Overcoming Opposition Pt. 1: The Pre-Game Coin-Toss and Why Opposition Matters

Over the weekend I was given the opportunity to preach out of Nehemiah chapter four with the topic "overcoming opposition." First, we needed to carve out what we meant by "opposition" since next week they were going to tackle "overcoming conflict."

So here's my arm-chair definition for you: opposition is conflict calcified. It is to be in a situation where someone or something is implacably set against you that will not be negotiated with without a winner and a loser.

When there's conflict, you can often work it out. There's room for dialogue in a conflict, maybe even end up with a win-win. But not so in an oppositional situation.

I have a deep love, as I professed last week, for football in all its various forms. And when two teams go out for the coin toss, they aren't meeting to negotiate a peace treaty. There's no settlement being offered. They are opponents. One will win and one will lose.

Opposition is conflict, calcified.

This makes the opposition conversation a bit more difficult because not everyone has faced true opposition. All of us have had conflict, but not all of us have experienced genuine opposition.

But here's why this matters for us and why it's important for us to engage with this topic: opposition is a crucible, it is a deeply visceral experience. What opposition does to us emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and physically is extreme.

For many of us an experience of opposition will be one of the most defining moments or seasons of our lives. It will be a fork in the road, where the trajectory will be radically altered for good or for ill.

For some of you, that's already happened. You look back and you can identify an incident or a season of opposition that was a turning point in your life--again, either for good or for ill.

So here's the deal: if the God of the Bible and the work and the message of Jesus Christ do not matter here, then they do not matter at all. Opposition matters. And how we deal with it matters. And so if God matters at all, he must matter here or else we should just pack this whole thing up and go home.

The good news is that God has much to say and much to do with how we deal with and address opposition, as we'll see as we look at Nehemiah chapter four.