There was this little boy and, this being more modern times in the suburbs, he had a pet cat rather than a pet dog. A couple of grown-up men were watching when he let the cat out and told the cat “now follow me to the tree and then remember to come back home!”
Well, the boy walked to the tree in the back yard and the cat, as cats do, decided to walk around the house and under the fence to the neighbor’s yard.
One of the men said to the boy, “You need to teach that cat to follow you better. He might not come home.”
The boy answered him. “Oh, he knows how to come home. He comes home every evening about the time the sun sets. He just doesn’t know how to do what I want him to do when I want him to do it!"
Just like the cat, we often do all the good things that Christ asks us to do. We just don’t do them when He wants us to do them – which is all the time.
This is the first of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know that we are to become kind, to be patient. To love deeply, to break our slavery to addictions, to control our tongues, to trade fear for hope, to stop gossiping, to make good habits, to become joyful, and generally to follow Jesus. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.
How to become kind, How to develop patience. How to love deeply. How to break addictions. How to control our tongues. How to trade fear for hope. How to stop gossiping. How to make good habits. How to become joyful. How to follow Jesus.
That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life.
Today, we’re going to start with being kind.
In Galatians 5:22, Paul tells us that "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. “
In this passage, there nine different good attributes listed that are the fruit of the Spirit. Those nine attributes are how we know that someone has the Holy Spirit in them and are listening to that Spirit. Today, we’ll talk about the fifth attribute – kindness.
In the original Greek, there are several words that are translated from time to time as kindness. In this passage, the word used is xrēstótēs (chrestotes) – which means “useful kindness”.
You see, a mark of a mature Christian is the presence of kindness. Not just a gentle word that we say, kindness in this sense is useful.
In our Luke passage, Jesus goes to the synagogue to teach because it is Saturday morning, it is the Sabbath, the time when the Jews gather to hear holy Scripture and hear a sermon about that Scripture. And there that morning, in the back of the synagogue, there was a woman who had been bent double. Luke tells us she had been bent over for 18 years, controlled by an evil spirit which kept her in that bent over, hunched position.
Jesus sees her and takes pity on her condition. Like a doctor who sees someone bleeding, Jesus sees this woman spiritually bleeding every time she takes a step. And so Jesus, like any good doctor, does what is in His power to do.
He calls her forward to the front of the synagogue. And slowly, carefully, with much agony she walks forward. “Woman, “ Jesus says, “You are set free from your infirmity.” And he puts His wonderful healing hands upon her and she straightens up and praises God! It was a wonderful, useful kindness that Jesus demonstrated. Jesus changed this woman’s life, He changed her entire outlook on life, He made a simple change in her life that allowed her to now work and survive as any other woman instead of staying bent over, forced to struggle just to walk.
And here is where we see the difference between those who are kind and those who are not kind.
The leader of the synagogue says to the woman and the other members of the congregation: “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”
For this man, the rules were more important than being kind to the woman. And the rules said that you don’t work on the Sabbath, you don’t work on Saturdays, you stay unproductive on God’s holy day.
(You’ll notice this guy addressed the woman and the congregation even though it was technically Jesus who was working, but I guess he didn’t have the guts to speak directly to Him.)
The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
Jesus makes the point that the men standing around Him treated their donkeys and cattle better than they would treat the woman now standing before Him.
When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.
Perhaps the largest barrier to being kind is our attention and focus upon the rules. We get so carried away in following the rules that we forget that we have people in front of us. How do we do this?
- The rules say that you teach your son to be strong and self-sufficient by giving him a task to do and then letting him do it. “Dig this ditch!” we say – and then, when we’ve finished our work and he hasn’t, we tell him to finish his work before he comes inside to the cool air conditioning because it is his job, right? The kind man would finish his own work and then shows kindness and grace and helps his son finish his ditch.
- The rules tell us to clean up our own messes. So when the daughter breaks a pitcher, the mother has the daughter get down and pick up all the pieces and sweep up all the shards, instead of helping her pick up the pieces, as the kind woman would do.
- The rules tell us to pick the best people for our teams, and leave the worst players for last. The kind person picks the players that always get picked last and then figures out how to give them a chance to run with the ball.
- The rules tell us that starting time is 8 o’clock, and if you are late three days, you’re fired. The kind boss understands that the woman needs a starting time of 8:15 because her teenage son needs to be driven to school and so the exception is made.
When we stop worrying so much about the rules and worry more about people, kindness and grace can flow from us more easily.
Today, we're told the best diets have us eating five or six snacks a day and avoiding big heavy meals. You may remember that there was a time when we were taught to only eat three meals a day and no snacks between meals? My grandmother Boley was a kind woman and listened to the Holy Spirit most of the time. After school, I often walked to her mobile home and spent a couple of hours there until my parents came home from work and picked me up. Not only did she listen to my stories after school, she almost always had warm biscuits waiting when I walked in. As soon as I opened the door, I could smell them! And if she didn’t have biscuits, she had buttered potatoes or warm oatmeal cookies. Her kindness, you see, was useful to a young, hungry boy after school.
A useful kindness.
My son Andy has that useful kindness. Just last Friday, we went to Sam’s Club to pick up some things for his dorm room, things like Styrofoam bowls for soup, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup in 12-packs, and a couple of 36-packs of Raman Noodles. I guess that's what the well-equipped dorm room needs these days.
We left Sam’s and passed a woman begging at the entrance to the parking lot. Her sign said she had a couple of children and no job and needed food. We got another 100 feet or so, when my kind son said, “Turn around. I need to give that woman something.” And so we turned around. When we got back to the parking lot, Andy jumped out and took her one of those 36-packs of raman noodles. That is a useful kindness! He got back in and said, “Do you remember where Jesus says, ‘if you have two boxes of Raman noodles, give one to the person with none?’” Of course, Andy was referring to the passage where Jesus tells us that if we have two cloaks, we should give one to the man with no cloak. What goes for cloaks goes for noodles.
So we know what useful kindness is, but how do we develop this trait of kindness to the point where it becomes part of our character? We’ve already discussed one way – worrying about people instead of the rules. Here’s another way.
In Proverts 31:26, the wonderful wife of Proverbs 31 is described in this way in the New King James Version; “She opens her mouth with wisdom, And on her tongue is the law of kindness.”
Have you ever worked for a kind supervisor? Oh, we’ve all worked for unkind bosses, but have you ever worked for someone who takes the time to phrase things so that when you really, really messed up, you were lifted up and taught how to improve and you felt forgiven and good with your supervisor all at the same time? That’s the law of kindness on someone’s tongue. That’s one of the things we are shooting for. When you speak, have the law of kindness on your tongue. But that often involves changing our character. And that can be difficult.
Usually, changing our character is a matter of a three-step process.
First, we recognize what our character flaw is. The opposite of kindness is being harsh. Harshness is something we learn at an early age. Let me see if I can give you an example:
You break a glass. Your parent yells at you, “Why did you break that glass?” You paralyze in fear, for you suddenly realized from your dad's reaction that breaking glasses is bad. Really bad. And so, twenty or thirty years later, when you are an adult and married and your daughter drops a glass that costs 50 cents, you freeze up. You know in your gut that you didn’t train her right and she’s done something terribly wrong and your body waits for the other shoe to fall. And so you yell at your daughter.
But what your mind doesn’t take the time to do is to realize the facts:
The fact is that when your dad yelled at you over breaking a glass, glasses cost $5 each at a time when a good job paid $2.50 an hour, so a glass represented 2 hours worth of pay. The other fact is that now glasses cost 50 cents each and you make $25 an hour, so a glass represents about a minute and a half of pay.
Another fact is that your dad’s back was always aching because his job was carrying 80 pound bags of mortar back and forth all day in the heat, and you broke the glass in the late afternoon on a 90 degree day. Your job, on the other hand, involves sitting at a desk typing up reports with very pleasant people in an air conditioned office.
But if you realize these two facts, it is easy to be kind, isn’t it? Because the situation is very different for your daughter than it was for you and your dad. You can be kind instead of harsh.
So when you are harsh instead of kind, recognize the character flaw of harshness for the flaw it is and recognize the situation may be different than the one you remember from your childhood.
But what if you are the one living in difficult times? What if you are your dad, working in pain, in heat, struggling to pay the bills?
Then we take the second step. We make a choice. You see, the law of kindness says that every time we open our mouths, we will choose to say something kind instead of harsh. Every time we take action, the law of kindness says we will choose to do something kind instead of harsh. Easy to say, but hard to do. So how will we do this?
This takes a minute, so let me get into this.
We know that Jesus was perfect, sinless, divine. We know that Jesus came to our planet and remained kind. In fact, even his strong words that He said to people like the Pharisees were said to shock those very unkind men out of their death-dealing ways, to lead them toward the way of life. Jesus truly wanted them to have eternal life also! Jesus remained kind – even when He went to the cross. In fact, almost His last act was to think of His mother and to announce that the Apostle John would be her new son and she would be his mother, making sure she would be taken care of in her old age. He did not die bitterly spouting anger at His enemies; He kindly made sure His elderly mother would be taken care of.
How was Jesus able to remain kind?
I think it was because He was never afraid. For you see, it is easier to be kind to people and animals we see as weak and helpless than it is to be kind to the overgrown bully who is holding a gun at your chest. Our fear leads to harshness. Confidence leads to kindness. Despite what our cultural myths say, statistics show that wealthy people generally give a higher percentage of their income in charitable giving than poor people do. It is easier to be kind when we are confident and not fearful.
