the first step in taking care of fighting…

in looking at starting the process of taking care of conflicts and arguments we see that you must take  of the inside first.  colossians 3.15 (niv) says, let the peace of CHRIST rule in your heart.

when we have the peace of CHRIST in our heart then we’ll be at peace with other people.  if we don’t have this in our life – GOD’s peace in our hearts – then we try to manipulate others, try to control them and try to move them around to get what we want out of life.

there was a time in our marriage that margaret and i had a major conflict.  it was horrible.  we have jokingly said, that we have never contemplated divorce in our life, murder yes.  we had three horrible years.  

listen, in every marriage there is some kind of power struggle but we finally got to the point that we said to GOD, we can’t do it, we have to have you.  i was in staff ministry at that time, in a large church in Indiana and i was working 90 plus hours a week.  i was going to make it no matter what it cost and it about cost my family but it showed me that i need to change that i was the cause of the conflict so i resigned my job and we moved to indianapolis and GOD started working on me and i started selling domino’s pizza and started falling in love with GOD and falling in love with my family.  GOD started working in me, changing me.

you see only GOD could change our marriage and it started in me, it started in margaret.  you work on you and watch what happens.  the starting point of getting along with others, to avoid arguments, is to get peace in your heart through the rule of CHRIST.

give in to GOD.  this means you learn to say “THY will be done” instead of saying “me first”.  That’s the difference.  when you say, “LORD, whatever you want that’s what i want” then the peace process starts.

just a thought from the front porch…