January 31, 2025 Show with A. M. Brewster on “Quit: How to Stop Family Strife for Good”

Opening Broadcast and Program Introduction

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I'm delighted to have a returning guest on the program today, A .M. Brewster, who is president of Evermind Ministries. He's also an ACBC Certified Biblical Counselor, an author, a conference speaker, and host of the Truth Loved Parent podcast, and today he's going to be addressing the theme of his new book, Quit! How to Stop Family Strife for Good.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron.

Radio, A .M. Brewster. Thank you very much. It has been a little while. So much has happened. You've had some health struggles. We had this little hurricane sweep through our state, but God is good. We're both still here, and I'm very.

Excited to have this conversation. Why don't you give our listeners some updates on the devastating effects that hurricane—is it Helena or Helene? Helene. We're on a first-name basis. That hurricane Helene had upon you and your neighbors there in North Carolina, and the progress that you experienced.

Digging out of that mess. Yeah, well, I appreciate the opportunity to share. Please be praying for North Carolina. There are still people living in tents, people whose houses were destroyed. We drive through certain parts of the state, and the devastation is just as extreme as it was the day after it all happened.

Real help is needed. Real prayer is needed. I recently am joining a committee here in the Transylvania County area to help specifically the government—the county's goal is to want to focus in on what they call spiritual and mental health.

And a pastor in town reached out to my pastor, who reached out to me, who got me connected. And I'll be starting up here soon, connecting with them, looking for ways. You know, we're trying to help people build back, but we're also realizing that right now there's a huge need for the gospel.

That's what I and, obviously, the other pastors are recognizing, and we want to be able to speak into that on a district, county level. So please bring in prayer for that. So people ask how we did, and I said, you know what?

We are proof that the bell curve exists. There are some people who did far worse than we did, and there are people who did far better than we did. On our street alone—our street was actually the hardest-hit part of the city of Brevard.

That's where we live. And there were houses on our street that had two, three, four feet of water in the house. But by God's grace, years and years ago, when they built our house, before we ever owned it, it was built up on—they were just dumping tons and tons of dirt where they were going to build the house.

And so we're approximately five feet higher than the house next door to us. The flood was inches away from getting into the main floor. Now, we lost our HVAC. We lost our bottom level. We lost tons of personal belongings.

The building back has been difficult. There's so much work that it's been—we just recently—this happened back in October, and just now in January, we just recently were able to find people to come out and start the work, basically.

We still have personal belongings sitting out in our yard. There are two crates of my wife's china that she inherited from her grandmother that have been sitting out in the backyard for months, just because there's just nowhere to put it.

So the Lord's been good. Andrew Rappaport from Striving for Eternity Ministries started up a Give, Send, Go for us, and so has been trying to collect some money to help us with this. We lost a car to the flood.

It was really pretty amazing. And the fact that we kind of represent the middle ground and that there are people who fared far worse than we is really just—it's staggering. But we praise the Lord that, though I evacuated my wife and daughter on the day that the flood came in—they were taken by police in a boat that pulled all the way up to our house and then took them to a shelter—I stayed back with my dad, who could not be transported that way because of medical reasons.

And so my mom and my dad and I kind of spent the night waiting for the water to get into the house, but the Lord kept that from happening. Anyway, it's a very, very intense experience, but we thank the Lord for it, and we thank the Lord for where he's brought us.

But we are still building back ourselves. We could still use prayer and support in that process, but again, like I said, the whole state of North Carolina is in that spot, and there are people who need even more because they don't know the gospel.

Amen. Well, how do people actually access that fund app that Andrew Rappaport has.

Created for you? Yeah, so it's kind of—it is not a GoFundMe, but it's kind of like that. It's called GiveSendGo .com, and then after the GiveSendGo .com, if you put slash S-F-E, which stands for Striving for Eternity, that will take you— and it says support the Brewsters after Hurricane Helene.

Striving for Eternity is facilitating all of those donations on our behalf and then sending them to us as it comes in. But GiveSendGo .com forward slash S-F-E. Great. Well—.

Thank you for asking. Hey, my pleasure. I'm going to give our listeners our email address right off the bat in case they have questions of their own for you on the topic of the day, and the topic of the day is the title of your book, Quit! How to Stop Family Strife for Good, and our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state of residence, and country of residence. So, Aaron, the theme of the book is probably something that is universally experienced by nearly everyone on the planet Earth, whether you are the most seasoned Christian walking the planet, or you're an unbeliever, or a member of another religion.

