Soft-Handed Gentleness

We’ve almost reached the end of these reflections on the fruit of the Spirit, and I imagine you know Paul’s words by heart now: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”

Today’s fruit is surely one of the most attractive. It’s maybe not the biggest or brightest-looking, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s one that the Spirit especially delights to produce in us, even though it’s rarely mentioned in the Bible. It’s gentleness. It’s a word that’s used several times by the Apostle Paul, but it’s not always translated in the same way. Sometimes it’s translated as kindness, and that’s interesting, isn’t it? I suppose the tradition of the translation gentleness instead of kindness is just to distinguish two qualities that really belong together. Kind people are gentle, and gentle people are kind. And like all the other fruit of the Spirit, they belong together.

In a sense, actually, the fruit of the Spirit are all one fruit, but we need to think more about that. Forgive me if you hate the game of golf and think it’s just a good walk spoiled, but here’s a golfing illustration, although I suspect it’s true of other sports as well. If you watch golf on TV, you’ll hear the commentators talking about a player having “soft hands.” It means they grip the club gently, even when they grip it securely. It’s kind of counterintuitive when you begin, and it remains counterintuitive for many golfers, alas. They think the really important thing is how tightly they hold the club, and they don’t understand that the really important thing is how the other end of the club, the club face, makes contact with the ball, and a tight grip instead of a gentle one often means that the ball veers off to the right or to the left and ends up in the rough, or in a sand trap, or even out of bounds.

I think that this may be a parable of the Christian life. If you don’t live with a gentle spirit, if you grip things tightly in order to control them, if that’s how you relate to other people, then things will veer out of control. You thought that the way to live was by having a tight grip, but you discover, perhaps when it’s too late, that what you really needed was gentleness. I suspect you know the words of Psalm 18:35. The psalm begins with the words: “I love you, O Lord, my strength. The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer.” It’s a wonderful psalm, but there’s no statement in it more moving than the last words of verse 35: “Your gentleness made me great.”

When you think about it, it was God’s gentleness with David that must have enabled David, in turn, to be gentle with Saul. You remember that Saul was within his grasp at the cave of Engedi in 1 Samuel 24. David could have tightened his grip and killed him, but he used soft hands. God had used soft hands to protect him, and David used soft hands to protect Saul. In fact, his hands became so soft that he felt ashamed he’d even cut off the corner of Saul’s robe and probably made Saul look a fool in the eyes of his men.

Here’s something I often think about: there’s a kind of Christian whose only concern is being right and, too frequently, also trying to show that others are wrong. Too many of them have become self-appointed gurus on our social media. But when we’re trying to discern the spirits as the Apostle John tells us to, we should not only ask what is being said; we should ask two other questions. Number one, “What isn’t being said?” And number two, “How is what he or she says being said?” You see, we need to discern whether something is true or not, but we also need to discern whether the person who says it is gentle like Christ, don’t we? That’s a sobering thought about others. I find it a sobering thought about myself too, don’t you?