Love Is... Kind, Part 2.1

Visionary Family with Dr. Rob Rienow

Open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 13, this is part two of our seven week series on an essential ingredient for the Christian life. You know what an essential ingredient is, right? It's like a necessary ingredient, so chocolate chip cookies, an essential ingredient is what? Chocolate chips. If someone comes to you and offers you a plate of chocolate chip cookies and it looks like this, you say very politely and very lovingly, you're a little confused. You thought you were being offered chocolate chip cookies because if there's no chocolate chips, it's not a chocolate chip cookie. This series is about an essential ingredient in the Christian life. If we don't have it, we don't have a Christian life. In fact, if we don't have it, the Bible goes so far as to say we don't know God. What is this essential ingredient we're talking about? Love. It is love.
Look with me at 1 Corinthians chapter 13 beginning in verse one. It says, "if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clanging symbol." In other words, if I speak with all the eloquence in the world, but I don't have love, I'm a noisemaker. Verse two, "if I have prophetic powers and can understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I'm nothing." So if you have all the smarts, all the genius, you know the Bible backwards and forwards, you're a person of great faith, but you don't have love, what are you according to this verse? Nothing. Verse three, "if I give away all I have, if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." Love is an essential ingredient. It's a, if I don't have it, I don't have anything ingredient.
And now in the next four verses, God tells us what love is. Last week we got through three words. Love is what? What'd we do last week? Love is patient. This week we'll go two more words and we're going to talk about how love is kind. Love is kind. And each week that I'm with you, I'm going to do three basic sections to each sermon. The first section is we're going to talk about God. The Bible says God is love, therefore God is kind. We're gonna talk about what does that mean. Then Jesus says the most important commandment in the whole Bible is that we are to love God. So that means we are to be kind to God. What does that mean? How am I supposed to be kind to God? And then Jesus says the second commandment is that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, which means God calls us to be kind to one another. So that's the plan, let's dive in.
Part one, God is love, therefore God is kind. If I were to ask you to describe God, give me words that describe Him. You might say Creator, you might say all powerful, you might say loving. The list would go on and on, but a great one to put on that list would be God is kind. He's a perfectly kindhearted Father. Older English translations of the Bible like the King James Version, it was written almost five hundred years ago, they used a word "lovingkindness" to describe God. They took loving and kind and whipped it together in this awesome word, "lovingkindness." So Psalm 36:7 says, "how excellent is Thy lovingkindness? Psalm 69:16, "hear me, O Lord, for Thy lovingkindness is good. Turn to me, according to the multitude of Thy tender mercies." It's like, God, I know I can talk to You. I know I can pray to You because You're kind and I know You'll listen to me. Now perhaps the most amazing thing about God's kindness is that He continues to be kind to us even when we are unkind to Him.
The Bible's filled with real life examples of this with exhibit A perhaps being the Israelites as God brings them out of slavery from Egypt. So the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, God raises up Moses, Moses comes, says, "Pharaoh let my people go". Pharaoh says, "no." God sends ten plagues against Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The final plague, the Angel of Death goes over the land of Egypt, taking the firstborn son of every home, but spares the homes of the Israelites because they have the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and the angel passes over. After that plague, Pharaoh relents and he lets the people go.
So God gives the people a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to lead them and God leads them to the shores of the Red Sea. At this point, Pharaoh says, "what have I done? I need these slaves back" so he sends his army to get them and the people then, they see the Egyptian army coming and they say to Moses, "why'd you bring us out here to die? It'd be better if we died in Egypt." So Moses says, "fine, pack up. I'll take you back." You're like I don't remember that part. No, he didn't say that. He says, "fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, the pillar of cloud and fire move from in front of the Israelites to behind them to separate them from the Egyptian army. Moses raises his staff over the Red Sea, the waters part all night long.
The people of Israel walk through on dry ground with a wall of water on the right and a wall of water on the left. They get to the other side, the pillar of cloud then comes back before them. The Egyptian army rushes into the Red Sea, God brings the waters back over again, not a single one of them survive. Now I want you to imagine if you had seen all these things, how would it affect your faith? How would it affect your love for God? People say all the time, "well, if only I had proof that God was there. If only I could see a real miracle." I'm going to go out on a limb and say these folks just saw proof. Is that fair? They just saw like real miracles. God is there, He's powerful, and He loves them. How long will their faith last? Three days.
