BOUNDARIES (Snapshot)
Boundaries are one of those things I did not really know much about for most of my life. I knew plenty about forgiveness. That is, I knew I had been taught that I was supposed to offer it unconditionally, and that I would potentially burn in hell if I refused to. Wasn’t the fear of burning eternally in the fiery furnace used to keep many of us silent? And to my shame, I never really questioned it. Not for a very long time anyway.
Too blunt? Probably. But why sugarcoat it? I’m a little too old to care much about the shock of admission or the scorn of those who decide that associating with me might now be beneath them. Honestly, these days I feel more disobedient not saying what I feel nudged to expose. You learn a lot about who is actually for you when you start telling the truth. But I’ll save that for another day.
Survival mode does something to your ability to question the system you are surviving inside of. When you are busy trying to keep the peace, preserve the relationship, forgive quickly enough, submit properly enough, extend enough grace, and make sure you are not the one disappointing God, there is not exactly a whole lot of oxygen left to ask whether any of what you have been taught is actually true.
There was an overlap there that I did not understand at the time. I knew about turning the other cheek, laying down my life, submitting, giving grace, loving my enemies, and of course, that good old Christian favourite, forgiving and forgetting. What I did not know much about was where “I” ended and everyone else began. And frankly, the idea that I was “allowed” to have boundaries seemed pretty far-fetched when measured against all the other bunkum I had been taught.
And I’ll say upfront that there is far more to be said about boundaries than I could reasonably squeeze into a Facebook post or even a website blog without all of us needing to pack a lunch. Boundaries touch autonomy, trust, forgiveness, reconciliation, access, consequences, responsibility, safety, and our understanding of what it actually means to love another person. So I am not attempting to exhaust the subject here. I am simply starting where I wish someone had started with me: bearing Christ’s image never required me to cease being a person.
I feel a little rise in blood pressure when I think about it now and can finally process how teaching people to distrust boundaries decimates a person’s autonomy, and how, in some systems, preserving someone else’s access appears to have been precisely the point. Somewhere along the way, Christianity managed to turn having no boundaries into a spiritual virtue and call it “Christlike.” Now I know better. Teaching people that holiness requires endless access, endless tolerance, endless forgiveness without consequence, and the surrender of personal autonomy is not the Gospel of Christ. It is a gospel that serves the person who benefits from having no boundaries placed around them. A gospel of “self.”
The problem is that Jesus had boundaries.
Lots of them.
What people think it means …
- Cutting people off.
- Being unforgiving.
- Holding a grudge.
- Punishing someone.
- Refusing reconciliation.
- Being selfish.
- Putting yourself first.
- Walking away instead of extending grace.
- Building walls around yourself.
- Refusing to love someone the way Christ commands us to love.
In unhealthy Christian environments, boundaries can even be treated as evidence that something is spiritually wrong with you. There is an almost automatic label of “bitter” attached the moment you create distance or step away from someone who repeatedly harms you. Surely, you must be unforgiving. Surely, if you had truly forgiven, you would stay close, remain available, keep the door open, and continue offering access as though forgiveness somehow requires you to keep volunteering for the same wound. There was a time when I actually believed that was true. Thankfully, I am no longer drowning quite so deeply in the ocean of gullibility. And what I am really praying for is that someone reading this, or anything else I write, comes up for air sooner than I did.
And heaven forbid you dare, even for a moment, to use the word discernment, or any of its relatives, in a way that interferes with someone else’s access to you. Suddenly you are “judgmental,” and we all know what the Bible says about judging others, right? Wrong.
There is even the audacity of others to peg you as “selfish” if you say no to some outlandish request or, frankly, any request you simply do not want to agree to. I have been called selfish before. Unfortunately, I have also given in to the pressure and done things I did not want to do because saying no somehow felt more dangerous than betraying my own instincts. I am willing to bet a whole lot of us have. We have been taught to associate goodness with availability, kindness with compliance, and love with saying yes. So when someone finally says, “Actually, no, I do not want to do that,” it can sound almost scandalous in environments where everyone has grown accustomed to access. I want you to sit with that for a minute, because there is something deeply wrong when another person’s disappointment feels more morally significant than our own right to say no.
One of my favourite rebrands of placing a boundary is when leaving an abusive situation or relationship gets renamed abandonment. Imagine that? Someone repeatedly lies to you, betrays you, manipulates you, violates your trust, ignores your boundaries, and continues doing the very things they know are causing you harm, and somehow, when you finally reach the point where you can no longer remain in it, you become the abandoner.
That is quite the sleight of hand. Among other things. Apparently, the person who repeatedly abandoned the safety, trust, honesty, and integrity of the relationship gets to remain comfortably seated while the person who finally walks out of the harm gets handed the label, as though leaving what was already being dismantled makes them the one who destroyed it.
This whole system of assigning moral failure to the person who finally responds to harm needs a serious overhaul. We have become far too comfortable scrutinising the boundary while barely glancing at the behaviour that made the boundary necessary. We ask why someone left before asking what made staying intolerable. We question why access was removed instead of why that access became unsafe. We accuse someone of abandonment while conveniently ignoring all the ways they were abandoned within the relationship long before they ever walked away.
This is where “Christianese” does some of its most dangerous work. It takes the person responding to harm and recasts them as the problem, while the behaviour that created the boundary quietly slips out of the frame.
