How to Stop Family Strife for Good: Insights from AMBrewster

Nobody in the world has issues of family strife. I mean, everyone in the family always gets along. No problems in your family, I know. But in case you have a friend who struggles with strife within the family, you may want...

Introduction to Family Strife and the Book Quit

Welcome to the Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another.

Edition of the Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian podcast community, of which this podcast is a proud member. We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life, and today we are going to talk about a topic that no one in the audience, I'm sure, ever has to deal with.

The issue of family strife. I know, your family is perfect. You just wish everyone else's was, too. I get it. But in case you're the one that has the family strife or you have that friend, that's what it is, you have a friend who is struggling with this, we are going to talk about how to resolve issues of family strife.

We're going to talk about a book called Quit. Yeah, just it makes it easy. You know, it's kind of like that Bob Newhart thing, you know, the video maybe you've seen where the woman comes in and she's struggling with feeling that she's gonna be buried in a box, and he just says, stop it!

Well, here's the similar thing. Just quit! Subtitled, How to Stop Family Strife for Good. I am with the author, Mr. A .M. Brewster, who happens to be one of the speakers at Striving for Eternity, but he also has a separate ministry he does, so he works with us and does some other things, and I'm going to introduce him, let him actually introduce himself, tell you all about himself, where you can find him, because at the end you're gonna want to be following his podcast, you're gonna want to get his app so you can listen to different sermons, different classes he's got on his app, and then you're gonna definitely want to get this book, oh, for a friend.

I know, your family's fine, but it's for a friend. Aaron, how are you? Let folks.

Know a little bit more about you. I am doing really well. I would be lying to say that that Bob Newhart sketch, A, isn't my favorite counseling little sketch on the internet, and that B, it had zero influence on my, how I titled this book.

It did, it did have some influence, not as not as big of an influence as the Bible had, but it did influence me a little bit. Stop it! Quit! Yeah, my name is Aaron Brewster. I am married to my wife Johanna, and we have two children, Micah and Ivy, and we live with my parents, so we have a multi-generational home, and it's really fantastic.

It's kind of sad right now, but my mom is in the other room, and she's, she is very sick. She is not feeling well at all, but my dad can go to work, and we're here, and we're caring for my mom, and it's just such a fantastic situation here at this house.

The ministry that I have is called Evermind Ministries, and we have various sub-ministries, different parts of the Evermind family of ministries that speaks into various facets of our lives. Evermind's mantra, or not mantra, really the wrong word, I suppose, our mission is to keep God's truth at the center of the human experience.

The thing is, though, is that as humans, we have a very multifaceted experience. I am a son. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm a president of Evermind Ministries. I'm a biblical counselor. So, to keep God's Word at the center of those main facets, we have these sub-ministries.

So, as an example, Truth, Love, Family is where we keep God's truth at the center of the family experience. We have a podcast called Truth, Love, Parent. We have over 560 episodes. I am starting a new series right now.

Actually, just started a new series called Parenting Your Children to Adulthood. Really excited about this. It's something that my listeners have been waiting for for a while. So, that's Truth, Love, Family.

We also have another slice of the ministry called The Celebration of God, or excuse me, The Year-Long Celebration of God, which is all about personal growth and discipleship and corporate worship, how the body of Christ works together to help the body grow and mature into the image of Christ.

The podcast associated with that is called The Celebration of God, and it takes our main events on the Christian calendar, as well as the mundane moments of our regular Mondays, and focuses on how can we glorify God better?

How can we worship Him better today in those areas? And then I have a speaking ministry where I go around and I speak both for Striving for Eternity, but also for Evermind, and that's A .M. Brewster Ministries.

Pretty straightforward. Gets the point across. And then, as a biblical counselor, and biblical counseling is a huge part of each facet of this ministry, there is Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship.

That one in particular, you know, is where people come when they are looking either for the crisis counseling that we so often find ourselves in, as well as looking for discipleship. And though we love doing that facet, you know, we love meeting people in their needs and having that discipleship relationship with them, I will say that one of our biggest focuses for the church is to get discipleship back to the church.

