Family Feud or Family First?
God is our Father, He is our Bridegroom King who saved us, and He is our Comforter, Strengthener, and Friend. We are seated in heavenly places with and in Him, which means we are part of the same household. And because of the blood Jesus shed for us, those of us who accept Him become related by Blood, born again into the same family.
Our Heavenly Father makes us brothers and sisters, our Bridegroom King, JESUS, makes us the Bride, and Holy Spirit connects us all. We are a family, living in the same household. We are an engaged couple, the same as being married according to Jewish tradition, and we share the same Spirit. This should make us close, right? This should make us close to Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and one another, right? Yes. It should. But many of us know and have experienced that even being in the same family in the same household with someone, even being married to someone, doesn’t automatically make you close / united. Family is not automatic. It takes work. Jesus made us family, not just by being who He is, but by putting in the work of dying for our sins. Without putting in the work, we have the opposite of family. What are we if we are not family? We are drifters, itinerants, rootless, strays, wayward, and down-and-out.
A person would have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to notice the obvious split in the Body of Christ in the days we are living in now. It’s so sad that the world won’t listen to our talks, speeches, messages, etc about loving God and one another, because they don’t see us walking like Jesus and loving each other. Instead, they see us taking sides against one another. They see us acting the opposite of family. How can my testimony of love and being in the Body of Christ carry any weight if I’m living like a drifter? How can a rootless individual convince anyone to join the family of God? A rootless tree dies, and so does a rootless person with no connection to anyone.
So, how do we change this? How do we stop the feuds that are going on in our natural families? How do we stop the feuds that are happening among us, brothers and sisters, in the Body of Christ?
The word “feud” means a prolonged and bitter quarrel or dispute that is unlikely to change (inveterate). Putting family first means putting our relationship with God at the center of our lives and allowing all of our relationships to flow from that. Family first means I’m walking in love, and even if my brother treats me wrong, my desire is toward reconciliation. When we choose to feud instead, we put into action things that go against love. We’ve all watched those movies about feuds in families lasting for decades. We may even be part of a split family where one side, for whatever reason, does not talk to the other. This is not God’s will for us.
One way in which we can avoid family feud and put family first is to be careful of who we open our ears to. My church, Gateway Christian Fellowship, is reading the book of Genesis together for the 10 Days of Awe, an annual time of fasting, prayer, heart reflection, and repentance. I noticed in 3:1-6, what listening to the wrong voice can do to a family. The snake wanted to convince Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Once Adam and Eve heard the snake questioning the way God told them to do things, they should have immediately turned away from him, but they entertained his conversation and presence. He told them something different than what God told them, and it seems that immediately a desire to go against God’s will was birthed. Eve must have passed by that tree a million times, but listening to the wrong voice made it seem much more delightful, delicious, and desirable. Would they have eaten the fruit if they had immediately rebuked the snake for questioning God’s will? We’ll never know, but what we do know is that it was this wrong relationship with the snake that prompted the whole thing. The result was Adam and Eve moving away from one another, ashamed of their nakedness. Genesis 3:16 says, “…you will desire to dominate your husband, but he will want to dominate you (TPT).” Listening to the wrong voice caused disunity where there was harmony. Haven’t we all had friends who suggest the wrong thing to do, a thing we would have never even dreamed of doing on our own, but once they said it, it suddenly became desirable? That’s why the Bible tells us in 1 Cor. 15:32-34 that bad company corrupts good character. Proverbs 13:20 also gives us the warning that if we walk with the wicked, we’ll become just like them.
Another way we can avoid family feuds within the Body of Christ is to stop the negative speech we say against one another. Does saying all Democrats are going to hell bring unity? Does declaring all Evangelicals as devils promote love? Over the last 5 years, those are just some of the things I’ve heard from pulpits, read over social media, or watched in videos. Why are we at war with one another? We are the Body of Christ. What sense does it make for the right foot to stomp on the left foot when all that does is make the whole body cry out in pain? Right now, we look like the left foot stomping on the right foot and the right foot stomping on the left foot, and all that does is cripple us. It stops us from walking out our destiny. It stops us from running the race He set before us.
We are mistaken if we think that feuds can be ended once we prove who was right and who was wrong. Jesus was right, perfect, and sinless, but He took the hit for all of us born in sin. He didn’t wait for us to “get right” because He knew that we couldn’t without love, which looked like His perfect sacrifice. What would happen if each side decided to sacrifice their need to be “right” and just loved each other? We know from what Jesus did on the cross, that sacrifice brings life. If each of us chose to sacrifice our side of the issues, we would bring new life to the church, and a living church is life to the world!