Lenten Devotional (30) & Providencia

10 Lenten Days Before Easter

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace…”

When Jesus talks about managing something, he refers to the proper responsibilities that come with an investment. A steward does not manage things for his own pleasure but for the pleasure of his master. This is how we should think of conflict. Conflict is not God’s curse on you; it’s “a management opportunity.”

It is quite fascinating how these virtues build on one another. We can say that love and joy prepare us to manage conflict well. Someone selfish and prideful will look at conflict as a way of getting what they want. They will not steward conflict with godliness. They will mismanage it and look for an opportunity to prove something or control something else. In short, stewarding conflict will require love and joy.

So, in the middle of conflict, we need to realize that these principles must be at work. We are to remind ourselves that the goal of conflict is peace. Even if peace is not secured through the first or second meeting, peace needs to be secured for ourselves before God. God will not judge us for failing to reconcile every conflict. He will judge us for failing to pursue love and joy in the pursuit of peace.

Only Jesus can guide us in this journey, for he is our peace; he has secured our reconciliation even when others may not wish to be reconciled.

Prayer: Our gracious Father, I know that I tend to either pursue conflict or avoid it altogether. But it is inescapable as a Christian. I ask that you would keep me in your peace so that I may manage well the confusion that sometimes emerges in my conflicts with others. I pray this through Jesus Christ, who is our peace, amen.

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*Karl Barth has always been in the background of theological conflict, and I read much of the critiques from Van Til and John Frame over the years. He is considered the most influential theologian of the 20th century. In seminary, I delved into some of his Romans material and sundry works. But a friend recommended Christiane Tietz’s biography as the definitive work on Barth. So I took the opportunity to discover a bit more about the man who was involved with the Confessing Church and the influential Barmen Declaration that challenged the Nazi Party.

He appears to have been deeply influenced by landscapes (15), and many of his theological illustrations were built on his disposition toward nature.

When asked how Christians can bridge the historical distance between our world and the world of Christ, he noted that the One whom we remember is “Himself in action now, today, and here” (16), and what took place back then happened again in our world. Christ’s life in the first century is not divorced from our reality.

However, one can see liberal tendencies even in his earlier training, where his educational background took place in schools that left any form of biblicist tendencies (17) which is almost always a cue for future approaches to theological discourse.

Barth was a rascal (18) who constantly daydreamed in school, misbehaved, and was constantly encouraged to stay focused in class (18); the latter point would play a role in his theological writing, where he would urge focus “on the essence of the topic.” (18).

**My dear friend and marvelous pianist, Jordan Doolittle, played a casual rendition of my tune Providencia, which I found spectacular: