Dealing with Difficult People - Counter Culture pt 3

And again, can you give a great big God bless you to our worship team? You know, I. I hope I hope you didn't come to hear from me. I hope you came to hear from the Lord. And what we need. What I need in this moment is that he would breathe, that he would breathe on us, that he he would speak to us, and that we would have the courage to respond in obedience.

You know, I have it's a joy to be back and to be a part of what guys doing here at one church to be able to share God's word. If I haven't met you, my name is Santis, baby. I have the privilege of serving as the student pastor here, and I'm a part of an incredible team of leaders and students.

And if your student is not coming or if you're not coming on Wednesday nights, we encourage you to come and join us downstairs when C groups are happening. We're also downstairs with our middle school and our high school students. But some may know this. If you've been with us the last several weeks, you know, we started a series called Counter Culture where Pastor Ryan has been walking us through some really difficult topics.

And some of these topics, they're kind of seen as a taboo for some people. But I'm encouraged that our leadership sees these topics, these issues as things that we need to engage as Christ followers. Come on, say amen. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of hearing just what the culture says about things. I want to know what God says about it.

And I don't I don't just need to know that for the sweet by and by. But I need it for the nasty right now. Come on. Say, man. And so I'm excited that our church is is willing and ready to engage in these types of issues and walk through what we might consider to be difficult topics. So, you know, in week one, we talked about money in the context of stewardship and stewardship is the careful and responsible management of something that has been entrusted to one's care.

And so as we looked at stewardship, we looked at money and we talked about the fact that all of it belongs to God. Amen. But God chooses to give us some of it, and we now have a responsibility of what do we do to steward what he's given us. Like some of that, we're to give back to him and give back to the local church so that we can see ministries move forward, not just locally, but globally.

But also it's an issue of how do we steward the rest of it so that we might be generous with other people. Amen. Then last week we talked about the S-word, we talked about sex. And I know some of you like your face crack when he mentioned sex because, you know, we're not used to talking about sex in the church, but we can we can take the church face off.

Come on. Say, man, we can sit it down and deal with the fact that the reality that sex is a very important topic for us to engage in our culture, not just outside of the church, but in the church, that it is something that God designed for a purpose. And what I say to our students all the time is that, you know, sex is a gift from God.

It can be like a fire. Right. And fires, if they're used the wrong way, can consume everything and destroy everything. Or it can be a fire placed in a fireplace. And. And marriage is like that fireplace, right? That. That that space where God designed for it to be in a healthy marriage. And that when it's used that way, it gives warmth and creates intimacy and pleasure for those who use it the right way.

Well, this week, we're turning our attention to another topic, and it's one that I think is really, really important. My task is to talk to you about how do we as Christ followers deal with difficult people? How do we as Christ followers deal with difficult people? Now, I know for some of us, if you grew up like I grew up, like your first response, your fleshly response is to clap back.

Come on, say, man. Like, that's that's just what you know, to do is. Is is it to write them off? Is it to argue with them to make your point or do do you really love them? Now, anybody out there, I could already tell when I gave the topic, Is there anybody out there that has some difficult people in your life?

Mm hmm. Now, don't look to your left or to the right. If they sit next to you like this, just keep your eyes on me. Just play it cool. Here, here's the other reality. Like, you might be that difficult person for somebody else. Is this too soon? Did I go there too early in the message? I mean, we family group.

I've realized that, like, I have difficult people, but I might actually be the difficult person right now. I for somebody else. And if we're honest, like, we don't just need to know how to navigate this as the person who is responding to a difficult person. But we need to know how to look inwardly and ask the question, am I the difficult person?

I remember years ago I had grown really, really close to someone and they were battling cancer and we saw them become cancer free. And there was one thing that we were concerned about when they were at the VA hospital in Nashville that they would not contract meningitis, which is an infection. And they came out of the surgery well, but they contracted meningitis and it 28 years ago, this person who I had grown so deeply to trust and respect died at 28, had battled a breast cancer, came on the other side of it.

But meningitis consumed her body and she died. Close friend, someone that I had grown in my my own walk with God with and I had grown in the family and connected with the family so often. And this person had a house in Cartersville. And I was living in Greensboro at the time and the brother who lived in Ohio said, Man, like there's nobody in the house.

