Sermon Transcript
wanted to see what was going to happen. You’ll have to watch Malcolm in the Middle to watch that. I’ve shown that, I feel like, before to a couple different people, but it’s always good to watch. We want to talk about conflict today, and some of you have seen me use this illustration before, but anytime we talk about conflict, I have this kind of picture in my mind of one of these spheres where you’re arguing with somebody about something, and then it becomes like this really, really quickly, where you’re talking about something that seems small and insignificant, and boom, how did we get from one place to all of a sudden where it’s escalated to this giant level. Some of you have either been through a conflict like that, or you’re going through a conflict like that with somebody, or you’re going to go through a conflict soon with another person.
And it’s one thing to go through a conflict with another person, but it’s really troubling whenever you’re going through conflict with another Christian, with another believer. And it’s frustrating because it seems like we should be able to get along, but very often we find ourselves in a position where We look back and we go, how did we get from here to this here all of a sudden? I know Shayna and I have had our share of disagreements through the years. I’m not going to go into detail about the different conflicts that we’ve had over time, but the first conflict we had was right before we were married, and really we haven’t had a whole lot of conflict since, right? It’s been smooth sailing.
I spent a lot of time praying this last week about— for the Lord to show me different conflicts and ideas that I could use. But here’s the deal, a lot of them involve Shannon and I, and then a lot of them involve me with my kids, or a lot of them involve some— like some of you here in the room. And so I know for a fact that you all wouldn’t want me sharing some of these things, but this last week— I really like to immerse myself in a topic whenever I’m gonna preach. And so I went this last week to a doctor’s appointment with my daughter Raya, and I had been praying that the Lord would just open my eyes to conflict around me. I know that it’s all around But I just wanted to see some different ideas in conflict and kind of observe.
And 5 minutes after I prayed that prayer, at the doctor’s appointment, there was a grandmother in the waiting room who started arguing with the person behind the counter. And I was smiling, and her eyes said, why are you laughing? I said, because I prayed for this conflict. I wanted to see this. That’s how twisted I am.
Some of you people watch car racing, and you watch auto racing. Like, why do we watch that? We want to see some crashes, right? Like, we want to see some people get it on. And why do we watch MMA?
Why do we watch wrestling? Why do we watch football? It’s because we like collisions, we like conflict, and we like to see people get into it. We don’t want to be involved in that, but we like to watch other people get involved in that. So I want to look at Philippians chapter 4, and just 2 verses really today is all we’re going to look at, where Paul all of a sudden takes a detour from all he’s talked about up until this point to live as Christ and how we are citizens of heaven and perseverance and all these things.
And all of a sudden he takes 2 verses to talk about a personal squabble that 2 people in the church have. And so we’re continuing our series in the book of Philippians, and I want to see some observations that we can take and apply to our own lives and our own conflicts. Chapter 4 is where we are. We’re just going to look at verses 2 and 3, and we’ll go other places too, but we’ll come back mainly in chapter 4 here, and it says this in chapter 4, verse 2 of Philippians. Paul says, I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord.
2 people, 2 women, Euodia and Syntyche. I plead with them to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you, my true companion, help these women since they have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my coworkers whose names are in the Book of Life. I want you to imagine that you’re a member of the Philippian church in the first century. Okay, can you picture it?
You were founded by the Apostle Paul himself, and you’d heard the stories about how the church got founded, how Paul ended up in Macedonia, in Philippi, because he was going to Asia, but God told him, no, you’re not going to Asia, you’re gonna go somewhere else. And so God gave him a vision of this man in Macedonia saying, Paul, please come help us. And you can read all about this, by the way, in Acts chapter 16. Paul comes to Macedonia, to Philippi, and the church is founded there. He goes to down by the river, meets some women there, including a wealthy businesswoman named Lydia.
