I wonder – who’s the most difficult person in your life right now?  Chances are you can picture their face.  Well I’d like to spend some time with you chatting about the number one most difficult person in your life.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but there’s one thing about other people, they’re everywhere, you just can’t get away from them! Sure we can have a break, bit of quiet time, read a book, have a cup of coffee, but for most of us most of the time we have to spend with other people. At home with our families, at work with our bosses or colleagues or staff, socially with friends and acquaintances, and some of those people, let’s face it; they’re difficult to deal with.

Sometimes they’re rude or hurtful, sometimes they ignore us or disappoint us, sometimes they abuse us. Dealing with difficult people is one of the most important skills that we all need because it turns out our whole quality of life can be affected by how we deal with difficult people. So how do we deal with difficult people?

It’s true isn’t it; difficult people are there everywhere you turn? And they upset our lives, we don’t need a lot of them, just one in one part of our life will do it for us. Just recently Jacqui and I moved to a new house which is a very old house, it’s an old terrace and it needs a little bit of doing up and we started with the bathroom. The bathroom was sort of grotty and old, so we thought, “let’s do it up!” Now let me tell you this is no huge bathroom, it’s about 2 metres by 2 metres, it’s the second smallest room in the house. And to do it they had to rip all the tiles off the wall and the concrete and cut into the concrete wall and pull the concrete up from the floor.

They had to use a jack hammer and a diamond tip saw. And the noise and the concrete dust for three days went into every corner of the house; you couldn’t get away from it. I am certain that a hundred percent of the surfaces in our house had concrete dust; you know that really fine awful dust. Now they put some blue plastic up to try and keep it down but it doesn’t matter how much they tried the disruption and the impact of their work in this tiny little room effected the whole house and I’m sure it effected our neighbors as well, it went on for three days.

It’s like that I think with difficult people too. It maybe that we have a difficult person just in one part of our lives. Maybe just at work where there is friction with someone but it’s hard to leave it behind. We come home and it affects who we are, it affects what we do, it affects how we feel, it affects our relationship with our family. Or maybe at home there’s tension between husband and wife and so our teenage children go to school and they’ve got turmoil inside, they don’t know why but they just have. See difficult people in our lives are just like those builders renovating my bathroom, the impact goes right through our lives and it affects not only us but those who are close to us.

We’re going to spend some time together this week, looking at how to deal with those difficult people, we all have impacts in our lives from difficult relationships and I really believe that God wants us to be set free from the pain and the hurt that comes from dealing with difficult people. Let me ask you, who is the most difficult person you’ve ever met? Just close your eyes for a minute, just think and picture who that person might be. Chances are that stirs up all sorts of emotions, chances are you can see their faces; chances are you feel the hurt and the pain.

Now open your eyes and if I was with you right now I’d like to hold up a mirror and say, “have a look in this mirror, have a really good look because there is the most difficult person you’ll ever meet. Let me introduce you to you, because you are the most difficult person you’ll ever meet, and I am the most difficult person that I will ever meet.” Why is that? Because you can’t ever get away from you, and I can’t ever get away from me. We are with ourselves 24×7 for the rest of our lives.

And when we look at difficult people in our lives, actually it’s not so much that the people are difficult it’s the fact that the relationships are difficult. Takes two to tango doesn’t it? In any relationship it takes two to tango, and as much as we might want to pass all the blame onto the other person, fact is when it comes to difficult relationships we are often the biggest contributors through our own weaknesses, through our own mistakes, through the stupid things that we do.

Isn’t it funny how we will cut ourselves a whole bunch more slack than we cut the other person? True isn’t it, be honest? We forgive our own failures and faults and make allowances for our own weakness and laziness and stupidity and pride, we make allowances and forgive ourselves much more quickly than we will do for other people.

