Coping with Difficult People (Joyful Relationships, Part 4)

[This message was shared during worship at Friendship Lutheran Church, Amelia, Ohio, on July 15, 2007. It's the last of a four-part series on Joyful Relationships. If you live in or are visiting the Cincinnati area, you're welcome to worship with us at Friendship.]

Matthew 5:44-47
Psychologist Alan Loy McGinnis tells the story of a young pastor who began his years of ministry in a congregation in LA. The congregation was growing. But on the Church Council sat a man who was negative in his thinking and constantly throwing roadblocks to progress. The situation got so bad that the young pastor left that Los Angeles church and took a call to pastor a congregation in Kansas City. “But the week I arrived at my new church,” Pastor David Cowie said later, “I went to the [Church Council meeting] and there, sitting at the conference table, was the same guy...” Different name. Different face. But the same guy.

Wherever we are in life, we’re likely to encounter troublesome people. They rub us the wrong way. Often, we’re at odds with them. And running away from them won’t help.

As David Cowie’s experience demonstrates, no matter how far you run, you’ll always find new people who you find difficult.

Today, I want to talk about how to cope with difficult people, how we can heed the call Jesus gives to us in today’s Bible lesson, taken from His famous Sermon on the Mount, to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”

First and foremost, we need to maintain a strong relationship with God. Many of you know that often, when I meet couples contemplating marriage, I talk to them about the best strategy for insulating their marriage from division or divorce. So, I ask these young people why they think that their marriage will make it.

They tell me that they love each other. I point out that in all my years of doing weddings, every couple has reported that they were in love. But not all of them made it.

These couples will then tell me how open they are in talking with each other. Most couples contemplating marriage are. But even they divorce.

Currently, you know, something like one of every two marriages ends in divorce. But that rate drops to something like one in sixty for those couples who worship together at least three times a month. And it plummets to one in six-hundred for those couples who worship regularly and who pray together regularly.

This isn’t magic.

Nor are Christians taught to expect less of their marriages. (In fact, Christians expect more of marriage than the general population.)

I think that the explanation for these statistics is simple. The Bible teaches us that all of us are sinners who need to surrender our lives and wills to Jesus Christ so that God can reconstruct us from the inside us out. It also teaches that each and every one of us is so important in the eyes of God that we were worth Jesus’ death on the cross.

People who have a strong relationship with Christ can be more charitable regarding the faults of others. We recognize that others are sinners just like us.

But people who have a strong relationship with Christ also see the saintly potential in others. When, through Christ, we realize that God is our friend, it frees us to have a more friendly and accepting attitude toward others. Even toward those who drive us nuts.

Second: Out of this attitude rooted in Christ, we need to try to understand the difficult people with whom we deal. In his book, And the Angels Were Silent, Max Lucado talks about the fateful night when Jesus was betrayed by Judas. Judas had been an apostle. The apostles--the term apostle means sent one--were a select group taken from Jesus' disciples. (Disciple, mathetes in the original Greek of the New Testament, means student or follower, which we're all called to be: students and followers of Christ.) The apostles were Jesus' inner circle of followers. Judas was part of that special group.

Yet, for a measly thirty pieces of silver, Judas agreed to lead the Temple police to the secluded garden where he knew Jesus could be found praying, where the police could quietly arrest the Savior of the world. Jesus knew that Judas would do this. Even before Judas knew. Jesus knew too, that Judas’ action would lead Jesus to a painful death on the cross. Despite that though, when Jesus saw Judas in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus called out to him. “Friend, do what you came to do,” Jesus said. Lucado writes:

The way to handle a person’s behavior...is to try to understand [them]...Jesus knew Judas had been seduced by a powerful foe. He was aware of the wiles of Satan’s whispers...[Jesus] knew how hard it was for Judas to do what was right...He didn’t justify what Judas did. He didn’t minimize the deed. Nor did he release Judas from [the consequences of] his choice. But He did look eye to eye with His betrayer and try to understand.