I preached on her, I think, earlier this year in the spring. We talked about Lydia and her successful trade and how the Lord converted her and used Paul. And then Lydia opened up her house and the church started meeting there. It’s very possible that Euodia and Syntyche, these ladies here, were part of the founding members of the church. Imagine that you’re there And you’re there at the church because you know that Paul was such a prominent member of the history of your church.
And so now Paul sends a letter, and whenever a letter was sent, you would read it in church. Okay, and so Paul sent this letter, and one of the church elders stands up to read after maybe the church had a prayer, maybe a contemporary chorus or something like that in the church by their worship band. Then the elder stands up and he’s going to read the letter, and he reads the letter, and he gets to this point where he’s saying, I plead with Euodia and Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. And you have to imagine how awkward that must have been, and everybody’s looking at them because Euodia and Syntyche would have been there.
What do we know about these women? We know a couple different things. First of all, their names, Euodia, Syntyche. We’re going to practice this together because I had to learn this, and so now you’re going to learn it. Pastor Dave has a book of Bible pronunciation, and so I’ve learned how to pronounce these ladies’ names.
The first one, Euodia. Everybody say Euodia. Euodia. And Syntyche. The emphasis is on the first syllable.
Syntyche. Let me hear it. Syntyche. Yeah, there you go. It’s not Synticky or Syntyche.
It’s Syntyche. Euodia and Syntyche. Now, we don’t know everything about these women, but we know a few things. First of all, we don’t know the nature of their disagreement. There’s speculation that it was over which of them had the sillier name.
I think it was probably Euodia, and you can imagine Syntyche teasing Euodia about her name and saying, you’ve got 4 consonants in your— or 4 syllables in your name, and yet only 1 consonant. Come on, Euodia. And that really drove Euodia mad. And then Euodia would say, well, you can’t have Syntyche without sin. And that drove Syntyche nuts.
And then she would put the emphasis in the wrong syllable. No, that’s probably not what it is. It’s probably more significant, obviously, than that. Paul is writing them and he feels compelled to call them out by name. Now, we also know that these ladies were prominent because all he had to do was mention their name.
Everybody, oh yeah, Euodia and Syntyche. Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe it was Syntyche and Euodia, and then that was switched one time and Euodia didn’t like that, and so they got upset about that. But obviously they were prominent members. We also know that they were influential because Paul felt compelled to say something in the middle of his letter when he was talking about heaven and about suffering and about perseverance.
Oh, and by the way, you 2 ladies get on the same page and work things out together. Because they were influential enough that they could have started a church split. And maybe the church was already dividing. Maybe there was already a faction that was growing, and they were that influential. We also know that they were having an intense quarrel, and this wasn’t a surprise to anybody.
I’m sure whenever they read it, everybody, oh yeah, no, we know about that. It’s been ongoing. It’s interesting, we’re not sure where Paul wrote the book of Philippians from. We think that the consensus is he wrote it from a prison in Rome, which is more than 800 miles away. And so word of this disagreement travels 800 miles away.
This is some disagreement, this is some conflict. So Paul’s going to give them some instructions about what to do. And notice here in this that he doesn’t It’s probably not about doctrine, because if it was, he would just say, hey, here’s what I have to say about that, and then move on.
Most often in church conflict or conflict with other people, especially other believers, it’s not about doctrine. What is it about? It’s about you hurt my feelings or I hurt your feelings. It’s about the fact that we have God-given diversity in the church, especially in an area like this where people come from different cultures, different countries, different ethnicities, different backgrounds religiously, spiritually, socially. And so we bring this diversity together, and you mix everybody’s perspectives and opinions together, and you’ve got conflict.
We also have conflict because of simple misunderstandings. You are not a perfect communicator, and neither am I. I say things that I need to take back very often. I write things that I want to take back. Sometimes I’ll write something and I’ll have somebody read it before I send it, just because I want to make sure that I get it just right, but even then people misread what I’ve written, and I’m just not a perfect communicator. Neither are you.
