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.