Q3, S05 Family Conflict
Quarter 3, Session 5: Family in Conflict
WILL YOU WORK FOR THE GOOD OF MY FAMILY?
Passage
Matthew 18:15–35
Concept
This session falls under Jesus’ eighth question: Can you see my kingdom as a home? In this passage, Jesus explains to his disciples how to handle conflict within his kingdom. The father is seeking to get his family to all sit down to a family meal, so conflict must be addressed. After explaining the concept, Jesus then told a parable on the importance of forgiveness—this is how life in the kingdom works.
Key Question
How does Jesus’ approach to handling conflict and offering forgiveness compare or contrast with your typical approach? What makes Jesus’ teaching so powerful in this case?
The Home & Table Tool
Do you see our Home and Table tool being played out in Matthew 18:15–35? With whom? How so?
Family in Conflict
How do you handle conflict in your family? Conflict is something we all encounter on a regular basis, but we don’t often think strategically about it. We tend to simply react in the moment, and our reactions are always great.
Conflict is inevitable for everyone who has any kind of a relationship with anyone at all. Any time we enter into relationships with other people, our freedoms are necessarily limited. Maintaining a relationship requires us to give up certain freedoms at certain times. If we only did exactly what we wanted to do all the time, we would necessarily be alone. Because a relationship with anyone at all requires us to surrender what we want to do at times and in ways for a greater purpose.
This dynamic is true of us within the kingdom of God as well. We can’t all just do the things that seem best to us at every moment and still maintain the relationships that the kingdom of God calls us into. We saw in the previous session that the kingdom is like God as our father inviting us in to share a family meal. If we’re going to share that meal together, we will have to learn to handle the conflicts that will inevitably arise.
Of course, we could avoid conflict by trying to completely isolate ourselves. But we know that being absolutely alone is not worth the freedom of doing whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it. In the kingdom, God is calling us into relationships, which means that he is calling us to handle conflict well. How will we approach these conflicts?
1. Read Matthew 18:15–35. Right off the bat, what strikes you about this passage? What do you find interesting or challenging or confusing?
The Cause of Conflict
As we have seen, God’s desire is that we all join him at a table for a family celebration. But what do we do when we encounter the relational conflict that will inevitably hinder that celebration? In the case of the prodigal son, the younger son caused conflict by running out on the rest of the family. This destroyed the family meal. But after he returned and was enthusiastically welcomed into a celebration by the father, the older brother caused conflict by refusing to celebrate. The kingdom of God is not conflict free.
Conflict exists because of sin. We tend to think of sin as something we pursue individually for our own specific reasons and pleasure. But sin also leads us to break our relationships. And this means that the kingdom will still be full of broken relationships. What Jesus offers us, then, is a means of healing this brokenness and restoring the family meal.
When we are sinned against, Jesus tells us to go and talk to the person who sinned against us. That may sound like very elementary advice. But one reality we cannot avoid is that when one person sins against another in the church, very often the first thing a person will do is go and tell his friends. It’s easier than talking to the person who wronged us, and we can often find commiseration and affirmation. But Jesus tells us to talk directly to the person who sinned against us. This means going and looking the person in the eye in order to explain how we have been affected. When we avoid this, anger and resentment are hidden. When we don’t say anything, the person will often continue on, often without even knowing how we’ve been affected by what they did.
Sometimes when we go and talk to someone about what they have done, we realize that it’s difficult to articulate what that person did. This is a good check for us; it helps us ensure we’re not allowing ourselves to be upset about something that wasn’t actually an issue. Much of our conflict is over things that aren’t actually sin. When we go and talk to someone, it can help us realize which things are matters of preference rather than matters of sin. If it’s not a sin, maybe it shouldn’t bother us as much as it does. If it is sin, the person needs to know.
As the process continues, Jesus calls us to purposely invite in other members of the church body to help. As you begin to carefully involve more people in the church, the truth can often begin to come clear. We can begin to see through issues that we can’t see properly because our own perspectives are limited. This is true for the person who sinned and the person who was sinned against. It’s not easy, but Jesus is teaching us what it means to live in his kingdom.
2. How do you tend to handle conflict?
3. How does Jesus’ teaching on handling conflict compare or contrast with your typical approach?
4. What do you think the church would look like if we took Jesus’ teaching here seriously?
Forgiveness & Unforgiveness
When we are truly sinned against, there’s no way to fix the relationship through paying one another back. It requires forgiveness. This is the only path forward. And this is why Jesus tells us to forgive continuously. It doesn’t matter how many times you’re sinned against, forgiveness is always the goal. It’s hard, but it’s a defining characteristic of the kingdom. Forgiveness must become the culture of the family of God. As we learn to forgive and even become quick to forgive, we find a way to heal the conflicts that we continually encounter.
Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant to illustrate the importance of this. The parable highlights the spiritual debt we’ve been forgiven by God. Our spiritual debt has been accumulating over time. Every time we choose to resist or reject God, we are only adding to our debt. And yet here we have a picture of how God deals with this debt: it is simply forgiven. It’s gone. We will never understand forgiveness until we acknowledge the way and extent to which God has forgiven us. It’s easy to focus on the debts of other people, on the ways we’ve been wronged. But remembering first that enormous debt we have been forgiven provides us with a model for what it looks like to forgive those who wrong us.
If you owed a huge debt, and someone came and told you, “I will pay off your massive debt, and all you have to do in return is also pay off the much smaller debts that other people in your family owe you,” how could you refuse an offer like that? The parable shows how petty it is to withhold forgiveness. Of course, this is easier said than done in many cases. There are sins that are completely impossible to forgive. So we must look to God’s example and pray for the strength and guidance to follow in his footsteps.
5. What grievances are the hardest for you to forgive? Why?
6. Have you found freedom through forgiving another person before? What was that like?
7. Why do you think talking about sin in person and being quick to offer forgiveness are central to what it means to live in God’s family? How could these things shape our lives together?
8. Spend some time in prayer. Thank God for the forgiveness he has offered you. Pray for the grace to forgive as you have been forgiven. Ask him to bring to mind the conflicts you need to address and for the wisdom to handle this as he directs.
Key Question
How does Jesus’ approach to handling conflict and offering forgiveness compare or contrast with your typical approach? What makes Jesus’ teaching so powerful in this case?