People often put on different faces to suit their audience. And when that happens, it can be quite tricky to know what’s really going on inside.  And that can lead to misunderstandings and conflict.

Faces are a funny thing. Have you ever thought about it? Most of what we know about a person comes from their face. The face includes 23 different surface landmarks and non-verbally, it’s the most expressive part of the human body. The face is every person’s visual trademark; our facial expressions are controlled by 53 different muscles in the head, face and neck.

In an instant, without thinking, we can smile, pout, frown, wink, let’s face it our face is the window to who we are, but sometimes people put on a face. We can get pretty good at hiding what’s really going on inside by pretending something on the outside that doesn’t match with the inside. So what you see isn’t what you get and when that happens, life gets a bit confusing. So what faces do we wear?

Its interesting when you think about it, the face, I mean its a physical thing, I see my face for a few minutes each morning when I look into the mirror, in fact for most of human kinds existence almost 99% of that time people have only been able to see their faces in water or in a reflection in something natural because of course mirrors are a very recent invention, to see ourselves with a clarity that we can see ourselves in the mirror today so most of the time, for most of human history, people have spent time looking at other peoples faces but not a lot of time looking at their own faces.

So the face is this physical thing and when we think of a person we tend to think of their face. If I say to you, “think about your Mum.” You’ll think about her face. “Think about your Dad.” You’ll think about his face. Think about this friend or that friend, your wife or your husband and immediately we picture their face.

It is truly each person’s visual trade mark but the face is also a term that we use for what a person says or does on the outside. We know that expression, “He’s two faced.” Which means he says one thing but does another, he presents this face to this person and another face to another person and the reason that that’s a problem is because, by and large, the face is supposed to mirror what’s going on in the heart.

So if we’re happy – we smile; if we’re sad – we cry; if we’re angry – we look cross; if we’re content we have this relaxed look on our face and by that, other people can look at our faces and they know what’s going on inside us. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, that’s the theory.

The face is the mirror to the heart, we want and we expect, what’s known in the computer industry as WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get because that way we can figure out people, we can look at their face and get an accurate picture of the territory of their hearts. We need some balance around that too of course, look at anger and aggression; some people that we know just flare up at the smallest thing.

I can think of one person that I know, as soon as he doesn’t like something, as soon as he’s uncomfortable, the face goes and you can see this whole contorted thing, most of us would like people like that to be a bit self controlled, “come on, chill out, relax. Hold on to it for a bit, calm down!” So we don’t want every expression happening on every face all the time.

You know that saying, “He wears his heart on his sleeve.” Well we can get pretty sick of people like that because they are always gushing their emotions out. So we do expect some balance but, on the whole, what we really hate is when people deliberately or even unknowingly put on a face that gives us the wrong impression about what’s happening in their hearts.

You know what I mean, maybe you work in a workplace and you go to a meeting and people are talking at the meeting and everything’s sweetness and light and afterwards, people talk about your or people talk about another person and you think, “that is so two faced.” It’s a hurtful thing to do, to wear a face or a mask for one person and then show something totally different to another person and talk behind their backs.

I have a counsellor friend and she talks about the fact that people come to her and they present with something that looks like a problem, that’s the outer problem, the face, the thing that they know and recognise but often the outer thing is really only a symptom of the real problem which goes much deeper.

So often our behaviour has a disconnect with our hearts. If we do that deliberately it’s deceptive, if I come to you and smile and tell you how wonderful you are and I go to another person and say, “Boy, that’s a turkey over there.” Well that’s deliberate, that’s deceptive and it’s wrong. A lot of people do that, a lot of Christians do that, it’s wrong, its a sin, its not what we’re meant to do.

People can unknowingly do that too and this week on ‘A Different Perspective’, over the next four days, we’re going to look at some of those different faces and masks that people put on. Why are we talking about this stuff? Because life is for living, life is for abundance isn’t it? We all get this one chance on this earth, one chance; it’s not a stage rehearsal. It’s live, its real and when we’re dealing with people, we often haven’t learned the skills that we need to have, not only to know that we should have a good life but how to have a good life and reading a persons heart and understanding sometimes that their face doesn’t present what their heart is feeling.

Its a really important life skill that we need to learn because if we don’t, we end up with mistaken identity, if we don’t understand sometimes that this persons face does not equal what’s in their heart, we end up with tension and aggression and misunderstanding and hurt and anger and ruin relationships, really important things for us to learn and understand.

