FAMILY IT! — Wednesday Family Devotional — “Gentle in Our Time”

Everyone likes a pat on the back. We crave approval, even from our earliest years. Don’t believe me?  Spend five minutes with a toddler and count how many times they want you to look at them and applaud what they're doing! 

I think God hard wired it into us--this desire to hear, "Well done good and faithful servant."  He wants us to seek his voice and approval, but until we learn to hear it from the Father, we look for it wherever we can find it.  And that leads to one of the biggest relational diseases out there: Pride. 

We are a proud people. It doesn't matter how old you are: kids, teens, adults. We're all a bunch of braggarts. We love to boast about our accomplishments, show off how smart, how clever, how beautiful, how talented we are. "Look what I did!"  

I know you don't like to admit it, but if you're totally honest with yourself, you know it's true. I see it in so many other people--that impulse to brag, and then suddenly I see it in myself!  Yuck!!  Nobody likes to listen to someone else toot their own horn. 

When we boast about ourselves we’re telling others how awesome we are...which kind of implies how awesome the other person is not. "Look what I can do," is what we say, but what we’re silently saying is, "And that makes me better than you."  A proud attitude erodes relationships.   Like I said, it's a relational disease.  If we’re going to be gentle in our time, we need to find the antidote!

Paul has the answer, and he models it in our passage this week from Ephesians.

7-8 This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God’s way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities.

8-10 And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along. Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels!

11-13 All this is proceeding along lines planned all along by God and then executed in Christ Jesus. When we trust in him, we’re free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go. So don’t let my present trouble on your behalf get you down. Be proud!

If you’re not familiar with him, Paul was an incredibly intelligent, well-educated man.  He had an amazing resume, and would have impressed even the most jaded human resources rep.  And yet in verse 8 he talks about being the least qualified of any Christian available.  Paul has found the antidote to pride—humility.  Now, this is not false humility.  He’s not just trying to be nice.  Paul truly realizes that since he once hated Jesus and all of His followers, he is really the least likely to be chosen to share Christ’s gospel message of love and forgiveness.  Paul feels genuine humility.  He sees other as better, as having more value.

What an awesome way to develop strong relationships, by building others up!  Not in a fake way, but in a sincere value-giving way.  Even when Paul talks about pride at the end there, it’s pride in God—the source of all of our blessings and gifts.

We want to be gentle, HUMBLE families for Jesus.  In fact, we can’t be gentle unless we’re humble first.  What are ways you can practice humility at home?  The more we practice humility with each other, the more humble we’ll be when we’re away from home and with those who need to know the gentle Jesus.  

So how can we practice being humble?  Could you set a goal as a family to say one encouraging thing to each member of your family every day?  How about a “brag jar?”  Every time someone boasts or toots their own horn they have to give a quarter or do an extra chore.  It may even be helpful to spend time worshiping God together each day or sharing ways he is worthy of our praise.  This helps us keep our focus on the real source of pride in our lives!

Let’s work together to be wonderfully, humbly gentle!