Hi there, welcome to Friday, you made it! We’ve been slowly working our way through Paul’s letter to the Philippians, a few verses at a time. Today is one of those days though that even though the passage is only 8 verses long, we could easily have a week or two of podcasts pulling out all the great advice and teaching it contains.

REFLECTION

The passage is Philippians 4:2-9. Let’s focus in on verse 5. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. This verse is easy to miss when we read this power passage. However, I love the simplicity of it. Also, I’ve learnt that if I skip over a verse more than once then I probably need to go back and read it properly as it means I’m missing out on something!

Let your gentleness be evident to all. One of the ways that I like to relax is by playing computer games and one that I’m playing a lot of at the moment is Fifa. Fifa is a football game that gives each player statistics depending on not just how good at football they are, but on their particular style of play. It’s pretty detailed,in fact I counted 35 different attributes that are rated for each player. It may or may not surprise you to hear that gentleness isn’t one of those attributes. Aggression is though so maybe you can measure gentleness by the absence of that. But that touches on the fact that we often see gentleness as a weakness. Simply, it’s not a weakness! Paul says that it is something that we should aspire to. Gentleness is showing grace. It’s about having compassion for the people in front of you. It’s about seeing beyond a situation and the social norms that tell us how we would be justified in acting and seeing what is really at stake. Gentleness is about seeing people as Jesus saw them and treating them as such. 

If being gentle then, is about caring for and showing love to others then how should we act? How can we deal with the times when life is hard? Those times we have tough decisions to make, perhaps in the workplace. At my workplace, which happens to be STC Sheffield we employ the axiom ‘hard decisions, soft process’. This means that sure, sometimes we have to make really hard calls. Decisions we know might not be popular with 100% of people 100% of the time. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be loving in how we do that. Making hard decisions doesn’t mean we’re harsh and uncaring, being gentle doesn’t mean you’re a pushover, we can be gentle but firm. But this works the other way as well, making hard decisions doesn’t mean you have an excuse to be harsh and uncaring. There is a lie in the world that says that to be professional is to be cold and uncaring. There is another that says that to be a good parent we have to be friends with our children. (I speak on the experience of others on that one, to be clear.) Gentleness is the path between these two extremes, to look on a situation with eyes of love and make the tough decisions in a caring way.

Being gentle shouldn’t be something that comes out of us when necessary, when we sense a pastoral situation brewing. Paul says let it be evident to all. This is a big challenge. Thinking back to yesterday, we need a role model in this. Jesus is the obvious answer. Being gentle is to be like Jesus. Gentle but uncompromising. All loving but totally focused on His mission to see lives changed. Caring but utterly truthful. He was driven by compassionate yet He followed His Father’s call. Let’s be gentle people today. 

PRAYER

Father, thank you that you love us. Thank you that you call us to a good life, a life where we get to be part of your rescue mission to the people around us. Help us to be gentle people today, growing in love and grace. Teach us how to make hard decisions whilst sticking to a gentle process. We pray that we would be described as gentle people today, and that would point people to you. Amen.

READING: PHILIPPIANS 4:2-9

I plead with Euodia and I plead with Syntyche to be of th...