Why Do We Sometimes Look for the Worst in People?
Years ago, Dr. George A. Gordon, the famous Boston preacher, was taking one of his trips abroad. Upon boarding the ship and going down to his stateroom, he discovered that his roommate was a hunchback, a very ugly man, dwarfish and evil in appearance.
After fretting about this for a while, and after returning some icy stares to their original source, Dr. Gordon went to the purser of the ship to say, “I want to leave my valuables with you. I’ve just been down to my stateroom and, to be honest with you, I don’t trust my roommate.”
The purser took the valuables, put them in a safe, wrote out a receipt, but then turned around to say, “It may interest you to know, Dr. Gordon, that your roommate was just here a few minutes ago and he said the same thing about you! And it may also interest you to know that your roommate is none other than Dr. Charles Steinmetz, known worldwide as the ‘electrical wizard’, employed by the General Electric Company.”
Well, as it turned out, Dr. Gordon and Dr. Steinmetz later became warm, intimate friends. Yet, their friendship of many years was almost breached at the outset by this needless exhibit of destructive emotions.
So why do we look for the worst in people? Why can’t we restrain these feelings that so easily wound?
Our penchant for punitive put-downs is taken to task by this little poem:
Of all the lunacies earth can boast,
The one that must please the Devil the most,
Is pride reduced to whimsical terms of
Causing the slugs to despise the worms.
Oh, my! That gets to the point.
Often, it’s our ego that triggers this sort of thing.
The inflated ego scans the room to see who the competitor might be, and then starts imagining noxious negatives of his supposed rival.
The deflated ego, always insecure, will withdraw with a sour look for the least of reasons, wondering when the dirty deed will be done.
Not a good way to live, either way.
You might ask how might a Christian avoid such behavior—all of it interior, in the realm of one’s attitudes? Well, the provision God gave is also interior.
One part of the Holy Spirit’s fruit, the antidote to what we just described, is gentleness. And as with all the fruit of the Spirit, gentleness is already inside you! Most Christians don’t know that.
The driving dynamics of divine life, all nine of them, came to reside within you when the Holy Spirit came inside you. At the precise moment the Lord’s life became your life, so did every part of the Holy Spirit’s fruit.
Be clear on this: The Holy Spirit doesn’t help you produce this fruit (that’s what most Christians think). This fruit has already been produced! Harvested! Stored! The Holy Spirit will help you take it out of storage and put it into action.
But if you make the mistake many Christian’s make and try to produce this fruit yourself, the outcome will be what the Bible calls “dead fruit”—and what smells worse than a bunch of dead, smelly, rotten fruit?
The lesson to be learned here? Don’t take the Holy Spirit’s place! You can’t produce this!
Let’s get a better understanding of this particular part of divine life—your life!
The gentle spirit is approachable, attractive, amicable, appealing. There’s no condescension, nothing alienating and nothing suggesting strife.
The Bible says the gentleness of the Lord was like that of the Lamb. The cute, cuddly lamb we think of—so vulnerable, the chosen pet of a child—has a gentleness that is endearing.
However, that lamb is gentle because of its inferior capacities. Why, every animal in the jungle could destroy it. Hence, this picture of the quivering lamb.
What the Bible describes in Jesus is different than that.
Whoever heard of an attacking lamb? Would a lamb bear its teeth and become the terror of the countryside? Actually, according to Scripture, this Lamb will!
The Bible speaks of a day when the wrath of the Lamb will send all the guilty into wild fright! Their escape will be frantic! Their attempt to find a hiding place will be desperate! Finally, unable to do so, they will beg the mountains to fall on them—anything, only not the wrath of the Lamb!
Important to see here is that the Lord’s gentleness has strength undergirding it. No scampering away when aggression appeared!
There came that time when torches suddenly lit up the place, as soldiers, hundreds of them, armed and dangerous, surrounded Jesus. How did he respond?
Jesus arose from the blood sweat of Gethsemane that night to stridently cross the garden to meet the soldiers head on. And before long, all of them were knocked down flat, and the Master stood over them all.
Suffice it to say that the meek and mild qualities we associate with a lamb didn’t entirely define the Lord’s gentleness.
The Greek word for “gentleness,” praustes, often translated as meekness, literally means “to be in harness”. The truly meek person, the gentle person, is moldable, pliable, teachable; and because his emotions are mastered by the Master, these emotions are not destructive in their designs.
Completely absent from their lives is the sullen, sour disposition that is ever prone to take up its own cause and to see life through a lens that belittles others.
The gentleness of the godly person was well described by George D. Watson, the nineteenth-century American evangelist, who said that being in the company of such gentle souls was like “going to a tropical climate in mid-winter; the very air around them seems mellow; their slow, quiet words are like the gentle ripple of the seas on the sand .…”
How good is that! A personality that makes others feel the way they want to feel when they’re on vacation! Relaxed, welcomed, positive.
People value this! They go a long way to get it!
Let them go no further than you.