Come on, what about your life? What about just this last week, this last 7 days, what tensions have you had? What arguments? What stresses? At home with husbands and wives and families and work, with a work colleague, who are the people that you’ve been struggling with just this last week?

We’re going to look at four faces over the next four days that people put on. The first one is the face of disapproval. It’s tough because we want people to approve of us and often what we get is a face of disapproval. How do we understand that? What does that say about you and me versus the other person who is being disapproving?

The face of confidence, some people are so confident, they seem to be so secure and yet often, an overconfidence hides a hurt, it hides something in their hearts. Some people we know get aggressive very easily. Why is that? What’s motivating that? How do we deal with the face of aggression? And lastly, the face of perfectionism, what’s that all about? That’s actually quite an insidious face that people put on and it’s very hurtful and very damaging.

So this week on ‘A Different Perspective’ we’re going to look at how the life skills and why to equip us to deal with people who put on faces that don’t match what’s going on in their hearts and when we know some of these things instead of reacting, we can understand them, we can accommodate them. That man I was talking about before earlier who was very reactive sort of face, I’ve known him for many years now and I’ve learned to love him, I’ve learned to say, “Ok, this is who this person is. I know he is going to react in a certain way but I can still benefit from his goodness and his wisdom.”

When we just react we miss out, it hurts but when you make sense of what’s going on, when we understand the other person, when we accommodate them, when we love them through this disconnect between their face and their heart, all of a sudden life changes.

Last week we looked at dealing with difficult people, this week, for the rest of the week on A Different Perspective, we will just have detailed look at some of these basic life skills of dealing with disapproval, with overconfidence, with aggression and with perfectionism. Let’s have a look at life, life from A Different Perspective.

We all want other people to approve of who we are and what we do, but sometimes they don’t.  And when that happens, it can really undermine your confidence and self-esteem.

One of the things that we all like is for other people to approve of what we do and who we are. We work hard at something and we want people to say, “Wow, yeah, that’s fantastic!” Like when our kids bring home the painting they did in the art class and they show mum and dad. They need our approval, it builds up their confidence, it’s a normal part of growing up. But in the big wide world out there it doesn’t always work that way.

We can do something that we think is really good and other people just frown or maybe a woman dresses up beautifully for her husband and he just says, “How much did that cost?” Disapproval can be disempowering, it kind of takes the wind out of our sails. People around us often put on the faces of disapproval and that’s something that we have to learn to deal with. So how do we deal with disapproval?

Last week, on A Different Perspective, we looked at what it would involve when dealing with difficult people, we all have difficult people in our lives and this week we’re going to go on and, I guess, do a little bit more detail and look at the faces that people sometimes put on. Our face should be a mirror to our heart, you know if we’re happy we smile, if we’re unhappy we cry, so the whole idea is that when we interact as people, I can look at your face or you can look at my face and we kind of know what’s going on inside of each other.

Sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t because dealing with something like disapproval, we focus on the face. You know when you’re doing something and you give something to someone and you see their reaction on their face you think, “oh no, they disapprove of that, they don’t like what I’ve done?” But really, in understanding this whole disapproval thing, we need to look at peoples hearts.

Before I began doing what I’m doing right now, I spent seventeen years of my life as a consultant in the Information Technology industry and probably worked with a couple of hundred client organisations, so thousands of people that I’ve worked with and interacted with and worked for and in consulting, typically, I would do a review of say how this organisation managed its information technology budget or department or strategy or whatever they were doing and that involved not just the technology but people and politics and sometimes, in fact often times, I had to deliver bad news.

I remember one very high profile organisation and I had to go to their CEO and say, “Look I’m sorry but your organisation is one of the very worse in managing information technology that I’ve ever come across in almost twenty years of consulting.” Now, surprise surprise, there’d be lots of furrowed brows, lots of concerned looks. Approval? Often there was anger and aggression and defensiveness.

I used to take it personally, I’d walk out of those meetings and think, “my goodness, I’ve failed. My goodness I’ve done something wrong. My goodness I’m just not good enough.” I couldn’t sleep and there was pressure because all of this disapproval I was taking as a reflection of my performance and what I was doing and not doing. That was early on but I learnt not to, I learnt to say, “What’s actually going on here and why am I feeling hurt?”

