Jesus, Meet My Unbelieving Family
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They were my three best friends as long as I could remember.
We did everything together. Football in the cul-de-sac, video game marathons, and late night discussions about girls. They were my brothers and they were the best in the world.
We grew up, went to college, and everything changed.
It wasn’t because we lost touch – we talked all the time. Instead, everything changed because I heard about Jesus Christ and the good news of forgiven sin and became a Christian. Everything I believed began shifting on me, almost overnight. I was filled with a sense of joy and purpose that I had never known and my faith in Christ became the cornerstone of my identity.
My life changed for the better, but my relationships with my brothers dramatically suffered. We saw life through different lenses and it colored our points of view. We begin having arguments over topics we had agreed on for years. Frustration, disappointment, and resentment became common experiences as we continued to relate with each other. It was one of the more difficult seasons of my life.
Maybe you’re in a similar situation. You’ve trusted in Jesus’ death on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins. You’ve begun the process of change. But now you’re facing the challenge of relating to your family with your new convictions and it can be hard. Really hard.
Applying the gospel means remembering our condition before God, His compassionate mercy to us in our sin, and then humbly responding to the sins of our family with the same compassion.
How are we supposed to think and act and feel toward our family, now that the gospel has become the center of our lives? How do we deal with the frustrations and challenges that an unbelieving family brings?
Let me say up front that there is no “one size fits all” solution. Each family has different issues that range in their intensity from small to extreme. Your best solution is to talk to a pastor in your local church and seek counsel for your specific situation. But there are ways to guard your heart from sin through the gospel that can help you while you pray for your family’s hearts to change.
Sins to Guard Against
One sin to watch out for in your heart is anger. James 4:1 says, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (ESV).
We shouldn’t expect our families to respond well to our faith. In fact, it would be more reasonable to expect them to respond poorly due to the sinful nature they’ve inherited from Adam (Gen 3). Our unbelieving family members do exactly what sinful people do: sin.
Unfortunately, we forget this and begin demanding of them what they are not able to do. And when our demands are unmet, our hearts turn angry and often times assign the blame to them.
James is both helpful and corrective - we don’t get angry because our family sins against us. We get angry because we want something so strongly that we are willing to sin in order to get it. And many times, what we want is good! We want respect instead of ridicule. We want acceptance instead of rejection. But if we want these things more than we want to trust and please God, our hearts will fight, quarrel, and turn angry.
By the power of the gospel, we don’t have to respond with anger. We can trust in the goodness of God even when we are mocked. We can relish His perfect acceptance of us even when we are slighted. We can demonstrate patience in the face of sin, knowing that He has promised to give us everything we need for life and godliness.
Another sin to look out for is arrogance. Arrogance is a form of self-righteousness – it’s when you exercise a moral superiority over another person. It’s evaluating their behavior without the recognition of your sinfulness toward God.
Romans 3:10-11 says, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God” (ESV). This includes us, as well as our unbelieving family, apart from the grace of God through the gospel!
It can be easy to slip into self-righteousness and begin viewing our parents or siblings with judgmental eyes. We can think that we’ve cornered the market on all wisdom and discernment because our eyes have been opened to the truth.
Truth shouldn’t produce arrogance in our hearts, it should produce humility. The truth of the gospel is that we are the chief of sinners. We may see some of the sins of our family, but we know a greater depth of sinfulness by looking into our own hearts. And God (who is righteous) did not look at us with moral superiority, but humbled himself in obedience to death on the cross.
Applying the gospel means remembering our condition before God, His compassionate mercy to us in our sin, and then humbly responding to the sins of our family with the same compassion.
Lastly, you must be on guard against apathy. Apathy is the desire to ignore the issue, with hopes of it disappearing. You start checking out in your heart and grow cold toward your family. Maybe you find yourself wanting to be around your family less and less and with your Christian friends more and more.
This is so common! How much easier would life be if we simply surrounded ourselves with other Christians who thought exactly the way we did? We have to remember that his is not a description of earth, but of heaven! We will have perfect community someday, but its not now.
Until that day, we are called by God to be ambassadors for Christ, bringing the message of reconciliation (2 Cor 5). It’s great to spend time with other believers (actually, its critical), but the gospel calls us into uncomfortable places for the sake of others.
Hope to Hold On To
Have you lost hope for your parents? Your brother? Your sister? If you have, maybe you’ve lost sight of the cross. When we forget about the cross of Jesus Christ, we can forget any hope we have for our family to change. We can grow apathetic.
But as we meditate upon the perfect life, substitutionary death, and glorious resurrection of Jesus, the gospel can warm our hearts toward our families and give us faith to pray for their salvation. We can even be a part of the process! By the amazing grace of God, all three of my brothers have come to faith in Christ and God has given us deeper relationships in the Lord than we ever had growing up.
As you look to the future with your family, don’t let these sins get the best of you. We guard against anger, arrogance, and apathy by applying the gospel to our hearts. Only then can we truly demonstrate the power of Jesus Christ to our families that need to see it on display. As the gospel changes us into patient, humble, caring people we will testify with more accuracy to the wonderful Savior that we follow.
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Chris Daukas is as pastor at Sovereign Grace Church in Gilbert, AZ where he leads twentyfour:seven—the church’s singles ministry.
This article is part of our series applying the gospel to areas of daily life. See more from the series.
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