Are you the subject or the verb?

The LifeWay Leader Guide labels Step 3 of the lesson “Glorify God” as “Getting Along” (sound familiar?). It’s based on Romans 15:5-6, which reads like a prayer for Christians to come into agreement so as to glorify God together.

Paul also wrote about divisions over leadership styles (1 Corinthians 1:11-13). Control issues cause most church conflicts. J. David Hoke tells the story about a guy who can’t get along even with himself. Maybe you can think of other examples, but are you currently not in harmony with another Christian in your church? Is it mutual?

Subject and verb disagreement is an outlaw that writers catch to eliminate syntactically incorrect sentences. To illustrate “come into agreement”, I’m thinking of showing example sentences that contain subject and verb disagreements and having the class correct the errors (creates glorious English!). If needed, you can garner more examples from the exercises on this page.

I may stretch the illustration by asking members if they personally are a subject (needs action), or a verb (action oriented) with respect to some current disagreement. If so, what needs to change in order to achieve agreement? How would this agreement magnify God?