People Who Undermine You // Dealing with Difficult People, Part 4 A Different Perspective Official Podcast

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