If you've got a Bible, go ahead and get that open to the book of
Titus that's in the New Testament.
If you can't find it, that's OK. There should be an index on the
inside of your Bible. If you don't have one of those,
that's OK. We'll have all the relevant
words on the screen for you. We are in Titus chapter 3.
We're only looking at verses one through 2.
We've got a handful of Titus sermons left before the Advent
series, and this morning we find ourselves in the last, the third
of three, the last chapter of the small book of Titus that
we're army crawling through. As you do, let me ask you a
question. How do, how should, how are
Christians to engage with the culture?
Christianity has a gentleness problem.
It's partly theological. Christians have the tendency to
elevate one of God's attributes over the other.
Some Christians have the tendency to emphasize Jesus's
lion, like nature, and neglect his lamb, like nature.
Some Christians do the opposite. But Christians have a gentleness
problem, partly theological. It's also partly practical.
Sometimes it feels in a hostile world, like gentleness is
ineffective, and if we're honest, hostility, anger,
vitriol are all very effective. In fact, the science teaches us
that. I don't know if you know this.
The science actually teaches us that human beings bond more
deeply over shared hatreds than shared loves.
And so one of the most natural human postures possible is the
desire to be around people who hate all the same things that
you hate. And so hatred, hostility,
vitriol is really effective. If Christians are known, if a
denomination is known, if a church is known, if a leader is
known for a long list of all the things that he hates, he will
tend to draw a very large crowd around him.
So it's effective, partly theological, partly practical,
but certainly pervasive. The problem or lack of
gentleness is pervasive. There was one famous Christian
author who wrote a book on the necessity for gentleness in the
modern world. He called it a gentle answer.
It was one of my favorite books of that year.
Later that year, he got removed from leadership because of his
domineering and abusive leadership style.
He wrote the book on gentleness. In fact, things got so bad in
the culture a couple years ago, not necessarily within our
church, but the surrounding culture, the Christian culture
at large. Even the city of Des Moines
where there were so many pastors being fired for domineering,
abusive leadership styles, so many churches that were falling
apart because of that, that as an elder team we had to take one
of our meetings and just ask ourselves the question, as a
pastoral team, are we known for our gentleness?
That might be a good question for you to ask about yourself
this morning. Are you known for your
gentleness? I'm not talking about a
personality trait. You can be extroverted and be
gentle. You can be introverted and not
be gentle. You can be an ENTJ.
You can be an IDK and you can be gentle or not, but would you say
that gentleness is a top five quality of yours?
Or to phrase it a little bit differently, if you asked your
closest friends, which I think you should, maybe it's a fighter
group. Maybe it's your community group,
maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's a friend you asked your
friend. Am I known for my gentleness?
Would they laugh at you? It's worth thinking about.
Amen. If you're able, let's go ahead
and stand for the reading of God's Word.
If you have missed all of our Titus sermon series, we're
psyched you here. I can catch you up.
We're in chapter 3 this morning. So far, what Paul has been
doing, the author of Titus, is this short book is really all it
is, is it's an instruction manual on how to be a church.
That's why we're calling it how to be a church.
These little churches have sprouted up in the ancient world
on this little island called Crete.
And so Paul's unpacking, hey, here's what it looks like to be
a church. And so he greets the churches
almost immediately after that. He warns the Church of false
teachers and wolves, and he gives explicit instructions for
what pastors should be, how to find them and what qualities
they should have. After that, what Paul does is he
starts to blast through all the various people groups within the
church. He says, hey, older men be like
this, older women do this, younger kids be like this.
And then after he blasts through all of those instructions, he
says, OK, now when you gather together, this is what your
central message should be. Preachers, this is what you
proclaim. Church members, this is what you
proclaim. The central message of the
church must be the gospel. He works through all of those
things. And then when he gets to chapter
3, he starts to unpack this question.
What should the churches in Crete be known for as they
engage with the surrounding culture, the leaders, the
governors, the political authorities, the cultural norms?
And Paul says this. Remind them, that's you, That's
the Church, to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be
obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no
one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle and to show perfect
courtesy towards the people that you like and agree with you.
Perfect courtesy toward all people.
Heavenly Father, I have been so challenged this week.
