Episode 1. A Life of Kindness
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Have you ever compared someone in your life that’s kind and someone that’s not? Pretty obvious who we’d rather be around. So – how can we develop kindness in our lives? Join Berni Dymet – …
Have you ever compared someone in your life who’s kind with someone who’s not? It’s pretty obvious who we’d rather be around, right? So, shoe on the other foot now, how do you develop the sort of kindness in your life that makes others want to hang around you?
I wonder whether you can remember the last time someone surprised you with an inexplicable act of kindness. You know, it’s just a day like any other day just plugging along, doing this, doing that and then, then someone comes along with a kind smile or a kind word or a phone call. Something so small yet it touches us somewhere deep inside. Isn’t it funny how just the smallest act of kindness can do that?
When was the last time you were startled by an act of kindness? Perhaps it’s been so long you just can’t remember, or maybe, maybe you’re blessed and you’re surrounded by lots of kind people. There’s not one of us who wouldn’t like someone today to reach out to us with just the most simple act of kindness. In fact when kindness becomes a way of life, all of a sudden we feel loved and valued and cared for. Kindness, it turns, out might be a small thing, but it’s a big deal.
Last week on A Different Perspective, and again this week, we’ve been looking at something that God calls “The Fruit of the Spirit”. We all have lives that are like trees in a sense – we bear fruit. We bear either good fruit, fruit that blesses other people, fruit that develops other people, fruit that grows other people as they feed on it, or bad fruit.
And we were looking last week and we will look again this week, as Paul was writing in a letter to the Galatian Church. He was writing about this thing the Fruit of the Spirit and in a sense he was saying, “We are what we eat. On the one hand we can indulge our self, all our selfish desires.” And he said, “If you do that, you know something, we’re going to grow some bad fruit.”
On the other hand he said, “We can actually have a relationship with God, with the Holy Spirit and we drink that up like a tree drinking up nutrients out of the ground and water out of the ground.” And he said, “You know what happens? What happens then is we can’t help ourselves, we just end up growing good fruit.”
Does it work? Does this whole Christianity thing work?
So often we try to change ourselves. That’s hard, that’s tough because our behaviours, I don’t know about you but for me, the behaviours that really are bad fruit in my life have been so deeply ingrained, sometimes we don’t even see them, we don’t even recognise them let alone try to change them. On the other hand if we have this relationship with Jesus, the Son of God, this God who humbled himself and became a man, that relationship changes us.
I mean, my relationship with my wife Jacqui has changed me as we have become one flesh, as we’ve gone from being two totally separate people to being a unit, to being husband and wife. When those two become one, I don’t know, it changes you. You have to accept the other one, you have to love them on the good days and the bad days. We do things together, we encourage one another. It changes you. You can’t help but be changed in marriage and the same is true, even more profoundly, even more deeply when we have this relationship with Jesus.
Let’s look at kindness again and say, “What’s all that about?” Kindness, for me, it’s like a language of action. It’s like speaking through what we do. It’s a language that says, “I value you, I care for you, I love you.” Six years ago my wife Jacqui and I arrived at a new Church, we just felt called by God to leave the Church we were in, a little Church and we moved to a larger Church. We actually sold our house, moved house because we just felt called by God to do this.
Now, as we left the old one we left the friends and that sort of family that we’d built over many years. We knew the new Pastor at the new Church fairly well and his wife, I’d known him through Bible college but it was still, you know, you have to break into a new family, you have meet new people and that’s not easy. Becoming a part of a fellowship you really need to connect with someone. So we go along, the first service and we walk in and there’s all these new faces and we think, “Oh, have we done the right thing? Are we listening to God? Should we be here?”
You can get lost in a place like that and one guy, a guy called James, walked up, smiled, shook my hand, invited us to sit down with him during the service and he got up and said, “Let’s have coffee afterwards.” And we talked with him and all of a sudden we felt at home and the following week when we went back, sure enough, we walked into the place and we were looking to find this guy. I mean his kindness on that first Sunday had somehow made a connection into our lives. He stood out. I mean this is not rocket science is it? And do you know something, today six years on, we count him and his wife as amongst our closest friends.
Now I’m not someone to have a whole bunch of friends and have lots of people around me yet James and his wife Shirley are two of those friends. That small act of kindness, that first day that we walked into that place, from that has grown a friendship. You know something, my hunch is that it’s going to be a life-long friendship. And then we look around in this world of hurt and difficulties and we look at other people and think, “How can I make a difference in this world? There are so many problems, it’s too big, and I’m so small.”
Kindness is such a small thing. Kindness between husband and wife, kindness from parents to children, kindness amongst people at work or at the local football club or the local tennis club or at the local orchestra, whatever we’re part of, a family, a workplace, social things. When we put our roots down in a relationship with Jesus Christ, His Holy Spirit is like the sap that draws up in our bodies and a tree-like that, it just can’t help itself, it has to bear good fruit. A simple act of kindness. Small, surprising, sensitive. You’ve heard that saying, “It’s the thought that counts.”
I was at a conference last week, at a broadcasting conference and I was away from home and I was sitting listening to the speaker and I just felt to grab my phone and send my wife an SMS saying, “I love you, I’m thinking of you.” Isn’t it wonderful when we’re going through our day, humdrum, day after day and someone does something small and says, “I’m thinking about you?” Oh, that is so wonderful, it lifts your spirits, it changes your day. Kindness … kindness whispers, “I love you” into someone’s heart.
I wonder this week, just this week, just one thing, I wonder if you couldn’t say, “Lord, God, show me the one person you want me to touch with a simple act of kindness. Just something small or just show me the person who needs the sort of kindness that I can give.”
And when we do that, this is what happens; this is what happens for me. God’s Spirit kind of changes my heart and a changed heart moves my hands or my mouth or my fingers to key an SMS. And like James, a smile, a handshake, a coffee for two people who are new at his Church was so small, today I’m telling tens of thousands of people about it. Today those people are close friends, lifelong friends, solid friends through a simple act of kindness.
Jesus loves to change lives. It’s real stuff, its life stuff, and when we put our roots down like a tree into a relationship with him, and His goodness and His joy and His peace flow up then that fruit grows on our branches and the fruit of kindness is one of the most wonderful sweet fruits that we can ever grow.
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