Today, our message series is called “Growing a Godly Family.” The family is the foundation of society. A society where families are growing in godliness will be blessed and prosperous. Of course, the opposite is true as well. Even when godly families are the minority in society, they will be blessed as they follow God.
So, today, we’re going to talk about how to “Develop Family Kindness.” In this message, we’re going to look at three areas in which God desires us to grow in kindness. First, we’ll look at our immediate physical families. Then we’ll look at the church family and finally, we’ll look at growing in kindness to everyone else.
So, in order to talk about kindness, we need to define what kindness is. Defining kindness isn’t the easiest thing in the world. When we get past the dictionary definition of kindness as the quality of being kind, we find quite a few definitions. The definition that I believe captures the essence of what the Bible means by kindness is as follows. Kindness is the quality of being gentle, caring and helpful.
Let’s briefly look at this three descriptions of kindness. Being caring is the attitude of having compassion for the needs of others. Being helpful is taking action to help meet the needs of others. Finally, being gentle is the manner in which a kind person takes action. So, let’s begin to look at what the Bible, God’s Word has to say about kindness.
Proverbs 11:17 (ESV) A man who is kind benefits himself, but a cruel man hurts himself.