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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 24x7 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!

Words are cheap aren’t they. If someone says “I love you” that’s fantastic, but it doesn’t prove that they do. The evidence of love is in what they do. It’s true of people … and it’s true of God. I mean, if God were put on trial, accused with loving you, would there be sufficient evidence to convict Him?

The Bible says that God is love. The Bible says that God loves us – you, me and every other homosapian on this earth. The Bible says that we’re created in His image, and that despite our rebellion, despite the fact that that original image has been marred and disfigured almost beyond recognition, He wants to restore us back into that original image. The Bible says …

Now at this point, I know what more than a few people are thinking. The BIBLE says! Whoop. Big deal. Come and look at my life. Come and look at my lousy marriage, my rebellious children, my loneliness, my pain, my financial hardship, the losses I’ve been through, the complete lack of hope for the future.

Come and look at that … and then tell me what the Bible says. And if you relate to any of that, just a bit of that, then today, I want to share some good news with you. I want to put God’s love under the microscope for you. Let’s make like we’re in a court of law, in a trial that accuses God of loving us.

The question I want to answer here is this: Is there enough evidence to convict Him. Now please don’t right in or email or call – I don’t mean that disrespectfully at all. I simply want to see what the evidence tells us as to whether God loves us or not. So … where do you begin. I’d like to suggest that we begin at the beginning. Let’s take a look:

Genesis 1:26–31: And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

So God goes on to create the whole universe and then … then He gives it away to you and me. The whole, cotton pickin’ lot. But it’s not just that. It’s not just an act of incredible generosity, it’s an act of incredibly vulnerability. Not on our part, but on God’s. Because He creates us knowing full well, that, having given us a free will, we would turn our backs on Him. We would rebel against Him.

In fact, if you like, that’s the whole story of the Old Testament in a nutshell. God’s people rebelling against God. The name “Israel” literally means to struggle with God. And through all the ups and downs of the Old Testament, one thing becomes abundantly clear. It’s this: that in our relationship with God, we will never, ever, ever be able to hold up our end of the bargain. We will always fall short. And that’s exactly what the Apostle Paul writes in the New Testament:

Romans 3:23: For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. … and

Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death.

So … what to do? Now God has a dilemma. If He truly is a God of love, does He put sinners to death? That is after all what it says there. I mean if He truly is a God of justice, He has to follow through. So His response to this dilemma is a real test of His love for us.

So, what is His response? Well, let’s look at the whole of Romans 6:23:

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The price of justice is paid when Jesus, the Son of God, takes our sin on His shoulders so that we can be forgiven. In fact, when you think about it, this is the only way to solve the dilemma, by meeting the requirements of both justice and love.

So, forensically, what does this tell us about God’s love? Again, Jesus puts it this way:

John 15:12–13: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

Just the other night on the evening news where I live, there was a story of a father who died, drowned in the surf saving his sons who were caught in a rip. Now, you might expect a father to do that for his sons. They after all HIS sons. He loves them. If I had to put my life in harm’s way for my children, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even think about it. I love them. They’re my children.

The question however is, would you put yourself in harm’s way for someone who has treated you badly? Would you lay down your life for someone who has rebelled against you, spoken badly of you, turned their back on you? Well, would you? Have a listen:

Romans 5:6–8: For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

And that my friend, right there, is proof positive of God’s love for you. I know that things in your life may not be perfect in every department. I know that you may be suffering over this thing or that thing. And I know, believe you me, I know – I’ve been there – that life can sometimes look so bleak, so desperate that you can’t even see how you’re going to make it through until tomorrow.

But right in the middle of whatever it is that you’re going through at the moment, God has something to say to you. Through His Word today, He’s saying “I love you more than words can ever say. Just look at my Son. Look at how He suffered and died for you.” That’s how much I love you. That’s what you are worth to me.

And you know, it’s not until we feel loved that we can ever love other people. If you don’t feel secure in love, you don’t have any love to give. So many people are missing out on the abundant life that Jesus came to give them because they know about God, they just don’t know Him personally.

And if that’s sounds like you, then why not pray this prayer with me:

Father God, I’ve heard about your love today. I’ve heard about Jesus and I want to accept Jesus as my Saviour and the Lord of my life. I want to experience for real this love that I’ve heard about. So please forgive me, please accept me just as I am, please fill me to overflowing with your Spirit and your love. In Jesus name. Amen.

If you just prayed that prayer, you are forgiven, you have been made whole. And your life has just completely changed, for ever and ever. Amen.

And please don’t forget about that free life application booklet I’ve been telling you about. It’s called Love Is … and it’s all about picking up on some of the teaching in this series, and helping you apply it to your life.

You can request your free copy right now, online at christianityworks.com. You’ll see that free offer right there, in the middle of the home page – you can’t miss it. Just click on the offer, pop in your name and email, and it will be on its way to your inbox in a flash. It really is that easy.

And while you’re there, don’t forget to check out the audio lounge. A treasure trove of teaching resources, arranged by topics that will interest you. You’ll find the Audio Lounge in the Resources section of the site.

But back to that free booklet. It’s called Love Is ... and the web address, is christianityworks.com.

Love Is.  My prayer for you ...

Love they say is what makes the world go round. But as I look around the world, whilst yes there’s obvious love between family members and other people and whilst yes, there are some great missional and humanitarian initiatives afoot  – there's no doubt about the fact – man there’s a lot of hatred too.    

