Pastor Curt Taylor:
Well, we are in a sermon series called Messy. And two weeks ago we talked about how the brokenness of this world, we see that introduced in the Bible in Genesis chapter three, that sin comes into the world, it breaks the world. And the first thing that it breaks is our relationship with God. So, so two weeks ago we talked about how our relationship with God is messy. And that’s why Jesus came, Jesus came to die on the cross for our sins in order to restore that relationship. Last week we talked about community. And community is messy because we live in a broken world that has sin in it. And so doing community together is challenging and messy. And today we’re gonna talk about some of the steps that we take in order to fix that messiness. And one of those is healthy conflict. So in order to talk about conflict, I decided, as opposed to just talking to you myself about conflict, to bring the single person that I do conflict with more than anybody else in the world. And that is my wife. And so first give, give it up for my wife. Join me on stage.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
Let me give a little background and, and brag on my wife a little bit. So she was a fourth grade teacher. So when we got married, she was a fourth grade teacher. She was a teacher the year, her second year as a teacher. What, what also got a master’s in education. Then she stayed home for a while. So we had kids, our kids are now, they’re on the front row right there. They’re about to be 13, 11, and seven, all in the next month. They, they turned. And so she stayed home for a while. And then for the last three years and some change, she’s been over at Denver Seminary, getting another master’s in both licensed professional counseling and in school counseling. So when it comes to conflict she’s got some really great clinical research and insights that will go along with the biblical truth that we see God’s word has for how to do conflict well.

Lauren Taylor:
Alright, so we’re gonna start out with the question. Excuse me. We’ve been asking this question and I want you to ask this question to yourself right now. You don’t have to tell the person next to you, but how do you typically handle conflict? And we’ll talk about patterns of that in just a minute. But as you’re thinking about that question, also think about what type of conflict do you typically get involved in these days? I would say we’ve been married 19 years. So over the course of those 19 years, it’s changed. We, in the beginning, I, I would say, and I felt this, we’ll talk about in a minute how I dealt with that, but I felt a lot of conflict between just how to live with another person who’s different than you. So just showing up in the same house with the same kitchen and the same, you know, rooms and having to figure out how to even do that caused conflict.

Lauren Taylor:
I know we, we talked a lot about how do we do the dishes in like the right way to do the dishes or the way to fold laundry if folding is even a part of that, right? <Laugh>. So all those things that became like actually pretty big conflict at that time. Now looking back, I’m like, that was probably not something I needed to spend so much energy on. But it was conflict and it was conflict that we don’t necessarily have anymore. ’cause We’ve kind of worked through a lot of those things. But now we have kids. And when they came into the picture, I would say a lot of our conflict was I, my conflict was impacted by having kids. So I was exhausted all the time. And so that impacted how I engaged in conflict. Now we not only have conflict with one another, but we also are having conflict with our kids.

Lauren Taylor:
Our kids are having conflict with one another, right? So there’s a lot of conflict happening all the time in our home. And so, number one, what does it look like for you to have conflict, whether it’s with family, with neighbors, with friends and coworkers. Maybe it’s the family you currently live with. Maybe it’s those who you grew up with, but there’s conflict in every single relationship. And so I would like you to think about how do you tend to handle that conflict? We may do things differently with different people somewhat, but I would say most of us have a pattern of how we handle that conflict. So it may look like avoidance. That is definitely my go-to. I hate conflict. If I could avoid it, I would accommodate I, this is one I fall into often too. ’cause I’m a people pleaser and I just wanna make it all go away and make it peaceful again.

Lauren Taylor:
Some people are either yelling or competing so it becomes maybe a little more escalated and like heated. Maybe you’re trying to compromise, which can be good, but can ha can go a little too far one way or the other. And then lastly, collaborate. So as we think about conflict today, be thinking about what is it that you typically lean towards? What is it that maybe you even grew up with and you’re used to? And then what do you do currently? But what we know about conflict is that it is hard, whether you are afraid of it or not afraid of it, it causes distress in most relationships to some degree, right? It causes emotional breakdown. It causes even sometimes like physical separation from people you choose to even no longer even be around people that you have conflict with because it’s become so difficult.