So, Berni has worked hard, Berni has delivered a report or delivered something and I’ve been working flat out and I deliver it to the client and the client gives me one of those disapproving responses, disapproving look and I look in the clients face, at this face of disapproval and what I see is a mirror which says, “Berni, you have failed.” And that’s a normal reaction when we encounter disapproval, what we normally understand it to mean is that somehow we are the ones that have failed.

So the other persons reactions become a measure of our performance or our success or who we are but actually, that reaction of disapproval is about two things, sure there is a component which is about my performance or your performance but there’s another part, another very, very big part and it’s what’s going on with that person in their circumstances, what the politics are, what their perception is. A lot of people’s behaviour, how they react and respond, depends on the situation.

If I go and deliver a consulting report which is threatening to a person, why should I expect approval? If this person feels they might lose their job, they might be demoted, they might not get their bonus or pay rise, why would I think I’d get a happy, smiling, gee that’s a good report response? Of course, the response that I get from them that disapproval may have more to do about them than it does about me.

It may have more to say about how they’re feeling than it has to say about my performance. And so, what I learnt is, I needed to look into peoples hearts, into peoples circumstances and understand if someone is feeling threatened, if someone is having a bad day, if someone’s not travelling well at home, if someone is just inheritantly insecure, all of those things impact on how they’re going to react to something. And when I see that face of disapproval on them it may well be that I’m encountering their behaviour in a particular situation rather than their reaction, especially to me. What’s going on for them? Because that bit of their reaction is not my fault, it’s not your fault.

If we are dealing with a loved one who is insecure and they react really badly towards something we’ve done and what we’ve done isn’t wrong it’s just coming out of their own security then we don’t own that problem. It’s not our fault. They’re not commenting on who we are. Maybe they think that we’ve failed, maybe they’re reacting to what we’ve done but you see, that situational behaviour is something that you and I can’t control and for us to feel blamed, for us to feel inadequate, for us to feel that we’ve failed is the wrong thing. We can become approval junkies and if we’re approval junkies, if we’re always looking for other peoples approval we will invariably be disappointed. If we are always trying to please imperfect people we’re going to have imperfect experiences.

The Apostle Paul had spent 10 to 12 years travelling around, in the first century, telling people about Jesus. Now this guy had huge opposition, riots, assassination plots. He’d been imprisoned, beatings, death row and he said this. He said, “Am I trying to win the approval of people? Am I trying to please people? If I was still trying to please them I wouldn’t be a servant of Jesus Christ.”

Paul figured it out, he said, “I can either be a people pleaser or a God pleaser and if I try and be a people pleaser, I’m going to be trying to please imperfect people, people who are sometimes wrong. I’m not going to run my life like that, I’m going to do what God wants me to do, I’m going to be a God pleaser.”

People are imperfect. God is perfect and as I said last week, if we try and measure our success, who we are, our value by looking at the faces of disappointed people, it’s like looking into one of those distorted mirrors you get at the fun parks, you know the theme parks. If we’re going to be people pleasers we will always see a distorted image of who we are and how we perform but if we become Christ pleasers, God pleasers, then we see ourselves in a crystal clear perfect image, the image of God.

Does that mean we shouldn’t try and please other people? No, of course not. It’s wonderful to do good to please other people but that’s not where we get our sense of worth. That face of disapproval that we see often has much more to do with that person and what they’re going through than it does about us. When we stop this whole ‘approval junkie guilt trip’ we stop judging our own worth through the mirror of other peoples failure and imperfection. Disapproval does not always mean we’ve failed; the question is: Are we going to be people pleasers or God pleasers?

Some people seem so confident in their own abilities – that, well, the rest of us just end up believing them.  Problem is, that that sort of confidence can have disastrous consequences.

Some people, well, some people seem to be so sure of themselves, they may not be perfect but they’re so sure that they are perfect, pretty soon the rest of us all believe them. I remember working with a man who was like that. Realistically his level of competency of what he was doing was about 3 or 4 out of 10 at best but he was a heck of a nice guy and he seemed so sure of himself that the rest of us all just went along with it.

We all kind of knew that ‘The emperor had no clothes’ but somehow his face of confidence carried us all along and, in fact, in that work situation it had disastrous consequences. Has that ever happened to you? Who are the people in your life who are incredibly confident and how do we deal with that face of confidence?