I was up late last night praying and asking you why I struggle so
much with gentleness. Why when I get caught, I tend to
not bleed out gentleness, but I tend to bleed out anger on one
side, or equally worse, cowardiceness on the other side.
And Lord, you call us to be people who bleed gentleness.
Are we known for that? How do we, how do we even do
that? I'm not so sure I've got a great
answer to that question, Lord. So you must work this morning
and send your Holy Spirit powerfully to bring about
answers in every human heart here this morning that are
effective and help us live out the gentleness of Christ.
Would you do that, Lord, do that in the precious name of Jesus,
all God's people prayed Amen. You can have a seat OK, I
already showed my hands there I. These couple verses are Paul's
explicit instructions on how do we engage with the surrounding
culture as Christians how do we engage with pop culture?
How do we agree with the political culture?
How do we, how do we engage with the cultural norms around us,
the, the cultural leaders, the social norms, the decisions that
they make? And I'll exegete the text a
little bit more in a bit. I'm going to do what I don't
usually do, which is before I look at the text more closely,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just 5 minutes and
I'm going to give us a framework that I find really, really
helpful. It's a framework for engaging
with culture. This isn't my own.
I don't, I didn't develop this. I don't even know who to
attribute this to. It's pretty common.
But if you've never engaged with this cultural framework, I think
this will be really helpful for you because there's a lot of
aspects about our culture like what music or movies am I
allowed to watch or engage with? Or what parenting decisions do I
make? Or what are the social norms
that I can embrace? Or what are the social norms I
can reject? Or what are the social
inventions I can embrace and which ones must I reject?
And parenting decisions and even holidays, like what do I do
about Halloween? This framework can be helpful
for everything in that question. So when it comes to an engaging
with culture, Christians have three options.
Receive on the other end, reject or in the middle, redeem.
We're going to start on the bulletin point to the right
reject. There are some things in culture
this needs to be said. There are some things in culture
that Christians simply cannot redeem or receive.
No matter how hard they try, no matter whether or not they try
to stick a Christian label on it.
There are things in a culture that Christians must boldly
reject. For instance, if you are an
entrepreneur, I don't care how effective or spiritual you are,
you cannot as an entrepreneur start a Christian strip club.
That must be rejected. That's an element of culture
that you cannot baptize, you can't partner or try to redeem
lust. There's no such thing as
Christian porn. Porn must be rejected outright
by Christians. The institution of slavery.
You cannot justify that evil with an economic argument and
then say, well, we're just practicing Christian slavery.
No, those things must be rejected.
There are aspects and culture that must outright be rejected
by Christians. No compromise.
And on the other end, the four end, that left end is the
bulletin point of receive. There are things in culture that
Christians can just outright receive.
They can embrace these things without using a ton of
discernment over cultural inventions like lawn mowers.
Like you don't need to like sit in front of your lawn mower on a
Sunday afternoon and pray. Like, Lord, is it OK for me to
embrace it? Just mow your lawn.
You can just receive some things as Christians or cars or
transportations. I think most of the time, even
fashion styles tend to be like, can Christians wear skinny
jeans? Can they wear baggy jeans?
Like there are just cultural norms.
This is fine. Just embrace them or not.
Christians can just receive these elements without wondering
whether they're compromising their faith.
Let me give you here's one way of I like the way this pastor
says that. He says, quote, you may sit down
one day and do some historical work and figure out that the guy
who invented air conditioning was a godless Pagan and you can
still say I'm for air conditioning.
Amen. Like you, people could still
love Jesus while using their air conditioners, even if you
discover through a lot of historical exegesis that air
conditioners have Pagan roots. Use the AC is completely,
completely a morally neutral thing.
Christians can just receive those things.
But in the middle is this trickier option that is redeem.
Look at that on the screen there.
If on one side there are things that are inherently sinful in
culture that must be outright rejected, and on the other end,
there are things in culture that Christians can just outright
embrace and receive them, there are the grey things in the
middle. These are the morally ambiguous
elements of culture that Christians can choose to
participate in if they redeem them for Jesus or they can
reject them. I'll give you an example that's
really near and dear to me. OK, Death metal music.
I love death metal music I it just speaks to a place in my
heart that CCM music can't hit. I don't know, that feeling of
being locked in, the intensity of it, blasting it in my
headphones in the gym. I just love it now.
