Gentleness is not apathy but is an aggressive expression of how we view people. We see people as so valuable that we deal with them in gentleness, fearing the slightest damage to one for whom Christ died. To be apathetic is to turn people over to mean and destructive elements, to truly love people Is cause for us to be aggressively gentle.
The single most serious problem people have with the Bible is not with a lack of understanding but with the fact that they understand many things too well! For example, with such a text as “Do everything without grumbling or arguing” (Phil 2:14), the problem is not understanding it but obeying it — putting it into practice.
Persecution is an enemy the Church has met and mastered many times. Indifference could prove to be a far more dangerous foe.
… Some Christians are content to merely exist until they die. They don’t want to risk anything, to believe God, to grow or mature. They refuse to believe his Word, and have become hardened in their unbelief. Now they’re living just to die.
Apathy is unconditional surrender where we are driven into hiding by unrealistic fear, and firmly held there by the misinformed belief that we are helpless to do anything other than hide. Therefore, apathy survives solely on lies and can be completely abated by truth.
But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.
Jim devoted ten days largely to prayer to make sure that this was indeed what God intended for him. He was given new assurance, and wrote to his parents of his intention to go to Ecuador. Understandably, they, with others who knew Jim well, wondered if perhaps his ministry might not be more effective in the United States, where so many know so little of the Bible’s really message He replied: “I dare not stay home while Quiches perish. What if the well-filled church in the homeland needs stirring? They have the Scriptures Moses, and the prophets, and a whole lot more. Their condemnation is written on their bank books and in the dust on their Bible covers.