Evidence Of The Spirit: Part 1–Kindness And Generosity

Be at peace among yourselves. And we earnestly beseech you, brethren, admonish (warn and seriously advise) those who are out of line [the loafers, the disorderly, and the unruly]; encourage the timid and fainthearted, help and give your support to the weak souls, [and] be very patient with everybody [always keeping your temper]. See that none of you repays another with evil for evil, but always aim to show kindness and seek to do good to one another and to everybody. (1 Thessalonians 5:13b-15 AMPC)

The number one thing that should set Christians apart from the world is the evidence of the Holy Spirit working in their lives. One of the fruits of the Spirit is kindness. But what does it actually mean to be kind?

He started it!

If you have more than one child, or if you grew up in a house with more than one child, you have heard this phrase (or maybe even said it). When two kids are caught in the throes of conflict, they are less concerned with ending the conflict than with determining and/or declaring whose fault it was that the conflict began. One of my frequent lines when my boys were little was, “I don’t care who started it; I’m FINISHING IT!”

Kindness is about learning how to finish it before it even starts. Bellowing like a deranged grizzly bear might have gotten my sons to shut up and stop fighting, but it didn’t really teach them about being kind to each other or to anyone else.

To be kind is to seek peace, which is nearly impossible to do if you are also trying to get your own way. Kindness, like mercy, goes first. It was the kindness of God that moved Him to send Jesus to save us. He didn’t wait for us to be good enough to earn His kindness. He went first, putting our benefit first, with the goal of restoring our relationship to Him.

Jesus’ message about loving your enemies from the Sermon on the Mount is another demonstration of kindness:

But I tell everyone who is listening: Love your enemies. Be kind to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who insult you. Luke 6:27-28 (GW)

There is more to kindness, however, than just being nice or turning the other cheek.

WARNING!!!

Sandwiched in the middle of the scripture at the top of this post is an admonition to “warn those who are idle.” That may not sound like kindness to some. If kindness is about living at peace with people, then why do you want to be all up in their business?

Remember that the main goal of kindness is seeking the other person’s benefit. If it would benefit the other person not to lose his job, then you are doing him a kindness by telling him to get off his lazy tuchas and get to work. If it would benefit someone to kick an unhealthy habit, break off an unhealthy relationship or not get arrested, then anything you do to prevent those things qualifies as being kind, even though it may come off as “meddling.”

Let me be clear. If you are in a position to keep someone from ruining his or her life, you are not doing that person any favors by “staying out of it.” Sometimes kindness is displayed by helping people who can’t help themselves, but sometimes, you can also show it by helping people who WON’T help themselves. That one is harder, and to be honest, it doesn’t always work out. But at least you have done your part. And, you have done something that most would not have been willing to do.

This kindness is the evidence that the Spirit of God is working in your life.

AI-generated image of money in the shape of a heart. — …there your treasure will also be. (Created by the author at craiyon.com)

Where Your Heart Is

Don’t hoard treasure down here where it gets eaten by moths and corroded by rust or—worse!—stolen by burglars. Stockpile treasure in heaven, where it’s safe from moth and rust and burglars. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The place where your treasure is, is the place you will most want to be, and end up being. (Matthew 6:19-21 MSG)

Have you ever been truly in need?

There’s a chance that some of you have. I don’t know the personal story of everyone reading this. But if you’re reading it now, then you have access to the Internet, which means you likely have shelter and enough means to know where your next meal is coming from.

The point is that whoever you are and whatever your situation is, someone has it worse than you do. This is true for every human being on this planet except one. Theoretically, someone has to be at the end of the line, and whoever that is will probably be dead by the time I finish typing this sentence.

The reverse is also true. If there is always someone that is worse off than you, then obviously, that means that you are better off than someone else is. If all of your needs are met, and you have one extra penny in your pocket, then to a great many people in this world, you are rich. So if you are reading this, you have more than you need. It might be a little more; it might be a lot more. And lots of folks out there have less than they need.

Let me be clear that I am talking about needs, not desires. We need clean drinking water, but we don’t need Perrier. You need clothing, but you don’t need the little black dress from Chanel. You need shelter, but you don’t need a mansion in Bel Air.

Some people get the wrong idea about how to get what they need. They decide that because you have more than you need, they might as well take some of what you have. Some might call that “redistribution of wealth,” but what it really is is theft.

If you have more than you need, technically, you are always at risk of having it taken away from you. The more you hoard for yourself, the more you stand to potentially lose.

There’s a way around this though.

We as a nation need to get over this ridiculous mentality of piling up wealth for ourselves. Malcolm Forbes is frequently quoted as having said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Well, Malcolm Forbes is dead. Someone else got his toys. So what did he win?

Remember what we’ve talked about before— the toys aren’t even yours to begin with. Everything you have is on loan from God because you don’t take anything with you.

So if you have more than you need, and what you have isn’t yours anyway, why not give some of it away? Nobody can take from you what you have already voluntarily surrendered. All you have to do is get to a place where the people you meet that have less than you are more important than the stuff you have that they don’t.

But if you’re not at that place yet, then how do you get there? In a word, trust.

Trust that God is your provider. Trust that He will continue to meet your needs as He always has. Most of all, trust that He can do more with the money you’re giving away than you could if you kept it.

A Life of Kindness and Generosity

Think about it—why do we try so hard to hold on to our money? Is it because we worked hard, and we earned it? Maybe, but I think it’s more about fear. We are afraid that we will LOSE what we have earned. We have probably set goals for ourselves that involved “moving up in the world.” Maybe we have been successful in attaining those goals, at least in part. We get jealous for what we have acquired along the way, because we have devoted so much of our lives to acquiring it.

This tells me that maybe the goals are the problem. If the ambition of our lives is to build our own legacy, what’s the point of that? We won’t be around to enjoy it.

On the other hand, when we trust God to take care of everything we need (again, not everything we want, but everything we need), we find ourselves holding on more loosely to a lot of things, but especially money. The less we try to grasp at the material things in our lives, the more we find ourselves learning to be content. We learn what the meaning of “enough” is. We learn that if we have enough today and trust that we will tomorrow, God will open our eyes to people we can help and situations we can change with the more-than-enough with which He has blessed us.

Best of all, we learn that when we help someone else have enough, we find that we STILL have enough. And by being kind and thinking of the needs of others first, we pay our blessings forward. And maybe, with this generosity as the evidence that the Spirit of God is doing something in our lives, we might inspire someone else to follow our lead.