Hello everyone and welcome today to Trinity Sermons.
It is such a pleasure to have you joining us here today where we at Trinity Church,
Streetsville are learning together to love Jesus, live like Jesus and lead others to
Jesus.
Now today we are continuing along our sermon series, The Fruit of the Spirit and today
Rob will be unpacking what kindness is, specifically Christian kindness.
It's going to be a great message and we are so glad that you are with us today.
We hope you enjoy and God bless.
A reading from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 10, verses 25 to 37.
On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.
Teacher, he asked, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
What is written in the law?
He replied.
How do you read it?
He answered, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your strength and with all your mind and love your neighbor as yourself.
You have answered correctly, Jesus replied.
Do this and you will live.
But he wanted to justify himself so he asked Jesus, and who is my neighbor?
In reply, Jesus said, a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he was attacked
by robbers.
They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead.
A priest happened to be going down the same road and when he saw the man, he passed by
on the other side.
So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.
But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was and when he saw him, he took pity
on him.
He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.
Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.
The next day, he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper.
Look after him, he said, and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense
you may have.
Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?
The expert in the law replied, the one who had mercy on him.
Jesus told him, go and do likewise.
The word of the Lord.
Good morning, everyone.
It's great to see you this morning.
I want to begin by showing you a little bit of an update.
These are the beans that are currently growing in our garden.
In fact, I uprooted one and brought it in here this morning.
One of the very interesting things about these bean plants is if I were to go out in the
morning and take a look at them in the morning, they are facing kind of eastward, the leaves.
And then if I come back again at the end of the day, the leaves have changed their position
and now they're facing more westward.
And if I were to stay home all day and watch these leaves throughout the whole day, what
I would see is what appears to be the leaves kind of following the sun all the way through
the sky throughout the day.
It's like an amazing thing when you think about how God created this organism to do
that.
It's almost magical, which is probably why they say beans, beans, the magical fruit.
They follow the sun all through its root.
Right.
But actually, this process that I'm talking about is a process called phototropism.
And from the outside, what it appears to us is it appears that the bean plant is actually
bending and facing and following the sun as it goes through the sky.
That's what we see.
That's what the appearance is.
That's what our eyes pick up.
But actually, there is something really cool going on inside the plant that makes this
happen.
And what it is is essentially there are these chemicals called auxins.
And auxins, for whatever reason, accumulate on the shaded side of the stem of the plant.
So if the sun's over here, the auxins accumulate on the shaded side.
And when auxins accumulate, they create kind of an acidic environment in the plant cells.
And that causes the plant cells to swell.
And as those plant cells swell, it actually bends the stem and moves it toward the light.
It's fantastic.
And so what I'm trying to say is, on the one hand, there is this external thing that we
see.
There is this movement, this bending toward the sun.
But actually, that only happens because of an internal change that's occurring that we
can't see with our eyes.
So today, we're continuing our teaching series, which we're calling organic.
And what we're learning is that, like with plants, as we try to change our life, to make
outer changes to our behavior, to our attitudes, to the way we live our lives, we want to make
those changes.
In order for that to happen, in order for us to bend our lives more toward God, there
also has to be this inner change that is happening inside of us, this inner transformation.
Now, most religions, I have to say, they focus primarily on the outer, on the externals.
Most religions say, bend your life in this way.
Live your life in this way.
Try to live as a follower of God or a follower of whatever the teacher of that religion is.
That's how most religions operate.
But McChristianity says, well, actually, the true way to be blessed and the true way to
experience the fullness of life is not simply to try to follow, follow the God.
And Jesus did say, follow me.
He does say that we are to follow him and to follow.
But it's more than that.
It's not just following.
It's not just bending our life.
But there actually also has to be a filling, a filling of ourselves with Jesus.
So we don't just follow Jesus.
We are filled with Jesus.
It's really, really hard to follow Jesus on our own strength, to bend our lives in God's
direction on our own strength.
We need to be filled and transformed from the inside.
And so when you see changes happening in your life, those changes cannot simply be happening
by your own strength.
There's going to be an interchange.
God is doing something on the inside.
In fact, that's why Jesus said, it is way better for everyone.
If I go away, if I return to my father in heaven, because that way I can send the spirit
and the spirit can actually affect the inner transformation that we can't just get by trying
to follow Jesus.
Although trying to follow Jesus is still very, very important.
And how are you going to know if that transformation is happening in your life?
Well, it is going to show up because your own life is going to start bending in the
direction of love and peace and patience and, and, and joy.
And today we come to one, we're going to look at kindness.
One of the ways you know that the fruit of the spirit is growing in your life is that
your life is bending more in the direction of kindness.
I want to say that it is very hard to be kind.
