How to have a healthy, biblical relationship with conflict
This semester at CSF, we’ve been talking about how to have healthy and godly relationships with various aspects of our lives. We’ve talked about romantic relationships, friendships, money, alcohol, social media, parents and family, the Bible, and time so far, in relation to how to engage with these things rightly according to what Jesus says the meaning of life is, which is to love God and to love our neighbor. Today, I’m going to talk about what it means to have a healthy and biblical relationship with conflict.
But first, I want to tell you a story. In 2020, my brother moved into my house because he was starting at Western that fall and my family thought it would be better for him and cheaper if he lived with me. Many of you remember 2020 and how difficult it was in school, and college had similar challenges. His classes were mostly online or hybrid, and he really struggled. By Thanksgiving, he was failing all of his classes. When he told me that, I said that I would help him try to get his grades up so he wouldn’t fail every class. He pulled out with one C, but the rest, he ended up failing.
That winter, he retook a class, and under my supervision, he got a 98%. I didn’t do his work for him; he just really needed the accountability. The following spring, my parents asked me to continue helping him so that he could succeed in college.
Now, my brother and I didn’t really get along. He’s 5 years younger than me, and just overall, a different person than I am. He needs a lot of accommodations for school because he just thinks differently than a lot of people. I have a hard time understanding him, and when he feels misunderstood, he lashes out, and then I lash out defensively, and it’s a tense relationship. So this situation only exacerbated it. He lied to me about his school work a lot, making it really hard for me to help him. And I took it all super personally, as if his failing assignments was a reflection on me. And sometimes my parents would make it feel like it was a failing on my part. I spoke harshly to him, and he spoke harshly to me. He said things that made me cry almost every week, if not every day.
There was one day that I found out he had lied to me about a big project, I got mad, he said really mean things to me, and I called my mom crying, saying, “you better come get your son.”
My mom called him and talked to him, and the next day, she and I talked again, and she told me that my brother said he couldn’t do well in school because, when he was in middle school, he really needed me, and I wasn’t there for him. And everything was all my fault.
I was devastated. As angry as I get at my brother, I do love him and I want him to do well and I never wanted to hurt him. When my mom told me that, I cried so much that I couldn’t get myself to do anything for nearly a week. I couldn’t do tasks, I couldn’t focus in meetings, and this conflict was eating me from the inside out.
I got some counseling, from friends and a professional, and I realized that that whole situation was unfair. It was unfair of my parents to ask me to be so involved in my brother’s schooling. It was unfair of me to speak so harshly to my brother, to hold him to unrealistic standards for who he is and what accommodations he needs. And it was unfair of my brother to blame me for all his struggles in school, even if what I had done as a 15- or 16-year-old had hurt him, no matter how unintentional.
It’s just a fact that conflict is a part of life. It’s a part of every aspect of life: family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, neighbors, strangers, the person who honks at you for not going fast enough at a red light—conflict is everywhere. You’re either in the middle of a conflict, just coming out of a conflict, or about to get in one. So it’s wise to assume that Jesus and the Bible have something to say about conflict.
James 4:1-2 says this: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.”
The Bible says that fights and quarrels break out when our desires battle within us. Conflict happens when what we think, want, and do contradicts what someone else thinks, wants, or does. Many conflicts are the result of sinful attitudes and desires that lead to sinful words and actions. When we don’t get what we want, we rise up in defensiveness or hopelessness. It’s so easy for pride, fear, anger, or despair to rise within us when we’re in conflict. But all of those are sinful.
Pride says, “I’m right and they’re wrong and none of it is my fault.” Pride can cause us to refuse to apologize or even trick us into thinking that we’re taking the high ground by distancing ourselves from a conflict without ever addressing it.
Fear makes us believe that the outcome of whatever conflict says something about our identity; “what if I’m actually a bad person and not who God says I am?” Fear freezes us and delays the opportunity to resolve the conflict.
Anger is similar to pride, but you don’t have to think you’re right to be angry. Anger is a defense mechanism usually, often in response to a perceived threat, sometimes causing you to speak without thinking or to act in a way that only makes it worse instead of better. It’s not wrong to be angry, but it is not helpful in conflict to be controlled by your anger.
And despair is just saying, “God, this conflict is bigger than you and there’s no way it could ever get resolved.” Usually, this one comes after attempts to resolve conflict that didn’t go as expected or when it just takes time to forgive someone or for someone to forgive you.
So we’ve determined that we can’t avoid conflict and there are wrong ways to engage in it; then there must be some way that we’re supposed to approach conflict.
Let’s read Matthew 18:21-35.
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
“Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand bags of gold was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.
“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.
“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’
“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.
