SETTING BOUNDARIES (PART 1)

Pastor Kunle Osunkunle 

(President, The Singles and Married Fellowship, The Fountain of Life Church, Lagos, Nigeria)

Friendship is like a plant having a slow growth. You don’t just stumble into it, it’s a covenant word, and people who have good marriages obviously succeeded in friendship as well as in courtship. You can be friendly to all; courteous to all, but you can’t be a friend to everybody. Friendship is an in-depth relationship, combining trust, support, communication, loyalty, understanding, empathy and intimacy.

When I say in-depth, I mean that it is detailed and thorough, deeply at great length and fully. The opposite of this is something that is done casually, sketchily, hastily, carelessly and usually at first sight.

Your emotions should not lead you into friendship. EMOTIONS are “E-MOTION”, they are moving, they keep changing and therefore, values (not emotions) should guide you when you are making friends. You should not manipulate people into friendships.

It is only when you have grown into a close friendship with someone that you can develop an intimate relationship with him/her; then you can consider such for marriage. A lot of people get into intimate friendships so fast that they keep breaking their relationships. And anytime you break a relationship, a part of you leaves, and is gone. A part of you moves out and as Pastor Bimbo had said, “If you’ve had like ten relationships, ten parts of you have gone.” If you had gone ahead to sleep with the person (or those people) while you were in a relationship with that person (or them), it becomes a soul tie that is so difficult to break.

This is the main reason I need to talk about setting boundaries here. Even in friendships, we have boundaries that are set. This is to ensure that you build friendships that are better positioned, friendships that will not hurt you, friendships that everybody knows what is expected. Because many do not set boundaries in their relationships, they had run into a lot of troubles.

Boundaries are necessary gates in a relationship that will enable people seeking opportunity to relate with you to know what is permissible or not permissible to you.

Setting boundaries is a necessary skill you need to develop. You can learn how to manage conflicts because it is also a skill, you can learn how to have good communication skill; it is a skill! Also, you can learn how to pray and do various things. These are skills. How to laugh together, how to tantalize yourselves, how to sweet sensationalize yourselves; whatever it is, you can learn. But if you do not learn how to build boundaries, you would run into serious troubles. And therefore, setting boundaries is very important in every form of relationship that you have.

In our society and culturally, boundaries are set normally by the laws that we have, so people can live in peace. You cannot just enter someone’s house anyhow, that’s why they put gates there. Even if it is not a big gate, there’s something that deters you first of all; there is a door! This is to assure a level of security. Therefore in society, we already have laws that govern how people would relate, as such; we have the Law courts as regulators. When people pass the boundaries they are not supposed to pass, you can go to the court to advocate your need. When we get into family relationships, boy-girl, and man- woman relationships, these boundaries are a little bit harder to get. They have more blurred lines and boundaries are not easily defined and are left to individual discretion to define. It is necessary for us to build boundaries as a means of self-security. Jesus said in Matthew 18:18, “Assuredly I say to you, whatever you bind on earth would be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth would be loosed in heaven.” Another translation says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you forbid and declare to be improper and unlawful on earth would be declared forbidden and would be declared to be improper and unlawful heaven.” (Amplified Version)

“…whatever you declare to be improper and unlawful…”, which means there are certain things you need to declare improper, else, whoever comes to deal or relate with you will think it is proper for him/her to do them to you. He/she may think it is lawful for me to do this to this person and therefore at the end of the day, sometimes when you get hurt when you are taken for granted or when you are used and abused, it is your fault because you never declared it is improper for them.

Building boundaries help you to protect yourself from getting hurt and enable people to take cautions in certain areas as they relate with you. Jesus said,”What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord Your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind, and the second is like it; Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Bible did not say, “Love your neighbor more then yourself,” which means there is an underlining assumption in that statement that you love yourself and know how to love yourself. That’s the reason why some people with hurt feelings inside them only respond to other people relating with them with hurts. It is not their fault. It is what they have that they would give. You cannot give what you don’t have.

The beginning of how to love yourself is, when you love God, He reveals yourself to you and you are able to love yourself because you love God and He loves you. When you love God the Bible says the love of God is shared abroad in your heart by His Spirit inside you. Romans 5:5. That love enables you to love yourself and to transfer that love to other people. The reason that we have so many people hurting who do not love themselves who are suffering from rejection is because they have actually rejected the love of Christ. When you accept the love of Christ, the love of Christ does not judge you, does not condemn you, but it reveals who you are and gives you the opportunity to change and move forward in life. It gives you the opportunity for a new beginning.

There is a love that is of the world but there is a love that is higher which transcends the love of the world, that is, the love of God. The Bible says, “For God so loved the world that He gave…” God became man because of us, died for us because man could not save himself, and therefore that is the love that comes into our hearts that enables us to love ourselves so that we can love other people. It is because you love your neighbor, because you love people that you set out boundaries for them, boundaries that they should not cross. Many people have left themselves opened. Some friends who should not pass your gate are in your bedroom.

I am not saying that you should build a wall so high, because the boundaries we are talking about here are not physical boundaries, they are boundaries of the mind, boundaries that you have also communicated to people that, “please do not step over this line.” Some people take it in the wrong direction, they’ve built such a high wall and nobody can get to them to relate with them. You’ve built boundaries to anybody and everybody that for a simple ‘hello’, you begin to suspect. Because of your past experiences. Maybe you should stop and think that the reason I was hurt in those days is because I did not set the right boundaries. Some people will tell you “I cannot trust a man because of what men have done to me; John did it, Joshua did it, Gabriel did it, Chukwudi did it, even Paul did it”, and you put the face of all those five men on the faces of all the men in the world. There are some changed men! And when you do that, what happens, is you begin to miss your miracles. Because there are some people on your path whom God have placed there to bless you, to honour you, to favour you; but, because you have closed yourself up you are like the red sea where everything enters and nothing goes out. You begin to stink and nothing can thrive or live inside you.

What I’m saying in a nutshell is that, don’t build such high walls in your life that nobody can reach you to relate with you, nobody can touch you, and nothing moves you anymore. The Bible says, “…there are some people their conscience has been seared with hot iron...” Don’t let situations that have happened in the past make you build such a high wall that nobody can reach you and touch your heart. Perhaps, when people give you a compliment, you begin to suspect - e.g. “You look good”…”Why did he say I look good?” But the boundaries I am talking about here are setting some small boundaries that people will not cross in order to hurt you. I am sure you’ve been in various relationships in lives, you’ve been friends and all that, and because someone said something, you felt hurt, you felt “why should he have said that?” It means that person has crossed the boundary. But you see, most people would not know that you are hurt if they do not know what you expect from that relationship. It is important to learn about setting healthy boundaries so that you can make decisions about what is and what isn’t permissible in all our relationships. The closer people get to you, the smaller the boundaries you create.

I wish to implore you to ensure you read the part 2 of this post...coming up here soon.

Also, feel free to post your questions, share relationship testimonies and prayer requests here or to our email address at  -

                              thesinglesfellowshiptfolc@gmail.com

Invite your friends and loved ones to read the posts here. It will help you in building a healthy relationship and a marriage that is heaven on earth.

Thank You and Happy New Year 2011

Wishing You a Complete Turn Around in you relationships, marriages and life's endeavours this year.

Share this

THE CONFIDENT SINGLES