Love With Kindness || How Do I Do This? || Part 2

How many of you have experienced the transformative power of accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? How many of you have committed to living a life of repentance, knowing that it leads to a new, purposeful life? How many of you believe that the only path to heaven is through Jesus? If you have, it’s a testament to the hope and inspiration that Jesus brings. If you haven’t, no worries. The Bible says you need to say that you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior and turn away from your sinful lifestyle into the one God has created for you. If you’re interested in doing so, this series will help you.

Once you make the decision, you may feel like nothing has changed. Your next question may be, “What’s next?” or “What now?” That’s what I intend to answer in this series. Over the following four parts, we’ll examine the new things you will do with the Holy Spirit inside your heart. I hope you enjoy this series. I’m simply calling it “Now What?”

Today marks part two of a five-part mini-series within this series. We will explore Romans 12:6-21 to understand the gifts within us, how to be kind to others, how to be hospitable, how to treat others with respect, and the essence of Christian living. This mini-series is titled “How Do I Do This?” and I hope it fills you with anticipation and joy as we uncover the unique gifts God has bestowed upon each of us.

Romans 12:9-10

9            Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good.

10          Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other.

Most of us have learned how to be kind to one another – speaking kindly, avoiding hurting people’s feelings, and appearing to be interested in them. We can even be skilled in pretending to do all those things when we hear someone else’s needs or when we become disgruntled learning about worldly injustice. Pretending to be kind to one another may work to get yourself out of sticky and uncomfortable situations because you don’t want to hurt their feelings. Still, internally, it hurts you on the inside because of the person or the situation that the person caused. Sometimes, we do it for survival; sometimes, we do it out of annoyance or ego.

God calls us to have a genuine love that goes far beyond the surface level of politeness. Genuine love requires concentration and effort. It means we help each other become better people. It demands our time, money, and personal involvement. Love often requires sacrifice. No one person can express love to a whole community. Still, your church or community of believers can love like Jesus. Look for the people who need your love, and look for ways your community can love the bigger world, like Jesus. The love God calls us is not to benefit our ego or pride or chase clout on social media, but to care for those around us. You may receive some honor for the work you do but don’t do the work expecting it. We can honor others in one of two ways.

One way involves ulterior motives. We could honor our boss at work so they can reward us. We could honor our employees so they can work harder. We can honor the wealthy so that they will contribute to our causes or the powerful so they can use their power for us and not against us. Another way involves God’s path of love. As Christians, we honor others. They’re made in God’s image because they’re our brothers and sisters in Christ and because they have a unique contribution to make to Christ’s church. Honoring someone is good, but we must look at our heart posture when we both give and receive the honor to ensure we honor God about it.

Amos 5:14-15

14          Do what is good and run from evil so that you may live! Then the Lord God of Heaven’s Armies will be your helper, just as you have claimed.

15          Hate what is evil and love what is good; turn your courts into true halls of justice.

Doing good goes hand-in-hand with seeking God. God wants his people to protect the poor. They could show their change of heart by sweeping away their corrupt system and insisting that only just decisions be made. It’s not just a note for Amos’s audience but for us. It’s a command to reform our own legal and societal system. (SOAPBOX MOMENT INCOMING!)

We’re living in a society with a significant need for reformation. As of writing this, I’ve been hearing and understanding more about Project 2025 and Project 47. We’re hearing intense debates between supporters of Trump and Biden. Our Supreme Court continues to make decisions that harm our political systems and society in the long term. Our representatives continue to argue about different minority rights and ethical rights about abortion, gender equality and identity, gay rights, and more. We need a reformation, and that can start with us. It starts with being educated on the outstanding issues and seeing how our elected leaders view those issues. It’s then working with local, state, or national organizations to help support the causes you support. It’s voting for representatives for Congress, the House of Representatives, the President, and state legislation that supports causes that both you’re in favor of AND that better the common good. When we vote for representatives for Congress or in our own state and locality, we have to look at it less than our own good but for the good of our community and nation. It’s about supporting laws, policies, and organizations that remove the gatekeeping that had been set in place for years due to racism, sexism, bigotry, and more. It’s about allowing for a fair and just court system that judges each crime and each person accused in a system that allows for proper evidence, testimony, and more that allows for accurate validity and truth behind a ruling. There’s more that I can get into about this, but I’ll leave it here. With an ever-important, ever-demanding election coming up this year, please educate yourself on the stances of your favored representative. Ensure that they align with you (which is okay), but they align with taking care of those around you. That’s one of the best ways to examine election from a Christian standpoint. Christianity is not a legal system, for Jesus came to fulfill it, leaving us with loving God with all of who we are (on an individual level, not a corporate or national level) and loving each other as Jesus loved us. (SOAPBOX MOMENT OVER!)

Paul shares the reason for his instructions with Timothy, showing us how genuine love can look between friends.

1 Timothy 1:5

5            The purpose of my instruction is that all believers would be filled with love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a genuine faith.

Paul wanted all believers to be full of heart, which he claims comes from having:

• A pure heart, devoted to God and free from guilt and corruption.
• A clear conscience, clean from unconfessed sin, free from pride, and great for personal gain.
• Genuine faith, based in Christ and motivated by sincerity.

Love comes from being devoted to God and not living according to our guilty and corrupted thought processes. Love comes from a clean conscience, not being stressed by our secret shame, and not being chained to our pride. Love comes from genuine faith, focused on learning the teachings of Christ and believing in them to a point where we can live by them with sincerity.

John 13:34-35

34          So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.

35          Your love for another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.

Love is more than just the warm, fuzzy feeling. Love shows itself through action. How? We replicate what Jesus did:

• Help when we’re too busy
• Give sacrificially
• Devote our energy to others’ welfare over our own.
• Absorb hurts from others without complaining, fighting back, or seeking revenge.

Loving others was not something new to Jesus’ audience. It was a commandment given by Moses in the laws in Deuteronomy. To love others as much as Jesus did was the revolutionary part. We are to love others based on Jesus’ sacrificial love for us. This kind of love will not only bring others to understand who God is and commit to believing in Jesus as their Lord and Savior. It will do that and keep those who do believe solid and united in a world hostile to God. Jesus was a living example of God’s love, just as we’re meant to be.

The love that Jesus calls us to show can seem crazy impossible. In order to have this type of love, we must humble ourselves through Jesus’s death for us and our sins. Then, the Holy Spirit helps us pour God’s love into our hearts so that we can love others.

Philippians 2:3

3            Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.

Selfishness can ruin a church, but genuine humility can build it. Paul talks about the church in Philippi, but it applies to other facets. Selfishness can ruin a relationship, but genuine humility can build it. Selfishness can ruin a career, but genuine humility can build it. Selfishness can ruin a family, but genuine humility can build it. Being humble involves having a proper perspective about ourselves, which we can gain through prayer and reflection with God. It doesn’t mean putting ourselves down, but it means acknowledging our sins, shortcomings, and weaknesses and learning how God can use them to proclaim his glory through us to the world. Before God, we were sinners, saved only by God’s grace, but we are saved and have great worth in God’s Kingdom. We must set aside our selfishness and self-centeredness to treat others respectfully and courteously. Consider other’s interests as more important than our own, and we will understand the true nature of Christ and humility.

That wraps us up! This entire blog was about how to treat each other with kindness as God shared with the world through Christ. It feels like a simple concept, but there’s a lot of information about how to do it in a Christ-like manner. Until next time, everyone, stay blessed!