And Jesus comes along and says, “Look you know what the problem is? The problem is the way we see things. The problem is our perspective is distorted.” I’d like to read you what he said, it comes from Matthew’s gospel, first book in the New Testament, chapter 7, this is what Jesus said:

“Don’t judge other people and you won’t be judged, because with the judgment that you judge, you will be judged, and the measure that you give, you will be measured by. Why is it that you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye but you don’t notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbour, ‘come over here, let me take the speck out of your eye’ whilst there’s a log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then, then you’ll see clearly enough to take the speck out of your neighbours eye.”

Isn’t it funny how we just want to get judgemental we’re not self aware, we don’t see that we’ve got failures. “I don’t got failures, have you got failures? No, I haven’t got failures.” Come on! And we think we’re seeing clearly but we’re not really, we’re seeing through our own weakness and failures and insecurities and hurts and … Come on the list goes on.

We see the world through those things and Jesus is saying here, “you don’t notice but you’ve got a log in your eye, your perspective’s distorted, your insecurity is making you think this is a bad person, well its not the person at all its your insecurity. Your pride and your ambition is getting in the road of you really seeing this other person for who they are. Come on; first take the log out of your own eye.”

Do you like hypocrites? I don’t, none of us like hypocrites. Well let me tell you something, if we’re caring around a log in our own eye, as much as we might deny it, as much as we might say its not my fault, its not my fault, it’s not my fault, we’re being hypocrites! And then we have the hide to go to someone else and point out that they’ve got a speck in their eye when we’ve got a log in our own. That log is our own failures, our dishonesty, our self ambition, our laziness, our pride, our insecurity, and we want to blame it on the other guy.

First have the courage to say, “You know something, I heard that joker on the radio today, I’ve got a log in my eye, you know something it’s true, this particular thing in my life is distorting my view of other people.” And then have the courage and the determination and the humility to go to God and say, “you know something God I heard this guy talking about you and I’ve a log in my eye, I don’t know how to get rid of it.”

It’s when we get real with ourselves and stop blaming other people for everything that’s going on when we’re at least half of the problem. When we get real with ourselves the thing that I found is I don’t have what it takes to get the log out of my eye, the only thing I can do is admit it and in humility lay it down and go to God and say, “Jesus set me free.” And when we do that you know what happens? Eighty to ninety percent of what other people do doesn’t hurt us anymore, isn’t it amazing? Jesus wants to set us free. Jesus wants to give us a life. He’s real!

Dealing with difficult people is all about perspective and sometimes our perspective is distorted, and sometimes, we need A Different Perspective!

Every now and then you can get someone in your life who tries to dominate you – you know bully you and always get their own way. It’s tough. So – what do you do with those people?

One of the hardest things that we have to deal with in life is when other people try to dominate us, you know when they try to be the enforcers, have their way all the time. When it happens to a whole country we call that a dictatorship. Now sure we all live under some sort of authority, the authority of law for starters, the authority of our parents when we were growing up. There’s authority at work too.

That’s OK but what happens when people overstep those normal boundaries of authority and they try and dominate our lives. Sometimes it can result in emotional even physical abuse. Other times its just a sick feeling in our stomach because we know that when we go to work today we’re going to have to deal with THAT person again. How do we deal with the difficult people who try to dominate us?

Freedom is a funny thing, it’s not just about doing what I like because if we could each do just what we wanted to there’d be lawlessness, there’d be fear. In fact if we were all free in that sense, none of us would be free. It’s a kind of strange paradox isn’t it? Freedom actually involves constraints, it involves right and wrong. For us to be individuals in a society there have to be some boundaries and without those boundaries actually, we can’t be free otherwise one persons freedom becomes the next persons fear.

My liberty becomes your liability and that’s not freedom. When we get that out of balance then one person ends up dominating another. Even good things out of balance, freedom things out of balance, end up in that kind of win/lose situation. You end up with a power struggle, you end up with the domination of one individual by another individual.

