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.