Get Out Of The Tarpits

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. And we have started a series called Resolve. At the beginning of the year, when many people make resolutions to try to change, change is very difficult for any of us, honestly, right? It's also a series about resolving conflict, because there's a lot of conflicts, actually, in this world today. That little video, I had a time, AJ and I, when we put it together at FGCU, he was just writing down all sorts of things, right? And there's so many of them, we couldn't even exhaust the list by any means. And so, the question today that we have about the global issues, as well as the personal in our lives, and how often we're in conflictual situations, is do we really want to solve the conflict? Do we want to solve? Do we want to fight, or do we want to solve things? Do we like to throw blame around, or do we want to find a solution? It's a fundamental question. And I'll tell you, there are many times that I look at how this world is handling the differences that we have, and I have to go like, hmm, I have a feeling most people just want to fight. They don't want to solve anything, they just want to be right. They don't want to actually make progress, they just want to dominate. That's a problem. That is a problem. So, slowly but surely, we'll be working with resolving conflicts during these weeks in January. Those that we experience in our everyday relationships at work, home, in the classroom, I've heard already numerous comments from students about my roommate is driving me crazy, right? But we're going to try to get there, and we'll get to a gospel-centered, biblical perspective on how do we resolve questions. But today, we're asking the question simply, do we want to resolve conflicts, and how do we do it? And are we listening to people? Are we being influenced by people? Are we around the people? Are we following people who want to resolve conflicts? Amanda Ripley wrote a book, I would recommend it, it's a book called High Conflict. As she, over the last few years, and she's now working at trying to bring peacemaking and resolving conflicts worldwide, corporately, as well as just personally for people. But in this book, she traveled around the country and worked with different people that found themselves in their good intentions, good intentions, ending up in what she calls high conflicts, in the tar pits, stuck in a situation where it got so bad, they didn't know how to get out of it, and everything that they did actually caused more. Okay? So today, we're going to be exploring all of this through Psalm 1, and see how this psalm, not randomly put at the beginning of the Psalter, the 150 Psalms, this one starts out the entire Psalter to tell you what is the way to live, the methodology to read the rest of the Psalms, as well as the model of how to live your lives and deal with conflict. But let's follow along. Let's read together now Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither, and all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish. So we're going to be weaving together a number of passages today, as we start in Psalm 1 and use that kind of as the outline of our message. People do get trapped into, you could call it the quicksand or the tar pits of conflict, where every move they make, the ones that would naturally come to you just make it worse. Good intentioned people, like I said, as Amanda Ripley had studied, people who know that they're right on the subject, but somehow it just goes all wrong in resolving conflicts. So how do you do, how do you, well you might be questioning right now, how do you know when you're in that kind of conflict? Because we all have it. Conflict's inevitable, but how do I know I'm in a high conflict? And here are some of the questions you might want to ask yourself, it's quite the long list. Do you lose sleep thinking about this conflict? Good, that's a good statement right there. If you're losing sleep over this conflict, you might be stuck in it. Do you feel good when something bad happens to the other person or side, even if it doesn't directly benefit you? There's a German term called Schadenfreude, have you ever heard of that? Oh, that's so sad, but you're really happy that it happened to them. If the other side were to do something you actually agree...