If You Bite & Devour One Another

Our group just recently wrapped up a book study of "If You Bite & Devour One Another" by Alexander Strauch. With its title based on Galatians 5:15 it was a great book that showed how our attitudes and motivations for disputes among believers was more important than the disputes themselves. Unfortunately in this fallen world not everyone in our congregations are going to be in perfect unity of doctrine. We will disagree amongst ourselves, but how do we handle these situations? With love and caring and longsuffering for our Brothers and Sisters? Or do we get angry and attack one another, forming factions and divisions and misrepresent our fellow believers as evil for not seeing things exactly the way we see them. 

We could be technically right in our argument and our Brother or Sister could be the one mistaken, but if we use this as an occasion to attack and destroy them we are in sin and our attitude shows what spirit we are under. The scriptures abound with encouragements to deal peacefully with each other, to build each other up, to love one another. We cannot tear each other down with scripture, we would be breaking our Masters instructions with the intent to uphold them.

It was a very good book and I recommended it to anyone. It did have some standard Christian doctrines that as a believer in finding the Hebrew Roots of the faith I don't necessarily agree with, but in the spirit of the book, I felt that the positives far outweighed the negatives and I have no qualms recommending it. Shalom.