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We have a complicated relationship with presents at Christmas time, don’t we? We wrestle with the idea that Christmas has become too commercialized and hate that stores have taken the meaning of Christmas from good tidings of great joy to great spending on good toys. That is true as far as it goes, but who can deny how good it feels to give a child a great present that they are so thankful for? It’s a great feeling to do that for adults as well, especially if it is a practical gift that they will use everyday. One of the most useful gifts I got from Abby was an electric kettle. You fill the thing up with water, set it on the little base, turn it on, and in a couple of minutes, you have water heated perfectly for tea or coffee! It is a perfect gift for me that has been going strong for a couple years now. The thing is though, it is so much a part of my everyday life, that I often forget that it was a gift. It just blends into the kitchen. I think that is often what happens with the gifts that God gives to us. They are so freely given to us, and often so perfectly suited to our needs, that they just become part of the background of our lives. And I’m not even talking about the physical gifts like the car you got here in today, or the house you came from, I’m am talking about the gifts that are given to you in your life that you don’t notice are there. I’m talking about the fruit of the Spirit. There is no gift more practical, more satisfying to oneself and others than the fruit of the Spirit. You’ll notice that I say “fruit” not “fruits,” and that comes from something that Pastor Reader would always point out. This list of virtues in its entirety is present in the life of a true Christian; they are not multiple choice. We are expected to have all of them, even if we have more of one virtue than another. There isn’t a way to cover all of these virtues comprehensively in just a few weeks, so I have selected a few that correspond more or less with the theme of the advent candle for that week. Unfortunately, for this sermon, hope is not on the this list in Galatians, but I think that the one I’ve picked out today is often not talked about, hence the title of sermon, the forgotten virtue of gentleness. Part of the reason why gentleness is forgotten is because we as a society have abandoned it by changing its meaning. Instead of how the Scriptures define it, we think that gentleness is a limp-wristed, weak excuse for lack of action. For example, a basically punishment-free approach with one’s child is called “gentle parenting.” Speaking “gently” implies today a soft tone of voice, safe words, and subtle coaxing rather than confrontation. We certainly wouldn’t apply the term “gentle” to someone who flips over tables and chases people out of a temple for defiling it, but that is exactly the term that Jessup applied to Himself (Timothy George, 404)! Far from a limp-wristed excuse for lack of action, gentleness actually requires a great deal of strength. Listen to how my old seminary dean, Timothy George puts it: "As an expression of the fruit of the Spirit, gentleness is strength under control, power, harnessed in loving service and respectful actions. One who is gentle in this sense will not attempt to push others around or arrogantly impose one's own will on subordinates or peers. But gentleness is not incompatible with decisive action, and firm convictions” (404). You see, gentleness isn't the absence of correction, it is the manner of correction. It isn't the absence of passion (see Jesus flipping over tables) or strong action, it is the heart's posture while doing so. The dictionary definition of the greek word for gentleness is “the quality of not being overly impressed by a sense of one's self-importance” (BDAG, 861), or as I have put it on your outline, The ability to live in humility. Why is this a gift? It is something that we don't naturally have, it is something that our society actively discourages, and it was something that Jesus embodied. So let’s look at the Scriptures and see how this term is used. Our main text is going to be Titus 3:1-7, because this sums up very well how gentleness is the ability to live with humility. Paul writes to Titus, a young pastor, what he needs to be teaching the church. Chapter one talks about what the leadership is supposed to look like. Chapter two tells us what the whole church needs to be taught, namely, “sound doctrine” and how that is practically applied. When we get to chapter three, that thought continues. Paul points out that we are to be gentle, as opposed to quarreling, but verse 3-7 gives us the motivation, the reason, the proper perspective on why we need to be gentle. We need to be gentle because we were just like the people we don’t want to be gentle towards, namely, sinners. We were just like them in kind if not in degree. We committed the same sorts of sin, even if they weren’t as visible as other people’s. We were saved from those sins not by anything that we did, but by everything that Christ did! So since we were just like the people we want to be harsh with, AND the only reason why we aren’t like that anymore (sort of) is because of the grace and mercy of Jesus, we are not in a position to be pompous and arrogant towards people. So what does it look like practically? What does gentleness look like when there is sin that needs to be dealt with in the church? Well, we turn to Galatians 6:1-2, where we see Paul telling us to restore someone with gentleness when they are caught in transgression. We do so knowing that the roles could just as easily be reversed even post-salvation! True Christians can and will fall into sin, and we want grace when it is our turn! So extend that to others. We need to be reminded of this, because this approach is strange to us. Is this how the world operates? No, it is not. When someone commits some sort of online sin (usually a thought that hasn't been approved of), what does the internet do? They cancel you. If you haven't said anything bad lately, people will dive back to the beginning of social media posts and dig up stuff from a decade ago. And then somehow the way to deal with someone being mean online is to be meaner to them. The internet doesn't forgive because it can't. You can't forgive what wasn't directed at you. The internet does not restore because it can't. If someone tries to restore someone who has been disgraced, what does everyone think about you? You must have done the same thing! They come after you as if they had never sinned themselves. And it isn’t just online, isn’t it? Our southern culture lives in honor and shame, and once you’ve moved to the shame category, it’s