The Kindness of God

How are you doing on your Thirty for 30 challenge? Yeah, it's harder than I thought it would be, too. It's so easy to let daily life squeeze your time. I hope you're making time for the Word though and letting God speak to you through it this month though.

I want to share a verse with you today that God has brought to my mind lately.

Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? Romans 2:4 (NASV)

I have been convicted lately about just how sharp I sometimes speak to my children in an effort to chastise them or get their attention. Impatience and frustration seeps in and my tongue becomes too harsh in its delivery.

Just like our children don't always get it right the first, second, or thirtieth time, neither do we ourselves as God's children. Just how often do you fail, do you have the wrong attitude, gossip about another, make that same wrong choice, ...sin?

Unless you're reached perfection--and we all know that's not the case--then you are probably just like me and daily need to cry out for God's forgiveness.

And how does He receive us? With grace and mercy and loving kindness. Every.Single.Time.

He doesn't say, "Oh, it's you again. Seriously, you've done that again?! How stupid are you? Why don't you ever learn?"

He gently, patiently, kindly receives us and helps us back up again and loves us, encouraging us in the right way, His ways. A wonderful heavenly Father!

And I am striving to model that in my own parenting. Endless verbal tirades don't really ever get the job done--unless the goal is just to get me to shut up, right? But correcting our children with love and grace and kindness goes a long way toward true behavior and heart change.

I want to receive my children the same way. When they've totally blown it, they fought with each other all day long, they've absolutely driven me crazy ...to show kindness. Losing my temper, yelling, lecturing--none of that is very productive. But sitting down with them, correcting in love and showing God's loving kindness goes a long, long way toward them making true heart change--repentance.

I leave you with a favorite song of mine from the 80's. It's by Leslie Phillips and it's simply titled Your Kindness. (The quality of the video isn't great, but it was the best I could find).

Don't forget to head over to There Is Grace for today's link-up!

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