Begin by reading the Magnificat Luke 1 verses 46-49 and then Luke 2:13-19.
I find that passage gives me a sense of the peacefulness and gentleness of the night of Christ’s birth. There’s no better display of gentleness in the Bible than Mary when she found out she was pregnant, and then gave birth to Jesus as she pondered all these things in her heart. Every thing we hear about, and from Mary seems to have a softness or gentleness about it. I also remember when Denise was pregnant, I had never seen her have such a gentleness of Spirit. Maybe that’s what that pregnancy glow is.
Today we explore another fruit of the Spirit that gets lumped together with goodness and kindness sometimes, so let’s just take a minute to review. We learned that kindness tends to be the actions of love, being useful in someone else’s life, making their life easier. Goodness is more of a character trait that certainly leads to good deeds, but it’s more of a “nature” what we call perfect when we refer to God and His goodness.
Now we deal with gentleness, which is actually from the same root word as kindness, to be useful. However there are many more uses of the word in the Greek that have slightly different meaning like mildness, meekness, suitableness, and humility. Of course it also means what we would expect it to mean:
Gentleness is:
I. Gentle (Mt 11:29, 1Pe 3:4)
Aren’t you glad you pay me to come up with this deeply intellectual stuff?
The sentence still jumps out at me from the middle of an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which I have hardly ever read by the way. It’s been a while since I read it, but it was one of those expressions that sticks with you: "People want to be lightly governed," the writer said, "by strong governments."
That’s what we’ve wanted since we were small children. You wanted your dad to be big and strong and able to do anything you could think of—except that, when he dealt with you, it had to be with gentleness and tenderness. You wanted a policeman on the corner tough enough to handle any neighborhood bully, but who would also hoist you to his shoulders and help you find your parents when you got lost in a crowd.
Lots of muscle; lots of restraint. It seems there’s an innate yearning in almost all of us for that rare combination. When evil people rise up, we want a government with the clout to back them down. Yet we never want that clout turned on us.
In the final analysis, people want to be lightly governed by strong governments because that’s how God governs.
The omnipotent ruler of the universe is also the one who invites us tenderly: "Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
He is saying that he is meek and humble, not like the Pharisees who laid the load of the Law on people all the time. Pressure doesn’t make us feel rest, but gentleness allows us to let go and relax.
1 Peter 3 talking about wives who are very vain and overly proud of the way they look, Peter calls them to have a gentle and quiet spirit. He’s not telling them to be weak and not to talk, but he is saying that God looks at their heart, and this heart should be humble, not flaunting what they have.
But gentleness is not just a female trait. Jesus is gentle. Perhaps the best way to describe this gentleness is strength under control. When you play with your baby do you use the same strength you would if playing with another adult. Obviously a baby needs to be handled more gently. Mothers of course are usually more gentle because their nature tends to be gentler, and I think Peter is saying here that women were made by God to be gentler than men, so don’t be afraid to express this God given attribute.
But men we can be gentle too. It’s not unmanly! It is not weakness! It is necessary. Was Jesus weak?
The essence of gentleness is that it is:
II. The Absence of Pride (Eph 4:2, 2Co 10:1)
2 Cor 10:1 Paul is defending himself against accusations that he’s not humble. The “Gentleness of Christ” he speaks of is his slowness to anger and patience, allowing time for repentance.
Ephesians 4:2 talking about unity in the church, “walk (live) in a manner worthy of your calling as a Christian with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” How many of us can say we are walking in a manner worthy of the title Christian? That’s a heavy question.
So if we take all the instances of the words gentle and gentleness in the New Testament we can safely conclude that the fruit of the Spirit Paul is talking about here is humility, or pridelessness. Never treating others like you are any better or smarter than them.
I once had a real man’s man client, motorcycle, Dayton boots, the whole bit. One day we ended up talking about Jesus and whether this man would give his life to Christ. His response to me laid out humanity’s resistance to the gospel with striking clarity.
He said, "My biggest problem is pride. I can’t humble myself. Surrender is dangerous. And you wanna know the reason I can’t give up my pride?" He leaned forward on his chair and paused for effect. "Because it’s brought me so far."
What he meant is that if he didn’t strut around as this big powerful mean guy, he wouldn’t have made it through his life. I knew that his pride had brought survival but also great pain. It was all he held onto while growing up in gangs—while his father died of a drug overdose and his mother beat him and had new boyfriends at the house every month. I knew that this self-made man beat his wife regularly, that he was unemployed, that he had just gotten out of prison.
In a separate meeting, his wife told me that his young daughters are terrified of him, that he’s an alcoholic, and that she was planning to leave him.
Yet despite all the differences between him and I, I couldn’t help but notice that in some ways, this guy and I were similar. I struggled to lay down my pride, because I thought it brought me so far—that it was pride that made winners in this world. What it really brought him and no doubt all of us—is pain, isolation, and ruined relationships.