And then there is “self-protection,” which somehow becomes “rebellion” the moment it interferes with someone else’s ability to harm you. That one is particularly clever. You can tolerate the behaviour, absorb the consequences, extend grace, forgive repeatedly, pray harder, explain yourself more gently, give another chance, and then another chance after that one, and somehow all of that still qualifies as Christian obedience. But the moment you finally say, “No, you cannot keep doing this to me,” suddenly we need to have a conversation about the condition of your heart.
Please, spare me.
This one lands right up there with, “If you responded a little nicer to the harm, perhaps you would be harmed less.” As though the real problem is not the behaviour causing the harm, but the wounded person’s failure to be harmed pleasantly enough. Perhaps if you were softer, quieter, less angry, more forgiving, more submissive, and considerably easier to hurt, the person harming you would finally discover the motivation to stop. Maybe it would just appear out of thin air in some miraculous aha moment where they suddenly grew a conscience, underwent a heart transplant, and realised that repeatedly harming another person was, in fact, harmful.
Wouldn’t that be convenient?
Unfortunately, people do not usually stop harmful behaviour because the person on the receiving end learns how to suffer more pleasantly. Sometimes the exact opposite happens. The absence of boundaries can become permission, teaching someone that there is no meaningful cost to continuing.
And to all those therapy rooms teaching that “secondary abuse” is the real abuse problem, where the wounded person’s anger, distress, or reaction to ongoing harm somehow becomes more concerning than the behaviour that produced it, I am fairly certain Jesus never taught us that the answer to someone else’s sin was to train the person being harmed to endure it more politely.
And then comes the particularly impressive bit of Christianese where remaining available to someone who continually harms you is elevated into Christlike love. Apparently the holier you are, the fewer boundaries you should need. That logic falls apart rather quickly once you actually examine the life of Christ.
If someone repeatedly lies to you, manipulates you, ignores what you have clearly asked for, speaks to you in ways that are harmful, or continues crossing lines they already know exist, your decision to create distance does not automatically mean you are bitter. It may simply mean you have finally stopped arguing with the reality of what is happening.
If you no longer hand someone the same level of access they once had, that does not necessarily mean you hate them. It may mean they have demonstrated that they cannot safely hold that access. And I just want to say that, at my ripe old age of 51, I have finally figured out something I really wish I had learned sooner: we are worth protecting. Who knew?
- If you say, “I am not willing to have this conversation while you are yelling at me,” that is not rebellion.
- If you say, “I forgive you, but I do not trust you,” that is not a contradiction.
- If you say, “I love you, but I cannot continue participating in this,” that is not a failure of grace.
And if you walk away from an environment that repeatedly requires you to become smaller, quieter, more compliant, more absorbent, and increasingly invisible just to keep everybody else comfortable, perhaps the spiritual failure belongs to the system that required your disappearance in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, we got very good at placing all the moral scrutiny on the person drawing the boundary while barely examining the behaviour that made the boundary necessary in the first place. That is a rather convenient arrangement for the person who benefits from having none. It’s another one of those “Trauma Taxes” we are made to pay without even realising the bill has been handed to us. I want to highlight those hidden charges and drag them into the light so the people carrying the cost can finally see exactly what they have been expected to absorb.
Somehow, by the time we are finished Christianese-ing all of that, the person being harmed is standing there without a single boundary left while everyone around them congratulates them on being “Christlike.”
Except that is not how Christ lived.
By Definition …
In modern English, a boundary is a limit that identifies where something begins and ends. In relationships, boundaries identify what belongs to me, what belongs to you, what I am responsible for, what I am not responsible for, and what access another person may have to my life.
Scripture does not give us one Hebrew or Greek word that neatly corresponds to our modern psychological use of the word boundary. Instead, we see many of the principles that inform healthy boundaries throughout Scripture in concepts such as personal responsibility, self-control, wisdom, discernment, stewardship, refusing participation in evil, and recognising that each person is responsible before God for their own choices.
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4:23
“Each one should carry their own load.” Galatians 6:5
That does not contradict Paul’s instruction only a few verses earlier to “carry each other’s burdens” in Galatians 6:2. There are burdens we are called to help one another carry, and there are responsibilities that still remain our own. Scripture makes room for both. Biblical love does not require the erasure of personhood.
The Biblical Framework …
Scripture repeatedly recognises that human beings are responsible for their own choices, their own conduct, and their own response to God. Throughout Scripture, we are taught to guard our hearts, exercise self-control, discern what is good, flee what Scripture identifies as evil or destructive, speak truth, confront wrongdoing, refuse participation in darkness, withdraw at times, and recognise when it is time to leave.
“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”
Ephesians 5:11
“Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”
1 Corinthians 15:33
A boundary, then, is not necessarily something we establish against another person. Very often it identifies what we will do in response to another person's choices. Boundaries are hardly foreign to Scripture. From the beginning, God gave humanity limits. In Eden, Adam and Eve were given tremendous freedom, but there was also a clear limit concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God did not remove their ability to choose. He told them what the limit was and what the consequence of crossing it would be.
A boundary does not erase another person’s freedom to choose. It simply makes clear what follows when that choice crosses a limit. We need to be able to identify the difference.
For example:
- You may choose to lie. I may choose not to remain in a conversation where I am being lied to.
- You may choose to rage. I may choose to leave the room.
- You may choose not to respect what I have clearly communicated. I may choose to change the access you have to me, or my children.
The boundary does not control your behaviour. It governs mine. And I have a right to govern what happens within the borders of my own life, regardless of what your entitlement may have taught you about your access to it. It’s important to understand that boundaries and control are not the same thing.
Control says: “You are not allowed to do this.” It attempts to dictate another person’s choices, behaviour, or autonomy.