Death metal is historically and notoriously anti God.
It was. It was not cultivated and
developed by people who are like, hey, how do we invent a
new Sonic sound that really praises Jesus now?
It's historically anti God, but it played a huge role in my
faith because I grew up a metalhead before I knew Jesus.
I was the type of kid who on Sundays I would rather be in a
mosh pit than at a church on Sundays.
I grew up in the pit. I loved it.
The amazing thing about growing up in the 2000s is that there
was this phenomenon in music where a bunch of Christian
artists decided that what they were going to do is they were
going to redeem death metal and Melacore and punk and all these
different genres. And what they did is they took a
notoriously anti God music genre, brought it before the
Lord, redeemed it with Christian lyrics, and then ended up using
death metal to evangelize to kids like me and the mosh pits
and help us scream about the Lord.
And it shaped me big time. They took that element of
culture and redeemed it. Saint Augustine, a long, long
time ago, was a big advocate for redeeming the elements of
culture that could be redeemed. He used to look at the book of
Exodus and he saw a type of this in the Tabernacle.
Augustine noticed how the Tabernacle was famously built by
God's people with the gold that the Egyptians had used to build
their idols that they would worship as false gods.
What Christians did is they plundered the Egyptians.
They use that gold that was for idol idols, and they use that to
build God a temple. Augustine's point was that
Christians should plunder Pharaoh's gold in order to build
God's temples in the world. There are elements of culture
that we can redeem, like music genres famously.
Here's the famous one, the early church.
You can read about this in almost every New Testament
letter. Almost every church in the
historical world in the in the, in the, in the distant history
of the church was faced with this problem of what the heck do
we do with meat that was sacrificed to idols?
They really struggle with that. That person has a clean
conscience and can do it. That person doesn't have a clean
conscience and they don't want to do it.
And the New Testament is actually really clear in its
lack of clarity. The New Testament instructions
are, if you can't do it, if you can't eat that meat with a clean
conscience, don't do it. But if you can eat that meat and
praise Jesus, go for it. Like, I don't know if you know
it who in here like steak. See a show of hands?
Are there any godless people in here that like it well done
rather than rare or medium rare. Really Marine?
Oh my gosh. No communion for you today.
There is forgiveness in the name of Jesus.
That's right. Did you know that eating meat
has Pagan roots? That's in the Old Testament.
That's what the godless Pagan neighbors of Israel did.
Eating meat has Pagan roots. Do you know what you can do?
You can take that Pagan practice, choose to not worship
evil spirits, and instead you can eat your steak cooked medium
rare, and you can eat that medium rare steak for the glory
of Jesus. Amen.
You can redeem that, but we all have a tendency towards one of
these two options. Well, I think one of the extreme
options, some of us in the room, we have a tendency towards
rejecting that one on the far right.
If you have a tendency towards rejecting everything in culture,
what you'll tend towards is being a culture warrior.
You'll constantly talking about how you hate this or how you
hate that on major cultural issues, and you'll probably be
known more for what you hate than what you love.
But on the other hand, if you have a tendency on the other end
of thoughtlessly just receiving everything in culture, you'll
tend towards being worldly. You'll look like the world,
you'll smell like the world. You'll celebrate things in
culture that need to be criticized.
I think the key is being able to define, hey, I have a tendency
towards this direction, to define where you're at so that
you can have a healthy and biblical posture towards the
culture. But is this helpful?
Yeah. OK.
But here's the thing. The the point of these two
verses is not actually to teach you about what to reject,
receive or redeem in culture. I think that's helpful, but
that's not the point. What Paul wants to do is he
actually wants to shape the dominant posture that your heart
has towards a hostile culture that has the tendency to poke
you. And what should that dominant
posture be? Look at the text verse one.
What should the normative posture of Christians be in
culture? Here's Paul's actual
instructions about how to engage with the Cretan culture.
He says remind them again, that's you to be submissive to
rulers and authorities. This is why I say that these are
his instructions for engaging with culture.
This is a reference to their political authorities and
governors who are making the civic decisions within Crete
that will form the common culture.
And Paul says, remind them to be obedient, to be ready for every
good work, to speak evil of no one.
Why do you think Paul has to say that?
He probably has to say that because they're not doing that.
