My wife used to work at a Wal-mart in Hattiesburg, MS in the jewelry department. Now many of you know Wal-mart’s policy, that the customer is always right. There may be the case on paper, and it may be great for the overall business of the company, but what do you do when a customer takes full advantage of this slogan and is an obnoxious idiot who has had a bad day and has decided she wants to take out all of her frustration out on you. Now, I must say, my wife was good at this (the working with the difficult customer not being one); when a person came in screaming and yelling, she was always kind and caring and most of the time, the situation calmed down and the customer walked away happy and content.
But Denise had a co-worker named Gretchen who lets just say didn’t exactly agree with this policy. If someone came in yelling, Gretchen yelled back. Instead of getting better, things got worse. The result was normally either the manager getting called in or Gretchen relaying to the person what time she got off work and to meet her in the parking lot for a little rumble. Now almost every time Gretchen got upset with a customer, she had reason to. Yet, because she was a Wal-mart employee she was not her own, because she wore the nametag and got the paycheck and the benefits of a Wal-Mart employee, she was supposed to behave differently and react differently.
Now there is no doubt in my mind that you have come across a difficult person a time or two in your life. Maybe it’s a co-worker who tries to boss everyone else around to make himself look important. Perhaps it’s a relative who is so opinionated that he must share them with you and tell you just how wrong you are. Maybe it’s a fellow church member who likes to gossip and start trouble, whatever the reason, you have someone in your life who is hard to get along with.
Now the question we want to look at this morning is how do we get along with those people. Now the natural reaction is to be difficult right back to them. When I was a teenager I worked at Burger King and one day a fellow worker of mine who just happened to be on our cross county rival’s wrestling team played a trick on me and fixed it to where when I turned on the water facet, water would spray all over me. It worked, I got wet and they all laughed. Now, let me state this was before I became a Christian, but the next day, before he came to work, I went to where he would be working and I unscrewed all the lids to the ketchup and mustard bottles and then put them on very lightly and placed them back to look like they had never been touched. When he got to work that afternoon, someone had ordered about 3 Whoppers and he reached and went to squirt the ketchup on the burger, and splat, the lid went off and ketchup went everywhere. SO he grabbed a new bun and the next bottle, and Splat! This went on for a while…you get the point. I felt justified in what I had done, and I thought it was funny to. But that is how we think it ought to be, right, you are difficult to me, I’m difficult to you. Your mean to me, I’m mean to you.
That may be fine for the world, but just as with Gretchen, we are not our own. As Christians we are to be set apart and we are called to behave differently. Now as we come to this passage, Paul was dealing with an issue in the church. Not only was the church experiencing persecution from the outside, and many believe that when Paul wrote this letter, he himself was in jail, but the church itself was going at it. We are not told the specifics, but later on in chapter 4, Paul singles out two women by name and tells the church to get these women to stop fighting each other. It seems not everyone in the Philippian church was easy to get along with. So what are we supposed to do with difficult people, whether it be in our church or in our work or in our family. Let’s look at this together and see.
The first thing, and this is a big one…the best way for us to deal with difficult people is to first not be a difficult person our self. I don’t know if you follow football or not, but it was hard to ignore the story that came out this past off season in the Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Eagles have a wide receiver named Terrell Owens who after signing a 7 year deal, one year into the deal decided he wanted more money. Now that’s one thing, but then it got ugly. He started calling other players names and so on, until he eventually came to the preseason camp, but under the assumption that he wouldn’t talk to his offensive coordinator or his quarterback Donavon McNabb. Now it got to be down right funny, when in an interview, Donavon McNabb said, “If he doesn’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to talk to him.” Now this may sound okay if these were 4 or 5 year olds, but I bet you the coach was shaking his head saying, “C’mon guys, somebody here please be the grown up!” And I think that’s part of what Paul is writing this letter for, we have these Christians who are fighting, and from the context of the letter we get the idea that it wasn’t about some deep theological issue but about selfish attitudes. So Paul is writing saying, “C’mon people, somebody be the Christian here!” and he goes on to tell us some things about how to be this Christian, a Christian that fosters love, unity, and joy.
Now the first thing Paul does is that he reminds them of what they had received in Christ. Phil 2:1says, “If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion…” Now those ifs there are not real questions, they are more like statements. Paul was a logical thinker and he was setting up an argument. It’s better understood as saying “Since”. It’s much like if my wife said “Barry, if you enjoyed your dinner, if you had your full, if you are well fed at the expense of my hard work and culinary skill, then show me your appreciation by doing the dishes.” That’s kind of what Paul is saying here, If you have received all these things from Christ, then show your appreciation by loving each other and being united. If you have fellowship with Christ, have fellowship with each other. If you have received compassion from Christ, show compassion to each other.
When ever you have received something that is so great and wonderful, it should impact you and affect everything about you. This past week my wife’s parents who live in Waveland, MS came to our house and her father was telling me about all the help he has received and the impact it has had on him. They had a work crew from a church in Indiana come to their house and shovel the mud out of their house, pull up the carpet and floor, and tear down all the drywall. Now what made this powerful to John, is that these were not men who had to do this. These men were successful business men who took vacation time to come and shovel mud out of another man’s house who they did not know. John said, “If you had asked me 2 months ago to go and dig mud out of a house of a man I did not know, I would have said “Never in a million years”, but now I wouldn’t think twice about doing it.” And what Paul is saying, since you have received all this, you give it to others. You live out what you have received.
