What to Concentrate on

"God is more tender than we can conceive." I need to concentrate on that statement. If Oswald is right, if Scripture backs up that characterization, then I need to dig a foundation in my brain, lay a concrete wall around that truth, and protect it with every fiber of my being. I am certain that it would change me. I do not currently know God as tender. I do not experience him as tender. But experience is more often than not a fickle gauge of truth.

My assignment: research God's tenderness.

The referenced passage from Matthew 10, which sounds rather more hard than tender -- "I came not to send peace, but a sword" -- follows Christ's reference to our inestimable value as compared to the sparrows and the reassurance that the very hairs on our heads are numbered. As he often does, Oswald brings to the foreground a paradox: the Prince of Peace came to drive a sharp sword to the very core of our sinfulness -- what was, for many of us, disguised as our righteousness.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis has the lion Aslan use his claws to tear away Eustace's dragon flesh, a painful process: "The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've every felt." And yet, surely, that was the most tender thing the lion could have done. Eustace did not want to live his life as a dragon.

"Cut down to the very root," Oswald writes, "or there will be no healing." To leave someone with the impression that anything less than total transformation in Jesus Christ will do is not tenderness. "Thousands of people are happy without God in this world. If I was happy and moral till Jesus came, why did he come?" Oswald answers his own question: "Jesus Christ came to send a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal relationship to Himself."

I comprehend God's righteousness, but if I do not see it in light of his tenderness, I am missing the full picture.

Barbara