What Jesus Teaches Us About True Love and Kindness
- Lee Young
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
John 15:10 (NIV)
If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.
Jesus kept the commands of God throughout His 33 years on earth. The Bible says He was without sin (Hebrews 4:15). The commands of God work to keep us in His love by helping us to remain in a loving posture with Him, ourselves, and everyone else. Therefore, if Jesus never sinned, then everything He did and said must be examined through this prism. We can analyze His actions and behavior in each moment and see what love would look like in that specific instance. And when we do this, we see that love doesn’t always look the same.
Jesus is quite tender with the woman at the well (John 4:1-26). She has gone to the well in the middle of the day, which was unusual. She has done this because she has been married multiple times, and now she is living with a man, but they are not married. She is avoiding the other women who would get water in the cool of the morning. They would have made sport of her, and she has had enough of this. But Jesus, who should have shunned her if He were following the cultural norms, both because of her race and sex, purposely engages with her. He is truly compassionate to a woman beaten up by the world.
This is not the case with the Pharisees. Some Pharisees became followers, but Christ addressed, in a not-so-kind way, those who maintained their religiously superior attitude. He called them whitewashed tombs, a brood of vipers, blind guides, and fools because of their hypocrisy. At face value, this does not seem like love, as love is always kind, according to Scripture (1 Corinthians 13:4). Jesus teaches about love with every interaction.
If love is always kind, then, at this moment with the Pharisees, we have to say Jesus’ words were kind. But how can this be? To grasp what Christ is doing, we must redefine love in His terms. Christ’s highest aim is that all would be saved. Love is doing whatever is necessary to help us find His salvation.
Imagine a father teaching his son to drive. He will start gently in his direction but become louder and more direct in his frustration if his son does not listen. It may not seem kind, but the father knows that if his son continues to maintain bad habits, a wreck is unavoidable. He does not want his son to be hurt, so his reactions may not always be gentle, but they are kind because, at a certain point, his son needs to feel the urgency of listening to his father so that he learns to drive safely.
God’s love is gentle at times, but not-so-much at other times. But even when He is not gentle, it is still kind. When we are prideful, arrogant, and flippantly ignore His teachings with no remorse or repentance, for God to be kind, He can’t be gentle. We must love people with gentility, but when they don’t listen and we see them driving their lives toward an eternal cliff, fueled by extreme pride and arrogance, gentility will no longer be enough to help them. We must still speak the truth in love. Jesus never said anything about them that was not true. But there is a time when the truth may not come across so sweet. The Bible says that the wounds that come from someone who truly loves us are a good thing (Proverbs 27:6).
