Conflict over Personal Preferences

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Conflict over Personal Preferences

Conflict over Personal Preferences
By David Cox

The next element of a dying or dead church is that there is conflict over personal preferences. One of the key elements of a very alive church is that the church can discern, understand, defend, and fight and apply Bible principles in their world around them. This is the opposite of that. A dead and dying church is one which cannot do this.

Life defends itself, but in death, one has no control, and priorities seem to fade into non-issues.




Discernment

One of the key factors of a vivid church is that they can discernment between issues. This is a lost art in our day. Church fights have split churches because they could not agree on the color of a new carpet for the auditorium! This is par for the course among dead churches.

Note that we as God’s children don’t have a say in a lot of things. We just obey. When we understand that this is a battle, and we must insist on the essentials, defend the fundamentals of the faith, and complete our mission, and anything that stops that is failure for us. Then we grasp what kind of situation we are in. Unfortunately, most churches today have no idea of the authority of Scripture because they have relegated everything to just a church vote, or what they personally want, a preference. They have no discernment as to what they should be doing as a Christian or as a church. This is sad. Worse is that being in that situation, they think everything is fine with them.

Understanding

We began with discernment. Discernment and understanding are very similar. To discern is to make a difference in your mind between two things. They are different. Is it okay for a Christian to go to a party where there will be dancing, alcohol, and drugs? You must identify that this is not the same as eating a meal with family for somebody’s birthday. The elements that are wrong are x,y, and z. But discerning them, we must understand biblically (with scriptural exposition) the why it is wrong.




Defending and Fighting

Moreover we must be able to face people who say they are Christians and promote doing that thing. This is a spiritual battle over principle. Satan wants us to fall in upholding the principles of God, and God wants us to be a testimony to an unsaved world to the moral principles of God. This fighting back and forth is exactly what God wants us to do.

Application and Integrity

The end point is that we have to understand, discern, and fight to uphold the moral principles of God. A dead church won’t do that. A live church will.

These thoughts are taken from a post “7 Deadly sins of a Dying Church“.

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