The so-called Culture Wars are in full rage all around us. There have been many "battles" in this war in recent days, months and years. From legal abortion access to gender and sex classifications to how we read and interpret history the battles have been raging.
I've had a few people ask if I would write on this blog about a few of these topics. I'm not necessarily against addressing these things in public writing. To be completely honest, a one, three, five and seventeen year-old have been taking shifts keeping me from my writing and baseball doubleheaders and pure uninspired laziness have been their allies.
My conscience or the Holy Spirit (hard to tell between the two at times) responded to the most recent question with a question of its/His own: Is a desire to and a skill in engaging a cultural battle a most defining quality that people see in me?
"Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls." Matthew 11:29
Fairly recently my church encouraged us all to read Dane Ortlund's Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (highly recommend). Ortlund used the above verse, in the style of the classic Puritan writers, as the basis for the entire book. He says, as Charles Spurgeon before him, that this is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus tells us about His own heart.
Jesus is gentle and lowly in heart.
Am I?
This post isn't designed to plumb the depths of Christ's heart, Dane Ortlund's book is a much better, accessible route to that end. I just want to know if I am gentle and lowly in heart and if I can be that in a way so as people see that over witty and jagged in pen or tongue.
Again, there is most certainly a place for sharp wit and the demolishing of arguments (2 Corinthians 10:5), but is my trademark quality the very quality of heart that Jesus Himself says is His?
1 Timothy 3:3 says that an elder or overseer must be gentle. Am I gentle?
Now, you might be thinking, "Yes, gentleness is important but we also must be strong and courageous."
You're right. Be strong, play the man, be courageous: these phrases take up much ink in Scripture. Yet, when Christ, who is the strongest, most courageous man, wanted to tell us about Himself He chose gentle and lowly.
My son is bigger than his 3 year-old and 14 month old siblings. I often talk to him about being a gentleman. I tell him that because he is strong he must be gentle. Because he can overpower he must be especially self-controlled. That's what a gentleman is: Strength under gentle control.
Brothers and sisters, we have much strength and therefore must exercise and exhibit much more gentleness. We don't need to enter so-called culture wars from a position of weakness. We must realize that the strength afforded us must be accompanied by gentleness. AND if Jesus can be lowly in heart when He always was right then how much more can we when we are far from always right?
I am not as gentle and lowly in heart as I need to be. I want to be a man marked by gentleness. I want to be a gentleman like Jesus.
"Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." Colossians 3:12-14
Pursue genuine, Christ-like gentleness in our corse world today.
