Kindness
March 31, 2016
Kindness
Colosians 3:12-13
Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also [do] ye.
Kindness, an obvious word with an obvious application, it is often descriptive of one of the attributes of the fruit of the Spirit. Kindness is so obvious and so simple and yet so missing among so many of us. It is simply goodness and favor toward another person. Many families and relationships are missing this little social grace from their words and actions. Even in our every day encounters with strangers and people that we interact with, we fail at this little thing called kindness. Oh yes, we feign kindness through superficial words and platitudes, but is it an issue of our heart? True kindness pities, it empathizes, sympathizes and identifies with another’s need. Kindness puts itself in the place of its neighbor and then responds appropriately according to how it would want to be treated. Kindness isn’t a social mask that we put on to give the illusion of our graciousness; it is something that issues out of the foundation of who we are in Christ. Kindness genuinely cares for another and will not hesitate to go out of its way to minister or help another. Kindness overlooks the opportunity to be right when it is at the expense of another. It compliments the rest of the attributes of the Spirit and it chooses the high road even at its own expense. Kindness is what covers another with grace and favor even when they may not deserve it. Kindness is slow to be offended and it returns good for evil. True kindness is often the brunt of abuse and is commonly taken for granted. Yet, it is the kindness working in us that causes our Father to smile and reminds Him of Himself.
Today and each day of your life, develop the habit of random acts of kindness, not just on the deserving but on the undeserving as well. Practice that kindness on the ones you say you love and yet always rub you the wrong way. While others may not always appreciate it and it may be abused by some, you will never regret the warmth it leaves inside and the smile it puts on the face of God.
Blessings,
#kent
The River of God
March 11, 2014
The River of God
Psalms 65:9
You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, for so you have ordained it.
Water is an essential element to life as we know it. Without it this planet would be another dry desolate planet like most others that we are currently aware of. In God’s kingdom that water is like Spirit Life. As necessary as water is to us in our human state to live and produce life not just in us, but in plants, animals and other organisms, so the Spirit is the essential to the production of Spirit Life. We find a description of this river of Life in Revelations 22:1-4, “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, [was there] the tree of life, which bare twelve [manner of] fruits, [and] yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree [were] for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: And they shall see his face; and his name [shall be] in their foreheads.”
Ephesians 1:11-14 tells us, “In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, 12in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. 13And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, 14who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.” Here is the thing that God wants us to know as His people. There is a river from the throne of God that is waiting till the fullness of time to be channeled through the earth. As the scripture says the seal, the earnest, the foretaste of this has been given to us as believers to speak to us of whose we are, of what we have and to give us insight into the abundant flow of God’s Spirit that He is waiting to release in the earth.
Guess who He has chosen to be the channel of this river of His grace and Spirit life? Yes, it is His saints He is waiting to channel His divine Life and blessing through. Romans 8:18-25 tells us, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” Many of us have known this inward groaning within us. We have cried out in the midst of our pain and sufferings, “how long oh God?” The Spirit of the Lord is saying “soon”. Soon the Spirit of the Lord will no longer be just trickles and streams, but will be poured out so that no one vessel can contain it. It will be the vessels of His people that will be filled to overflowing and spill out upon the nations so that the Spirit life of God will fill the earth. We have an anointing and an anointed One that lives within us. It is a time to prepare our hearts and our lives for the release of His glory. He is coming to be glorified in the earth in an unprecedented way and He desires holy and sanctified vessels to have expression through. As John came saying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord”, this is the day when message is coming forth, “Prepare ye for the glory of the Lord.” Many of who have suffered much affliction and discouragement will be fully refreshed and delivered. They will be like the lame man who leaps like a deer. Prepare your hearts, set your lives in order for the River of God is soon to flow through the earth and carry with it healing for the nations. You are called to be His conduit and channel.
Blessings,
kent
The Pothole of Self Pity
February 28, 2014
The Pothole of Self Pity
Jonah 4:1-4
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, [was] not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou [art] a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for [it is] better for me to die than to live. Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?
In the Word of God perhaps Jonah serves as kind of the poster child of self-pity. He had to go where he didn’t want to go, preach to a people he didn’t want to preach too, and then see God’s mercy toward them when they repented, that he didn’t want to see. He made no bones that he had an attitude concerning the matter. So he is just telling the Lord to end his life, it’s not worth living any more.
While it is easy for the reader to see how wrong Jonah’s attitude was, he didn’t see it and most of the time we don’t really see it in us either.
I really think the enemy tries to feed our minds with thoughts of how unfair life is to us and how we so often are mistreated, abused, neglected or unappreciated. That is not to say that there is never any substance to these feelings, for often there are valid reasons we feel this way. What we must guard against is the subtly of the enemy and our own self, as we tend to get our eyes on us and all of our woes.