And so that happens. And then also just the fact, if you go— if you know the book of James in chapter 4, James says, what causes fights and quarrels among you? It’s the fact that you don’t get along in your selfish desires. You have selfish desires. You want something and you don’t get it, so you’re fighting with other people.
Remember I said several weeks ago, and I even mentioned it again last week, we have an I problem. The world revolves around us. So because of that, we have conflict. So what do we do with our conflict? Well, let’s look at again these 2 verses a little bit closer and see what Paul tells us here.
First thing that he says is, I want you to be of the same mind in the Lord. He’s saying, I want you to have the same attitude. I want you to have the right attitude. What is the right attitude in a conflict? He’s saying it’s being of the same mind.
So is Euodia going to take the first step and be of the same mind with Syntyche? Is Syntyche going to take the first step in this conflict and be of the same mind with Euodia? Actually, what Paul is saying there is something a little bit different. If you go back to chapter 2, and I preached about this a few weeks ago, he’s saying, I want you to not have the same mind as each other. I want you to have the same mind in the Lord.
That means the same mind of Christ. Chapter 2, verse 5, where Paul says, in your relationships with one another, have the same It’s the exact same word he uses in chapter 4 with euodia and Syntyche. I want you to be of the same mind. I want you to have the same mindset as Christ Jesus. Look at how Jesus handled conflict, and I want your attitude to be that as you’re going through this.
What was his attitude? Well, we said Jesus did nothing from selfish ambition. He did nothing from pride, nothing from conceit. In humility, he considered others more important than himself. And he put others’ needs and preferences above his own.
He had every right to exalt himself, and yet Jesus did not do that. And so Paul is saying, I want you to have the same mindset as the Lord himself. And he’s urging them, he’s pleading with them, ladies, be of the same mind in the Lord. You see, what happens is whenever we have a disagreement, we very often focus on the things that we disagree about. And Paul is saying, how about starting with agreement?
What can we agree upon? 2 people here that love the Lord have in common this salvation by grace through faith. And you start with agreement, and as you do that, you find that the disagreement begins to get smaller and smaller. I was here on Thursday night as part of our men’s basketball league. I coach and play on one of the teams, and there was some conflict.
On Thursday night, and they were involving believers. And I stayed up here until 11:15 to try to learn a little bit more about it. But ultimately, these are among Christ followers, and it’s interesting, and maybe you’ve seen this, how shouldn’t we be able to at least agree on certain things and then kind of move forward from there? And yet you’ve been a part of conflicts where it’s— now you’re more focused on what the other person has done wrong. So Paul is saying, I want you to have the right attitude in order to work through this conflict.
I want you to have the right attitude, which is having the mind of Christ. I also want you to take the right approach. Now, he doesn’t explicitly say it here, so we have to go somewhere else to look at it. So what is the right approach in a conflict? What is the right approach that we should take here?
Well, if we’re gonna have the mind of Christ, we need to know what Christ said about conflict. In chapter 7 of the book of Matthew, We have some ideas. Jesus himself expressing his mind when it comes to conflict. Chapter 7 of Matthew says this. Jesus says, why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and you pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
So you’re looking for something in somebody else, and yet you have something in your own eye. How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye, when all the time there’s a plank a giant plank in your own eye, you hypocrite. First, before you do anything else, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Jesus is saying it starts with you. Before you go nitpicking somebody else’s sins, look in the mirror and recognize your own unrighteousness, your own need for grace.
He’s not saying don’t ever judge. He’s not saying don’t ever point out a person’s sins to another person. He’s saying before you do that, own up to your own responsibility. You say, I’ve— listen, I’m only 5% to blame in this situation. So he’s saying, so own 100% of your 5%.
Well, the other person is like 95%. It doesn’t matter. You start with your own heart. Because I don’t know about you, I’m really, really good at pointing out other people’s sins. I see it instantly.
