Good Boundaries and Goodbyes: Loving Others Without Losing the Best of Who You Are

by Lysa TerKeurst

I hope you’ll soon see that boundaries aren’t just a good idea, they are a God idea. Boundaries are woven into everything God has done since the very beginning. We’ll get to that in the coming chapters. But think about this for now: God even put an actual boundary around the sea during creation. The sea would eventually be known to the people who lived during biblical times as a symbol of chaos. So, the boundary for the sea was a barrier of sand placed by God that the chaos was not allowed to cross (Jeremiah 5:22). Where there is an abundance of chaos, there is usually a lack of good boundaries. Chaos shouldn’t be the norm and while we can’t always change the source of the chaos, we must tend to what we can change. Please know: it’s not unchristian to set these healthy parameters. It’s not unchristian to require people to treat you in healthy ways. And for us to do the same for others. It’s not unchristian to call wrong things wrong and hurtful things hurtful. We can do it all with honor, kindness, and love, but we have to know how to spot dysfunction, what to do about it, and when to recognize it’s no longer reasonable or safe to stay in some relationships.

Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” I’ve often heard this verse taught in the context of dating relationships and purity. But I think it also applies to guarding the access to our hearts in other relationships as well. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for guard, mišmār, communicates an active nature of how someone should guard.1 What this means is that guarding is active, not passive. We aren’t trying to protect ourselves from love. If we love, we will risk being hurt. But we are trying to protect ourselves for love. We don’t want to get so consumed with the pain and chaos of unhealthy relationship patterns that we become a carrier of human hurt rather than a conduit of God’s love.

Love can be unconditional but relational access never should be. God loves us but He has established that sin causes separation from Him. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were no longer given the same kind of access. What started out as a lot of access to God, with one boundary in the garden of Eden, changed because of sin. And as I keep reading through the Bible, the more the sins of humanity increased, the more the access was decreased, and the more boundaries were given. In Genesis chapter 2 there was one boundary, but as we near the end of the Law and Prophets there are 613.2 Then, as we keep reading through the Bible, the access to God became more restricted and conditional. His love was unconditional but access to Him was not.

Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. (Isaiah 59:1–2)

If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. (Psalm 66:18 ESV)

“Continued iniquity leads to irregular desires, which leads to a degenerate mind. Romans 1:28–32 describes this deviation in graphic detail.”

Like God, we must require from people the responsibility necessary to grant the amount of access we allow them to have in our lives. Too much access without the correct responsibility is detrimental.