Like, why don't you why don't you buy the house? Why don't you move into the house? You've been doing apartments for, you know, most of your life here since you've come out of college. And I didn't want to do it. I didn't think that it was a good idea. But as I prayed more about it, I felt like God said, move into the house, take care of the house, and abide by the house.

So I did. I moved in. I was a single dad at the time. I had just started walking with Jesus when I was 22 years old. I had recommitted my life to Christ and felt like this was a new season. You know, it was I didn't have the apartment anymore. I had the big yard and I'm staying. So I had my riding lawnmower.

You know, I'm saying I'm not getting any on the ride. And I'm just like, you know, this is a new season. And what I did not know is that other people in the family had keys to the house, know. And I come home one day after work and 90% of the house is gone, gone, furniture gone, plates, cups gone, TVs gone.

My deejay equipment come home, gone. I know, I know. You hate me. I know you want me gone. And so I get on. I get on the phone with my dad and I'm like, Dad, like, we got to go to Rome, Georgia. We got to go. We got to go get my stuff. So I called the brother and I'm like, Man, I don't know what just happened, but somebody came and took the stuff and and he said, I think it's Auntie, I think it's auntie.

And so we go down. My father and I, we take a trailer, we go down. You know, I'm fuming because how could someone come in and take my stuff? You notice I said, Ma, they took my stuff. I get down to Rome, Georgia, and my stuff is at the back of the storage unit. Right? And so I got to climb over all of this stuff to get to my stuff.

And I'm pulling out boxes and I'm pulling out equipment. And oh, my second way back out to the trailer, to my car, God says, Stop. Leave the rest up. Go home. And so I step back out of the storage unit. I look at Auntie and I said, I'm sorry. You can have you can have the rest. I'm going home.

And Auntie looked at me like, What? Because up to this point, there was this tension between the two of us. Because you know what? Like, I didn't realize. What I didn't realize is that they had lost someone, too. And I had my own process of grieving and letting go. I had not considered the fact that maybe there were some things in the house that they wanted to get to to have a tangible connection to this person that they had lost.

I had totally forgotten about that possibility because all I could think about was my stuff. And on my way to the car, I looked at my dad. I said, Dad, let's go. And Dad, who's a pastor at the time, looked at me and said, But what about your stuff? We just drove 5 hours to get your stuff. And I said, God just said to me, it's not about the stuff.

And I looked at Auntie and I said, I'm sorry. I did not think about how all of this affected you. And I've been selfish. Do whatever you want to do with the stuff. I'm going home and I'm starting over. Sometimes what's going on with a difficult person is not always what we think. And sometimes the difficulty doesn't actually originate with them, but originates with some stuff that we haven't dealt with in our own lives.

Now, it got real quiet right there, but somebody ought to say, Man, so. So what I want to do is I want to tell you, like for responses, for general responses that we had when we went into conflict. One is we fight, right? We blame, we attack, we lash out. Like if you are constantly feeling like you have to defend yourself, your heart posture might actually be off when you know who you are.

Watch this. When you know who you are, you don't have to prove who you are. But now I'm not saying you have to cower to them, but let God defend you. Whenever I said that to Auntie, I gained more respect from her in that moment than I had in years of our relationship because she saw God doing something in my heart that had nothing to do with natural things but spiritual things.

I had to forgive and I had to move on. I was one of those people that for so long in my life, I thought my life revolved around what I had, what I owned, what I possessed. And I came all the way back to Greensborough and sat on the floor in my living room. And I had to learn.

It's not about the stuff God says, I'm gonna teach you how to start over. I didn't realize that that was the beginning of things that I would learn later in life. In ministry, what you have to learn how to start over in a new community, how to start over in a new relationship, how to start over in a new church.

It was a principle I had to learn the hard way that has helped me now along the years. I don't mind starting over because I've lost everything and God still been there. Do I have a witness there? When you when you lose everything and you don't have anything left with the clothes on your back, you learn that God can help you start over.

But the second thing, the second thing we do is we flee, right? We we try to withdraw. We try to avoid it. We try to act like the conflict is not there because we don't want to rock the boat. Now, I'm not talking about the fact that when there's abuse or something like that, because sometimes you need to flee, sometimes you need to get out.

You know, talk to Joseph in the Old Testament when Pastor's wife is trying to get him to go with me. Like, sometimes you need to cut out. I'm not talking about those kind of situations, but there are times when we flee, when we're supposed to stay and engage. The third thing we do sometimes is we freeze, right? We have the paralysis of analysis.

