|
"Christian
Kindness" Having addressed selected groups within the congregation -- citizens, slaves, and wives and husbands --, from 2:13-3:7, Peter now addresses the entire congregation generally. And he begins with their life together as a community, a family and the way in which they should treat one another; then how to carry that same spirit and behavior toward outsiders, unbelievers. He describes the spirit with which they ought to live together with five adjectives: "like-minded"; "sympathetic"; "brotherly-loving"; "compassionate"; and "humble." That is the spirit that forms the basis of Christian community and shapes Christian charity toward the world. That should lead to the conduct he describes in v. 9: Christians not repaying evil for evil, but loving even those who treat them unfairly, poorly, inconsiderately. To bless those who curse you, to be kind to those who are unkind to you, was the teaching of the OT. There too we read that we are not to take vengeance ourselves but to love our neighbor as ourselves and leave the issue to God. Jesus Christ made a special point of this teaching as the distinguishing mark of his ethics. Everyone thinks we ought to be nice to people. There is nothing particularly Christian about that. But to be kind, generous, thoughtful to those who mistreat you; to return kindness for unkindness, blessing for cursing -- that is more than most people think they have to do. And Christians very clearly see that they must do so, precisely because that is what was done to them. They offended God, they took his gifts and abused them, they ignored his interests in their lives, though he was their Creator, they constantly lived in ways that grieved him, they rejected his kindnesses, and yet, when they were God's enemies he loved them, redeemed them by the suffering and death of his only Son, and has then continued to put up with them even when, once they have come to know his grace and have been forgiven their terrible sins, they continue to grieve the Lord and to abuse his gifts. How can they, who when they cursed God were blessed by him so mightily, return cursing for cursing in their own lives. It would be for them to betray the gospel and the spirit of the gospel and the love and example of Jesus Christ not to strive to treat others as Christ has treated them. In fact, that seems to be the idea Peter has, there at the end of v. 9. There is a debate about how best to translate that verse. The question is this: does Peter mean, as the NIV has it, that if we bless those who curse us, we shall be blessed ourselves (something like "give, and it shall be given to you" as the Lord says in Luke 6:38) or does he mean that God has given us a blessing precisely so that we might share it with others (something like "freely you have received, freely give" as the Lord says in Matthew 10:8). There are strong arguments on both sides of the debate and both statements would be true -- would agree with what is elsewhere taught in the Bible. But perhaps, in the context, it is more likely that Peter is saying that we have been blessed -- in defiance of our offenses against God -- in order that we might pass that blessing on to others, especially others who offend us! In that way, we would be in a very profound way, following in our Savior's steps. Then Psalm 34:12-16 is cited to confirm the point. The Lord will take care of his children who suffer. There is the comfort, but it is a comfort reserved for those who walk faithfully, who live in consistency with the gospel, who follow in their Savior's way, and, in particular, who use their tongues to bless and not to curse and who seek peace with men. As so often in the Bible, he adds the warning to the promise, citing the first half of Psalm 34:16 "the face of the Lord is against those who do evil", but he tempers it by omitting the second half of the verse, "to cut off the memory of them from the earth." The accent falls on the encouragement and the exhortation, understandably in a letter addressed to persecuted Christians. Now, there is the argument of those few verses and it is an argument we are familiar with. It is made many times and places in the Bible and especially in the Lord's own teaching. But it is found in Hebrews and in Paul also. It is a centerpiece of Christian ethics and of that distinct and unique behavior to which Christians are called. Sympathy, compassion, kindness, even to the unlovely. That is what God gave us when we were and have remained decidedly unlovely, and that is the blessing that we have to share with others in Christ's name. As we have freely received, so we are freely to give. Ho Hum! We've heard that before! Oh, no, my brethren. We cannot hear that enough. For you and I hardly have begun to understand how profoundly this truth and this commandment must and would reshape our lives if we gave it the true heed of our hearts. How much kindness would have always to be flowing out of us to others, how much blessing we would have to return for all the cursing we have received. In our self-absorbed lives, we hardly know, we hardly recognize how much opportunity for this kind and compassionate living there is all around us, all the time. This is not instruction for the odd occasion in your life when you might show sympathy to someone else or be kind to someone who has been unkind to you. This is to be the transcript of every day we live in this world. This is the great way we show our loyalty to Christ by embodying in our behavior the principle of his grace and mercy to us -- it is the great way precisely because we do not live a day in this world when have not opportunities to do this, to live this gospel way, this uniquely Christian way, opportunities piled one on top of another. Listen to me. I went away for a week, two weeks ago. Just one week. When I arrived in Chattanooga a week ago Tuesday I heard immediately of a tragedy that had occurred two days before, the previous Sunday. A mother and her daughters on their way to church at our New City Fellowship -- this is a family with connections also to the church Kevin Skogen pastors -- the 18 year old daughter was driving, was somehow distracted and ran the car into a utility pole. She was killed outright. The youngest daughter was in a coma several days later, is still paralyzed and they fear will be for the rest of her life. Another daughter broke her back and must have a rod inserted to support it. The mother, who had already lost a leg to cancer a few years before, was also seriously injured and there were fears that she may lose the other leg. Up at the college I met for the first time face to face Damaris Wessel, the daughter of Hugh and Martine, our missionaries in the south of France, for whom we have often prayed on