Reconciliation – Part 3 – Must Risk Confrontation
Matthew 5:23-24 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”
Matthew 18:15 “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.”
One of the greatest difficulties in the area of leadership is the inability to confront when necessary. Often the leader gets pushed into a corner where he must confront and then it is done in a wrong manner and does irreparable damage.
Many people fear confrontation. There are probably a number of reasons for this. It might be that we are afraid of making judgmental statements, or we have a feeling of inadequacy ourselves (who are we to judge?), or we ourselves have things to cover up. In other words, we do not have a clear conscience and so we feel hypocritical. Whatever the reasons might be, confrontation is something that we try to get out of.
Yet, when I read a verse like this in Matthew the one thing that comes out to me is that God wants a constant movement towards one another. “If I see my brother… go!” “If I know that my brother has something against me… go!” We need to have honest communication with one another.
Often we go, but not to the one that we should go to, but we go to a third party and there we do our sharing. It becomes more of a time of gossip (God forbid that we call it “gossip!”) than a time of honest sharing and praying.
Some people ask the question: When should I go to another person and confront for any grievance or something that I think is wrong? I have found that before I confront another person I should first bring the matter before the Lord. I have learned that when I have brought certain things before the Lord that soon they were erased from my mind. I took this to mean that I was not to confront the other person with it. However, if after I have brought it to the Lord and it still remains in my mind, often this is something that the Lord wants me to bring out to the person involved.
Sometimes when a person is confronted with something, they deny it. What do we do then? We take it as far as we can and then we leave it with the Lord. When I was the director of the Doulos (one of Operation Mobilization’s ships) I had a situation where a brother was confronted with a particular thing, but he denied it. I left it at that. A few months later I was visiting his country and through some rather strange happenings I found out that this brother had lied. Later I confronted him with this. At that time there was real confession and repentance.
When I look back over this incident I see a spiritual truth coming out about how to deal with confrontation. In 1 John 1:7 we read, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” When I originally confronted this brother I was walking in the light that I had. When he denied it I had no more light at that time. However later on, through circumstances arranged by the Holy Spirit, I received more light on this brother’s situation. I now needed to walk in the new light that I had received and to confront that brother with it. The result was brokenness, confession, repentance, fellowship and through restoration this brother is now being used by the Lord. I often thought what would have happened with this brother if these steps were not taken.
In Matthew 5:23-24 the idea is that confrontation is to take place quite quickly, but first we need to pray and make sure that we have the log out of our own eye. Then sometimes we allow too much time to go by so that when we think about confronting, it seems that we are bringing something out from the past and so we would like to by-pass the incident.
When confronting we need to make sure that we go with humility. This is the idea that comes out in Matthew 18 where it says that we should “go.” The Greek word brings out the idea “to lead oneself under, to withdraw or retire as sinking out of sight.” In other words, we are to go with humility. It always helps to realize that we have the same capacity for sin as the brother we are confronting.
My prayer for myself and for those who read this is – that we might be the kind of confronters that God wants.