What we let the tension or the resentment or anger build beneath the surface until we explode. Now, notice these first three. They're usually rooted in fear, but then there's this fourth one. That's faith. Somebody shout faith. A faith is when we trust God. We trust maybe begin to trust the person and we put the trust over the tension that we may feel.

So. So what we want to do over the rest of our time is we want to look at two different stories are two different scenarios in Scripture. One is in the Old Testament and the other is in the New Testament. What I want you to understand about the relationship between the Old Testament, the New Testament. Sometimes it is that the New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed, but the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed.

You'll get that the New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed, but the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed. And so what we will do is we'll contrast these two stories and the characters in them, and we want to ask the question what can we learn about how to deal with disappointment, how to deal with difficult people, maybe how to deal with people that are divisive.

So we're going to start in the book of Genesis, chapter 16. So go ahead and turn there. If you if you don't mind, we're going to read it off the screen in the in our V, but Genesis 16, let me remind you of what's going on in the context of the Book of Genesis. God has created this group of people.

He has given us responsibilities on the Earth. The story transitions into how God sends a solution to the problem or the issue of sin, because when sin comes into the world in Genesis three, it begins to multiply in the world. And God is not surprised by that. God knew what would happen. He has a solution to that. And that solution is a family.

That family is started by Abraham and Sarah and God makes this covenant. God makes this agreement. God also sends this promise to this group of people. And the rest of the Book of Genesis is about how that promise is is challenged, how these obstacles and these conflicts come against God's people. And God's people sometimes make the right decisions and they're on the mountaintop, and sometimes they make the wrong decisions and they find themselves in the valley.

So the whole book of Genesis is about this engagement of this family and their pursuit of God and God's pursuit of them all with me so far. So when we get to Genesis chapter 16, the promise to Abraham and Sarah, or at this point they're called Abraham and Sara, it has not been fulfilled yet. They're in the waiting process.

They're in what some might consider to be a holding pattern, right? So that's where we are when we enter this text. Let's read it. Genesis 16, beginning at verse one, it says, Now somebody shout now, now. Sara, Abraham's wife had borne him. No children. Somebody say, No children, but somebody shout. But she had an Egyptian slave name Hagar.

So she said to Abraham, The Lord has kept me from having children go sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her. Now, notice she said, Perhaps I, Abraham, agree to what Sara said. So after Abraham had been living in Cain in ten years, Sarai, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Eve Hagar, and gave her to her husband to be his wife.

He slept with Hagar and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant. She began to despise her mistress. Then Sarai said to Abraham, You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. Mm. I put my slave in your arms. And now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge. Between you and me, your slave is in your hands.

Abrams said, Do with her whatever you think best. Then Sarai mistreated Hagar, so she fled from her verse seven, The Angel of the Lord found Hagar near a spring in the desert. It was the spring that is beside the road of sure. And he said, Hagar, slave of Sara, where have you come from and where are you going?

I'm running away from my mistress, Sara, she answered. Then the angel of the Lord told her, Go back to your mistress and submit to her. Hmm. Well versed in the angel added, I will increase your descendants so much that they will be too numerous to count. The Angel of the Lord also said to her, You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son.

You shall name him Ishmael for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. That's not encouraging. Verse 13 She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees somebody shout, sees you are the God who sees me.

For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That is why the will was called bere le ha ro he it is still there between the dish and bread. So Hagar bore Abraham, a son, and Abraham gave the name Ishmael to the son she had borne Abraham. Abraham was 86 years old when Hagar bore him.

Ishmael dealing, dealing with difficult, difficult people. Now there's a lot in this text that we could talk about, but but I want to overlay what what I'm about to share. I want you to overlay it over every or any conflict that you're dealing with right now, like any of the concerns that you're currently having in your own life, because these are principles time tested principles.

We don't just see in this text that we're talking about today, but we see them all throughout Scripture. Like these are things that you'll find nuggets of truth for us to stand on all throughout Scripture. So the first takeaway that I'm going to give you from this text is conflict is not always a sign that something is wrong.

Conflict is not always a sign that something is something is wrong. For some reason, we we often believe the law in our relationships, in our society, and maybe even in our churches. That conflict always means that something is wrong, that something is wrong with me, that something is wrong with them, maybe that something is wrong with God. But we have to remember what James teaches us.