For a good many years, for seventeen years, I worked as a consultant in the information technology industry and I probably went into a couple of hundred different organisations. And there were some organisations, companies and government departments that were ruled by fear. Where management was so intrusive that there was this unbalanced culture and no-one was happy. No-one enjoyed work because, some how, the right boundaries of authority had been over stepped and had become even more like a dictatorship.

That can even happen, let me say, when people take God’s love and turn it into a religion. Jesus discovered that, he was talking to some religious leaders, Pharisees. Now these Pharisees were a sect who followed religious law to the absolute letter, to the ‘enth’ degree. This is what he said to them; if you want to read it you can find it in Luke’s gospel, chapter 11, he said:

“You Pharisees, you’re in trouble. You give God a tenth of your spices from your gardens and mint and all that sort of stuff but you cheat people and you don’t love God. You should be fair and kind to others and still give a tenth to God. You Pharisee’s are in for some big trouble because you love the front seats in the Synagogues and you like to be treated with honour in the market place but boy are you in for trouble. You are like unmarked graves that people walk on without even knowing it.” A teacher of the Law of Moses spoke up and said, “Teacher, you said some cruel things about us.” And Jesus said, “You teachers are in for trouble, you load people down with heavy burdens but you won’t lift a finger to help them carry the loads.” 

I love that because the stereotype that a lot of us have about God is that God = religion and religion = rules and therefore God is a rule book. And here’s Jesus, and Jesus is saying to these people, “NO! NO! It’s not about that, it’s not about rules and burdens. God does not want to dominate you.” Now if anyone should dominate anyone, can I say this? If anyone should have the right to dominate anyone, God should have a right to dominate us but that’s not how he sets it up. He sets us up to be made in His image, he sets us up to be free and that freedom only means something within some constraints of goodness.

We know deep down what’s good and right, come on, we do, we might want to marginalise it, we may want to say that good is bad and bad is good, we might want to say its all grey and nothings really right and wrong. Deep down inside we know what’s right, we know what’s wrong. And as long as we live our lives in those ‘good’ boundaries we know what freedom is.

People, governments, religions, systems, companies, when they dominate and marginalise and belittle individuals; get this, Jesus screams out, “NO! We are not meant to be dominated in that way. God’s love is not meant to be turned into a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo by people called Pharisees who load people down by following rules and yet don’t give them goodness and mercy and love which is what God is all about.”

In fact it was that clash between God’s Son, Jesus and oppressive religion that ultimately got Jesus crucified. He threatened these religious leaders so much they conspired against Him and had Him nailed to a cross. That’s how big the conflict is between freedom and domination. That’s what God thinks about that conflict, He thinks enough about it to let His Son Jesus be nailed to a cross in the middle of it all. Its pretty sobering stuff, God does not mean us to be dominated in that way.

Well, what can we do? For me, the only thing that I can do is get closer to this Jesus. Back in the first book of the Bible, Genesis chapter 1, verse 26, it tells us, “We are made in the image of God.” Psalm 139, verse 14 says:

We are fearfully and wonderfully made.

It was God who knitted us together in our mothers womb. When we look at who we are through Gods eyes, when God looks at us, He’s captivated. God is delighted, God is just overflowing with joy and love when He looks at you and He looks at me. When we get close to that, when we sidle up to that, when that becomes the foundation of our lives then His perfect love casts out all that fear because domination is about power and fear, right?

If someone wants to dominate me whether at home or at work or however they want to do it, they rule by fear and it’s that fear that enslaves us. As we get closer to Jesus, as we really get to know Him it’s where God speaks His love and His grace into our hearts. That perfect love of His casts that fear out, it breaks the power of someone’s domination over our lives.

It may not change the other persons behaviour, it may not change the way that the other person thinks or talks or acts but what it puts in our hearts is a quiet confidence, a sense of value coming from an intimacy with God that replaces the fear and when that happens they cease to dominate, they cease to control.

