©1998 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
|
2/15/98
|
Faulty Blueprints
|
...
|
This is our 3rd week in our study
on dealing with difficult people.
Two weeks ago
we started talking about
some of the principles from Scripture
that can help us better communicate
and interact with the difficult people in our lives.
Our study began be looking at several comments from Peter,
from Paul,
and from Christ Himself
all telling us that
one of the key measures of maturity
in the Christian life
is found in how well we deal with
the difficult people around us.
I then suggested six broad categories
of potentially difficult relationships:
1. There are those people in our lives who have hurt us in some way.
2. There are those who hold positions of authority over us and who do not use that authority in ways we think are right.
3. There are those who have in some way infringed on what we believe to be our rights.
4. There are those whose ideas, values, or belief systems are radically different from our own.
5. There are those who are demanding from us something we cannot deliver.
6. There are those who have something we want or believe we need and refuse to give it to us.
Then we looked at the first major principle
in bringing greater health to those relationships:
choosing to believe
that this relationship
is more important than our rights
our things,
or our ideas,
more important than getting what we want,
and more important than winning.
But accepting that goal
does not in itself
automatically bring greater health to the relationship.
Without the acceptance of that goal
we can make no progress at all,
but having once accepted it,
our Lord then begins to lead us
through a two-step process
that can eventually bring changes into those relationships.
Step #1 involves helping us to understand
what a healthy relationship
with this particular individual really involves.
Then, step #2 involves taking whatever practical steps are necessary
to establish that healthy relationship.
We will look at the first of those two steps this morning,
and then take up the second one next week.
And I need to warn you
that the work our Lord needs to do within us
for this first step
is often the most difficult part of the whole healing process.
Have you ever wondered why
people who have been raised in painful,
abusive situations in their childhood
often repeat those same destructive patterns in their adult years,
either through abusing others
or through allowing themselves
to be abused as adults?
If you’re married,
or have been,
have you ever been suddenly shocked
to realize that you are living out towards your mate
that same relationship style
that you so resented in your parents
when you were a kid?
If you were raised in a home
in which conflicts always seemed to degenerated into people screaming at one another,
have you ever been shocked
at the sound of your own voice
screaming at your partner
or your children?
If you were brought up in a family
in which open conflict was to be avoided at all costs,
in which outward image
was far more important
that facing and resolving real issues,
do you find yourself now as an adult
following the same unproductive pattern?
This is something that has fascinated me for years.
You see, logically it would seem like
each generation would learn what didn’t work from the past generation
and become increasingly more skilled
in building healthy relationships.
Remember those times
when you were a kid
and your parents did something
that just crushed you
or infuriated you
and you said to yourself,
"When I grow up I’m NEVER going to do that to my children!"
Now we can’t even remember
what most of those things were.
Remarkably,
rather than each generation
learning from the relationship blunders of the last generation,
we not only tend to repeat the same mistakes,
but even to amplify on them.
Let me explain why,
and then we’ll bring this back to our difficult people study.
You see,
every one of us enters our adult years
with a flawed concept
of what a "healthy" relationship really is.
Our relationship concepts,
or maybe I should say our mental "relationship blueprints"
were written for us
during our childhood
by the family structure in which we were brought up.
EX. When Sandee and I built our house
a number of years ago,
we sent a bunch of money
to this company in Washington,
and they in turn sent us several truck loads of building materials,
and a set of blueprints.
The theory was
that I was suppose to take all of those materials
and assemble them exactly like that blueprint told me to.
It was a nice theory...
But the point is,
the blueprint was the accepted,
undisputed authority
telling me what this thing should look like when I finished.
Every one of us
have highly detailed relationship blueprints filed away in our minds,
blueprints that were etched into our personalities
through what we saw modeled for us
during our childhood.
What does a male-female relationship look like?
In a general sense
how does a man relate to a woman?
What attitudes does a man bring
to any female relationship?
Does he bring respect?
Does he bring destain?
Does he view himself as superior in some way?
Is he threatened or insecure or intimidated?
The foundation for that blueprint
came from the way dad,
or more broadly men related to mom.
How does a woman relate to a man?
Does she view males as the enemies?
People whose motives and intentions
you can never really trust?
Is a man someone to be controlled?
Manipulated?
Handled in some way?
Does she bring respect,
or fear,
or a sense of security to relationships with men?
That blueprint came
from the way mom related to dad,
or to the men in her life.
What does a husband/wife relationship look like?
How does it function?
What things are acceptable?
What things are not permitted?
How did dad and mom relate to each other?
In fact, our fundamental concepts
of masculinity
and femininity are rooted in dad and mom.
Masculinity looks like whatever dad was like.
My dad spent much of his life
as a business man in Seattle.
His work required him to wear
a suit, white shirt, and tie every day.
Several years ago
it suddenly hit me
that a big part of the reason
I’ve never quite seen myself as an adult is because I wear jeans a sweatshirt most days.