I should be discipling people in my church and in my family, and you guys should be discipling people in your church and your family. And that's where we go back to the yearlong celebration of God, where we're equipping you to help disciple the people in your local body of believers.

That's an overview of Evermind Ministry, a little overview of my family. We also have a bunch of pets in the house. I had to throw that in there for all the animal lovers. So, there you go.

Okay. Cats or dogs?

We have one dog.

Okay, you're fine. Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it.

I probably shouldn't list any of the other pets, or I might ruin it, even though we don't have cats.

You have snakes, don't you?

There is a snake in the house.

I just pictured you as a snake person.

Well, see, my son has the snake.

But you encouraged it, I'm sure.

Well, you know, I encourage my kids to pursue their pet dreams. Yeah, maybe I did a little bit, but yeah.

The Hidden Reality of Family Strife

So, let's get into the issue of family strife. I mean, I would venture to guess that every household that probably everyone grew up in, and every household that someone is in where you're dealing with marriage right now, has some strife.

Where do we see the source of this? I mean, where does this come from? What are some factors that create strife within the home?

I want to answer that question, but before we do, you know, we're messing around, we're playing around, talking about how, of course, your family doesn't have strife. One of the things I've actually found is that a lot of families don't realize they actually have strife.

And it's basically the frog, boiling a frog. Everyone's familiar with that. You know, you got a frog in water, you turn up the heat slowly over time. The frog, in theory, will slowly boil to death because it doesn't know.

Another example is how some Inuit tribes would kill wolves. They would take a sword, they would dip it in blood multiple times, allowing each layer to freeze. The wolves would come and they would be licking at this frozen bloodsicle.

And what's happening is that they get into a frenzy with this, but they're also numbing their tongue as they continually are rubbing on this chunk of ice. Eventually, they get down through the ice and they get down to the blade and the blade is now slicing their own tongue.

And now they've got fresh blood, but they're also not able to feel it because they've numbed it for so long and the wolf bleeds to death. And those are graphic pictures, boiling a frog and killing a wolf like that.

But they're designed to illustrate the fact that our families do have strife. We have strife every single day. I'll be honest with you. I haven't even been up that long today, and there's already been strife in my household because there's sin in my household.

And any time that anybody ever sins against somebody else, even if that sin is only in their own minds and doesn't come out, that creates strife in the home. It creates conflict. So, some people, when they think about strife, they're thinking about like, you know, kids are sneaking out of the house at night, or you've got a dad who's, you know, a drunk and he's always yelling and hitting people.

And yes, that's definitely a biblical understanding of strife, but it's so much more nuanced than that. It's so much more subtle than that. And I just want to say right off the bat, even though we might joke that our families don't have strife, the painful reality for the Brewster family is that we do, in fact, have strife.

And we have strife nearly every single day because our family is made up of sinners and we do sin. So, that's true of your family, too. I don't say that, you know, Andrew, I say to you, I say it to all of your listeners.

I don't say it to be rude. I don't say it to be disrespectful. I say it to be honest about the condition in which we're in. So, if you thought to yourself a little bit, well, you know, we don't have that much strife, I would encourage you to reevaluate your definition of strife.

Understand that strife isn't just the worst case scenarios we can possibly picture. It's so much more than that.

You know, it's interesting because you're saying that, and I think about how I grew up, the house that I grew up in, I would describe that as having a lot of strife. And I really didn't want that in the house when I was raising children.

And yet, it's so interesting because my kids felt that there was a lot of strife that I didn't see because it was nothing like what I grew up with.

Yeah.

And, you know, it was actually kind of interesting because my daughter went to Thanksgiving one year when we couldn't make it, and she's hanging out with my siblings. And she actually said, like, I thought that you were just kind of making it up, like, all the strife that was in your household, until I talked to all your siblings and realized, you actually didn't make it sound as bad as they did.

Like, you made it sound pretty good compared to what they said. And it was like, and it was just kind of interesting to realize that, you know, the strife I grew up with, the strife that I knew, I wanted to reduce that.

