Wholesome Relationships VII, Fruit of Gentleness

A couple extra minutes when I say turn to 1st Kings. I know it's not exactly like Matthew, so we'll wait a minute. About way of background, let me just take you back to these days in the Old Testament when one of God's choice prophets fell into despair. Up until then he was a hero. He had fought battles valiantly, winning most of them. But interestingly, after winning a major battle, he falls into discouragement unexplainably. So much so that I could describe it as nothing less than a freefall down into despair. And might I add that at this time of year, there are lots of people who fall right there into despair and depression. But God learns about this prophet's situation and sends word that he wants to go and meet with him on a mountaintop. He wants to show up there and talk to him just a bit. And I can only imagine what's going through Elijah's mind when he knows he's going to meet with God up on the mountain. Just think about if it were you. Well, certainly he was secretly wishing that it was another time in his life, you know, because he really wasn't at the top of his prophetic game right then. He was at the bottom. He was sort of lumping along and he wasn't sure he really wanted to meet God in that weakened condition. And he's wondering, well, how will God show up? How will he demonstrate his presence to me? How will he manifest who he is? So let me read for you from 1st Kings 19. End of verse 11. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountain apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord. Just imagine it. Here's Elijah up on the mountaintop and this mighty wind comes so powerful that rocks are being blown along in the wind. Think of Hurricane Andrew or one of those tornadoes that blew through the valley here several years ago. That kind of power. And I can just imagine Elijah thinking, if this is God, I'm in deep trouble. But look what it says. But the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind there was an earthquake. The mountain begins to tremble. Everything secure begins to be shaken around. And I'm thinking, Elijah must be at this point wondering, if this is God, I can't handle this one either. I know what's going to happen. But notice what it says. The Lord was not in the earthquake. And then a raging fire. You see, whatever was combustible and not destroyed by the wind blowing it along or the earthquake shaking it up starts to burn. And Elijah's thinking, if our God is a consuming fire, I'm history. But the Bible says, God wasn't in the fire either. After the wind and the earthquake and the fire, the Bible says, came, read it with me, a gentle whisper. And the voice of God says, Elijah, what are you doing here? Or better translated, what's going on, Elijah? We need to talk. Why are you in this condition? And I want to tell you that I think that God is in this condition. I think in that moment, Elijah, the prophet, was stunned by God's gentleness. And this text tells me something about who God is, how he operates in the world, his style, his demeanor, how he approaches the people that he loves. Now, a little later on in Scripture, in a rather unnoticed passage, and by the way, unless you're a prophet, a shepherd, a pastor, or an elder, you may have never even read Ezekiel 34. There's a powerful little story there, where the Lord approaches the spiritual leaders of the people of Israel, and he exacts some discipline. He confronts them, and he says, I want you to know, I see what's going on. And here's what he indicts them of. The Bible says, you have been treating my people with harshness and severity. And God says, that's not acceptable. I don't want that kind of leadership over my people. In fact, God says, and we have an overhead of this, Ezekiel 34. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to demonstrate how I want the people to be cared for. I, myself, will search for my sheep and look after them. I will rescue them from all the places where they have scattered. I, myself, will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign Lord. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, and I will shepherd the flock with justice. With gentleness and justice, God says, I will shepherd my flock. Now, a little later on in redemptive history, as we're going through the centuries of time, God sends his Son in the flesh, Jesus Christ, the one whom we focus upon this Christmas season. And how does God choose to manifest himself on that occasion? Is it with a legion of angels in horseback and a king riding on a mighty stallion? No. How does the Lord manifest himself? In the purest, most innocent, most gentle form that we know even today. What was it? A tiny, little, pure baby. Thirty years later, this same Jesus comes into public ministry, and he's touching people, the sick and the lame, the blind and the deaf, the poor and the hurting. He's touching them with tenderness. And at one point, he calls out to the crowd and says, you know the words, Matthew 11, 29. He says, 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. At the very core of who Jesus is, he says, I am gentle. And sometime later, the Apostle Paul writes and says, Now that you know what God is like, now that you've seen him working through history, now that you've experienced his grace, he says to him, to the church at Ephesus, Be completely humble and gentle, forgiving one another in love. Now by watching your eyes, some of you are saying, okay, I get it. Get on with it. What's this gentleness? What's the big deal about it? Well, dear ones, the big deal is in this Christmas season, I've been made very aware that God is not like us. He is gentle in his dealings with man. And we're not. Contrast what we've just read here today with what we've read about all week and heard about all week long in the media. Contrast the gentleness of our God with the violence and brutality and fear that we see just