by Bill Kirkham
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.
Colossians 3:12-14
Earlier in Colossians 3:5-11 Paul talked about what not to be. In this passage as God’s chosen people there are responsibilities. I have always found speaking the gospel to Australian men difficult when it goes against their image created by the media or even the ‘ocha’ down under Aussie mateship fallacy. Women in society can embrace these virtues without challenging their identity if they wanted to but men have trouble with how it is and has been portrayed in the past. Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience are considered very effeminate qualities.
The challenge therefore is to find ways to communicate to the Australian men that these virtues have a value. But the first thing to do is find these virtues inside ourselves and how do we rate these virtues. It would be true that we can show compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience to our friends with little effort but the real challenge is to show them to our community.
If you really look at what we are asked to do it is not wimpy to stand for Christ’s reality in our lives. Have you really tried to forgive someone who has done the wrong thing personally to you? Have you found compassion on those who have not had the breaks in life that we have had. Can you show patience with those who deliberately test you because they know you are a Christian? What peace do you desire when a person who has been brought up from birth in another religious faith that is contentious with what you think? These are hard choices and take serious effort to confront our own sinful desires to follow the world’s ideals and attitudes, putting aside ourselves to take up our cross and follow Christ’s example.
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