A boundary says: “If you choose to do this, this is what I will do.” It recognises that you are free to make your choice, and I am equally free to decide what I will do in response to it.
One attempts to govern another person's autonomy. The other exercises our own. Your autonomy does not cancel mine.
Boundaries Protect Autonomy …
All I can say is, oh how I wish I had known about and understood boundaries as a young woman. I can think of more than a few situations that would have ended very differently had I understood that I was allowed to say no, allowed to leave, allowed to change someone’s access to me, and, perhaps most importantly, allowed to trust what my own discernment was telling me.
Turns out, having a boundary was never the same thing as being difficult. I’ve come to realise that difficult is often simply the word used when someone stops being conveniently compliant. This is where boundaries became far more significant to me than simply learning how to say no. For much of my life, I did not really understand that I could have a voice in what happened to me, that someone else’s expectations did not automatically become my obligations, or that protecting my own autonomy was not somehow an act of selfishness or rebellion.
The forgive-and-forget policy I had absorbed through the Church overrode my boundaries, and when my boundaries were overridden, so was my autonomy. That is a much bigger problem than I understood at the time. In fact, I personally believe it is one of the ways parts of the Church have created shelter for abuse and allowed it to continue. And there I go opening another can of worms. Another topic for another day.
If I believed forgiveness meant continued access, then someone else’s wrongdoing could create an obligation for me. If I believed grace meant absorbing repeated harm, then another person’s choices determined what I had to tolerate. And if I believed submission meant surrendering my own discernment, then someone else effectively became the decision-maker over what happened to me.
And if I believed God Himself had created me in a second position because I was a woman, then who was I to speak against it? If God ordained it, surely resisting it meant resisting God. That belief did not merely affect my boundaries. It overrode my autonomy. Eventually, there was very little of me left that breathed outside of survival mode. I cannot begin to explain the harm this kind of theology has done to God’s daughters, convincing women that disappearing inside someone else’s authority was somehow what faithfulness looked like.
Perhaps the Church needs to take some accountability for the harm produced by teachings like these. When we teach people that holiness requires them to surrender their God-given agency, silence their discernment, and remain accessible in the name of grace, we should not be surprised when harmful people discover just how useful that theology is to them.
Open the doors wide enough, remove the locks, shame anyone who tries to close them, and then please do not act shocked when harmful people walk right in. And yes, they do. Perpetrators are not stupid. They notice where the doors are open, where accountability is weak, and where the theology itself can be used as cover.
Let’s not become so “grace-driven” that we become naïve about what this kind of teaching actually produces. When a husband already carries a sense of entitlement to his wife, teaching her that submission means compliance, forgiveness means continued access, and grace means enduring repeated harm does not correct that entitlement. It can actually reinforce it.
And then we carry the same framework straight into counselling rooms, where the person being harmed is encouraged to soften their response, forgive more quickly, communicate more gently, or remain committed to reconciliation while the theological foundation that helped make the harm possible is barely questioned. In many cases, that foundation was laid in the Church long before anyone ever sat down with a counsellor.
Open your eyes, people.
That is the part I think the Church needs to stop pretending not to understand. This kind of teaching does not merely mishandle harm after it happens. It can lay the foundation for it. It teaches the person being harmed to doubt their own instincts, silence their own objections, surrender their autonomy, keep the peace, forgive faster, stay longer, and keep granting access. Meanwhile, the person causing the harm learns that the theology of the system around them can help shield them from consequences.
Then, when the harmed person finally says, “Enough,” we suddenly become deeply concerned about their heart posture, their forgiveness, their submission, their tone, their anger, their willingness to reconcile quickly, and whether they are extending enough grace. Where was all that theological urgency while the harm was happening?
At some point, the Church has to ask itself what its actual boundary policy is when it comes to harmful people and harmful behaviour. Are we teaching people how to recognise harm, name it, confront it, expose it, and remove themselves from it when necessary? Or are we teaching them how to endure it more quietly while protecting the reputation, comfort, marriage, ministry, family system, or leadership structure surrounding the person causing it?
Don’t kid yourself, perpetrators notice where the soft spots are. They notice where victims are expected to remain accessible, where consequences are weak, and where the system is more invested in preserving itself than protecting the person being harmed. And they most certainly notice when theology itself can be used as cover.
So if our theology consistently protects access for the person causing harm while questioning the faithfulness of the person trying to establish a boundary, we do not have a boundary problem.
We have a theology problem.
The Curious Thing About Jesus ...
Yes, Jesus commanded us to love everyone. But He never commanded us to give everyone access to us. When we pay attention to the way Jesus actually moved through relationships, we find something remarkably different from the endlessly accessible version of Christ we have sometimes preached.
Jesus withdrew. “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
Notice the word often. People needed Him. People wanted Him. Crowds were looking for Him. And Jesus still withdrew. Their desire for access did not create an entitlement to Him.
What can we learn from this? Perhaps most importantly, another person’s need does not automatically become our obligation. Jesus was capable of recognising the needs around Him without allowing those needs to dictate His every movement. He could love people deeply and still withdraw from them. He could be compassionate and still be unavailable. Saying, “I need to step away,” is not evidence that we have suddenly misplaced our Christianity.
We see something similar in Mark 1:35–38. “Everyone is looking for you!” His disciples told Him. Jesus still went somewhere else.
When an angry crowd attempted to throw Him from a cliff in Luke 4:28–30, Jesus did not stay behind to demonstrate forgiveness, repair the relationship, explain His position more carefully, or prove that He loved them. He walked through the crowd and went on His way. What does that tell us? At the very least, it tells us that removing ourselves from harm is not inherently unloving or ungodly. Jesus did not treat remaining physically present in a dangerous situation as evidence of superior holiness. He left.