permeating. So a 12-year-old girl snatched from her bedroom slumber party and taken out and assaulted and murdered, and the whole nation is stunned. And so five people are killed on their ride home from work and a commuter train and 21 others seriously injured because one person has feelings of anger toward another group of people. You wonder what's really scary about that to me as I've been thinking about it and reading about it? It's that those things are becoming more and more the norm in our culture. More and more what we hear about. More and more what we read about. USA Today said this, I'll quote from this last Thursday, By the time you read this, news that a stone-faced gunman wordlessly executed five commuters and wounded 21 on the Long Island Railroad train will begin to recede into the nation's subconsciousness. After a wasn't that awful at lunch or a shake of the head, it may become a cold factoid tucked away in a curtain corner of the National Memory Bank where we store things like 23 shot in the Texas cafeteria. Remember that? 21 died in a San Ysidro McDonald's. Remember that? 22 killed over a weekend in Los Angeles. And new threads will be woven into a national fabric of fear and distrust, adding impetus to sales of guns, motion detectors, double locks, and alarm systems. Yet at the same time the violence terrorizes us, its epidemic volume numbs us so profoundly that 26 shootings can become a standard of acceptability. Defining deviancy down is what Senator Daniel Moynihan calls it when 23,706 annual murders become a baseline for comparison, not a global horror story. Contrast that with the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which took seven lives and at its time was the paradigm of a shocking crime. What's happening? I did a whole teaching on this two months ago, tape 1374 on violence, if you want to look into that a little bit more. But what is amazing to me, it's not these things that shock us, it's now gentleness. When we see it, we don't expect it. And I want to share with you why I believe God's divine gentleness can affect our lives when we encounter it. Let me just mention a few things. Number one, when we encounter God's divine gentleness, sometimes through another person, sometimes directly. Number one, if you're taking notes, it opens us to a new truth. You see, what happened to Elijah when he went on the mountain to meet with God was that he was shocked by the way God appeared to him. It wasn't in the wind, it wasn't in the earthquake or the fire, but God shows up and speaks in that still, small voice. And Elijah says, this wasn't what I expected, God, and I know I didn't deserve it. I expected something a whole lot more harsh. And if this is how you really are, God, if this is how you treat me when I deserve judgment, God, this is just too wonderful. This is unbelievable. Dear ones, unexpected gentleness, particularly when it comes from God, has the power to free you from the old mindsets and fears that bind so many people. It's like the two men that I may or may not have mentioned in this service about a month ago. Two older men, senior citizens by today's definition, were in the locker room at the health club where I work out, and they were just going on and on about religious fanatics that they knew. I mean, they were chewing them up and chewing them down, making fun of them going to church every week, carrying their Bibles. Can you imagine it? Might have been a couple of you. You know, religious nutcases, making fun of having devotions and talking to God and giving money, what a rip-off. And I kind of moved over toward their place in the locker room, you know, ready to stand up for God's honor and maybe my own. And right about then, the conversation turned back to history. With some expletives deleted, they described their experience in a blank-blank school where they were slapped till they were silly because they got out of line now and then. One guy said, yeah, I remember walking down the hall once and didn't even know where the hand came to knock me in the back of the head, knock me over. And then the picture, you know, the fuzzy screen began to become clear, and what I saw was a couple of men who were scarred when they were little kids, and their image of God was some judge up on a throne looking for a way to smash him with a hammer. And for 60 years, they'd been living in that misunderstanding of God. So the only way they could deal with religion was to mock it and deny its validity because they couldn't confront the fact that that's who God was. And I was just about to step in and say, well, maybe it's not how you thought, and then across the hall came this, hey Rev, you know, blow in my cover. And that's how it happens for me lots of times, and I just knew at that point that they wouldn't listen. But another time. You see, no one had ever told these men what Titus 3, 4, and 5 says, or at least they'd never heard it, when the kindness and love of God, our Savior, appeared. He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Spirit. You see, it wasn't by works of righteousness. It wasn't by trying to do good religious things. It wasn't by going to church, but by the mercy of God, and they hadn't known that mercy. And I would venture to say that if someone told them, they would be stunned by God's grace and mercy and gentleness. And if they would admit their pride and receive His forgiveness, their lives would be changed. Now, there's got to be at least a few of you thinking this this morning. You're thinking, well, you know what? I mean, that's true about that gentleness and all that good stuff, but God is gonna judge them, isn't He? I mean, He is gonna, He's gonna wreak vengeance on their sin. He's gonna come back, and I mean, He's just gonna, He's gonna burn them up, isn't He? And the Bible clearly says, and I'm going to talk about this next week, that He is going to bring judgment. But dear ones, until He does, that is not