Strategy 10

Your Relationships

Uniting in a Common Cause

If I were your enemy, I’d work to create division between you and other Christians, between groups of Christians, anyone with the potential for uniting in battle against me and my plans. I’d keep you operating individually, not seeing your need for the church or tying yourself too closely to its mission. Strength in numbers and unity of purpose . . . I would not allow things like these to go unchecked.

Friendly fire is the term used in military circles to describe soldiers killed in the line of duty by their own fellow fighters. Various military reports put the estimate of wartime deaths and other incidents attributable to friendly fire as high as 20 percent, some even higher. Imagine the added sense of devastation that staggers a young wife or a set of parents when that uniformed chaplain comes to the door to deliver the news of their loved one’s death. Killed in defense of their country, yes, but . . . killed by one of their own? The senselessness. The pointlessness. The pain of loss, deepened even further by the pain of needless loss.

Sadly, this type of tragedy isn’t only a reality on foreign battlefields; it’s also happening far too frequently on ours. The number of wounded on the military record books pales in comparison to the number of human hearts that have been disparaged and broken by fellow believers, by people who were supposed to be fighting with us, not against us—like the person we exchanged rings with, or the lifelong friend we shared our secrets with, or the fellow congregants we go to church with.

But when it happens in these circles, it’s no accident. Friendly fire in the church or in our most vital relationships is almost always code for enemy activity. He knows his odds of success jump markedly whenever he can cause heart-wrenching division between us, isolate one or two of us, and separate us into warring or stonewalled camps. We cannot leave these kinds of openings for the enemy to infiltrate.

So one of our most important strategies—a call for our most fervent praying—must be to stand against all forms of disharmony in our relationships and to battle for oneness among ourselves and all of God’s people. We owe it to the Lord and we owe it to one another. The gospel we share in common is meant to continue to be shared together, both the giving and receiving of grace, inspiring each of us to pure living and spiritual fervency so the gospel can shine outward to others through our loving, enriching relationships.

Together, we are a mighty force. Satan knows that.

And by remaining united, we let him feel that.

The grand purposes of Christian living travel far beyond our own personal battles and border wars. The enemy knows full well that our one little candle, even if carefully, consistently trimmed and manicured—even if we’re sure we’re right and other people are wrong—can only produce so much heat and can only cause him so much mischief. But when we expand our prayer closets to include prayers for our circle of relationships and the shared community in our churches, suddenly we’ve unharnessed a live wire within his control center, shooting off sparks, fishtailing along the floor, causing alarms to blare throughout his headquarters.

He hates—hates!—when God’s people get their act together, when we’re unified as a couple, a family, a local church, as well as the global, “capital-C” Church. He hates when we’re all praying for one another’s needs and potential and mission and unity, going to the throne for (and even with) those around us and closest to us.

The hallmark, the true pearl of God’s work on earth that frustrates the enemy’s plans to no end, is this mysterious gelling of people from various backgrounds, experiences, personality types, races, and traditions—the kinds of differences that should easily keep us from being able to get along, much less to work together for kingdom purposes or to care how one another is growing in faith and perseverance. They’re the kinds of things that make the option of friendly fire seem unavoidable, perhaps even appealing on occasion.

The Bible calls these natural obstacles between us a “dividing wall” (Eph. 2:14). But the power of the gospel changes all of that, breaking down the wall and bridging all potential sources of division that conspire to keep us apart and fighting. Our job now is to make sure we’re clinging to that gospel and not letting personal, friendly-fire skirmishes hammer away at our unity from the inside.

If we’re not praying for oneness—seriously, specifically, strategically—we’re leaving our hopes for togetherness to the fickle weather patterns of emotion, misunderstanding, and imposed pressure from outside sources and circumstances. We’re giving the enemy room and access to scout for breaks in the line, then to nudge his way into cracks in our relationships, separating us from the people we need most for maintaining our health and balance and authenticity, as well as from the shared energy and ideas required for our relationships to thrive.