Wednesday nights. She has a serious form of hepatitis, her long term prognosis is uncertain and every two weeks she must take powerful treatments to control her disease. A few days later I was in Memphis, preaching at one of our churches there. At a men's retreat on Friday afternoon and evening I met the twelve-year-old son of Paul Hill and, then on the Lord's Day, I met the boy's mother. Paul Hill you remember is the man who shot to death the abortionist in Florida and now sits on death row. After the morning service last Lord's Day I went to lunch with some old friends who are in that congregation, one a friend from college. They told me of a mutual friend, a PCA pastor, who just a month or so ago, up and left his church and his family. He left a note behind resigning his pastorate and saying he was off in search of a new career, but he didn't tell his wife or children where he was going. They were left with no knowledge of what was to come, no plan to provide for their needs. Nothing. That same evening I received a call with the news of David Bender's death last Lord's Day. Just a single small slice of life. Just one week. And we could multiply those tales a thousand times over. And such things as I have just mentioned are merely the most striking and noteworthy instances of the suffering all around us and the evil and wrong all around us that ought to bring forth from us kindness, compassion, and humble fellow-feeling. There are thousands more woes everywhere and always that are less dramatic, or less public, or less uncommon, but which still have the power to discourage, depress, sadden, and darken the sight of people old and young, rich and poor, righteous and unrighteous. There are sick children and older folk whose health and strength have departed them and for whom life is every day a chore to be completed; there are those who are sick and know they must die and leave behind so much that is precious to them. There are those who plod along in a loveless marriage and those who have been abandoned. There are those for whom it is a struggle to pay their bills or achieve a decent mark in school. There are those who are so lonely that they ache when they go to bed at night and still ache when they wake in the morning. There are those who have failed and never escape the shame of that failure, others who so fear to fail that they live their lives in a state of constant fear and inner turmoil. There are those who are ridden with guilt and those who suffer because people who have hurt them deeply seem to feel no guilt whatsoever for what they have done. And, in many of these cases, there is someone whose behavior has contributed to the woe and against whom all our vengeful tendencies immediately rise. It is not for nothing that the Bible itself describes this world as a "vale of tears." No wonder, then, that the Bible should place front and center in its description of the Christian lives, these virtues of kindness, sympathy, compassion, and brotherly love. You will never lack opportunities, brothers and sisters, you will never lack opportunities to practice what Peter preaches here. Indeed, there is enough opportunity in this single fellowship to keep all of us busy, genuinely busy, for the rest of our lives. And there is an entire world around us also awaiting our kindness and love covering a multitude of sins. I tell you, the more you embrace this calling, this Christ-likeness, my brothers and sisters, the more you will see the world as one gigantic object of compassion and sympathy. Every Christian could be unique in compassion, there is so much opportunity! I mentioned Simone Weil to you several Lord's Days ago. The French Jewess, the socialist philosopher who became a Christian. Do you remember how she died? Sympathy killed her. Brotherly love put her to death. Compassion was her undoing. She was a minor member of the French government in exile during the Second World War. She lived and worked in England, longing for the liberation of her homeland. But in the truest sympathy and fellow feeling with her countrymen in occupied France, she refused to eat anything but and anything more than the official daily ration the German occupation government had appointed for French citizens. In fact, almost nobody in France ate so little as that meager ration, that totally insufficient diet. But, Simone Weil ate it and nothing more. And she literally starved herself to death in her fellow-feeling for those who suffered at home. There is the heroic spirit, the spirit of the noblest surrender of oneself for others, the spirit of self-denial for the sake of others, the turning away from all vengeance, all self-assertion so that one may take part with the sorrows and trials of others -- I say there is the very great spirit that Peter is after here. The Christian life is to be an extravagant thing. It makes extravagant demands upon a man or woman. Someone who lives it faithfully will do all manner of things almost no one else in this world would ever think to do, including the vast majority of Christians. Other people and their situation in life will become a guiding force of daily existence. Every day will be a search for the opportunities for compassion and sympathy that are the true expression of a gospel spirit. We must not domesticate his commandments here or those same commandments when our Savior gives them to us directly. I know I am exposed by these commandments as hardly a Christian. But I also know this is the life for me -- and for you -- if we would be followers of Christ! For, if we domesticate these commands, if we turn them into some bland obligation to be nice to people from time to time and simply polite, we have denied the gospel and the power of the gospel, which is, after all, a message of a great love, an extravagant love, to those in desperate need who had no claim, no claim whatsoever to that love but received it anyway. People who have experienced the gospel are to be changed by it into people who express in their relationships with others its principle of self-giving and love in the teeth of the undeserving needy. There is a magnificent passage in Bunyan -- in both Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography, and in Pilgrim's Progress. It concerns a moment early on in Bunyan's experience as a Christian, when he came fully to realize the extent of Christ's love for him and the greatness of the gift that had been made to him in defiance of his sins and ill-desert. The fact that Bunyan saw fit to describe this experience in both the autobiography and in the famous allegory is some demonstration of how profoundly he was affected and how much he saw his feelings at that time to be the true, authentic experience of Christian faith and love.