“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
So a man had a huge debt forgiven and then turned around and wouldn’t forgive someone who owed him something even less. That’s like if I owed Nate ten thousand dollars that he loaned me and he said “don’t worry about paying me back; I got it,” and then I turned around and bullied Olivia over the ten dollars she owes me for Spencer’s. Obviously if Nate heard about that he’d probably be upset and demand I pay back the whole sum of what I owed him, plus interest. As he should.
Jesus is saying here that because we have been shown mercy and offered forgiveness from God, we should extend mercy and forgiveness to those who wrong us. If we keep our eyes on Jesus, on what He has done for us, on what He had to do to bring us back into relationship with Him, then it will only follow naturally that we want to extend that same love to those around us.
When sin entered the world, the relationship between God and His creation was broken, causing pain and grief and conflict. We can do nothing on our own accord to fix this relationship; we’re the ones who sin against God, so the ball is in His court here. And He loved us so much that He sent his son to die for us, taking the penalty we deserved and giving us His right standing with the Father. There is always a cost to forgiveness, and Jesus paid ours. God has forgiven the inexcusable in us, so then we should extend that same forgiveness to those we are in conflict with.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
I count four uses of the word reconcile or reconciliation, so it seems a little important, since it says that God has committed us to this message, the message of reconciliation. To reconcile means to restore friendly relations between or to cause to coexist in harmony. So this Scripture says that God reconciled us to himself, or restored friendly relations between us and Him, that He did this through Christ’s work on the cross and His resurrection, and that now we are supposed to spread this message of reconciliation.
And how do we spread the message of reconciliation in conflict? By reconciling. By peacemaking. By forgiving. By apologizing. Our end goal in conflict should be reconciliation, coming back together in harmony, as God designed. The goal isn’t to be right, the goal isn’t to get your way; the goal is to glorify the Lord and to live at peace with everyone, even when there’s conflict.
Ken Sande and Kevin Johnson say in their book, Resolving Everyday Conflict, that “God treats us with extraordinary, unearned kindness. And his gracious response to us gives us power to respond to others in an entirely new way” (REC 13).
Conflict of any kind usually doesn’t just happen one-sided. There are at least two people involved. So then, there are at least two people we have to take into account: ourselves and the other person or people. But before I talk about how to own our part and help others own theirs, I want to give some disclaimers.
Not every conflict will end with reconciliation. Romans 12:18 says to live at peace with everyone “as far as it depends on you.” Sometimes reconciliation is not possible because the other person is unwilling. God is not reconciled with those who refuse the gift he has offered them. It takes both sides willing to participate in reconciliation.
And this does not mean you have to tolerate abuse. Consequences can still exist where forgiveness abounds. If someone continually treats you poorly and consistently hurts you or takes advantage of you, even after your attempts at reconciling, then you do not have to continue allowing them access to you.
And lastly, this is a very general overview of conflict as a whole and I cannot and will not speak to every specific situation you might face or be facing currently. It takes prayer, discernment, and sometimes guidance or counseling to determine what to do in specific situations.
That being said, let’s start with ourselves. Jesus says in Matthew 7:3-5 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
That’s such a silly image, isn’t it? If there really was a plank in my eye, a huge piece of wood, how would I be able to see anything rightly, let alone see well enough to get a tiny speck out of yours. That’s exactly Jesus’s point. Yet don’t we look past our own wrongdoing and point fingers at other people all the time? If someone came to you, pointing out all the things you had done wrong, and meanwhile, you can see such a huge plank in their eye, a huge sin or something, that they haven’t taken responsibility for, isn’t it true that you’d be much less likely to listen to them? So Jesus says worry about yourself first. Deal with your own planks, your own sins, your own wrongs, before pointing fingers at anyone else.
Let’s take my example with my brother. It was so easy for me then to see how he hurt me, how mean he was, and take my defensive stand without considering where I might have hurt him. But in that situation, I was not innocent. No matter how unintentionally, I did hurt him when we were children by not being there for him. I don’t know how I wasn’t there for him–he didn’t tell me–but I could ask him, if he were willing to talk to me. And I did speak harshly to him. I said things to intentionally make him feel bad. I called him bad names, and I made it seem like not doing well in school meant he was stupid or that he was a failure. I didn’t say that directly, but it was implied. And the angrier I got with him, the worse it was. I allowed my anger to control me, and I said things I wish I hadn’t.
How do we move forward from here? It’s easy now for me to fall into fear and despair: I’m actually a bad sister and a bad person and what I’ve done is too big for my brother to forgive me or for God to reconcile us. But that’s not right or true. I did a bad thing, but I am redeemed by the blood of Jesus and He calls me daughter. He says my sins do not define me. What I can do now is apologize and ask for forgiveness.
In my experience, there are many people who don’t know how to apologize. “I’m sorry if I hurt you” is not an adequate apology. “I’m sorry but I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing even though I know it hurts you” is not an adequate apology. And “I’m sorry for everything” is also not an adequate apology.
