Fighting Like Brothers (Round 3)

In my last post, I talked about fighting as brothers, rather than with brothers. I said we need to quit fighting with our brothers over silly issues and fight for our brothers’ marriages, ministries, and children.

So how do we put this into practice? How do we change our behavior?

I’d like to offer seven suggestions:

1. Realize that good men are individuals and will therefore be different from each other. Understand that God makes each of us different. (Romans 14)

2. Learn to tell the difference between methods, which change, and actual Bible doctrines, which should not change.

3. Observe a man’s heart for ministry before judging his methods.

4. Be open to people who think differently than you.

5. Enlist for combat against the real enemy.

6. Commit to the defense of your brothers.

7. If you feel you need to confront a brother about something, pray about it, don’t write a blog, email or letter. Call him on the phone or, better yet, buy him coffee or lunch and ask him about it.

As we said earlier, our brothers and we fought “like brothers” growing up. We went at it. Despite the fact our brothers and we fought, if something or someone ever threatened him, we would jump to his defense in a heartbeat! 

So men, it is time that we not only fight like brothers, but we begin to fight FOR our brothers, against enemies that are a real threat: the pattern of this world, the flesh and its passions, ministry burn-out, discouragement, immorality, pornography, the devil, etc.

Many brothers are being beat down and knocked out by these very virulent threats while we blast each other from blogs, quibbling about nonsensical issues like whether to wear a tie on Sunday or whether certain instruments are OK to play in church. The enemy is not the Gospel-preaching church down the street or the brother across town with a different ministry philosophy.
I am under no illusion that one set of blog posts can cure the ills of our public discourse. The above-mentioned unscriptural habits are too deeply entrenched to be rooted out by anything but the power of the Holy Spirit through the incremental work of sanctification.

I do hope that if at least one person would take these thoughts and put them into practice, it would make a difference. If we are busy fighting for and alongside each other, locked arm in arm, it’s a lot harder to turn and fight each other.

If, one by one, we would commit to fight for our brothers against real enemies, we might just see the tide turn for our movement and the cause of Christ — in our generation.