When that happens we get this quiet assurance and peace about who we are and from that position we can then learn to assert ourselves, we can then learn to say, “no.” We can then learn to be our own person. Nine times out of ten, the person who is trying to dominate us will discover they can’t do it anymore, that the fear is no longer ruling in our hearts so they move on. Isn’t that great?

You and I can’t always change the behaviour of other people, if you’re married to someone who dominates you, you can’t always change their behaviour but God can change you, God can change me. God can put His perfect love into our hearts, all we have to do is ask Him.
What about you? What are you going to do with the people who try to dominate you? We can fight them, we can argue with them, we can try and change them but nine times out of ten that won’t work.

Or we can get close to Jesus and let Him change us inside.

You get back to your desk after a long meeting – and everybody else – well, they’ve gone out for lunch together and left you behind.  It’s not easy being ignored, is it?

One of the most painful experiences we’ve all had is when other people ignore us. When we’re the last ones to be picked on a team at school, when our friends all go out for dinner but we’re not invited we feel like the ugly ducking, we feel so alone. We go through anger and resentment and then this sense of failure and worthlessness. They’re all out there having fun, I’m stuck at home, how dare they, I mean it’s not fair. Maybe they don’t like me. You know what I’m talking about. Being ignored hurts, it can hurt deeply, so deeply in fact that it can ruin a relationship but sometimes being ignored is a fact of life, sometimes we have to deal with it. So exactly how do we do that?

Being ignored is hard because it means being left out, means being left alone. Being ignored is a double sided coin because one side of the coin is the other people who are enjoying each others company and enjoying whatever they are doing, the ones that are leaving us out and on the other side is I’m left alone, forgotten and my side of the coin of being left alone and left out and forgotten is made so much worse by the fact that the other crowds out there enjoying themselves, you know what I mean.

Why does it happen? Why is it that sometimes people ignore us? Well sometimes it’s just circumstances, sometimes maybe you’re single and you’re home alone and your friends are married and they’re at home with their family. It’s just the way it is, married people go home to their families. Single people often go home to an empty house, I’ve been there, I know exactly what it’s like so sometimes we feel as though we are being ignored, we feel as though we’re being left out but it’s just the circumstances we’re in, no-one’s fault, just where we are.

The second thing is oversight. Sometimes the people at work go out for lunch and you happen to be at a meeting and you get back late and you don’t know where they’ve gone and no-one left you a note and it just happened. No-one meant it to happen it’s just the way that it happened, you just missed out somehow and we can get angry about that but well, you know, it just happened and sometimes it’s deliberate.

Sometimes people deliberately avoid us. You know when you go into a group of people and a person in that group who you see time and time again never eyeballs you, never looks at you, never talks to you, never engages in conversation with you and there’s almost like there’s an emotional ostrisization going on. That is a really hurtful thing.

Whatever the cause, they’re over there having fun and I’m over here alone and it hurts, being left out hurts. Can I encourage you, when that happens, to figure out the reason? Because if it’s just circumstances we were talking about before or if it’s just a simple oversight, it’s so easy for us to get hurt and injured and resentful for nothing. We read more into the situation than is there. Married people go home to there families, it’s what they do.

Sometimes people accidentally miss out on stuff, it’s what happens. We get all miffed and uppity and offended and angry and hurt and we question ourselves because we got left out, it’s just the way it was, no-one meant anything by it, it just happened that way. Sometimes we think that we’re being different or being the odd one out or being left behind, it’s like we’re lepers.

I remember when I was single, and on Sundays after Church, all the married couples used to go home maybe one couple had another couple over for lunch, somehow they didn’t quite engage with single people and I’d go home on Sunday to an empty house thinking, “Well you know, gee it would have been lovely to catch up with someone for lunch or this or that.” Well, married people want to go home with their families and have lunch on Sunday, they don’t always want someone else over there and we think, “we’re a leper.”