And I thought, like, hey, I did pretty good not having strife in the house. And yet, my kids are going, yeah, there was still strife in the house. So it's like, even though we may be thinking we're pretty good because it's not as bad as we grew up with, or other people, and then we realize, okay, it might be worse than we thought.

Yeah.

Another issue is the fact that the word strife is not one that's in our contemporary vocabularies as much. We talk more about, you know, conflict, we talk about fighting and things like that. But strife is a word that shows up.

When we talk about sibling rivalry, that's a term that's used.

But it's used all throughout the scriptures. Some of the best, in fact, all of the best translations use the word strife. So another time, you know, when we hear the word strife, since it sounds a little archaic, it sounds different.

It doesn't sound like something that we regularly encounter. So there are a lot of things that I think our flesh and that Satan and the world use to convince us that we don't have as big of a problem as we actually have.

And that's where I always just like to start. You know, John warns us in 1 John, if we think that we have no sin, then we're liars. We are deceived. And since sin always produces strife, if we have sin, we are going to have strife every single time.

So it's there, whether we see it or not.

Strife Creators in Proverbs and the Root of Addiction

So what are some of the things that, you know, from your book, what are some things that we would see cause strife? What are some things that would be the ways to recognize it within the family?

So the genesis of this book, and I share it in the introduction to the book, was I was working at a boy's home for at-risk teens. I was there for five years. And boy, oh boy, it's easy to see the strife when you're in that situation.

We had one young man in particular who was just everything he touched, every relationship. It was just, it was conflict and strife and nobody liked him and he didn't like anybody.

Else.

And by God's grace, I was the lead residential counselor at the time. The boys lived in my home and I handled all the counseling. He and I started a Bible study together where we just walked through what the Bible had to say about strife.

And we started in the book of Proverbs and it was through that process of talking and reading through what the Bible said about strife that I ended up later putting together chapter one of this book. In chapter one, sorry, part one, excuse me, has two chapters in it where we look at nine strife creators that are identified in the scriptures, specifically in the book of Proverbs.

So the very first one that we talk about, and I compile the list in such a way that it kind of goes from the most egregious in our minds, in our contemporary view, down to potentially what we might consider the most benign.

But it's designed to help us to see and I'll just kind of give this away as a little sneak peek for your audience. The reality is that every single one of these categories, regardless of how egregious they sound, is in fact evident and present in the strife causers in your, the creators in your.

Home.

As an example, Proverbs 23, 29 through 30 says, who has woe, who has sorrow, who has strife, who has complaining, who has wounds without cause, who has redness of eyes, those who tarry long over wine, those who go to try mixed wine.

And you say, okay, Aaron, well, you know, nobody in our house drinks. Okay, so that category doesn't apply to us. But one of the realities of this verse that's also shown to us in other portions of the scripture is that people who are addicts stir up strife.

And you're like, yeah, I get that, you know, a drug addict, a drunk, sure, I can see how they would stir up strife. But in this little section, what I do is I help us to see that the biggest addiction that all people have is to their own desires.

We are born, we are created by God to worship. And we are born idolaters, because we come into this world incapable of worshiping God. So all we have is to worship ourselves, we are addicted to our satisfaction, we are addicted to our pleasure.

And it is that that is that root of our sin, that self worship that ends up creating all being the root of all the other sins in our lives. And so it ends up being one of the biggest reasons we have strife in the house, because of the fact that we are addicted to our own way, we do what is right in our own eyes.

And one of the other things I think that people really like about the book is that it's really short, it's only 110 pages tops, I think it actually the actual content of the book itself is less than that.

But all throughout the book, what I've done is I've pulled resources from the over 560 episodes that I've done on Truth, Love, Parent. So as you go through the book, and you're reading this, and you get to page 20, you will see that there is a little QR code there that says underneath it is your child addicted, you scan that, and it'll take you to a podcast resource that I've created that talks about this in greater detail.

So you're sitting here going, you're reading it like, wow, I think I'm understanding what he's saying about how even my youngest children are in many ways, addicts, they're addicted to something and that something creates strife in the family.

I wish he would have built out on this more. Well, I did. And those QR codes are available all throughout the book to help point you to different areas.