Lauren Taylor:
But we also can see in research that it actually physically is affecting us. So looking at research that says clear evidence shows that relational hostility is harmful to our health. Couples who exhibited hostile communication styles, so contempt, sarcasm, eye rolling. And this is not talking about physical abuse, but more just the way that you engage in the conflict. Those people who had those difficult communication styles, hostile communication styles healed more slowly from small standardized skin wounds and had higher inflammation. So the way we fight literally affects our bodies. It affects how we feel it affects our physical bodies. And I wish we could get up here and say, okay, here’s how we fix that. We just stop having conflict. It’s so easy. I would love that, right? But it’s unavoidable. We’re gonna have conflict. But what we can do is we can see that relational damage can be optional.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And, and I, I think that’s what we don’t want you to hear is, Hey, we’re gonna give you a few steps and then you’re never gonna have conflict for the rest of your life. That’s not going to happen. The reality is you will have conflict. We will have conflict. It’s about how we do that conflict. Look at what Jesus says in Matthew chapter five, starting in verse 23. This is the Sermon on the Mount. And he says, so if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go first be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. Now, Jesus does two interesting things in this passage. The first is that he ties our worship to our reconciliation. Now what we typically don’t tie those two things together.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
We think of worship as, yeah, go to church and I sing songs and, and I open God’s word. But he’s saying to this first century audience, he said, when you go to the temple and you are about to worship, he says, before you do that, if you recognize that there’s a broken relationship that you have that has not been reconciled before you worship, I want you to go fix that relationship. So he’s tying our worship to God, to the reconciliation we have with the people around us. Additionally to that, he, he’s showing something really important, and that is that reconciliation has high value in the kingdom of God. That if we are going to be following after Jesus, if we’re gonna be Christ followers, that we need to have a high priority for living in relationships that have reconciliation. But that’s hard. Why? Because relationships are messy.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
That’s the whole series that, that everything is messy. The world is messy. I’m messy. You are messy. And so when we are in relationship with each other, that relationship is messy and not every relationship is the same. So I want you to, to imagine with this image that that, okay, you are in the center and then you’ve got these relationships around you that the closer the relationship, the more intimate the relationship, the further out the relationship, the less intimate. So the relationship I have with my spouse, if you’re married, is a very different type of relationship. Therefore, the conflict that you enter into the reconciliation that you’re attempting to have should look different than other types of relationships. How we do conflict as peers in an equal relationship with a covenant that we’re looking at and saying, Hey, no matter what, we’re in this together.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
That’s different than how we do conflict with our kids. That would be that next level out. Now, how we do conflict with our kids is still really important. There’s still a lot of value to that but it’s going to be distinctively different than this. The relationship we’ve got with our kids right now with them being children, living in our house, has a very unbalanced power dynamic that when we are in conflict, we’re completely equal. When we are in conflict with our kids, we are not completely equal. They are. They, they are, they live in our house and they’re underneath our authority. Now that creates challenges on both sides. It creates challenges for our kids in conflict with us. It also creates challenges for us in conflict with our kids. It means that we’ve gotta be cautious of that power dynamic. Then you’ve got relationships that are your close friends.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And maybe it’s people that you’re in community with here at church. Maybe it’s it’s whoever your best friends are. That how you do conflict in that context is slightly different. And then you’ve got one further out than that and that’s just acquaintances. Maybe this is a coworker that you’ve got. Maybe it’s someone that’s on your kids’ sports team. Maybe it’s the neighbor that is to your left and to your right at your house or at your apartment. How we do conflict in those contexts looks different. And yet there are some very practical application pieces that come from scripture are rooted in scripture that that can help us with conflict resolution in every single one of those environments.

Lauren Taylor:
And I think what’s important in that is recognizing that there are people watching us have conflict all the time. So whether it’s our kids watching how we do that together, whether it’s them noticing how we have conflict with them something I have been very convicted of lately is I, I could easily as a mom just get caught up in the conflict that my kids are having, but my job is to teach them to do conflict well, and that’s something I’m working on. So I’m having to work on that in order to teach them better. How do we do this well so that they then grow up and become people that can do conflict well in the world. Because the truth is we’re we are showing that to the people around us. They’re seeing how we do that, whether it’s behind doors at our own home, they’re seeing the effects of that, or they’re seeing us actually have that conflict out in front of, in public.

Lauren Taylor:
And so what does God tell us about that? A verse that we probably don’t typically look at with conflict is the fruits of the spirit. Because when we kick think of conflict, we don’t typically think of things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. Because how many of us do those things when we’re having conflict? Mostly none, right? Most of the time we don’t. And so being able to understand that God is calling us to have those fruits of the spirit even in conflict, that is what we are asked to do. And that is hard. And so why is that so hard? James four one says, it tells us right there what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you isn’t not this, that your passions are at war within you. And so right there we see immediately our selfish desires are gonna come up in those conflicts.

