On this episode of The Disciple-Making Parent Podcast, we start unpacking three hard topics that come up in conflict: forgiveness, reconciliation, and what some people call boundaries. We walk through a simple peacemaking framework, then clarify two complementary kinds of forgiveness: a heart-level decision to release the moral debt to God, and a relational forgiveness that enables reconciliation when repentance is present.
We also talk about how to love people who will not repent, including how to stay open-hearted while setting wise limits that separate wisdom from folly, and how to rebuild trust proportionally over time. Along the way, we look at key passages like Acts 15, Matthew 18, Romans 12, and Luke 17, and we end with practical encouragement to pursue peace in a way that honors Christ.
Topics Covered in This Week’s Podcast
01:47 Introduction and review
03:59 Principles of forgiveness
10:29 Inner forgiveness
17:29 Relational forgiveness
22:55 What about someone who will not repent or reconcile?
Resources From This Podcast
Biblical Conflict Resolution Part 1– Introduction and the Call to Glorify God
Biblical Conflict Resolution Part 2– The Call to Get the Log Out of Our Own Eye
Biblical Conflict Resolution Part 3– The Call to Go and Restore
The Peacemaker, by Ken Sande
Pursuing Peace, by Dr. Robert Jones
Making Sense of Forgiveness, by Brad Hambrick
Podcast Transcript
I am Chap Bettis, and you’re listening to The Disciple-Making Parent, where we seek to equip parents and churches to pass the gospel to their children. Do you have people in your lives where you feel unreconciled even though you’ve tried? Are there others where you feel the need to put up boundaries? Then what about people you need to forgive? All of us have people like this in our lives. Do you know what the Bible has to say about this? Hi, my name is Chad Bees and I’m the author of The Disciple-Making Parent, and today is podcast number four of our four-podcast series on biblical conflict resolution. In this podcast, we’re going to start, and I emphasize, start covering three different hard topics: forgiveness, reconciliation, and what some call boundaries.
Before we start though, I want to remind you about two things that might be helpful to you. The first, of course, is that we give away the audiobook of The Disciple-Making Parent for free. We’re on a mission to equip parents and grandparents, so just visit thedisciplemakingparent.com and sign up for our weekly family discipleship email. And if you do that, we will happily give you the audiobook of The Disciple-Making Parentcompletely free. And I also just want remind you that we are a donor-based ministry. In fact, donors underwrote the material that you’re about to hear in this podcast, so we just invite you to become or consider becoming a financial partner with us giving either on a yearly or a monthly basis. So head on over to thedisciplemakingparent.com/partner.
Before we start, I want to have us look or think about a scripture that’s found in Acts 15. And in that passage, God’s word tells us this:
Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the believers in all the towns where we preached the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the believers to the grace of the Lord.
Here recorded in scripture is a sharp disagreement between two godly men. Did Paul and Barnabas ever reconcile? We do know Paul and Mark did. We can see that in 2 Timothy 4:11. Nevertheless, here we see two godly men who ended up disagreeing with each other.
Well, in this episode we’re going to talk about forgiveness, reconciliation, and what some have called “canceling”- hard situations or boundaries. Can you think of someone where you’ve had a disagreement like Paul and Barnabas and the relationship still is not reconciled? Or is there someone in your life that you’re having trouble forgiving? Well, we are going to begin to cover some of these topics, but let’s start by reviewing the four steps of peacemaking. And I get these right from Ken Sande’s book, The Peacemaker. step one is Glorify God. We’re going to have a vertical focus. We’re going to please the Lord. That’s what we’re going to do first. Second, we’re going to get the log out: We’re going to look and say, is there any way I’ve contributed to this conflict? Step three that Sande gives us is, he calls it, Go and gently restore. So we are to go. We saw that in Matthew 18. We’re trying to be restored. We’re trying to bring about Unity. So we are to go. And then if that doesn’t work out, we are to bring a couple of others along.
Well, in today’s episode we’re going to talk about step four, which I’ve entitled Go and Be Reconciled (Maybe). So let’s start with talking about forgiveness. You know, C.S. Lewis said, “Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive.” Actually, I’m worried that many Christians don’t have a clear and biblical understanding of forgiveness. It’s a topic that’s all over scripture and it is complex.