The Cretan church is probably speaking evil of everyone
everywhere and all the time. And Paul says remind them to
speak evil of no one to avoid quarreling.
And here's the big one. I think that this is the whole
summary statement of these two verses.
Remind them to be gentle and to show perfect courtesy towards
all people. I'm trying to guess what's going
on in your heart right now. My guess is that when you hear
those verses, you have the tendency to say, yeah, but that
was 2000 years ago in a culture that's must much, much, much,
much less hostile to Christianity towards ours.
And if that's you, what you need to know about these verses, that
is that these commandments were not written to people living in
a Leave it to Beaver 1950s. Everybody in their neighbors are
Christians. Culture.
This. These verses were not written to
a culture of people who lived in a Veggie Tales bubble.
Joseph. Now Veggie Tales is great.
I've heard I didn't grow up in a Christian culture.
But yeah, maybe we'll watch it sometime.
The culture that Paul's writing to entity us was actually far
more hostile towards Christianity than the one that
we live in. And what that means is that
there are no loopholes in this text that we can point at to
wiggle out of God's commandments and say, well, it was for them
and not for me. Now, of course, TuneIn for a
second, because I know this is going to be something that pops
up in conversation. There is one obvious exception,
and that obvious exception is that there are there is such a
thing as civil disobedience. Of course, if your culture or
its civic leaders are demanding that you renounce Christ or live
totally out of step with the gospel, you are called to rebel.
Don't just read the words of Paul, read the example of Paul.
See what he does in the book of Acts.
The dude is bold. The same guy who says be known
for your gentleness is the same guy who is also known for his
boldness. But your dominant posture
towards the culture should be 1 of gentleness.
Which begs the question, how could a person in this hostile
culture, this loud culture, this quarreling culture, how could a
person possibly cultivate a heart whose operating system,
let's say operating system, a heart whose operating system is
1 of gentleness? How does a person even do that?
And I'm going to answer that question with a Riddle.
It's my favorite Riddle. I think this is like the third
time I've preached on this in my 9 years of preaching just
because it's so darn good. OK, here's the Riddle.
You put water in a cup at work. OK, can you picture that?
You got a cup full of water. You're you're walking to your
office. You turn the corner.
Or maybe you're at home and you put water in your cup and you're
walking through your home and suddenly one of your kids comes
blitzing through the room at 100 miles an hour and bumps you.
Or maybe you're walking around the corner at work.
You're walking to your office and you got a Co worker blitzing
around the corner. You turn the corner, pop pops
right into you, bumps you right in the cup, bumps your cup.
Here's Here's the Riddle. What comes out of the cup?
You can say that water, water, water.
Why did water come out of the cup?
That's right. Most of us would have the
tendency to say, well water came out of the cup because my kid
ran into me. Water came out of the cup
because my coworker is an idiot, came around the corner 100 miles
an hour, bumped me, and that's why water came out of the cup.
And if you said water came out of my cup because someone bumped
into me, this person bumped into me, you would be wrong.
And the reason why you would be wrong, I can prove this.
I can, I can substantiate this claim.
The reason why you'd be wrong is because if you put wine in your
cup and your kid bumped into you, what would come out of the
cup? Wine.
So why did water come out of the cup?
Because you filled it with water.
Stick with me when you're interacting with culture.
Maybe you're on social media. Maybe you're watching the news.
Maybe a decision that a leader made comes down to you.
Maybe it's just somebody who's hostile towards Christianity,
who's sitting across from the table at you and poking you,
calling you names when you get bumped, when something in the
culture bumps you and anger comes out of your heart.
Why did anger come out of your heart?
Your temptation is going to be to say because he said this or
she said that, or they did this, or the culture this and the
culture that. And the culture sucks and I hate
our city. And they always do these things
and they always say these types of things.
And if you said that, you would be wrong.
When the culture bumps you and anger comes out of your cup, why
did anger come out of your cup? For the same reason that water
did and not whine. Anger came out of your cup
because you filled your cup with anger.
That means that if you are in a position right now where you're
like, man, I'm not gentle. I'm not known for my gentleness.
That means that you cannot develop or cultivate gentleness
by will of strength. You can't just look in the
mirror and say, Cole, you need to be more gentle this morning.
The first thing you need to attend to is you have to stop
pouring anger into your cup. And if you want gentleness to
come out, it's not just a matter of trying harder.
