Fruit of the Spirit - Part 1 - KINDNESS

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Tuesday, May 21, 2019

But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  There is no law against these things!                              Galatians 5:22-23

Paul, the apostle, uses fruit as a metaphor to explain the way God prepares and uses His own nature and strength in us to be a blessing to others.  It’s really a great metaphor (of course God doesn’t need my approval…I’m just celebrating the truth here). 

Fruit from our earth’s bounty is a continuing staple of refreshment, nourishment, and tasty blessing in my life.  If you ask what I had for breakfast, and fruit is not mentioned, call the FBI, because you’re talking to an imposter, or my evil clone; you’ll probably find I’ve been kidnapped and put on a boat to Shanghai. 

Over the next week or so I’d like for us to enjoy examining together the fruit of God’s Spirit.  There are nine kinds of fruit in this cluster of heavenly produce.  Today we begin with kindness.

There are a ton of words that are associated with a person being kind:  benevolent, caring, compassionate, generous, giving, thoughtfulness, consideration, helpfulness, charity, tenderness, sympathetic, tolerance, understanding, courtesy, decency, altruistic, gracious, patient, cordial.

All those words have their birthplace in the human heart.  Kindness cannot be enacted by Presidential fiat, Congress passing a law, or the United Nations international court.  Rather it is evoked by a gift of human unselfishness which includes another heart, usually one that is in need.

In Acts ^(11:27-30) we find at Antioch a church full of believers exercising the gift of kindness.  One of their own, Agabus, is a prophet, and predicts a coming famine in the Roman Empire.  Knowing the church at Jerusalem is already experiencing hard times, they didn’t wait for the prophecy to hit (which it did several years later).  Instead they immediately took up an offering for their fellow believers in Jerusalem and sent it with Paul and Barnabas.

I know what that’s like.  Elizabeth and I have experienced some rough times financially over the years.  Sometimes it was self-inflicted, just spending unwisely.  At other times the causes were just a matter of life happening.  We’ve had family and friends who helped us, and one particularly kind anonymous helper who just sent unsolicited funds through the mail. 

During one crisis of our ministry, I was coming to the end of ministry in one church and had nowhere to go.  A couple of dear co-laboring ministers recognized the signs of depression in me and made it their mission to get me out of my routine – a lunch, a time of listening, and some prayer later, their kindness gave me some hope.  It proved to be salvation for my sanity, and a strength for the journey.

During that same period there was a meeting that had all the signs of a lynch mob with the pastor’s neck as the center of the agenda.  One of the leaders stood up and gently, but firmly challenged those who were conspiring to push me out the door, and God used his leadership to change the whole tenor of that group.  His kindness to stand with me was the difference between calm reason and a broken spirit.

Kindness cannot be overrated!

For You Today

Let’s let Scripture finish our devotional thought on kindness today:

The seeds of good deeds become a tree of life;  Proverbs 11:30a

If your gift is to encourage others, be encouraging.  If it is giving, give generously.  If God has given you leadership ability, take the responsibility seriously.  And if you have a gift for showing kindness to others, do it gladly.  Romans 12:8

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com  
             Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©