That's very helpful for folks to realize that not only just reading the book, but within the book, you're having extra resources to dig in deeper in certain subjects, because that's something to be honest, I haven't thought about doing in a book.

I don't know that I've ever seen that in a book is, hey, like, let's dig in deeper on.

It.

The book is short, you can get through it quickly. Here's where you dig in deeper on specific areas that you may be dealing with. And you're right. I think a lot of people don't realize people think of addiction and we'll dig into this for a bit.

A lot of people think of addiction just as drugs, alcohol, pornography, something like that. People don't think about addiction as work, relationships. Well, some people think of addiction with gambling, but gambling's an interesting one because, you know, there's someone I know who we think he is addicted to not really gambling, but winning.

And we say that because his business, he could make millions of dollars and he could lose millions of dollars. And if he loses a million dollars, she's just like, okay, let me go make some more.

Yeah.

I hate fishing, but I am addicted to catching. I don't sit in the boat and catch all day long.

I really will.

But fishing, oh man, I go too long without catching. I'm done.

Well, yeah, I would agree with that. But see, I'm not addicted to catching because it's not enough to get me to go and do it again.

Well, I just don't, I catch so poorly. I never actually want to do it. But I'll tell you when it hits, it's like a feeding frenzy. I don't want to leave.

Yeah. Yeah.

So addiction is something, folks, I'm saying this to say, some people think, well, the person has a good work ethic. They're working very hard. They're providing for their family. They're whatever. It could be grades in school.

You know, really what it is, is in that one, you may be, you know, people are addicted to attention, especially in a social media world. People are addicted to wanting to get attention from others. People can be addicted to, if it's grade, the praises that they get from other people.

Let's be honest.

We live in America. People are addicted to food. To this.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, come on. Why do you have to go there? You know that that's my weakness, brother.

Why?

Why do you have to go there?

I need to share this episode with Dominic.

He hates it.

Every single time I preach about food, man.

Yeah.

And you do it right before lunch.

I do. I do. Yeah.

Look, you know, I will say you mentioned the food, right? So you know that I usually start my day with a cold plunge. I hate the cold. I absolutely hate the cold. I do it for health reasons. But one of the things that's good for brain function is forcing your body to do something that you know you don't want to do.

Even the anticipation of it, you start to get good brain activity. So I force myself to do a cold plunge. Do you know that doing something like that, forcing myself into 40 to 45 degree water for five minutes first thing in the morning, everything else is easy that day.

So I never thought about this as a benefit of that, but as much as I know I'm a glutton, I know I have an addiction with food, it has become easier for me to say no to food when I'm doing cold plunges because I've already done something really hard.

Yeah.

I completely understand how that would work.

Yeah.

The thing about addiction is that we've forced it, we've keyholed it to mean only one little thing, but we have to step back and look at it from a biblical perspective and see that even though the Bible doesn't use the word addiction, it does talk about the basic tenets of what it is.

Even the physiological things that I just read speak into that idea of addiction. And when we look at addiction simply for what it is and talk about it in biblical terms, we realize that man, addictions can be literally anywhere.

A child can be addicted to a toy, video games, that is a huge addiction I think that most people recognize, but it goes far beyond just video games. So yeah, it's a massive thing and it is going to create strife everywhere it rears its ugly little head.

And so that's why it's the first one that I deal with in the book. And then from there we deal with another eight different strife creators over those two chapters in order to help us really sit down and identify in our families, okay, it's easy to say that these people all create strife.

It's a very general observation, but why are they creating strife? The answer to how to fix it is going to start by identifying why it's there in the first place. And at the end of each chapter, I have this thing called life work.

I joke that nobody likes to do homework, but everybody wants to have a better life. And so people don't mind doing life work. I'm not sure if it actually practically works out that way, but I like to think that it.

Does.

And at the end of the chapter, there's a spot for you to sit down to think carefully about everyone in your family, including yourself, and to go through and to list out, okay, do I have this type of a creator in my family?

And here's the thing I found as a biblical counselor, as people work through this material, the ones who are being the most honest, but also the ones who are understanding the material and seeing their family through biblical eyes, generally speaking, what I will find when I look at their life work is that every name of the family member will be there.

