Eritheia

In my quiet time the other day, I came across the passage in Galatians 5:20, which mentions the acts of the flesh. For your reference, here's the NIV version:

¹⁹ The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; ²⁰ idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions ²¹ and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

As I was studying this scripture, I recalled some time ago reading in one translation something phrased much differently than the NIV version. Of course, things get lost in translations, and a lot of it is left up to the interpretation of the translators. The Living Bible used the phrase " the feeling that everyone else is wrong except those in your own little group."

Having remembered that, I decided to investigate with my handy Bible app called the Blue Letter Bible. (BLB is a tool that utilizes concordances and other sources to help dig a bit deeper into scripture.) The word that I came up with was eritheia.  

Strong's Concordance defines it as this:

1) electioneering or intriguing for office

1a) apparently, in the NT a courting distinction, a desire to put one' s self forward, a partisan and fractious spirit which does not disdain low arts
1b) partisanship, fractiousness

In this hyper-partisan age, I find it dangerous that we're not willing to attack the seed of dissent that has easily been sown in our churches. Some of the most contentious bickering has come from people who claim to be believers.

I, too, have felt the pull of partisan politics in my life. In my chosen career field, I read about it daily. However, we're not called to be tools in a shouting match used by political parties to cast a divide across the country in order to gather votes and/or influence.

In fact, much of Galatians 5:19-20 describes the political climate in America. Discord, hatred, jealousy, factions, distension, selfish ambition — any of that sound familiar?

From personal experience, I'd like to run down the caveats of getting too involved in partisan politics:

• It takes our focus off Jesus and puts it on a political leader. Any time we put our hopes on a person and not on our Father, we commit idolatry. 
• We lose our joy. People and ideas often let us down. We can spend our lives hoping for a utopia that will never come, except from God. Besides, how can you tell people about the goodness of Christ if you're too worried about what the government is doing.
• We lose sight of our mission field. Everyone we come in contact is part of that field, whether they are liberal, conservative, gay, straight or any other group. If a person doesn't know Jesus, we should be focused on introducing them to Christ — not winning an argument. 

It's likely that in any situation, we can win an argument and lose our minds and souls in the process. To me, that's much too high of a price to pay.