It’s ok to be alone, it’s ok to spend time by ourselves, it’s ok not always to be with other people. It doesn’t make us a leper, doesn’t make us any less, it’s ok and half the time we’re over here and we over rate the other sides experience and we’re sitting home alone thinking, “oh boy, I wish I had a family around me” or “I wish I could spend time with them” and the person, over there, in the family which is in a mess and falling apart is thinking. “boy I’d love to have some space. I’d love to be single for a while.”

It’s a crazy thing, we sit where we are, we look at the other person lot and think that their lot is much better than my lot, come on, lets get real. My lot is my lot; your lot is your lot.

The question is when it comes to being left out, to being ignored, where do we get out value from? Do we get our value from what other people think of us or do we get our value from who we are? Because if we get our value, our sense of who we are, from other people, wether they invited us to lunch or not, wether they included us in this or not, we can get a distorted sense of who we are.
People do get clicky; people do get to ignoring other people. They will disappoint us, they will hurt us. And if I derive my sense of value from other people it’s like going into one of those theme parks, those amusement parks with those distorted mirrors that they have that make you look really tall and skinny or really short and fat or all wobbly. That’s the self image we get of ourselves. If I look at other people from my self image I’m going to get a distorted self image.

God doesn’t call us to a self image, God calls us to a faith image, God calls us to look at the cross of Jesus Christ and say, “This is how much God loves me, this is what God thinks of me, this is my value, this is who I am. I know that by the price that He was prepared to pay on the cross.”

One of the most beautiful times of my life was when I was alone, I was desperately alone. And I often felt like I was being left out and ignored and it was in that space that I discovered who I was at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ. Some days the married people as I said, would go home after Church and I was single and I’d go home to a cold, empty house and I felt left behind but God was in that space, Jesus was in that space and it was in that space that I learnt to open this book called The Bible and read it and hear God speak to me.

It was in that space I learnt to experience the presence of God, it was in that space that God grew this quiet confidence in me and it was in that space I learned to enjoy Gods company and my own company. Can I tell you truthfully? I wouldn’t be here with you now if it wasn’t for the time that I spent in that space alone with Jesus discovering who I was in Him.

That’s what values about. Not what other people think, not what other people say, not wether other people invite us to lunch or they don’t invite us to lunch or wether they talk to us or don’t talk to us, who knows why they’re not talking to us? Maybe they’ve got some stupid thing going on in their lives that’s ruining their life and they’re seeing the world all distorted and they think we’re part of the problem. Who knows? That’s not where we get our value from.

Value is about looking at the cross with Jesus hanging on it and saying, “That’s what God thinks of me. That’s how much he’s prepared to pay for me.” When it comes to dealing with people who ignore me it’s really about having a different perspective.

One of the hardest things to deal with, is when someone’s polite to your face, but then goes behind your back and undermines you.  Boy, that hurts. Question is – what do you do about it?

Without a shadow of a doubt one of the finest pieces of television in the history of humanity would have to be the British comedy series, ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Yes Prime Minister’ and one of the finest lines from a Machiavellian head of the British Civil Service on that show, Sir Humphrey Appleby when he was talking to a more junior Civil Servant was this, he said, “Remember Bernard, you have to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back.”

That’s brilliant and funny and oh so true. We’ve all been stabbed in the back haven’t we? And mostly it’s by people who smile and appear to be our friend and then they go behind our backs and undermine us with rumours and whispers and freely sharing our failures. That hurts doesn’t it? So when that happens, how do we deal with it? I mean, how do we deal with the difficult people that undermine us?

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at the subject of dealing with difficult people because they’re everywhere, have you noticed? There are difficult people at work, sometimes at home, sometimes amongst our friends. So we’ve been looking at the subject of how do we deal with difficult people because just one bad relationship can really ruin our lives so, on Monday we looked at the most difficult person we’ll ever meet which is us and then we looked at people who try to dominate us and people who ignore us.

Now if you have missed any of those programs and you’re dealing with those sorts of people can I encourage you to hop on to our website, https://christianityworks.com/adp/ and you can listen to any of the programs again.