This week, on A Different Perspective, we’re taking a look at the faces that we wear. We all kind of put on some faces sometimes don’t we? Some people more than others. And the problem with wearing a different face is that it represents a disconnect between what’s happening in our hearts and what we’re presenting, on the outside, to other people and lets face it, in trying to understand other people and interact with other people we tend to look at their face and see their expression. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they angry? Are they cross? Are they threatened?

You know that face with its 53 different muscles that control facial expressions; that face is very important as that person’s trademark and as our mechanism of understanding of what’s happening inside that person. Now counsellors and psychologists often refer to the fact that when someone comes to see them, the problem with which they present is often just a symptom, the real underlying issue is somewhere deep inside, in their heart, in their soul.

And so when there’s a disconnect between the heart and the face, between what’s happening on the inside and what’s happening on the outside, between the inner person and the outer person, the one that we see and the one we don’t see, it becomes hard to understand what’s going on with that person. We know people who put on faces and we know that they hide the real person inside. If we rely on that outer face we can end up with the wrong image of that person. That’s the problem.

Yesterday we looked at the face of disapproval, we saw how often disapproval, when I do something or say something and someone else disapproves of me, often that disapproval has more to do with what’s going on inside that person than, in fact, what I’ve done or what I’ve said or who I am. Today we’re going to look at the face of confidence.

Who are the people in your life who seem supremely confident? You can see their faces right now; you can picture them right now. In one sense confidence is not a bad thing, it’s a good thing but there’s also a wrong sort of confidence. I remember, after the last Olympic Games, one of our swimmers who was very well known and got a lot of gold medals in the pool, I was walking through the centre of the city where I live and I looked up on the side of one of the really tall buildings, there was a photo of this man about four storeys high. This guy was larger than life and sometimes people try and pump themselves up to be larger than life, to impress other people and so often those people are really confident, you look at them and think, “boy this person really knows who they are and where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

Wow, I wish I was as confident as that person and as they try and pump themselves up to be larger than life we start feeling pretty small and puny. We start thinking, “Oh I’m not as good as that person, ooh, I don’t know as much as that person.” They kind of talk us into it, a bit like that photo of that swimmer, 3 or 4 storeys high up the side of that skyscraper. No-ones that big, no-ones that good in real life and then to sweep us up in that, they flatter us. “Wow if it wasn’t for you and me this place would fall apart.” And all of a sudden, that pumps our ego, “ooh, I’m as good as that person.” So ego 1 and ego 2 pump each other up and it’s a real deception.

Over confidence sweeps people along and it ends up in disaster. Over confidence often masks a very deep insecurity or failure inside that person’s heart. At the beginning of the program I was talking about a man who was like that, who I worked with. He was so confident in who he was and his language about himself was so upbeat, you know realistically he wasn’t a star performer at all but we all kind of believed the rhetoric. Later I discovered two things, firstly that he had some awful stuff happening in his personal life, full of lies and deceptions and just really awful stuff and secondly the guy, just mostly never delivered and this over confidence was a compensator, a cover up.

Firstly for the deception that was going on in his personal life and secondly for his inability to do a lot of things that were demanded of him and the people around him, me included, we were kind of swept along with this for a couple of years, we went, “Oh well, maybe he’s as good as he says he is.” And then it kind of ended up a real mess, this person who was so confident just didn’t deliver.

These days, do you know how I tell the difference? The people who are really good at what they do, the people who are really secure and who I can trust, they have like a humility about them, they recognise their own limitations, they’re happy to talk about their own failures when they’ve made mistakes and they hand the credit, the glory around. Those are the people who I trust and you know, mostly they’re the people who deliver in life too.

The second last book of the Bible, the book of Jude, talks about over confidence, it says, “These men are grumblers and faultfinders who follow their own evil desires. They boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage.” And I thought, “that’s exactly what this guy was like, he did grumble about other people, he was always finding fault with other people and he spent a lot of his time boasting about himself and then flattering me to make me think I was as good as him.” Boasting covers up their failures and mistakes. They grumble and fault find and pick with other people to make us feel small and then, when we’re feeling small, they flatter us and sweep us up into the deception.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself over and over again in our personal lives, in our working lives; maybe we’re part of a football club or a Church. The people who are supremely confident, who talk a lot about themselves and how good they are, to tell you the truth, I approach those people with a sense of wariness because I need to understand to what extent this over confidence is masking some deep hurt or failure or inadequacy inside or whether it’s really the real thing.