And then every name has every single one of the nine strife creating personalities underneath their name. They're honest enough to say to be, yes, as I look at my life, I see that I create strife. My children create strife, and it's because we're addicts, because we tend to be God-hating and people-hating and greedy, and we're liars, and we're angry, and we're prideful, and we're fools, and we're sinners.

And that's why there's strife that we all create. And that's a beautiful place when we're able to start by recognizing, okay, this is the problem. This is why we have an issue right here is that we are these things.

And this is always going to create strife. Once you start there, once you realize that, it makes it a lot easier to start addressing the problems.

The Consequences of Strife and the Need to Focus on Sin

Well, there's two possible things that could cause strife for some people, and we have a solution to both. One could be you didn't get a good night of sleep. And for that, we have a solution for you. Go to MyPillow .com and get yourself a good pillow, because, and this is in all seriousness, there are people who have strife in their home because of a lack of sleep.

There are people who are cranky and upset because they just didn't sleep well. And so a good night of sleep—.

You're going to be struggling in my home.

Yeah.

I mean, sleep is very important to us, and so getting a good night of sleep will actually can help with some of the strife, and it's something we don't often think about. So you could go, and I really recommend getting the mattress topper.

That is probably the one thing that made the biggest difference in my sleep, is getting that three-inch mattress topper from MyPillow. I do travel with MyPillow. Aaron can attest to that, and he travels with his.

I can attest to that. Although I use mine in the hotel rooms to go to sleep, and Aaron uses his while I'm preaching. I don't know. But I have seen him with a MyPillow while I was preaching, just saying.

But go get a good MyPillow. And to get a great discount on all their products, from robes, to slippers, to coffee, to whatever, they have a ton of products out there. You can go to MyPillow .com. Use the promo code SFE.

Stands for Striving For Eternity. That will help you get a good night of sleep. However, for some, they get up in the morning, and they're just cranky. I mean, some of you are not morning people, and you're not willing to get into a cold plunge.

I totally get that. Cold plunge will work at keeping you wide awake for much better than coffee. But some of you need a good cup of coffee in the morning. And therefore, the second thing we have to help you with strife in the home, other than the book Quit, How to Stop Family Strife for Good, would be to get yourself some Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.

It's a Christian-based company. They are providing great coffee. I love their coffee. Aaron would love their coffee if he drank coffee. But his wife loves it when he speaks at conferences, and they give him a free bag of coffee.

His wife is always glad when he goes away to a conference where Squirrelly Joe provides the coffee, because it means she gets the bag of coffee that he comes home with. But it's great coffee. I enjoy it every day.

And so you can go to strivingforeternity .org slash coffee. That's strivingforeternity .org slash coffee. That lets them know if you use that link every time, even when you reorder, that you got there through us, so they'll keep supporting us.

And we appreciate that support. And so if you use the code SFE, which again stands for Striving Fraternity, you will get, I forget, they've changed it up, whether it's 20 off your first bag or your first bag free, one or the other.

But either way, you will get a discount on the first offer. So use the promo code SFE. And if you are getting the 20 off, do like I do and make it a big order. I mean, you got to make sure you get the most discount.

I regret that I didn't get the five pound bags on my first order. But I do get it regularly. And I'm moving to where I'm going to just get five pound bags because I'm going through it a little too quickly.

So Aaron, let's get into the question of the consequences of strife. We talked about where it comes from and whatnot. How does strife end up affecting the family?

So originally, the consequences of strife, it's part two of the book, it's one chapter. It used to be the first chapter of the book. I started off with the consequences and then moved to the creators.

And a friend of mine, an author named Shannon Popkin, a wonderful woman, wonderful author, wonderful speaker, I actually have to give her the credit for the QR codes. That was her idea. She said, you've got so much content, you should do this.

And so it was an amazing idea. She also endorsed the book.

See, I knew you weren't smart enough to come up with that on your own. No, man, I'm obvious enough.

But Shannon suggested.

It's a great idea.

She suggested starting with the creators because we all, I mean, if anyone picks up this book, it's probably because the consequences of strife are evident in their family. And to start off with them, you know, moving toward figuring out what the cause of the issue, the deep root of the issue might be.