So it’s important to understand how we deal with these difficult people and today, today I’d like to look at people who undermine us, the ones you know, who smile to our faces and talk to us nicely and sweetly as though they’re our best friends and then in the next breath go behind our backs and share our failures openly and whispers and rumours and innuendo and make jokes and poke fun.

It’s one of the hardest of all to deal with isn’t it when you’re looking at difficult people? Because it’s dishonest, it’s two-faced, it’s hypocritical. It’s kind of like stealing and lying, I mean dishonesty is awful but what they’re stealing is our reputation, what they’re lying about is you and me and that can be really emotionally damaging. This one can really get to us.

Well, how do we handle that? Sometimes we go into the foetal position and let out a primeval scream, you know we get so angry and hurt and disillusioned about my reputation and how dare they that we just want to go and kill them and we might feel like doing that because we have deep hurt so we want to lash out but it’s not going to help is it? It’s not going to be constructive or positive as much as we might want to kill them. Nor is keeping it inside, nor is stowing it and letting it stew and brew and letting it eat away at us like a cancer. That doesn’t work either.

I think today God wants us to really sharpen our perspective, what do we do when someone goes behind our back and undermines us? Can I say to you? No matter how it plays on our insecurities, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how disillusioned we feel, that person has done the wrong thing. Either they’ve lied about us or they’ve made fun about us or maybe they’re openly shared our faults and failures rather than just covering for us when we couldn’t cover for ourselves. People love to do this, they love to go and say, “Do you know what Berni did? Oh you would never imagine. He gets on the radio and talks about all these good things and then he goes home, do you know what he did? He did this.”

Now, I’m not saying that we should be covering up our sin, I’m not saying we should be hiding stuff but it doesn’t help when other people go gossiping behind our backs. I can’t imagine what it must be like for celebrities when they have an argument between husband and wife and it’s on the front page of some tabloid, that it’s in the news, how do those marriages function? People need privacy to deal with that.

Let’s face it, each person is a package, I keep saying this, you may have heard me say this before and I’ll say it again, each person is a package. We’re made up of strengths and weaknesses, I am and you are and if I go around and talk to other people only about your weaknesses and not about your strengths, I am lying. I am giving a dishonest view of who you are, it’s unbalanced. So wether they lie outright or wether they have played on our weaknesses and joked of our failures, they’re both wrong. We might feel inadequate but let me say, they’ve done wrong.

Let me ask you, what stops us from murdering, from stealing, from raping? The answer is, the law does. It wouldn’t take long in a society without the rule of law for it to degrade into anarchy and robbery and fear. The law keeps us accountable, there’s a sense of justice in our community, we have freedom in right constraints and without those right constraints we don’t have freedom. In a sense there is a framework of accountability to one another through the law, a society demands that, a Church needs that. Any group of people have to have some form of accountability to keep us honest, to keep us decent and that’s the key word here. The person who has been out there talking behind our backs and sneering and muddying our names has to be held to account.

Jesus said, “If someone is wronged you, go and talk to them about it and if they don’t listen to you, take two other people and go and talk to them about it.”

Jesus wasn’t into sweeping things under the carpet, he said, “Go and talk to them, go and deal with the issue.” You can read about it in Matthews’s gospel, chapter 18, verse 15. The apostle Paul talked about ‘talking the truth in love’.

In other words, when that stuff happens, I really believe we need to confront it, we need to make the person accountable, in love, not with a pickaxe in one hand and a blow torch in the other, not with a chainsaw, that’s not going to do it, might make us feel better in the short term but it’s not going to work. We need to actually deal with that person and speak out of a place of security.

You and I are wonderful to God, God delights in you when He looks at you, you’re made in his image, He loves you and He sent his Son for you, you have the most incredible value and that’s the place from which you can go and talk to someone when they’re stabbing you in the back and if they have a problem with you, shouldn’t they do the same and if they disagree with you or they disagree with me, shouldn’t they come into our office or our home and sit down and speak to us alone, isn’t that the right thing to do? Of course it is, that’s what we’d like, isn’t it?