In the first chapter of his book. He says things like this consider it pure joy. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, watch what he says. Because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And then he says, Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

So that may be sometimes trouble, sometimes conflict, sometimes that difficult person is actually a gift. Oh yea, yea, yea. Saying Hey man. Like like sometimes like we see them as something God needs to get rid of something. God needs to move, but they may actually be a gift. Yea. Yea. No. Like some of y'all work out right? And I probably need to be out there more.

But like when you work out and you use like weights, like usually there's resistance, right? Or maybe you're running on a treadmill. Like usually you have your developing endurance. And what happens when you do new activities when you're working out is sometimes you get sore, a man, you get sore and out of it, like my oldest, like she was, you know, starting sports and and she was working out.

She was getting it here. And then she came home one day and she was like, Oh, oh, Daddy, Oh, Daddy, I'm hurting. And I was like, What's wrong, baby? And so I'm trying to check out cause, you know, I did sports medicine for a little girl in college. I'm checking out of all this. I Oh, I said, So what do you do today?

Oh, we did a new workout. I said, Oh, baby, that's not an injury. That's soreness, that's natural. That's that's the assets in your body responding to the muscle being used in ways it's not used to like you got to work through what you think is pain. It's actually just soreness. It's just a natural process of exercising a muscle.

You have an exercise. Oh, is anybody getting this? And we're trying to move people out of the way because we saw and we think we injure and gossip. No, no, no, no, no. You got to work through this baby. Oh, you only see any man. You only women. Like you got to work through. This conflict is not always good.

Something bad. Our conflicts, our challenges. They may be even our difficult people will either drive us away from God and apart from each other, or they will cause us to lean in, to build unity as we learn what God is trying to teach us. These are not always dangerous situations to avoid, but they are actually may be God orchestrated opportunities to see or participate in one of his miracles.

Mary. Mary. Mary had a conflict. She had a baby. She had no husband. Jonah and Peter had a conflict that the people they were once taught to hate. Now they were told to go to and that God had a heart for them, too. But those conflicts watch this. We're platforms by which God would orchestra his plan of redemption in this passage.

Let's go back to the text. In this passage, we begin to understand that Sarah, who would later be named Sarah, she runs into her own obstacle. She has most everything that a woman could want, but she's missing one thing she can't have children. Now, let me stop and say to those of you who are trying to have children and you've been unable to do so, that we limit with you, we we grieve with you, that this deep desire to be a parent has eluded you.

And we pray for either a miracle from God or the ability to accept God's plan for you to have children and a family some other way. For those of you who've lost children to miscarriage, I want you to know that we grieve with you. Also, we see you. And what I found sometimes is we don't talk about these issues in church because we think they're too tough or they're too sensitive.

But what we find is that a lot of people are suffering in silence. And we need to address some of these issues and love and say love engages, love, comforts. Love is compassionate. Love sees people like God saw Hagar. We see you now. Back to Sara. She had status. She's faithful. She's a successful woman in her community, and she's already heard the message from God in Genesis 12 and Genesis 15 that she would have children more numerous than the sky, the stars in the sky, more numerous than the sand on the seashore.

But now she has this moment where she comes face to face. She's in the land in between. It has not happened yet. And this this idea of her being a mom has eluded her. And she cannot eliminate the stigma and the stark fact that she is barren. And the older she got, the more she felt like time was running out.

And this woman that normally would be celebrated is now being scorned, surprised, frustrated. She's disappointed and she's impatient. And she takes matters into her own hands. Point number two, try not to make important decisions from a place of pain. How would you have felt if you were in your seventies and you were told you would get pregnant, have many children, but you were still waiting between hearing the voice of God and the promise and the fulfillment of that promise, like all of us have been there.

Like, have you ever needed God to show up by 2:00? And it was 155 not only saying, Hey, man, yeah, I'm like, like you at 155. And you're like, God, I need you about 2:00, you got 5 minutes. And so sometimes when we in those kind of moments, we say, God, let me help you out, you know, saying like, you probably want me to do something.

You know what I mean? Like, you probably want me to step out. And so this is kind of where we find ourselves because, see, what was happening with Sarah is that even though she does what is culturally okay, it is humiliating. And as Pastor Ryan said last week, just because something is permissible and or allowable does not necessarily mean that it is beneficial or helpful.

