Jones Pursuing Peace

A Christian Guide to Handling Our Conflicts
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3016-6
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

A Guide to Resolving Relational Conflict You have conflict in your life-we all do. You encounter it in your home, your workplace, your school, or even your church. All around us tensions exist and disputes persist. Offered here is a step-by-step process for pursuing peace in ALL your relationships and a tool you can use to help others. This guide is: - BIBLICAL - relies on the absolute authority, sufficiency, and life-giving power of God's Spirit-breathed Word - CHRIST-CENTERED - depends on the forgiving and empowering grace of Jesus - PRACTICAL - provides concrete action steps, case examples, discussion questions, and suggested language to handle specific situations - PROVEN - offers tried and true methods from a pastor, professor, counselor, and certified Christian conciliator who has led couples, churches, and Christian schools to make peace for nearly thirty years Packed with wisdom and practical techniques, here is a manageable book on reconciliation that will send you on your way to pursuing peace while helping others to do the same.

Robert D. Jones (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is associate professor of biblical counseling at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a founding member of the council board of the Biblical Counseling Coalition and a member of the Evangelical Theological Society.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Robert D.

Leseproben

1

Finding Hope in the God of Peace

To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 1:7

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

Romans 12:18

Maybe you can relate to Jen and Rick. Jen had been a believer in Jesus all her life. When she married after high school, she had high hopes for a happy marriage. The first two years sailed by blissfully. She and Rick both proclaimed the joys of marriage. But an assortment of ongoing conflicts soon developed. Should we have children, and when? How will we cover our expenses? What involvement should we have with our parents who seem so meddlesome, and why won’t my spouse stand up to them? Along with these questions Jen found herself increasingly upset over Rick’s workaholism and his lack of involvement in her life. Rick concurrently grumbled about Jen’s critical spirit toward him. His frustrations grew. He had become a follower of Jesus only a year before they married, and his dreams of a truly Christian marriage were fading fast. If this trend continued unchecked, Rick and Jen would soon become another divorce statistic.

Or maybe your conflict concerns your church. Having worked tirelessly in the children’s ministry for six years, Joanie had serious questions about the changes made by Gail, the new children’s director. Joanie tried to get to know her, to understand her, and to support her, but their brief conversations proved unfruitful. Gail’s answers seemed evasive, and Joanie increasingly sensed that her questions irritated Gail. Yet in the back of her mind her discouragement mounted. Doesn’t Gail know that changing the Wednesday night program will disturb parents? Does she even care? Worse, Joanie was not alone. Several of her co-teachers voiced similar concerns to Joanie and each other. And so Joanie wondered, Maybe it’s time for me to take a break from ministering to kids and to consider another ministry.

We could multiply examples not only from the arenas of marriage and church but also involving parents and children, roommates, and the workplace. Surely we and the many conflicted people around us need help with peacemaking.

But why a book on biblical peacemaking? Does the Bible really have something crucial to contribute to the real world of marriage fights, parent-teen breakdowns, job tensions, and church splits?

Yes, for two reasons . First, peace and conflict are Scripture mega-themes. The Bible is all about God and his peace-pursuing, peacemaking activities. Its story line from Genesis through Revelation records conflict— earthly and cosmic, natural and supernatural. The paradise of Genesis 1–2 disintegrates swiftly into the disaster of Genesis 3. There, as the Scripture’s curtain lifts, we see the war between God and Satan, and between God’s people and Satan’s people. Chapter after chapter in the Bible records victories and losses. The casualties are great; souls lie strewn across the Bible’s battlefield. The combat continues through human history—raging throughout Israel’s history, heightening at the Prince of Peace’s birth, intensifying at his cross and resurrection, and culminating in Revelation 20’s last battle, where we witness the final revolt, overthrow, and destruction of the Devil and all who belong to him. After that—but not one hour before—will the Peacemaker’s work be finally done, as fractured humanity enjoys flawless harmony. In short, the Scriptures breathe conflict out of every pore. Between the Bible’ s two bookend chapters—prewar peace in Genesis 1–2 and post-war peace in Revelation 21–22—lie nearly twelve hundred chapters of hostility, aggression, alienation, and betrayal. You cannot read your Bible well and miss its militant plot; it is the ultimate “war and peace” novel. We long for the eternal day when, as theologians and hymn writers put it, the church militant will become the church triumphant.