But if you’ve ever gone to driving school, one of the first things they tell you about is about a blind spot, something you can’t see. So you have to turn anytime you’re getting into another lane or you’re turning, making sure you’re aware of what’s going on. One of the biggest blind spots we’ve got, because we have an eye problem, is that we see everybody else’s sin but we don’t see our own. We see everybody else’s bad attitude and we don’t see our own. We see everybody else’s percentage of fault in the situation, and we don’t see our own.
And he’s saying— Jesus is saying the right approach here is to start with asking, what is my role? What is my responsibility? What should I own here? And once I do that, then we can have a conversation.
And then he goes on later on in the book of Matthew. Another example of the right approach to take is in Matthew chapter 18. This is— anytime you’re in a conflict, go to Matthew 18. This is just great. I preached on this before, and this is just a foundational passage.
Matthew chapter 18, verse 15. Jesus says this: if your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault just between the two of you. Just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you’ve won them over. Great.
Verse 16: but if they will not listen, okay, take one or two others along. So that every matter may be established by the testimony of 2 or 3 witnesses. So it’s not just you 2, you’re able— you’re not able to work it out, widen the circle a bit, just 2 or 3 others. And if that person still refuses to listen, then tell it to the church. And apparently this conflict in Philippi has reached this point where Euodia and Syntyche are not on the same page.
And so Paul is saying, I need you to work it out, but now he’s telling it to the whole church because He’s having to take that extra measure. But I tell you, I think we make a misstep anytime we take our conflict and we move it beyond just the 2 people. You have to be very, very, very careful with that.
See, very often we start involving other people, and Pastor Dave has talked many times, and you’ve probably heard him talk about triangles where person A has a problem with person B, so where do they go? Person C, person D, E, F, and G. I send out emails to people I get some friends together and I make it sound spiritual, like I’m, you know, just wanting people to pray about this situation. No, you’re not. You’re gossiping. Person A, go to Person B.
Person B, go to Person A. Start there.
That wasn’t working for Euodia and Syntyche, but he’s saying anytime you’re in conflict, that’s where you should go. That’s the mind of Christ. That’s the right approach. Now, my philosophy on this, and I think it it’s really the right— biblically speaking, the right approach is face-to-face is always the right approach. Face-to-face is always the best way.
You have to be able to see the other person. You have to be able to watch their body language. You have to listen to their words. Phone calls, better than nothing.
You know, you’re not seeing their body language, but at least you’re talking voice-to-voice. I’ve had to do that before. Where a person just is not willing to meet with me. I’ve also had occasion where a person’s not willing to meet or talk on the phone, so I’ve had to send an email, but I really don’t like doing that. Email’s not really the right way to do this.
It’s like last resort sort of a thing.
But before I do that, again, I pray about it. I make sure that I’m articulating what I need to, but face-to-face is always the right way to go.
And it’s funny, I mentioned this basketball conflict that happened on Thursday. I talked to a person who was involved on Friday. I saw them during the day and they said, so any further news on stuff? I said, no. And they said, well, I was just calling so-and-so to tell them.
I said, no, why are you bringing in another person? Don’t do that. Person A, go to Person B, find areas of agreement and start from there, and you’ll find that the disagreement begins to disappear. And Paul is saying, I urge you to have the right approach. I want you to have the right attitude.
I want you to have the right approach. Going back to Philippians 4, he also advises other people to start getting involved. He mentions this guy Clement. We don’t know who he is. We don’t know who the rest of Paul’s coworkers are.
Even Paul says in verse 3, I ask you, my true companion— we don’t know who that is. He’s just saying you need the right advocates. You need the right people. If we’re going to widen the circle, you need the right advocates. And some of us go to the wrong advocates.
We go to the wrong people for advice. You have somebody who’s trying to stir it up, and you go to that person just to win people over to your side so that you feel better about your side of the argument.