When people rejected what His disciples brought, Jesus did not tell them to remain indefinitely, absorb the hostility, love harder, pray harder, become smaller, or keep returning until their boundaries disappeared. He told them to leave. So much for “never leave” being the measure of Christian faithfulness.
“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet” (Matthew 10:14).
Christianity has sometimes turned “never leave” into a virtue Jesus Himself did not teach. When the rich young ruler walked away in Mark 10, Jesus did not chase him down and negotiate the truth in order to preserve the relationship. Scripture specifically tells us that Jesus loved him, and yet He still allowed him to walk away. Loving someone does not require chasing them, changing the truth to keep them, or taking responsibility for a choice that belongs to them.
And then there is this: “But Jesus would not entrust himself to them...” (John 2:24).
That one reads like a slap in the face. Jesus loved people He did not entrust Himself to. Love and trust are not synonyms. Who knew?
Neither are forgiveness and access. Neither are grace and reconciliation. Neither are compassion and proximity.
And neither is Christianity an obligation to remain available to someone who repeatedly harms you.
Herod questioned Jesus at length in Luke 23:8–9. Jesus gave him no answer. Silence can be a boundary too.
Jesus loved without surrendering discernment, forgave without pretending evil was good, confronted wrongdoing without apologising for making people uncomfortable, withdrew when necessary, refused demands, and remained silent when He chose to remain silent. He walked away when walking away was appropriate, and He allowed other people to walk away too.
What Boundaries Look Like Today …
Boundaries shaped by biblical principles may look like saying no without writing a dissertation explaining why. That’s certainly a lesson I need to learn better. No explanation needed. Just, “that doesn’t work for me.”
- They may look like ending a conversation when someone becomes abusive.
- They may look like limiting someone's access when they have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with it.
- They may look like refusing to discuss something until the other person can do so respectfully.
- They may look like leaving an environment where harm continues.
- They may look like allowing another person to experience the consequences of their own choices instead of continually rescuing them.
- They may look like forgiving someone while recognising that trust has not been restored.
- They may look like accepting that reconciliation requires participation from more than one person.
Boundaries do not determine what another person is allowed to choose. They determine what we will participate in when they choose it.
What Boundaries Do Not Do …
Don’t believe the lie that boundaries automatically mean someone is unforgiving. They do not require hatred, erase compassion, control another person’s choices, or guarantee reconciliation. And for the love of Peter, they do not become unbiblical simply because someone dislikes the consequences of crossing them.
A boundary is also not revenge. “If you hurt me, I will hurt you back” is retaliation. “If you continue hurting me, I will remove myself from the place where you have access to hurt me” is a boundary. Those are not remotely the same thing. As in, not even in the same category.
In My Own Words …
Boundaries are the limits that protect the autonomy, responsibility, dignity, and stewardship God has given each of us. In the simplest of definitions, boundaries say, “I belong to God, but I am still responsible for the borders of my own life, and I have a voice in what stays and what goes.”
Personal boundaries are deeply connected to personal value. When you have been repeatedly harmed, manipulated, dismissed, or taught that everyone else’s needs matter more than your own, you can begin to lose sight of that value. And when you no longer believe you are worth protecting, boundaries tend to disappear right along with it. That, of course, makes a person remarkably easy to manipulate. And I’ll leave that one sitting right there for now.
Boundaries recognise that I am responsible for my choices before God, and you are responsible for yours.
Boundaries ask:
- What belongs to me to carry, and what belongs to someone else?
- What am I responsible for before God?
- What behaviour am I willing to participate in?
- What access has this relationship demonstrated it can safely hold?
- Am I calling fear “grace” because saying no makes me uncomfortable?
- Am I confusing forgiveness with restored trust?
- Am I surrendering my discernment because someone has convinced me that doing so is more Christlike?
- And does this relationship honour the person God created me to be, or require me to disappear in order to maintain it?
Boundaries do not say, “I do not love you.”
Sometimes they say, “I love you, but I will not participate in this.”
Sometimes, “I forgive you, but I do not trust you.”
Sometimes, “I want restoration, but I cannot manufacture repentance for you.”
And sometimes the boundary is simply, “No.”
Why It Matters …
When Christianity confuses love with unlimited access, forgiveness with reconciliation, grace with the absence of consequences, or submission with surrendered autonomy, boundaries begin to look sinful and boundary violations begin to look holy.
That inversion can do enormous harm. It has before, and it still does. People who believe they are not permitted to say no are extraordinarily vulnerable to people who believe they are entitled to hear yes.
Jesus did not model the kind of relationship where love required endless accessibility or where compassion meant surrendering Himself to everyone else’s demands. He loved people deeply, but He still exercised discernment about who had access to Him and when. His love never required the abandonment of wisdom, truth, purpose, or personal agency.
So perhaps the question is not: “Is setting this boundary Christlike?”
Perhaps the better question is: “Who taught us that being Christlike meant having none?”
That is really the question I would like us to ask. And when we answer it, we have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of what that answer may expose. If some of these ideas were handed to us through church culture, marriage teaching, leadership structures, counselling rooms, or theology that consistently privileged access over autonomy, then shrugging and moving on is no longer enough. We have to be willing to name what that teaching created, the harm it made easier, and the people it protected.
Jesus commanded us to love everyone. He never commanded us to give everyone access to us. If you leave this post with nothing else, understand the difference between those two.
