Pastor Rick Warren Sermon Maintaining Harmony in My Home, Small Group, and Church: We’ve been in a series called the awesome power vision and the bible says without a vision, the people perish what does that mean “the people perish? It means they become discouraged, you need a vision for every area of your life or you’re going to get discouraged, you need a vision for your personal life, you need a vision for your marriage if you’re married, you need a vision for your work, for your small group, for your church and for your future.
Today pastor Rick Warren shares with us the antidote to the greatest enemy of vision and that is division. Division destroys vision, nothing causes you to lose your vision for anything faster than conflict and division and today, because of all what we’ve been going through this past year, conflict is at an all-time high.
Really In every kind of area, people’s anger is as at a time higher level, why? It’s about what causes an explosion and he said he learned that for an explosion to take place you have to have three elements and all three of them are necessary
First you need fuel, second you need containment and third you need a spark. In other words if you take a can of gasoline and pour it all out over the pavement, and throw a match on it, it’s going to create a fire but it won’t explode, it has to be contained in a can or in a tank for it to explode.
The parallels to all the conflict and relationships, that people are having these days and why there are so many explosions of anger out there today. It’s because we’ve been in containment for the past year due to covid-19 pandemic we have been in a period of strict containment.
We’ve had masks and all other kinds of limitations on our normal freedom that we’re not used to, we felt contained and so that containment is frustrating.
Guess what, that’s a flammable situation, so if you’ve had more than your normal share of explosions, in your marriage, in your family, in your neighbourhood, in your friendships, at work, if you had more conflict more explosions it’s because of this containment principle.
Some biblical principles, on how to maintain harmony in your home, how to maintain harmony in your marriage, in your family, how to maintain harmony in your small group, in your neighbourhood and in your church.
Ephesians 4:3, says strive earnestly to guard and keep the harmony of the spirit, first Corinthians 14:33 God’s word translation says, this God is not a God of disorder he’s the God of peace.
The first principle is to Reserve judgment until I know all the facts and the whole story, that’s the first principle of harmony and the first principle of lowering the anger factor in your relationships.
The second principle for maintaining harmony in your home and reducing the number of explosions in your marriage and relationships is to be sensitive and empathetic to what offends others we have to be sympathetic to the things that offend other people.
The third principle for harmony in your home, in your work, in our church, anywhere is limiting my freedom out of love, Galatians 5 13-16, do not let your freedom become an excuse for indulging your selfish nature. he says instead let love make you serve each other.
Finally, the fourth principle is to always be humble and kind, always be humble and be kind, now there are a ton of do not let commands about this point but a few of them are Philippians 2 3 do not let selfishness or pride be your guide instead be humble and give more honor to others than to yourself. James chapter 2 verse 1 says do not let class distinction enter into your faith in Jesus Christ.
This are ways in which people can maintain harmony at every level of life.