Kindness

it just isn't fair

Kindness has been rebranded by the world, made soft, safe, and sentimental. It’s been reduced to niceness, something polite and inoffensive, a way to feel good about ourselves, maybe even a little superior. But true kindness isn’t about being nice; it’s about being like Christ. Real kindness carries divine power, the kind that heals the unworthy, forgives the undeserving, and led the Son of Man to the cross so that we might live.

That’s not niceness, it’s divine compassion, fierce enough to bear a cross. It’s the sort of kindness Scripture calls grace.

I’m sure you have heard it said that grace is God’s unmerited favor, His divine mercy and selfless lovingkindness toward humanity. This extreme grace, given to receive nothing in return, is the ultimate act of kindness and the model of what kindness should look like in our lives.

So for humanity, kindness has to include mercy, which means it doesn’t give people what they really deserve, like distrust, retaliation, or rejection, but what they don’t deserve: compassion, sympathy, forgiveness, and love.

And that means a big part of kindness is getting over our self-protective idea of fairness. In grade school, we could have whined to adults about this idea not being fair, but as adults, it’s time for us to learn that demanding fairness, keeping records, and playing judge, jury, and executioner isn’t doing us any justice.

Sure, we can complain about how unfair life is and start to balance the scales of justice by treating people the way they deserve, but that is an act of the flesh. It’s a natural human impulse to want to punish the bad ones and reward the good ones, but that’s not how grace operates, and grace is the pattern we’re called to follow.

God gives us more than we deserve; He gives us unmerited favor. He shows us repeated mercy and grace. He makes the sun shine, and the rain fall on the sinner and the saint. He makes us pure and acceptable by a system that feels wildly unfair to us because grace gives us what we could never earn, purchased through the death of His Son.

So, complaining about someone not deserving your kindness is like having your massive credit card bill forgiven by the bank, only to turn around and yell at your neighbor for not giving you back the ten bucks he owes you.

The Spirit is generous. He gives us more than we could ever ask or imagine and definitely more than we deserve. As people who really want to produce the fruit of the Spirit, giving people more than they deserve should be a dream come true because when we do that, we allow the Spirit of God to actively flow through us and to feed His goodness and grace to the world.

If you’d like to read more about the generosity of the Spirit, look for my latest book, Fruitful: Cultivating a Heart of Love Only God Can Produce, available now. Or get the Audio at Audible.com

We also have a group discussion guide for free here. And I may be available to Facetime your group if you’d like. Just send me a note!

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