I look back at when I was a child, especially, and I was not what you would call a kind kid.
I lost my temper a lot.
I fought with my siblings a lot.
I talked back to my parents a whole lot.
And it's not like I didn't know I was supposed to be kind.
I mean, my parents were like, Rob, be a good boy.
Rob, be kind.
My teachers, my Sunday school teachers were saying, it's important to be kind.
I knew I was supposed to be kind.
I just couldn't be kind in that way.
Instead I, I threw a brick at my sister and shattered a window and I stabbed my brother
with a pen and I said all sorts of horrible things that, that I regret today.
I have changed.
Thanks be to God.
But those were not good moments of why was I like that?
And although, although I'm, you know, I'm not doing that kind of stuff anymore.
Why am I still like that?
Why is it still so hard for me to be kind?
You know, I mean, Jesus was right.
Jesus once said, he said, no one's good except God alone.
Look at our world.
There's an appalling lack of kindness everywhere you look in our schools, in our homes, online
for sure, in the financial system, the justice system, even in, in politics, we're in the
midst of a campaign right now.
Campaigns are not when the kindness of people comes out for all to see.
Even look at the inequality we see in our world between the rich and the poor.
And you could say that that is a result of unkindness at its very heart.
Why is it so hard to be kind?
Well, whether you've been, you consider yourself kind or not, or whether you've been the recipient
of kindness or when maybe you've been the recipient of great unkindness today, I think
we all need to look at this topic and we have to figure out how can we bend our lives more
in the direction of God, more in the direction of the son of God and more in the direction
of kindness.
And today I want to just talk about three things.
I'm going to talk about contagious kindness.
We're going to talk about counterfeit kindness, and then we're going to talk about Christian
kindness.
Okay.
So let's talk about a kind of kindness that is absolutely contagious.
And this is really important to understand because the very first Christians were kind,
kind people.
This is how the world remembers them.
And that kindness was radically contagious.
The Greek word for kindness is this word here.
It's Christates, right?
But this word does not just mean, Hey, you know, be a good little boy, Rob, or, or mind
your P's and Q's.
No, no.
Christates has a unique idea attached to it.
And that is Christates isn't just that you love someone.
It's that you put that love into action.
So when I walk by my neighbor and I say, hello neighbor, you might say, Oh, that's kindness.
That was a really kind thing to say.
But according to the biblical kind of definition of kindness, that's not true kindness.
True kindness would be if I walking by my neighbor and they're mowing their lawn and
I say, hello neighbor, I see you're having trouble with that.
And I hop over the fence and I get over there and I, and I help them mowing the lawn.
That is true biblical kindness.
It's putting your love into action, which means that kindness always costs you something.
There is an expression out there that says kindness costs nothing.
Have you heard that?
Oh, kindness costs nothing.
That is not true.
Kindness always costs you, costs you your time, costs you your energy.
Kindness costs you money lots of times.
And in short, what we mean when we talk about kindness in the scriptures is it's meeting
people's needs through deeds.
And believe me, this is what the early Christians were known for.
I'm going to just kind of take a little bit of a sidetrack here, but this is actually
really, really interesting.
So in the oldest copies of the Bible, some of the oldest manuscripts, you come across
this word, Christianity.
So if a person, if kindness is Christa days, then a Christianity is a person of kindness.
And so in some of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible that we have, Christians are
described as Christy, anoy.
They're described as people of kindness.
The funny part is, is that the word Christy, anoy looks a lot like, linguistically speaking,
looks a lot like this other word, Christianity and Christianity means people of Christ.
And as biblical copyists and authors were putting these manuscripts together, very interesting.
Because they just got these words mixed up and they were using these words almost as
if they were interchangeable.
Right?
So the Christy anoy or the Christianity, oh, it doesn't really matter.
People of kindness, the people of Christ, it doesn't really matter.
They're all the same thing.
Just use this one or use that one.
They all are the same thing.
I want you to understand how powerful that idea is.
How could it be that it didn't matter whether you put the people of Christ or the people
of kindness is because the people of Christ were the people of kindness, especially in
the Roman world at that time.
In that time, if you were a woman, if you were a child, if you were a slave, if you
were sick, if you were aged, it was a very dangerous time for you.
But the Christian, the people of Christ became known as the Christy anoy, the people of kindness
because they elevated the role of women in that culture.
They cared for those who were sick.
They rescued children that were being neglected and thrown away.
That was their thing, right?
That was their M.O.
They were the people of kindness.
They put love into action.
They met needs through deeds.
And that was really the only leverage that they had in that world.
They didn't have power.
They didn't have influence.
They didn't have people in high places.
All they had, all they had going for them was kindness.