Now, every Christian knows very well that that is how he or she ought to feel about the love that God has poured out into his or her heart. We ought, everyone of us, to be taken up to that same marvelously extravagant extent with the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. And we ought, also, to reckon with how that love continues to accompany us even though we think so little of it, do so little with it, and are changed so little by it. This is our entire faith and our entire life as Christians -- an indescribably great love given to us despite our unworthiness, despite our many offenses committed against that love, despite our failure, far too much of the time, to love God back in any thing remotely similar to the way in which he has loved us. But, then, if that is true, every Christian also knows that there is no more perfect embrace of that love, no more perfect response to it, nothing that would better demonstrate the place that the Lord's love for us has found in our hearts, than just our trying to live our lives by that same kind of love, to praise and honor our infinitely compassionate God by striving to put on compassion ourselves and as extravagantly as we possibly can, God helping us. Do you want the perfect picture of the Christian life? It is not a person tithing one's income, important and right as that may be. It is not a person striving to put certain sins to death, as essential as that is to the holiness to which every Christian is called. It is not even a person devoted to the Lord's House and his worship, impossible as it is to conceive of a Christian life without such a devotion. No, if you want to know what a Christian is, first and foremost, what a Christian life is. It is a life so dominated by the knowledge of and experience of God's saving love to a profoundly unlovely sinner, that that love becomes the principle, the impetus, the guiding force of daily life. As the Bible everywhere says, Christians are people who, having been loved in spite of themselves, love others in spite of themselves. It is the compliment they pay to the divine love that they seek to enshrine it in their lives. It is the honor paid to their Redeemer that they seek to imitate him in his greatest work -- loving others, and, especially, loving the genuinely undeserving. That was Bunyan's instinctive recognition in that moment when he saw so clearly how the Father and the Son had loved him. A love like that has got to be served; honor must be paid to it. And so a Christian, like himself, should cherish opportunities to show compassion and mercy like Christ showed him, in the same way that misers cherish gold. If you cannot have a thousand gallons of blood to spill for Christ's sake, you have thousand people to love in his name. People often come to me with problems stemming from the mistreatment they are receiving at the hands of others. And I always tell them first, and I promise you, I will always tell all of you this first as long as I am your minister: if we understand the gospel aright, we ought to fall on our knees in the deepest gratitude when we find that we have an enemy, because that enemy gives us an opportunity to do the very greatest thing a Christian can conceivably do -- viz. love our enemy, just as Christ loved us when we were his enemies. Our whole lives, our entire existence is compressed into such grand and glorious opportunities to exalt and honor by our own practice and imitation the great love with which Christ loved us. And it is the same for all of us with sorrows all around us. We ought to hunger and thirst for opportunities every day simply to be kind and compassionate and sympathetic in Christ's name and for his sake. The man or woman who seeks such a life of true Christian brotherly love, a love that gives but does not ask, a love that requires no worthiness, not even the barest appreciation, is a man or woman who lives nearest the very heart of the meaning and purpose of human life and is paying the highest conceivable honor to the Lord Christ. We have our goals for each day. We hope to do this or that, accomplish this or that, complete this or that. It is good that we should have such goals. Well chief among them, we ought to plan to show compassion to someone, show kindness and generosity to someone who has been thoughtless or unkind to us -- scarcely a day will pass without some opportunity to do so, -- certainly if not outside of at least within our family circle (which is, after all, the great training ground of Christian living) -- to have imitated our Savior in the great love with which he loved us when we were his enemy. Young people, if you would live the Christian life, start first with your brother or sister. A man or woman who seeks out such opportunities every day is a man or woman in whom the spirit of Christ's love will reign. And to the man or woman who seeks first that spirit, everything else will be added. You will never lack for the opportunities. The kind word, the small gift, the time and effort offered in another's need, the prayers promised and then offered, the failures (of others) overlooked, the willingness to be inconvenienced, unappreciated by someone else -- every day there will be opportunities. You have only to commit yourself in Christ's name to seizing them one by one, day by day, until your entire life is dominated by this one glorious principle: "freely you have received, freely give." |
|
[Home] |