A Gentle Answer: Our 'Secret Weapon' in an Age of Us Against Them

by Scott Sauls

Hurtful behaviors such as violence, scorn, gossip, and slander injure both victim and perpetrator. The hurtful behavior certainly devastates its target, but the hate that lies beneath eats the haters alive, clouding their thinking, crippling their hearts, and diminishing their souls. In the end, those who injure become as miserable as those whom they injure. Those who vandalize someone else’s body, spirit, or good name also vandalize themselves.

But it always brings peace

Jesus and Christianity do not discriminate between good people and bad people. Instead, Jesus and Christianity discriminate between humble people and proud people. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6).

This movement of Jesus toward Zacchaeus—before Zacchaeus does anything good or does anything for Jesus—is another feature of Christ that sets him apart from every other religious leader, philosopher, politician, or self-help guru. Jesus—like the Christian faith he came to establish—says to Zacchaeus and to every other person, “You belong even before you come to believe.” We see this dynamic also in Jesus’ interaction with the woman caught in the act of adultery. Before he says to her that she must leave her life of sin, he first assures her that as far as he is concerned, she is not condemned. “Neither do I condemn you,” Jesus says, “go, and from now on sin no more” (John 8:11). If you reverse the order of these two sentences, if you say, “Leave your sin” before you will consider saying, “Neither do I condemn you,” then you have ceased to speak the language of Christ, and you have ceased to reflect the heart of Christ. With Christ and with Christ-attuned Christians, belonging comes before believing.

He does what the theologians call putting the indicatives (statements about who we are by virtue of whose we are in Christ) before the imperatives (statements about what we must become, and how we must now live, in light of who and whose we are).

think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation . . . It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not be able to tell anyone how good he is . . . to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.”

Jesus gave us the Great Commission was to make our own joy complete.

When “love your neighbor” takes a back seat to American partisanship, when the protection and advancement of our own rights and privileges take precedence over the needs of the least of these, spiritually and socially sensitive people can find it difficult to get on board with versions of Christianity that look, smell, and talk more like Uncle Sam than like Jesus Christ. A

Counterfeits of Christianity have earned for Christianity itself a black eye in today’s cultural climate.

Not only this, pride steals from us the joy of surrender to a loving, wise God who writes our stories much better than we ever could.

When faith becomes sour and starts to look and feel like all law and no love, all truth and no grace, all judgment and no embrace, all exclusion and no welcome, it’s clear we have drifted from the heart and ways of Jesus Christ.

We believe that being happy is the equivalent of being successful, comfortable, and in control of our lives.

“Heaven, once attained,” he says, “will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”16

When Jesus expresses anger, it is always with a view toward defending and protecting something good or someone he loves.

Another thing I have discovered about my misophonia—my little pet peeve—is that it is God’s gift to me for the formation of my character. Misophonia presses me to make thousands of minidecisions to cooperate with the Holy Spirit.

As the late–nineteenth-century pastor C. H. Spurgeon wrote, “God is more ready to forgive than I am to offend.”1 If it is true that it is not our repentance that leads God to be kind but God’s kindness that leads us to repent (Rom. 2:4), then why would we ever consider not repenting of our sin? If God has moved our judgment day from the future to the past through the perfect life and atoning death of Jesus, why would we ever think it right or good to continue living in ways that are worthy of judgment?

Going against the law and love of God tormented his soul, blocked his vision, sapped him with grief, and wasted him physically (Ps. 31:6–10).

Because we are not yet what we are meant to be, we need people in our lives to remind us that we have not arrived.

Forgiving others as God in Christ has forgiven us is gutsy and gut-wrenching, courageous and terrifying, redemptive and messy, breathtaking and exhausting, and heavenly and hellish in what it is going to require of us. This practice of forgiveness is no easy endeavor.

To pity an offender is to discern the truth that beneath every sin and offense, there is also a wound.

It helps to be reminded that in this tired world filled with sin and all of sin’s collateral pain, it is hurting people who tend to do most of the hurting of others.

You are his beloved and blood-bought child. You are his inheritance (Eph. 1:18), his beloved daughter or son (Gal. 4:6), his workmanship (Eph. 2:10), the apple of his eye (Ps. 17:8), the bride with whom he is smitten (Song of Songs, all of it), the crown of his creation made a little less than the angels and with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5), and the joy of his heart worth dying in your stead (Heb. 12:2).

We must become settled in the truth that whatever Jesus asks from us, he has already done for us. Only then can we grow thicker skin, do anger well, receive criticism graciously, forgive all the way, bless our own betrayers, befriend our fellow sinners, resist our inner moralist, disarm guarded postures, and anything else of the sort. At the cross of Calvary, he confronted our violence with his nonviolence, our hostility with his forgiveness, and our wrath with his gentle answer.