To then take the offense back, or up, as our own right and duty to have a chip on our shoulder and huffily rant and rave about how horribly we've been wounded . . . when Christ bore it all . . . is AT LEAST More than a little askew of God's priorities for us VIRTUALLY all the time.
Yes, that's right. I was only referring to the Biblical exhortations that all of us be gentle and loving in our own exhortations to others. But God never promised us a rose garden, so we all should be able to roll with the punches.
I mostly agree with you.
I believe that the GENERAL Biblical RULE OF THUMB is to be gentle & conventionally loving in our exhortations.
I also believe that what God may call loving in a given situation will not always be seen conventionally as loving by onlookers. In general and most of the time, what’s loving is what most people would feel, see, construe as loving.
Now in a lot of situations, ‘most of the time’ would be 99.9% of the time. In others, 51% of the time.
King David had an interesting reply to his cohorts once when even his enemies were ranting at him horribly. You probably remember that.
Sometimes Ecclesiastes is more of an applical construction on reality than we would prefer to believe in our simplistic preferences for realities. Lots of things have fitting times and seasons and contexts that we’d prefer didn’t.
Thanks.