Kindness: Overcoming Self-Pity
Welcome to Gospel in Life. If you’re a Christian, you know that the journey to become more like Jesus is both a gradual process and an inevitable fact, just like the acorn growing up into an oak tree.
Today, Tim Keller is teaching on the fruit of the spirit or what it looks like to grow to be more like Jesus.
1 John 3:11-20 This is the message you heard from the beginning. We should love one another. Do not be like Cain who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brothers were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possession and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence. Whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts and he knows everything.
Let’s end the reading of God’s word right there. In the list of the spiritual fruit we get now finally to kindness. The spiritual fruit are love and joy and peace and patience, kindness. And the word kindness in that list which is not what we read here, that list is in Galatians chapter 5. In that list, the word kindness actually means loving deeds. What’s the difference between love and kindness, somebody says? Well, in English there’s not much difference between it, love and kindness, but even in English I think love is a more general term and kindness is a more specific term.
Kindness is loving deeds, doing something for someone out of love. And what we’re going to look at tonight is really quite different than what we did last week. I was considering last week we talked about anger, and as a result it was a psychological study. Tonight you really have something that isn’t so much a psychological study as it is a social study. Because here we’re told that one of the marks of a real Christian is that your love finds expression in deeds of kindness, especially to those with material, physical, economic problems.
That’s what it says. And it’s very strong because it says, anyone, pardon me, it says This, then, is how we know that we belong to the truth, and we set our hearts at rest. That’s a frightening thing, because, you see, the Bible, not just here, but at a number of places, the Bible says, one of the ways you can tell you’re a real Christian is that you care for the poor.
Now, I think we have to, I’m going to try my best tonight to cover this theme. It’s a very important theme in the Bible, and it seems so different, in a way, to last week and the week before last, when the spiritual fruit of patience and of peace is a very psychological thing. This one is not. And the beauty of the Christian faith, and the beauty of the Bible, is that you just cannot fit it into one particular kind of … you can’t get it into one particular kind of … I’m sorry, I’m going to fall back into a colloquial statement.
It’s not one kind of rap, actually. People get … I find this is true, and this is a problem for me, I find it true of churches and ministers and teachers, they get a particular idea in their mind, and they read the whole Bible through it. If you have a psychological bent to you, that’s what I mean by a rap. Everything you read in the Bible tends to be a psychological study, so no matter what you teach on or what you read, you turn into a kind of, well, how does this help me with my personal problems?
There are other people who’ve got a social bent to them. They’re concerned about social justice and social change, and every time they read the Bible, they tend to run that through that filter, and so every time you hear them teach, every time they read about it or study about it, they’re looking at the social implications of it. The beautiful thing about the Bible is that the Bible is truth, and therefore, it has something to say to every one of these areas. Tonight, we come to an area that really is quite different. It’s got that area of the Christian social concern, the area of the Christian social responsibility. That’s what we’re going to look at. Now, what I did on your handout, you did get a handout, didn’t you? Right, thank you.
As usual, I broke down. the spiritual fruit into four aspects.
- What is the definition of kindness?
- What is the opposite of kindness?
- What is the counterfeit of kindness?
- And how do we cultivate kindness in our life?
So let’s just take a look at the spiritual fruit of kindness along that line, along that outline.
Number one, the definition of kindness, I guess I’ve already talked about it in some ways, kindness is being practically generous. It doesn’t just mean loving. It doesn’t just mean you have this sense of a feeling for someone. It means you put your time, you put your money, you put your talents, you put your deeds where your heart is. That’s what kindness is. It’s essentially treating things as precious. It’s kindness and being kind is a kind of valuing.
