Sermon excerpt:
I’ve been thinking a lot about gentleness this week, and what it might look like for us to be aggressively gentle in our hardened and broken world. I was browsing through quotes on Goodreads.com, looking for inspiration.
That’s how I found this quote about “aggressive gentleness.” It says, “Gentleness is not apathy but is an aggressive expression of how we view people. We see people as so valuable that we deal with them in gentleness,fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died. To be apathetic is to turn people over to mean and destructive elements, to truly love people[causes] us to be aggressively gentle.” (Gayle D. Erwin) [1]
It seems to me that before we can actually BE aggressively gentle, we need first to work on seeing people as valuable, “fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died.” We need to see each person we meet as one for whom Christ died and deal with them in gentleness.
[1]http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/gentleness
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