Let me say it another way. Just because it's okay in the culture does not mean that it pleases God. But at least in my third point, God doesn't always make the details of his plan clear. Now, I'm not saying that God is the author of Chaos. That's not what I'm saying. Oh, no, He is never the author of Confusion.

But this is something we also don't like to talk about in the church that because we want people to believe that we have it all together. You know, I'm saying that we too blessed to be stressed that we all fight for the Lord two times. I always say any man and that we know everything that God is going to do and how he's going to do it.

And the reality is, if you follow scripture and if you follow people, it will not always be clear. And so what you have to learn to do is hear the voice of God. And if you haven't heard anything recently about what you're supposed to do, do the last thing he told you to do right? Let me say, if you're not hearing anything fresh or new, do the last thing he told you to do.

Maybe that's where the problem is. Point number four Find your identity in him. Let me say it again. Find your identity in him. Part of what happens, what's around this text is hurt. Her emotional unhealthiness is when she is trying to find her identity in something outside of who she is in God. Now she has a natural desire and the promise is for her to become a mother.

But she had elevated being a mother over being a daughter. And let me say that again. She had elevated being a mother over first being a daughter. And that's sometimes what we do. There's something in front of us that's so important, and maybe even it is a promise from God. It's not happening yet. And we make that thing more important than where we currently are.

Or somebody ought to say, Man, right there she is so concerned about her legacy and maybe even her reputation that she does something that is out of character for her. She does something that I'm sure years later she looked back and said, I don't even recognize that person. I don't recognize that woman. It wasn't just giving Hagar to Abraham because God hadn't told Abraham or her how the child would come.

But it's how she treated Hagar that reveals an issue in her heart. She was looking for her identity outside of where she was supposed to be. Like What? What are you finding your identity in look like? What? What are you finding your identity in? If we follow your social media posts, we will will. We'll be able to tell you what your finding your identity in.

Are you seeking the approval of others only to lose focus on what God told you and what God promised you. So now Soraya's story is compelling, but could you imagine being Hagar in this story? She is a slave serving faithfully in her master's home. She has to do whatever Sarai tells her because she's seen as property and that the child that she would bear would possibly never be seen as her own.

But surprise. So when this ask is made, Hagar secretly resides. It's Sara, and Sara secretly resents Hagar, and eventually the bitterness of both of them goes public. God help us to deal with the junk on the inside of us. That affects how we see other people and how we treat other people. Because the job our job is not to fix other people.

Our job is to love other people. It's God's job to work on their hearts. Oh, I need honey. Damien right there. How freeing and how liberating it is to know that you don't have to fix nobody. Because guess what? You can't even fix yourself something. Something happens when Hagar knows that she's pregnant, her pregnancy seems to awaken something in her.

Her status has changed. She is no longer just a slave. She went from being property to Sam and to someone who has now needs to be protected. Hagar However, she has our own trauma, we can tell, and that now leads her to mistreat Sara hagar's own disappointment. Her own pain causes her to act a little brand new friends with Sara?

Yeah, with me. She starts acting a little brand new. She thinks this about her now, and Sara feels humiliate it. And then she blames Abraham. Know. And I'm sure Abraham is like, That's what I do. That's another message for another day. But. But at this point, watch this. At this point, Sara is fighting, Hagar is fleeing, and Abraham is freezing to catch that.

Nobody seems to be living out of their faith in this moment because somebody needed to be the bigger person in this story and remind everybody what God said. Yeah, nobody's nobody's doing that. So the Bible says Hagar runs away with her son, but God says this angel to her in a desert. Have you ever noticed that All that that although we have a tendency to run from God, God has a tendency to chase after us, is our catch.

What Felicia said before they sang one of those songs that God has a tendency to chase after us. It is a story of sin and grace. This is what we've been talking about with our students, talking about the the story of Jonah downstairs on Wednesday nights. It's about sin and grace. It's about running and chasing is about sin and surrender.

So number five, God sees us and loves us. God speaks to Hagar through the angel. But notice what she says in response. She calls him the God who sees her. Can I talk to some real people? It is possible to be in a family, to be in a society, to even be in a church and feel invisible at times.