Depending on the severity of your offense, there are seven aspects of an apology. And they all start with A, so they’re the 7 A’s.
Address everyone involved.
Avoid “if,” “but,” and “maybe.”
Admit specifically.
Acknowledge the hurt.
Accept the consequences.
Alter your behavior.
Ask for forgiveness.
If you’re going to apologize, make sure your apology is given to every person you have wronged. I feel like that one is kind of obvious, but sometimes it’s not, so it’s the first one. Secondly, don’t make excuses for your bad actions, no matter how valid they seem to you. Yes, I reacted in anger because I was hurt by my brother, but that doesn’t change the fact that I hurt him. Admit specifically; I feel like this one gets overlooked sometimes, but if you can’t name the hurt that you’ve caused, how can you be apologizing for it? How can they forgive it? How can they trust that you know what hurt them and won’t do it again?
Going right along with that, acknowledge that you did hurt them! “I’m sorry IF I hurt you” is not good enough. “I did this thing specifically and I hurt you and I’m sorry;” you know what you did wrong, you know how it affected the other person, and you are repentant. And repentant people accept the consequences and change their behavior. Then you can ask for forgiveness from someone. An apology without changed behavior isn’t much of an apology at all. And their forgiveness does not mean that there won’t be consequences.
Even if you are only responsible for 1% of the conflict, you are 100% responsible for your 1%. Even if you think that the other person hurt you worse, you still should apologize for how you hurt them. An apology, admitting you were wrong in some way, is a vulnerable thing to do, and vulnerability is almost always met with compassion and greater connection. “Unexpected and undeserved love can break down even the most stubborn heart” (REC 106). And remember, that’s the goal here: reconciliation. When you approach an apology with that in mind, it’s easier to set aside your pride or anger or fear or despair and come back together in harmony, as God designed. The goal isn’t to be right, the goal isn’t to get your way; the goal is to glorify the Lord and to live at peace with everyone, as was intended from the beginning.
There’s still another party involved in this conflict, and it’s the other person. Again, Jesus said in Matthew 7 this:
“First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
And THEN you will see clearly. He doesn’t just say worry about yourself; he says own up to what you’ve done so you can help other people remove specks from their eyes. So how do we help other people own their parts of conflicts?
First things first: only God can move others to change. There is only so much you can do. So let’s focus on what we can do when others have hurt us. We can PAUSE. Yes, I do mean to take a minute to think, but I also mean PAUSE like an acronym.
We can prepare for conversations. Pray about it, get all the facts, anticipate the other person’s side. This does NOT mean to gossip. Gossip is talking negatively about someone when they are not present. Don’t go around talking to everyone about your conflict before you’ve talked to the person you’re in conflict with. Ranting or getting something off your chest can also so easily turn into gossip when you’re talking to everyone and their mother about it, not just your trusted few. When in doubt, it’s probably best not to talk about someone if they’re not around. But you can still prayerfully prepare for conversations. And I heard somewhere that you can’t hate someone you’re praying for, so I find that it’s helpful to start here in any sort of conflict.
The next letter in PAUSE is A: Affirm relationships. The point of conflict resolution or peacemaking is reconciliation, the way God reconciled with us. Restoring the relationship. If you’re nervous or still upset, remind yourself and the other person of that goal: reconciliation.
Next, understand the other person’s perspective. Think about where they’re coming from–their concerns, desires, needs, limitations, fears. Put yourself in their shoes. Were their words said defensively? Were they only unintentionally hurtful?
Next, search for creative solutions; my pastor calls this prayerful brainstorming, which I think is fun. And lastly, evaluate options objectively and reasonably. This isn’t supposed to be a time to argue more; it’s a time to see practically how reconciliation can occur. What consequences will there be? What needs to change going forward? How can forgiveness abound? This isn’t about getting what you want or even giving the other person everything they want; it’s about moving forward together.
When someone has hurt you, especially if it’s a big hurt that feels hard to let go of, forgiveness can seem impossible. But think back to the parable of the unmerciful servant, when I compared it to Nate forgiving me of a ten thousand dollar debt and then me not forgiving Olivia’s ten dollar debt. By the way, not a real scenario if you were confused. Doesn’t it seem silly that I wouldn’t forgive a small debt when I had been forgiven such a big debt? That’s the comparison Jesus is making with the debt He paid for us with his life. We owed a debt we could not pay and Jesus paid it all. We have wronged God with sin and it tore us apart. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4-5 ESV). C.S. Lewis said, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
Let me tell you what forgiveness is not:
Forgiveness is not a feeling. You don’t have to feel like you’ve forgiven someone to forgive them. It’s a choice, a series of decisions not to hold an offense against someone or to talk about what someone has done to hurt us.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. It’s choosing not to remember–not to mention, recount, or think about someone’s wrongs or sins against you, the way God promises not to remember your sins in Isaiah 43:25.