But you need godly advice. You need godly counsel. And if you’re involved in a conflict, you need somebody around you, just maybe one other to be able to pray with you and to counsel you on this, but don’t widen the circle really beyond that unless it’s absolutely like last resort type of a thing, like what we had here. And if you’re watching somebody go through a conflict, one of the worst things you could do is to counsel them to have the wrong attitude. Yeah, no, you should absolutely be upset.
You should withhold love from this person. You should just stay away from that person instead of encouraging them in the right way. No, go to that person. I’ll be there with you. I’ll pray with you about that.
So Paul is saying, anytime you’re in a conflict, the right advocates are very, very helpful. And notice Paul doesn’t take sides here. He could— listen, Syntyche, get over yourself, okay? Euodia is in the right, and just submit to her and everything will work out. He doesn’t do that.
Instead, he’s expecting them to be able to get along, but they’re going to need some help. And so often I think that we go to the help first, but that help is not really all that helpful because we’re getting bad advice, unbiblical advice. So get the right advisors, the right advocates. And then lastly, and this is really subtle here, he says that these women are very, very dear to him. These women have contended at my side in the cause of the gospel.
You all know I love to talk about the gospel whenever I preach. What’s most important in an argument is having the right ambition, the right ambition. And for me, I’ll be honest with you, whenever I’m in a conflict with somebody, my ambition is to win. I wanna win. I’m competitive.
I wanna win. I want the other person to say, Steve, you’re right, I was wrong.
I want the other person to to feel bad about what they’ve done to hurt me. And Paul is saying there’s something greater than winning.
There’s something greater than that, and that is unity. And that unity comes about because of the gospel. It’s very subtle in there, but he’s essentially appealing to the gospel here and saying the gospel is what brings about peace. Now again, we’re just talking about conflict between believers. If this is you and an unbeliever, you don’t share the gospel in common, and they’re not going to have the same values.
He’s primarily talking about people within the church, and he’s saying start with the gospel. Start with the gospel. Always go back to the good news about what Jesus has done for you, because anytime you do that, you recognize the grace that has been shown to you. How in the world can you and I withhold grace from another person and being ungenerous towards another person when we know all that Jesus has done for us? How?
How is that even possible? Go back to the gospel again and again and again. And you’ve heard me say this, and I’ll continue to say it. We need the gospel not just when we get saved. We need it every day.
Preach the gospel to yourself every day for situations just like this so that you can be on the same page and work through conflicts. You say, well, how am I supposed to do what Jesus told me to do? He tells me to love my enemies and to pray for those who hurt me. How am I supposed to do that? You do it because of the gospel.
You go back to the gospel. And you remember that while you were Christ’s enemy, he died for you.
You say, well, why should I take the first step? Why should I go to this person first? Shouldn’t they come to me first? No. Go back to the gospel.
Who made the first move? It was Jesus. And had he not made that move, you would not be here today.
Go back to the gospel. You say, how can I extend grace to this person? They don’t deserve it. Exactly. That’s the whole idea of grace.
Go back to the gospel. Grace has been extended to you. Getting what you don’t deserve. God’s mercy. Not getting what you do deserve.
You say, well, why should I have to confess my own faults in this situation and own up to my responsibility? Because your sins have already been covered. You don’t have to hide that. There’s no condemnation. Go back to the gospel.
See, all of our problems, especially among Christians, are gospel problems. It’s when one or both people, or whoever’s involved, forgetting the grace that has been shown to, to you and to me. And relationships are critical for mission. Our mission as a church is to help more people come to Christ and help more people become like Christ. And relationships are crucial for that.
And yet conflict divides us. They turn us against one another. And Paul is saying, I need you to work through this because there’s a greater ambition than you winning. There’s a greater cause than you getting your way, than you having your little turf war here with this other person. And yes, you’ve been wronged, but have the mind of Christ in this situation.
Go back to the gospel. What is Paul saying really in all of these words and in these verses here? He’s saying, I want you to do your part. I want you to do your part, whatever that is. You heard Jesus say it himself.
