One of my favorite things to do is to play golf. One of the reasons I like golf so much is because the goal is very simple. Get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. Now golf is incredibly complex when you begin to study it but the overall goal is simple. Sometimes I wish life felt more like that.

One of the character challenges I have that I’m trying to work through is turning everything into a competition. I start to view other people as my competition and I want to beat them in everything that I do. I even sometimes turn Christianity into a competition in my mind. I want to spend more time in the Bible and in prayer than everyone else. I want to go on more mission trips and reach more people. My motivation goes from being pure to being completely selfish.

When I view others as competition I’m much more tempted to not speak well of them. I stop wanting their best interest and I secretly begin to hope that they slip up.

I’ve been working through the 70 resolutions of Jonathan Edwards and his 36th resolution is…

Resolved, Never to speak evil of any, except I have some particular good call to it.

Edwards wanted to work for the good of his fellow man. He understood that people were not his enemy. There are evil forces in this world that are beyond our ability to comprehend and these are the primary forces that we war against. Even though some people work with those forces as though they were one and the same, this is not actually the case. In a sense, we are all in this together. There are times when we have to call out evil in others but it should be done in the context of love and for the purpose of conviction and accountability.

What if we began to see other people as being on our team instead of as contending against us? Jesus said in Mark 3:25, “If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” If we keep fighting against each other for selfish reasons, our house will not stand.