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©

When You Give

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

When you give to someone in need, don’t do as the hypocrites do—blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity!  I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get.  But when you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.  Matthew 6:2-3^(NLT)

As the Lenten season begins it’s time to focus inward, and the attitudes we bring to our everyday walk with Christ. 

In this part of the Sermon on the Mountain Jesus warns that all the best results of giving disappear when you pat yourself on the back for being so generous.  To be certain, if you happen to have billions, and give a lot of it away, as did Bill Gates and other notables, it will make news – it’s hard to hide that much money changing hands!  But whether or not it becomes news isn’t why Jesus said to keep our giving a private matter. 

Our more important consideration is the needy person who is receiving.  When you draw attention to what you give, the needy one who is receiving loses the opportunity to offer appropriate praise to God.  Public humiliation can turn thankfulness into envy or even despising the giver.  Despite the giver’s best intentions to help, the gift can become a destructive force, rather than a blessing.

So What’s the Best Way to Give?

Jesus used a phrase that is pretty self-evident; don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. 

Given the reality of hand-eye coordination, and short of a neurological intervention, the right and left hands of any person know what the other is doing.  So it’s not possible to literally hide from the left hand what the right is up to.  And neither does that explain Jesus’ meaning about how to give.  The saying is more an analogy which helps us understand the extreme caution we should take when it comes to the opportunity of being a blessing to another person.

A friend of mine asked me to be involved in blessing young pastors and their families.  He had only one condition to which I had to agree – his anonymity; I was to never reveal that he was the one giving the gift.  The gift itself was vacation time for pastors of small churches.  This friend of mine had seen some situations where young ministry families desperately needed the kind of worry-free time away in order to recharge and focus on each other, and not everyone else’s needs.  The demands of ministry and lack of funds are real deterrents to having time away.

Each family we identified received a gift of four days and three nights at Disney, with hotel, attractions, food and spending money all provided.  Some of the pastoral families that received this blessing had as many as five children, and could never have afforded this kind of getaway. 

Over the few years I was involved in this ministry I saw tears of gratitude and thankfulness from parents who knew God had dropped a blessing on their doorstep.  And I’m not sure they received the biggest blessing.  I was privy to knowing both the giver and the recipients, and the joy on both sides was a double-blessing to me.

For You Today

Taking some time during this Lenten season of preparation and repentance to look at what…and how…you give should be accompanied by a prayer for God to lead you into the joy of left and right-handed blindness!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

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NOTES

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Title image: © Roland Fischer, Zürich (Switzerland), via Wikimedia Commons