Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 207th episode. In this episode I want to bring you a leadership teaching I delivered to our staff recently. Every Tuesday morning the staff at my church’s main campus gathers for a meeting during which we pray and one of us presents a teaching. I hope you find this teaching as productive as I did when writing it.
Jesus said in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”
When it comes to your relationships, both romantic and otherwise, scripture supplies a set of tools which when faithfully practiced WILL transform the quality of your life and your standing in the community for the better. Not only is there a certainty of being blessed, but I would argue the inverse is also true. I think if you disregard these principles your relationships will reliably deteriorate. Today I want to talk to you about just one of these tools and that is how to be a peacemaker.
The Greek for the term peacemakers here is a closed compound — which is to say it’s a splice of two terms and it means those who do peace. So if peacemakers rendered in English is a 1-to-1 translation of the Greek, the question we must explore is what does the scripture mean when it instructs us to be peacemakers?
Being a peacemaker is not a call to weakness. When you’re constructing a worldview you have to be extremely careful against importing a false premise from the culture. A premise is just a starting point upon which the remainder of a thought or argument depends. What’s especially pernicious about a false premise is that you can actually build an internally coherent thought with one, but you can never build a thought which maps onto objective reality when you start with a false premise. So even though your thought is internally coherent, once you deploy it into your mode of being you will begin to see things breakdown because of it.
If you really want to dive deep into the insanity-inducing power of a false premise you should read Plato’s Allegory Of The Cave. So if you start with a false premise it’s easy to feel correct and to sound correct — but you will never be correct. One of Satan’s most powerful weapons in deluding your mind is to slip in a false premise. The reason is because the false premise is hard to spot and it has a recursive effect that compounds as it cascades down the rest of your worldview until your perception is so distorted you can’t even see God when you’re looking straight at Him.
The reason being a peacemaker is not a call to weakness is because earning respect was always about love and sacrifice and never about tyranny or fear. The culture would have us believe that if you want to be respected you must be a counter-puncher. So when they see Jesus turn the other cheek they see weakness. We as Christians know that Jesus has all power and all authority in Heaven and on Earth and so when we watch Jesus turn the other cheek we don’t see weakness we see meekness. And meekness is one of the key attributes of a peacemaker. A meek person is one who has the power to cause and win conflict but chooses not to. I would argue you actually cannot be a peacemaker UNLESS you have the power to cause and win conflict and choose restraint instead. If you don’t have this power you’re not meek — you’re just helpless and vulnerable. You’re like a naive prey animal. There is no courage or nobility in such condition.
So let’s talk about meekness. I think the most challenging moments to demonstrate meekness are in the midst of your anger. Untrammeled anger is antithetical to meekness because to be meek implies self-control. Proverbs says, “He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.” So the scripture is making a direct association between being slow to anger and maintaining self-control here. I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to lose your composure in service to your anger even if you think it’s righteous anger. James says, “The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.”
You all know how quickly you can permanently change your entire life and betray all of your relationships with one lapse in moral judgment resulting in something like infidelity. Well I would argue that same measure of damage is on offer to you should you impulsively react to your anger. It only takes one moment or one decision before everything is changed.
To illustrate this I want to point out that 50% of violent crime occurs when either the perpetrator or the victim is intoxicated with alcohol. This is especially clear in the data on homicides. This is because alcohol is a depressant that mimics a stimulant. It suppresses the neural activity in your prefrontal cortex breaking down inhibitory function and tranquilizing your brain’s ability to map consequences to actions. That matters for this because anger does exactly the same thing to your brain. It suppresses the PFC and impairs your ability to map consequences. Same thing. That’s why in a much simpler analysis you always hear people say things like, “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to, I was drunk.” or, “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to, I was angry.”
Thus far we’ve drawn a tight association between controlling your anger and being a peacemaker. Being a peacemaker means sufficiently developing the meekness of your character such that you can avoid doing or saying something which then must be followed by: “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to, I was angry.” But being a peacemaker also means your own meekness works as a stabilizing force which prevents others from needing to make the same apology to you. Your meekness can keep others from experiencing debilitating anger. And that’s where the potency of this tool is really revealed.
Scripture says, “A soft answer turneth away wrath; but grievous words stir up anger.” The way you compose yourself and the precision of your speech is actually reflected in the emotional condition of others who are around you. Your mode of being has a real and actual influence on the brain activity of the people who are in your proximity. So this cultural false premise that you can’t change someone or you can’t control other people’s decisions is just not true. Many of their supposedly autonomous and free decisions are simply reactions to what you’ve put forward. Change the quality of what you put forward and watch their reactions change immediately in congruence to your change. Once you understand how this pattern of reflective reciprocity works, your words and actions will become so influential it’s almost indistinguishable from direct control.
Now that we know the power of meekness and the hazards of anger, what should a peacemaker do in the presence of conflict? First is that you should remain silent if an angry person is volleying false accusations against you and yes this includes accusations from your spouse. Notice I’m saying angry person and false accusations. There is a time for careful conversation about sensitive subjects and setting things right using the exchange of truth, but that time is never when one or both people are possessed by a spirit of anger. But even now as I’m saying this the inculcated form of American masculinity is screaming within me that silence in reaction to false accusations is the pathetic behavior of a doormat. But you know who else largely remained silent when facing false accusations? Jesus.
Part of the reason for this silence is because His goal wasn’t to achieve victory over His accusers — His goal was to redeem them. The same should be true of your spouse or anyone else whose relationship is important in your life. Your goal should never be to achieve victory over them. If you’re victorious over your spouse then congratulations you were proven correct, but the cost of that victory is now you have to live with a defeated, resentful spouse.
There are always people, usually men, who react to this kind of advice by appealing to the importance of defending the truth. “I can’t just let this person get away with lying.” Yes you can, because you’re not the arbiter for whether they get away with it or not — God is. Your marriage and your relationships need your careful stewardship much more than God needs your careful stewardship of the truth. Scripture says, “He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life: but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction.” Silence in the presence of angry and false accusations is crucial for being a peacemaker.
But what if the accusation is true? Or what if just part of the flurry of accusations is true? This is where you speak up and thank the other person for pointing out your sin, then you apologize for it, and you explain the steps you’re going to take to keep it from happening again. You do this even if you don’t feel like doing it and you do this even if the overarching claim against you is false — just so long as part of it is true. So you’re isolating the parts that are true and you’re taking maximum ownership of everything you can while stopping short of affirming falsehood. As human beings we don’t like being confronted with our insufficiencies — but how we react when we are determines whether we will be a peacemaker.
Scripture says, “If we say we that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” Understand this: it is corrosive to your relationships if you make God a liar in the presence of those who love you. If they see you dishonoring God by making Him a liar, this sight will damage their perception of you probably more than the sin would have, had you simply confessed it.
The cultural false premise, and even the insecurities of your own wicked heart, will drive you to react to true accusations with desperate attempts at justification and these attempts usually come in the form of casting yourself as a victim. “My action wasn’t actually the sin it looks like, it wasn’t the sin you’re rightly pointing out, because such and such happened to me and that’s why I did it or said it.” If we could learn to reflexively apologize and take ownership of our sins the same way we reflexively defend ourselves with God-dishonoring justifications, I think the quality of our life’s conversations will drastically improve. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.
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