Kindness is an action which is generated by pity. When we look at a sick, crying child or a injured puppy, we can look upon them with pity and we can easily be kind. And so, the way to be kind is to see the weakness in other people and accept that weakness in them.
We all travel a faith journey toward Christian holiness and perfection. That journey often has us travel up and down mountains. But I’m convinced that there is not one single path that leads us to the summit. There are lessons we all need to learn, but we travel different paths getting there. You may learn more about how to deal with grief, far before I do. I may learn more about God’s love before you do. We each learn God's lessons in a different order. And so, when we look at another person and we see that they have just done something stupid or mean or nasty, we have a choice.
We can respond harshly. Or we can respond with a useful kindness.
And if we look at the other person and realize “Heh, they haven’t been through that particular lesson yet” , then we can look on them with pity, the way a graduating senior looks back at the sophomore who still has to read Shakespeare, the way the chemist looks back at the student who still has to take organic chemistry, the way the sergeant major looks back at the private who has never been in battle.
Only Jesus did not make mistakes. And when we remember the mistakes we’ve made, the weaknesses we’ve shown, the troubles we caused other people like our parents and bosses --- then we can look at those under our care and who work beside us with eyes of pity and we can then say words of kindness and do acts of kindness for those people.
So to be kind we look at the people instead of the rules, we look at the differences in our situations, choosing to react differently than people reacted to our mistakes in the past, and we look at people with pity when they make mistakes, and so through practice we acquire the law of kindness in our tongue.
I was at Ruby Hospital visiting a man this week. There was a line of people waiting at the information desk – all of us were hot because it was one of those days when the heat index was 110 degrees. And the woman behind the desk was on the phone trying to find a patient for the man in front of her and she had been on the phone for several long minutes. The second guard tried to help the next man in line and that man took probably four or five minutes telling a long story about how he had been treated before they finally decided that he wanted to talk to a patient advocate on fifth floor and so the next couple of people were harsh with the woman behind the desk as it became their turn.
At first, standing there in line, I began to lose my patience, ready to lash out, but then I remembered: I’m not in a hurry. And I relaxed. And then, when I finally got to the front of the line, I was able to say to the woman, “Busy day for you, I see.” I had a smile on my face. And she smiled back. That was all it took for me to be kind. I had simply acknowledged that she was a person trying to do a difficult job rather than treating her as a machine that was performing slowly, the way we often treat people in service positions.
Being kind takes some work, but if you practice it becomes easier. Show people that you know they are people, images of God, instead of machines. Perhaps there is one last story that will help you with your kindness:
There was a woman who was terribly upset about things and the way things were going in her life. Her job was difficult and her boss was mean. Her co-workers were nasty to her. When she got home, the house was a wreck and her children were of no help cleaning up. They were making messes faster than they were helping. Her husband had been on the road all day and got home late, and she was complaining about how the children in the neighborhood had left trash on the lawn.
So her husband told her to walk down through the neighborhood to the cul-de-sac, stopping at each house and telling the neighbors what they were doing wrong. And then, she should tell her children what they were doing wrong, then call her boss and co-workers up and tell them what they were doing wrong, (“This sounds good!”, she said, relishing the prospect of speaking her mind.) and then come out back onto the deck, where, he said, “I will have everyone waiting for you and then they will kill you.”
“HUH!”
“You see,” the husband said, “That is exactly what Jesus had to do. He told us all what we were doing wrong, and then His Father had everyone waiting to kill Jesus – and Jesus knew this all ahead of time and yet He was still kind to everyone - all of the people who called for His execution!”
That ability to be kind, even knowing what people were going to do to Him, my friends, is one of the reasons I worship Jesus.
In our Galatians 5:22 passage that I mentioned at the beginning: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. “ it is important to notice that all these good characteristics fruits of the Spirit. They are what people see in us when we have the Holy Spirit in us and we listen to that same Spirit. They are not characteristics we achieve by our own hard work.
There is no way to be consistently kind without being filled with the Holy Spirit of God. And the gateway to the Holy Spirit is belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, choosing to follow Christ as our Lord and Example, and becoming cleansed in the holy waters of Christian baptism. Truly, we cannot become kind by ourselves – only by the actions of the Spirit working through us. And that Spirit is given to us during the ceremony of baptism.
Is there someone you have trouble being kind to? Are there situations in this life which set you off and lead you to act or speak harshly instead of with a useful kindness? Perhaps you need a closer relationship with Christ, a relationship of trust and humbleness, which can only come through baptism. And if you were baptized as a young child, but have never stood up in front of a church and made a public profession of faith in Jesus Christ, or have never been confirmed, it is also time, for if you are to become a person who is kind all of the time, you will need the heart of Christ, which is given by the Holy Spirit of God.
Isn't it ironic that the kindest person who ever lived, who is our Example, should be so kind as to share His Spirit with us who resist being kind naturally? Be glad. Praise God!
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