Like you don't matter. Like all you're good for is getting people what they want or what they need. But they don't see. They don't see you. And when we feel invisible, we do something. What I've learned to call we have exaggerated visibility. Now, what exaggerated visibility is, it's a coping mechanism to empower yourself when you don't feel like you have a voice and you don't feel like you are being seen, it's when you say with your actions, Oh, you don't see me now, Oh, oh, you're going to see me now.

It's what pants sagging for a long time was. It was exaggerated. Visibility is what sometimes, you know, you get that hair done and you know, it's bang, bang, like it's exaggerated visibility, like sometimes the long nails, sometimes brothers. And, you know, your chest being out a little bit like is exaggerated visibility like you going to see me now exaggerated a little bit.

And what we do sometimes is we overcorrect because we're not being seen. And we need to be reminded that it's not important about who sees you outside is about who sees you inside. And so we exaggerate our visibility to make other people see us and and then we find ourselves getting in trouble because we've exaggerated something else. And that's not even who we are.

Oh, is anybody getting this? So the angel says, Stop exaggerating your visibility, Hagar, Stop acting brand new with Sarah. Go back. Go back to your mistress and submit to her. And the Lord says that he's going to bless this child. And in that desert, God saw her and the Bible says God promised to bless her. And Ishmael, she didn't realize watch this.

She didn't realize that this conflict would be the vehicle for her eventual freedom. It would actually be the thing that would cause her to no longer be a slave again. But she was doing it her way, and so was Sara. And both of them need to be confronted by God. Which leads to point number six. God is able to overcome every obstacle, even this junk that we have now.

We have to be willing to deal with disappointment and difficult people in a healthy way. We almost also must not allow what happens to us to define us like we can't always be the victim. Sometimes Disappointment is there to produce something greater than we could ever imagine or think. God wants to make people who are resilient, people who been but they don't break.

What Sara didn't know at the time was that her effort to take matters in her own hands. She actually created an obstacle that for generations today, her family and her seed is having to deal with. What most people don't know is that Ishmael became the beginning of what we now know as the Islamic faith, and that this prophecy that God gave to the angel was part of what we see now between Jews, Muslims and Christians.

All three of those came out of the house of Abraham and Sara in this text. All of this has roots in this moment. What a reminder to us that when a decision is rooted in disappointment and divisiveness, it can have devastating consequences, not just for us, but for generations to follow. Now, now, here's the good news. I want to say we need some good news.

At the end of the day, God bless both Ishmael, who Hager had by Abraham and also blessed Isaac, who Sarah had when she was 90 years old, and Abraham or Abraham was 100 in Genesis chapter 21. Now, I want to remind you, God keeps his promises. Now I've learned a new term that I want to share with you that I think is important.

It's called post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic growth. Now, we often talk about like post-traumatic stress. But I want to say to you, there's also something called post-traumatic growth. Let me explain what that is. It is a positive transformation following a traumatic life event that facilitates growth. Have you ever had something in your life that when you were going through it, you thought it was going to kill you, that you thought that you were going to make it out of it?

But when you got on the other side of it, you recognize how much it blessed you. Yeah, I believe that is how God wants us to look at some of the conflicts in our lives that God can grow you through disappointment, God can grow you through difficult people. And so I go back to this to this dumbbell, and I remind you, like this is targeting a muscle here, right?

And sometimes God will send you resistance like this dumbbell because he's targeting a muscle. And could it be possible that sometimes what God is targeting in your life is he's targeting the muscle of love. And he says your your love muscles are a little bit weak. Like if all you're doing is fleeing, if all you're doing is fighting, if all you're doing is freezing, then I need to work on that.

I need to work on that Love muscles, that love muscle might not be strong. You might be loving very weakly. And if all you're doing when people come against you is defending yourself, if all you do when that person walks in the room is you kind of go through all these emotions, then it's possible that I need to work on some stuff in you.

I'm going to deal with them right. Well, let me start on you. He's he's working on the love muscle because love requires strength. I love the way Pete Scars Zero. His book, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship, an Emotionally Healthy Leader. He says this. He says True Kingdom Peace will never come by pretending what is wrong is right. True peacemakers love God and others enough to disrupt false peace.

This is one of those messages I know because he's been challenging me ever since I felt like I was supposed to share this. God sometimes has to disrupt a false sense of peace. It's not just them. It's us, too. It's not just the difficult person. It's me. How do I deal with my stuff Now we transition to how do we deal with other people?