Lauren Taylor:
We are going to want our way or we are going to want to protect ourselves rather than connect with the person who’s next to us or across from us. And so it is hard, it is hard that we are fighting against that because we cannot do that on our own. I think it’s important to know the fruit of the spirit is not me doing that. It is, it is having God living within us that allows those things to happen during conflict. It’s dangerous. It’s dangerous to allow conflict. And I know some of you, and we have definitely felt this in our own relationships, have felt the damage and the distress that it causes. And so again, scripture tells us that’s going to happen in Ephesians four. It says, be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil.

Lauren Taylor:
So right away we see he’s gonna use that. The enemy’s gonna use those times in our lives when those small conflicts build up. And I know I have felt that where there’s days that have gone by and you just feel the tension between relationships. Maybe it’s caused a complete breakdown in a relationship. Maybe there’s been an entire cutoff that you’ve experienced in a relationship. And so what we wanna look at is how do we heal those things, but also going forward, how do we, how do we take care of those things so that they don’t become so, so severe and so painful?

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And I want you to recognize that scripture doesn’t say that you’re never gonna be angry. It says be angry and do not sin. So there’s a, there’s an understanding that being in relationship with people around us, there are going to be things that happen that that cause us to be angry. The challenge is when we’re angry not to allow Satan to get a foothold in our life. So the, the, the Bible’s trying to get this picture for us to understand that when we are angry and we enter into conflict in an angry manner, and it stirs up more conflict, and then there’s unresolved conflict that we don’t fix that. It’s saying, it’s telling us that Satan now has a foothold in our life as a result of that, that Satan wants you and me to have unresolved conflict that we’re completely ignoring. Whereas God wants us to heal that conflict.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
So how do we do that? Proverb 15, one says, A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Anger is this common theme when it comes to conflict that maybe you grew up in a household that when you had conflict, people tended to do conflict while they were angry. My experience with people is that your style of conflict resolution largely something that was modeled for you in your household. You saw how they did conflict and then you adapted, adopted that pattern into your own life of how you do conflict resolution. And now there’s some version of that that you’ve just carried with you. And, and I would say that sometimes you were modeled really healthy conflict resolution, but other times you were modeled some really unhealthy conflict resolution, which means that you need to recognize that and say, Hey, that that’s not what it should look like.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And I’ll give you a good example of it. In my experience, people that yell in conflict, they learned that somewhere so often, if you are a couple that yells or you are a household that yells mom and dad or kids that you yell at one another when you’re in conflict, probably that came from somewhere. And yet I would encourage you to reassess, yelling. It’s an unhealthy way to do conflict. That’s exactly what this verse is saying. A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. And, and we see that when we’re in conflict with one another. If you start to yell, I imagine that, that you’re in conflict with somebody and one person starts to yell, what they’ve done is they’ve escalated the conflict. Now by escalating the conflict, they’ve changed the power dynamic with this other person. What does it lead this other person to do?

Pastor Curt Taylor:
It it leads them to what? To to match. They, they wanna say, well, okay, you’re yelling and I want you to know that, that I also am angry and I’m also irritated. And so in order to show you that I also mean what I’m saying, I’m gonna escalate the situation up to your level. Which the problem is once you start fighting here, what happens Now you get into a bigger fight. And what do you wanna do? Like, well, we’ve always yelled before, but now I’m gonna yell even louder ’cause this is a bigger fight. Yelling in just by nature of it is an escalation tactic. And it does exactly what scripture warns against harsh words. Stir up anger. It, it makes the conflict worse, whereas a soft answer turns away wrath. There’s a fascinating study that they did on newlyweds, and here’s what they found.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
Research found that they could predict marital outcomes over six years from just the first three minutes of a conflict discussion. The more negative the startup, the higher the divorce risk. And now, now pause and take a step back and recognize how valuable that information is. If you’re in the room and you are a newlywed or you are engaged, you’re about to be married, the first three minutes of how you fight is the best indicator they have of the overall health long term of your relationship. And isn’t that really still true? No matter what stage of a relationship you’re in, whether that’s a relationship with a spouse or relationship with a kid, the the first three minutes, they matter a lot. And so if we know that that matters a lot, what should we do? Proverb 25 11 says, A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold and a setting of silver.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
Now, that word fitly only shows up one time in the entire Old Testament. This Hebrew word that means fitly. We only have it one time in scripture. So it’s this interesting word that carries this sense of something that is rolling smoothly or moving rightly or being in the proper place. So the picture that this Hebrew word is trying to get us to understand is that when we use our words, they should roll smoothly like a wheel turning effortlessly. They should fit the moment with appropriate timing and manner, and they should have beauty and order like a work of art in gold and silver. Now, if I do a good job of pausing when I’m in conflict and saying, are the words that I’m using, is the tone that I’m speaking in, is it fitly valuing this conversation, valuing this relationship? Or is it actually doing the opposite? Is it causing harm?

Lauren Taylor:
So what? Excuse me. So what goes wrong? We can look at a few different ways. And again, I would ask you to just pay attention the next time that you’re in a conflict. And maybe you can even think back to that right now. What is it that you typically use? Kind of what are your tactics? Maybe you’ve determined already that you get competitive or you yell or you avoid, but what specifically are those things that you use in conflict? So we’re gonna look at John Gottman’s four horsemen is what he calls it. And he is a relationship researcher. He’s a psychologist. He does a lot with marriage in particular, but this can be really applied to any relationships. He looks at destructive communication habits that reliably predict relationship breakdown. So the first of those is criticism. This is talking about when you instead of maybe approaching the conflict by looking at the topic or the what is happening the frustration that you’re feeling or what the person across from you did, you are attacking them as a person.

Lauren Taylor:
You are attack attacking their character. So at our house my kids can tell you this happens where I might walk in the room and I might point to them and say, you never, you never pick up your stuff. Socks, you guys, there’s socks <laugh> everywhere in our house. I don’t understand, but I say, you never do this or you always leave your dishes out, right? I could do that and I could attack the person who they are. Instead of noticing and saying, there’s a lot of things in the room, I’m feeling like maybe you think I’ll pick that up and that feels a little frustrating. Can we talk about that? Right? And I have done it both ways. They can tell you I’ve done it wrong and I’m trying to do it better, right? But I can easily criticize the person rather than talking about what is hurtful or what is frustrating about that particular situation.

Lauren Taylor:
Another one is defensiveness. I think we all do this very easily. Maybe this is something you do as a more of a habit, but I think we are all guilty for sure of being defensive because I think it’s natural. Nobody wants to be wrong. Nobody wants to be pointed at going back to the the soft answer, it’s much easier to approach something when someone has talked gently and soft to you versus been attacking, right? We’re immediately gonna get defensive. But a a chronic defensiveness means that you consistently self-protect. You consistently shift the blame or put it back on the other person. In our home, we, we really work hard between the two of us and with our kids to say, okay, you might not have done something wrong. Maybe the other person was wrong, but what could you have done different? ’cause We almost always could have done something a little different to make it have a better outcome.

Lauren Taylor:
So rather than pointing back to the other person, taking on that responsibility of, okay, where was I wrong? Where could I have done something differently? A third one, this is my go-to is shutting down, withdrawing and just avoiding it. ’cause It’s easier. It feels easier. It’s actually not. And so I used to think, well, I’m pretty good about conflict. Like I don’t fight and yell and get explosive. But what I realized after several years of marriage was that I, I actually stuffed it all in and eventually it did become even a bigger problem than it would’ve had. I just talked about it to begin with. And I think for us in our marriage, that took a lot of both of us understanding one another and just how we handle it, because he did not assume that that’s what I was doing, because he doesn’t do that, right? He is <laugh>. He’s like, why, why wouldn’t you just tell me what’s wrong? And I’m like, ’cause it’s, I hate that. I hate telling you what is wrong. And so I had to learn to explain, Hey, I have something to say and it does matter because I easily shut down. So please hear me out. And then he was able to more, more easily listen and understand what was going on.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And I would just challenge you that if you’re someone like me where you are married to someone, that their, their natural way to, to deal with conflict is to not talk about conflict. And my natural way to deal with conflict is, and we got a problem, let’s solve it. Like I, I am about, Hey, let’s bring to the, and it’s not to say that I enjoy conflict. I don’t know, I think nobody enjoys conflict, but I hate unresolved conflict. So if there’s an issue, let’s have the conversation today, right now in the moment it took me 10 years to realize that is not who she is and that is not how she operates. And so if you are in a relationship like that, I would just encourage you that you have to create avenues for outlet. And so one of the things that we started doing probably a decade ago in our marriage is really a lot of it on me of giving opportunities to ask her, Hey, what are the things that I could do better?