The Apostle Paul said, “if I’m going to boast in anything, I tell ya, if I’m going to boast in anything,” said Paul, “let it be in Jesus who died for me.”

Question: Who are the confident people in your life?

Let’s just take a stop, a quick stock take. Who are the people in your personal life, in your work life, in your Church life, whatever, who are the really confident people? Are they boasters? Are they deceivers? Are they people who just try and bolster themselves up and grumble about people behind their backs? Because if they are, they’re actually dangerous people in our lives because they’re likely to flatter us and mislead us and we end up shipwrecked because they manipulate our emotions.

The really good people have a quiet understatedness, the really good people talk about their own failures, the really good people talk about their limitations. They’re the ones we can trust and rely on and learn from.

Supreme confidence can be a face that masks deep failure and inadequacy. Doesn’t matter how confident they look in fact sometimes the more confident they look, the worse the failure or the inadequacy and if we allow ourselves to be swept up in that it will be a painful deception indeed.

We all remember being bullied at school – and sadly bullies grow up into adults.  Dealing with their aggression can be really hard – especially if they’re close to home!

When we were at school we all had bullies in our lives. They were the ones that seemed to be bigger and stronger than the rest of us and they imposed themselves on us, sometimes it was physically other times, emotionally. It doesn’t matter much, bullies are bullies and bullies ruin our lives. When we grow up you’d expect the whole school yard bully thing to go away but actually bullies grow up too and they still try and lord it over people.

Research shows that people who are bullies are underachievers so sometimes we have to deal with the aggression that comes from those people and that can be tough especially if that bully is close to home. If we have to deal with them everyday, it can be really, really tough. So how do we deal with that face of aggression?

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at the faces that people wear. I guess we do all, to some extent, wear different faces but it can become really quite a problem. The whole idea is, the way that God designed us, is that my face is supposed to mirror my heart. If I’m happy, I smile; if I’m sad, I cry; if I’m cross I get a cross look on my face, if I’m relaxed I get that relaxed look on my face and we can read each others faces and body language and what’s being said and get a sense of what’s going on inside the other person.

The problem is, when we put on a face, when we’re two faced, when a person says one thing to one person and entirely another thing to another person then all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to know what’s going on inside of that person. We get a misleading map and that misleading map can cause deception, confusion, pain, anger, argument. We’ve got to get a correct map of what’s going on inside people and nowhere is that more true than when we’re dealing with bullies, with aggressive behaviour.

Do you remember being bullied in the school yard? I do, it was awful, it would ruin my whole day. From the morning I would wake up and have this sense of dread of having to go and face these boys at school again who would bully me and belittle me and kick me in the pants, it was awful but bullying just doesn’t happen there, I mean kids are vulnerable and they’re cruel.

I don’t know if you’ve read the book or seen the movie, ‘Lord of the Flies’ but it’s a very good story and of course teens become clicky and they ostracize one other. And as adults we can experience aggression in the home or work or friends or clubs. Even with the elderly, I remember being on the board of an aged care organisation and we had to deal with bullying in those residential facilities. Bullying is something, aggression is something that affects us right through our lives.

Schools these days have anti-bullying behaviour, they have policies and guidelines and instructions and the teachers are taught about it, I was reading a report on this and one 5 year old said, “Bullying is when people force others, usually smaller people, to do what they want them to do.” Pretty good definition for a 5 year old.

This aggression, this dominance, bullying it’s like a small war when you think about it, when one country tries to bully another country we call it a war. When one person tries to bully another person it’s kind of like a small war and it hurts, it’s hard, it ruins our whole lives. So when someone’s aggressive towards us, you know, really goes for the jugular, what do we do? Do we hit back? I was really taken by this quote by Martin Luther King, have a look:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it’s a descending spiral begetting the very thing that it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar but you cannot murder the lie nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater but you do not murder the hate. In fact violence merely increases hate.

And so it goes:

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral destruction. The chain reaction of evil. Hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars must be broken or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

He sure knew how to string a few words together did Martin Luther King and really he was talking about what Jesus talked about. Jesus said, “Don’t repay evil with evil. Love your enemy.” That’s tough. When we’re being bullied, when we’re dealing with someone who is aggressive, who’s after our throats and our careers and our lives. Boy it’s hard to say, “Well Jesus, that’s really cool. I will love my enemy.” That is tough.

