I usually flip through these cards very swiftly before consigning the great majority of them to the trash can by my desk. But one card recently caught my eye. It’s from a company called the Dickson Company in Addison, Illinois. The little note at the bottom of the card indicates that they are Manufacturers of recording and testing equipment since 1923. There’s a little box to check to receive a free catalogue of Dickson temperature, pressure, and humidity recorders.

None of this was interesting enough to hold my attention for very long. But what grabbed my attention as it was designed to do was the bold black headline at the top of the card which reads: Here’s how to settle disputes about room temperature once and for all. I learned that for only $150.00 we could have a 24 hour or seven day record of temperatures in our buildings.

Well, the dispute settling possibilities are obvious. I can envision a congregational meeting where one of the members stands up and accuses the church of being cold claiming that one day last winter the sanctuary temperature was cold enough to freeze over and turn the place into a skating rink. I can then imagine the triumph of pulling out the permanent record of that day and showing with hard facts that the sanctuary temperature during that particular service was an even 73 degrees. That would be quite a triumph a sure way to settle disputes about room temperature once and for all.

But honestly! Don’t you think it’s pretty sad that such a card should be included in products for churches at all? It reflects a pretty poor view of the church to think that we would have such huge disputes about the temperature of our building that we would have to rely on a machine to settle them.

And what is even sadder is that there are undoubtedly some churches that are sunk so far into disputing that a machine is a way to hold the church together in peace an unbiased arbiter between the frying and the frozen.

This next week in our Purpose Driven Life small groups, we are going to be looking at six reasons why you need to be a part of a church family -- why it meets your needs and why you meet other people’s needs. We’re going to look at what it means to be formed for God’s family. How we are to care for each other and support each other as the people of God is a huge topic. I’m glad we’ll have the opportunity to go into detail.

This morning I only have time to deal with one aspect of life together in the family of God. But it’s a vital aspect. It is the question of how we are to live in God’s family when that family is a less than comfortable place for us to be. How do we handle conflict in the church? What is the Biblical response?

Ben Patterson, former pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, wrote: We Americans have been told ad nauseam that we live in the now generation. At McDonald’s we buy fast food and at Sears we buy microwave ovens or television sets whose weekly programs pose great human dramas, dilemmas and mysteries, all to be solved in thirty to ninety minutes excluding commercial breaks. To all this, the media adds its weekly opinion polls, and 45 second in depth analysis designed to evoke instant responses and quick decisions.

Behold now, Patterson writes, the local church with its garden variety mixture of sinners saved by grace, all representing different needs and points of view that must be brought into the harmony of the spirit and the unity of the body of Christ through committees, commissions, boards, and sessions. Real life conflicts here, as elsewhere, are not solved by just saying charge it, nor will they be solved in ninety minutes. On the contrary, such a do it quick mentality ensures that conflicts will not be solved, but will be intensified. The perseverance needed to solve differences will be just another irritant in an already irritating situation.

Many American Christians, Patterson continues, Respond to this situation by loving it or leaving it, shutting up or going to another church; or better yet, starting up their own church. As comedian Rodney Dangerfield says, We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations. We’re doing everything to keep our marriage together.’ That is sometimes Love, American Style’ and it is sometimes Christian unity, American style.’ We live in an age that is increasingly characterized by single-issue politics and single-issue churches.

But that isn’t what God wants. Instead, in Ephesians 4, God tells us through the Apostle Paul that we are to be eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Paul writes, I, therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, beg you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which we have been called being eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. For, as Paul has already declared in Ephesians, God’s purpose in Christ is to unify all things, and that the church is meant by God to be a living model of the unity which is to come.

But if God’s purpose for us is to bear fruit, we need to adopt a godly mind set toward conflict. Paul calls this the mind of Christ. What he is referring to is not an intellectual system on how to deal with conflicts or a manual for church fights. Instead, Paul exhorts the church to look at what Christ did when He laid aside His rights as God’s equal and lived the life of a servant in our midst.

We can’t avoid conflict. The early church didn’t and we can’t either. And it does no good to simply ignore it and hope it goes away. It just shows up a different way. So Paul says that the next time we find ourselves squaring off in a fighter’s stance that we should switch to a servant’s posture. This is what Paul calls the mind of Christ a posture of kneeling and washing one another’s feet.

Mark records that Jesus Aappointed twelve to be with Him and He sent them out to preach. With a whole world to reach, Jesus separated twelve people and devoted much of his three year ministry to their training. They were to continue the work He had begun.

What were they learning that would equip them to carry on Jesus’ work? Did they have homiletics, hermeneutics and speech courses? Philosophy of Religion? Systematic Theology? Anthropology? Certainly all of these things were involved in hearing Jesus teach and learning of the God He came to reveal.

But most of all they were learning how to live together, how to support one another, how to submit to one another, how to serve one another, how to defer to each other, encourage each other, pray for each other, love each other. That’s the kind of thing that happens in small groups, not in corporate worship. After Pentecost, they suddenly became members of one another, and as 1 Corinthians states it, were arranged in the body as God chose. These individual disciples were drawn into a supernatural unity by the filling of the Holy Spirit.

You know, you hear some people say, Well, I’m a Christian, but I don’t want to belong to any church. That just doesn’t make sense. The church is where you live out what it means to be a Christian. It’s like saying, I’m a football player, but I don’t want to be a part of any team. It doesn’t work. It’s like saying, I’m a tuba player, but I don’t want to be part of an orchestra. A Christian without a church family is an orphan. God meant us to be a part of a family.