Pastor Curt Taylor:
What are the things right now? Just how are you feeling? Where are the areas that you’ve got frustrations? And then, and here’s the really hard part for me when I ask those questions, is then I have to shut up. And that’s hard for me because the moment she starts talking about frustrations, what I wanna do is solve ’em all right, here’s what we do. Here’s how we’re gonna fix it. And instead, if I do that, then it’s gonna, it’s going to continue to create barriers. Instead, I just need to listen and not solve to understand her perspective.

Lauren Taylor:
Absolutely. The last one is contempt. And this is a really dangerous one that I think can, can be sneaky ’cause it can, and Kurt’s gonna talk about this, it can happen over time. Some of the other ones can be a little more like in your face. This one can be, but it’s like almost disguised. So contempt is a really dangerous one. Again, that shows up in any relationship. But it may include things like mocking, eye rolling sarcasm name calling. And it typically is coming from a posture of superiority. So someone, you know, kind of placing themselves above the other person and looking down on, on the person they’re talking with or having conflict with.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
So what does research tell us about why contempt is so toxic? It’s because contempt communicates I am above you. It erodes respect and safety, and it predicts breakup more than other behaviors and is linked to worse physical, relational health outcomes. So I, I wanna challenge you that no relationship starts with contempt, whether it’s relationship with your spouse, whether it’s a relationship with a family member, whether it’s your relationship that you’ve got with a neighbor that is right next door. We don’t jump straight to contempt. It’s a slow process that’s get, that gets us there. I, I’ve done a lot of premarital counseling. I’ve never had a a, a couple where I’m doing premarital counseling and they are in a stage of contempt because guess what, if you’re in premarital counseling and you’ve got contempt, I’m gonna say, Hey, you guys shouldn’t get married. Like, this is not, this is not a good thing.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
They, we all get married in love. We all get married looking for the best, and yet something happens along the way. And how we don’t deal with conflict in a healthy way that leads us there. And here’s the, the process that tends to happen. We slide there through a slow drift and not a jump. So it, it tends to start with unaddressed hurts. So I’ve got herz that we haven’t addressed, we haven’t resolved it, we haven’t had healthy conflict. And so it just sits there. And then that leads to repeated irritation. So this happens over and over and over again. I continue to have unaddressed hurts now. It just repeats it over and over. This now leads to global negative labels. Those are those you labels. Well, this is just who they are. You always do this. You never do that. That leads us to sarcasm.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
Sarcasm and scorekeeping tend to go hand in hand. And I would just tell you, as someone who grew up in a family where we would’ve said that sarcasm was our love language, we were sarcastic with each other all the time. And I didn’t realize till much later on in life how how damaging and dangerous sarcasm can be. My, my mom to show you how bad the sarcasm was in my house. My mom at one point was, was seeing a counselor. And the counselor used this phrase with her, where, where she told my mom, sarcasm is a shaming mechanism. It’s meant to shame other people. And so guess when my mom shared that with our family, guess what my family started doing with that phrase, using it sarcastically. That’s what we did. So we, anytime someone was sarcastic, we’d say, Hey, that’s a shaming mechanism. And we used it like, that’s so unhealthy as a way to operate.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And yet that became this normative pattern of behavior. And, and let me just give you this challenge. If you’re someone and your default is to say, well, I’m just sarcastic, that’s just who I am. That’s not a good response to that. You can’t just say, well, I’m just a jerk. That’s just who I am. Get over it. Like, like that isn’t unhealthy pattern that you’ve gotta recognize and take ownership of it. So sarcasm then leads to habitual disrespect that it’s just there under the surface all the time, and you’ve been around people that, that they’re continually disrespecting each other nonstop all the time. And then eventually that leads to contempt. And when you get to contempt, it’s not to say that you can’t recover out of it, but it’s a very, very dangerous place for a relationship to be.