“I, even I, am he who blots out
your transgressions, for my own sake,
and remembers your sins no more.”
And forgiveness is not excusing. Excusing says that what someone did was okay or not really wrong. The very fact that forgiveness is necessary shows that it was wrong and inexcusable. Forgiveness says “even though you hurt me, this will not stand between us.”
Forgiveness is costly. Jesus gave up His life to offer us forgiveness and reconciliation. When you forgive, you lay down your own rights to justice or money or something else that’s valuable. Forgiveness can cause suffering. But if we keep our eyes on what Jesus has done for us and ask God to change our hearts, He can give us the power to offer forgiveness for even the most painful offenses.
As I said, forgiveness is a radical decision not to hold an offense against the offender. But there are two separate components of it. There’s the heart component and the relational component.
The heart component is an attitude of forgiveness. This is between you and God, no matter what happens with the other person. It’s unconditional, the same way God’s offering of forgiveness was unconditional for us. To maintain an attitude of forgiveness means to work to maintain a loving and merciful attitude toward the other person. You don’t dwell on it; you don’t seek vengeance, even in your mind. You pray for them, ready to extend forgiveness and enjoy reconciliation. This attitude must be maintained regardless of the other person’s repentance or refusal to repent. Jesus had this attitude on the cross as He was dying, when He said in Luke 23:34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” The people who crucified Him weren’t repentant, but Jesus wanted to forgive them anyway.
The relational part of forgiveness is between you and the person who hurt you. Unless you choose to overlook an offense, granting forgiveness is conditional on the other person and whether they recognize that they did something wrong or want your forgiveness. Are you with me? Being forgiving is not the same as letting someone unrepentant have continued access to you. This is where reconciliation might not be possible. If one or both parties are unwilling to apologize and/or forgive, then reconciliation will not happen.
This is what God does with us. He chose to forgive us, to make a way for us to be reconciled, covering the debt Himself, ready to extend that forgiveness to us when we repent and believe.
1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
God comes to us with an attitude of forgiveness, a merciful Spirit, ready to offer us the forgiveness He has for the reconciliation He so desperately desires.
God offers four promises when He extends forgiveness to the repentant. He says:
I will not dwell on this incident.
I will not bring up this incident again and use it against you.
I will not talk to others about this incident.
I will not let this incident stand between us or hinder our personal relationship.
When you forgive someone, you make these same promises and they’re your responsibility to keep them. Once forgiveness is offered and accepted, you promise not to dwell on the incident, not to bring it up to them or to others, and not to let it hinder your relationship. If someone broke your trust, this offers the opportunity for trust to be rebuilt. Like I said earlier, consequences can still happen where forgiveness abounds. Forgiving someone doesn’t even have to mean that everything goes back to the way it was before. It takes wisdom and discernment to know what reconciliation looks like in specific situations. Sometimes it’s easy; and sometimes it’s not. But reconciliation is always the goal.
So what does it look like to have a healthy and godly relationship with conflict? I think it depends on the situation, but as long as you have your eyes on Jesus and what He’s done for you and the same message of reconciliation is your goal, you’re in pretty good shape to be forgiving and merciful, seventy-seven times, as Jesus put it.
But, once again, it’s as far as it depends on you. After the incident with my brother, where the whole tense situation kind of blew up, I had to take a step back from what I had been doing to help him. He passed that semester, but when I couldn’t help him the same way the following semester, he struggled again and ended up dropping out of college. He moved out shortly after that. We don’t talk at all. He doesn’t respond to my messages; he practically ignores me when I’m home for holidays. He only really talks to me if he has to. He has given me no space to apologize, and he has not apologized to me. If he is not ready to forgive me or if he thinks that he did nothing wrong, then that’s on him. I have tried to bridge the gap. I’m ready to apologize. I’ve forgiven him and am ready to offer the forgiveness that leads to reconciliation, but it has not happened yet. And that’s not my fault. So I’ll keep praying for him and for our relationship. It makes me sad that our relationship is so broken, but God is bigger than this and He can make a way where there is no way. I can still have hope for reconciliation, no matter what that looks like.
Like I said earlier, I probably didn’t directly answer all of your conflict resolution issues. If it did, that’s all God, not me. But I want to encourage you to look at whatever conflict you're in, whatever it is, through the lens of the cross. And ask yourself these questions:
How can I glorify God in this situation?
How can I own my part of the conflict?
How can I gently help the other person own their part of the conflict?
How can I help this conflict end in reconciliation?
God’s design is harmony, peace with God, peace within, and peace with others. God has extended peace and reconciliation to you. Shouldn’t we also extend peace and reconciliation to others?