So forgiveness comes about when a debt or trespass has occurred. There’s some sort of moral debt. There are two Greek words for forgiveness. One has to do with letting go, releasing, remitting. So it’s used for a debt that’s been paid in full. The other is to bestow freely favor freely or unconditionally. Forgiveness has this idea of a debt and someone has to pay it. With God, Christ paid our debt so that we could be forgiven. You and I and those who’ve sinned against a holy and loving creator by breaking his law, we owe a debt that we could never pay. Our sin debt is incalculable, and yet Jesus could say on the cross, “It is finished,” paid in full. Christians are the most forgiven people in the world, and as a result, we’re commanded to forgive others.
So right there in Ephesians 4:32, Paul says, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you.” So forgiving each other just as in Christ, God forgave you. And in Colossians, he shortens that to “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” So we need to remember that for God to forgive, there needed to be a payment. And who paid it? God himself. Well, similarly, when we forgive others, there has to be a payment as well. And who must pay it? Well, actually, it’s the forgiver. Forgiveness is painful and costly. Don’t let anyone kid you about that. That’s why C.S. Lewis said, “Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive.
So you can illustrate this. For example, if you borrow my car and you have an accident and you bring it back and it’s dented- you didn’t fix it, you just bring it back dented, and then you say, “Please forgive me.” Well, if I forgive you, then how am I made whole? How is my car put back together? I have to pay for the car repair. You see, forgiving you ends up costing me. And so we need to understand how costly forgiveness is and how forgiven we as Christians are in Christ and therefore extend that to others now.
Let me just run through here at the beginning, some biblical truths about forgiveness, and this certainly isn’t complete. There are a number of good books to help you work more deeply through forgiveness, but here are just some principles that have guided my own thinking and are biblical.
-Number one, it’s impossible to truly forgive others in your own strength, especially when they’ve hurt you deeply or betrayed your trust. But God can give you the strength to forgive. So God can give us the strength to forgive. Forgiveness is based on how much Christ has forgiven me. So that’s the first principle. God gives us the strength to forgive.
-Number two, forgiveness is not a feeling. It’s an act of the will that involves a series of decisions. The feelings come after you forgive and keep applying your decision to forgive. So number two, forgiveness is not a feeling. It’s an act of the will.
-Number three, forgiveness is not forgetting. You know, some people say, “Well, the Scripture says God remembers our sin no more.” Well, he doesn’t have divine amnesia. What that means is in that language is that he’s putting our sins behind him. That language means that he’s not holding our sins against us. And so similarly, horizontal forgiveness is a promise not to hold a person’s sin against them. So forgiveness is not forgetting.
-Number four, forgiveness is not a passive process. Forgiveness is active. It involves a conscious choice and a deliberate course of action.
-And number five, another principle just to keep in mind here, is that forgiveness is not excusing. Oh, oh, that’s okay. See, what that implies is it really wasn’t wrong, or the other person couldn’t help it. But forgiveness looks at the action and says, yeah, this was wrong. But based on all that I’ve been forgiven of Christ. I will forgive you. I’ll mark it paid. So again, bringing back the car that’s been smashed up. Oh, that’s okay. I don’t say that. I say, yeah, you’re right. It is banged up. I have to fix it, but I will forgive you. So it’s a deliberate action. Forgiveness is not excusing.
So those are some principles of forgiveness, but I want to unpack the dynamic a little bit more. And there, I’ll just to start by admitting it is that there are some disagreements in the evangelical world about some details of forgiveness and most hold to what I’m about to present to you of the dual forgiveness dynamic. I believe this twofold approach best encompasses the whole of scripture, including texts that seemingly emphasize one or the other side of the tension. And I, so I believe this fits with scripture and I believe it also fits with life experience. So the first relates to forgiveness that I commit to hold in my own heart. And the second- we’ll look at that in a minute- allows full reconciliation when repentance occurs.
