Carry Out Kindness

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were James 1:17-27 and Luke 6:27-38:

After last week’s message on practicing praise, I had a lot of people coming up to me to give me thanks, and so then I had to decide whether it was just everyone working on practicing praise, especially the injunction not to let people assume you are appreciated, but to tell them, or if there were lots of people who decided to practice the kindness challenge on me. But, since one of the things we are working on is assuming the best of intentions for others, I am going to go with the first answer. Today we conclude in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based off a book by the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn, and so a quick recap of the three rules of the kindness challenge. The first rule is to nix the negativity, that is we are not to say anything negative to the person we are doing the kindness challenge for, not to say anything negative about them to someone else. The second rule is practice praise, that is as we start to stop focusing on the negative we instead look for positives and to give one piece of praise or affirmation about someone else every day, and tell someone else what you praised them for. If you missed either of those messages, I would encourage you to go back and listen to them, which then leads us into the final rule, which we cover today, and that is to carry out kindness, or to do a small act of kindness or generosity for the person you are doing the kindness challenge for every day, and to do all three of these steps for 30 days, although you don’t have to stop there.

Additionally, while the kindness challenge asks you to do each of these things every day for 30 days, and really you can practice these for anyone and at any time. And the truth is if we want the world to be a kinder place, then it has to start with us. If we want people to be kinder, then we need to be kinder. And what’s more we shouldn’t be doing any of these actions with the expectation that we will get anything in return. We do them simply because they are the right things to be doing, the way that we should be living. And we of course hear that quite a bit in scripture. As we heard in James today, he says that we are to be doers of the world, not just hearers, which is a preview of him saying that faith without works is dead.

James: Patience, Suffering and Temptation

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was James 1:12-18 and 5:7-11:

When I met my wife Linda, she had a black lab, Vivian, and Vivi was really smart.  All you had to do was show her, or tell her, one time what you wanted her to do and normally she would pick it up right then.  That was a smart dog.  I’ve had some other smart dogs, but the dog we have now, Yogi, is not in that category.  And this isn’t just that he’s being ornery or stubborn, he’s just not that smart.  And to make it worse, he is part terrier and possibly some beagle, and so he likes to get his nose going and then just go.  So if given the chance, whether it’s the door being left open just a bit, or if he can find any way out of the backyard, he’s going to take the opportunity and take off and run as far and as fast as he can, until he’s picked up by the dog catcher and he ends up in doggy prison.

Now if Yogi was human, or perhaps if he was a little smarter, he might try and give some rationalization for what he was doing and why he ended up in trouble, because that’s what we try and do.  Perhaps he might try and blame the devil, with the proverbial “the devil made me do it” excuse.  No personal culpability.  Everyone else is responsible except for him, not even for giving in to the temptation.  Or he might even argue that the temptation was put there simply in order to try and bring him down because of who he is, and so not only is he not weak, it’s because he is so strong and so good that it even happened.  He is suffering unjustly.  Or he might even say, and we certainly hear this all the time, that it’s God who led him to this point, either to tempt him to see what he will do, or even worse in my opinion, is to say that God has led him to this, and not just led them to it, but actually pushed him through the door to run for all he is worth and to doggy prison, but that God will get him through it.  It’s that whole, “God doesn’t give us anything that we can’t handle” cliché.  But regardless of what excuse is used for temptation and suffering, they all take patience, and for me with Yogi it takes patience for me so that I don’t try and kill him.  But what James tells us today is that all of this is wrong, and the truth is we simply don’t understand what’s actually going on.