Have you ever noticed that you’ll spend a pretty good amount of money on your living quarters? If you own an apartment or you own a home, you can put a tremendous amount of money into it. Why? Because it’s the most, probably, the most valuable single possession you’ve got. And if it’s the most valuable single possession you’ve got, you think nothing about putting $1 ,000 or $2 ,000 into some important renovation, because, well, because the property is so valuable, you have no problem actually putting your money on the line. On the other hand, you would probably have a lot more trouble putting the same amount of money into fixing your stereo, you know. You say, if you say, oh, something’s wrong with the stereo and somebody says, ah, it only costs $1 ,000, I’ll be happy to fix it for you. You probably say, forget it, because it’s not worth as much. When the Bible talks about kindness, it’s referring to an attitude that sees human beings as so infinitely precious and valuable that there’s really nothing that you can put into them that’s too much. You put your money, you put your time, you put your talent from the line. Okay. Now, if we really understand kindness, we have to get into the nitty -gritty of it. So take a look here at verse 17, if anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him.
And there we have the opposite of kindness. The opposite of kindness is miserliness (excessive desire to save money), because kindness in a sense is generosity. And that brings up the fact that kindness is, number one, absolutely, it’s deed ministry, and number two, it’s absolutely necessary, and number three, it has got to go along with any kind of loving word. Let me show you these two things, one, two, three. Number one, the nature of kindness. Kindness is the willingness to meet all kinds of needs. Now, let me explain what kindness is. Kindness is the meeting of felt needs through deeds. Kindness is the meeting of felt needs through deeds. Let me explain.
I’m going to have to draw another diagram up here. Can you see? See right here? Okay, watch this. One circle, two circles, three circles, four circles, concentric circles. Can you picture that? Now. The Bible tells us that all of our problems come from sin. All of our problems come from that. There’d be no misery if there wasn’t sin. And in Genesis chapter 3 we see a remarkable, how do I put it, you see an absolutely remarkable outline of how all of our problems immediately flowed out of the decision by Adam and Eve to be their own gods, to be their own masters, to take life into their own hands. And when we decide to be our own masters, all of our problems flow out of that too. It’s almost as if at that point a huge stone came on down into our souls, whether it was calmness, whether it was placidness, it was like our souls were like a beautiful pond and in came a stone and out came these concentric circles.
The first thing that happened was man became alienated from God. We see that right away. There was a disintegration of his relationship with God, as soon after Adam ate the apple, as soon as he took his life into his own hands. God comes walking along, and we’re told that Adam was scared, and he hid. And that’s what we call spiritual alienation. Alienation means what? What does it mean? To be out of place, you know, for example, if you decide to put leaded gas into your car that says, unleaded fuel only, your car begins, after a while, not right at first, but it begins to experience alienation. Why? Because the car wasn’t built for leaded gas, so the leaded gas, and I haven’t tried this, I’m not completely sure what happens, but it will gum up the works. Don’t put leaded fuel in there because your car will begin to experience alienation. It’ll be out of place. There’ll be dislocation in its life. It’ll experience a lack of purpose in life because it was meant for leaded, it was meant for unleaded gas, right? It was meant for unleaded gas, and so it’ll gum up the inside. The Bible tells us the minute we decide to be our own masters, all sorts of alienations gumming up of the insides begins to happen. Everything gets gummed up. First, man is alienated from God. We see that when Adam has to hide.
Secondly, now here, that’s the first circle in the middle of these four concentric circles. Let’s call that spiritual alienation.
But then, next comes psychological alienation. It wasn’t just that Adam hid. Adam hid because he was scared. And here is Adam living in paradise, and it’s only after Adam sins and decides to be his own master that he begins to experience fear. That’s psychological alienation, psychological disintegration. Because we don’t know who God is, we don’t know who we are. One flows out of the other because we don’t know who God is and we were built for God. Therefore, we begin to experience identity problems and anxiety problems, depression problems, and lack of meaning in life.