Lauren Taylor:
Yeah. And the good news is we can, number one, recognize that we do these things. We can start to notice, okay, this is a pattern that I do have and I need to do something about it. The good news is what Gottman has found in his research scripture has told us, just like we’ve already looked at several proverbs that give us examples of what it should look like. Another one is Proverb 1218. And it starts out by saying, there is one whose rash words are like sword thrust. So going back to those four horsemen, those types of characteristics that you may or may not see, maybe you’ve been at the receiving end of those, and you would, you would say absolutely. Those are like sword thrust, they’re painful, they hurt. It, it tears me down as a person, right?

Lauren Taylor:
Even if it’s joking, sarcasm, it can be very harmful if you are the one receiving that. And if you are on the one on the side of giving it maybe it felt good in the moment, maybe it felt helpful in the moment. But we can all agree that the relationship damage that is happening is distrustful, is not something that we enjoy. And we realize there’s a brokenness there. And so although the scripture tells us those things can be extremely harmful, it also says the tongue of the wise brings healing. So there is a way to do it correctly. There is a way to ask God to be a part of our relationships and to help us with those. While I see a lot of of things in my profession of distress and pain among relationships, it’s been incredible to not only experience it for myself, but watch in other people healing take place between relationships, healing that you would think.

Lauren Taylor:
Never will this relationship get back to to a place of, of love and of care and it, and it can happen. And so our encouragement to you is to be able to recognize where you’re at in your relationships, recognize what it is that we all need to be working towards and praying about in our own lives. And then we have a couple steps. These are not, I wish they could be the, the problem solving, you know, solution for everybody. But they’re good ways to start, especially when you think back to the research that says those first three minutes matter. This, these three steps will help in those first three minutes. The first one is to be calm. And that may sound cheesy and sound easy, but it’s hard. It’s hard when you’re tired. It’s hard when you’ve had a tough day at work.

Lauren Taylor:
It is hard if you’re someone who just is more emotional and maybe, you know, goes from zero to 60 in a matter of just a minute and you are just ready to fight and it’s hard to slow down. But the first step is really to get into a calm place. I have said to my kids, I’ve never said it to Kurt yet, not yet of I am so frustrat frustrated right now that I can’t even think straight and I ask for a timeout, you know? Now I, I have done that, but I tend to take the time out too long actually. And so that hasn’t been an issue. But I feel that with my kids, my kids can tell you, there’s been times where I have come in hot and I have come in frustrated. And so to be able to calm and take a breath and kind of reorient myself to what I am about to engage in, what this con conflict is about is helpful.

Lauren Taylor:
The second one is commit. And really this is talking about committing to the person that you’re talking to, the person that you’re in that conflict with. Especially as Kurt mentioned back to that circle, especially if you’re talking about a spouse or children or a parent, or those relationships that are really tight and close knit. That’s a, that’s a big expense, right? To, to hurt that relationship. And so really taking the time to say, you know, I, I do care about this person right now. I feel like I’m caring a lot about the conflict, but actually deep down, I care about the person more. And so remembering that you care, remembering that you value them as a person and with feelings and and what God has made them to be is the second one. The third one is connect. This is, I think, more powerful than we realize.