our place. In fact, it reminds me when I read about that of something that happened in the Gospel of Luke when, well, let me read it for you. People did not welcome Jesus because He was heading for Jerusalem. This was in Samaria. So the disciples, James and John, saw this and they asked, Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven? Now, how many of you have prayed that prayer on somebody that you know? Oh, God, bring down fire from heaven. Show them how you really are. Listen, I mean, there's that exact same thing some of us feel sometimes. Jesus turned and rebuked them, and they went to another village. Maybe you're here today, and you've been running from an image of God where all you've been expecting is fire, and not His gentle grace. And can I say also, and I say especially to this service, since most of us here do know Christ, this is also true of some of us who are locked into habits and patterns and problems that we can't break free of. This is very true for a lot of believers here today. You think that God, if He really was honest with you, would exact retribution for your inability to be an obedient servant. That's not the way of Christ. I experienced a little bit of this myself. I shared with you some months ago how last summer, I arrived in my study break just pretty much in a melted-down condition. I hadn't managed my life very well, and I'd seen some relationships break up, and I was feeling unclear about how to proceed, and I remember thinking, you know, God, this isn't good. I did all the wrong things. I remember taking out a stack of books that I brought along just to, you know, kind of help myself along, and reading about, you know how Christian leaders can write things in a way that sounds, oh, that's just the way it ought to be, and everyone can do this. And I was reading those books, and thinking, oh, man, Lord, I messed that up, and I didn't do this right, and how come I didn't see this before? And I was expecting that hand coming down from heaven. And I shared last summer, one night I just kind of went out late at night, in a warm July night, and up on a mountaintop, and sort of laid down, and put my hands behind my head, and looked up, and saw God's unbelievable creation. And the Lord spoke to me, and I shared how he said just two little words. He said, trust me. It's okay. I see the broken pieces. I know what you've been going through. I'll put it together for you if you'll let me. But you can't go back and dwell on it. You can't punish yourself. You've got to trust me. And dear ones, I venture to say that there are a number of us here today who haven't made any progress in your spiritual journey, because you have been carrying around a bag of guilt that you think you deserve. But you won't let God take the bag off of you. You won't come to him and let him bear the burden. You won't let his gentle grace renew and restore you. And if you've never been stunned by that divine gentleness, maybe today, as we have communion in a few moments, you can lay it all back on him and say, God, I don't deserve this. I deserve the lightning bolt. But I come to your Son and receive. Dear ones, you know, it's understandable, if that's how you've been, by the way, because, you know, we live in a world of imperfect people where bosses, and teachers, and coaches, and sometimes even flawed parents have a propensity to come along and smack us when we step across the line. And so we think, well, if that's the way of the world, maybe God's the same way. Well, it's not that way, as I read the Bible. It's just hard to believe that God is different. And you know what, church? We as Christians, of all people, should treat one another with that same gentle grace. Shouldn't we? I mean, it's really a distortion when Christians begin to treat other Christians with harshness and severity. It's like two years ago. You remember the radio programs that were going on out there? And someone took it upon themselves to expose all the flaws of all the other churches in Pittsburgh, particularly this one. And it sounded severe, and it sounded harsh, and it was. And it wasn't of benefit to the body of Christ. You know, I contrast that, that way of dealing with faults, with something I experienced a while back, on a Sunday morning after a message that I thought was particularly good, someone asked me if they could walk me to my car. I said, well, sure. Figuring, well, this is going to be great. I can use a little encouragement. I get up, and I said, Jack, I just wanted you to know that single parents who heard the message, it was a message on parenting. Single parents may feel it's impossible to do what you talked about doing. I had talked about the fact that kids were affected, you know, when their parents weren't there, and they were in daycare and all that. And I'm thinking, well, how do you know how they're feeling? You're not a single parent. My defensive bubble was up. And then he said this. He said, well, you know, back off, man. He said, you're usually pretty sensitive, and I know that's not your heart to exclude anybody, and I just thought maybe you'd want to know that that's the way it came across. You know, in that moment, his gentle approach just melted all my defenses down, and I heard what he had to say. And it was powerful, and it changed me. That's the way. I would yearn that you and I could approach one another in our faults in a gentle way so that we would be heard, so the truth could get through, you know. Just imagine if in our home groups, and in all of our interactions in the church, in the body of Christ, if we responded to one another's faults with gentleness, you know, not with withdrawing or with rebuking, but with gentleness at first. That's why Proverbs 15, 1 says, A soft answer turns away wrath. That's what Paul was after in Ephesians 4, 2, when he says, Be completely humble and gentle. The second thing that gentleness does, it opens us to new ways of growing. You