If you want gentleness to come out, you have got to start
filling your cup with gentleness.
The first thing to attend to is the anger in your own heart and
making sure that you pour gentleness into your heart and
not anger. If you do not deal with that, it
doesn't matter how hard you try, whenever the culture bumps you,
anger is going to spill out because that's what you're
filled with. It's not flash cold, just beep.
Just be more gentle, bro. That's my tendency.
Can't do it that way, right? Not just trying harder.
The key is to fill your heart with gentleness.
Listen to this, listen to this. This is Thomas Watson, an old
Puritan. He says, quote, this is his
answer on how do you become more gentle?
Watson says, quote, a heart inflamed with the love of Christ
only will be made gentle. The sight of Christ's wounds
alone cures the swelling of wrath.
Oh my gosh, how good is that? Your heart needs to be inflamed
with the love of Christ. It needs to meditate on the
wounds of Christ here. For good measure, here's John
Owen, one of the later Puritans. He said almost an identical
thing. Owen said quote, Only when the
heart learns to die to its own exaltations and to rest in the
sweetness of Christ's humility, only then will it not boil in
wrath at every provocation. Be still my heart.
How good is that? How do I become more, more
gentle? Owen would say Your heart needs
to rest in the sweetness of Christ's humility.
Jesus, this conversation is useless unless we take it to the
darkest place that we can imagine.
And so this is going to be hard to come back from.
But I just want to take this to what is an honestly hostile
moment and see if even in that moment can we gaze upon the
wounds of Christ and rest in his sweetness and be made gentle
because we live. We live in a hostile culture.
We do. Ever.
The loudest voice wins. The most anxious voice wins.
So what ends up happening is hostility wins.
And hostility begets more hostility, which begets more
hostility until it creates a spiral of hostility so that we
live in a world where almost everybody is yelling at
everybody about everything all the time.
And what it creates is an in like an infinite hostility loop.
You get mad at me, I get mad at you, so you madder at me and I
get more hostile at you. And it creates an infinite
hostility loop that will continue to spiral and spiral
forever into eternity unless somebody has the divine
gentleness to absorb it and stop it within their own self.
So this is going to be dark. I'm just going to be I.
I just don't think it's helpful to give trivial examples.
So I've got a friend who she, she's awesome.
She she's recently become a lot more hostile and outspoken about
her political beliefs. I actually tend to agree with
most of her political beliefs. She's just become a lot more
outspoken and hostile and aggressive publicly about them.
And don't play the who's he talking about game because this
person is not in our church. You don't know her.
A friend of mine from college. So if you're thinking, oh, I
know it's, I know it's Chloe. It's not, it's not my wife.
She's like the most gentle person I know.
She's awesome. It's not.
And you can't guess her, so don't think about yourself here.
And she didn't always present this way.
And so I had a conversation with her I didn't like.
I wasn't mad. I wasn't mad about it.
I was just curious. And so I asked her.
I said, hey, I noticed that you've become a lot more
outspoken about some of your political beliefs, and we tend
to agree on most of our political beliefs, but you've
really turned the volume up. I'm just curious that
something's changing you. And she said, I thought this was
fascinating. She said, I can tell you exactly
when it changed. And I said, oh, do tell.
And so she said, well, I used to work in an environment, a
workplace environment that was really hostile towards
Christianity. I was like probably the only
Christian in this workplace. And and she said we used, but we
used to argue about politics and things all, all the time.
I'm going to say things are going to make you really
uncomfortable in just a second and that's OK, Just deal with
that. And and she said, you know, we
used to be able to have our disagreements over tons of
political issues and it was no problem.
We could be friends with it until one day.
And I said, tell me about one day.
And she said yeah, one day we started arguing about abortion
and I was advocating for the Christian view on abortion.
And I was like praise God. And she said all of my Co
workers disagreed with me. And the conversation got so
hostile that after like 5 or 10 minutes we just had to stop.
And I was fine. I pulled the plug on the
conversation. But she said oh gosh, this is
hard to I can't even say this. She said when I walked away from
the conversation though one of my Co workers grabbed me by the
arm and pulled me in close and she whispered in my ear, I hope
that when your daughter grows up she has an abortion.
That statement is evil. I can't imagine.
