A Gentle Answer
A Gentle Answer: Our ‘Secret Weapon’ in an Age of Us Against Them
By: Scott Sauls
[Fulfilling “A book someone gave to you” as part of the 2021 Fall Reading Challenge.— yes, I’m still working on this challenge in 2022… so sue me]
“While true faith is filled with holy fire, it is a fire that is meant for refining and healing, as opposed to dividing and destroying.”
Division and destruction is the currency of the day. I’ve addressed this environment of ‘us vs them’ in many of my other reviews. It’s pervasive and it’s toxic.
How do we handle disagreements, attacks, or divisiveness?
Scott Sauls tells us: with A Gentle Answer.
This is the posture of Jesus and it’s what we should exemplify.
Sauls has written an excellent book that is absolutely necessary in today’s world. Giving gentle answers in impassioned communications is very hard. This book has challenged me and convicted me in the best ways. For when we remember our position before the Lord, how can we respond to others except with gentleness?
Why Be Gentle?
The first half of Sauls’ book shows how Jesus is gentle towards us.
We must recognize the ways that we are sinners, Pharisees, and cynics. We are no better or superior than anyone else.
When we are humbled to remember how dead we were in our sins until Jesus made us alive, when we are humbled to remember how often Jesus forgives our sin, when we are humbled to remember the ways we don’t always live in accordance to our beliefs, we will be slow to anger, derision, contempt, and dismissal.
“The scandal around Jesus is a reality that distinguishes Christianity from every other world religion, as well as from all forms of human philosophy and politics: Jesus and Christianity do not discriminate between good people and bad people. Instead, Jesus and Christianity discriminate between humble people and proud people. (James 4:6)”
I thought this was a very insightful distinction to make. We cannot separate good people and bad people because we are all bad people. It’s shocking, but true, to say that the same evil that resided in the heart of Hitler is in us too.
Humans are capable of unthinkable things. We can look all around the world in every culture and era and find evidence of this.
Humility to recognize our propensity to choose sin and selfishness helps us interact with others with gentleness because we see we are not so different from them after all.
“Some condemn Pharisees in order to keep their distance from biblical truths and commands that make them uncomfortable… just as we shouldn’t shoot the messenger because of a message we find difficult, neither should we shoot the message because of messengers we find difficult…
…If we are harboring an agenda to protect ourselves from having to deal with certain parts of God’s Word so as to free ourselves to think, believe, and live however we choose, we are no different than the scribes and the Pharisees.”
The discussion here is evaluating our motives behind our words— are they in error or self-serving? Are we all law without love? Are we love without truth? Are we condemning others as Pharisees and becoming Pharisees ourselves as we do it? Are we rejecting biblical truths because we don’t like the people who are saying them?
[An appropriate book to plug here is The Intolerance of Tolerance by D.A. Carson— the definition of tolerance has dangerously morphed.]
Gentleness Changes Us
Part II of the book describes 5 ways we are changed because of Jesus’ gentleness:
We grow thicker skin.
We do anger well.
We receive criticism graciously.
We forgive all the way.
We bless our own betrayers.
He talks about suffering as Christians, locally and globally. How we have strength to endure.
He reminds us that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ. Christ died for our sins and imperfections. And he forgave us while we were still his enemies.
He talks about sinful anger vs righteous anger. That healthy anger is characterized by patience and is life-giving. Unhealthy anger is life-diminishing and is characterized by resentment, retaliation, slander, and manipulation.
Tim Keller says, “Even if only 20% is true, we can profit from criticism given by people who are badly motivated or whom we don’t respect.”
We need to look for truth everywhere and see opportunities to continue to grow in Christ.
“We must learn to love the light, even when it exposes the darkness in us, as opposed to hiding from the light and shielding ourselves from exposure… We need a gentled posture before the Lord, his Word, and his truth-telling messengers, to become the people he desires for us to be.”
Jesus’ gentleness radically changes how we interact with people and sadly, you won’t find this humility very often. As followers of Christ, we need to respond like Christ and set an example in speech and behavior, with our words, our tone, our motives, and our deeds.
[Two appropriate books to plug here: 1) The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt which discusses the increasing demand for ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses which require the removal of ideas or rhetoric they don’t like or agree with. But everyone loses if we remove critique from our lives. 2) Fortitude: American Resilience in the Age of Outrage by Dan Crenshaw which implores us to be unoffendable and resilient and gracious. Sauls actually references Crenshaw’s ‘run-in’ with Pete Davidson on SNL and commends his handling of the situation]
Conclusion
Scott Sauls’ book is practical, gentle, and world-changing if we would all seek to give gentle answers, be gracious with criticism, humble, unoffendable, and slow to anger.
Refuse to be used by either political side, but find the path of Jesus that does not divide people by good and bad. It’s not an easy path, but it is where we are called to tread.
“Make no mistake: Jesus’ gentle answer was bold and costly. His gentle answer included pouring out his lifeblood and dying on the cross. Our gentle answer will be costly as well. We must die to ourselves, to our self-righteousness, to our indignation, and to our outrage.”
I highly recommend this book to all people who ever have to talk to people they disagree with. So yeah… that means you.
Sauls’ charge is a biblical and worthy one:
“To those who are prone to injure, the call is to repent and to engage in the noble work of renouncing hatred and exercising love. To those who are vulnerable to becoming injured, the call is to participate in the noble work of resisting bitter and retaliating roots of anger while embracing truth-telling, advocacy, and forgiveness. To all of us, the universal call is to lay down our swords, listen, learn from our differences, and build something beautiful.”
Other Quotes:
“In the same way that it would make zero sense to call Beethoven a substandard composer because a six-year-old plays a Beethoven piece sloppily and out of tune at a piano recital, it makes zero sense to call Jesus a substandard Savior because his followers imitate him poorly.”
“When we come to the realization that the line of good and evil cuts through our hearts just as it does through the heart of every kind of betrayer, it gives us pause about assuming a holier-than-thou or fiercely oppositional posture in our dealings with others. The more attuned we are to this reality of in dwelling sin in us— and of the war that goes on inside of us between flesh and spirit, the old man and the new creation, good and evil—the more empathetic and gentle and kind we will likely become, even toward those who’ve done horrendous and unspeakable things.”
“We, too, are susceptible to warming ourselves at a fire created by the enemies of Jesus, surrendering our wills and ways to the tide of popular opinion. We, too, protect ourselves from having to take up crosses that Jesus— whose will and ways are counterculture to every culture— is calling us to carry in such a time as ours. In our modern context, a growing number of people who identify as Christian can, like Peter, allow themselves to become disciples of popular opinion as opposed to living as cross-bearing, counter cultural disciples of Jesus. This is especially true in areas where staying true to Jesus feels threatening socially, vocationally, politically, or otherwise. When blending in to popular opinion and staying on good terms with a world that does not love Jesus becomes priority, these Christians will eventually find themselves in a world of compromise.”
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