So let’s talk about type one. I’ll call it type one forgiveness. It’s foundational forgiveness, it’s attitudinal, it’s a heart disposition. We might think of this as inner forgiveness. When I survey scripture, it seems that there are many scriptures where we are commanded to have this type of unilateral heart forgiveness of others. So we canceled the moral debt that we’re owed. So let me just read some of these scriptures. So for example,
Mark 11:25- “And whenever you stand praying, forgive if you have anything against anyone so that your father also, who is in heaven, may forgive you your trespasses.” That is a shortened version of the Lord’s Prayer.
Let me read that to you in Matthew 6:9-15- “Pray then like this: Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And then Jesus goes on and says, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.”
Then we can also look in Matthew 18. Peter comes up to Jesus and says, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Peter’s thinking he’s being generous. “And Jesus said, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but 77 times.’”
And then Jesus goes on and tells the story of the king who wants to settle accounts with his servants, and he lets off one who owes him 10,000 talents- just a huge amount, the largest amount that could be imagined. And then that person who’s been forgiven so much goes out and finds someone who owes him a hundred denarii and he will not release him from that debt. So it’s reported back to the master, and then I’ll pick it up here in verse 32- “Then his master summoned him and said, ‘’You wicked servant. I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?’ And in his anger, his master delivered him to the jailers until he should pay all his debt. So also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” So here in all this teaching of Jesus, we just get this sense that we’re to give unconditional forgiveness in our heart.
And again, repeating those passages I read earlier.
In Ephesians 4:32- So Paul, to the church: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.”
In Colossians 3:12-13, where he says, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you. So you also must forgive.”
And we even see this in Jesus’ example in Luke 23:34 where Jesus says on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Or we can look at Stephen’s example in Acts 7: 60- “Father”- this is as he’s being stoned- “Father, do not hold this sin against them.”
So in all this, there seems to be a unilateral command that we forgive, that we cancel the moral debt that we are owed. So we want to think of this forgiveness as vertical in God’s presence between God and me, and it’s unconditional.
Well, how do we do that? I’ve already mentioned some principles earlier, and those still apply. It’s an active process to mark the debt forgiven before God. But just let me add a few more thoughts. In addition, I’m to entrust the offender to God and release him from my judgment. So with unforgiveness, what is it? I want justice and I want the other person to hurt like I do. So forgiveness is releasing that offender from that desire for justice and entrusting him to God, that God will render that judgment. So forgiveness and trust to God.
The second is to look at my own heart and to get rid of bitterness. What is bitterness? Well, bitterness is anger with a history. It’s settled anger against a person and we’re told not to let a bitter root grow up or it will defile many. That’s found in Hebrews 12:15.
Ephesians,4:31-32 says we’re to get rid of bitterness. I’ve heard someone say that bitterness is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die. No, it you and me who are affected by my bitterness and, and we’ll get into this, but I wonder if bitterness comes because I don’t understand the second type of forgiveness that we’re about to talk about, and I’m not willing to entrust them to God’s judgment. I want to take vengeance now myself. So I want to entrust the offender to God. I want to make sure I’m getting rid of bitterness.
I also want to be willing to grant transacted forgiveness and reconcile. And that’s what we’re going to talk about here in a moment. So it is important that we’re willing to be reconciled. We’ll revisit this when we talk about boundaries here in just a minute. But it’s important to say our heart is not closed off to the other person. We’re not reconciled, but we’re willing to be reconciled. So we need to realize that forgiveness is freedom and there are lots of complexities to forgiveness that I don’t have time to talk about right now. We could spend whole podcasts talking about them. For example, maybe there’s a deep, deep offense that you need to keep applying forgiveness to in your heart. You need to keep entrusting them to God’s judgment and asking God’s power. So yeah, there’s lots of complexities here. I want to make sure that we’re clear about the first type of forgiveness the Bible talks about, which is vertical towards God, that we’re entrusting them to God’s judgment and releasing them from our desire for revenge, and we are forgiving them based on how much that we’ve been forgiven in Christ.
Let’s transition here because we also want to talk about the second type of forgiveness, and I’ll call this type two forgiveness. And we might think of this as transactional, or relational, or reconciling. It’s horizontal. So here’s some very different verses.
Luke 17:3-4. Jesus says, “Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.” It’s found in Luke 17.