(The other part of the reason
may have something to do with the way I act.)
My mental blueprint of adult masculinity
wears a suit and white shirt and tie.
We also have mental blueprints
for virtually every other kind
of human relationship,
blueprints recorded in us throughout our childhood.
How does a mother relate to her children?
How does a father relate to his children?
How do we relate to people
who hold positions of authority over us?
Well,
how did dad talk about his boss?
How did he relate to laws
when no one was around to enforce them?
How did he view God’s authority in his life?
We also inherit a mental blueprint
of how a father or a mother
fits into the family structure.
EX. Two weeks ago I was poking at the hypothetical husband who spent 22 weeks
sitting in front of the TV
watching his football,
and then, after nearly a half a year
of emotional absence from the home
he tries to patch things up with his wife
by taking her on a cruise.
Well, since this fellow
is completely hypothetical,
a product of my imagination,
let me tell you a little more about him.
If we drop back into this husband’s childhood
we’ll find him being raised in a home in which his own dad
was also emotionally absent from the home for large blocks of time.
It may not have been football.
It may have been his career,
or his hobbies,
or his church,
or his car
or his boat,
or his airplane,
but the effect was the same.
Even when dad was there physically,
he wasn’t there mentally.
As a boy it certainly wasn’t what our football fan wanted from his dad,
but that little guy’s concept of maleness
was established by what his father modeled,
and now, as an adult, it just feels right,
it feels "male" to be emotionally absent from the home.
That’s what men do.
In my hypothetical example
this man’s emotional absence from the home has turned his relationship with his wife
into one of his "difficult relationships".
The beginning of finding a resolution
to that "difficult relationship"
is to allow God to guide him through
the process of reworking
his concept of a "healthy relationship".
And its important to see
that the answer is not simply
to cut out half the football games.
If he turns off the TV
and goes out to the garage
and works on projects for 4 hours
he is still emotionally absent from the home.
But I’m getting just a little bit ahead of myself here.
#1. The first step I want us to take today
is to recognize that all healing in difficult relationships
begins with determining what our relationship with this particular individual
really involves.
#2. Second, I want us see that
every one of us enter our adult years
with clearly defined mental blueprints
of every basic type of human relationship,
blueprints created for us
by the patterns modeled for us during childhood.
#3. The third thing I want to point out
is obvious - all of those blueprints
are flawed to some degree.
They are only as healthy
as the relationships on which those blueprints are based.
#4. Now, the 4th thing I want to point out this morning
is that, even if one of our blueprints is flawed,
it will still "feel right"
when we duplicate that blueprint in our own life.
It won’t work right,
but it will feel right.
It won’t work any better
than it did in the last generation.
But it will feel right
because it fits the blueprint,
it meets our mental specifications of what this type of relationship should be.
And this, of course,
is a major ingredient in why
abused people
get trapped in the same patters of abuse over and over again.
This is why
even though nothing was ever resolved
when your parents yelled and screamed at one another,
still you find yourself yelling and screaming at your mate.
This is why,
even though your parents’ refusal
to deal honestly and openly
with relationship issues in their life
only caused those problems
to fester and corrupt their relationship,
still now you tend to find it just feels right
to avoid conflict and direct confrontation of issues in your own life at all costs.
As a Christian
your theology may even tend
to view confrontation
as something that could never be truly "Christian".
You can accept in theory
the fact that Christ formed a whip
and drove the money changers from the temple,
but you really believe
that He did it in a calm, quiet voice,
and the whip was there only for self-protection in case some of them
took issue with His request
that they "please leave now in a quiet, orderly fashion."
Now, everything we’ve done this morning
is basically intended to provide
mental preparation for the concepts
we will look at next week.
But let me try to wrap this up
by emphasizing the heart of what I want us to see today.
You see, those relationship blueprints
that we carry with us from our childhood
will ALWAYS to some degree
continue to feel right,
whether they really work for the health of the relationship or not.
When our Lord begins His work in us
the first essential step in the process
is for Him to begin to correct
the flaws in those blueprints.
But when He does this
there are times when what He shows us will FEEL all wrong
because it does not line up
with that familiar pattern
imbedded in our emotions.
Some of the principles we will begin looking at next week
will feel all wrong,
and, unless we actively choose
to trust our Creator
more than our feelings,
we’ll reject them before we even give them a chance.
Several weeks ago I made the following statement:
There is really only one ultimate battle
any of us are called to fight -
it is the ongoing battle to trust what God has said to us.
That is true with our efforts to deal with difficult people
just like its true in every other aspect of our lives.
You see,
the beginning of dealing with all difficult people in our lives
is allowing our God
to define for us
what a healthy relationship will look like in each situation,
no matter how it may "feel" to us
given our past family relationships.
And sometimes that takes a tremendous amount of trust in our God.
Next week we’ll begin taking
each of those 6 types of difficult relationships I listed earlier
and look at what God says
about establishing greater health
in each situation.