What Are You Guarding and Defending? (Part 2)
By Pastor Joseph Dunkin
Last month, we explored three things God wants us to guard and defend for the church: 1) peaceable unity, 2) apostolic doctrine and practice, and 3) holiness. This month, I want to explore the amazing discoveries we can make by asking ourselves, “What am I guarding and defending?” This simple question can reveal not only our deepest motives, but also the tragic ways we lose what we love when we guard it the wrong way.
Take marriage, for example. In the book Created for Connection, authors Johnson and Sanderfer show how married couples can guard and defend their relationships in competing styles. When conflict jeopardizes our love bond with disconnection, “we resort to demanding and controlling, or (emphasis added) if we truly expect rejection and desertion, we try to turn away and shut down our needs for connection.” [1] Note how this would look in a marriage where each person handles loss of love differently. Both want to guard and defend the love bond, but one does it by vigorously engaging and the other, by a self-protective withdrawing. Both want the same the same love and can’t get it because they are guarding it in different ways. Asking themselves, “what am I guarding and defending?” could help this couple sit down and realize that they are guarding the same thing with opposing methods.
In the book Marriage Matters, Winston T. Smith expands this concept beyond protection of love bonds to conflict in general. He shows that when we are in conflict with someone we love, we will respond in one of three ways. We will seek to either 1) Appease (move toward), 2) Ignore (move away) or 3) Win (move against). But each of these conflict strategies has everything to do with what desires are being guarded and what fears are being defending against. An appeaser guards his desire for “acceptance, intimacy, and belonging” while defending against his fear of “rejection, isolation, and shame.” One who ignores guards his desire for “comfort, security, perfection, order and control” while defending against his fear of “hassles, chaos, punishment, and being controlled”. One who seeks to win guards his desire for “success, power, control, and admiration” while defending against his fear of “failure, humiliation, being dominated, and weakness.” [2]
Note in Winston’s description, a diverse response to conflict and a selfish bent toward what we guard and defend. This can be remedied by an equally diverse but holy bent toward guarding what God guards. Smith writes that that instead of appeasing, we can yield in the spirit of Matthew 7:5 by taking the plank out of our eye so we can see to remove the speck out of another’s eye. Instead of ignoring, we can wait in the spirit of Proverbs 20:3, “It is to a man’s honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel.” And instead of seeking to win, we can confront in the spirit of Leviticus 19:17-18, “Do not hate your brother in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in his guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.” [3]
Let me return now to the overall goal of guarding and defending unity, doctrine and holiness for the church. Beloved, as we pray for our church and look to our church’s growth and future, we must remember that these three treasures (unity, doctrine and holiness) have no hierarchy. One is not worth guarding more than another. We can’t guard doctrine above relationships or vice versa. We cannot defend holiness against doctrine or let relationships cause us to hold back from encouraging one another to holiness. Again, Ephesians chapter 4 is so helpful in how to do this. We speak the truth in love in order to uphold all three. And the gospel of Ephesians and the whole Bible helps us to understand our neighbor and meet him where he is, when so much of the time, his behavior is affected by his own guarding against the pain of fear, guilt, shame and uncleanness – things which the gospel we defend heals and remedies.
Beloved, we are all guarding something and defending something. Let us examine our own hearts and seek to understand our neighbors’ so that in gospel love, we can uphold all God has for our church in the midst of our variegated diversity. What are you guarding and defending?
Pastor Joseph
[1] Dr. Sue Johnson and Kenneth Sanderfer, Created for Connection (New York, NY: Little, Brown Spark, 2016), 30.
[2] Winston T. Smith, Marriage Matters (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2010), 154.
[3] Ibid, 155-156.