And then we look at the Book of Acts and say, how were those who heard the message reconciled to God? And let’s just read through this. Acts 2:36-41. Peter’s preaching. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
So in both of those scriptures, what we see is that forgiveness is dependent upon repentance. It comes after repentance. And so I think it’s helpful to think of this type of forgiveness as horizontal. It has to do with my relationship with the offender, between him and me. And so, in a sense, it’s conditional, it’s dependent upon the offender repenting. And I would suggest that we see both of these types of forgiveness play out in the life of Joseph.
As you know, Joseph in the book of Genesis was sinned against mightily out of jealousy. His older brothers plotted to kill him and then sold him. They lied to his father. He was falsely accused of rape by Potiphar’s wife and thrown into prison. He was forgotten by the baker and the cup bearer who he helped in prison. So from the outside, you can see, man, this guy has been sinned against mightily. But when we see him, we see no sign of bitterness. And then later in the narrative with Joseph, his brothers arrived back on the scene and Joseph of course has since risen to power and now he has power over them. But it’s interesting, Joseph does not immediately greet them. Instead, what he does is he tests them to see if they’ve changed. Will they betray Benjamin?
And specifically if you look at the text he’s looking to see, will Judah who betrayed him now betray Benjamin, or has he changed? And what Joseph finds out in Genesis 44:33-34 is that Judah says this: “Now therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father.” With that Judah articulates the change of heart that he has had. He has changed. He’s not going to betray another brother like he did before. And then you see that Joseph fully reconciles.
Now I can tell you in from pastoral experience, what makes the second type of forgiveness or reconciliation tricky is that there can be partial repentance or even manipulative repentance. And we’re going to talk about that in a minute, about trust as a proportional value. It’s not all or nothing. But what we need to realize is yes, there is this category where we can have forgiven before the Lord, but we’re also waiting to see has the offender repented before we move on and say everything’s okay. But if this does happen, and we’ll talk about some instances here when it makes it messy to figure out. But when we do forgive, the promise we’re making is not to raise the offense: not to raise it to myself, not to raise it to the other person, and not to raise it to others. Truly, I will mark the debt forgiven.
And so we want to keep these two aspects of forgiveness. We want to understand them. One is a heart attitude based on how much I have forgiven. I don’t want to become a bitter person. But the other is transacted forgiveness, we might call it, or reconciliation.
Well, what about someone who will not repent, who will not ask forgiveness? And unfortunately that is too common. So what do we do? Well, I think the question might be best phrased as: How do I love an offender who will not repent or reconcile? And one of our key verses I think here comes from Romans 12, where it says “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” What that’s telling us as is that it is not possible to live at peace with everyone, and it is not possible to reconcile with everyone. So we can do everything right and not have the other person respond.
Remember from one of the earlier podcasts where Dr. Jones counsels the couples and he says, “You need to seek to please God. If you do, I can guarantee that you’re going to become more mature, but I can’t guarantee the reconciliation of your marriage because it really takes two parties wanting to please God.” And I can tell you as a pastor, I’ve seen where one party desires to honor the Lord and the other does not.
And so how do we act towards a person like that? How do we love a person like that? And what I’d like to do is to turn our attention back to Matthew 18. And it may surprise you because this is often used for what’s been called church discipline. But I want us to read these last couple of verses here in this process, and think about this. So let’s start at verse 16. “If he doesn’t listen, take one or two others along with you”- we talked about that- “that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. And then,” but he doesn’t guarantee it’s going to work because he says in verse 17, “if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” And so Jesus is saying, I’m going to tell you how to resolve this situation with a person who doesn’t want to reconcile. Who doesn’t want to repent of his sin?
Let me ask you a rhetorical question. Is Jesus prescribing love? Well, the answer of course is yes. Yes, he is. And so, but he’s telling the church that I want to tell you what to do if in your efforts to reach out, you don’t find success. And what does he say to do if someone will not listen to the church? We’re going to treat them differently. Unrepentant sin means treating a person differently out of love. He’s outside the community, uh oh. He can still come to church, but there’s a tension in the relationship, and this concept may be new to you. I don’t know if your church practices this, but you can see this worked out in 1 Corinthians 5 where if you read the whole chapter, you realize that in the Corinthian church, a man was sleeping with his stepmother. Paul calls them out and says, you need to practice church discipline. And then he says in verse 9, I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people- Not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy or the swindlers or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler. Don’t even eat with such a one. In other words, what Paul is saying is treat this person differently.
