“Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud; instead, associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own estimation.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A friend of mine pastors a church that’s hard. The congregation has a reputation for being a church that chews up pastors and spits them out. There constantly seems to be discord among the members. Someone is always upset about something. My friend spends a fair bit of his time putting out fires. From the outside looking in, the people there do no live in harmony with one another. It makes accomplishing effective ministry a great deal more difficult than it might otherwise be. A church wracked by disharmony is going to have a much harder time proclaiming and advancing the Gospel than one that isn’t. This is why Paul gave us this next series of commands for living the Christian life well. Let’s continue our exploration of his practical list of how what it looks like to follow Jesus.

It’s tough to live in the midst of relational turmoil. It’s draining. It hangs as a pall over everything you do. It’s like you’re walking underwater with heavy weights on your ankles. You need to swim up for air, but the weights keep you in place. Maybe you manage to pull yourself up for a second to gasp in a quick breath, but then you get pulled right back down to the bottom.

Now, put that in the context of an entire church. A church beset by conflict and relational chaos cannot effectively minister the Gospel to anyone. They cannot make disciples very well at all. Everyone is constantly looking at other members of the church with suspicion and doubt. Everyone is out to get us, to take what is ours, to tear us down somehow. As a result, we start to live defensively. We go on the attack to protect ourselves and the people we have decided are part of our tribe within the larger body. It’s a bad situation.

Whether this picture is unfolding at home or in the church, disharmony is no way to live. If we are going to follow Jesus successfully and well, we have to resist it. We have to strive to “live in harmony with one another,” as Paul commands us here. Yet what does that actually mean in practice? How do we achieve such a thing? Knowing it is our goal is one thing. Actually seeing that goal achieved is another matter entirely.

Thankfully, Paul goes on to give us three practical steps to follow to help us in our pursuit of harmony. The first and last are echoes of one another. They sandwich between them a third command that gives us an alternative path forward. The first part of the sandwich is to not be proud. We must not think we are better than we actually are. While it is perfectly okay to have confidence in ourselves and our opinions, we must hold our opinions openhandedly, and not let healthy confidence slip over into arrogance.

The way we accomplish this particular feat is to make a deeper and richer relationship with God our constant aim. The more we know Him, the better we will be able to see and understand ourselves. If our identity is rooted in something other than Him, pride is going to be one of the natural results. We have to toot our own horn and advance our own interests because who else is going to do it? If we are not partakers of God’s promise to exalt us in Christ as we exalt Him in and with our lives, the only answer to that question is us.

At the same time, avoiding pride means keeping far from the opposite potential error here. We can overestimate our gifts and talents, but we can also underestimate them leading to a kind of sneaky pride wherein we glory in our perceived lack. Our mean estates become a kind of badge of honor. We tell ourselves that we may not be able to do much, but at least we aren’t like the folks who can. That whole line of thinking – at least I’m not like… – is relational poison. It is a guarantee that we will experience disharmony of some kind. By that mindset we will sow discord everywhere we go.

In the same vein and on the other side of the sandwich here is this: “Do not be wise in your own estimation.” Now, this command can be a bit tricky because we sometimes confuse intelligence with wisdom. There are some people who are genuinely, truly intelligent. Being humble is fundamentally about being honest about our weaknesses, but also our strengths. For someone who is intelligent to insist they’re not all the smart isn’t humility, it’s dishonesty. We can obviously be prideful in our giftedness, but acknowledging that we have gifts isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Being wise, though, is something different. Wisdom comes from God. A person can be incredible intelligent without having any wisdom at all. Wisdom comes from knowing who God is, how He made the world to work, and how to navigate the world from the standpoint of His word and character. Wisdom comes by soaking in the Spirit through the word and prayer over time. It comes from learning the lessons of grace and living them out. Wisdom is not something we can achieve on our own.

Because of this, believing ourselves to be wise is a dangerous pathway to walk. As soon as we start thinking in that direction, we will start to drift down the path of believing the wisdom we believe ourselves to have comes from us, that it is in fact something we can obtain on our own. When we head down this path, we will inevitably begin looking down on the people around us who are not as wise as we have assessed ourselves to be. This is not a recipe for relational harmony, but just the opposite.

The counter for this, and a way to enhance relational harmony in the church and in our lives more generally is to “associate with the humble.” This can be taken in two different sense, both of them legitimate applications of what Paul is saying here. The first is to associate with those who know themselves to be humble because of the hard circumstances in which they are living each day. Someone whose life is a mess and knows it is going to tend in the direction of humility. Spending time with folks like this to learn from them and to help lift them up out of their hard circumstances is a great way to gain a better perspective on our own lives. It can help us develop a better sense of contentment with our circumstances whatever they happen to be.

The other sense in which we can understand what Paul is saying here is that we should associate with who are humble and don’t know it. That is, they are naturally humble people. Spending time with these kinds of folks can help us learn what it actually looks like to be humble. Now, this may be a bit of a challenge because in their humility, they may not see any reason for us to hang out with them more frequently than we already are. But we should persist anyway, because they have much to teach us if we will put ourselves in a posture of learning with them.

Doing all of these things isn’t easy. It takes effort. But the result will be greater relational harmony in our lives and in our churches. That will make everything else we do all the easier. When we live in harmony, we can focus all the extra energy that would have gone to navigating our choppy, hazardous relational waters on kingdom advancing projects instead. Think how much more good you could do for the kingdom of God if you lived in harmony in all of your relationships. Let’s make that our goal.