So I ended up moving this, the consequences to the second part. But it's still really important. I didn't want to have it too late in the book. And the idea that I've been teaching my kids ever since they were small is to understand that sin.

Hurts.

And they needed to realize, in fact, that was when they would sin and after they've been reproved, and now it's time for them to receive some physical discipline for it. One of the things I would ask them is now, remember, why is it that God wants Daddy to give you these consequences?

And they learned to say, because I need to learn that sin hurts. And yes, sin hurts in many ways. The problem that we have is that we don't think biblically about the consequences, the hurts that come from our sin.

We focus on the external stuff. We focus on the sting from a spanking. We focus on the fact that we were grounded. We focus on the fact that our relationship with our spouse is maybe a little tepid right now, and we're getting the silent treatment.

We focus on all of that stuff, which is very real stuff. But they're all secondary consequences of strife. And so when we take the secondary consequences of strife, and in our minds, those are the important, when we try to address the strife, we're going to address it the wrong way every.

Time.

A child who doesn't like the secondary consequence of the sting on their posterior might try to fight it, to squirm, to move. In their mind, the most important thing they can do is avoid this consequence, when the reality is that the Bible teaches us that there are three primary consequences that happen every single time we sin.

And if we want to avoid the secondary consequences, we really need to focus on the primary consequences. And the thing about the secondary consequences is that they don't always come into our lives. If a child is very sneaky, parents might not catch them.

There are things, ways that we sin in our minds that our spouse might not ever know about. But the primary consequences of sin, those happen every single time we sin, whether anybody knows about it or not.

And there are three of them I outline in the book. I call it personal hurt, interpersonal hurt, and divine hurt. To be honest, I've never really liked the divine aspect of it. When I taught this to my kids early on, I taught them that sin hurts you, sin hurts everybody else, and sin hurts God.

But even that terminology is not something I was really, I was in love with. I just kept it that way so it was parallel. So, let me explain. When I sin, I make it, I hurt myself by making it easier for myself to continue that habit of sinning.

Every single time I sin, I increase the chances that I'm going to sin in that same way in the future because I'm habituating myself. Now, yes, there are those secondary consequences. You know, when I sin in certain ways, I can literally hurt myself, like if I'm doing self harm or something like that, or if I'm overeating and I'm hurting my health.

But the personal hurt that we see in the scriptures has to do with how we actually are spiritually damaging ourselves when we sin. The interpersonal hurt, that one's pretty obvious. The way that my sin affects other people in our family.

Proverbs 17, 25 says, A foolish son is a grief to his father and bitterness to her who bore him. There's no relationship that can thrive in the soil of foolishness and deception and rebellion. But the divine hurt one, though, the idea of hurting God is this.

My sin actually has an impact on my fellowship with God. The scriptures are very clear that God hates our sin, right? Proverbs 15, 9 says, The way of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord. But we also see that there are situations where because of certain types of sins, it can actually have an effect on my ability to commune with God in prayer.

God won't hear my prayers because I have this sin in my life. So it affects our fellowship. Now, I can't lose my salvation. Praise the Lord for that. He preserves us, and we can't lose that. But that doesn't mean that our fellowship with him is not hurt when we have lifestyles of sin in our lives.

So when we recognize that, we say, These are the main consequences, the primary consequences of the sin in our lives. Then we can start to say, Okay, I don't need to try to escape the secondary consequences.

If I make that my main goal, I'm not going to approach fixing the strife in my house the right way. What I need to do is focus on the sin that is hurting me and hurting others and hurting the Lord. Focus on that.

That's going to be the key, really, to, again, moving, being able to take that step forward and find a real cure.

And I know the question is, well, the cure is the Bible, right? So, but that is what everyone's going to say, but there's some practical things we could.

Do.

And again, we're talking with Anne Brewster, the author of Quit, How to Stop Family Strife for Good. I encourage everyone to get a copy of that. In fact, I would argue if you've already listened and maybe you know people in your church and you're going, you know, I know some other people that could really benefit from some of this.