"Let your gentleness be known to all men. The Lord is at hand." Philippians 4:5 NKJV
The Lord is at hand. In other words he is near and He is close. In a way, there are two ways of looking at this. (1) He is near to us each and every day of our lives - every hour of the day; and He longs for us to be near to Him as well. (2) As believers, we all know that the Lord is going to return for us and to establish His Kingdom permanently. It is the next thing on His calendar. Therefore, we should live in such a way that it could be very soon - even today.
With this in mind, there is no need to fear. As His children, we are highly favoured and loved. We are special to Him and He accompanies us everywhere we go; He never leaves us. He wants us to adopt the art of having a gentle spirit. We do this by being gracious to people that we meet and having unselfishness, mercy, tolerance and patience. When we achieve this, our gentle spirit links up with the Gentle Spirit - God Himself.
This is not as difficult as you think; we just have to model ourselves on Jesus and not the world. Some people model themselves on a rock or pop idol or movie star. The thing is, they may not only lead you astray, but when they've died out, who have you got then? Allow me to ask, who is your mentor? If it's anyone other than Jesus, sooner or later they will let you down. Never be tempted to place anyone on a pedestal, no matter who they are. The pedestal will fall. We've seen this in the media quite often over the years.
The Lord is near. When we're out and about, He is with us and in a way, He should be seen in our behaviour - what we say or what we do. To compromise and use bad language because we're in a crowd of unbelievers - no matter how small the word is, they're all as big as each other - is a big let down. Once we've said or done it, it disqualifies our testimony. Let's be careful of that one. If this happens to you, the best way out of it, is to repent straightaway - openly, by saying, 'I'm sorry for that, I'm a Christian and it was wrong.' It may be embarrassing to do this but it puts you back on the road to qualifying again. Don't forget who you are representing - Jesus, the King of kings.
Let's never forget that He is near!
Copyriight 2020 Grahame Howard
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