-RJB
Boundaries are one of those things I did not really know much about for most of my life. I knew plenty about forgiveness. That is, I knew I had been taught that I was supposed to offer it unconditionally, and that I would potentially burn in hell if I refused to. Wasn’t the fear of burning eternally in the fiery furnace used to keep many of us silent? And to my shame, I never really questioned it. Not for a very long time anyway.
Too blunt? Probably. But why sugarcoat it? I’m a little too old to care much about the shock of admission or the scorn of those who decide that associating with me might now be beneath them. Honestly, these days I feel more disobedient not saying what I feel nudged to expose. You learn a lot about who is actually for you when you start telling the truth. But I’ll save that for another day.
Survival mode does something to your ability to question the system you are surviving inside of. When you are busy trying to keep the peace, preserve the relationship, forgive quickly enough, submit properly enough, extend enough grace, and make sure you are not the one disappointing God, there is not exactly a whole lot of oxygen left to ask whether any of what you have been taught is actually true.
There was an overlap there that I did not understand at the time. I knew about turning the other cheek, laying down my life, submitting, giving grace, loving my enemies, and of course, that good old Christian favourite, forgiving and forgetting. What I did not know much about was where “I” ended and everyone else began. And frankly, the idea that I was “allowed” to have boundaries seemed pretty far-fetched when measured against all the other bunkum I had been taught.
And I’ll say upfront that there is far more to be said about boundaries than I could reasonably squeeze into a Facebook post or even a website blog without all of us needing to pack a lunch. Boundaries touch autonomy, trust, forgiveness, reconciliation, access, consequences, responsibility, safety, and our understanding of what it actually means to love another person. So I am not attempting to exhaust the subject here. I am simply starting where I wish someone had started with me: bearing Christ’s image never required me to cease being a person.
I feel a little rise in blood pressure when I think about it now and can finally process how teaching people to distrust boundaries decimates a person’s autonomy, and how, in some systems, preserving someone else’s access appears to have been precisely the point. Somewhere along the way, Christianity managed to turn having no boundaries into a spiritual virtue and call it “Christlike.” Now I know better. Teaching people that holiness requires endless access, endless tolerance, endless forgiveness without consequence, and the surrender of personal autonomy is not the Gospel of Christ. It is a gospel that serves the person who benefits from having no boundaries placed around them. A gospel of “self.”
The problem is that Jesus had boundaries.
Lots of them.
What people think it means …
- Cutting people off.
- Being unforgiving.
- Holding a grudge.
- Punishing someone.
- Refusing reconciliation.
- Being selfish.
- Putting yourself first.
- Walking away instead of extending grace.
- Building walls around yourself.
- Refusing to love someone the way Christ commands us to love.
In unhealthy Christian environments, boundaries can even be treated as evidence that something is spiritually wrong with you. There is an almost automatic label of “bitter” attached the moment you create distance or step away from someone who repeatedly harms you. Surely, you must be unforgiving. Surely, if you had truly forgiven, you would stay close, remain available, keep the door open, and continue offering access as though forgiveness somehow requires you to keep volunteering for the same wound. There was a time when I actually believed that was true. Thankfully, I am no longer drowning quite so deeply in the ocean of gullibility. And what I am really praying for is that someone reading this, or anything else I write, comes up for air sooner than I did.
And heaven forbid you dare, even for a moment, to use the word discernment, or any of its relatives, in a way that interferes with someone else’s access to you. Suddenly you are “judgmental,” and we all know what the Bible says about judging others, right? Wrong.
There is even the audacity of others to peg you as “selfish” if you say no to some outlandish request or, frankly, any request you simply do not want to agree to. I have been called selfish before. Unfortunately, I have also given in to the pressure and done things I did not want to do because saying no somehow felt more dangerous than betraying my own instincts. I am willing to bet a whole lot of us have. We have been taught to associate goodness with availability, kindness with compliance, and love with saying yes. So when someone finally says, “Actually, no, I do not want to do that,” it can sound almost scandalous in environments where everyone has grown accustomed to access. I want you to sit with that for a minute, because there is something deeply wrong when another person’s disappointment feels more morally significant than our own right to say no.
One of my favourite rebrands of placing a boundary is when leaving an abusive situation or relationship gets renamed abandonment. Imagine that? Someone repeatedly lies to you, betrays you, manipulates you, violates your trust, ignores your boundaries, and continues doing the very things they know are causing you harm, and somehow, when you finally reach the point where you can no longer remain in it, you become the abandoner.
That is quite the sleight of hand. Among other things. Apparently, the person who repeatedly abandoned the safety, trust, honesty, and integrity of the relationship gets to remain comfortably seated while the person who finally walks out of the harm gets handed the label, as though leaving what was already being dismantled makes them the one who destroyed it.
This whole system of assigning moral failure to the person who finally responds to harm needs a serious overhaul. We have become far too comfortable scrutinising the boundary while barely glancing at the behaviour that made the boundary necessary. We ask why someone left before asking what made staying intolerable. We question why access was removed instead of why that access became unsafe. We accuse someone of abandonment while conveniently ignoring all the ways they were abandoned within the relationship long before they ever walked away.
This is where “Christianese” does some of its most dangerous work. It takes the person responding to harm and recasts them as the problem, while the behaviour that created the boundary quietly slips out of the frame.
And then there is “self-protection,” which somehow becomes “rebellion” the moment it interferes with someone else’s ability to harm you. That one is particularly clever. You can tolerate the behaviour, absorb the consequences, extend grace, forgive repeatedly, pray harder, explain yourself more gently, give another chance, and then another chance after that one, and somehow all of that still qualifies as Christian obedience. But the moment you finally say, “No, you cannot keep doing this to me,” suddenly we need to have a conversation about the condition of your heart.