Hatred is rather a strong word isn’t it? But then again, according to Wikipedia, there are 54 armed conflicts underway in the world right at the moment. So yeah, there’s more than enough hatred to go around.

But maybe in your everyday life, hatred doesn’t quite fit. You perhaps don’t necessarily hate anyone. I know I don’t. So let’s now step it down to systematised, institutionalised self–interest. That’s a bit long winded and high falutin’ so what do I mean? Well, we all by clothes – and the chances are that the majority of the clothes that you buy and wear, not all, but the majority, were made in a sweatshop in a developing country, where the workers face harsh and dangerous conditions.

Some countries even have designated zones where labour laws are suspended and people live like battery hens, to produce the well known brands we wear. Not to mention the smartphones and tablets we use.

Well, Berni – you may say – I can’t help that. It’s not that I want to exploit those people, it’s just how things are. I can’t change them. Fair enough.

Then let’s drill down and get even closer to home. Think about your attitudes and behaviours towards people at work. Many people work in a competitive environment, where you not only have to succeed but be seen to succeed to get ahead. You get up in the morning, shower, breakfast, and then it’s off on the commute. Struggling through the traffic, honking your horn at the selfish idiot who won’t let you merge lanes. Or perhaps it’s the train or the bus where everybody jostles for a seat, or even just a bit of personal space.

By the time you get to work, you’re frazzled and in no mood for that incompetent boss of yours, so you join in the gossip in the tea room, complaining about this and that. Does any of that sound even vaguely familiar. And then by the time you get home, you’re snapping at your husband or wife or the kids. You feel like kicking the dog instead of patting him. Okay, maybe I’, taking the metaphor just a bit far, but you get my point.

Be it the geopolitical level, the economic level, or the personal level, there’s a whole lot of room for us to live out a whole lot more love, would you agree. Growing in this area of love is something that would make such a difference to the world – in our own lives, in the lives of those whom we love, those whom we work with …. Our whole circle of influence.

I want to take you back now to the central scripture that we’ve been looking at in this series. Let me read it to you and presuming that you’re not driving at the moment or operating heavy machinery, just close your eyes and soak it up. Think about what God’s saying in the context of the love that you try to live out in your life:

1 Cor 13:1–13: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Yeah, at the end of the day, there’s be three things left. Faith – well, that’s super important, right. Hope – can’t keep going through it all without hope. But without a doubt, the greatest one is love.

Without love, it doesn’t matter how clever, or talented, or sacrificial or industrious we are, it’s worth nothing – you know people like that. So do I – in fact, I used to be one.

I’m thinking what my little corner of the world would look like, if I picked up and owned and lived just these few verses, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day – much more so than I do now. I’m thinking what your little corner of the world would look like if you did the same:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Darkness can never consume light, since, after all, as a young Einstein pointed out to his atheist teacher, darkness is simply the absence of light. And so hatred, apathy, selfishness can never snuff out love, because they are simply the absence of love. And, selfish creatures that we are, the place where we discover an absolute abundance of love is in God Himself.

1 John 4:7,14–18: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. …

And the nearer we draw to Jesus, the more we get to know Him personally, the more His love starts to change how we see things. How we feel about other people. How we behave towards other people. All too often, we here a message like this one and what we take away is “I have to love people more.” Okay, who am I not being nice to? What do I have to change? What are the opportunities to love them better? And whilst none of those are bad questions to ask, if we think that it’s all about what we have to do, then we’ve completely missed the point.

Over the years I’ve had some people in my life who I’ve found incredibly frustrating. There are a couple of people who betrayed me deeply. And I used to think, I just have to change my attitude. I just have to change my behaviour. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed, it’s pretty much impossible to do. Because before we can change on the outside, something has to change in our heart.

Matthew 15:17–20: Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.

In other words, if we want to change on the outside, first we need, as we would say today, to have a change of heart. And that’s exactly what God promises you:

Ezekiel 36:26–27: A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

Real, lasting, powerful change doesn’t happen when we work harder. It happens when God the Holy Spirit changes our hearts. When he replaces the heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Then, all of sudden, living God’s way becomes a whole bunch easier. Why don’t we get that?

I’m truly praying that God’s Word will have a real impact in your life today, tomorrow and over the coming months and years. When all is said and done, the most important thing is love.

And that’s why in our audio lounge at christianityworks.com you’ll find a whole section dedicated to the topic of love. The reality is that the more we receive God’s Word into our heart, the more the Holy Spirit transforms us and achieves the changes that, no matter how hard we try, we can’t make on our own.

So please, stop by at christianityworks.com, check out the audio lounge, the TV programs, all the free booklets and downloads. It’s all designed to help you grow and mature in the Lord, to experience the peace and the joy that Jesus came to give you. I’m so passionate about seeing that happen in your life – in fact, it’s the reason I do what I do.

And listen, while you’re there, don’t forget that you can have instant access to our free, daily eDevotional. Words of inspiration, hope and encouragement delivered right to the inbox on your smartphone, tablet or computer.

That’s all at christianityworks.com.

It’s been great to be able to spend this time with you today. I’m Berni Dymet and I’ll catch you again, same time tomorrow, with … A Different Perspective.