Fruitful Marriages Are Marked By Kindness
A Fruitful Marriage • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Bible college?
Introduction
Introduction
Are you familiar with the old saying, “kill them with kindness?”
This saying has always been funny to me. It reminds me of an old “I dream of Jeannie” episode where a guy sits down on the couch and says, “my feet are killing me,” and magically to tiny guns appear on his shoes and they start shooting at him. I was literally rolling on the floor laughing at that one with my cousin as a kid.
As far as killing them with kindness, I can picture the old detective entering the morgue and talking with the examiner. “How’d he die?” Well, the interesting thing here is that the autopsy report shows he died of kindness.
Now, most of us know what the saying means. It doesn’t literally mean someone dies from kindness. It means that when you do kind things for someone who has wronged you, it has the ability to drive them crazy because what people expect is that you’d return evil for evil.
The Bible has a proverb that goes along with this.
If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.
I find it interesting that God rewards you for heaping burning coals on someones head. But it puts forth a principle that Paul quotes in Romans when referencing this verse and made famous during our time by Martin Luther King Jr. Paul says it this way, overcome evil with good, Romans 12:21
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Or, to quote MLK Jr., he says this
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
I believe kindness is one of the ways that God has given us to overcome the evil in our world. Most of us when we are wronged, look for revenge, but God says that evil is overcome by good. In our marriages, many of us struggle to be kind and we end up taking out our bad days, our bad weeks, our bad months, our bad years, our career problems and our emotional issues on the person we married.
On the subject of marriage, I read this recently about kindness…
“In a nifty new report (this was published in 2019) out of the University of Swansea in the U.K., researchers got 2,700 college students from five countries to progressively narrow down which characteristics were most important to them in a lifetime mate, and the one that emerged from all cultures was kindness.”
In other words, when it comes to marriage, the thing we can all agree on is this, we want a spouse who is kind. This leads me to my main thought for today.
If we want a spouse who IS KIND, we need to BE KIND
In other words, be the kind of spouse that you would want to be married to. Be kind to your spouse and your spouse will likely return your kindness with kindness. If we don’t get this right, we could be in serious trouble in our relationships.
Welcome to Cornerstone Church, if you are just joining us, we are in the midst of a sermon series called, A Fruitful Marriage, where we are looking at the fruits of the Spirit and how if we are filled by and led by the Spirit, those fruits will affect our marriage.
Today we are looking at the fruit of Kindness. So if you are single, married, divorced or widowed, this series should speak to you in a way that God will reveal how these fruits should not only affect marriages, for those of us that are married, but it should infiltrate all of our relationships from family to work to our friendships.
Today we will be back in Ephesians, but we are going to be looking not at our normal passage on marriage, Ephesians 5, but we will be a bit further back. Paul lays the foundation for Ephesians 5 and the topic of marriage and relationships throughout the beginning of the book. We are going to look at Ephesians 4:32 today and the idea is that this verse feeds into our topic.
So join with me and open your bibles. If you have your phone or tablet, I have sermon notes loaded into the app for you to follow along with. Hear now the very words of God.
My Main Text
My Main Text
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
When I started to write this sermon series, I ran into a real issue. If you list out the fruits of the spirit, We’ve gone through four of them - love, joy, peace and patience. Today we are doing kindness.
But here’s the problem. If you read the KJV, we actually don’t get kindness next if we are going in order. We get gentleness. But in the ESV, gentleness is listed later. What this means is we have two words that have similar meanings, but are different in nuance. We will come back the word translated at gentleness by the ESV or meekness in the KJV later, today we are focusing on the word that is translated kindness by the ESV.
Greek Word - Chrestos - Goodness, kindness.
This word has a basic sense of excellent and useful. It’s almost exclusively translated as kindness by the ESV, except in Romans 3:12, where it is translated as good.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
You can see how even that could have been translated as kind.
Kindness is a popular theme that runs through the Bible and to be frank, I’ve never really preached on it, so it kind of shocked me when I started diving into this how much kindness is mentioned.
The majority of the times that kindness shows up in the Bible should be no surprise to us, it’s in relation to God. A word that is really popular in describing God and how God relates to us is a compound word - His lovingkindness. God has lovingkindness towards us.