But what were the compelling factors that led you personally to write.

This book? So, the book Genesis actually started back when I was working at Victory Academy for Boys in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Wonderful program. It's a boarding home for at-risk teens. I was the residence manager as well as the lead residential counselor.

So, these boys would come from all over the United States, and we would work with them there. There was one boy in particular early on. Really, I mean, just as all these guys are, so, so sweet. You know, they're wonderful creations of God, wonderful individuals, and yet very enslaved to sin.

And this one boy, he just created strife everywhere he went. There wasn't a single relationship that wasn't strained at best. And it got so bad that he found himself working downward through our program in the level system.

And then he and I got to a place where we were spending a lot of time together because he just couldn't be civil with anybody. And by God's grace, I just decided to study something that I really hadn't thought of at the time.

Because for most of us, the word strife isn't really a word that's part of our regular daily vocabulary. We'll talk about conflict. We talk about disagreements and arguments, things like that. But strife isn't a word we use.

But as I was reading through another passage in Proverbs, I came upon this word strife, and I was like, oh, that sounds just like this young man. So, I did a word study on that word through the book of Proverbs.

And as I did that, I started sharing these verses with him because these verses were pointing at the different individuals who create strife, the different consequences that come with strife. But then also, they started hinting at here and there really the cures for strife.

And so, as he and I started that little study together, by God's grace, he started to change. Now, he didn't become perfect overnight, and I'm sure there's still a lot of strife in his life to this day.

But there was some significance. As he started to submit to those truths, things really started to change. And he finished off his year with us at Victory Academy, and I was sad to see him go. So, that was kind of the genesis where it started.

And then one day, I was like, you know what? Everybody needs this. I mean, literally, everybody needs this. And you made that observation already. Obviously, everyone needs this. But you know what? I found that it's not as obvious as you think.

And this is another reason I wrote the book. As a biblical counselor, there are people out there who would reject the idea that there is family strife in their home. And they reject it for different reasons.

I have found individuals who reject it for the same reason that people say they have no sin, as 1 John tells us. They're deluded. They don't realize that these things are a problem. They've kind of redefined in their own minds what's okay and what's not.

And then their minds are kind of like, well, this is just normal. This is just what we experience. And they say that it's not strife. And then other people, it's similar, but some people are just like, we don't sin.

You know, there's those people on one extreme. And then the other extreme, they're the people who they've just defined things incorrectly. I have a friend. I don't think that man ever stops blowing his nose.

I mean, I've known him for decades, and he's just perpetually wiping and blowing his nose. And what's interesting is that it's just become his lifestyle to such a degree that that just seems normal to him.

The idea that maybe there's something wrong that he needs to dig into and address, it's just not there. This is just how his life is. And there are so many people who are living with various levels of strife in their home that they don't even recognize the fact that it's there perpetually.

And so sometimes those people will only come looking for help when the strife has gotten so bad, the conflict is so explosive that all of a like, wow, well, this is a problem. But the reality is that it's been a problem for a long time.

And so I want people to be able to acknowledge what strife is, to see it for what it is, and to be able to start working on it before, God forbid, things get to that place where everything's just exploding.

Recognizing Family Strife and Its Creators

Well, before we start having you list creators of strife, perhaps you could give some telltale signs that strife exists, because as you just said, there are people who are oblivious to that. And by the way, is there anything wrong with being oblivious to having strife in your home?

Because isn't that like the bliss of ignorance?

You know, people say ignorance is bliss, but I've found that that's only true in one situation. When you are ignorant of the wickedness of sin, and I don't mean the fact that sin is wicked, but your mind doesn't think that way.

You don't realize the depths to which people will go and the things on which they machinate, you know? When you're ignorant of that kind of thing, that is bliss. When you are ignorant of the consequences of sin because you're not participating in those sins, that's bliss.

But being ignorant about the strife in our homes is not bliss, because that's very similar to being ignorant of the fact that you have cancer. Now, I'm not one of those people who likes to compare sin to cancer, because we don't want to see sin as a disease.

But I do use this comparison only because we all recognize the fact to be ignorant of the reality that there are cancerous cells in our body is not a good thing. It's not bliss. You want to know about it as soon as possible, start dealing with it as soon as possible.

And the same thing is true with strife. Now, the creators of strife are synonymous with, they start to define for us, help us to understand why strife exists. And the book is only 100 pages long. Actually, it's like 109, right?

But actual content is only about 100 pages long. So it's very short. But I broke it up into four different parts. The first one is the creators, second is consequences, then causes, and then the cure.