The Lord gave me a good revelation of this in myself recently. Request were always being made of me to do this or that which was okay, but then I began to feel that they really never seemed interested in caring and responding to my needs. Now the thing about self-pity is that it’s like a good stew, the longer it simmers the better it gets, the more justified we feel and the more unfair life seems. So finally it all came out and the other person had to sit and listen to all of my “woe is me”. The truth is they probably had feelings of being neglected or taken advantage of just like I did. Afterwards I began to get a revelation of the pothole of self-pity I had stepped into. Here is all of this talk about how we need to lay our lives down and walk in love and all of sudden I look up and see this big old stain of selfishness in me. Sometimes we get these wake-up calls about how shallow our love really is. I realized that whenever I am turning inward and caring more about me than about others, I am going to be discontent and unhappy, because my needs and expectations will seldom be really met by others. I need to be leaving those feelings with the Father, because He is the one who completes me and fulfills me. The truth is, I am probably often going to be a disappointment to others in meeting their wants and needs just as they are in meeting mine. How many times do needs and expectations not get met because we are living selfishly, upset about what we don’t have while we fail to consider if we are really meeting the needs in others. This introspection usually just leads to greater and greater polarization. That is why the Word is always exhorting us to get our eyes off ourselves and on to the needs of others. The less place that we give to self, the less place it has to feel sorry for itself.
We often think or say, “Will, if the Lord had given me a better husband or wife, or better children, or a nicer neighbor or better Christian friends, or different relatives, I wouldn’t feel and act the way I do. Do we ever consider that may be exactly why we have these people in our lives? In a perfect world you will never be stretched and grow beyond where you are at. Only opposing forces cause us to reach further, try harder, and exert more energy to overcome our opposition. We say, “Well, that person just brings out the worst in me.” Praise God, how would you and I ever know what was in us if we didn’t have people that revealed our true heart. It is the irregular people in our lives that give us the opportunity to exercise and practice our Christian values. Instead of seeing the irregular people in our lives as our problem, maybe we need to view them like our spiritual gymnasium where we can workout, exercise and practice our Christian love, values and the nature that God wants to work in us. It is only when I see and acknowledge my sin and weakness that I can repent of it and seek the Lord’s help in overcoming it. There is no one that can help us become more conformed to the image of Christ than our enemy. If Jesus would have had no Judas or religious leaders to betray and falsely accuse Him, there would have been no Calvary and we would not have the salvation we are now partakers of. Our adversity can serve to bring us up into godliness as we meet it with the Spirit and attitude of Christ. If we have a selfish or self-centered attitude, then like Jonah we are going to become angry and bitter as we justify and feel sorry for ourselves.
Watch out for that pothole of self-pity. It is one you can really twist your ankle on and cripple your walk. Do all things as unto the Lord and for His glory and honor, counting it all joy that in your service you first serve Him. “Let all your things be done with Love (1 Corinthians 16:14).”
Affectionately Loving One Another
July 29, 2013
Affectionately Loving One Another
Romans 12:10
[Be] kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another;
Did you ever notice that the people that you end up neglecting and abusing the most are usually the ones you say that you love the most? They are most often your family, close friends, or even your brothers and sisters in Christ. The ironic thing is that we often give preference to the ones or the things that are putting the more demands and abuses on our lives, but in the scheme of things are less in importance. Somehow we just expect those we love and prefer to understand when we put them last on our agenda or speak or treat them harshly. Perhaps many of you, like myself, find your lives out of balance with your priorities and preferences. In a society in which we find ourselves running like crazy in a thousand different directions, with people and pressures pressing in on us on every side, when something has to give it is usually our family. That can apply to both our immediate families as well as the family of God. Isn’t it strange that we are doing all of these things that in our minds we consider for the benefit of our families and yet they are often suffering as a result of them? What’s wrong that picture?
I speak this first for my own benefit and then for the benefit of anyone else who thinks it may apply to them. I find I get an agenda set in my mind and I’m not real tolerant of interruptions to that agenda. Some of you, like myself, may find that you have created walls of hurt and wounded the ones closest to you. You have communicated to them so many times through your actions and words that they aren’t as important or as valuable as so many other things in your life. My feeling is that this is a major problem with a good many of our families and relationships. We all need to get our priorities in order. God and his people are often at the forefront of our offense list. It is not usually something we do intentionally and often quite subtly these neglects and abuses creep in to undermine our most precious relationships and destroy one of the most valuable commodities we possess, our families, friends and brethren. We often put up our pretty fronts around others, but the loved ones so often see a whole different face and attitude.
Those closest to us rub us the hardest. We would most like to blame them for being the problem with us, but in reality if we didn’t already have a problem then a lot of what they did wouldn’t irritate us so. Like the old saying goes, “You can’t get a person’s goat unless they have a goat to be got.”
The unconditional love of God prefers the other above themselves. It displays that preference by being affectionate. The connotation of our theme verse is to be tenderly reciprocating love and caring in a relational way as with a parent and child or husband and wife. It is preferring the other above yourself. Please join with me in making it our goal to set the priorities of our relationships and commitments straight. Let our God be at the forefront of all that we do, then our family, our relationships with each other, then those outside and then us. Let’s make it our first priority to invest in the eternal things and then the temporal.
Blessings,
kent