Immediately following our passage today, in Ephesians 5:1, Paul instructs us to be imitators of God. After he tells us to be kind, he reinforces that instruction with the summary to imitate God. When you see the lovingkindness of God, you should think, that’s how I should act towards others and especially towards my spouse.
Let’s dive into this passage wholeheartedly now that we have defined kindness a bit and talked about how it’s an attribute of God that we should imitate.
Paul here gives us three commands. He says be kind, be tenderhearted and be forgiving. I think these are all connected together in the point he is getting at and I believe all of this feeds into what Paul says later in the chapter about loving our spouses well.
So I want to look at what being kind really means. Sometimes we hear these words and we don’t really give thought to what being kind really looks like, what it really mean.
Being Kind Means Being Loving
Being Kind Means Being Loving
In one sense being kind requires action. It requires us to do something. If you are kind on the inside, it’s going to come out. In other words, when Jesus says things like a good tree bears good fruit, he means it.
I keep pulling us back to this understanding, but it’s the basis for everything we are talking about. When I talk about kindness, Jesus is the ultimate example of it. He is kind. He exhibited kindness in so many ways.
In the same way, when we are filled with his Holy Spirit, our lives are radically changed by that and we start to pour forth fruits in keeping with it. In other words, when you are born again, you become a different tree. The old tree produced bad fruit, this new tree produces good fruit. Those good fruit are known as the Fruit of the Spirit. When we produce that good fruit in our lives, we will necessarily look like Jesus.
Jesus wasn’t kind in just name only. He was kind in action. It wasn’t just an attitude, but action. Being kind means actually doing the acts of kindness. Jesus did acts of kindness. And the ultimate act of kindness that he did was that he laid down his life for us. He died for us. We were his enemies and he demonstrated his lovingkindness toward us by dying for us. Again, listen to this passage from even earlier in Ephesians.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,
So when it comes to marriage, one of the ways that we show our kindness toward our spouse is by being loving. It’s about being kind to them just as Jesus is kind towards us.
Let’s look a little deeper, in salvation, Jesus dies for us, his bride to become one with us. Christ in us, the hope of glory. In marriage, it’s similar because it’s a picture of the gospel. Each person sacrifices for the other in order to become one.
What this means practically in marriage:
It’s not my will, but ours.
It’s not my ways (or my parents), but ours.
It’s not my desires, but ours.
Everything that made me, me, before marriage must die. I have to lay down those things, because if you carry them into marriage it will destroy it. The point is to leave and cleave.
This becomes a huge problem in the kindness area. We tend to think kindness is being appeasing. We talked about this when we discussed peacemaking, but when you just simply try to appease your spouse, you are not being kind. Kindness requires honesty. You don’t have to be rude, or hateful, but you need to be honest. It’s not kind to hide your feelings or to pretend nothing is wrong, when you are hurting on the inside.
For marriages to flourish, kindness has to be loving and honest. It should look like Jesus who was kind when it was called for. He was kind to the woman at the well, he was kind to woman caught in adultery and he was kind when he ran the moneychangers out of the temple. Kindness is not about being run over, it’s about loving people in an honest and helpful way. It’s looking out for the best in others.
Being Kind Means Being Tenderhearted
Being Kind Means Being Tenderhearted
Paul in Ephesians 4, connects being kind with being tenderhearted. I love the term tenderhearted. It gives you a great picture. The opposite of a stony heart or a hard heart. It’s tender. It’s soft.
Being tenderhearted towards your spouse starts with a tenderheartedness toward God. If you are going to have a soft heart towards your spouse, you first have to have God soften your heart toward him. That comes from the Holy Spirit and prayer.
In marriage, I believe that God uses our spouse to make us more tenderhearted, if we allow him. When we go through rough seasons together, when we stand together in the midst of the storm, when we experience pain together, what that does in us is it softens our heart toward each other.
Pain and hardship are intended to make us stronger, to humble us, to make us more tenderhearted and gentle toward others.
Richard Foster
Autumn and I have been through some pretty tough storms in our life. A lot of you may not know this, but we were married for three years before Elijah was born and that wasn’t by choice. We started “trying” to have kids pretty much immediately after we got married.
