A Gift to Give
Message Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund ends the year with a message on the importance of giving gifts to the people in our life with a focus on the gift of gentleness from Philippians 4:5.
Message Transcript
Hey, welcome to Orchard Hill Online this weekend. I just want to say first, thank you to all of you for your investment over the last week. So many of you served, you invited, you prayed, you cleaned up, you participated in Christmas Eve at Orchard Hill, and it has been a great run. I just want to say thank you for being a part of that, and thank you for your flexibility this weekend in deciding and participating in an online-only worship weekend.
This certainly is a gift to our worship arts team, our operations team, some of the other staff and volunteers, who have been at church a lot over the last week. Today, our hope was that we could have a very sweet time, where you could gather with your family and participate in this online gathering just before I pray, and we jump into the thought, I also just want to remind you that this is the last week of 2021.
It's the time that many of us make year-end gifts to the ministry of the church. This is a part of our church tradition, and, certainly, it's part of how we're funded, but even more, it's part of the fabric of praying about and saying, "I'm part of the ministry." Even if you're not sure that you want to make another gift, or are able to make another gift, we'd love just to invite you to pray, and let the church know that you're in.
Sometimes that'll be saying we're in with nothing. Sometimes it'll be we're in, and here's something for the ministry of the year ahead, but that prayer, that investment matters. I thank you for just being a part of that.
Let's pray together. God, as we're gathered in homes and in different places, rather than in our standard campuses this weekend, I pray that you would speak, that my words would reflect your word in content., and in tone, and in emphasis, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Christmas is, obviously, a time where there's a lot of exchanging of gifts. I would assume that, at some point in your life, you've come across the situation where it's hard to buy a gift for somebody. You know what I'm talking about, it's the situation where the person you want to buy for either has everything that they need, they don't like anything you buy, and if they do want something, they can go out and get it for themselves, and they usually do. You just end up feeling like, "I just don't have anything to get them."
Sometimes these people are called grandparents, because grandparents hit that space, and then what's always funny, at least, to me, about grandparents is then they always do the money in an envelope like, "Here. I'm not going to try to buy for you, but here's some money. Go get something for yourself."
Now, if you're a grandparent, know that I appreciate gifts of cash, and I assume that every other person does, too. But my point is, sometimes, it's just hard to know what to get somebody, but when you know, and you nail the gift, there's something really beautiful about that.
When you figure out something that somebody wants, and I don't know about you, but, at least for me, when I am giving gifts, I find more joy in finding something and giving something to somebody I love, than I even do in receiving, and I'm guessing that's true for a lot of us.
Today, I'd like to talk about a gift worth giving, a gift for everybody, something you can give this year to everybody you come in contact with, something I can give to everybody I come in contact with this year.
I'm going to just read one verse, it's from Philippians Four, Verse Five, and ask and answer four questions, as a way to look at this today.
Here's, here's what Philippians 4:5 says. It says, "Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near."
The first question is really what is this gift? If you were to answer that question, based on what I just read, it's clearly the word gentleness, and that actually comes from a Greek word that is epieikes, depending on exactly how you want to pronounce it. I have it here for you to see on the screen.
I know that that doesn't matter a lot, but here's why I mention this. When you read a word in the English, and if you look at another English translation, and it's a different word, often what happens is, there's more shades of meaning than a single English word can capture. In this instance, the New International version says gentleness, the New American Standard, the ESV, the English Standard Version, say reasonableness.
If you look this word up in a lexicon, which is a dictionary that is for the Greek words, it will say something like suitable, a suitable demeanor, fair, mild, and patient. This is pointing, not just to gentleness, not just to reasonableness, but it's pointing to something that is a mindset that says, "How can I interact with people? Or, how can I present myself in a way that's gentle, and reasonable, and fair, and mild, and has a host of other meanings.
Here's how one dictionary of the New Testament, it's Kiddle's Dictionary, defines it. It says, it means what's right or fitting, what is serviceable, and equitable, moderate, or reasonable. In Josephus, who was a historian of the day, who didn't write from a Christian standpoint, he said that this had a legal sense of leniency.