Please, spare me.
This one lands right up there with, “If you responded a little nicer to the harm, perhaps you would be harmed less.” As though the real problem is not the behaviour causing the harm, but the wounded person’s failure to be harmed pleasantly enough. Perhaps if you were softer, quieter, less angry, more forgiving, more submissive, and considerably easier to hurt, the person harming you would finally discover the motivation to stop. Maybe it would just appear out of thin air in some miraculous aha moment where they suddenly grew a conscience, underwent a heart transplant, and realised that repeatedly harming another person was, in fact, harmful.
Wouldn’t that be convenient?
Unfortunately, people do not usually stop harmful behaviour because the person on the receiving end learns how to suffer more pleasantly. Sometimes the exact opposite happens. The absence of boundaries can become permission, teaching someone that there is no meaningful cost to continuing.
And to all those therapy rooms teaching that “secondary abuse” is the real abuse problem, where the wounded person’s anger, distress, or reaction to ongoing harm somehow becomes more concerning than the behaviour that produced it, I am fairly certain Jesus never taught us that the answer to someone else’s sin was to train the person being harmed to endure it more politely.
And then comes the particularly impressive bit of Christianese where remaining available to someone who continually harms you is elevated into Christlike love. Apparently the holier you are, the fewer boundaries you should need. That logic falls apart rather quickly once you actually examine the life of Christ.
If someone repeatedly lies to you, manipulates you, ignores what you have clearly asked for, speaks to you in ways that are harmful, or continues crossing lines they already know exist, your decision to create distance does not automatically mean you are bitter. It may simply mean you have finally stopped arguing with the reality of what is happening.
If you no longer hand someone the same level of access they once had, that does not necessarily mean you hate them. It may mean they have demonstrated that they cannot safely hold that access. And I just want to say that, at my ripe old age of 51, I have finally figured out something I really wish I had learned sooner: we are worth protecting. Who knew?
- If you say, “I am not willing to have this conversation while you are yelling at me,” that is not rebellion.
- If you say, “I forgive you, but I do not trust you,” that is not a contradiction.
- If you say, “I love you, but I cannot continue participating in this,” that is not a failure of grace.
And if you walk away from an environment that repeatedly requires you to become smaller, quieter, more compliant, more absorbent, and increasingly invisible just to keep everybody else comfortable, perhaps the spiritual failure belongs to the system that required your disappearance in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, we got very good at placing all the moral scrutiny on the person drawing the boundary while barely examining the behaviour that made the boundary necessary in the first place. That is a rather convenient arrangement for the person who benefits from having none. It’s another one of those “Trauma Taxes” we are made to pay without even realising the bill has been handed to us. I want to highlight those hidden charges and drag them into the light so the people carrying the cost can finally see exactly what they have been expected to absorb.
Somehow, by the time we are finished Christianese-ing all of that, the person being harmed is standing there without a single boundary left while everyone around them congratulates them on being “Christlike.”
Except that is not how Christ lived.
By Definition …
In modern English, a boundary is a limit that identifies where something begins and ends. In relationships, boundaries identify what belongs to me, what belongs to you, what I am responsible for, what I am not responsible for, and what access another person may have to my life.
Scripture does not give us one Hebrew or Greek word that neatly corresponds to our modern psychological use of the word boundary. Instead, we see many of the principles that inform healthy boundaries throughout Scripture in concepts such as personal responsibility, self-control, wisdom, discernment, stewardship, refusing participation in evil, and recognising that each person is responsible before God for their own choices.
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4:23
“Each one should carry their own load.” Galatians 6:5
That does not contradict Paul’s instruction only a few verses earlier to “carry each other’s burdens” in Galatians 6:2. There are burdens we are called to help one another carry, and there are responsibilities that still remain our own. Scripture makes room for both. Biblical love does not require the erasure of personhood.
The Biblical Framework …
Scripture repeatedly recognises that human beings are responsible for their own choices, their own conduct, and their own response to God. Throughout Scripture, we are taught to guard our hearts, exercise self-control, discern what is good, flee what Scripture identifies as evil or destructive, speak truth, confront wrongdoing, refuse participation in darkness, withdraw at times, and recognise when it is time to leave.
“Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them.”
Ephesians 5:11
“Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’”
1 Corinthians 15:33
A boundary, then, is not necessarily something we establish against another person. Very often it identifies what we will do in response to another person's choices. Boundaries are hardly foreign to Scripture. From the beginning, God gave humanity limits. In Eden, Adam and Eve were given tremendous freedom, but there was also a clear limit concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God did not remove their ability to choose. He told them what the limit was and what the consequence of crossing it would be.
A boundary does not erase another person’s freedom to choose. It simply makes clear what follows when that choice crosses a limit. We need to be able to identify the difference.
For example:
- You may choose to lie. I may choose not to remain in a conversation where I am being lied to.
- You may choose to rage. I may choose to leave the room.
- You may choose not to respect what I have clearly communicated. I may choose to change the access you have to me, or my children.
The boundary does not control your behaviour. It governs mine. And I have a right to govern what happens within the borders of my own life, regardless of what your entitlement may have taught you about your access to it. It’s important to understand that boundaries and control are not the same thing.
Control says: “You are not allowed to do this.” It attempts to dictate another person’s choices, behaviour, or autonomy.