Prayer is what greases the friction between us, lubricating around the grit and flecks of irritability that work themselves into the system, preventing the normal wear and tear of life from causing us to grate against or rub on one another. Instead we maintain our fluid motions, our synchronized interconnections. Prayer helps us stay focused on bigger things, on much more eternal things than the petty stuff that threatens to puff itself up beyond actual size and become some huge deal it doesn’t deserve to be. In prayer we experience the kind of hard-fought peace that unites us into an army of soldiers for Christ.

Peace. Let’s hang here for a second while we unpack the importance of that word in our spiritual vocabulary. Peace. The enemy is flat-out against it. And he works overtime to dismantle anything resembling it. But what’s he so afraid that it might cause or lead us to do?

Let’s start here: “Having been justified by faith,” the Bible tells us, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). Peace with God. No more fear of condemnation. Unhindered access back and forth between Him and ourselves. So whatever lack of peace you or I might feel with God, and whenever we might feel it, it’s always coming from a source that is not God because He has already blown down every door that keeps us from experiencing total peace with Him.

Strike one. The enemy doesn’t like that.

To ruffle his feathers even more, our peace with God infuses us with the peace of God. It’s a gift that keeps us stable and strong even when our circumstances are the furthest thing away from being peaceful (John 14:27; 16:33). It also acts as a guide that helps us discern God’s leading and direction toward our destiny (Col. 3:15). The peace of God is what helps us navigate the will of God.

Strike two. Another thing the enemy doesn’t like.

This is now officially getting worse for him. Getting bigger. Growing new body parts and appendages. On the verge of getting out of hand, out of control.

Here, then, is why he digs in so hard in trying to separate friends and churches. It’s all a desperate attempt to avoid strike three. You see, peace with God is individual. Personal. The peace of God—same thing. It’s about you, no one else. But peace with others? Now we’ve got witnesses. Now we’re moving in a pack. We’ve got the strength of numbers. And that makes us more of a problem to him than ever.

The magnet that draws other people out of darkness toward the light and hope of Jesus Christ is so often not the A-B-C evangelism presentation they hear but the one they see—the recognizable change and difference in people who claim to be at peace with God themselves. Friends who forgive, sisters in Christ whose relationship is an inspiration, husbands and wives who clearly love each other with a passionate sense of loyalty and unity, churches and denominations that are known for celebrating their commonalities more than arguing about their differences—those are the kind of people who best entice others out of their loneliness, pain, and despair to seek their own peace with God through Christ.

So we should not be surprised when Satan thwarts our unity as believers, in all kinds of different pairings and places where we interact with fellow Christians.

He’ll do it in your local church. He’ll stir up a faction who thinks the pastor is woefully deficient in his preaching or his time management or his leadership style or his bedside manner. He’ll create a stir over how loud they play the music in worship or how often someone’s wife or daughter is allowed to sing solos. He’ll divide old and young, traditionalists versus progressives, private school kids from the public schoolers. Instead of people being able to freely exercise and emphasize their various spiritual gifts for the good of the body, he’ll cause folks to see one person’s ministry as being a direct competitor of another’s. Division, disharmony, friendly fire. They’re breaks in the line of our peace.

He’ll do it in the global church too. He’ll augment the clashes of race and economics and doctrinal stances concerning issues of relatively minor importance, turning them into trench warfare among fellow believers in the body of Christ, further quieting the voice of the gospel behind loud debates over our firmly held positions.

And he’ll do it in your own personal relationships as well. Mark the ones that form the inner circle around your heart, the tribe you go into battle with, the people who are most influential in helping you stay spiritually on task and on target—people who most likely depend on you in the same way. Think of your spouse, your closest girlfriends, your accountability partners, the other participants in your discipleship group. Do you ever sense any tearing or breakdown between the close bonds you share with these people? Do you occasionally grow tired of the level of commitments you’ve made with some of them, considering it more of an intrusion than a mutual blessing? Do you sometimes wish they wouldn’t call or want anything of you tonight or wouldn’t ask about how you’ve been managing yourself lately? Do you find yourself almost physically drawn toward gossiping and listening to stories about them or others that are less than flattering—things you’d never want them to know that you said or found so pleasurably, provocatively interesting?

