Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.
How do you react towards the faults of others? What about when they hurt you physically or emotionally? What if their fault came at a cost to you? In this verse, we find three fruits of the Spirit to tell us how we should handle the faults of others. This verse tells us that we should be humble, gentle, and patient with the faults of others. Now, living with humility, gentleness, and patience is hard…but why? Because we always tend to look out for ourselves. Our human nature tends to lean toward self-preservation and our natural reaction to being wronged or hurt is to put up our defenses and demand retribution. We point our finger at other people’s faults so that our faults don’t look that bad. If we can show the other person in a worse light than ourselves, then everyone’s attention will be on the bigger fault of the other person and we can keep ours tucked away, unseen or at least forgotten. We place the blame on their faults so that we don’t have to feel guilty for our own. None of us like the feeling of knowing we are guilty. So when tensions arise in relationships, we look for where we can blame others to either justify our own actions or so that we can say, “I might have been wrong, but not as wrong as they were!” We are urged to live a life that is becoming of one that has been saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus, and upon whom our Father in heaven has lavished so much grace and favor, forgiveness, mercy, and love. We are entreated to live in humility and lowliness of mind. We are implored to be meek and mild, unselfish and gentle. We are encouraged to be long-suffering and to patiently endure the difficult circumstances in which we may find ourselves. And we are called to bear with one another and make allowances for our brothers and sisters in Christ, for in so doing we demonstrate the love of Christ, being lived through us. If we concentrate on our own faults, we probably won’t have time and energy to be worrying about everyone else’s faults. As we admit and own up to our faults, we can then live patiently with others. Whether it’s with your spouse, co-workers, friends, family, or other drivers in rush hour traffic, how can you live humbly, with gentleness and patience today? Spend some time asking God to show you the areas that you are not humble, gentle and patient with others. Let us leave the self-life nailed to the Cross and live out our new-life in Christ, which we received at salvation, in humility and gentleness…patiently enduring with grace, tolerance, and love.
Spiritual Steve 