Cultivating Attitudes Of Grace

Three-Step Conflict Resolution Model:

            Step #1 – Please God

            Step #2 – Repent

            Step #3 – Love

                        A. Attitudes of Grace

                        B. Forgive

                        C. Confront

                        D. Serve

Every morning we get up and put on clothes.

Either we, our spouses, or our job dictate what we are going to wear.

No matter whether we want to or not, we are going to spend at least a few minutes every morning getting dressed.

The way we dress in part is due to our identity. (If I work for a certain company, their emblem may be on my shirt.)

We should also spend a few minutes every morning choosing what attitudes we are going to bring to the day.

How am I going to view my schedule?

How am I going to view my wife, children, boss, coworker, and friend?

These attitudes come from the foundation of our identity as well.

In Colossians 3, Paul provides us three statements of our identity in which eight attitudes are cultivated.

He shows us that as believers in Christ, we should dress ourselves with these attitudes.

He then shows us how these attitudes are essential for peacemaking.

Colossians 3:12–15 ESV

12 Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, 13 bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful.

Three identity statements

1. God chose us.

Do you remember when you were in elementary P.E. or in any type of sports with other kids? Two of the best athletes are chosen to be captains and then they would pick one at a time who they wanted on their team. It was the cruelest moment of some kid’s week when that happened. Everyone wants to be chosen and no one wants to be last.

In a much more profound and mysterious way, God in eternity past chose you to be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.

God’s choosing was not based on anything good in us, but solely on his pleasure and unconditional grace.

The impact of God’s choosing us in the way we handle conflict should be enormous.

Who cares if a coworker criticizes you when the God of the universe has favored you?

Why does it matter if you were picked for the team? Almighty God has chosen you.

The weight of missing out on the promotion is lessened by knowing God has promoted you from death to life.

What if someone has disrespected you? God has chosen to honor you.

2. God possesses us.

The term holy or sanctified means being possessed by God and set apart for his special purposes.

God has made us holy and possesses us by His Holy Spirit.

Have you ever watched a sporting event where one guy just goes off and outshines the rest? Sometimes the commentators will say that he is playing like a man possessed.

In the same way, this is how we can live as Christians even in the midst of conflict. We can handle adversity like men and women possessed by God.

3. God loves us.

Through the cross of Christ, we know the love of God that never ceases, never lets go, and never gives up.

If you don’t feel very near his love today, listen to this quote from J.I. Packer: “There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me…For some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose.”

God does not love us because we are good. He loves us because he chose to and the cross shows us how messy God knew we were going to be.

We need these identity statements to fill us with the power of the Holy Spirit in order to have the attitudes we are getting ready to look at. With these identity statements in mind, we are ready to dress ourselves with the eight grace attitudes God gives us through Paul.

Eight Attitudes To Cultivate

1. Clothe yourselves with compassion.

Compassion is a deeply felt sorrow for someone who is suffering in some way coupled with a desire to see the suffering alleviated.

There are three aspects to compassion:

1) sees the suffering person

2) feels personal sorrow in response to the suffering

3) acts to alleviate the suffering if at all possible. Godly compassion feels the needs of others and seeks to help.

We see it in God the Father.

2 Corinthians 1:3–4 ESV

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

We see it in Jesus.

Matthew 9:35–36 ESV

35 And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Compassion is vital to have in the midst of conflict.

It is easy to be so bitter over our own hurts that we do not see the hurts of the other person.

Godly compassion sees the hurt of the other, feels their hurt, and tries to alleviate it even if they have mistreated us.

Compassion can tear down many barriers.

2. Clothe yourselves with kindness.

Kindness is showing mercy and doing good to all, even to people who do not deserve it or may even deserve the opposite.

Paul uses the word “kindness” to describe God’s saving work through Christ.

Ephesians 2:7 ESV

7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

Titus 3:4 ESV

4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared,

We see Jesus imploring us to be kind like God is kind.

Luke 6:35–36 ESV

35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. 36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

God is telling us that our kindness should not just be for people who don’t deserve it but also for those who deserve the opposite.

If I choose to give a stranger who I don’t know at all $20, that is showing kindness.

Yet, if I choose to give an enemy who has slandered my name and spit in my face $20, that is a whole new level of kindness.

Kindness is the opposite of our natural tendency in the midst of conflict.

Our natural tendency is to say:

That’s the last time I help them out.