Like I know it felt like when I started to message like I was going give you all to deal with other people first. Now, like all of what we've been talking about so far is dealing with you right now. We're going to focus on closing how to deal with other people. Now, the best example that I could find is Jesus.

How does Jesus deal with difficult people? How does Jesus deal with divisive people? And, you know, we can go to a lot of places. We could go and we could talk about the greatest commandment like, you know, love God, love people, Like we could talk about Romans 12 and we could deal with how to live. But but like, I found this passage in Luke 23, and it just it just reminded me of two things that I think we can take away from Jesus and how he dealt with difficult people.

Luke 23, verse 32 it says to other men, both Criminals will also live out with him to be executed. When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals, one of his one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, verse 34, Watch this, Father. Forgive them for they know, for they do not know what they are doing.

And they divided up his clothes by casting lights. The people stood watching and the rulers even sneered at him. They said he saved others. Let him save himself if he is God's Messiah. The chosen one. Verse 36, The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him vinegar, wine, vinegar, and said, If you are the king of Jews, save your self.

The cross is a symbol of Christ that is best and humanity at its worst. We see the light of love and we see the darkness of hate. This is love in action. It embodies the strength to love. The Scripture says, No man takes my life, but I lay it down. And if I lay it down, I'll pick it up again.

Like they wouldn't have been able to kill him unless he decided it was time. Oh, did anybody get that? That's the kind of strength, Inner strength, spiritual strength. You can't take my life. I lay it down. And if I lay it down, I'll pick it up again. And so if you begin to understand that about how you're dealing with people like what you say, like I know you think that it's going to really like impact me and, and like, no, like I know who I am and I got to engage you and love you, but you don't decide who I am.

You don't decide what I'm called to do. God does Jesus is on the cross when he when he could have been calling down angels to to avenge him, when he could have been telling them all from the cross. He's forgiving them and he's loving them. Do we do we love like that? Now notice notice what Jesus says about the people who are crucifying crucifying him.

He says in some ways that they're blind. He says they don't know what they are doing is not a statement of condemnation, but it's one where he sought their redemption. Jesus knew that their inability to see could be their greatest tragedy tragedy, and it could be ours as well. Maybe watch this, because if you don't get nothing else, get this.

Maybe the difficult person in your life is not evil, but misguided. Maybe they're not bad, but blind. We must see beyond human badness and have the compassion to see human blindness. When Jesus teaches us to love our enemies. He did not say it was an optional strategy. When other things didn't seem to work. He suggested it should be our first response.

So here are three things here. The three things that we see in this text about Jesus real quick of how to deal with difficult people. Number one, confess everybody say confess that maybe we have to confess that we have not been loving the way Jesus wants us to love, that maybe my love has been weak. Are we better known for what we're against than what we hate in our rules?

Are we known for love? Second thing, we have to have compassion. Now, compassion is this concern for the well-being of other people that leads to an action that will help our compassion. Watch this. Alpert takes of this back in January at a at a conference we were in. It's just rocked my world, he said. Our compassion cannot be contingent on our shared convictions.

You'll catch that. Our compassion cannot be contingent on our shared convictions. We are supposed to have compassion where the people have shared convictions with us or not. We're supposed to have compassion whether people have the same values as us or not. Like it's not contingent on shared convictions, is contingent on our love for God and our love for them.

Yeah, we are sometimes so entangled with being right that we have the wrong posture. Wow. Are we focused on winning arguments or are we focused on winning hearts lasting? Consider Christ's example. Now, in first grade, the Chapter 13 is the chapter about love, which says Love is patient, Love is kind, love is, you know, all that hard stuff.

And then it gets down to the end of First Corinthians 13 and it's almost like Paul forgets what he's writing about and he's talking about love. And then he says, When I was a child, I thought as a child I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. I'm like, What are you talking about?

Like, you were just talking about love. And all of a sudden you're talking about when I was a child. Here's what Paul is saying. When love grows up, it looks like Jesus. When love grows up, it looks like Jesus. Some of you maybe you you feel like Peter. You remember when Peter went to Jesus and he was like, How many times do I forgive people?

Jesus? Sometimes. Sometimes enough. Because, you know, you could probably think that that, that Peter's like he's got that person has got one more time and he's forgiving them seven times and he's like seven and Jesus, because they got one more time and Jesus like no 70 times. So worse. A team of people join me. Forgiveness comes more naturally to people who've been forgiven.