All of our psychological problems come from that. But that’s not all. Not only does out of sin come spiritual alienation. That’s the middle circle and then the second circle. is psychological alienation. We also see in Genesis 3 that man is not just alienated from God and man is not just alienated from himself, that’s psychological, but man is also alienated from man. Because the minute that Adam and Eve sinned, what happened to them? They were naked and under shame. And though we don’t completely understand what that means, it certainly means that they had an absolutely pure unbroken relationship of love and communication. The minute that they had to start hiding from God, they had to start hiding from each other. That’s the teaching of Genesis 3. The minute they had to start hiding from God, they had to start hiding from each other. They were ashamed. They could not stay in this absolutely vulnerable condition. They couldn’t stay, and that’s what nakedness is. And those of us who know the joys of married love realize that that’s a tough thing to maintain. Nakedness is an absolute vulnerability. And human beings are just not capable of living in that absolute vulnerable state all the time. Why? Because we hid from God, we have to hide from other people. We’re afraid to let people see what we are.
And the Bible tells us, out of spiritual alienation flows psychological alienation, and out of psychological alienation flows social alienation. Because we’re alienated, cut off from God, we’re cut off from ourselves, because we’re cut off from ourselves, we’re cut off from each other. Because we’re falling apart on the inside, we’re falling apart in our relationships. That’s why C .S. Lewis makes a very good case. He says, can you imagine two cars going down the road like this, and they’re side by side, you know, going down Third Avenue, let’s say together, side by side in a lane. And suddenly you notice that in the car next to you, there’s somebody taking the taxi driver and stabbing him and choking him and beating him up. Do you say, well, that’s no concern of mine, that’s not going to affect me, that’s happening inside that car? No, of course not. You’re going to say, look out, because the car starts to swerve. The internal problems of that car become inter -carrel problems between you and him, because he’s not going to be able to stay straight. He can’t drive straight because of the internal problems. And what C .S. Lewis says is, if you have a bunch of cars or a bunch of ships that are streaming along in formation, and one of them begins to develop internal mechanism problems and internal steering problems, it’s going to be a problem not just for that ship, but of all the ships. It’s not going to be a problem just for that car, but all the cars. And out of our psychological and spiritual alienation comes war, racism, crime, divorce, family breakdown, the inability of people to get along with people. That’s the third circle. One circle overflows to the next circle, overflows to the next circle.
And then finally, finally, Genesis 3 tells us, not only is man cut off from God and not only is man cut off from himself, and not only is man cut off from man, that’s spiritual, psychological, and social, but also, lastly, man is cut off from nature. And there’s physical alienation because God comes to Adam after he’s sinned and he says to Adam, Adam, because you have decided to be master of your own self and your own life, you no longer will be master of my universe. I put you here to have all of nature completely, completely compliant with your beck and call on your will, but now nature is your enemy. It is not your friend anymore. You’re going to have to work in the dust of the earth and the dirt of the earth just to bring up any food and half the time thorns and thistles will grow up instead. And you’re going to labor and labor in the dust, in the sweat of your brow until in the end you will go back to dust because nature and you will be in an eternal battle and in the end nature will win. You’ll be fighting the dust all of your life and in the end the dust will win. Some years ago Irma Baumbach had a little, one of these little humor columns in the women’s pages and she says in this column, she says, you know, what’s the, what is the What is the greatest enemy of the traditional housewife? What is the greatest enemy of the traditional housewife? She says, dirt. I mean, it’s what makes your life miserable. There’s dirt on the dishes. There’s dirt in the diaper. There’s dirt on the rug. There’s dirt everywhere. And you spend all your time fighting against dirt, and she says, in the end, what do you get for years and years of trouble? Six feet of dirt. And, you know, what she meant was not probably what she said, but what she said was exactly what Genesis 3 says. That you will be toiling in the dust of the earth all of your life, and until the end, the dust will win. See, what God was saying when He cursed us, because we didn’t want to be master, didn’t want to be His servant, we lost our mastery. Because we wouldn’t be His servant, we lost our mastery. That is the principle of the Bible. The ones who are willing to serve are the ones who rule, and the ones who will rule will always end up being slaves.
