The Estate Eaten by the Fight
1 Corinthians 6:7a - “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you.”
Charles Dickens built much of his book Bleak House around a lawsuit that never ends. Jarndyce and Jarndyce, it is called, a dispute over a dead man’s fortune that crawled through the courts for so many generations that almost no one can remember what it was first about. People are born into the case and die still waiting on it. One young man stakes his entire future on the verdict and is ruined chasing it. An old woman loses her mind in the waiting. And when the will is finally settled and the case comes to its end, there’s a cruel twist. The whole estate, every last coin the family had been fighting over, has been swallowed up in legal fees. Nothing is left to inherit. The legal machine was the only real winner.
Dickens was holding up a mirror to his own England. Paul holds one up to us: “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you.” Notice the word already. Before the case is even decided, before anyone has won or lost, the real verdict is in, and both brothers have already lost. Paul says nothing about who has the stronger argument. He simply grieves that it ever became a contest at all.
We know this kind of pull from the inside. There’s a strange comfort in being the one who was wronged, in holding the higher ground, in quietly assembling the evidence for why we’re right and they’re not. We tell ourselves we only want justice, and somewhere along the way the grievance becomes something we feed, something we would almost miss if it were resolved. And the whole time, it’s consuming the very things we claim to be protecting: the friendship, the marriage, the years, the peace in our own chest. Like the Jarndyce estate, the longer we fight to win, the less there is left worth winning.
But here’s what Paul saw so clearly. In the kingdom of God, the aim was never to win the argument; it was always to win the brother. The moment our goal slides from the one to the other, we’ve wandered off the map, however airtight our case has become. Some fights you lose simply by agreeing to have them. To move toward the person when you could keep fighting is the instinct of a Compassionate Responder, the one who refuses to leave a brother stranded on the far side of an argument.
And we can let these go, really let them go, because of the way our own case was handled. We had a debt we couldn’t pay and a record that wouldn’t survive scrutiny, and God declined to press the charges. He took the loss into Himself at the cross so that we could walk out free. People who have been forgiven like that can afford to lose an argument. And our inheritance cannot be drained the way an earthly estate can; it’s being kept for us in heaven, untouchable, already ours!
Today: Bring to mind one fight you’re still trying to win. Now do the one thing the Corinthians never stopped to do: add up what the case is costing you while the verdict hangs out of reach (the strained dinners, the lost sleep, the friendship gone cold, the joy leaking out of your week, the version of you that has grown meaner than you meant to become). Then ask one plain question, and answer it honestly before God: even if I finally win, will it have been worth what the fighting is spending?
Prayer: “Father, forgive me for how much I love being right, for the cases I build and the grudges I feed. You had every charge against me and refused to take me to court; You took the loss into Yourself so I could go free. Teach me to want the brother more than the verdict, and loosen my grip on the fights that are costly. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK