19 My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, 20 how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you!
Before we pass to the next section, we must look at the wealth of metaphor Paul uses in this address to the Galatians. In 19a, they are his 'little children'; in 19b, it is mother-love and mother travail; in 12 they are his 'brothers'; and in 20 it is the firm, disciplinary tone of the father. The four metaphors all have one thing in common: they are family metaphors, and they speak of an intimacy in the bond that binds him to them. What a pastor's heart the man had! The tenderness and gentle care of a mother - travailing and agonising over spiritual children; the friendship and the enduring bond of a brother, strong, robust and faithful; the strength, firmness and sternness of a father's discipline - and never the one without the other, and the one always tempered by the other. And can we not say something else - this is also what God is like - His tenderness, His care, His gentleness, but never a gentleness, never a tenderness that degenerates into sentimentality - always there is the firmness of the fatherly hand that stands no nonsense. God's love, as has been said, is a love that will not let us go, that will not let us down, that will not let us off. Yet, at His sternest, we know that that sternness is ever tempered with tender and gentle love. That is why we can take it, and that is why we need to take it.