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.