The Bible tells us three days after this moment, they can't find water. So they mumble, they grumble and what does God do? He turns the bitter water sweet for them. A little while later, they're hungry. They say to Moses, "you should have left us to die in Egypt." Where's their love for God? Where is their kindness toward God after what He's done for them? So what does God do as they mumble and complain about being hungry? He rains down bread from the sky, every morning, enough for them to eat their full everyday. He rains down double on the sixth days so that they can have a day of rest and worship. Is that proof enough? Are they gonna love Him now? Well, they make their way to Mount Sinai. God calls Moses up onto the mountain. Moses is gone a long time, forty days and forty nights. So the people come to Aaron, they bring him their gold. They say to him, "who knows what happened to the Moses guy. Make us a golden cow so we can worship it as our god." Aaron does it. Now look at this scripture, Exodus 32:4, "and he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf and they said, 'these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt' " Can you imagine such a thing? Now God rightly brought judgment against three thousand of the ringleaders that day because as I'll talk with you about in a few minutes, God's kindness does not cancel out His justice, but He continues to love and lead His people through the wilderness. Right after this event with the golden calf in Exodus 34:6, we find one of the great descriptions of Who God is. Look at this, "the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love" that's lovingkindness, that's that old English word, "abounding in steadfast love, in lovingkindness and faithfulness." So what's the point? Well, we might say, "well Rob, hey, if I saw God do all that stuff, I'd never lose my faith. I'd never complain. I'd never invent my own God." Well that's where we're wrong. See the Israelites are us and we are the Israelites. How many days go by where I don't sin? I don't think I have any of those and He still loves me, He's still kind to me.
Now we could go on and on about God's kindness to us in the spiritual realm, His kindness to us and forgiveness, His kindness to us in mercy and eternal life, but let me talk with you a little bit about God's kindness to us in everyday practical life. How many of you enjoyed, at least once this last week, some good food? Put your hand up for me. You're like, "oh, I even remember it right now." You know what that was? That was the kindness of God. How many of you enjoyed being with another person God made? He made another person unique. Maybe it's a brother, it's a spouse, it's a friend, it's a coworker. How many of you enjoyed being with one other person this week? That's the kindness of God. Did you get outside? Did you take a walk? Did you catch a fish? Did you look at the blue sky? All those things, the kindness of God. People always want to talk about, "well, if you believe in God, how do you explain evil and suffering in the world?" That's a good question and there are good answers to that good question, but you know an equally good question is if you don't believe in God, how do you explain all the joy and happiness in the world? Evolution has no answer for joy. It's not random synapses and neurons putting dopamine in your brain. It's the kindness of God. In all the pleasures we experience here, we even experience them in the midst of suffering. I've had this experience many times and it always strikes me, have you ever been to a funeral service, a funeral reception, and you're there to grieve, but even in the midst of that, people are laughing. They're remembering a story, they're remembering a special time, they're remembering something that happened with this person that they're there to remember. Even in the midst of some of our saddest times, there's the kindness of God.
Let's move to the second part. God calls us to love Him therefore, God wants us to be kind to Him. Now it's strange to use those words. God calls us to be kind to Him. It's not that God has fragile feelings, "please be kind to Me. Please don't hurt My feelings," but rather that kindness is a part of love. Now one way we can be kind to God is by receiving and enjoying the blessings that we just talked about. Let me illustrate it for you. Let's say that one of you dads builds an amazing play set in the backyard. Triple decker, tree house, the ziplines, the swings, the tunnels, the pulley system to deliver food back and forth from the house, the hot chocolate spigot, which is always available. You can feel the coveting of the neighbors and you get this thing done and you say, "alright kids, it's done! Go play!" And the kids said, "but dad, we're not done with our chores." "Forget the chores, we'll do 'em later, go play!" "Well, we'd really rather finish working." Now, the father appreciates the hardworking spirit, correct, but he's not happy with this. The father receives pleasure when the children enjoy the gifts. The whole creation is the kindness of God and He loves it when we enjoy it. So you take that walk, you watch that sunset, you catch that fish, you eat that ice cream, every now and then, you enjoy the person that God created that you like to be with. You'll hear people say, when they take time to rest, when they take time to enjoy, when they take time for pleasure, you'll hear Christians say this all the time, "I just feel so guilty, just feel so guilty. There's so much I should be doing" and I don't want to overstate it here, so bear with me, but I wonder if our bad feelings actually should be reversed. I wonder if we should feel bad when we're not taking time to enjoy the Father's gifts, but the key ingredient folks, is giving God credit for it all. Telling Him how much you appreciate it.
We hope that this message on love has encouraged you. You can find more resources for your family at our website, www.visionaryfam.com. This podcast was brought to you free of charge because of financial support from listeners like you. You can help us reach more families around the world. Please visit visionaryfam.com/donate to make a tax deductible gift. God bless you.