While what
@Gregory Thompson has written is indeed correct, as Christians we are not called to be pushovers in the face of those who commit evil, including verbal negatives:
There are three ideas from this passage, and frankly the whole chapter of Ephesians 5, about how Christians should deal with negative people in word and deed. The first two ideas are distance and exposure.
1. Distance: For negative words, we are not to participate with people who engage in negative and slanderous language, and to remove all support from their negative behavior. As the scripture says above, “do not become partners with them”. This means that if a person who is negative is starving and in need, we give them food, in accordance with what
@Gregory Thompson has said, but we don’t give them watermelons to launch at the people they are condemning with their negativity. We don’t enter into business deals with them because their negative behavior would sabotage the business, and we don’t marry them because they will make our lives miserable for no good reason. We are called to be wise.
2. Exposure: We expose their negative personalities and hateful words to the world so other people know that person has a needlessly negative view of the world and not to trust everything they say. We also expose acts of evil that they commit secretly, possibly to the authorities. Paul’s writing in Ephesians is an echo of Christ’s teaching here:
Part of this is that we expose the fact that we are Christians to the watching world and we thus expose our desire to live as salt and light in a crooked and preverse generation. We do not go around hiding who we are or who anyone else is.
The goal behind these two strategies is to render their negativity an ineffective strategy. If you fight negativity with anger, that’s fighting negativity with more negativity and that plays into the hands of the negative person, who wants to get you acting like them and thus declare you no better than an unbeliever.
I do think an angry response is better than that of the mindless fool who allows themselves to be taken advantage of, but I have successfully employed the strategies above in my own life to dissolve negativity in the people around me and to encourage them to adopt a more loving approach toward myself and others.
The third strategy, however, is anger when the first two fail:
Again, Christians are not called to be fools and pushovers. Usually anger is used in concert with the exposure strategy in practice.
Sorry this was so long, but I’ve had to deal with a lot of negative people in my life. I can definitely say that my life has been better for having accepted the Gospel and learning Biblical truth about how to manage nasty individuals. I hope you find this encouraging.