Listen, if, if, if somebody has sinned against you, whose responsibility is it to go? You go. You don’t wait for them. And it’s interesting, earlier in the book of Matthew— I didn’t read this passage— Jesus is in the Sermon on the Mount saying, if you’re at the altar and you’re offering a gift there, and there you remember that your neighbor has something against you. It’s not that you have something against them, that they have something against you.
And you remember there at the altar, there in worship, you leave your gift there and then go settle it. So whether it’s your fault or it’s the other person’s fault or both people’s, it doesn’t matter. You go, you do your part, you take responsibility, because there’s nothing more important than the unity that comes about from the gospel. So I was thinking about this message, I was Comparing it to my message last week, and it was really interesting to read just these 2 verses. I’d never spent any time there thinking about it and thinking, what in the world does this passage have to do with what I preached about last week?
If you were here last week, I talked a lot about eternity, and I talked about how for those of us who are followers of Christ, our citizenship is not here. Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await the return of Christ.
And I started thinking about that and just laughing in the office last week about how different these 2 messages are. And I was talking to Missy Finnell in our church office, and she was saying, Steve, they’re actually really helpful because anytime you’re in a conflict with another believer, you need to remember that your citizenship is in heaven. You need to remember, in light of eternity, what are we fighting about here, honestly? Think about how little and inconsequential your problems and my problems are. The things that we blow up into such a big deal and we escalate and we just draw again these dividing lines.
And really, in the grand scheme of things, what are we fighting about? Our citizenship is in heaven. Moreover, we’re a family.
And some people, whenever they get their feelings hurt in the church, they gossip about it, or they’ll leave and they’ll go to another church. And they didn’t have that option back here in Philippi. This was the only church there. They had to work it out. And I would love to see us work through conflict and however many meetings or conversations you need to have in order to work through things so that we can, as a family, stick together as we each do our part.
So I’m praying for you. I was just thinking about— I don’t know all the things that are going on in this room. Maybe you’re going through a conflict right now, and today God has you here for this message. Maybe you’re about to go through something. I hope not.
I hope not. But if you do, go back to the gospel. Go back to the gospel and start there. Let’s pray. Lord, I thank you for just these 2 little verses about 2 women who lived 2,000 years ago, and we, we ask, what does their squabble have to do with us?
Father, I pray that you would help us to recognize that we’re just like Euodia and Syntyche, that we are people who need at various times to be of the same mind with others and to have the right attitude.
And that there are times where we need to look in the mirror and recognize that we’re at fault. It’s not that our sins are greater or less than another person’s, it’s just that we’re sinners and we need to start with having the right approach and not going as a hypocrite, but going with the right approach and also keeping the circle small, just going personally. Lord, I pray that you would also help us to seek out godly counsel and godly advice for help through conflict and challenges along the way. And I pray also for you to help us to remember what’s most important. It’s not us winning.
What’s most important is the unity that comes about from the gospel.
Help us, Lord, to do our part in any disagreements or conflicts no matter how big or small. May we be peacemakers, and as far as it depends upon us, may we live at peace with one another. Lord, if anyone here today does not know you and has not received your Son Jesus into their life, I pray that you would show them that that is available to them, Lord, and that they— anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. If that’s you here today, you need to know that your sins and our sins separate us from God. And that peace was made because of what Jesus did for us on the cross.
And he offers forgiveness and reconciliation to any who would call upon him. So just let him know that you want him to come into your life and to save you.
Father, hold this church together. Remind us that we’re a family and you are the head of this family.
We say to God be the glory. We pray in your Son’s name. Amen. Can I ask our worship team to come back up? We’re going to close.
I’m just going to be over here on the side, and Barbara Logan’s over here as well. If you want to pray with either she or I, or if you want to talk about anything related to this message, any questions about the church or anything else, please come on by and let us know, and we’d love to visit with you.