And that kindness was so contagious that within a few generations, the Roman Empire had essentially
become a Christian empire.
And it was all because of kindness.
Christ's people were the kindness people.
Now, the question that we have to ask, are we still known as the kindness people?
Are the Christy anoy still confused with the Christy anoy?
Is Christianity still synonymous with kindness or is it synonymous with judgment or arrogance
or hypocrisy or something else like that?
That's a really important question for us to ask.
As William Barclay wrote, he said, more people have been brought into the church by the kindness
of real Christians than by all the theological arguments in the world.
That is contagious kindness, love and action, meeting needs through deeds.
It's how Christianity started and it's how Christianity still needs to be today.
But there's also this kind of counterfeit kindness out there.
And it looks a lot like kindness, but actually it really isn't.
You might even be sitting here today and you're saying, I think I'm a kind person.
I do good things and I'm generous and whatever.
But we just need to be aware that there are some pretty convincing counterfeits out there.
One of them is a kindness that is actually motivated by guilt.
I'll give you an example.
Let's say you're watching TV and that commercial comes on and it's the commercial that maybe
is talking about how there are children in certain parts of the world that are severely
malnourished or there has been a crisis, a disaster, and they need some disaster relief.
And certainly not all organizations do this, but there are some organizations that really
do prey on your guilt.
They prey on your guilt.
They say, shame on you.
You're living in this nice house.
You have all this money.
You have all this going for you.
Look at what you have.
Shouldn't you be helping the hungry children of the world?
Shame on you.
Shouldn't you be out there giving your money to this disaster relief?
And actually it works.
We get up off the couch and we go to our phones or go to our computers and we make a donation.
And hey, that donation matters.
It makes a difference in kids' lives.
It makes a difference in relief for people who need it most.
But what just happened in that moment was not love in action.
It was guilt in action.
And we just need to know.
It's a slight counterfeit to kindness.
Another counterfeit to kindness would be a kindness that is actually motivated by the
opinions of others.
So sometimes we do great acts of kindness, if you will, but it's really just a show,
right?
We want people to see our kindness so that they'll be impressed with us.
So that when you feed the hungry, you're really just feeding yourself.
You're feeding your own reputation.
And when you clothe the naked, you're really just clothing yourself.
You're making yourself look better.
Doing things in order to be seen by others isn't really a kindness, even if they're great
things.
It's a counterfeit to kindness.
Here's a couple other counterfeits we have to watch out for.
One is when kindness is motivated by fear or duty.
So fear says this.
Fear says, I better be kind or God will punish me.
Duty says, I better be kind because it's just what we're supposed to do, right?
And actually a lot of religions, this is their primary motivation for getting people to be
kind, fear or duty.
If you aren't kind, God's not going to be kind to you.
If you aren't merciful, God's not going to be merciful to you.
God's going to punish you.
And so fear can motivate us into acts of so-called kindness.
But again, as you can probably see, it's not a real kindness.
It's a counterfeit.
It's more like fire insurance to make sure you've got yourself all covered with God.
So when you look at that list, when I look at that list, I certainly see myself up there.
I say, yeah, there's lots of times when that has been the reason why I have done an act
of kindness.
And maybe you see that up there as well, right?
It's not coming from a changed heart.
It's not coming from an overflow of our heart.
It's coming from guilt and the opinions of others and fear and duty.
It's not quite the real thing.
So as we end, let's talk about what is the real thing, right?
What does Christian kindness look like?
Or more importantly, how do we begin to be kind people, truly kind people?
Well, I'm going to give a few different answers to this, but just let's go back to my bean
plant here.
Just as my bean plant follows the sun, it points itself toward the sun and actually
tries to track where the sun is going and keep its eyes on the sun.
One of the ways we develop kindness in our life is simply that we keep our eyes on Jesus.
We focus on Jesus.
Jesus is our teacher, right?
He is the one who is showing us a way of life.
And our job is to do what he does.
I don't know if you guys remember there was this big craze, at least back when I was in
high school, but I think it's making a comeback where people wore these bracelets.
Remember these bracelets?
They said WWJD.
And what does WWJD stand for?
What would Jesus do?
Right, right.
And everybody walked around and they were wearing these bracelets.
And I think the idea was that when you put this bracelet on, as you went around your
day at home or at work, or maybe it was at school, right?
Or even at church, and you found yourself in a sticky situation, in a tricky situation,
and you just, what do I do here?
You would say, oh, wait a second.
You would look down on that bracelet and you would say, what would, what would Jesus do
right now?
And so in that way, Jesus became kind of like the sun that you were pointed towards.
You were looking towards it.
What's my next move right here?
If I were to follow you, Jesus, what would my next action be?
And so like a plant following a sun, you're trying to be like Jesus.