What he's talking about when he talks about this is, is this idea of saying, "I want you to let your reasonableness, your gentleness be evident to everybody in your life." If you listen to podcasts or news, what you find right now is not reasonableness. Part of the reason you don't find reasonableness, is because reasonableness doesn't draw you in, and what I mean is this.
That is, the more you or I hear outrage, the more interesting something is. In other words, you don't want to tune in to hear somebody say, "Well, it could be this way, it could be that way. Let's hear the other side out." What you want is you want somebody, typically, who takes a strong position.
I know this because when podcast become well-known, it's because there's click bait in them, because people are willing to be outraged. Usually, it's not taking the most reasoned or gentle approach. It's saying, "How can I be harsh? How can I jump to conclusions? How can I express moral outrage?"
What's happened is, we live in a culture that loves outrage, because we feel a little sense of superiority rather than gentleness or reasonableness. What is this gift? Well, it's gentleness reasonableness. It's a fair-mindedness.
Who's this gift for? Well, what Philippians Four says that, "This gift is for all, let your gentleness be evident to all." It's for everybody. It means it's for your family. Maybe your holiday gatherings have been fraught with some people that irritates you, and so you haven't felt like being gentle. It's for people that you dislike. It's for people that you disagree with. It's important, in our day and age, that we learn to be critical thinkers without developing a critical spirit.
For me, it's about being gentle or reasonable with what I call randos, a rando is somebody you just meet randomly in the world. I was on a plane this fall, and where I was sitting, I toward the back of the plane. There were a couple women, who decided that when the plane landed, we were late landing, that they needed to get off before everybody else, because they had a connecting flight, which most of the other people had, as well.
They proceeded to push their way kind of ahead, and get really snooty with people to get past them. I was sitting by the window, not by the aisle, and the man who was on the aisle was so kind to these two women who pushed their way ahead. I sat there and just thought, "It's probably a good thing I was contained to the window seat," because I wouldn't have wanted to be that kind, that reasonable, because I was feeling like, "No, everybody else needs to get off. Why are you more important than everybody else?"
Now, you may argue and say, "Okay, Kurt, that's not really being reasonable or gentle, and sometimes you do have to stand up. What I'm talking about out when I say, "Who's this gift for," family, people that maybe you don't like, or aren't like you. What this is about is saying, "I'm willing to listen to other people and be proven wrong. I want to understand."
What superiority does, what it does, is it feeds on, ultimately, not being reasonable or gentle. What I mean is, that we start to say, "Because you are like this, I feel superior, because how could you?"
When we decide that this is a gift that's for people that we like, and are in our network, people that we dislike, especially people we dislike, or dislike us, or have different views, maybe randos, what we're doing is we're saying, "Okay, this is me saying, how can my gentleness, my reasonableness be evident to everybody?"
I was thinking about this and remembering an article I'd read on marriage a few years ago, and I don't remember the exact source of it, but the author made the point that the research shows that when a marriage is in trouble, is when a couple stops giving the most generous explanation for the shortcomings of their spouse, and that as long as a couple continues to say, "I believe the best about him or best about her, and I'm going to give the most generous explanation for whatever shortcomings I perceive," that the marriage had a really good chance of success.
I remember when I read that thinking, "I want to be the kind of a person, who gives the most generous explanation possible to the people that I come in contact with," and what reasonableness, gentleness is, is it's saying, in a sense, "I'm going to offer that gift of a generous explanation to anybody and everybody I come in contact with, rather than outrage," rather than simply saying, "I'm going to assume the worst."
Here's the third question. Why is this gift important? In many ways, this is self-evident, because without it, there's just a perpetual downward cycle, because if I feel like somebody's not reasonable or gentle with me, if I feel like somebody pushes past the other people who need to connect on the plane, I feel like then I need to say something. Then, they need to say something, and next thing you know, it's an ugly cycle. Whereas, if there's one person who says, "You know what, go ahead," all of a sudden, the cycle's broken.