Lauren Taylor:
I know it’s, it’s easy to, to just say my own perspective and tell what I am frustrated about and what’s going wrong with me. But again, to be able to see that other person and connect with, you know what, maybe, maybe they had a hard day at work. Maybe I should ask about that. I think when kids are little, we often are a little more empathetic towards them. They’re like, oh, these poor little 2-year-old, like, they needed a nap and they’re hungry and we forget that we all have needs as they get into elementary school. Adolescents especially. I’ve been, I’ve been really working hard on just understanding that teenage years are tough. There’s a lot going on, there’s a lot changing. They are growing more independence. And those are beautiful things. Those are good things, but they often cause conflict among the parents and the kids. And so recognizing that I can empathize, I can see the other person’s perspective before I jump in to trying to solve the conflict.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
I, I think these steps have a lot of value if we change our perspective. Because the goal of conflict is not to win the conflict. The goal of conflict is to heal the relationship. And so if we change that mindset, it helps us to start operating in a more healthy manner. Jesus, in John chapter 13, verse 34, he says, A new commandment I give to you that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my, my disciples if you have love for one another. Now, the challenge to me that about that, that verse that, that Jesus giving to us, is he’s saying that the way that the world around us will know whether or not we love Jesus is not by how great our worship is when we come to church on Sunday morning.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
It’s not by how many Bible verses we have memorized. It’s not how often we spend time in the word or, or how good we are at teaching God’s word. Those all have value and are good and important things, but Jesus clearly says, but the way that we demonstrate that we love him is by how we show our love for one another. And I know some of these concepts are challenging. So this idea to say, when you are in conflict with someone that you should demonstrate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, that sounds like the opposite of conflict, doesn’t it? You say, well, hey, how am I supposed to do those things when we are arguing with one another? And yet as Christians, that’s what we’re called to do. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have conflict. We live in a messy, broken world.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
There will be conflict, but it means that when we enter into conflict, we do it in a way that still values and loves the person that I’m in conflict with. It says that I can have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithful to self-control when I’m at church and worshiping God, but I also can demonstrate those things in how I resolve and have reconciliation with someone that we have an issue over. The, the other piece to that is Jesus gives us this really high bar. He says, I want you to love others the way that I have loved you. Jesus loved us so much that he died for us on the cross. He reconciled our relationship to God. It’s grace that we’re saved, nothing that we have done. And so he’s saying that in the same way that the relationships that we had, we should have with our spouse and with our kids, and with our neighbors and with our coworkers, that it should be modeled with love and with grace.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
And in addition to that, I think there’s this beautiful opportunity. I love this quote from David Brooks when he says, culture changes. When a creative minority find a beautiful way to live. He’s talking about the early church, and he says, the early church finds this beautiful way to model life that looks radically different than the first century Rome. And because you had these Christians that lived life different, they loved each other different, they did conflict different. The whole world said, I don’t know what they’ve got, but I want that. There’s something unique about them that the way that Christianity exploded and changed a nation, the most powerful nation that has ever existed, Rome Christianity radically transformed it. How did they do that? They didn’t do it through a charismatic preacher. They didn’t do it through one amazing church. They did it through regular, everyday Christians living out the gospel in their lives.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
That, that, if we would do that, if we look at the messiness in relationships, the messiness and culture, the the messiness at this moment in time, the answer to it is to live the way that God has called us to live. Unapologetically love people, well, even people that we disagree with and are in conflict with. Last week we talked all about community conflict goes really hand in hand with community. And when you leave today, we’re gonna give you a magnet. This is a magnet that goes on your refrigerator. It’s based off the book called The Art of Neighboring. The book, the Art of Neighboring, really casts this idea. When we talk about love your neighbor as yourself, we, we tend to think of it as well, I, Hey, that just means love the world. And the book says, well, what about your literal neighbor?

Pastor Curt Taylor:
What about the people that live in close proximity to you? So when you get this magnet one per family, the idea is, okay, if this is you, whether this is your apartment or this is your house or, or wherever you live, that you’ve got neighbors that are across the street from you that are right next to you. And then you’ve got neighbors that are behind you. And if you just started with, with you, you take a, a, a marker, a dry erase marker, and you tried to name every single person and all eight houses around you, less than 10% of people can name all of their neighbors one step further, if you said, okay, I’m gonna have their name. And then one fact about them, less than 5% of people can do the name of all their neighbors. And one fact, if, if you want to go one step further and say, okay, the name of all my neighbors plus one fact about my neighbors plus one thing that is more personal, whether that’s the name of their kids or what they do for a profession or for a living, less than 1% of people can do that for every single one of their neighbors.

Pastor Curt Taylor:
So what would it look like if we Cherry Hills started to literally love our neighbor that is right next door to us really? Well? And the challenge with that is conflict, because I know that some of you have neighbors that you do not like. And I got news if you don’t like them, there’s a very good chance that you have neighbors that do not like you either. And we know that we’ve got neighbors that, that I’m sure we bug each other without any doubt. So what would it look like to do conflict with our neighbors? Well, but also intentionally try and enter into community with them? Why? Because if we can demonstrate the gospel in our lives and the gospel is just such a part of our life that it, it overflows into everyday conversations. What could it look like if we started literally reaching the people that are in close proximity to us every single day?

Pastor Curt Taylor:
Let’s pray. God, thank you so much for today. I thank you for the privilege to, to talk about a challenging subject with conflict. And God, I pray for anyone in the room that this is an uneasy topic, that maybe they grew up in a household that did really toxic things when they were in conflict with one another. God, I pray for the hope that comes with the gospel, the grace that comes with the gospel the the hope and the grace that comes with their opportunity for redemption and healing. That, that you can, you can make all things right. And so, God, I pray that we would be a church that models conflict well with each other in our relationships with the world. What could it look like if the world took note of the healthy way that we lived out these biblical principles? We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.