That is a principle. So God comes and says, it was going to be God over man over nature, but now it’s going to be God over nature over man. And that’s why we die. That’s why we get sick. That’s why there’s disease. That’s why there’s natural disasters. That’s why we have to build buildings to keep nature out half the time. It’s no longer a friend. George Whitfield, the great preacher, the great British preacher, used to talk like this. He used to try to convict people of the fact that they were not reconciled to God, and he would say, do you know why the wild animals shriek at you and growl at you and hiss at you when you come near and run away? Because they know, he said, you have a quarrel with their master. And he’s pretty close. That’s, you know, typical preacher -y hyperbole, you know? It’s pretty close to what the Bible actually says. There’s physical alienation, and so you see, even the sickness, even the disease, even the earthquakes, these things are all the results within the Bible says, because mankind is not in its power. his proper place in the order of the universe, therefore the universe is not operating properly. It’s a little bit like, can you imagine, can you imagine the internal works of a clock with all of those little wheels and gears and pulleys and things like that, and can you imagine just taking one gear, pulling it off where it should be, and just throwing it down in the bottom. Do you think that would affect the clock at all? You know, would you think the clock would say, well, one of my gears is up there, it’s down here, I saw right, no, of course not, the whole clock begins to, it still can move to a degree, but it grates and grunts and grinds and you smell smoke and you say, something is wrong here, and that’s what happened to the universe when we fell out of our place.
Now do you see the four circles? Are you back there? Spiritual alienation, psychological alienation, social alienation, physical alienation, all of our needs. We’ve got spiritual needs, the guilt, the lack of purpose in life, the confusion about what’s right and wrong. We’ve got psychological needs. We get depressed, we get anxious, we get angry, we don’t know who we are. We have social needs, the war and the crime and the divorce and the poverty and the oppression and the injustice. And we’ve got physical problems, right? We’ve got hunger and we’ve got famine and we’ve got sickness and we’ve got disease. All of these things, all of these things have all come out of sin. They’re all the results of sin. What is the job of the Christian to do about those? Does Jesus Christ say, well, all I come to do, he says, is to seek and just deal with that spiritual alienation and I don’t do anything about those other circles? Is that how he operated? Did he only preach the word and lead people into a personal relationship with him or did he counsel people or did he heal people or did he feed people? What do you think the miracles were? Were they just magic tricks? Were they just ways of saying, whoo, look at how I can do? No way. Because if he wanted to do that, you know, he could have done skywriting. But he never did that, did he? He always, always with his miracles, with his kingdom power, healed the results of sin in all of those four circles. And it is the job of the kingdom of God to come back and to renew the world and eradicate all the results of sin.
Now, it’s very clear that the fundamental problem is the spiritual one. And the fundamental problem in a person’s life and in the life of a nation and the life of a community is that people are alienated from God. And yet, the work of the kingdom of God is to heal all of those things. How do we know? Because look at the gifts of the spirit. The gifts of the spirit break down into both word gifts and deed gifts. Go to 1 Corinthians 12, go to Ephesians 4, go to Romans 12, the places where all the gifts are listed and you’ve got word gifts. You’ve got gifts of counseling, gifts of preaching and teaching, gifts of exhortation, gifts of evangelism.
But you’ve also got deed gifts, gifts of help, gifts of mercy, gifts of service. And if you take a look at these four circles, you will see there’s amazing… a major difference between the inner circle needs and the outer circle needs. What are those differences? Inner circle needs are what we call spiritual needs, spiritual and psychological needs, and they basically are hard to see, the needs are hard to understand. Without the Holy Spirit, a person is not able to discern that he or she needs God. Without a terrific amount of counseling, an individual does not know why you’re unhappy. It takes lots of therapy and so forth. The inner circle needs are met through words and they are hidden. But the outer circle needs are needs that are very easy to see and they’re met through deeds. You see, a person who is unhappy because he’s out of fellowship with God doesn’t know that he’s out of fellowship with God. But a person who’s hungry knows that he’s hungry. So the outer circle needs are felt needs. They’re needs that are conscious, that are perceived. The outer circle needs our needs, and you don’t need the Holy Spirit to see. Marriage is one of the most profound human relationships, but it’s one that at times can be difficult and painful.