A boundary says: “If you choose to do this, this is what I will do.” It recognises that you are free to make your choice, and I am equally free to decide what I will do in response to it.
One attempts to govern another person's autonomy. The other exercises our own. Your autonomy does not cancel mine.
Boundaries Protect Autonomy …
All I can say is, oh how I wish I had known about and understood boundaries as a young woman. I can think of more than a few situations that would have ended very differently had I understood that I was allowed to say no, allowed to leave, allowed to change someone’s access to me, and, perhaps most importantly, allowed to trust what my own discernment was telling me.
Turns out, having a boundary was never the same thing as being difficult. I’ve come to realise that difficult is often simply the word used when someone stops being conveniently compliant. This is where boundaries became far more significant to me than simply learning how to say no. For much of my life, I did not really understand that I could have a voice in what happened to me, that someone else’s expectations did not automatically become my obligations, or that protecting my own autonomy was not somehow an act of selfishness or rebellion.
The forgive-and-forget policy I had absorbed through the Church overrode my boundaries, and when my boundaries were overridden, so was my autonomy. That is a much bigger problem than I understood at the time. In fact, I personally believe it is one of the ways parts of the Church have created shelter for abuse and allowed it to continue. And there I go opening another can of worms. Another topic for another day.
If I believed forgiveness meant continued access, then someone else’s wrongdoing could create an obligation for me. If I believed grace meant absorbing repeated harm, then another person’s choices determined what I had to tolerate. And if I believed submission meant surrendering my own discernment, then someone else effectively became the decision-maker over what happened to me.
And if I believed God Himself had created me in a second position because I was a woman, then who was I to speak against it? If God ordained it, surely resisting it meant resisting God. That belief did not merely affect my boundaries. It overrode my autonomy. Eventually, there was very little of me left that breathed outside of survival mode. I cannot begin to explain the harm this kind of theology has done to God’s daughters, convincing women that disappearing inside someone else’s authority was somehow what faithfulness looked like.
Perhaps the Church needs to take some accountability for the harm produced by teachings like these. When we teach people that holiness requires them to surrender their God-given agency, silence their discernment, and remain accessible in the name of grace, we should not be surprised when harmful people discover just how useful that theology is to them.
Open the doors wide enough, remove the locks, shame anyone who tries to close them, and then please do not act shocked when harmful people walk right in. And yes, they do. Perpetrators are not stupid. They notice where the doors are open, where accountability is weak, and where the theology itself can be used as cover.
Let’s not become so “grace-driven” that we become naïve about what this kind of teaching actually produces. When a husband already carries a sense of entitlement to his wife, teaching her that submission means compliance, forgiveness means continued access, and grace means enduring repeated harm does not correct that entitlement. It can actually reinforce it.
And then we carry the same framework straight into counselling rooms, where the person being harmed is encouraged to soften their response, forgive more quickly, communicate more gently, or remain committed to reconciliation while the theological foundation that helped make the harm possible is barely questioned. In many cases, that foundation was laid in the Church long before anyone ever sat down with a counsellor.
Open your eyes, people.
That is the part I think the Church needs to stop pretending not to understand. This kind of teaching does not merely mishandle harm after it happens. It can lay the foundation for it. It teaches the person being harmed to doubt their own instincts, silence their own objections, surrender their autonomy, keep the peace, forgive faster, stay longer, and keep granting access. Meanwhile, the person causing the harm learns that the theology of the system around them can help shield them from consequences.
Then, when the harmed person finally says, “Enough,” we suddenly become deeply concerned about their heart posture, their forgiveness, their submission, their tone, their anger, their willingness to reconcile quickly, and whether they are extending enough grace. Where was all that theological urgency while the harm was happening?
At some point, the Church has to ask itself what its actual boundary policy is when it comes to harmful people and harmful behaviour. Are we teaching people how to recognise harm, name it, confront it, expose it, and remove themselves from it when necessary? Or are we teaching them how to endure it more quietly while protecting the reputation, comfort, marriage, ministry, family system, or leadership structure surrounding the person causing it?
Don’t kid yourself, perpetrators notice where the soft spots are. They notice where victims are expected to remain accessible, where consequences are weak, and where the system is more invested in preserving itself than protecting the person being harmed. And they most certainly notice when theology itself can be used as cover.
So if our theology consistently protects access for the person causing harm while questioning the faithfulness of the person trying to establish a boundary, we do not have a boundary problem.
We have a theology problem.
The Curious Thing About Jesus ...
Yes, Jesus commanded us to love everyone. But He never commanded us to give everyone access to us. When we pay attention to the way Jesus actually moved through relationships, we find something remarkably different from the endlessly accessible version of Christ we have sometimes preached.
Jesus withdrew. “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
Notice the word often. People needed Him. People wanted Him. Crowds were looking for Him. And Jesus still withdrew. Their desire for access did not create an entitlement to Him.
What can we learn from this? Perhaps most importantly, another person’s need does not automatically become our obligation. Jesus was capable of recognising the needs around Him without allowing those needs to dictate His every movement. He could love people deeply and still withdraw from them. He could be compassionate and still be unavailable. Saying, “I need to step away,” is not evidence that we have suddenly misplaced our Christianity.
We see something similar in Mark 1:35–38. “Everyone is looking for you!” His disciples told Him. Jesus still went somewhere else.
When an angry crowd attempted to throw Him from a cliff in Luke 4:28–30, Jesus did not stay behind to demonstrate forgiveness, repair the relationship, explain His position more carefully, or prove that He loved them. He walked through the crowd and went on His way. What does that tell us? At the very least, it tells us that removing ourselves from harm is not inherently unloving or ungodly. Jesus did not treat remaining physically present in a dangerous situation as evidence of superior holiness. He left.
