3. The Pattern of Christian Kindness
Two patterns of Christian kindness are given for us in the text. First is the forgiveness of God. Second is the love of Christ.
The first we see in verse 32: "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." So when kindness calls for forgiveness, the pattern is the forgiveness of God in Christ.
The second pattern is seen in 5:2, "Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." So when love expresses itself in kindness, the pattern is the love of Christ giving himself up for us.
Four Qualities of God's Forgiveness
What do these two patterns of kindness teach us about being kind to each other? Let's take them one at a time. What does the pattern of God's forgiveness teach us about our own? Four things come to mind:
God's forgiveness takes sin seriously and so should ours. Forgiveness is not flippancy toward sin. It sees it and names it—and then covers it. God forgives what he hates. When I called a man recently to apologize for something I had said and seek his forgiveness, he didn't say, "It makes no difference." Or: "I didn't hear it." He said earnestly and warmly, "Forgiven, and forgotten." And I got the deep impression he really meant it.
God's forgiveness reckons with a real settling of accounts and so should ours. Every sin that has ever been committed will be justly punished—either in hell or on the cross. God never sweeps one little lie under the rug. Someone always pays. So when kindness calls us to forgive a wrong that has been done against us, we are sustained by the truth of God's holiness. That wrong is going to be dealt with: either the person who committed it against us will trust Christ in the end, in which case the wrong they committed is punished in the wrath that was poured on Christ when the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:4–6); or the person who committed the wrong against us is not going to trust Christ in the end, in which case the wrong that they committed will be punished in the sufferings of hell. And in neither case should we fear to forgive as though there were no settling of accounts in the universe.
God's forgiveness was costly and so is ours. It cost God his Son. And it will cost us the sweet taste of revenge and the pleasure of savoring a grudge and the pride of superiority.
God's forgiveness is real and ours should be too. There is no sham in it. When he forgives, we are really restored. Nothing is held over our heads for later blackmail. It is gone: "As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12). And so we fall short of our divine pattern if we forgive a wrong but secretly plan to keep it in the back of our minds for a later touché. When we forgive, let us really forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave us.
Three Qualities of Christ's Love
That is the pattern of God's forgiveness and four things we can learn from it in pursuing the path of kindness. The second pattern for our kindness is the love of Christ in 5:2, "Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." What does the pattern of Christ's love teach us about our own? Out of all the things we could say let me just mention three.
The love of Christ for us is undeserved, and so we shouldn't insist that people earn our love and our kindness either. Jesus said in Luke 6:35, "Love your enemies, and do good . . . and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish." None of us has ever qualified to be loved by Jesus Christ. Freely we have received it; freely we should give it (Matthew 10:8).
The love of Christ for us is holy and ours should be holy. The aim of the love of Christ is the holiness of his church: "Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her . . . and present her to himself in glory . . . that she might be holy and without blemish" (Ephesians 5:25–27). And therefore we should put away all notions of love that are driven by mere sentiment and emotion. Love aims at the holiness of a man and a woman, not at their approval or their worldly happiness. Christian kindness is not a strategy to avoid conflict. It's patterned on the love of Christ and aims to promote holiness.
The love of Christ for us was sacrificial and self-denying, and ours should be too. This is basically the same thing we said earlier, namely, that the love of God was costly. But it is good to say it again. Because every one of us knows that the hardest thing about Christian kindness is to show it when it hurts. I have never forgotten the kindness shown to me by Frau Dora Goppelt in 1974 during the weeks following the unexpected death of her husband, my Doktorvater in Germany. It is a miracle of grace when the pain of loss is so great that you don't know if you can last another day, and yet you reach out in kindness to a foreign student and reassure him that three years of labor will not be lost with the death of his mentor.
A miracle of grace! That brings us to the fourth thing that this text teaches us about Christian kindness. We have seen the extent of Christian kindness in replacing all bitterness and malice and slander. We have seen the depth of Christian kindness in tenderness of heart. We have seen the pattern of Christian kindness in the forgiveness of God and the love of Christ. Now we look at: The Instrument of Christian Kindness.
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