So even when they’re out there talking behind our backs, I truly believe that we shouldn’t try and fight them by doing wrong, we shouldn’t try and fight them by going out and undermining them behind their backs because then we stoop so low we become no better than them, we become thieves, we become dishonest. I know that we want to, when someone is undermining us, we want to do exactly the same back to them, we want to fight fire with fire.

It’s not the way Jesus did it, Jesus dealt with it in Love, Jesus dealt with people in Love and if we just go and sit down with that person at work or at Church or at home, wherever he is and say, “Listen, you know something? What you did was wrong. What you did hurt me. If you have a problem with me why don’t you come and see me? Why don’t you have the courage to come and talk to me directly?” Nine times out of ten that is going to make that dishonest person accountable. Nine times out of ten by confronting an issue like that with them, it might be painful at the time, there might be sparks and fireworks at the time but it’s going to make a difference.

We can only do that, we can ONLY do that from a position of quiet confidence of who we are and I only find that in my relationship with Jesus. Sometimes it won’t work but we’ve still done the right thing and people will respect that. It’s tough when people undermine us but Jesus does have an answer, to speak to them the truth in love.

Sometimes, it seems like … all people ever do is let you down.  We expect something of them – and yet, they disappoint.  Question is – how do you handle that sort of disappointment?

We all have high expectations of other people, we expect our mothers to be perfect mums, we expect our fathers to be perfect dads, our teachers to be perfect teachers, our friends to be perfect friends, our wives or husbands to be perfect wives or husbands, our kids to be; you get the picture right? We have high expectations of other people. What happens when they fall short of those expectations?

I mean, when our friends aren’t as friendly as they should be or our kids aren’t as well behaved and balanced and obedient as they should be. Other people disappoint us, in fact, I guarantee you that today won’t pass by without someone else in your life falling short of your expectations for them. People can be difficult can’t they? So what do we do when those difficult people disappoint us?

I’ve spent seventeen years as a consultant in the IT industry. Now consultants aren’t cheap. They have an hourly rate. Mine wasn’t really expensive and it wasn’t really cheap but I charged people quite a bit of money for doing what I did. And at the beginning, because of that, I tried to be an expert at everything. After all I was charging them quite a bit of money but the result was, well, no-ones an expert at everything, right? We can’t all be good at everything and so the clients were happy with the things I could do well and they were a bit touchy with the things that I couldn’t do so well. Why is that? Because they had wrong expectations.

And one of the things I learnt, as a consultant, was that it was really important for me to set limits, to set realistic expectations, with my clients, as to what I could do and what I couldn’t do. Berni’s good at these things but you know this thing over here, well, I need a specialist to do that because I can’t, that’s not my area of expertise. And once I had learnt to set those expectations correctly, consulting as a business was much easier because people accepted, kind of, that I couldn’t be good at everything. I just thought that I had to be good at everything because of the money I was charging them. That story, for me, serves to illustrate why we get disappointed with people sometimes because we expect them to be perfect.

Now, let’s get a revelation here today. Nobody else that walks this planet is going to be perfect – nobody. There’s only been one person in all history who has been perfect and that’s Jesus, the Son of God.

Some people are really good at detail, you know they like doing crosswords or they like doing stitching and sewing. Other people are ‘the big picture’ people and the detail drives them nuts. Some people are really relationship focused, other people are more ‘outcome’ focused. Some people are very good communicators, other people are very good doers. Some people are very good navigators, some people, come on husbands, are not good navigators. You know we are all different aren’t we? And praise God that we are because it would be a boring world if they all looked like you and me out there. So why is it then that we have these unrealistic expectations in our hearts of other people?