Aggressive people, bullies are invariably like that because they’ve never really known the warmth of that light that Martin Luther King was talking about. The studies with chimpanzees who have been isolated from their mother at birth show that they become really violent and aggressive with other chimpanzees.

So often bullying behaviour is a pattern and the older a person gets, the worse it gets. It’s a pattern of behaviour that reflects not having been loved, that reflects a response to not knowing unconditional love and it’s a really hard pattern of behaviour to unlearn and it often takes a lot of time. Bullying needs two things. The first thing is it needs unconditional love day after day after day.

If someone is being aggressive towards me I can love them in return. Jesus talked about it, he said, “If someone hits you, turn the other cheek.” Ouch. That is so counter intuitive in this day and age but I truly believe it’s the only way that we can deal with aggressive behaviour in a right way, in a way that shines light into a night that is already devoid of stars, is to love a person in return, to love our enemy and yeah, that love can be tough love sometimes.

Assertiveness is the right thing. You and I were not meant to be bullied, we’re not meant to be door mats. It’s not what we were made for and it’s okay to assert ourselves, gently and firmly. I’m sorry but I don’t accept your bullying. I’m sorry but I won’t accept your aggression. Aggression is emotional blackmail; aggression says, “You do what I say otherwise I’ll come after you.” No I won’t dance to that tune anymore, no matter what you do, no matter what you say, no matter what it costs me – I won’t.

And if we come towards someone who’s being aggressive, someone who’s bullying us, with a real unconditional love that says, “I don’t care what you do, I’ll still love you.” And yet in an assertiveness that says, “I won’t be blackmailed by your aggression”, I think that’s the right thing to do. We can either do that or react and fight violence with violence and through violence you may murder the liar but you cannot murder the lie nor establish the truth. “You may murder the hater”, as Martin Luther King said, “but you do not murder the hate. In fact violence merely increases hate”.

We can look at this person and give them a soft answer. Proverbs, Chapter 15, Verse 1 says:

A soft answer turns away wrath but a harsh word stirs up anger.

What about it? What about these people who are aggressive towards us. They come after us and want to yell and scream and be angry, what if we adopted a tough love attitude? What if we decided I’m not going to lift anything, a finger, a word against you?

I will love you unconditionally but I won’t accept your aggression. Yes, draw boundaries but I still love you. That’s hard, that’s a really tough gig but can I encourage you? It’s what Christ calls us to. The face of aggression, so often, masks a heart of desperate pain. What if you, what if I were the ones to shine light into that heart?

We all have one or two perfectionists in our lives.  The ones that always squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.  But perfectionism has – well – an ugly side to it.

I have a confession to make, I have to come out of the closet, come clean, by my very nature deep ingrained into my DNA – I’m a perfectionist. I like everything to be just so, everything. A place for everything, everything in its place. I mean how can you not hang the towel in the bathroom perfectly straight, come on how come the mustard isn’t always in exactly the same place in the fridge door. It’s tragic isn’t it? Now in some respects it’s not a bad thing, we need people like that in this world but perfectionism can be the scourge of a relationship because perfectionists use their perfection to condemn and belittle other people. It becomes a form of control. So what do we do when we run into perfectionists?

This week on ‘A Different Perspective’ we’re looking at the faces that people sometimes wear and we do don’t we? We put on faces to kind of hide what’s going on in our hearts. My face should reflect what’s going on in my heart, if I smile I’m happy, if I cry I’m sad, if I have a frown I might be angry and that way you know what’s going on in my heart and I know what’s going on in your heart.

That’s the theory and that’s the way it’s meant to work. But it doesn’t always work that way and sometimes people put on faces or masks that kind of hide what’s really going on inside. And we read their face but we miss out on what’s happening in their hearts and that causes confusion, it causes hurt, it causes descent, it causes anger.

We need to kind of get with it and begin to understand people at a deeper level and that’s why, this week, we’ve been looking at the faces that we wear and if you’ve missed any of the programs you can go and listen to them again online at www.adifferentperspective.org.

Now I was saying earlier this week that one of the things that I did for almost twenty years of my life was that I was a consultant in the IT industry and sometimes I’d deliver a report or deliver what I’d worked hard on and I’d get a bad reaction. And I’d think it was all about me when actually it was they that felt threatened, it was they that felt insecure and I needed to learn to read the terrain. So this week we’ve looked at the face of disapproval, which I’ve just talked about there; the face of over-confidence, which often hides deep insecurities; the face of aggression, which often hides a deep hurt; and today, today we’re looking at perfectionism.