Forgiveness can be it can be instantaneous, but for some people it might also take some time. We give up the right to get even when we forgive and we rediscover that they are people to. Now, forgiving does not mean ignoring. It doesn't mean putting a false label on an evil act. It means rather that the evil is no longer it no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.

Now, forgiveness is sometimes the catalyst that creates an atmosphere for fresh start. It is lifting the burden. It is canceling the debt. But forgiveness doesn't always mean that the relationship will be better, that sometimes the forgiving person will not want to be reunited with us. And sometimes the forgiving person may not change, but there can be no reunion without forgiving.

But there can be forgiving without. Let me give you an example and a close with repentance. When I was around nine years old, I went to my grandparents house and my uncle in his bedroom was also the TV room. So this place is back in the day and we have VHS tapes. I want to say some of your own.

We went straight over and I'm there watching TV and I'm trying to find something else to watch because what's on TV is not that good is when you only had like four or five channels. I remember that and I put something in the VHS recorder player that I think based on what's said on the on the label is a cartoon.

And it was not a cartoon. Not a cartoon. And I pulled it out and threw it over to the side of my uncle's band and ran out of the room because I had seen something I'd never seen before. And it messed me up. And you would have thought that I would have gone to my parents or I would have said to my uncle what I saw.

But I kept it a secret. And later on, months later, I found myself back in my uncle's room. And I find that VHS tape and I put it in. This time I didn't run. I stayed turned watching now and I watched and it started for me, an addiction and an obstacle in my life that it would take years to overcome.

Fast forward to 2006. I'm passed. I'm a youth pastor at the time, and my uncle, this uncle who lived in that room, he dies in December of that year. And I found myself at the going down to the funeral and there's something tight in my chest that I just can't figure out what's going on. And my wife could tell that something was wrong with me.

She didn't know what, but something was going over. I don't know when I realized is that Uncle June never knew about that tape or he never knew the years that it took me to fight to overcome it. And there was a part of me as I was going to a funeral that I wanted him to pay. I wanted him to know what he had done.

I was suffering from unforgiveness. Unforgiveness is when you drink poison, but you expect somebody else to die. And I found myself at the burial site and God just said, Get on your knees. I got on my knees. And that day African. Then I did the heart of the game myself. Because this is not just about forgiveness, this is also about repentance.

And this is where I close what is repentance. Repentance is recognizing the need for change. In addition to the need to seek God's forgiveness. Repentance is when we change our mind, we change our direction, and we turn away from the world, turn to go change our behavior. Repentance doesn't earn God's forgiveness. It is the acknowledgment of our need to be forgiven.

It is a work of God's grace in our lives. So when John the Baptist was preaching to the Sadducees and to the Pharisees about repentance, he says, You should produce fruit in keeping with repentance. You. I really wanted to bring a plant in the room and just give you this as a closing, please. There. What I wanted to illustrate was that repentance, producing the fruit that is keeping with repentance is almost like a plant that has some dying leaves or some dying branches.

And I'll never forget, like my wife and I, we're not green thumbs. My my grandma, my father in law is. So he came into our house and in our front room we had bought all these plants and they look real nice for a while and we thought we was wearing them real good, had them in the sun, but the leaves were starting to turn brown and he went over.

He took a pair of shears and he just started cutting back. He started cutting back the dead leaves. And then he did something that messed me up. He started cutting leaves that were still green. And I'm like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, What are you doing? I think you're supposed to cut the ones that have died. Oh, no. A real good gardener sees when there's something in the way of growth.

And so he cut the dead leaves, like, yes, God will cut away some of the toxic things and some of the stuff that's harming you and harming your relationships. But also be aware that sometimes he cuts stuff that's not dead yet, stuff that looks alive to you. But he knows that that's going to get in the way of growth.

How do you deal with difficult people profess compassion. Consider Christ's example, and maybe for you it's the same for me, but maybe it starts with just repentance. There's got I've been I've been trying to love, but I've been loving in my own strength. I've been trying to deal with difficult people, but I've been doing it my way. And I need you to help me to do it your way.

So as the worship team leads us, I'm going to open the front and allow it to be a place where you can do business with God and maybe the battle is with another person and you have to walk through that confessing and compassion and Christ example. Maybe it's just some inner work God needs to do on you. Whatever it is.