I actually there's very few things I can imagine that are
more vile than wish you could bond somebody because of a
difference in opinion that their daughter would murder their
granddaughter. It's such a vile opinion.
And she said, when that person said that to me, it dawned on me
that these were not neighbors to love.
These were enemies to be defeated.
And I get it. I think the most natural thing
in the world in response to evil is to return evil with evil.
That's why Jesus has to say when people curse you bless them.
He has to say that because we don't do that, our flesh doesn't
do that. But when when she told me that
story, it's like I saw the world, the absolute truth of the
world for one of the first time. I recognize that at the bottom
of all the volume and all the yelling and all the hostility in
our culture, at the bottom of all of it, all the arguing and
anger that seeps through every square inch of our culture.
I recognized in one fell, one fell swoop that at the bottom of
all of that is pain and hurt and woundedness.
And there's like a light bulb that turned on in my mind where
I recognized for the first time that people who are hostile and
angry and finger pointers and name callers, they don't wake up
one day and look in the mirror and say, from today on, I'm
going to be a mean person about everything.
That's not how it happens. I recognize that the majority of
our world is operating out of woundedness, deep woundedness.
And the most human response is to lash out in response.
It's for hostility to bigot, hostility which begets more
hostility, which will always bigot, more hostility always,
unless divine gentleness intercedes and absorbs it.
So what I'm going to ask you to consider, you cannot do in the
flesh. But I want you to consider when
that person said that thing, that unimaginably evil thing.
I am not asking you to relinquish the truth.
That's not gentleness, that's cowardness.
But what if you took that wound and you brought that wound to
the cross instead of retaliating out of it?
And what if, when you brought that wound to the cross, what if
you compared your wound to the wounds of Christ?
And in comparing your wounds with the wounds of Christ, what
if you recognized that as much as that hurt?
What if you recognize that the wound of Christ was deeper and
your hostility towards Christ was actually greater than your
neighbor's hostility against you?
And then recognizing that, what if you recognize that when your
hostility provoked the Lord in your flesh, your sin, your
rejection of Him, the way you cursed Him, and because of His
gentleness and loneliness of heart?
What if you recognize that your hostility provoked not more
hostility from Christ, but provoked in Christ compassion
towards you rather than hatred? Sister, brother, if you could do
that, then out of your wound, rather than coming more
hostility, out of your wound might come a wellspring of life.
Gentleness, unbending gentleness.
Not a gentleness that forfeits truth, but a gentleness that I
think you know what I'm talking about.
You get in an argument that the temperature starts to raise and
all you want to do is raise your voice louder.
And if you do, you know it's just going to raise the volume
on that person. And there are these rare moments
where you, I feel anointed by a divine compassion instead.
And rather than meeting their hatred with more hatred, you
look at that person and you say, hey, are you OK?
That would change somebody. Those moments of compassion and
gentleness in the midst of hostility.
If you did that, wow, that would be one of those sweet moments in
life where you can see heaven Pierce the corpse of hell with
the blade of gentleness can see it.
But that posture requires that the Holy Spirit put to death
your flesh, and it's almost impossible.
It is impossible to be like that and to act like that in the
flesh. It's only possible with the
Spirit. A posture requires you to
partner with the Holy Spirit. But I don't know what to tell
you about a Jesus who commands you to bless those who curse
you. This needs to be our dominant
posture towards a hostile culture, Sacrificial, truthful
gentleness. I don't know that there are
objections to what I'm preaching this morning.
I think there are two main objections to what I'm preaching
this morning. So I'm just going to look at
both of them. Objection number one.
OK, this text, Cole says be gentle.
But it sounds to me like you're encouraging me to forfeit the
truth. If that's what you hear me say
this morning, you need to hear me loud and clear this morning.
Never forfeit the truth as a Christian again.
That's cowardice Ness. That's not gentleness.
A gentle posture and an unflinching conviction to the
truth are perfectly compatible. Read about the life of Jesus.
I'm saying that when you read Titus three, it should be
crystal clear that our dominant posture towards a hostile
culture cannot be hostility. Do not mean that we relinquish
the truth, right? Do not mean that we just go
along with love. And I certainly do not mean that
we don't want to win the culture to Jesus.
We do. I want to win all of culture to
Jesus. I want everybody to know Jesus.