One of my ongoing prayers is to ask God to help me to see people through the compassionate and realistic eyes of Jesus. Through the years, God has answered this prayer in remarkable ways. Once, I found myself thrown into a working group with a pastor for whom I had little patience. I regarded him as a difficult person...noisily opinionated, confrontative, sarcastic. Or so he seemed to me. I bit my tongue and asked God to love the man through me, mostly because I didn’t see how I could ever love him. I endured my work with the guy and then didn’t see him for six months. It was at another gathering and he asked if we could talk. He pulled me aside and said, “I want to thank you for what you said and did with our working group. Some of what you said really has had an impact on my life. I just wanted you to know.”

When we view others with the eyes of Christ, we may encounter a betrayer--a Judas--or we may make a new friend. There are no guarantees.

That’s part of what Jesus is getting at when He says in today’s Bible lesson that God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

We need to also remember that people have the freedom to react to us just as they have the freedom to react variously to Jesus. But when we belong to a forever Savior and ask Him to help us to look at people through His eyes, we have the freedom to be charitable, the freedom to seek to really understand the difficult people life brings our ways.

Of course, it’s easy to love those we find lovable. Jesus tells us today, “if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?” He goes on to say that even the tax collectors of first century Judea, extortionists who routinely hung out with other criminals and notorious sinners, knew to treat their own kind well. So did the Gentiles, non-Jews, Jesus said. But a really rewarding life, one filled with the grace and power of God, belongs to those who ask Christ to help them love all their neighbors as they love themselves. Each day, I ask God to help me to live like that! Some days I almost do.

Third: We need to approach people with an attitude of forgiveness. The New Testament book of Colossians says, “Be tolerant with one another and forgive one another...You must forgive...just as the Lord has forgiven you.”

In fact, in His teaching on the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says, “...if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

We block God from our lives when we refuse to forgive the sins of others. Someone has written: “As long as you hate your enemy, a jail door is closed and a prisoner is taken. But when you...release [another] from your hatred, then the prisoner is released and that prisoner is you.”

Fourth: We need to repent for any difficulties we may have introduced into our troubled relationships. This will always mean seeking God’s forgiveness. It may sometimes mean seeking forgiveness from the person we find difficult.

Mark Twain once said that when he was fourteen, he thought that his father was the stupidest person on the planet. When Twain hit twenty-one, he said, he was astonished to find how much the old man had learned in seven years!

The point is that often the people we see as difficult aren’t really difficult people. They’re people telling us things we’d rather not hear. Or, they’re people we misunderstand.

Some of you know that early in my four-plus year seminary career, there was a professor I was sure didn’t like me. I thought he was a pain. I avoided him and when I couldn’t do so, I was surly and incommunicative. Then, my senior year, I had no choice but to take one of his classes. At the end of the quarter, he thanked me for doing so and asked if I would enroll in another of his seminar-style classes the following quarter, just to prompt and guide discussion among the underclassmen. At the end of that quarter, he thanked me again. I learned that this man I’d thought was a cold automaton was a warm, gracious, loving Christian, filled with charity for others and a great sense of humor in spite of many tragedies that had befallen him in life. I realized that I may have been the problem in our relationship. I repented, asking God’s forgiveness.

Sometimes the people we find difficult really are difficult. You learn this mostly because when the person you find troubling comes up in conversations, others wince or complain about how difficult they are.

But in any troubled relationships we have, we need to ask God to show us where our sins are causing the problems. John writes in the New Testament, “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

A young boy was praying with his father one night. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die...If I should die...If I should die...” Stuck on that part of the famous prayer, he bolted from his bed and left his room and came back a few moments later. When he did, the boy finished the prayer, “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

When the father asked his son what his sudden exit had been about, he explained that earlier in the day, mad at his brother, he’d gone into the other boy’s room and pulled out all of his toys just to make him mad. “If I should die before I wake,” the boy said, “I wouldn’t want him to find his things like that. Lots of things seem right if you’re gonna keep on living, but you don’t want them that way if you should die before you wake.”

If I die before I wake, I want to have done everything I can to restore relationships with even the difficult people in my life. How about you? If you agree with that praying boy, ask Christ to help you do just that.

[Note on the picture: "Death therapy," which Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfuss) attempted to use on Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) in the movie, What About Bob?, is not a way I would recommend coping with difficult people. As Marvin learned, such approaches have a way of backfiring on us.]

[THANKS TO: Preaching.com for linking to this message as part of their Today in the Blogs feature for July 18, 2007.]