I won’t let anyone do that to me again.

After all I have done for them, this is the thanks I get?

It is important to understand that God does not ask us to show kindness because the other person deserves it but because God deserves it and He has shown the ultimate kindness to us.

He wants us to be like Him.

3. Clothe yourselves with humility.

Humility is recognizing that all you have comes from God and that you are absolutely dependent on him as both your Creator and your Redeemer.

Isaiah 66:2 ESV

2 All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the Lord. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.

Micah 6:8 ESV

8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

1 Peter 5:5 ESV

5 Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

“God dwells with the humble, esteems and highly values the humble, walks with the humble, justifies and exalts the humble, and gives them grace.”

Humility provides an utter trust in God which allows others to be honored above me.

Philippians 2:3 ESV

3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

Since God is in control, I don’t have to be first.

I can lower myself, and allow him to be exalted as I honor others.

4. Clothe yourselves with gentleness.

Some versions translate it as “meekness”.

Gentleness and meekness are attributes misunderstood in our culture, especially when it concerns men.

Gentleness and meekness are not weakness.

The apostle Paul was gentle with the Thessalonians.

1 Thessalonians 2:7 ESV

7 But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children.

There is only one place in the entire gospels where Jesus describes his inner character.

It is in Matt. 11:29 where he says he is gentle and humble in heart.

Matthew 11:29 ESV

29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Masculinity should find its prime example in Jesus Christ.

So, men should be gentle and humble, and Christian leaders should be gentle and humble.

Gentleness is maintaining a demeanor of calmness even in the midst of hardship.

One who is gentle is not easily provoked.

Do you feel the strength in that definition?

A Greek language commentary says, “It is the power that enables us, precisely in situations of conflict with our fellow, so to meet him that he experiences the criticism of his behavior not as condemnation but as help.”

Imagine the strength to be so at peace in the midst of conflict that the other person you are in conflict with feels your calm and imitates it.

That’s the strength of gentleness.

5. Clothe yourselves with patience.

The word used in this verse has to do with patience in relationships.

It gives the picture of being long-suffering, long-fused, and long-tempered, even toward those who irritate us.

Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible explains patience in this way, “The ability to take a great deal of punishment from evil people or circumstances without losing one’s temper, without becoming irritated or angry, or without taking vengeance. It includes the capacity to bear pain or trials without complaint, the ability to forbear under severe provocation, and the self-control which keeps one from acting rashly even though suffering opposition or adversity. The Hebrew expression for patience is related to the verb “to be long” and involves the idea of being long to get riled or slow to become angry.”

Our great example is God himself all throughout the Bible yet culminating at Jesus’ arrest, trials, beatings, and death on the cross.

6. Clothe yourselves with forbearance.

Forbearance means bearing with one another or having patience with one another.

It is great how realistic the Bible is with us.

Paul assumes that people will sometimes annoy us and there will be tension at times.

Jesus knows that we will have relationship problems until he returns.

He knows it will be tough to communicate with teenagers.

He knows that one person will want to talk and the other won’t.

He knows someone will forget to pick up their socks or take out the trash over and over again.

We must learn to bear with one another.

NAC says, “Forbearance is showing patience to someone when they fail or act differently than we expected.”

Forbearance is very closely linked with patience.

7. Clothe yourselves with Christ-like forgiveness.

The Greek root word is “grace”.

It has the idea of giving them grace.

The word in the Greek has the connotation of allowing room for error and weakness.

Two Christians were driving through an area where the road was being widened.

At the end of the repair zone, a sign informed travelers, “Construction In Process. Thank You for Your Patience.”

“I think that would make an appropriate epitaph for my life,” said one of the Christians.

8. Clothe yourselves with love.

One way to define “love” is: a self-sacrificial giving for the other person’s best.

Love is like the outer garment that holds the other seven in place.

We love because he first loved us.

Dr. Burns Jenkins was a popular preacher and writer of a generation ago.

When his son went to college, Jenkins admonished him not to join a certain fraternity.

This, of course, was the very fraternity young Jenkins joined.

For months he lived with the secret.

Then, as he spoke to a church youth group one night, he was smitten by a sense of unworthiness.

Returning to his room, he wrote his father in detail of his disobedience.

Two days later he received this wire: “It’s all right. I forgive you. I knew it two days after you did it. Love, Dad.”

God, clothe us with your mercy and grace to display these attitudes in our relationships with others.