know, when we encounter gentleness, it disarms our defenses as much as I just talked about a moment ago. It makes us ready to go on to new things. Our inclination, even here in this church, is to really, you know, be scrutinizing and pushing one another. I'm all for iron sharpening iron. I think that's biblical. But, dear one, sometimes, you know, it needs to be kind of gently done at first. By the way, personal prophecy has an inclination many times to be cutting rather than edifying, and that's one of the reasons we need to be very, very careful how we administer that gift. But, in any event, if we don't give correction, if we don't give growth opportunities in a gentle way, many times people are crushed by it. I remember a family meal a while back. All of my kids... How many of you try to have a family meal once a day? I mean, if you have kids at home, it's an event you try to make happen. Well, we were all together, and I don't know how to say this, but I guess I could best say it was I... I was not distinguishing myself in couth in that particular meal, and I noticed that David and Jonathan and Amy were kind of like muffling laughter. You know, eyes were looking back and forth, and so I wanted to kind of in on what they were laughing about because I hadn't gotten it yet, you know. And Carol just kept on eating, head her head down. She knew, they knew, and then all of a sudden I realized that what they were kind of stifling in their laughter, what they were really laughing about was me and my untruthness. Well, I'll tell you, I jumped on that as an opportunity to deliver a mini-series on parenting and honoring your parents, and I tied it in with the verses about long life, you know, and Ephesians and all that stuff, and I mean, I'm going on and on, and I'm just like going into my third point, and I looked up, and two of those three kids had tears in their eyes, and it wasn't because they were laughing that hard anymore. And I realized that my little mini-series had gotten into a hellfire and brimstone kind of exposition, and Carol looked up and said, why don't you just take it easy? You know, let me just say a word to parents, younger parents today, because I look back on my parenting, and I'm not done yet. I just wish I had learned something about this gentle authority a long time ago. 1 Corinthians 13, 1 says exactly how I feel these days. Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, if I have not love, I'm just like clanging gongs and crashing cymbals. Just discovering in these days the secret power of gentleness in other people's lives, because you do. That's how God got through to us at Christmas time. And I hope in the future we'll treat one another, and can I just say this? I'll risk it a little bit. I hope you'll treat me that way in my faults. Sometimes when I get your letters, I get your notes correcting me, and our staff. I want you to know, you don't think pastors have feelings. We do. And much of what you'd say would have much more impact if you spoke it gently. That's why Paul said, learn to speak the truth in love, Ephesians 4, 15. The third thing that gentleness does, that it opens us, and I conclude with this, opens us to community. You see, isolation is a destructive thing. A prime strategy I've viewed over the years of Satan is to find a person and pull them out of the care and protection of other believers and other loved ones, and cause them to imagine that people are thinking a certain thing about them, when in fact that's not the case at all. Isolation is very destructive. We read about it in the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15. He had been given all of his inheritance because he demanded it from his father, and went out and squandered it all, and wine, women, and song, the Bible says. And his relationship with his dad at that point, in his mind, was over. He blew it, he knew it, and he didn't know what to do about it. He finally came to a sense, as the Bible says, well, at least I can be a servant in my father's household. So he went back fully expecting to be banished from the community of his father's relationship. And when he showed up, I remember what the Bible says the father did. What did he do? He ran to meet him. And he said, my son, he put his arms around him, my son, I thought you were dead, but you're alive. And I believe in that moment that son was stunned by the gentleness of his father. And that is a picture, keep this in mind, of how God treats wayward sinners who come back to Him. And presumably, we don't know, but presumably he spent the rest of his life in the companionship of his father. Dear ones, the Christmas message is one of a gentle, holy, loving God drawing all types of people together in the community. The magi who were out on their own, they came from the east, the Bible says. The shepherds who were out on the field, the other end of the economic spectrum, they came into community together. Mary and Joseph and other people in the city, they all came because they came out of isolation in the community around the gentle little child. And that really is our message to people this Christmas time. It's not a fist, it's a nail-pierced hand that leads us down from heaven. I so pray that every one of us count it as our mission, our personal charge from Almighty God, even if we have to walk up and down and intercept the bag people who push their carts on Route 19 and bring them into this place, that someone would benefit from your extending gentle grace to them that they might find the grace of God in the next two weeks. It's so within our reach. And if you're here today and you've never experienced it, you don't know what you're missing. Those nail-pierced hands are open to you this morning. God says He so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believed in Him would not perish but have eternal life. It's His gentle grace. That's what we celebrate this Christmas. Can we stand, please?