We set this standard of perfection. What’s perfection? Perfection is when they’re exactly like me, perfection is when they see the world the way I do, when they’re good at the stuff I’m good at, when they conform with what I want them to do, that’s perfection – they’re like me. Come on; and then we wonder why they fall short of our expectations and then we get all disappointed with them and it ruins our relationship.

We do some silly things sometimes don’t we? We have these expectations of people that they’re never going to measure up to. My wife is a wonderful woman You know, Jacqui is the most wonderful wife and man could ever ask for but she is never going to be able to help me navigate with a street directory, it’s just not her cup of tea. And she does things in our Ministry at Christianityworks that I could never do. She handles so much detail and when you call our toll free number or when you write to us, chances are Jacqui will probably handle that call, you talk to her. She does some wonderful things in those areas that I’m just not skilled or equipped to do.

I need her and she needs me, we’re a team, we’re good at different things and that’s great. But if I expect her to be like me, if I expect her to have the same outlook exactly and the same behaviour and exactly the same priorities, well I’m expecting something that she would never be. And if she expects that of me, she is expecting something of me that I can never be because, praise God, we’re two different people and that’s Gods plan. I really believe that the reason that we get disappointed with other people is we set patently unrealistic expectations of who they should be and what they should do. They are who they are, they see the world the way they see the world, they’re good at what they’re good at and they’re not good at what they’re not good at. That’s always been Gods plan.

Have a look at this; there was a story of two sisters, Mary and Martha that bumped into Jesus on his walk. It’s fascinating how they saw things differently and the different skills they had. Jesus and his disciples were on their way and He came to a village where there was a woman named Martha who opened her home to him and she had a sister called Mary who sat at Jesus’ feet listening to what he had to say but Martha, she was doing all the cooking and preparations and cleaning and stuff and she came to Jesus and said:

“Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her to help me.” And Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset over so many things but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her.

In other words, Martha was one of these people, like my wife Jacqui, who wants to love people by serving them by cooking and by doing things, there are people who are gifted that way, it’s their natural way of behaviour and those people can sometimes get really cranky and upset when everyone else isn’t like them and that’s what was going on here.

Mary, Mary was listening to Jesus, she knew there was something different about this guy, she thought, “wow, this guy’s in my home and I just want to sit and listen to what he is saying because what he is saying is amazing.” She wanted to hear his voice, she wanted to hear the story, she was a big picture person.

Martha, Martha was a detail person, Martha was a servant, that’s why she wanted to do that, that was her gifting and she got so cranky with her sister Mary because Mary wasn’t like her and Jesus said, “whoa, whoa come on, we’re all different. Your sister Mary is choosing the right thing here. I’m not always going to be sitting here with you in your house for you to listen to.”

How silly is it for us to have wrong expectations of people, to have a standard of perfection that says you’ve got to be like me and to then get disappointed with the differences. We’re going to catch more flies with honey than vinegar. When we delight in peoples differences, when we celebrate their complimentary natures, that person would rise up to a relationship with us.

I have a cat called Doggy, great name for a cat, and she’s often squatting down on all fours and when I go to pat her she will always sit up, she will always rise up to my encouragement. We people are like that too, we rise up to encouragement and truly that will deal with 90% of the differences. When we start to see people for who they are and value them for who they are and get excited about what they’re good at, that we’re not good at, 90% of the disappointment goes away because 90% of the disappointment has to do with our wrong expectations of a standard of perfection that they can never live up to.

I’ll say it again, I say it many times, every person is a package with strengths and weaknesses. When we celebrate and leverage and value those strengths, when we understand and compensate and de-emphasis their weaknesses all of a sudden that relationship changes, all of a sudden we’re playing to peoples strengths. Isn’t that better, isn’t that smarter, what do you think? Lets have a look around at all the people in our lives who are different to us and think, “what expectations am I setting of this person? What are the unrealistic things that I’m expecting and is that maybe, just maybe the reason I keep getting disappointed with this person?”

So, come on, let’s look at people from a different perspective.