And I hate to use this word, I really don’t like it. But this is where the idea of boundaries has come from. And we’re going to unpack this in a minute, but I think that the biblical basis of proper change in relationship- I hate the word boundaries- but this idea of a changed relationship comes from what we can see in Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5. But of course, there’s an open heart. We see that the goal all along for the Corinthians was to win back the brother, and Paul shows us this in 2 Corinthians 2 when he says, now that this brother has repented, 2 Corinthians 2:7, “so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you reaffirm your love for him.” So in other words, even as they treated differently, there was an open-heartedness and a hope that he would change.
So we’re in the section, just to remind you, we’re in the section on handling those who will not reconcile or who are difficult. And really in a sense, it’s saying we need to love our enemies. And it seems to me that there are two types of un unreconciled relationships. There are these unreconciled relationships that fade over time because the person’s not in your presence. And that really goes back to the passage that we read at the beginning out of Acts 15 with Paul and Barnabas. It seems that they had a broken relationship, they split up, they went in different directions. We can see that in 2 Timothy. And it does in fact seem that Paul and Barnabas reconciled because there are references to Barnabas, both in 1 Corinthians 9:6 and Colossians 4:10. But the realization is, there are relationships that will not be reconciled.
And I think that’s what Paul is drawing out in Romans 12 when he says, as far as possible, live at peace with all people, but sometimes we can’t. We’ve done all we can, but another category is unreconciled relationships where there’s regular contact. So I have friends have had abusive mothers or fathers, or even as adults they were manipulative. Or I know of those my age whose children have said, “I need to cancel you for my own sanity.” Perhaps there are people in the church where there’s an unreconciled relationship with regular contact. How do I deal with those? Well, again, Romans 12 can help us. “Don’t repay evil for evil.” And so we want to not respond with evil, not sin and respond to sin. Again, the verse that we’ve talked about, verse 18: As far as possible, we want to live at peace with those that we can. So we we’re on only responsible for what we can control. Verse 19, “Don’t take revenge, my dear friends.” So we want to leave room for God’s wrath, leave the person to God. And then Paul finishes up that section, “On the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he’s thirsty, give him something to drink. Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” So if there’s a way that we can sort of bless that person, that’s to be our heart attitude.
Let me finish up here by sharing with you three biblical commands that I think we should pray through as how they apply to those where we’re living with or we have a continued unreconciled relationship. And the first is this, that Jesus tells us to love our enemy, to bless them, pray for them. So for example, Matthew 5:43- “You’ve heard it said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” See, unforgiveness says, I want bad for you. I want you to pay. Forgiveness is able to say, I forgive you. I let that debt go and I actually want to pray. I want good for you. So we, we can forget that a sinner besides their sin against us is also deceived and enslaved by sin. And we are rebellious and disobedient, but we’re also deceived and enslaved. And so God can give us supernatural love for our enemies. And often we think I’ll pull out that verse if I’m about to die for my faith. But sometimes there are people who really are functionally our enemies. And we need to resolve, Lord, I’m going to love my enemies, I’m going to pray for them.
And I can remember a very personal time when I was sinned against by someone very deeply in our church. And as I wrestled with bitterness, part of what brought me out of it was praying God’s blessing for them. Booker T. Washington said, “I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” So that’s just a very powerful quote. I’m not going to let any man having the effect on my own heart to hate him. So first we want to love our enemies, bless them, pray for them.