So, you need the Holy Spirit to see the internal need. For example, William Wilberforth, one of the great men of history, Christian, he’s the one who abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, 1833. And I’d love to tell you more about it, but I can’t probably today. He was just a marvelous man. He was actually, his mentor was John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace. And John Newton was a convert of George Whitefield.
And 100 years after Whitefield began the Great Awakening in England, and so many people came to Christ, William Wilberforth and a group of Christians that were called the Clapham sect, had wormed their way into Parliament and into an important place and said, we have got to bring about the biblical justice in our society. And so they worked to abolish the slave trade and abolish slavery in the British Empire. And, you know, the most amazing thing about that story is how many years it took. Another most amazing thing was that Wilberforth realized that the only fair thing to do, the only biblically just thing to do in abolishing slavery was to pay every slave owner in all of Britain, all of the British Empire, for his slaves. The only way to abolish slavery without completely breaking off. these people with the say, we’re abolishing slavery as of midnight tonight on 1833, but we will pay every slave owner for the value of the slave so you are not materially and economically destroyed. And believe it or not, the British government paid out something like 30 million pounds sterling to people. It was the most righteous act that a government ever did. It was a deed of kindness on the part of Wilberforce. Wilberforce had a great friend named William Pitt. Pitt, his father was a fairly famous person and his grandfather before that, they were prime ministers, Pittsburgh’s name after him. William Pitt was not a Christian. And Wilberforce always wanted Pitt to go hear this tremendous preacher downtown London. His name was what called Richard Cecil, Richard Cecil was a great preacher. And one day William Pitt came to Wilberforce and said, okay, I’ll go to church with you. And Wilberforce was extremely excited. So he came and he took William Pitt. Now, William Pitt was a brilliant man, a more brilliant man than Wilberforce. And they came and sat in a pew together. And Wilberforce was so excited because it was about the best sermon he’d ever heard in his life. You know how usually when we bring somebody to church finally, you finally get that person to church, you’ve been so excited that they’re willing to come and that’s, you know, Stewardship Sunday. And, you know, everybody’s saying, you need to give more money because we’ve got to fix the roof. And you’re just so excited that you brought your friend and he heard the word of the Lord. And that wasn’t what happened this day. Richard Cecil was so great. And Wilberforce said, I can’t believe that my friend is hearing this sermon on the way out the door. William Pitt turned to Wilberforce and says, Wilberforce, I haven’t the slightest idea what that man was talking about.
You know, unless the Spirit of God opens your eyes to those inner circle needs, you don’t see them. But you know when you’re hungry, you know when you’re thirsty, you know when your marriage is breaking up. I mean, it’s pretty hard not to know that, even though some of us have gone on pretty late in life. And the outer circle needs are felt needs, perceived needs, and they are met through deeds, not through yakking. The one thing that Christians have got to keep in mind is that your spiritual gifts are both word and deed gifts. We have gifts not only for the inside, but for the outside circle. And, not only that, there’s two kinds of officers that are stated in the New Testament. There’s elders and deacons that are supposed to be set up. And if you read carefully, and someday I’ll show you this, elders are word officers that are worried and concerned about the word ministry, but deacons are deed ministers who are concerned about whether or not the church is putting its money where its mouth is, and really helping people with its needs. There’s word officers and deed officers. There’s word gifts and deed gifts. In fact, it says in Luke 24, verse 19, Jesus Christ was mighty and word and deed. Everywhere you see Him, He went preaching, and what? He didn’t just preach. He healed and ministered to people. He was mighty and word and deed. And the ministry of kindness is just as important a ministry as evangelism or anything else. The Bible tells us that kindness is the meaning of felt needs for deeds.