But I am saying that we cannot fight God's battles with the
devil's weapons. You cannot fight God's battles
with the devil's weapons. Hostility, anger, hatred, all of
those things are ugly enough on their own.
But when people use Christianity to cloak them, when Christianity
is used to justify hostility, anger, and hatred, we make the
beautiful God of the cosmos appear ugly to our neighbor.
Our posture towards a hostile culture cannot be hostility, it
must be gentleness. Gentleness is how we win the
culture to Jesus. Objection #2 What about the
demands in the Bible to be bold? The Bible calls us to be bold.
Heck yes, 100% yes it does. There's a small percentage of
Christians though who might hear my sermon and be extremely
critical of it. They might protest saying, OK
Cole, you're just one of those wishy washy pastors who would
have rebuked King David and told him you just got to be nicer to
to Goliath. To which I would say Goliath was
a bloodthirsty giant clan Nephilim king who was violent.
He doesn't represent your grouchy neighbor, and to
misinterpret that massive portion of Scripture and its
types is deadly. Goliath is not a type of your
neighbor. He doesn't represent your
grouchy boss. He doesn't even represent the
unbelieving world. Goliath is a type of Satan.
David's defeat of Goliath is a shadow of Jesus's defeat of
Satan. To misinterpret that moment and
apply it to an argument with the school board member over whether
a certain poster should be on the school wall is a big swing
and a miss at Bible reading. One O 1 you should not kill the
school board members over the poster on the wall and chop his
head off like David did with Goliath.
Please don't apply. That's that portion of scripture
to that moment that was Jesus's defeat of Satan on the cross.
But still, you might argue the Bible calls us to be bold again.
Heck yes. I was talking to a pastor friend
about this once and he told me dude you can't be gentle all the
time. I agree.
That's true about parenting. That's true about being a
Christian. That's true about being a
leader. You can't be gentle all the
time. There are these moments in
cultural engagement when Christians must temporarily lay
aside their gentleness for the sake of boldness.
But here's what I would tell you.
Make sure that you are known for your gentleness.
So known for your gentleness. This is the way the Bible says
it. Let your gentleness be known to
all. So the key is to be so known for
your gentleness that when you have to lay aside your
gentleness, the check doesn't bounce.
So think of it, this one, be known for making so many gentle
deposits, so many gentleness deposits that when you have to
take a boldness withdrawal, the check doesn't bounce.
And people say, well, Kohl's always yelling about everything.
No, no, you want to cash the check.
Be so known for your gentleness that the boldness matters.
So is this helpful? So back to our original
question, Are you gentle? Are you known for your
gentleness, or do you boil in wrath at every provocation?
If that's you, sister, brother, remember the gospel and remember
it daily. Remember that when you were yet
a sin or hostile to God, God chose you and died for you.
Remember that Jesus absorbed your sins when you were hostile
to him. Remember that Christ clothed you
in his very own righteousness. Remember that God has
resurrected and promises to resurrect you in glory.
He did all of that for you. Do you think that?
Do you think that asking God to make you gentle is too big of an
ask like? Like God can take a dead body
and resurrect it into glory, but when he looks at my angry heart,
he's like, crap, I can't make that thing gentle.
That one's crap out of luck. I can do the dead body thing,
just not the hard heart thing. No, that's not too big of an
ask. It's not too big of an ask.
You probably just ask too little.
That's probably it. So ask.
Ask him often. Ask him daily.
Fill your heart with gentleness. Fill it with wine constantly.
And then examine yourself closely the next time culture
bumps into you. What spills out of your cup?
Is it water or is it wine? Water's regular, right?
You spill water, it dries up. You forget it ever even
happened. That's what anger is.
Anger spills out of people all the time.
Wine. Wine's rare.
When that spills out of somebody's cup, you know what it
does? It stains people.
They can't scrub it off. They can't stop looking at it.
They look at that stain and they think what was what's different
about that person? That's how the early church won
the entire culture to Jesus through gentleness.
The early church was a wine stain in a world that just
spilled water over each other. So Bee Weinsteins, my friends,
and this is Part 1 of the two-part secrets on how to
engage with culture. So come back next Sunday and
we'll explore verse 3, where Paul gives a very explicit
strategy for how to become more gentle.