Where does that fit into the list? Why are we looking at that? Well perfectionism is a real insidious face because it proports to be one thing but actually, very deeply, it’s something quite different. As I said at the front of the program I, by my nature, my very nature am a perfectionist. I used to have my favourite saying, “it’s so hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkey’s”.

Now perfectionism is different from perfection, two quite different things. My school motto was ‘arguo quad argus’ which meant ‘whatever you do, do it well’. Now it’s good to do our best, it’s good to strive to excel, to achieve, to deliver, there’s nothing wrong with any of those things.

I would encourage everyone to have a strong work ethic, to work hard to do the very best with their lives that they can do. That’s normal but perfectionism is when that striving, where that achieving, where that reaching perfection becomes an obsession. We have an eagles and turkeys mentality, we look down on the turkeys, we belittle them.

We use our perfection to dominate and belittle and marginalise other people. “How can you be like that? How can you not do this? That’s appalling!” That’s the sort of language that comes out of a perfectionists mouth and when you think about that it’s a form of domination, I make myself bigger by criticising you and making you smaller, that’s perfectionism.

It masquerades as something good, it masquerades as ‘arguo quad argus’ , ‘whatever you do, do it well’. It masquerades as doing our best and striving and achieving but actually it’s about domination and that’s bad. Perfectionism doesn’t mean to do well, it means that I’m trying to be better than you so I can be bigger than you so I’m more important than you are. And let me say, having been a perfectionist and addicted to this, it is a very, very powerful pattern of behaviour.

Now ten years ago when I came to Christ, I became a Christian I guess it’s one of the first things that I began to see, that I couldn’t actually go around talking about eagles and turkeys anymore and say that I believed in Jesus because Jesus loves eagles and turkeys. He loves us all and God began to deal with me, in my heart, about this spirit of perfectionism because the sense I had was that I have to perform to be loved. A lot of people, a lot of people live on that premise. In order for someone to love me I have to perform, I have to deliver, I have to do better and so I became a perfectionist.

But Jesus comes along and says, “no, no, no, you’ve got it the wrong way round. I love you no matter what, now go and be all you can be.” Wow, isn’t that a different way of looking at life, that’s the Jesus way of looking at life. I don’t have to perform at anything to be loved deeply by Him. I can go and sit in that red chair I have in my study and open my Bible and close my eyes and pray and spend time with Him.

And you know, it doesn’t matter whether I succeeded or failed yesterday, we have that time together because He loves me and He died for my failures. And so over a period of time God dealt with me in this and little by little, grace sank in. Now my desire is still to do the best, I still love to do that but it becomes an asset instead of a liability.

Let me give you an example, each of our program series is available on CD at our website or you can write or, whatever and we’ve decided that our CD packaging should be quite professional. So Gary our assistant director, Gary Brown, designs the packaging and then he sends them to me and I refine them and tune them and improve them and we collaborate in this creative process together that we both really enjoy. Now, let me say, when I was a perfectionist I would have criticised him for not getting it right completely up front, I would have said, “How can he do it that way? Why did he do it? How come he didn’t get that spelling right? How come he didn’t get that word right?”

And I would have done that to feed my own insecurity, to make me feel bigger and better and more important. But now, now I realise Gary has some skills that I just don’t have and he knows I have some skills that he just doesn’t have and we really enjoy that creative process of bouncing things around together and building them and developing them, it’s really good fun because we’ve got complimentary giftings, it’s a team experience that we both really enjoy and I have to say, the outcome is much better than if he did it on his own or I did it on my own.

So my desire to get all the words right, to have it perfect, to get it just so, that’s still there but it’s there in a loving and a supportive way, in a team player way rather than in a dominating and critical way. That’s the difference between perfectionism and perfection and when perfectionism is out there it masquerades as perfection but it’s not that at all. It’s a face of perfectionism and perfectionism is a prison, it’s like a treadmill. Jesus came to set the captives free, Jesus came to get us out of this eagles and turkeys attitude and His unconditional love leads us out of that prison.

I no longer need to be bigger by making you smaller and so, if you suffer from perfectionism, I trust that Gods really ministered into your life and if you’re dealing with perfectionists, I trust that you have a better understanding of what’s really going on when you see the face of perfectionism but understand the struggle in the heart behind it.