Are we doing it? You see how important it is? Look, going down your outline here, it’s not just that that’s what kindness is, it’s also that kindness is absolutely required. And this is very frightening to me. The Bible continually says the way you can tell whether you’re a real Christian is that you are concerned and compassionate and generous to people with economic needs. It says it many places. I put it down here. See, for example, Isaiah 1, verse 10 to 17 is a place where God says to the people through Isaiah, you go to church, you give your money, you fast and pray, you read the Bible, but is not this the fast I choose, he says, to loose the yoke of oppression, to bring the hungry into your home? It’s a fascinating passage. It says you can be religious and still not be a true Christian unless you’re kind. It says it in Matthew 25, this is another one of these weird places where it says on the final day, on judgment day, Jesus will take the people and he’ll divide the true Christians from the false Christians. And he’ll say, you can come into my kingdom, why? Because I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty, you gave me drink. I was naked and you clothed me. I was without shelter and you took me in. I was in prison and you came to me, I was sick and you visited me. And they will say, when did we see you in this condition, Lord? And he says, because you treated these little ones like that, you treated me like that. And then he’ll say to other people, you did not feed me when I was hungry. You did not, you see, clothe me when I was naked. And they’ll say, when did we see you in that condition? And he said, because you turned your back on these all around you, you turned your back on me. That has got to be one of the more unnerving passages in the Bible. Have you ever come to grips with that? Why would the Bible do that kind of thing and say that when everything else the Bible says is so clear that we’re not saved by our deeds, we’re not saved by our good works. There’s nowhere in the Bible that says the social workers will go to heaven first. It says you’re saved by grace alone through faith in Jesus Christ. So what is this Matthew 25 parable about? The only possible answer is that it’s not deeds of kindness that save you, but deeds of kindness that show whether or not your faith is real or it’s just lip service. And like I said, that’s a pretty frightening criterion. The fruit of the Spirit is kindness. What does that mean? If you really have the fruit of the Spirit growing in your life, you will find that you become more kind, that you’re willing to sacrifice, you’re willing to give, you’re willing to burden yourself for people around you who don’t have the same kind of living standard that you do. The Bible says that that grows along with the peace and the joy and everything else. It grows the pace. Number three, I don’t have time for all this, the integrity of kindness, word indeed. The fact is that talking to people and dealing with inner circle needs. Let me just, I’ll briefly summarize this, trying to deal with inner circle needs without doing outer circle needs doesn’t work because the world can’t see us doing spiritual, meeting spiritual needs, but the world can see us meeting the outer circle needs. When I say by sea, it’s just what I told you, Wilberforce and Pitt, Wilberforce comes in with William Pitt. He looks around and the church is full. William Pitt sees the church full. And he sees the preaching, and he sees people saying, my marriage has been healed, my life has been healed, my depression has been healed, my life has been turned around by the word of God. And he listens and he says, I don’t get this, seems just like a lot of claptrap to me. I can’t believe it. And so Wilberforce walks out, pardon me, William Pitt walks out saying, this is silly, I don’t see what’s going on, I can’t figure it out, but when William Pitt sees the church meeting material needs, helping troubled families, dealing with the outer circle needs, the social and the physical problems, Then, Pitt says, hmm, pretty interesting. Maybe these people really are loving. Maybe they’ve really got something. And that’s the reason I have this interesting quote by Julian, one of the early Roman emperors who absolutely hated the Christians. And he tried to stamp them out. He was an emperor of Rome in the second century. And one of the problems he discovered, and he wrote his friend, a pagan priest, about it, and he explained why he couldn’t stamp out Christianity, why it just kept growing and growing and growing. And here’s what he said. He said, nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of these Christians as their charity to strangers. The empire’s Galileans provide not only for their own poor, but for ours as well. Now look, we know that that is not the reason the church grew. It wasn’t because they were so caring of the poor. It was because of the spiritual dynamite of the word of God and the spirit of God. And yet, here is a non -believer who looks, and the one thing that he just cannot say anything against, the one thing that stops his mouth and it gets rid of all of his objections to them, the one thing that the world saw was the fact that they were kind.
The Greeks took care of the Greek poor, and the Jews took care of the Jewish poor, and the Romans took care of the Roman poor, but these Christians were promiscuous about this thing. They took care of our poor as well, with these people. As I said before, the thing that baffled the early Roman world about the Christians was they were so absolutely different than anyone else was in two areas. One is they were sexually chased, they only had sex inside marriage, and number two, they were unbelievably generous to the poor. And in those two ways, the Romans and the Greeks said, these people are mighty weird. And if we did that, if we were characterized by those two things, we would look just as weird in New York City. Now, the counterfeit, take a look at the back.
