What happened to kindness in today’s culture? Maybe a better
question for today’s culture is, “What is kindness?” If we look to the Bible,
we see God’s kindness defined in several ways. God’s love is everlasting
(Isaiah 54:8), His kindness is merciful, meaning that we don’t deserve it
(Psalm 117:2, 119:76, Titus 3:4), His kindness is great (Joel 2:13), God
demonstrated His kindness by sending Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:7), He also
showed his kindness through his deliverance of Israel out of Egypt (1 Samuel
15:6), God’s power is marvelous (Psalm 31:21), and last but not least, God’s
kindness is abundant (Nehemiah 9:17).
Kindness is
a difficult quality to have and keep, but it is attainable. No one’s kindness
can be as perfect, as forgiving, and as abundant as God’s kindness. I looked up
the difference between kindness and love, and the difference is that love tends
to be a feeling, while kindness tends to be an action. So God’s love for us is
his feelings toward us, and his kindness toward us is the miracles (small or
large) that God does for us. To put this concept in a more concrete form, take
the Exodus, for example. God loved
his nation, the Israelites, so He was kind
to them by delivering them out of Egypt. Kindness usually flows out of a heart
full of love. If I am very angry at someone, I am not likely to go and clean
their car for them or give them a present. Use this equation: Love + Action =
Kindness.
So all of
this is like a jumbled dinner where none of the components seem to go together,
but it is all headed toward a general point. You have God’s perfect kindness at
the top, and our imperfect kindness on the bottom, and we have to climb the
rope. We can never and will never (until we have our glorified bodies) reach
the top. Everybody may be different places on the rope. You may be an overly
kind person who enjoys showering people with gifts and words of encouragement
or you could be an Ebenezer Scrooge before his change, but most of us are somewhere
in between those two.
Here comes
the practical part. How do we climb the rope? Well, first of all, I think that
as I work on climbing, I tend to slide back down a little bit. Many times, it
feels like the “one step forward and two steps backward” feeling, where I’m not
really gaining ground, but if you are praying for strength and going out of
your way to be kind, you will find yourself steadily moving up the rope. I
think the main aspect of kindness that I struggle with is letting people have
their way and not forcing my opinion or idea on them. In order to improve in
kindness, we need to be purposefully going out of our way to be kind to
someone, and that can be anything from a gift to a word of encouragement. Let
the other person have their way. Go out for lunch where they want to. In
Matthew 5, Jesus says to love your
enemies, and as I previously mentioned, kindness flows out of love. In
order to show kindness to someone, you almost always have to start by loving
them.
So after
throwing all of that at you and calling it “practical”, I just want to throw
out another question, “Why should we be kind to anyone?” It is certainly a
valid question, and the answer is simple, “God changed us by pouring out
undeserved kindness on us.”1 That’s it; God modeled kindness
to us so that we would be able to show kindness to others. If we think about
what God did for us, I think we can find a way to be kind to others, no matter
what. God’s kindness to us should inspire us to climb the rope.
Before
wrapping up this article, I should go back and attempt to answer the question
that I asked to start the article. The question was, “What happened to kindness
in today’s culture?” Kindness has not disappeared, but the amount of it in the
world has lessened. I think that part of the reason for its lessening can be
credited to the fact that climbing the rope, as I call it, is a grueling
process, and many don’t want to work for the prize at the end. So the question
is, are you going to strive to climb the rope as I am. I mess up a lot, and so
will you, but most of us have nowhere to go but up. Climb the rope.
1 J.D. Greear, Gospel: Recovering the Power That Made Christianity Revolutionary
(2011), pg. 115
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