nearly impossible to get back to honor, isn’t it? It doesn’t take much to get a reputation around here, and it is very hard to get that back, especially in a small town. If people do manage it, it doesn’t come by grace. It comes with years of grinding work. A graceless honor/shame culture, online or otherwise, can only exist as long as someone thinks that they don’t sin, too. This is exactly the point that Galatians is trying to make, isn't it? We can restore someone with gentleness because we know that we are susceptible to sin, too. The humility of knowing our own susceptibility to sin makes gentle correction in the church possible. Pride makes that impossible. "Good, good," you may say (channeling Palpatine for some reason), "we should be gentle to those who are around us, so let's spend our time sharpening up the knives for those outside the church!" Well, let's take a look at 2 Timothy 2:24-25. The opponents here are thought to be false teachers (Guthrie, Tyndale), so even here the requirement for gentleness stands. Again, this is meant for people who are undermining the church with their teaching and yet the call is to correct with gentleness and to do so patiently. Notice that in verse 24. It isn’t a quick process. You know, oftentimes the gentleness part of correcting with gentleness doesn’t look like talking. Take the story of Rosaria Butterfield. If you've somehow never heard of her, she used to be a lesbian literature professor whose goal was to make this sin acceptable. She was married to her female partner at the time, and was in every sense of the word a gay rights activist. Now, she wanted to understand how Christians thought about this, and one pastor, named Ken Smith, offered to have her over for lunch to explain the Bible and how he came to the positions he did about homosexuality. She was intrigued by his hospitality and kept coming back. Take a guess as to how many meals it took before she came to Christ. 10? 30? According to her, 500, and that is apparently a conservative estimate (link). That's gentleness, y’all. Do you see how much ability to live in humility you have to have to do that kind of work? Do you see how little a sense of self-importance Ken Smith had there? Who takes the time to have 500 meals with the same person? Would not after meal 250 we might be tempted to say, “My time is too valuable to give to this one person!”? This kind of gentleness isn’t limp-wristed non-action, this is a robust display of endurance and strength of character. Ken told Rosaria the truth. He called homosexuality what it is, a sin. There was genuine opposition there, and yet, making 500 meals for a person does something, doesn't it? The end of the story is now she is one of the most prominent voices in defending Biblical understandings of sexuality and is married to a presbyterian pastor! That doesn't mean that all you have to do is have several hundred meals with someone and they will guarantee change, but if they haven't changed, did you try that? Have you corrected with this kind of gentleness? There is no denying that that is a big calling. It’s way easier to just call someone an idiot in the comment section. Y'all, so much of our internet apologetics doesn't even reach the first rung of the ladder God calls us to climb. Our efforts for people often drop very quickly. Now, yes, there is a difference between gentle correction like this and enabling sinful behavior. Allowing someone to live in your home so they are free to indulge in their sin, whatever that looks like, liquor, laziness, or lust, isn't gentle correction because it isn't correction! But we are very quick to reach for the easy button, aren't we? Now, you might say, "Well, there is no way we can do this for everyone!" and you are exactly right! This is why gentleness is the ability to live with humility. It takes humility to recognize that you actually can't do it all. Modern life has convinced us that we can live the Christian life in twenty directions at the same time, and we can't! Not like this. You've maybe got time to do this with your immediate family and maybe one or two friends at a time, and that's about it. But can you imagine if we all did that? Can you imagine if we all did that using the different gifts and talents that God gave specifically to each one of us and brought us all together so we could work like, I don't know, a body? Wouldn't that be great? If only that was in the Bible somewhere. So how do we apply this to ourselves? Really, the only way to do this for anyone is to recognize that it has already been done to you. How patient is Jesus with you? You know, Ken Smith had basically a year and a half’s worth of lunches with Rosaria. Jesus spent thirty three full years on Earth away from heaven. Three of those years was nearly constant contact with disciples, eating, drinking, praying, traveling, teaching, all the time. Constantly serving rather than being served. He did so all the way to the cross, being despised and rejected by men, a suffering Servant. Listen to Paul apply all of this to us in Philippians 2:3-8, (1165) “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Did you catch verse 5? You already have this mind in Christ. In Christ, you are perfectly gentle in the eyes of Christ. Jesus has given you the title “gentle in heart” because you and Christ are united together like a marriage. You’ve already gotten the title. God because of Christ sees you as perfectly gentle, and now, in light of that, be gentle with others. One scholar put it this way: ‘When Paul thinks of (the glory of Christ) he does not look back, he looks up … men [and women] were saved, not by dwelling on the wonderful words and deeds of One who had lived some time ago, and reviving these in their imagination, but by receiving the almighty, emancipating, quickening Spirit of One who lived and reigned for evermore … And so it must always be, if Christianity is to be a living religion.’ (James Denny, from Martin’s commentary in the Tyndale series). You aren’t gentle because you can see a good ethical example in Christ, you can be gentle because Christ, gentle and lowly, is living in you at this very moment. Now, anytime that you are able to display even a moderate amount of gentleness, that is a gift that doesn’t come from you but from Jesus. So take the time to not only notice it, but thank God for it. To forget that last part makes it just pride and an abandonment of gentleness! Notice the gift that God has given to you, and pass it on. Show Christ’s gentleness to your kids, spouse, co workers, fellow church members, it is a gift too precious to be forgotten, too precious to be unshared.
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