The counterfeit of kindness is sentimentality or manipulation, and I don’t really have time to develop this too much, but I’ll put it this way. When I say sentimentality, I mean a lot of times we say, look, I care about people with needs, but I’m pretty strapped myself. The Bible says you have to not just give spot relief, but you need to sacrificially help people around you who’ve got needs. And I’ve got this great quote by Jonathan Edwards that I’ll just read to you. Edwards was constantly talking to people in his congregation who said, I really can’t afford to help other people. And he says, they who are poor may be obliged to give for the relief of others in greater distress even than they. We may by the rules of the gospel be obliged to give to others when we cannot do it without suffering ourselves. How else will we bear one another’s burdens? If we are never obliged to relieve others’ burdens, but when we can do it without burdening ourselves, how do we bear our neighbor’s burdens when we bear no burden at all? Now, Edwards was saying something very simple, but it’s typical ever as he said it in a kind of convoluted way. He says, look, when you say, I can’t afford to help people, what you mean is I can’t afford to help people without its burden. When you say I can’t afford it, you mean it’ll really, really hurt. You don’t mean you can’t do it, it just means it’ll really hurt. And he says, of course, how do you bear somebody’s burden without letting some of that burden slide on you? Here comes a person carrying a hundred pound burden. Okay, how are you going to bear their burden? You have to get at least 20 pounds on you, so he only got 80. Or 30 pounds on you, so he’s only got 70. You’ve got to let some of it slide on you. Now listen, what is a needy person? The Bible really says poverty, the Bible doesn’t give you a poverty line. The Bible doesn’t say right now for a family of four, if you’re making less than this, then you’re poor. The Bible says poverty is a matter of choices. Poverty is a person, a poor person is really somebody who has got less and less choices. That means they can’t just pick up and say, well, where do I want to go to eat today? They’ve got very few choices. You’ve got more choices. They can’t say, well, what do I want to put on? They’ve got more, fewer choices than you do. And that means people who are finding themselves getting very, very strapped and they’re more strapped than you should be and could be the object of your particular concern. You don’t wait for people to be destitute before you help them. It says love your neighbor as yourself. What does that mean? Do you wait until you’re desperate before you help yourself? Do you wait until you’re destitute or in the gutter before you help yourself and you shouldn’t wait until somebody else is in the gutter to help them. And as a result of that, we believe, the Bible teaches, that you have got to look for people who have a burden on them and be willing to just slip underneath so some of that burden slides on you. You haven’t really helped.
You’re not really being kind until you can point to parts of your lifestyle that have been changed, have been cut down, choices that you have lost because you’re helping other people. Did you hear that? Frankly, if you’re helping people to the tune where your number of choices have not been diminished. at all. You’re not helping people enough. The Bible doesn’t give you a nice abstract way to give. Some of you are virtually living on people’s sofas and really have very little money to give. And some of you are making out very, very well. And the Bible doesn’t say, here’s the percentage. I don’t think, really. Yeah, the Bible gives a tithe of the good general rule, a tenth of your income. But basically, the Bible says, give until the burden falls on you. Give until your choices have been diminished because of your giving. All right? And lastly, the cultivation. By the way, I know this raises a lot of questions that I’m just not, don’t have time to answer right now. Some of you are going to say, how can you talk like this in New York City? I mean, every day I’ve passed dozens and dozens of people that I probably should just take out my wallet and empty it in on the basis of this. And the answer to that is not necessarily at all. You should act, not react. Do you hear me? You see, if you react when somebody suddenly comes and grabs you and says, I need something, you may be, frankly, as a Christian, it’s difficult. I personally feel that as a Christian, I’ve got to react to some of those people. But I also realize that can’t be the main place that I put my kindness ministry because I have got to make sure I know what’s the best use of what I’ve got. I should study, I should look, I should find people, I should look for people that I can pour myself into, I should look for ministries I can pour myself into, or ministries I should start. I want to act instead of react. So don’t worry too much about that. Don’t be afraid that every time somebody comes to you, you absolutely have to do something. You have to act and not react.