And yeah, it's alliterated. Yeah, you know, they say Baptist preacher thing, whatever. I'm not a huge fan of alliteration unless it comes really naturally. And this one did. So I liked it. I leaned into it.

But I also want people to remember it too. That's why if we did alliteration correctly, they'll remember it. So the first section, which is the creators of strife is broken into two parts. And I just stepped through the book of Proverbs and I'm pulling out the verses that talk about the type of people who create strife.

And it starts with a really specific, the list that I build goes from a really specific, in some of our minds, exceptionally egregious, you know, we're like, wow, that's a, of course, that kind of person would create strife, but that kind of person is not in our home.

And then it goes out to the more general. But here's the one thing they all have in common. And this is why I can say categorically that every single household in the entire world has strife in it. It is the fact that strife is the natural consequence of sin.

So unless you actually do have a sinless household, and you don't, every time there is sin, there is going to be a certain level of strife. And none of that strife is acceptable. None of it's okay. None of it does God look upon and say, that pleases me.

It's all bad because it's all a consequence of sin in the home. And as we look through Proverbs, we'll see that each one of these creators of strife are identified by a specific sin. The last one, the most general, the broadest one that I deal with.

So if somebody honestly works the entire list and they're like, oh, well, you know, my family, none of these things describe my family. The last one that we look at is from Proverbs 17, 19, whoever loves transgression, loves strife.

And you know what? Every time we sin, we sin because we want to. We sin because we love it. And the point on this one is this category of sinful people stir up strife. All of them do, every single one.

So if you have a sinner in your house, even if none of the other categories apply to them, you're going to have strife. It's there. But what I love doing is I love starting with the more specific, even, like I said, potentially egregious sin.

The very first sin I list in the book comes from Proverbs 23, verses 29 through 30, which, if you're familiar with that, it asks who has woe, who has sorrow, who has strife? And it goes on to describe someone who tarries long over wine.

They go to try and mix wine, right? And we see very easily, it's not a problem. We all understand, we all recognize that addicts stir up strife. People who are addicted to substances stir up strife. I mean, Chris, you and I have spoken about this on a number of occasions, especially when a person is under the influence of something else.

Man, most of what they do is strife causing. Here's the thing, though. Most people, especially with younger children, when they get to this point in the book, which is the very first point, the very first creator of strife, they'll be tempted to skip over that.

Because as far as I know, their kids aren't smoking marijuana, no one's on crack in their home. But I go on to reveal that, biblically speaking, the reality is that every single person in the entire world, including you, including me, including everyone listening and everyone in their family, we are all addicted to something, to something that is far worse than alcohol, that is far worse than any drug.

We are addicted to our own way. We are addicted to what is right in our own eyes. We are addicted to our own desires. We are addicted to our sin. We worship self, and we use everything in our lives to lay on the altar to self.

And so we are all addicts. And what my hope and prayer is, as people work through this list, what they'll see is that, number one, the vast majority of the people in their house, each one of these nine categories applies to all of them.

You might find a category that doesn't apply to one person in your house, but I'll tell you what, all nine of them apply to me at different times. So not only do I create strife in my house by sinning, I create strife in all of the ways that the book of Proverbs identifies these sins create strife.

And I, Aaron Brewster, am doing that in my home. So it is a very big deal. It's very important. We have to understand who the creators of strife are. We need to be able to identify how they're creating that strife, if we're ever going to be able to really help them to stop.

Well, we'll pick up after the first commercial break with those specific details. And once again, if you have a question of your own for Aaron Brewster, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-S-E-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

And this is definitely one of those topics that would lend itself to personal and private questions. But we'll be hearing from you and your questions and more of A .M. Brewster after these messages. So please do not go away.

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So, go to royaldiadem .com today. We're now back with A .M. Brewster, and we are discussing his book Quit, How to Stop Family Strife for Good, and before I go into any of our listener questions, I'd like you to begin talking about the root causes of these things.

I'd love to do that for sure, and I think we will get to that. There's a section. So, the second part of the book is called The Consequences of Sin. The third part is The Causes of Sin, and I don't mind jumping to the causes if you want me to because I can probably

You can go in the order that you feel is best. In fact, I actually had more of the creators of strife in mind when I made that statement.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Definitely. Originally, the book was going to start with the consequences of strife when I wrote it, started working on it years ago. I wanted to start with the consequences because I think everybody

Again, I wanted people to be able to say, see, hey, look, there is strife in your family. It is there because these consequences are there, excuse me, in your family. So, I wanted to start with that, but a good friend of mine, an author, and the lady speaker, Shannon Popkin, she and I were talking a lot about the book, and she said, no, you really should start with the creators so people can start identifying right off the bat, and I was like, that's a really good idea.