This is such an important fruit because God hates pride and if you look closely, pride is at the core of so much sin and relational problems. Pride isn’t just thinking highly of yourself, we should all think highly of ourselves, but pride is thinking you are higher than others, flaunting how good you think you are, making decisions based on what is good for you and how you look, and Jesus is very clear about putting others higher than yourself.
So what does that look like? Well most people think pretty highly of themselves unless their self-esteem is very low. God wants us to think highly of ourselves as His children, His special creation, but as highly as we can see ourselves, he wants us to think even more highly of others. Doesn’t that sound like a recipe for a really good world? If everyone did that.
Because pride, believe it or not, actually comes from a lack of confidence in oneself, from not feeling worthy. Pride is a compensation for a lack of self-worth. So what if we all truly thought highly of ourselves so that we had nothing to prove to anyone else, had no need to put others beneath us, and spent our time encouraging others instead of compensating for our own lack of self worth?
Gentleness is humility. It’s also:
III. Necessary for Restoring Relationships (Gal 6:1, 2Ti 2:22-25)
This relates to the last point. When we feel offended or hurt by someone else, what is usually at the centre of that hurt? Isn’t it pride, somehow or another our pride is hurt, our perceived flaws are highlited, and our pride tells us that we can’t let that person get away with that. But not only are we told to turn the other cheek, we also read in:
Gal 6:1 “Restore him in a Spirit of meekness and humility”.
2 Tim 2:22-25 Paul calls Christians to “flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord with a pure heart. Having nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord’s servants must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.”
So what does this gentle restoration or correction look like? Well here’s what it doesn’t look like, from a real example I observed: “How could you be so stupid, did you grow up with wolves? You are going to pay for this buster, and you’re going to straight to hell where you belong.” I have left out a few words and names that can’t be uttered in church, but you get the message. This was a wife who just found out that her husband had had an affair.
Gentle correction might look something like this. Again from a real life conversation between a couple of Christian accountability partners. “Man, we all struggle with sin. What man doesn’t find beautiful women attractive. But you have got to get this under control before you lose all the things that are important to you. I care about you too much to sit back and watch that happen. How can I help you? Lets read what God says about it right now.” This fella was having trouble viewing porn on the internet.
When I thought of these examples, the definitions of gentleness that include suitableness and usefulness came to mind. Guess which response was more effective in those two examples?
But here is the big one when it comes to relationships being healed. If you do not have a Spirit of gentleness which includes the absence of pride, you will find it very hard to forgive. More and more I am realizing that the key to any relationship healing is real forgiveness, and if I am not willing to put myself in the other person’s shoes and view them with gentleness and compassion, my pride will dig its heals in and hold onto a desire to make sure the other person doesn’t get off the hook for what they did. But what use is that?
That’s not how God instructs us to heal relationships, so why should we be surprised when they don’t heal doing it our way. There can be no moving forward if even one person in the relationship can’t move to a stance of gentleness and forgiveness, because it takes two people to make a relationship work. A broken relationship cannot be healed unless there is authentic forgiveness from a gentle, humble heart.
Mercy has to be included under the fruit of gentleness as well. We are here today because of God’s mercy, because of his forgiveness and the humility that allowed him to come be one of us. We need to be merciful even to those who don’t deserve it, like us.
If Jesus had been ruled by pride, first of all he would have given into the temptations Satan presented to him when he was in the wilderness after being baptized. He also would have likely fought back and called on his angels when he was being persecuted going into his crucifixion. “Wait a minute, I am Jesus the Son of God, I shouldn’t have to go through this, I’m entitled to have everything I want.” Jesus had the gentleness, the humility to allow people to persecute him while he stayed quiet and even forgave them while it was happening.
But again it was because he knew he was the son of God that he had the self-worth and confidence to humbly go through what he did, knowing it was the Father’s will. He knew his worth and didn’t have to prove it to anyone including himself. We now are also children of God, why should we fear anything that other people throw at us?
We need to ask ourselves, are we willing to follow Jesus’ example. Do we have enough faith and humility to say that it’s Ok to be gentle with others even when they are not being gentle with us? Oh how I pray that I might be able to do this, and that the world can become a gentler place for my children.
In Psalm 37 the great warrior David says, “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace.” What a precursor for what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy, and especially, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
David says they shall inherit the land and Jesus says they shall inherit the earth. It sure doesn’t look that way does it? What do they mean? They are talking about the promised land. David about the actual land God promised Israel, and Jesus is talking about the new promised land from Revelation 21:1 – then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. The meek shall inherit an entirely new, perfect and refreshed earth and a new heaven that will be with us. There will be no separation between heaven and earth.
I think I’m going to take this seriously. I am going to do my best to be gentle and humble, because not only will we inherit this new promise, but Paul also said that in our weakness God can be strong. When we are gentle and don’t try to do God’s work, we will see him work, and the world will see that he is real, not just a bunch of Christians who think they are better than everyone else. Do you get it?
