A Different Perspective Official Podcast Berni Dymet

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 st

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

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 el

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.

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

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