So, now the question was, where do we put the consequences? So, I ended up putting it second in the book because, again, it's really important not just that we say, yeah, of course, well, strife is a consequence of sin, so that's the problem.

Well, no, there actually are consequences of strife as well that layer on top of it. Different sins hit us in different ways. The main verse associated with this book comes from Proverbs 17, 14, which says, the beginning of strife is like letting out water.

Now, that sounds really very simple, like letting out water. You almost think about turning on a hose or spilling a bucket or something like that, but this is a picture of water that is pouring through a broken dam.

And all throughout the book, we have this metaphor, this picture of our lives as an aqueduct. I just lost the word. The dam is the wall, but all the water behind the wall, the dam is our ability to have self-control, our ability to keep all of this stuff inside of us.

And we know that because of our sin nature, it always works itself out, whether it's working itself out through our actions or our words, our heart comes out. And so, when our self-control breaks down and we can no longer hold back these, not that we're victims and that type of a thing, but we choose basically to sin, that dam wall breaks and water just comes pouring out, and it floods the countryside, it destroys houses, it makes a huge impact.

And so, that's what really the main picture of part two is all about, the consequences of sin. And this is something that I think is really important to teach our kids, because we focus on all the wrong consequences.

We know from experience and from the scriptures that sin hurts. That's a concept you can teach the youngest children. That's the title of that chapter, chapter three, sin hurts. But how does sin hurt us is the main question.

And because we're humans, because we're fleshly minded, because we don't think about what we should think about, the secondary consequences of sin end up becoming the most important thing to us. The secondary consequences are those punishments that we might receive.

Somebody grounds us, or we get a spanking, or there's marital silence, there's quiet going on because there's that tension. Those types of consequences are the ones that hit us where we are and kind of sting the most in our physical lives.

But those are secondary consequences. Those secondary consequences are actually there in our lives to point to the primary consequences of sin. And too often in biblical counseling, people have come to get help for the strife in their families because they want to deal with the secondary consequences.

But listen carefully, my friends. If your main goal for dealing with anything in your life, any sin in your life, is to just not have to worry about the secondary consequences anymore, you will never find the answer.

You will never find the cure. You will only ever continually make things worse. Because the secondary consequences, when we get focused on that, we're just focused on how it affects us. But as I said earlier, the secondary consequences are designed to point to the primary consequences in our lives.

And there are three of these that we see. The first of which is the real personal hurt that happens. But this isn't the personal hurt that comes from somebody giving me a consequence, grounding me. This is the hurt that basically, the more and more I sin, the easier I make it for me to sin.

I'm creating a habit. I'm habituating myself to sin in the same way over and over again. And by the way, though I'm not doing it right now, I'm hitting the highlights. This book is filled with scripture.

I'd never like to make a claim, either in my speaking or in the book that is not paired with the scriptural evidence for that claim. But given our time, I am kind of going through this. Read the book, see the scripture, see all the points, dig into it.

But this personal hurt idea is very clear. In fact, Ephesians 4 .19 talks about the fact that we have become callous and we give ourselves over to sensuality. That practice of becoming callous to sin is part of this concept.

But then there's interpersonal hurt. That's the hurt that happens in our relationships. Now, here's the thing. Secondary consequences only come into your life when it's found out by people. But even if nobody else knows, no one else in my life knows about this sin, maybe it's a thought pattern, maybe it's an attitude.

If nobody else ever knows about it, the primary consequences happen every single time without fail. That means that if I have a lust problem and I am addicted to pornography and my wife doesn't know about it, my relationship with my wife cannot help but be hurt.

It cannot help but be affected by that sin issue in my life. And sometimes people can't put their fingers on it. They don't know what it is, but it's there. And it's definitely having an effect on my relationship.

And the last one is to stay with the parallelism of personal hurt, interpersonal hurt, I went with divine hurt. When I'm explaining this to children, I'll talk about how our sin hurts. It hurts us, it hurts others, and it hurts God.

To be clear, we want to make certain that we understand this and our children understand it, that our sin doesn't hurt God in any tangible, physical way. We can't lose our salvation. Really what it's affecting isn't our relationship with the Lord so much as it's affecting our fellowship with him.