There's another reason, and it's right here in this text, and that is where it says, "The Lord is near. The Lord is near." Why is this important? Well, you could say, that the reason that this is stated is our audience for our gentleness isn't the other person, but it's God, that God sees, that God knows, and so he says, "I want you to make your gentleness evident to all. I want everyone to see it." The Lord is near it. The Lord actually sees it. It's important, because of what it does in our culture, but it's also important because the Lord is near. He sees.
I want you just to think for a moment, what would happen to dialogue in this country, in families, in marriages, in parent-child relationships, if each person said, "I'm going to try to give the most reasonable, generous explanation to the other person's point of view, as I possibly can. I'm going to be lenient. I'm going to be fair-minded. I'm going to have a demeanor that says I do not want to assume the worst."
How do you think that would change our political debate? How do you think it would change interactions in churches, and in schools, and in families? I like how Sheldon Vanauken put this a generation or two ago. He had written a book called A Severe Mercy. In it, he says this. He says, "The best argument for Christianity is Christians, their joy, their certainty, their completeness, but the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians, when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug, in complacent custom creation, they are narrow, and repressive. Then, Christianity dies a thousand deaths."
"The best argument," he says for Christianity "is Christians," and I would say, the reason the gift's important is because that is how people encounter and think of Christianity. It's your gentleness, my gentleness that people say, "There's something about you that's different."
That leads me to the fourth question, and that is, "Well, how do you get this gift?" Well, there's no shortage in the supply chain when it comes to gentleness. Certainly, you can, in your effort say, "I'm going to be gentle. I'm going to be reasonable. I'm going to reach for the most generous explanation possible."
I want to come back to that little phrase, "The Lord is near" again, because that little phrase, I think, shows us something about this idea of gentleness that's important, because when you, or I say, "There's injustice in this world, and I need to crusade for justice somehow," and, by the way, people do this in all kinds of arenas. When you can say, "God is near," what you're able to do is say, "God has not left this situation."
It doesn't mean that we don't want to speak for those who don't have a voice, that we don't want to work for justice, but what I'm saying is, you don't have to assume that every result is up to you, because the Lord is near. There are probably few things in this world that are as obnoxious, as somebody who assumes that they're doing God's bidding, without gentleness, without reasonableness.
You see, when you or I assume that we're speaking for the moral high ground, but we do it with gentleness, with reasonableness, recognizing our own sinfulness, it changes the way that we interact. But when we think that we're right, and we don't have gentleness or reasonableness, then we become people who are not acting in this, and acting in a way that's gentle. The way that this really happens, is by recognizing God's incredible gentleness with us, his leniency.
I love how the verses that follow tie right into this. These are much more familiar verses. If you've been around church, you've probably heard these, Verse Five, Philippians Four, "Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near." Verse Six, "Don't be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and mind in Christ Jesus."
He says, here's what I want you to do. The Lord is near. You can be gentle. Why? Because you don't have to be anxious in every situation. You can pray and cast your cares onto God, and he will give you a peace that transcends understanding.
Why can you trust God? Because he's been so gentle with you, so gentle with me, in Jesus Christ that you can say, "I can cast all my cares to him, and therefore I don't have to be somebody who's unreasonable with others." Instead, I can say, "This is a gift that I can give that God has extended to me."
You see, the more I'm aware, the more you're aware of God's gentleness in our own lives, the more we will be willing to extend gentleness and reasonableness to everybody else we come in contact with. I can do a little bit of it by being aware, but when that's a daily thought, when the rando pushes by me on the plane and says, "Me getting my connecting flight is more important than you getting your connecting flight." I can say, "God's been gentle and lenient with me. I can choose to be lenient and gentle."
Now, you may disagree and say, "You should step into the aisle and stop it." That's your decision, but what I'm saying is, I don't have that resource without the resource of saying, there's a God who's been channeled through Jesus Christ with me. It's the gospel, the changes, the gift that I can give to everybody I come in contact with, and you, as well.
Wouldn't it be great if this next year, the church, the global church, was more known for reasonableness and gentleness, than for being at odds with each other, and with the world.
Father, I ask that you would help Orchard Hill, us, to give this gift of letting our gentleness, our reasonableness, be evident to all, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