When people rejected what His disciples brought, Jesus did not tell them to remain indefinitely, absorb the hostility, love harder, pray harder, become smaller, or keep returning until their boundaries disappeared. He told them to leave. So much for “never leave” being the measure of Christian faithfulness.
“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet” (Matthew 10:14).
Christianity has sometimes turned “never leave” into a virtue Jesus Himself did not teach. When the rich young ruler walked away in Mark 10, Jesus did not chase him down and negotiate the truth in order to preserve the relationship. Scripture specifically tells us that Jesus loved him, and yet He still allowed him to walk away. Loving someone does not require chasing them, changing the truth to keep them, or taking responsibility for a choice that belongs to them.
And then there is this: “But Jesus would not entrust himself to them...” (John 2:24).
That one reads like a slap in the face. Jesus loved people He did not entrust Himself to. Love and trust are not synonyms. Who knew?
Neither are forgiveness and access. Neither are grace and reconciliation. Neither are compassion and proximity.
And neither is Christianity an obligation to remain available to someone who repeatedly harms you.
Herod questioned Jesus at length in Luke 23:8–9. Jesus gave him no answer. Silence can be a boundary too.
Jesus loved without surrendering discernment, forgave without pretending evil was good, confronted wrongdoing without apologising for making people uncomfortable, withdrew when necessary, refused demands, and remained silent when He chose to remain silent. He walked away when walking away was appropriate, and He allowed other people to walk away too.
What Boundaries Look Like Today …
Boundaries shaped by biblical principles may look like saying no without writing a dissertation explaining why. That’s certainly a lesson I need to learn better. No explanation needed. Just, “that doesn’t work for me.”
- They may look like ending a conversation when someone becomes abusive.
- They may look like limiting someone's access when they have repeatedly demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with it.
- They may look like refusing to discuss something until the other person can do so respectfully.
- They may look like leaving an environment where harm continues.
- They may look like allowing another person to experience the consequences of their own choices instead of continually rescuing them.
- They may look like forgiving someone while recognising that trust has not been restored.
- They may look like accepting that reconciliation requires participation from more than one person.
Boundaries do not determine what another person is allowed to choose. They determine what we will participate in when they choose it.
What Boundaries Do Not Do …
Don’t believe the lie that boundaries automatically mean someone is unforgiving. They do not require hatred, erase compassion, control another person’s choices, or guarantee reconciliation. And for the love of Peter, they do not become unbiblical simply because someone dislikes the consequences of crossing them.
A boundary is also not revenge. “If you hurt me, I will hurt you back” is retaliation. “If you continue hurting me, I will remove myself from the place where you have access to hurt me” is a boundary. Those are not remotely the same thing. As in, not even in the same category.
In My Own Words …
Boundaries are the limits that protect the autonomy, responsibility, dignity, and stewardship God has given each of us. In the simplest of definitions, boundaries say, “I belong to God, but I am still responsible for the borders of my own life, and I have a voice in what stays and what goes.”
Personal boundaries are deeply connected to personal value. When you have been repeatedly harmed, manipulated, dismissed, or taught that everyone else’s needs matter more than your own, you can begin to lose sight of that value. And when you no longer believe you are worth protecting, boundaries tend to disappear right along with it. That, of course, makes a person remarkably easy to manipulate. And I’ll leave that one sitting right there for now.
Boundaries recognise that I am responsible for my choices before God, and you are responsible for yours.
Boundaries ask:
- What belongs to me to carry, and what belongs to someone else?
- What am I responsible for before God?
- What behaviour am I willing to participate in?
- What access has this relationship demonstrated it can safely hold?
- Am I calling fear “grace” because saying no makes me uncomfortable?
- Am I confusing forgiveness with restored trust?
- Am I surrendering my discernment because someone has convinced me that doing so is more Christlike?
- And does this relationship honour the person God created me to be, or require me to disappear in order to maintain it?
Boundaries do not say, “I do not love you.”
Sometimes they say, “I love you, but I will not participate in this.”
Sometimes, “I forgive you, but I do not trust you.”
Sometimes, “I want restoration, but I cannot manufacture repentance for you.”
And sometimes the boundary is simply, “No.”
Why It Matters …
When Christianity confuses love with unlimited access, forgiveness with reconciliation, grace with the absence of consequences, or submission with surrendered autonomy, boundaries begin to look sinful and boundary violations begin to look holy.
That inversion can do enormous harm. It has before, and it still does. People who believe they are not permitted to say no are extraordinarily vulnerable to people who believe they are entitled to hear yes.
Jesus did not model the kind of relationship where love required endless accessibility or where compassion meant surrendering Himself to everyone else’s demands. He loved people deeply, but He still exercised discernment about who had access to Him and when. His love never required the abandonment of wisdom, truth, purpose, or personal agency.
So perhaps the question is not: “Is setting this boundary Christlike?”
Perhaps the better question is: “Who taught us that being Christlike meant having none?”
That is really the question I would like us to ask. And when we answer it, we have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of what that answer may expose. If some of these ideas were handed to us through church culture, marriage teaching, leadership structures, counselling rooms, or theology that consistently privileged access over autonomy, then shrugging and moving on is no longer enough. We have to be willing to name what that teaching created, the harm it made easier, and the people it protected.
Jesus commanded us to love everyone. He never commanded us to give everyone access to us. If you leave this post with nothing else, understand the difference between those two.
-RJB