[Female participant] [What happens if boundaries that are blurred because of incompetence, and so other people will come to you, to try and get things done?
[Pastor Mike] Okay, so you've got two people working side by side; one person's skills or attitude or whatever means they're not capable of functioning properly in the job, and so now the other person, everyone's bypassing them and coming to this one. Now that's a problem.
[Female participant] If you don't do it, everything will collapse, so someone has to do it or it all goes to pieces.
[Pastor Mike] Now you see therein lies the problem. The person who thinks they've got to do it, is the one who's now become the problem. They weren't the problem originally, but they've become the problem, because they are empowering the incompetence of the other. What needs to be addressed is the incompetence of the other person. It has to be addressed, so it requires love and truth, talking, and an outworking of a better way of working the responsibilities. Once you bypass the system, then what you do is create problems, so if we've got two people, and one's incompetent, the other's highly competent, and people bypass and come to the competent one, then that creates a malfunction, and a discretion in the whole flow of the relationship. And of course don't think that the one who's incompetent doesn't know what's going on either, and they will be going through all kinds of stuff. They will feel something shift, they may not know what.
They'll feel resentful and angry, they will feel they're being eroded, they'll go through all kinds of things, and it's not sometimes because they're incompetent. It can be because they're difficult people to deal with relationally, and that also causes the transfer; people bypass them to go to where they can work relationally, and that creates problems as well. So the only way to deal with it is, you've actually got to talk face to face about what is happening, bring it to the light. It doesn't need to be an angry thing, you'd just be simply hey, I noticed this is something that people are bypassing and going here. The effect is to undermine the situation and overload this situation. We need to have a talk about why this is happening, and we need to come up with a strategy we agree on, to sort it out. If this is a skill lacking, let's talk about what skills: can we upgrade the skills? Can we talk about it and work it out? If this is a relationship thing, can we talk about it and work it out?
Now the easier thing is for the person who's competent to stay silent, and fill in, and take it all over. Now they have become a participant in the whole deal. Before they were just willing. Now they're actually empowering. It stays and works because they're doing that, and there's many situations like that. Usually I've found no one is happy in it, no one. No one is happy. Everyone knows what's going on, and no one is happy, and they're not happy because it's not out in the open, in the light. There's nothing like having things in the light. It's so freeing to have everything in the light, even if it's terribly painful: listen, the job you're doing, you're not doing well, you're missing this and this and this, and this is creating these problems. It's better to have it out in the open, than it is to have it hidden away. When it's hidden away, that's when spirits work, that's when you have your mind tormented, that's when all kinds of stuff goes on in the spirit world, because of the blurring of boundaries.
Remember that these invasions of territories make room for demonic spirits to operate, so where there is a situation where say, a family will collapse because one person is not doing their job, or something in an organisation will collapse because someone's not doing their job, it's better to face it. Long term, it's better to face it, and better to do it more quickly than keep a long time, so we're better to face the situations rather than continue in an unhappy situation, because the one who keeps doing everything will feel burdened eventually. They will become resentful about that, and the one who's not doing it will feel rejected in some kind of way, and they will in the end react at some point.
[Female participant] Oh yeah, I've seen it.
[Pastor Mike] So you find that marriages, where the man retreats and the woman takes - because she's got a great sense of heart for the home and responsibility, she'll rise up and take responsibility. Then she's burdened, and he's guilty because he's not doing anything, and feels she's taken over - but actually he was to blame. He was responsible. He should have actually initiated and worked these things out, so sometimes there are conflicts come around blurred boundaries and you can fix them easily or the hard way. [Laughs]
Okay, well praise the Lord. Father, we thank You for what You're teaching us, help us to learn how to walk in the spirit, move in the spirit, keep everything in the light and to disempower demons. Help us to learn how to bring Your presence in Jesus' name. Amen.