Gentleness

What comes to mind when you think of someone being gentle?  When I first sat down to write this, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what gentleness was all about.  I pictured someone holding a small baby.  For some reason, gentleness makes me think of babies.  I guess I was only thinking about definition #2 from Dictionary.com:  not severe, rough, or violent; mild.  This is definitely gentleness, but it is not where I feel like I need to go in this blog.

The definition that surprised me was #6:  characteristic of good birth; honorable; respectable.  When this one is paired with #10:  entitled to a coat of arms, and #11:  Archaic. noble; chivalrous: a gentle knight, I think we get a better idea of what God is trying to tell us.  Using these definitions, someone who is gentle is honorable, noble, chivalrous, and entitled to a coat of arms!  Sound like anyone you know?  That narrows down the candidates doesn’t it.  Someone who is gentle could be likened to a prince or princess.

Well…that’s you!  In Ephesians 1:5-6, God says through Paul, “⁵he^[c] predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— ⁶to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”  Notice it says He adopted us as his sons.  That makes us sons and daughters of the King!  Last time I checked that makes us princes and princesses!

1 John 3:1-3 also speaks of our gentleness, “¹How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. ²Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears,^[a]we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. ³Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.”  We are children of God!  In my book that definitely makes us gentle.

This begs the question, if we are nobility, why don’t we act like it?  In my opinion, we don’t act like a child of the King because satan has done an outstanding job of stealing our identity.  I don’t know about you, but I have found satan to be a whisperer.  He whispers things to me like, “God can’t forgive that”, “God can’t use someone like you”, “you are not worthy”, etc.  It doesn’t take long before those whispers creat doubt.  Can God really use someone like me?  With my past?  Someone who want to do the right thing, but often finds himself sinning anyway?  Unfortunately, these whisperings, if allowed to go on unchallenged, can sometimes form an identity.

I was talking to a 4th grader one day who was in the office for assaulting a teacher.  This particular boy spent a LOT of time in the office.  I was trying to talk to him about the power of choice.  I kept telling him, “you are a good kid.  You just made a bad choice.”  He wouldn’t even look at me.  After several minutes of talking , I told him again, “you are a good kid”.  He raised his head and looked at me for the first time, and said, “No, I’m not!”  “Sure you are”, I said.  He looked me dead in the eye and said, “No I’m not.  Just ask my mom.  She will tell you.  I’m not a good kid”.  I wanted to take this child somewhere, hold him in my arms, and tell him he was good unitl he believed it!  He allowed his mother (and satan) to give him his identity.  He was a bad kid in his mind.  So why behave?

I think we all are that 4th grader sometimes.  We have a skewed self identity.  I think God is challenging us today to accept what He says about us.  He says we are gentle.  We are of noble birth.  We are children of the King!  What difference could we make for the Kingdom if we bought into our true identity?  Who are we going to get our identity from?  The Creator of All Things, or that which He created?