meet the needs of the individual or the group stricken with want. It also fractures the families' foundation and creates significant barriers that eventually break them down.

It seems that at the heart of much of the internal conflict and rivalry is the compulsion to protect the perception that our own view is right, and that view must win out at all cost. Nevertheless, if harmony and unity cannot be achieved, it will further the harm done to those who suffer around us.  

The family of God often acts the same, as the differing views about how to live a life of faithfulness to God contend between its members. We also know about the efforts to bring harmony on that subject in local congregations or within denominations, but it can be difficult.

Many people in local faith communities have formed a well-thought-out set of personal beliefs regarding what is the best way to live out our faith in God and some of those convictions have created divisions within that body of believers.

What do you think about the problem of disagreements and infighting regarding how to live out their faith in God in certain congregations? How does our congregation live out our faith as a body of Christ? Do we agree, for the most part, about the essential ways that we should be doing that?

In James 1:17-27, we can read about how that encourager of God's word states the source of spiritual unity and presents a prescription to remedy the fight to always be right and thus incurring a great cost to those in need of God's love and care.