Number two, and this really fills out number one, I want to love with wisdom and discernment. So Philippians 1:9 is really helpful here because Paul is praying for the Christians, and he says this: “This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more.” There it is. I want you to pray. I’m praying that you’ll have more love this year than you do last year. I’m praying that you have more love towards your enemies, but he also says, “with knowledge and all discernment.” And so we need to realize, we need to pray for discerning love. We need to love with wisdom and discernment. So the preeminent one another is love one another. But what you can see throughout scriptures is “love one another” also means sometimes we admonish one another, we rebuke one another. There’s ways we could even go back to that passage in Matthew 18. Actually, one way we’re loving you is by excluding you from the church because you’re continuing in unrepentant sin. You see, we need to love along the train tracks of scripture. Scripture tells us what is loving. Jesus said in Revelation 3: 9, “Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline.” And so we want to pray, Lord, show me how to love my enemies. And we also want to pray, Lord, show me how to love them wisely and with discernment based on scripture.
But now let’s continue with a third principle here. And it’s an application of loving with wisdom. And that has to do with what is today called boundaries. And I want to suggest that the principle here is that we want to love with boundaries between wisdom and folly. And let me unpack that common phrase that people, even Christians use- the word boundaries. The word boundaries can have many different meanings. Sometimes the word is used to refer to emotional walls that we put up against anyone getting close or really knowing us and doing that in order to protect ourselves from hurt. Well, those types of boundaries are unhealthy. Boundaries by definition, divide things. So I want to unpack this section carefully. Honestly, because of the way the word is used, I don’t even like the word, I don’t want people to use it. For example, I know of young people who have used that concept to close off relationships with their friends or even leave a marriage. I have several friends who’ve been effectively or essentially canceled by one or more of their children. Basically their children or one of their children has gone to counseling and come out and saying, Well, I’m messed up and it’s because you, my parents, messed me up and I have to put up boundaries so that I’m never in contact with you again.
Well, that is so dishonoring to the Lord and unlike anything that the Bible teaches. So boundaries that cause people to “cancel” others unilaterally are not good. But I want to suggest, and I can’t even believe I’m saying this with the word boundaries, but I think there actually is something here that’s biblical. And if you go back to Matthew 18 which we saw earlier in this podcast. We can see that for a person who refuses to repent, the church is to change and treat him differently. They’re to treat him or her as a Gentile or a tax collector. They’re to confront his sin and then if he will not repent, then remove him from the church. So even if they’re relationally open to him, there’s a boundary and the relationship has changed. And again, I don’t know if your church practices this or you’ve done much reading on it. But the idea is that we no longer have just open fellowship. Something has changed. There’s a problem in our relationship.
So the third principle I’m trying to suggest to us as Christians is we love with the boundaries between wisdom and folly. So I’m saying close hearted and unilateral canceling is wrong, but openhearted boundaries is not. Especially boundaries that divide wisdom from folly. And I just want to put a footnote here and say, I’m thankful for Dr. Brad Hambrick in his book Making Sense of Forgiveness: Moving from Hurt to Hope. And he really helped clarify my thinking here in this because even as we have a heart that wants the best for a person. We can also not let them drag us into their foolish and sinful living. So forgiveness or hoping for a reconciled relationship does not commit me where I have to live in an unwise or destructive pattern of relating.
So in essence, we might say something like this: I’m not rejecting you or giving up on you, but I refuse to enable your foolishness. So if you insist on keeping on living foolishly, you’ll find yourself on the other side of my boundary from folly in a sense. But I want you to come over here on this side of wise living. And that’s exactly what we see in Matthew 18 that we referenced before. The church is saying you can’t live in this sinful, foolish way and have everyone act like it’s okay, but we really want you back. We really want you back. But it’s not okay where you’re at. There is a break in our relationship. So, Dr. Hambrick says, boundaries when rightly communicated are an invitation, not a rejection. You’re inviting the other person over this line from folly to wisdom. This doesn’t make forgiveness conditional. It makes trust conditional after forgiveness. The hesitancy in restoring trust is to see if you’re going to honor the principles of a healthy relationship. So in summary, I think we do see this idea of a boundary of not being willing to participate in foolish or destructive relationships or allow someone to treat us that way. So we want to love with boundaries, not between people, but between wisdom and folly.
