Put On The New Man预览

We Are Not Scallops, We Are The Body 

 The opposite of clothing ourselves with mercy would be to clothe ourselves with judgment, to clothe ourselves as judges. God did not make us judges. He is the only Judge. God wants us to be merciful, as He is merciful; and just as God’s mercy is limitless, how far should our mercy go? It should be the same as His. “Be imitators of God as dear children.”

Colossians also tells us that we should clothe ourselves with kindness, which is the opposite of evil. Even so, many people have the wrong idea about what it means to be kind. It does not mean that I should be well-behaved. There are a lot of people who are well-behaved in life but are completely useless. They behave properly at home, they never go out, they do not even have a parking ticket, and never hurt anyone, but they never did anyone any good either. 

When the Scriptures say that we have to clothe ourselves with kindness, they are not talking about our behavior; they are talking about doing good. Kindness is an action.

Kindness does not mean you stay sitting down without doing anything wrong. Scallops are really nice because they never hurt anyone. They do not bite. They do not fight each other. They do not make noises nor go out to parties. They do not deceive each other; there is not a scallop who has cheated on their scallop partner. In short, they behave themselves, but they do not achieve anything in life. They attach themselves to a rock in the ocean, and they live and die there. We are not scallops. That is not what being kind really is.

 

To be kind is to do good works, the works of the Father; not to achieve a position with God, but as a fruit of the life that God has given us. Is God flesh or spirit? God is Spirit! Are God’s children flesh or spirit? We are both! We are flesh and we are spirit, but does God have a body? Of course, He does! We are the body of Christ; so the manifestation of good works is God working through His body, through us. To do the works of God, those for which we were predestined even before the foundation of the world, is to be kind. It means doing what will benefit someone else; to keep doing it, and make God shine through us, that is what it means to be kind.