Your friend has an issue with someone else. You want to help them and you want to counsel them. You hope to encourage and build them up – point them in the right direction. They desire counsel or friendship on the matter. And they want to describe the situation and conflict with you. But sometimes there is a fine line between helping and harming. There should be a boundary between addressing them and the actual issues they have with someone else.
One of the most precarious elements of discipleship, counseling, and friendship is when we open the dialogue for our friends or brothers and sisters to address the issues they have with someone else. There is a dangerous slippery slope of gossip, slander, and disunity that can come about in the information that your friend exposes to you.
How so? It's truth and good counsel, isn't it?
Any whisper about another person, whether true or not, isn’t wholesome, for building up, or what Jesus desires in His people. Grace is often mugged in back alleys of gossip mislabeled as good counsel.
Instead, we must disciple and help our friends to see the Gospel, apply the Gospel, confront their sin, understand grace, work on their own actions, and teach them to act within Gospel truth.
Jesus says in Matthew 18:15-16:
"'If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.'"
Did you see the first phrase there, "go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone"?
Jesus specifically commands that when we have an issue, we don't tell anyone else. That bears repeating – We. Don't. Tell. Anyone. Else. It is between you and the other person alone. We are to only go to that person first.
As an important caveat, if there is an issue of abuse or fear of violence or something of a similar nature, then that is grounds for a different direction and form of help.
Aside from the extremes, when we don't follow the model of going and discussing the issue with the one we have an issue with first, then we violate Christ's teaching, we violate love, and we create gossip and slander.
How is that? Think about the following:
1) Miscommunication: If you don't go back and communicate with the one you have an issue with, then you haven't found out all of the information. You may have miscommunicated something or misunderstood something. The whole issue might be overblown or nonexistent. You will never know the truth or have an issue that actually needs counseling until you have determined the actual problems and confronted them. In love, we should be trying to understand the "why" and "what" of those we are trying to love. We are to be quick to listen and slow to speak (I feel heavily convicted here).
As Paul David Trip says, in Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands, "Thanks to your assumptions, the person you think you are helping may exist only in your mind." Likewise, our assumptions of situations and hurts will often construct personas and create solutions and dialogue to issues that don't even exist.
2) Misplaced Love: You aren't loving the other person that you have an issue with more when you go to someone else, instead you are loving yourself supremely. You are going to someone else first, avoiding the other person, and loving your own side of the story. Humbleness is a hard but necessary road back to reconciliation.
Or you aren't loving the other person enough to go to them first – which demonstrates to everyone a lack of love and connection with the other person. This creates disunity and breaks down a loving community. If you truly loved the other person, then you would go to them to work things out. It is often an out-of-joint connection when we go to someone else about someone else.
Love IS hard. But it IS worth it because Christ IS worth it. It's our call and who God is, according to 1 John. And if we lack love or don't love our brother or sister, then how can we call ourselves members of Christ's body?
3) Bad Testimony: Telling others about your issues with another, before the other person has a chance to explain, apologize, or even for you to apologize and repent, creates negativity in the person you are telling.
Whether you mean it or not you are spreading information and allowing others to create opinions of someone else that you are supposed to be loving, honoring, and building up. You are allowing possible false information to be spread and poisoning the hearts of others around you. You have now broken down someone's opinion of someone else. You have torn down a temple of the Holy Spirit in the heart of another believer.
And even if the information is true, their sin is now being spread abroad. Whispering seeds that are easily blown in the winds of insecurity and judgment.
Or the person you are telling now bears a bad testimony of how you deal with issues. The only thing we are to spread is the Gospel. The spread of bad seeds doesn't grow anything but bad and rotten fruit, which spoils the whole batch.
4) Growing Conflict: You have now created a situation where forgiveness is even more difficult. Because even if you reconcile with the person you have an issue with the other person you told now bears and holds that sin, whether imagined, misunderstood, or true in their minds and hearts.
Forgiveness and grace mean we let things go and don't hold it against someone, but when we tell someone else first, then we withhold and destroy the forgiveness. It isn’t being let go of. It is now being held captive by another– the other person you told– who now has a bow hearsay and arrows of assumptions. You have weaponized and created a totally new conflict.
5) The Goal is to Gain: Not going to the other first (and only them first) is a lost moment, a lost opportunity, and may cause a sister or brother to be lost. Trust is more important to the ones that have the issue between them.
Your relationship with the person you are going to is Christ's goal and His desire. Going to someone else breaks that goal and makes gaining them secondary. If the other person finds out you talked to someone else, then you have created shame and mistrust between you both and now you have another issue to deal with.
In the process, you haven’t gained a friend but identified yourself as an enemy and untrustworthy. You have hurt them. And now the road to gaining them back is full of potholes of doubt and mistrust.
6) Which is the greater sin or issue? You might have an issue with someone, but not following Christ’s specific teaching to go to the other person, in love, might be a greater violation and issue. In some ways, this points to you claiming to see a splinter in your brother’s eye and you having five sheets of plywood in yours.
7) Bad Witness: If you were to approach and tell someone who isn't actually a believer or a nominal believer about another, then you have created an image of a dysfunctional Gospel family. You have produced the trifecta of a gossiping Christian, stained Christians with condemnation labels, and relationships that are hypocritical.
Our witness, not only to the world but to one another, is the Gospel of Grace. We are to witness to the world how Christ can change everything – even our methods of conflict resolution. We are to love one another as Christ loved us. We are to witness to one another the love of Christ. We are to produce and live out the trifecta of truth, grace, and love.
8) An Awkward Bigger First Meeting: Since you jumped the order, you now have to take along everyone you told to your meeting with the person you have an issue with. This means having to come in greater humbleness (and repentance) and make the others feel ashamed or awkward.
Can you see and understand why it is important that exposing issues is and should be labeled as sin, gossip, slander, hurtful, unChristlike, evil, and part and parcel with the enemy?
Yet, it is one of the enemy's greatest weapons amongst Christianity– gossip– easily mislabeled as something else and quickly used.
Hear this teaching from Christ:
Matthew 5:21-25: "'You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.'"
If every day of our lives, in light of his mercy, we are living it out as gifts on the altar of God, then we are called to view issues we have with one another of paramount importance. We are called to pause all other duties of living sacrifices and not go to someone else, not let it go, but go and be reconciled to them before we go on doing anything else we consider as worship of giving to God. Our issues and pride have to be sacrificed also.
So what do we do when we encounter the situation of a friend, brother, or sister wanting to expose the issues they have with another?
I believe the answer to this question within counseling, discipleship, and friendship is:
- Tell them that you don’t want to know anything about the other person if they haven't gone to work it out with them first.
- Point them to quickly address it with the other person. Teach them Matthew 18:15-16 and 5:21-25.
- Let them know that you can only talk about the issues between them when and if it doesn’t get resolved between the two of them. And then you will have to meet with them both so that the issue is hopeful resolved and uncovered, quickly.
- Have them talk about their heart, their own motivations, their own possible sin, and Gospel actions.
- If this is a repeated offense, then you can also confront, and lovingly rebuke them (if they are Christian) on the issue of why they aren’t going to the other person first (Matt. 18:15-16). Seek them to see a possible pattern of sin and a need for repentance in their hearts.
- Remind them of Grace. Remind them of the great grace that Christ gave us when we had an incredible dividing issue with Him – our sin – and He came to reconcile with us. If this Grace has any worth, and beauty, then we will see the great gift and importance of being reconciled one to another. We will value being image-bearers of God's great grace and redemption. Praise God!