Now how is this shown? Well Paul gives us some examples here. First he says to do nothing out of selfish ambition. Now like we said, we don’t know what was going on here, but it appears someone in the church had a bad case of “me-itis”. Now we all tend to be selfish a time or two. Max Lucado points this out in his book, “A Love Worth Giving” by saying, “Suppose you are in a group photo. The first time you see the picture, where do you look? And if you look good, do you like the picture? If you are the only one who looks good, do you still like the picture? If some are cross-eyed and others have spinach in their teeth, do you still like the picture?
We all have by nature a case of “Me-it is” that must be overcome. Look at Vs 3, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” Now it’s important here that we not misinterpret what Paul is saying. Paul is not saying, “Don’t try to get ahead in this world or Don’t try to make something of yourself.” That’s not what he is saying.
Let me read to you again from Max Lucado about what he wrote about this passage. He wrote, “The word the apostle uses for selfishness shares a root form with the words strife and contentious. It suggests a self-preoccupation that hurts others. A divisive arrogance. In fact, first-century writers used the word to describe a politician who procured office by illegal manipulation or a harlot who seduced the client, demeaning both herself and him. Selfishness is an obsession with self that excludes others, hurting everyone.”
So what Paul is saying here, is don’t be so concerned about getting what you want or what you think you deserve at the expense of hurting other people. Don’t exalt yourself at the misery of others. You might know that last Sunday I wasn’t here. I was preaching a revival in Kentucky and on Thursday night, we had a packed house. It was well over a hundred folks there, and we had a man who came to sing for us. Now, this guy had his equipment set up in front of the altar and he had all of his CD’s and tapes for sale right there. But when he was invited by the preacher to come up and sing, he stopped being the revival service and it became this man’s one man show. He told us that he had been called to preach, and preach he did. He was supposed to sing two songs, three at most, but he sang six songs (all from his newest CD I might at). But he would sing, then preach, sing, then preach, sing then preach. Now the service started at 7:30 and it was getting close to 9 pm and he was still singing and preaching.
Now I understood what he was doing, this was his moment to shine and he had a crowd and he felt the Spirit moving, although it appeared no one else did. Now I was upset a bit about this. This was abusing his invitation, he was taking advantage of that churches invitation to sing in the worship and it tried to turn it into his show. After he was done, the pastor of the church introduced me and before I got to the pulpit she stopped me and whispered to me, “Barry, you take as long as you need.” I had my own selfish thought there myself. Never tell the preacher he has as much time as he needs, but even though I thought I had a great sermon, I cut it in half. Many were grateful, and some of you are wishing I would do the same this morning! How selfish of you.
But Paul is making the point, don’t think that you can do anything you want at the expense of others. It’s not all about you, and don’t act that way. You are a Christian, and if you truly have received what you say you have, then the only response is one of humility, love, and grace. Don’t do anything out of selfish ambition, but instead be humble, and put the needs of others above your own.
Don’t think just about what you want, but think of others first. Look at Vs. 4, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” I remember when I was in the Navy once and we were in Puerto Viarta, Mexico and my friend Randy Yakos and I were at in the town and we stopped at a shop. The man had a little bitty tent set up and you could tell they lived in poverty. Now one of the things about shopping there was that you could barter them down real low. Well, Randy went to go buy a blanket and the man started at saying it was 15 American dollars, and I was ready to try to get him down to about $5, but Randy went ahead and gave him the $15. I thought that perhaps Randy didn’t understand how the Bartering worked over there so I told Randy that, “you know, he would’ve come down a whole lot.” Randy said, “I know, but he needed it more than I did.”
Now when it comes to a difficult person in your life, you may want to lash out at that person, give him your two cents worth, put him in his place, but when you look after the needs of others, you don’t always do what you originally want to do. Maybe instead of a lashing out, that person needs someone to treat them with respect. Maybe they have been treated a certain way their whole life, and they have lived in response to that, and now what they need is for someone to treat them nice for a change. Chuck Colson tells about a man on death row who was befriended by a former congressmen in South Carolina, and they became good friends, to the point where the man was almost like a son. The hardened criminal began to soften with each visit, and over the years began to change and he gave his heart to Christ. On the night before the man was to be executed, the congressmen did something that he did to his other kids when they were growing up. He leaned over, tucked him in and gave him a kiss goodnight. The condemned man said that in all his years, that was the first time he had ever been tucked in and kissed goodnight.
You see the best way to deal with a difficult person is to not be one in the first place, but also in humility, love that person and treat them in a nice way even if they don’t deserve it. It’s seeing them through the love you have received from Christ yourself. And freely you have received, freely you must give.
This is what we call selfless love. It’s love that gives and doesn’t say what can I get in return. It’s a love that says, I will give even though you won’t or can’t give back. It’s a love that says I don’t always have to have my way. It’s a love that doesn’t demand that everyone stop and recognize me or my needs. It’s a love… that wraps a towel around its waist and washes the feet of even the most difficult of people. Now, you go and do likewise.