We struggled through some infertility issues and it was tough. It was hard on both of us. After a couple of years, we had pretty much given up hope and bought a second dog. Eventually as most of you know, we had Elijah and that solved the infertility problem as we had three more back-to-back after that.
And while we had a happy ending to that season of struggle, not everyone is that fortunate. We know plenty of people dealing with infertility issues. And because we have gone through that, it creates in us a tender heart.
In marriage, you bring your previous suffering into the union. In other words, everyone comes in with baggage of some type. That baggage can either harden your heart or make it tender. It all depends on how you respond.
One of the biggest ways I’ve seen my heart harden in life has been through bitterness. Someone does something wrong to me and then I get bitter. When that happens, my heart towards that person is not tender anymore, but hard. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. I learned my lesson in dealing with you buster, you won’t get me again. That’s not a sign of strength, that’s a sign of bitterness.
If you hold onto bitterness because of what you’ve been through, guess what? Your heart is hard. If you have learned how to extend grace even when you’ve been wronged, guess what? That’s a tender heart right there and it connects into the final thing Paul says.
Being Kind Means Being Forgiving
Being Kind Means Being Forgiving
In our passage, Paul connects being a forgiving person to being kind. Many of us think that being kind is simply buying someones meal at Bojangles or coffee at Dunkin Donuts. Those are kind actions, but being kind, I think, goes deeper than that.
I think it’s really about how you respond to others. You have a lot of choices in how you respond when bad or hard things happen in life. For instance, if your spouse lies to you about something involving your finances. What are some possible ways that you could respond?
You could blow up and be angry.
You could avoid talking about it because it causes you anxiety.
You could hold a grudge against her and never let her touch the money in your family again.
You could forgive and forget, but never deal with the issue.
You could forgive and work through the problem.
Wisdom teaches us that the best way to respond is that last way. It comes from honest communication. Asking…What causes you to lie about this? What can I do to prevent that from happening in the future? I’m not going to hold this over your head in the future, but let’s work on this. Let’s have open and honest communication.
You guys know we are in the business of forgiving, right? Jesus gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That means people are going to be hurt and torn apart and our job is to offer them the forgiveness of God as we work to bring them back to unity.
Forgiveness in a marriage has to be unlimited for it to work. If you number the times you have forgiven your spouse of something, you will eventually run out of fingers and toes. Forgiveness has to be unlimited.
Forgiveness shouldn’t be abused either. Just as its not kind to withhold forgiveness, it’s also not kind to abuse it. If you are constantly hurting your spouse over and over again in the same way, it’s time to break the cycle. It’s time to change. Forgiveness is too important to be abused.
Marriage Is A Mirror
Marriage Is A Mirror
Marriage is like a mirror in someways. It reveals what you really look like. If you want to know what you look like, ask your spouse. They will tell you. Most of the time, you don’t even need to ask. Just look at how they react to you. Listen to what they say to you.
Typically this comes out in a way that is hard for us to believe. When your spouse says that you are an angry man, or if your spouse says something about you being lazy, regardless of whether they are wrong in saying it that way, they are likely showing you something about yourself. And those things can be hard to believe.
Autumn has said many things to me over the years that hurt in the moment, but were absolutely true. Marriage has a way of revealing your flaws. Pretty much everyone in this room thinks they are kind. But most of us aren’t very kind. Everyone in the room thinks they are loving, but in truth we really only love ourselves.
So don’t think this message is for someone else. It’s not. It’s for you. It’s for me. I’ve got a lot of work to do in order to be as kind as Jesus. And so do you. In other words…
If we want a spouse who IS KIND, we need to BE KIND.
We need to be the kind of spouse we would want to be married to.
If we don’t get this right, you guys know what happens right? If the number one trait people desire in a spouse is kindness and we aren’t kind, it will destroy our relationship with our spouse and your marriage will likely not survive. Kindness is really that important. If you aren’t loving, tenderhearted or forgiving, your marriage will suffer. If you are in a bad relationship right now, I can almost assure you, it likely comes down to what we talked about today.
Conclusion
Conclusion
To close, I’ve got a few prayer points I’d like for you to pray through. I encourage you again to write down
Prayer Points
Lord, help me to plan an act of kindness this week.
Father, where do I need to forgive someone?
Jesus, where are you trying to soften my heart?