Well, in that last section, I brought up the idea of trust and trusting a person who either doesn’t want to be reconciled or is not will willing to repent. And again, I’m thankful for the principle here that Dr. Hambrick brought to light in my mind. And this is the fourth principle, thinking about basically difficult people in our lives. And the idea number four is that we want to love them with proportional trust. What does that mean? Well, what that means is trust is a dynamic virtue. It’s a proportional virtue that there are actually degrees of trust. So we might think of this as a spectrum. And on way on one end, you’ve got the cynic who has zero trust and you’ve got the naive person that has a hundred percent trust.
But what Dr. Hambrick brings out is that it’s not an on or off thing; it’s proportional. So for example, I might trust you to drive a car but not an airplane. There are degrees of trust. And so the call on the Christian is to have a wise trust, to want to move towards trust if we can, but to be wise. So, for example, if we have an abusive adult child or a parent or a church member or a spouse or some other situation I can’t even imagine throughout this whole series, I’m suggesting different steps to confront and to work for their change. But if they’re not changing or their repentance seems questionable, then in this last section of what we talked about is how do we handle that?
We want to love our enemies, we want to set up boundaries for foolish behavior, and those boundaries come because our trust has diminished over time. We don’t want it to, but their actions cause us to trust them less. So sometimes maybe we say, It breaks my heart to say my trust of you is actually at a very low level. But here’s where restoration comes in. When there is repentance, we want the trust to grow proportionally also. So if we believe that a person is repentant, we want to seek to grow in that trust. We don’t want to constantly be holding their sin over their head so that any slip up, even small, causes them to move the trust needle back closer to zero. That’s just not the way relationships work. So on the one hand, as we think about trust between two people, the offender cannot nor should not demand trust. He or she shouldn’t say, I said, I’m sorry. You need to trust me. Like that’s a demand. No, that’s wrong. Trust is given, it’s not demanded. But on the other hand, the one sinned against, as he or she seeks to grow in that relationship, should not be looking for reasons for the trust to quickly drop back to zero. And again, this whole subject, these last two sections deserve a lot more time than we can cover here.
So in this podcast, in the last section I’ve been talking about or think it’s so important to think about how to handle difficult people, and I suggested that we’re called to start by realizing we can’t control the relationship. As far as possible, Romans 12 tells us we’re to live at peace. And so that means I can’t control the other person. But again, we’re to please God, and how do we do that? We’re going to love them and pray for them. Seek their best, but that love is going to be wise and discerning. It’s going to realize that sometimes God has to deal with a person apart from me. Sometimes we have to live with a tension in a relationship. And then the third point I suggested is properly defined, it is okay to have boundaries, not walls towards a person, but boundaries towards foolish behavior. And fourth, we talked about our need to watch our measure of trust. Not giving it naively nor canceling cynically, but realizing it’s dynamic, watching that trust as the relationship either grows or progresses, hopefully, with repentance, or perhaps deteriorates.
And again, just a reminder, at the beginning of this whole podcast, we talked about forgiveness and just we talked about the process of forgiveness and the two types of forgiveness. Because we have been forgiven much, we are to have a heart of forgiveness towards others not becoming bitter. But it also is good and right to see if there’s repentance before we reconcile. Well, there is so much more that we could say about this topic. I feel like I barely scratched the surface. There’s so many angles that this could be approached from, so many different relationships, so many different types of conflict. I know things have been left out, but hopefully this will give you a start, a blueprint to help you move down the road.
Again, I encourage you to check out the three books that were mentioned here. The Peacemaker by Ken Sande, Pursuing Peace by Dr. Robert Jones, and the book on Forgiveness by Dr. Brad Hambrick. Remember, God is God and God is good. He’s in control and he’s brought this conflict into your life for your maturity. Conflict is inevitable so we should expect it. Conflict is an opportunity, so we should steward it. And so we want to seek to glorify God and please him with our focus first vertical. We want to get the log out of our own eye, look in, and then we want to go and try and gently restore either one-on-one or with others. And then hopefully we want to try and be reconciled. And if we can’t be reconciled, we want to live with that relationship in a God honoring way.
Thanks for listening to The Disciple-Making Parent podcast. But you know we have numerous resources to help you glorify Christ and live out the gospel in your home. Just head on over to our website, thedisciplemakingparent.com. Please feel free to pass on and recommend this series on conflict to others if it was a help to you.
Thanks for listening.