The second reason to view your Bible as indispensable for peacemaking is that Scripture is all about our relationships—with God and with others. Are you ever tempted to think that the essence of Christian living is vertical only? What really matters is praying unceasingly and communing continually with Jesus. If I can also have peaceful relationships, that would be nice too. But having God-pleasing relationships is not a dispensable luxury. It is more than icing on a good Christian’s cake. It lies at the heart of Christian discipleship. In his two great commandments, Jesus inseparably linked loving God with loving our neighbor, teaching us that the second is like the first and that the two together summarize all the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 22:37–40). You simply cannot love God without loving your neighbor. The apostle John elaborates, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). To devour your Bible, enjoy rich corporate worship, maintain personal purity, and tell dozens of people about Jesus—the sum of Christian living for some people—is simply not enough if your interpersonal relationships crumble.

For these reasons this book will help you handle your daily tensions with others. You have conflict in your life. You encounter it, admit it, and somehow endure it. You see it in your own home, in your place of work, and among your extended family. It flows through the water supply of your relational system. Conflict marks your parents, your children, your city, your coworkers, and even your church. (In fact, the odds are high that your church began out of conflict sometime long ago, as many do.) But you are not sure how to handle it, you too often contribute to it, and you sometimes mismanage it.

The Starting Place: Our Peacemaking God

So where do we begin? Like any subject, the proper starting place to think biblically about pursuing peace is God. And here is the central truth about God we need to start with: our God is the God of peace, his Son is the Prince of Peace, and his Spirit brings peace. And what has this God done? He has made peace with us, he pours out his peace on us and into us, and he calls and enables us to pursue peace with others.

The Bible links peace and God in at least four ways: There is the saving peace that God made with us at the cross, and the ongoing inner peace God gives us in our souls. These twin gifts in turn bring two more blessings for the Christian believer. They enable us to pursue relational peace with others in this life. Moreover, they guarantee us an endless life of future situational peace in the world to come, “a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13).

From many authors in many passages, these four divine-peace provisions weave their way through the Scriptures. Let’s think about these promises in light of the whole Bible and along the way envision the help they give to Joanie, Rick, and Jen.

We will start with Paul’s first letter in the New Testament canon, the epistle to the Romans. Hailed by countless scholars as the greatest gospel treatise ever penned, it brilliantly describes and declares the peacemaking work of God. The reason is obvious: the gospel of Jesus is the gospel of peace.

Saving Peace with God

We learn from the opening verses of Romans that this letter is all about the gospel of God, which centers in his Son. It is the good news of God’s saving grace in Jesus for sinners like me and you. And that good news is all about God’s peace. Paul closes his introduction with this promise and blessing: “To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:7).

These words come to us as more than mere formalities. They declare life-giving hope to seize and believe. The apostle announces God’s stance—his posture of grace and peace toward us in Christ. Just as the words “loved” and “saints” point back to the designation of God’s people in the Hebrew Scriptures,1 so this promise of peace calls to mind the great Hebrew word shalom and the Old Testament vision of peace, fulfilled in Romans in the person and work of Jesus. It is no wonder that the formal worship liturgy in some Reformed churches frequently begins with an opening salutation, a word of greeting from God through the minister, often taken from texts like Romans 1:7.

Probably the most famous shalom prayer-promise comes from Numbers 6:24–26, the benediction assigned for Aaron and his sons to proclaim to God’s people.

The LORD bless you

and keep you;

the LORD make his face shine upon you

and be gracious to you;

the LORD turn his face...