The Power of Healthy Conflict
Learning to prioritize loving conflict that actually produces health even in your enemies is the key to understanding true love from God's perspective.
Christ is risen!
Conflict is not fun. Most studies show that, when given a choice between confrontation and avoidance, most folks prefer to avoid confrontation. And that is because conflict isn’t usually a pleasurable experience.
However, confrontation and conflict are necessary for growth and maturity.
This has been my experience with most of the confrontations I have seen in my own life. While never enjoyable, they have usually proven informative and beneficial for my maturity and self-awareness.
However, it all depends on your perspective and how you handle the conflict.
IF you handle confrontation well, you have more profound and closer communion and growth. If you don’t, well, you get the opposite!
Choosing to do conflict well is a sure sign of maturity and humility. Interested?
Look at our Lesson today in Acts 4:1-10:
“Now as they spoke to the people, the priests, the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees came upon them, being greatly disturbed that they taught the people and preached in Jesus the resurrection from the dead. And they laid hands on them, and put them in custody until the next day, for it was already evening. However, many of those who heard the word believed; and the number of the men came to be about five thousand.
And it came to pass, on the next day, that their rulers, elders, and scribes, as well as Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and as many as were of the family of the high priest, were gathered together at Jerusalem. And when they had set them in the midst, they asked, “By what power or by what name have you done this?”
Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders of Israel: If we this day are judged for a good deed done to a helpless man, by what means he has been made well, let it be known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by Him this man stands here before you whole.”
Notice two important insights into this confrontation between the religious leaders who had Christ Crucified and the emboldened Apostles of the Risen Lord!
First, the Apostles were living a life of resurrection.
This particular confrontation was a result of the apostles ministering to the sick and the sick being healed by the power of the Risen Christ within His disciples. When the apostles were asked about the healing, they boldly proclaimed it was through the Resurrected Lord Jesus that this man was healed.
In other words, they were living in the daily reality of Christ defeating death in all of its ugly manifestations, and this brought their lives into conflict with those still gripped by the power of death and the delusion of slavery to death.
Our confrontations about our faith should never be the result of trying to be controversial, but by us simply living our lives as if the Resurrection happened!
Which, of course, it did!
Second, the Apostles were emboldened by the truth.
Now, once our faith in the resurrection brings us into conflict, and it will, dear ones, then we cannot remain silent.
Silence, in the face of those who are still gripped by the power of death, is both unfaithful and unloving. But our words must always be focused on directing these persons to Jesus Christ and on our heart’s desire to see even our enemies set free from the power of death by faith in the resurrection.
On this second Tuesday after Pascha, we continue to press out the practical, daily, and cosmic implications of the Resurrection. Jesus, conquering mortality, changes everything. It is embracing this reality that will enable my life to embody this profound truth in my everyday life. It must affect my choices, my priorities, and my relationships in a way that reflects the enormous reality of my new life in Jesus Christ. No amount of lip service to the Resurrection will do justice to this miracle, this salvation, in a Normal Orthodox Christian’s life will suffice. I am called to live my everyday life in the light and joy of His Resurrection.
Today, let your faith, your new life in Christ, shine so others can find their way out of the darkness of the fear of death, and ask the Holy Spirit to embolden you to speak the words of freedom to all who are enslaved by death, starting first and foremost with your own life. It’s by living daily within the awesome reality of the Risen Lord that I can genuinely live a Normal Orthodox life!
P.S. Christ our God, You are the Life that dawned from the grave, though the tomb was sealed. Through closed doors You came to the Apostles. You are the Resurrection of all. And, You renewed us through them with an upright spirit, according to Your great mercy.
Fr. Barnabas Powell is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, GA. He is also the founder of Faith Encouraged Ministries and produces the Faith Encouraged Daily Devotional on Substack. Watch the Faith Encouraged YouTube Channel here - https://www.youtube.com/@FaithEncouraged
We celebrate Fr. Barnabas’s birthday for the rest of April in our Annual Pascha Fundraiser! Please take a moment and click the link and wish Fr. Barnabas a happy birthday with a special gift for Faith Encouraged! Thank you!