Faithbase

Hello and welcome to our series, Thinking About the Bible, and we are spending some time on thinking about love, and today we are back in 1 Corinthians 13, 4-7, New Living Translation. We talked about yesterday, of course, love is patience, and today we talk about love is kind. Now, not to be, well, I don't know, blunt maybe, but patience is something that doesn't require a lot of action sometimes. We just kind of do something, and I'm not saying that's how we should approach patience. We talked about that yesterday, that instead, patience should be active, no question about that, as we are working with a child, or a loved one, a co-worker, whatever. We are showing patience to them, even when our natural reaction might be to be grumpy about it. But showing kindness takes that a step further. Let me give you an example, let's say you're at Baskin-Robbins, you've got yourself a triple cone of your favorite flavors, you pay for that, you step outside, and you notice right outside the store there's a child who's dropped their ice cream cone, and they're crying. And now, I'm not going to elaborate on whether a parent there is, or whatever, but in this case, kindness would be to purchase another ice cream cone for that child. That might not be the only thing you could do, but that is how kindness is. It's somehow, maybe we could say, more active than patience. It actually does something to correct a situation. Kindness does that, patience will, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but it puts up with something, but it does that in a loving way. We are willing with our patience to work through a situation to help somebody. Kindness, we actually step in with some action, and again, the illustration of a child with an ice cream cone is simply that, and it could be anything, it could be your loved one, to show kindness to your spouse as you come home from a long day's work, or they've had a long day at home, perhaps, or perhaps your spouse works, or whatever the case may be, but you pitch in, you show kindness by helping out, maybe doing some of the chores that are typical for your spouse to do. All kinds of examples. I think you understand what I'm saying, that when we show kindness, we are showing love. That's what we want to think about today. Think about love, think about showing kindness. Think about ways you can show kindness to people in your life today, whether it be at home or at work, at school, wherever it might be, but think about love, and think about showing kindness, and I appreciate you being here this morning, and we will be back together again tomorrow. Until then, God bless you, and think about love, think about kindness.