When Should I Approach Someone about a Sin That He or She Has Committed against Me?

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: Joining us this week on the Ask Ligonier podcast is Dr. Derek Thomas. He serves as the senior minister at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, South Carolina. Dr. Thomas, when should a Christian approach someone who has sinned against them?

DR. DEREK THOMAS: Yes, this is a really tricky question. It’s a very important question. It’s a good question, but it’s not an easy one to answer because it depends on so many different circumstances.

From one point of view, you have a passage like Proverbs 19:11 that says that good sense makes me slow to anger. Love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8). But then you’ve got a passage like Luke 17:3, which says almost the opposite—that if your brother sins, rebuke him. And again, this happens so much in the Bible, that you can pit one verse against another. And Bible detractors love to do that sort of thing and say, “You can’t trust the Bible because it contradicts itself.” And again, I think one needs to interpret all of those verses within a certain context.

God is patient with us, and I think that should govern our first instinct. So, if somebody does something or says something to us, we don’t immediately pounce upon it like a cat would pounce upon a mouse or something. We pause, we reflect, we remember that we too are sinners. We, too, are capable of saying, doing all kinds of terrible things, but God has forgiven us.

I think you ask questions like, What do I know about this person? I mean, is this person somebody I meet on the tube—that’s a British expression for the underground in London—or the subway in New York, and I’m never going to see this person ever again? Do I really want to get in a fight with this person, or do I just simply ignore it and smile and say, “I love you too,” and move on.

Or is this person somebody you actually know, and you know that they’re passing through difficulties, trials—people have wronged them, and you know about it, and now they’re just lashing out and they’re retaliating against you? But you understand those circumstances and you sympathize with those circumstances, and a soft answer turns away wrath.

Or is this someone who has now developed a mindset of hostility towards you for no good reason. And he’s a friend, or was a friend, and you say: “Hey, let’s sit down and talk. What in the world’s going on? Why do you keep saying this to me? As a brother in Christ, let’s talk this out and let’s be reconciled.”

So, there isn’t one answer to this question. There are fifty, or five hundred, answers to this question. And it all depends on context, I think, and how well you know this person. And what are the consequences that if you do operate according to Luke 17:3: “If your brother sins, rebuke him”? Well, you’re going to be rebuking a lot of people because a lot of people will sin against you at some point or another, and then you just develop a really brittle personality, and you don’t want that. So, those would be some of the ways in which I would approach that question.