The Bible tells us this in Romans 12, verse 5, In Christ we who are many form one Body, and each member belongs to all the others. In this decision that we make for Christ, we suddenly belong to every other Christian. We are members together.

Now, I know the word membership is a funny word to some of us. But did you know that this word originally was a Christian word? It came right out of these verses in the Bible. I know that today it is used for being a member of every kind of club and signing up for this and joining that. But originally, the meaning was right here in the Bible; a member of the Body of Christ. Just like your hand is a member of your body, that’s how tightly we are tied to each other. This isn’t about being a part of some silly club, wearing silly hats and having silly signs. This is about belonging to each other, making the choice to belong to a family.

Jesus loves the church. And you and I need to have the same kind of love. Remember that we were formed for God’s family. This is where God wants us to be. Jesus calls the church the body. We need to have that same kind of respect for it, to recognize what it means. What if I said to you, you know, I love you, I just can’t stand your body? How would you feel about that? The church is Jesus’ body. He loves the church. The church is also called the Bride of Christ. What if I said, I love you, but I can’t stand your wife. How would you like that? How do you think Jesus feels?

It is only in America that we have bunny believers -- you know, people who hop from church to church to church. It’s One week, I’m a part of this church and the next week oh, they are doing something hot over here. And next week I’m over here.’ If you want to grow, if you want to see God at work in your life, you have got to commit. That’s where your Christian life becomes real We need to attach ourselves to a group of believers, where we say, I want to be a part of what’s going on there -- the good and the stuff that needs work. Yes, there are times when you need to leave a church family and find another. But that should be both hard and rare.

The Bible declares that the church is a people brought together by a sheer act of grace on God’s part. Christian community is first and foremost a gift of the Spirit. We are not talking here about a human manufactured community but a community that is created and defined by the ministry of the Holy Sprit.

We do not create unity in the church. It is God’s gift. Paul says that it is our role to maintain the unity that has been given to us. This means that if we find ourselves out of fellowship with anyone or any group by our own fault, we are not called to negotiate. We are called to repent.

In the face of fragmentation, Paul calls us to be eager or diligent to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. To be eager is to go after something happily and with great energy. To maintain something means to give it the care it needs to keep going.

Our eagerness should grow out of the fact that God has made us participants in His great project of reconciling the world to Himself. God’s goal is the unification of humankind. A fundamental way in which we can work with Him is by displaying a sample of that deep oneness that God intends everyone to know. For me, the ability to do this grows out of the recognition that God chose me to be a part His church. I am a part of the church not by my choice by His. I continue in the church not at my discretion but at His insistence. I was formed for His family. For me to cut myself off from fellowship with other believers would be for me to move myself totally out of the will of God. These are God’s people and therefore they are mine.

In the light of this fact, how should we live with each other? Paul says that it is to be in the bond of peace. Peter Marshall summarized the bond of peace in this prayer: Lord when we are wrong, make us willing to change. And when we are right, make us easy to live with.

We are called to an attitude of servant hood a ministry of washing one another’s feet. And, as we do this, it helps a whole lot to be careful of the temperature of the water we use! Some come to others with icy, cold water and say, Here stick your dumb, stinky feet in here! Their cold, forbidding attitude works against the bond of peace. Others are so angry or so resentful of the servant’s role that it is like offering to wash another’s feet in boiling water. The way to peace is not only take the position of a servant but to bring the kind of water, the heart attitude, that makes your servant hood real.

In a booklet titled Life’s Hidden Power, I read an account of a session meeting at a Presbyterian Church. The pastor asked one of the elders to lead in prayer. The elder paused for a moment in embarrassment and said, Pastor, before I pray I need to clear something up. I have been trying to knife one of the men here in the back for a long time because of a wrong I thought he did to me. I have been his constant secret enemy, and I must ask his forgiveness before I can pray.

He stepped over and took another elder by the hand. To his surprise, the other said in turn, And I want to say that I’ve been talking about you behind your back and saying things about you that aren’t true. It was an unchristian thing to do. I want to quit trying to get revenge.

Each gripped the other’s hand, and then there was a long time of prayer. In this prayer, confessions were made around the circle and words of commendation were spoken that had, before, died on their lips. Hearts were cleansed, and accumulated anger washed away.

At the close of the meeting, the Clerk of Session said to the pastor. There’s not much to record in the minutes tonight. The pastor replied, Just put down, They loved each other!’ That’s the most important thing we could have done!’

Love is what make us go.

The Christian Science Monitor carried an article a few years ago about the sport of cross country skiing. The article stated, A ski is built to glide. The friction of the ski melts the snow enough to create a thin film of moisture. Without this film, the ski has trouble sliding. There are several situations, however, that prevent this film from forming. One, with which most cross county skiers are familiar, occurs when one or both skis get wet when the skier crosses a stream. As the water on the skis begins to freeze, it blots up patches of snow. There moist patches of snow in turn gather more snow until the resulting buildup makes the ski feel as though it’s made of lead. The skier is reduced to plodding through the woods.

The experienced skier, however, immediately recognizes the reason for his trouble. He stops, takes off his skis, scrapes them thoroughly, puts them back on, and flies down the trail once again.

As we close this morning take a look at yourself, as I have looked at myself. Are your relationships with other believers no longer frost-free? Is your Christian walk icing up? If so, here’s the scraper to use: forgiveness, servant hood, commitment and love. Then you will be walking a walk or skiing a ski that is once again worthy of the calling you have received as a son or daughter of God. For if you are the child of the king, formed for the family of the King, why not live like it?