LOVE AND CONFLICT

Pastor Hope Flask

February 16, 2025

Main Scripture: 1 Samuel 26:7-14, 24-25

Additional Scriptures: Mark 11:25

POINTS:

• Who can lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed and be guiltless?

• We are surrounded by people made in God's image.

• You can’t look at what they deserve; you must look at what the Lord deserves and treat them as you would the Lord.

• With our words and actions, we are helping one another along to either heaven or hell.

• Only humility can carry the weight of treating others with the dignity that they deserve as God’s image bearers.

• Forgiveness:

  • We all owe a debt to God that we can never repay.

  • To forgive our debt, God must pay our debt for us.

  • We must then pay the debt of what other people owe us through forgiveness.

  • It must be granted before it’s felt.

  • Still confronts, but does so humbly and lovingly, wanting the best for that person and others.

  • Has clear and consistent boundaries.

• Mental Courtroom: A self-imposed prison where we are constantly tortured by our bitterness.

• Our lack of forgiveness will turn us into what we won’t forgive.

• A fool: someone who is destructively and willfully blind to what is wrong with themselves.

• It isn’t loving to allow someone to sin against you.