“Why do you not rather suffer wrong?” (I Corinthians 6:7)
A dog can whip a polecat, the saying goes, but it’s not worth it.
Some fights you need to walk away from.
We’ve told here of the time in 2004 when a small group of members of a local Baptist church was taking the pastor and trustees to court over what they perceived as breaches of scripture, ethics, and good sense. As their new associational leader, I was invited to sit in with them one evening and hear the reasons they were taking such serious action. Toward the end of the evening, the leader said, “So, what do you think?”
I said, “I think you should walk away from this. No one is going to win on this thing except the lawyers. Everything about this is wrong and bad.”
He said quietly, “We can’t. It’s gone too far for that now.”
He was wrong. They could have stopped that train in its tracks by a phone call to the lawyers. In doing so, they would have saved a church from going out of existence (within a year, the church “gave” itself away to another church that would take over its indebtedness), saved themselves and the church a ton of money (both sides hired teams of lawyers from high-priced New Orleans firms), and saved the cause of Christ a lot of bad press (the media jumps all over these things).
It’s never too late to back away from a fight.
It’s just hard. And takes more strength than most people can muster.