I realize how easy some of these habits and attitudes can be to fall into. But each time you detect them taking shape, both in yourself as well as in others, realize you’re being taunted by an opposing batter. He’s pulling out every trick in his strategy book. He’s working to keep you from winding up and throwing a fastball of peace right over the heart of the plate, where all he can do is stand there and watch it sail past him. He wants to keep your aim wide of the target, low and outside, hoping to get to first base and keep himself in the game. Hoping to give himself a fighting chance for as long as possible.

Because if it weren’t for him trying to get in there and cause trouble, would any of us be feeling the need to nurse hurt feelings, harbor unforgiveness, belabor the gossip, or (for goodness sake) find a whole new set of friends?

He’s the reason our team doesn’t always want to play like one.

And I say we throw him that third strike.

And get him out of there.

Call to Prayer

As you begin to develop your personalized approach to this tenth strategy, start by identifying the most common tools of division and disunity the enemy employs to destroy your key relationships. James 3:14–16 is as good a place to start as any, because this New Testament letter doesn’t pull any punches . . . just says it out there the way it really is.

If you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth. This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. (James 3:14–16)

Jealousy—the idea of never wanting to take a backseat to someone else’s success or growth pattern. Bitterness—irritations that have simmered inside you long enough until they’ve turned into intolerable dislikes. Selfish ambition—the desire to dominate or come out looking better than someone else, even someone you care about. Arrogance—thinking you’re most likely the one who’s the most right whenever there’s any difference of opinion. Those are just a few of the high spots from a thirty-thousand-foot sampling. There are plenty of others on the way down. But James’s interpretation of the root causes behind this rotten fruit sounds fairly comprehensive. The reason they result in “disorder and every evil thing” is because they don’t bear any of the earmarks of those qualities that come down to us from God, from above, but instead are “earthly, natural, demonic.”

Straight from the devil’s domain.

So if we can pull back for a moment from whatever’s creating distance and disrespect among the people we know and among the church where we worship, you can bet your bottom dollar there’s a demonic tint to most of it. He’s got a lot of chips invested in chipping away at our unity. And while he can’t turn us into little devils ourselves, he can lure us into doing things that bear a striking resemblance. Our job as people who’ve caught on to his schemes is to keep the truth plastered in large letters where we can’t help but see it and to pray we’ll be able to sniff out his activity both in ourselves and in others . . . because we know it’s doing nothing more than inserting holes in the line of our peace and unity, slowing our steady march forward. Together.

So starting today, we craft a prayer strategy with peace in mind, leading to peace of mind for ourselves and the ones we love.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. (Col. 3:15)

Pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another. (Rom. 14:19)

We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming. (Eph. 4:14)

Let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. (1 John 3:18)

Let us not judge one another anymore, but rather determine this—not to put an obstacle or a stumbling block in a brother’s way. (Rom. 14:13)

Let us not become boastful, challenging one another, envying one another. (Gal. 5:26)

Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near. (Heb. 10:24–25)

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is

For brothers to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious oil upon the head,

Coming down the beard,

Even Aaron’s beard,

Coming down upon the edge of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon

Coming down upon the mountains of Zion;

For there the Lord commanded the blessing—life forever. (Ps. 133:1–3)

Make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. (Phil. 2:2–4)

. . . so that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. (1 Cor. 12:25)

The peace of God, preserved by the prayers of God’s people, is meant to forge us together in friendship and unite us in mission. And when it does, not only does it cause the people around us to sit up and notice, but it declares the manifold wisdom of God through the church “to the rulers and authorities in the heavens” (Eph. 3:10 hcsb). Unity among brothers and sisters puts Satan promptly in his place.

And that’s something that ought to make us eager to be watchful, to be encouraging, to be merciful.

To be unified.

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