What the Bible Says About Arguing and Servant Leadership

From the sermon preached on June 14, 2026

Most of us do not think of ourselves as someone who argues. And yet, if we are honest, the need to be right shows up in the kitchen, in the truck on the way home from work, in the comment section at midnight. What the Bible says about arguing is not primarily about managing your words; it is about what is happening in your heart before a single word leaves your mouth. Servant leadership, in the way Jesus modeled it, starts with getting your eyes off yourself and onto something bigger.

The first passage Watseka Campus Pastor Bart Koester brought before the congregation comes from Mark chapter 8. The Pharisees had approached Jesus demanding a sign from heaven. These were not honest inquirers. They had already watched Jesus feed four thousand people. The evidence was not the issue. Their hardened hearts were the issue. And what did Jesus do? He sighed deeply in his spirit, gave them a two-sentence answer, got back in the boat, and left.

That detail (the deep sigh) matters more than it might seem. Conflict resolution in the biblical model does not begin with finding the perfect comeback. It begins with grief. Jesus was not annoyed or threatened. He was grieved by what he saw in the Pharisees: the persistent, willful desire to see him fail. That kind of sadness is different from anger. It does not produce retaliation. It produces clarity.

When someone comes at you hard (at work, in your marriage, at a family gathering that starts normal and ends badly) the instinct is to counter. To defend. To rehearse what you should have said on the drive home. But the first principle Jesus modeled in this passage is to feel the weight of the moment the way he felt it. Not to calculate a response. Not to go cold. To actually grieve what is happening, which requires keeping your eyes on Jesus rather than on your own pride.

From that place of grief, the next step is to pray for discernment. James 1:5 says that if any person lacks wisdom, they can ask God, who gives generously without reproach. That is the posture of conflict resolution the Bible is pointing toward: slow down, listen, pray before you speak. Proverbs 29:20 is blunt about the alternative. James 1:19 puts it plainly: "Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." The practical step is the one nobody wants to take; stop rehearsing what you are going to say and start actually listening to what the other person is telling you.

Part two of the message moves from someone coming against you to the harder question: what happens when you are the one picking the fight? The scene is Mark chapter 9. Jesus and the twelve disciples had been walking through Galilee. Jesus had just told them, plainly, that he was going to be handed over, killed, and raised after three days. And the disciples, rather than sitting with that, had spent the road arguing about which one of them was the greatest.

When Jesus asked what they had been discussing, they went silent. They knew. And that moment of silence is one of the most honest pictures of handling criticism the Bible gives us. The disciples could not even defend their argument out loud, because the moment Jesus looked at them, the root of it was too obvious to hide. Their argument was not about theology or mission. It was pride (an attitude that elevates oneself above God and others, producing spiritual blindness and broken relationships).

The evolution of that pride is something most of us will recognize without much help. It starts in the playpen, where two kids fight over the same toy for three minutes before moving on to something else. It moves to the school hallway, where the battle shifts from possessions to reputation. It lands in the home, where arguments between spouses can sound sophisticated but are still, underneath, rooted in self-interest and unmet expectations. And now it lives on the internet, where a person can spend thirty minutes composing a response to a stranger they will never meet because they simply cannot let a disagreement go. The setting changes. The heart problem does not.

Handling criticism honestly requires something most people resist: looking at what the criticism reveals about your own need to be right before you decide whether the criticism is fair. Examine your heart because Jesus already has; not to catch you failing, but because he wants your eyes on him, not on yourself. The small, honest step is to ask, before you respond to the next thing that makes you want to fire back: what is actually driving this?

The answer Jesus gave the disciples about greatness was not a motivational speech. He sat down, called all twelve of them over, and said: if anyone would be first, he must be last of all and a servant of all. Then he pulled a child into the center of the group, held that child, and told his disciples that whoever welcomes a child in his name welcomes him. In the first century, children were not symbols of innocence. They were the lowest-status people in a room. They had nothing to offer, no influence, no position, nothing to gain from.

Christian humility, as Jesus demonstrated it in that moment, is not a personality trait or a posture you perform to earn credit. It is a choice to treat the person in front of you as someone worth your full attention, even when nothing about that interaction benefits you. The disciples had been arguing about greatness while walking beside greatness. They were fighting over first place while following the one who would go to the cross.

That is the inversion Jesus keeps returning to. When everyone else is running for the front of the line, choose last place. When the argument inside you is pushing for justification and recognition, consider what the other person actually needs instead. Serving someone in the middle of conflict looks like surrendering the need to win. Not swallowing the truth. Not pretending everything is fine. But genuinely releasing your grip on your own reputation and asking: what does this person need from me right now, and can I trust Jesus with the rest?

Christian humility is not weakness. It is the decision to stop fighting people and start fighting pride instead. That is the harder fight, and it is the one that changes things.

Watseka Campus Pastor Bart Koester returned to this phrase throughout the message: keep your eyes on Jesus. Hebrews 12:2 says: "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith." That verse is the hinge the whole message turns on. When attention stays on Jesus, pride loses its grip. When attention drifts back to self, the need to be right starts running the show again.

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from carrying a long argument you cannot finish. It might be with a family member who has not spoken to you in two years, a coworker at the plant who never lets anything go, or a version of yourself you keep losing to when something gets under your skin. Most people carry that weight quietly, without making a scene about it, without telling anyone how much it has cost them. If that sounds familiar, Trinity Church has campuses serving communities from Watseka, Ashkum, and Gilman across Iroquois County to Goodland and Kentland in Newton County, and there is a place for you at any of them.

Jesus did not die on the cross so that we could win arguments. He put us first. He gave up the fight he could have won so that we could be forgiven and live forever. If that is the model, then the small sacrifice of listening first, of sitting with someone else's pain instead of defending your own position, is not actually that much to ask. Conflict is not going away. Pride does not disappear. But when your eyes stay on Jesus, your pride stops being the loudest thing in the room.

If something in this landed close to home, you are welcome at any of our campuses: Ashkum, Goodland, and Watseka. No dress code, no expectation that you have any of this sorted out. Plan your visit below at whichever location is closest to you.

If you are not ready for that yet, you can send a prayer request or fill out a connection card with no commitment attached; connect here.