To Be Kind

by Emma Cockley, WBL Interim Director

I recently had the privilege of teaching a session for Women Business Leaders’ Summer Series. Because the Summer Series’ theme was on the Fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5, my lesson dealt with the two virtues of patience and kindness. Below is a short excerpt from my lesson that provides greater understanding upon what it means to be a Christian who is truly kind by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This blog is part two of two essays that have been developed from my initial lecture, exploring the themes and applications of patience and kindness.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

gentleness, and self-control. Against these things there is no law.”

Galatians 5:22-23

Definitions

The word for kindness that is used here in Galatians 5 is found in the New Testament only in Paul’s letters. As applied to God, the word denotes God’s gracious attitude and action towards sinners. God’s kindness, which consists in forbearance and patience, is aimed at the sinners’ repentance. Most ultimately, salvation is the manifestation of God’s kindness and His love for mankind, and Jesus Christ is the supreme act of God’s kindness towards us as was ever revealed- that God gave up His only Son so that we might be united with Him.

As those who have experienced the kindness of God’s salvation in Christ, we too are to clothe ourselves in kindness. This is an essential quality to be displayed by Christians. Similarly, kindness is an essential ingredient of love as seen in 1 Corinthians 13 where love is first described with the very words we are focusing on today- love is patient and kind.

Moreover, kindness expresses itself in action. While patience may express itself in inaction- in waiting and in long-suffering, to be kind is to treat others in the same way as God has treated them. To put it plainly, kindness is goodness directed towards another person. It is to consider others more highly than ourselves and to treat them with love and dignity.  

Kindness is not Niceness

I think, however, there is an important distinction to be made with this quality. To be a person who is kind, is not necessarily the same thing as to be a person who is nice.

Sometimes we confuse kindness with niceness- thinking that if we are really “kind” we will just be very accommodating, be very accepting, very flattering perhaps to win approval of others, very sweet in all circumstances, never saying anything that may be judgemental or seemingly offensive. But this is not kindness; this is niceness. Niceness may be pleasant, but it lacks conviction. It has no soul. Niceness trims its sails to prevailing cultural winds and wanders aimlessly, standing for nothing and thereby falling for everything. Kindness is certainly not aggression, but it’s also not niceness. Niceness is cosmetic. It cares only for how people perceive it to be and in many ways is flattery for one’s own gain. It is not honesty, and at its core it is not loving because it has no convictions and does not stand on what God’s word declares as true and righteous. 

For example, niceness is keeping an employee in the job, knowing she’s no longer the right fit, therefore failing her and the company because you don’t have the courage to do the kind thing. Kindness calls you to tell her she’s not the person for the position and then dignify her in the transition. 

At its core, kindness is goodness directed towards another person, and the Lord declares in His Word what is good and how we are to treat people- when to encourage them, when to gently rebuke them and confront them when they are in sin, when to restore them back into fellowship with the Lord and His church, when to pray for them, when to be hospitable, and the list could go on and on. These are all attributes or actions that can be bundled up under kindness, but to be kind does not necessarily mean to be nice. And this distinction is important as we seek to be people who are obedient to the Lord. We must be men and women who are kind and who are willing to not always be nice.

Practical Steps

While we may all desire to be people who demonstrate patience and kindness, it is much easier to praise these virtues than it is to personally embody them, and so I want to provide a few practical measures for how we can practice patience and kindness by the Lord’s strength and with His help.

First, if you want to grow in patience, you need to pray for greater patience. If you want to grow in kindness, pray to be more kind. It really can be as simple as this. The Lord does not withhold good gifts from His children. The Lord does not withhold this fruit from His children.

Pray that the Lord would make it clear to you where your impatience festers, where you lack kindness. Pray he would make your sins clear to you- He will. But ultimately, pray He will give you the strength to conquer the desires of the flesh. A fleshly person- one who walks not according to the Holy Spirit, but according to his or her own devices and desires and in accordance with his or her own comfort and ease- seeks to make life entirely serve their purposes and as such they are only kind, they are only patient when it best serves themselves. Do not be this way. 

In Galatians 5, Paul goes on to write after recording this list of what the fruit of the spirit is – that for those of us who belong to Jesus Christ- our flesh has been crucified with Christ along with its passions and desires and instead we live by the Spirit and the Spirit makes these virtues possible in us. He develops them in us as we likewise work to do battle against our flesh. So pray that the Lord would produce these good fruits in you- He will.

My second recommendation is to understand that to be a man or woman of patience and kindness requires discipline and it requires training in righteousness. And training involves plain old practice. It takes great practice to be someone who offers a patient response, who offers a patient word in the face of great frenzy and chaos or even in the face of another’s anger. It takes great practice to be a woman who has the teaching of kindness on her tongue as Proverbs 31 says and to be a man who offers a gentle answer that turns away another’s wrath.

You are going to have to train yourself in advance for the patience that is required each day- prepare yourself, think through the common situations that strain your patience and kindness. What are they? How do you typically respond? Is your typical response sinful? When you go through situations that test and try your patience and kindness, are you prone to have afterthoughts of how you wish you would have responded differently? Do you wish you wouldn’t have snapped at your spouse, or had harsh words with your kids, or been dismissive with a coworker in a moment of stress, or snapped at your parents who were being just a little overbearing?

I’m not sure what you all are like, but if something has really bothered me or someone has upset me, I’m prone to re-run the conversation in my mind, analyzing every detail- what the other person said, what I said or didn’t say. Sometimes- rather sinfully- in my mind, I create future conversations in which I have a really pithy, scathing response. I remember doing this chronically as a child. Thankfully this habit has lessened, but I would review arguments with my sisters while I showered, and I have two very spirited younger sisters and we argued a lot as children. And as the hot water poured over me, I would pour over their hurtful comments, my responses, and how I could really jab at them next time with a scathing comment or a backhanded criticism that maybe they would be all too dense to understand at first but it would be a comment that would haunt them once they understood it later… This was a wretched thing to do! 

Thankfully, the Lord through His kindness and His unfailing patience with me has slowly begun to root out such wicked patterns from my thought-life but I say all this because I think we can all be prone to such things. I don’t know when your wicked thoughts come to you- maybe on your drive home, maybe on a walk, maybe not when you are in the shower. But regardless, often wicked thoughts come very naturally to us. It is easy to be fleshly, to give in to evil. We don’t have to do much training in self-centeredness and impatience. Often these responses simply pour out from us. And so while aspects of our sinful nature are innate and require almost no training, rehearsing impatient responses and unkind words is certainly a hindrance to our training in righteousness. 

Just as I took the time to rehearse my sinful responses in the shower, I, through the help and power of the Holy Spirit, can flip this on its head and with great diligence train myself to have patient and kind responses- responses that are gentle and loving and life-giving to those who are in my midst. Rather than fuming in the shower, I should take that opportunity to consider what is provoking me and how I will respond in kindness and patience next time that situation arises.

So in this same way- prepare yourself, know your sins, know what makes you upset. We all have circumstances in which our natural response would be to be impatient and unkind. So prepare yourself for these scenarios in advance, and prepare your responses- think through how you want to act in accordance with God’s Word. Pray that the Lord would allow you to approach these situations with godliness. Pray that He would train you in righteousness. Pray that His fruit would come to bear on your relationships.