I follow Jesus' teaching.
I want to reflect Jesus in my own life.
So what would Jesus do in this situation?
What would Jesus do in my marriage?
What would Jesus do in my parenting or in my workplace?
Now that kind of motivation to be kind, it's, that's not motivated by fear or guilt or
the opinions of others.
It's actually just motivated by you are an organism that is following the son of God,
right?
You are doing what Jesus has called you to do.
But here's the thing, WWJD as a pathway to kindness is actually really quite difficult.
It's really, really hard to follow the example of Jesus.
You might think of, you know, think of the, the parable of the good Samaritan.
That's, that's, that's still pretty hard to do, right?
How do we exemplify that kind of kindness in our own lives?
So that's why I think that as much as Jesus told us, Hey, follow me, go and do what I
do, go and do likewise.
There's actually maybe a better bracelet that we should be wearing.
And that is, Oh, I didn't change it.
I should say W J I D W J I D. Okay.
And that's not so much what would Jesus do, but what is Jesus doing?
What Jesus is doing in my life?
What is Jesus doing in my heart?
What is Jesus, the spirit of Jesus doing in my life right now?
Right.
I need WWJD.
I need to follow Jesus, but I also need to be filled with Jesus so that I can actually
have the internal change to bend me in the direction of kindness.
So I can do things that I could never just do on my own strength by trying to follow
Jesus, right?
Kindness isn't just about following, it's about filling.
So in this case, it's not just what is Jesus, what would Jesus do, but it's, it's what
is the spirit doing in me and Jesus then becomes my strength.
He becomes not just an example to follow.
He becomes the very strength that enables me to make the changes that I could never
make on my own.
So when I look at this parable of the good Samaritan, I'm like, I could never do that.
The good news is, is that we're not left to our own devices to figure out how to do that.
The spirit comes into us, it's like the oxens and the acids that are at work in us that
enable our life to bend in a direction of kindness that we could never do on our own.
So it's not just WWJD.
It's got to be W J I D. What is the spirit doing?
What is the, what is Jesus doing in my life right now?
But here's finally, I want, I want to end with this one.
Those are both great motivations to figure out how to be kind people, but really the
greatest way, and I think if we made bracelets like this Trinity, we could make a whole packet
of money, but, and that's the W H J D bracelet and W H J D would stand for what has Jesus
done.
Not what would Jesus do or what Jesus is currently doing in my life, but what has Jesus done?
You see those early Christians who were known for that kindness, they had WWJD.
They knew what Jesus would do and they tried to follow their teacher as we should, and
they had the spirit living in them.
So they had what Jesus was doing, what the spirit was doing in them.
But I have to believe that what fueled the most of all was that they knew what Jesus
had done for them, right?
They had no problem being kind because they had tasted the kindness of God and what God
had done for them.
Jesus had laid down his life for them.
So they had no problem showing mercy because they had experienced the mercy of God in their
life.
They knew what that felt like.
God had forgiven them.
They could forgive others.
God was good to them.
They could be good to others because of what Jesus had done.
So that's why for them, Jesus wasn't just an example to follow.
He wasn't even just the strength to do the following.
He was their savior.
They had been saved by God's kindness and that changed everything.
And so I think that probably when they read the parable of the good Samaritan, you know
what they said?
They said, you know what?
I was the one in the ditch.
I was the one who had been beat up and left to die on the side of the road.
And Jesus came along and he came over to my side and he lifted me up and he cared for
me and he bandaged my wounds and he forgave me and he washed me and he anointed me with
oil and at great expense to himself, he took care of me and he saved me.
And that's why early Christians went out into the world as the Christates, as the people
of kindness, because they had tasted and experienced and felt what it was like to know the kindness
of God.
So my question is, have you, do you know WHJD?
Do you know what Jesus has done for you?
Amy Carmichael says, if you can write an unkind letter, speak an unkind word, think an unkind
thought without grief and shame, then you know nothing of God's love.
We may try to bend ourselves in the direction of kindness, but God in Jesus Christ comes
along and loves us into the direction of kindness.
So kindness costs nothing.
No way.
Kindness costs God everything, costs Jesus everything.
And if you can see the kindness of God and you can look at the cross and you can see
how he loved you and forgave you, you will not just be given an example of kindness.
You'll not just be given the strength to be kind, but you will actually experience his
kindness toward you, and that is the real way we change and grow the fruit of the Spirit.
Thanks be to God.
Thank you so much for joining us today here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, and we hope
that you found this message something that you can take with you all week long.
Please join us again next week for yet another sermon.
Today's sermon was taken from the June 9th, 2024 service at Trinity Church, Streetsville,
Mississauga, Ontario.