Perhaps you’ve heard the concept that you can win every battle and still lose the war. In a marriage, every disagreement has the potential to become a battle, and the severity of the battle depends on many aspects unique to each argument: past experiences with similar arguments, how loving they act toward one another, their ability to state what they feel, the choice to listen fully while the other is speaking, and how willing they are to understand and relate to the other’s emotions. A discussion can gradually escalate, quickly accelerate or rapidly diffuse depending on a myriad of factors for each partner.
If the desire is to WIN every “battle” in a marriage, then the relationship will not thrive and the war will be lost — by God’s design.
Make Peace the Goal
Another concept that you may have heard is that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link. In a group of people, perhaps an organization or a team, the success of the entire group depends on the strength of each individual. In a sports team, every player on the field or the court matters, because one weak point allows the other team to quickly take the upper hand. If we look at one church at a time, it’s easy to see that the success of a specific program or event takes many people working together, and one person that has a different objective, motives, or that fails to do their part can cause the entire program to begin to crumble.
The strength of a chain of people is only as strong as the weakest link — by God’s design.
Build Up Others Around You
In the same way, the pastor attempting to lead the church through his or her own knowledge and understanding rather than leaning on Holy Spirit for guidance, dismissing Jesus’s role as the High Priest, and not prioritizing their relationship with God over following laws and traditions can cause an entire church to crumble. Good leadership matters, and just as a leader can rally each member to be better together, they can just as easily cause everyone to lose hope that they matter. When people feel like they don’t matter, they stop trying. If individuals in a church don’t feel like their input, gifts and talents matter, they will stop volunteering, stop showing up emotionally and physically, and they will drift away.
A church is only as strong as the pastor unless leadership of the church is placed into God’s hands — by God’s design.
Follow Holy Spirit’s Lead in Leadership
To look at it through a broader lens, consider the entirety of the body of all of the Christians across the world, made up of individuals of many nations, denominations, and ages, with Jesus Christ as the Head Priest. As a leader, Jesus has shown us time and time again that his method for leading was as a servant, which goes against every cultural norm and human tendency. Why would this be?
If the leader ignores the reality that a group of people functions as a body, then the group will cease to work properly as parts become severed from one another — by God’s design.
Strength is in Empowering Everyone in the Group
By design, God created humans with love and purity as our core (think of a baby here). We were masterfully created as individuals, with strengths and weaknesses uniquely our own. Even identical twins have differences from one another, and no two people are exactly alike. We were also created to need other humans to offset our shortcomings, because no human has been created with everything they need to thrive in this life. Only the Creator himself has every element it takes to be complete, and he is the only One who can fill every single need of ours. He even created us with the need for human touch and companionship, which is evident in babies that fail to thrive in environments that lack these things, our natural feelings of loneliness as humans, and our desire to form relationships with others. Knowing that he had created us this way, God realized that even though he could fill every need of ours, we would require others on earth in order to be fully complete because of our need for human touch and companionship.
Not a single person is able to live out their greatest purpose in isolation from others — by God’s design.