But the last thing I’ve got to tell you here is the cultivation. Cultivation is this. Why is it that God says that the way you know that you’re really a Christian is there’s a ministry of kindness going on, that you are helping people with the outer circle needs as well as talking to people about the inner circle needs?
How can he do that? And here’s the reason why. If you are a Pharisee, if you basically believe that God accepts you because you’re a pretty good person, then you are going to look at people in need and you’re going to say, buck up, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You see, you’re going to have a kind of self -righteous attitude toward them. But if on the other hand, you believe that spiritually speaking, if you believe your righteousness is a filthy rag, if you believe you’re a sinner saved by grace alone, then when you see somebody on the street who’s got no resources, no friends, probably, very few friends, not much of a mind left, smells terrible, looks terrible, everything about that person, you see that person every time you go by one, you have to say, Lord, that is what I look like to you spiritually. I am that person spiritually. I’m in the same position to you that that person is to me, only it was a lot worse. My righteousness is a filthy rag. rag. I’m looking in a mirror. And that means your attitude is forever changed toward people with needs because you say, well, some of these people are deserving and some of these people are undeserving. But it doesn’t make that much difference because look at all the people that God gave His mercy to were undeserving, including me. And so what happens is the Gospel gets down into your gut and it may take years before it finally goes off, but there is a button down deep and everybody who’s a real Christian down deep in your heart that someday God will push and it will turn you into a kind person. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, whether you believe the government ought to be helping the poor or the government ought to be completely out of welfare. It doesn’t matter what, it doesn’t matter. You have a button down there and it’s called grace. And I’ll just press that button by reading you this little passage from Robert Murray McShane and then I’ll close. McShane was a Scottish minister. This is a sermon that he preached to his congregation once and this is what he said to them. and see how he does not make them feel guilty. He doesn’t use the old guilt thing, he doesn’t use the old Marxist thing.
“You’re so wealthy, and these people have so little, don’t you see how unfair it is? You know, that works for about a day. Because you start this after, after you feel guilty for a day, you begin to say, but I work pretty hard for what I’ve got here, you know. That’s never the way the Bible comes at you. Never! Never uses guilt. No way. Instead it uses the gospel, and it comes at you, and listen. Now, dear Christians, some of you pray day and night to be branches of the true vine. You pray to be made all over in the image of Christ. If so, you must be like him in giving. Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor.
Objection, someone said. My money is my own, say, I earned it. Answer, Christ might have said, my blood is my own, my life is my own, and then, where would we have been?
Objection. The poor, many of the people who I could help are undeserving. Answer, Christ might have said, these are wicked rebels. Shall I lay down my life for these? No, I will give to the good angels, the deserving poor, you see. But no, he left the ninety -nine and came after the lost. He gave his blood for the undeserving.
Objection. If I give it to someone, they may abuse it. Answer, Christ might have said the same thing. Yea, with far greater truth. Christ knew that thousands would trample his blood under their feet, that most would despise it, and that many would make it an excuse for sinning more. And yet he gave his own blood.
My dear Christians, if you want to be like Christ, give much, give often, give freely to the needy, even the thankless. It’s not your money I want, my dear friends, but your happiness. It’s what Jesus said. It is more happy, it’s more blessed to give than to receive. And I fear there are many hearing me now who know they are not Christians because they do not love to give. To give largely and liberally, not begrudging at all, requires a new heart.
An old heart would rather part with its life blood than its money. Oh my friends, enjoy your money, make the most of it, give none away, enjoy it quickly, for I can tell you, you’ll be beggars throughout eternity.”
And the reason I read that is why. I don’t really have the guts to say that straight. But the Bible says it. Kindness will grow. Did you feel your button being pushed on the basis of the gospel? Okay, let’s pray.