the character of god


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THE CHARACTER OF GOD Week Five | September 15, 2019 | Kindness, Goodness, Patience

GETTING RE ADY Before your group meets next time, spend some time alone in God’s Word reading through this week’s texts: Genesis 1:1–4; Genesis 50:20; Nehemiah 9:16–17; Psalm 37:7–9; Psalm 63:3; Psalm 107:1–9; Ephesians 2:7; Romans 2:4; Romans 8:18– 25, 28–29; Titus 3:4–6; James 1:1–4, 17; 2 Peter 3:9. Pray that God, through His Spirit, would bring to life the truth of this text and how it applies to your life.

KEY BIBLICAL TRUTH God’s kindness, goodness, and patience lead us to repentance and follow us all the days of our life.

THEOLOGY APPLIED Because kindness, goodness, and patience are often misunderstood, distorted, or even forgotten in today’s society, the best way to recover them is to see how they are evidenced in the character of God.

MEDITATE “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:22–23).

+ Use this section to prepare your heart and mind for the truths of this week. This section will help to introduce the focus of this week’s lesson.

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Kindness, goodness, and patience are three of the most undervalued virtues today. We would much rather be strong, successful, and productive. Sure, sometimes it helps to “appear” to be a nice person while you are on your way to becoming strong, successful, and productive. And while appearing nice is positive, if you are actually good or kind you’ll get run over in the real world. Or, so we think. Of the three, patience is the one that makes the least sense to us. Our work environment tells us time is money. The beauty industry tells us time is an enemy to fight. Culture tells us youth is more valuable than old age. Unlike other cultures, we seek to remove as much time as possible from the way we cook and the things we eat. Good things don’t come through time, but from beating time. For some, productivity is the new patience. Being productive is not a bad thing at all. But when it defines our lives, it creates impatient, hasty, control freaks. Others confuse passivity with patience. They are slow to act, decide, take responsibility, stop injustice, speak up, etc. Neither productivity nor passivity are fruits of the spirit. Kindness, goodness, and patience are three communicable attributes of God, meaning humans can share these attributes, or image God through them. Since these characteristics have been reduced to superficial appearance or entirely replaced, we should recover them by looking at the way they are expressed in God. We should first rejoice that we are recipients of God’s kindness, goodness, and patience. That joy should compel us to image Him by the transforming power of the Spirit.

Q: Describe the way kindness and goodness are viewed and lived out today. What is and is not considered kind and good? Q: What ideas, expectations, or activities in our everyday lives discourage the cultivation of patience?

U N D E R S TA N D I N G T H E T E X T This week we will study three of God’s attributes—kindness, goodness, and patience. We will learn what they mean and why they are important for us.

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2. GOODNESS 3. PATIENCE

+ This next section will help show what God’s Word says about this week’s particular focus. Read through the Scripture passages and connect the text to this week’s biblical truth.

KINDNESS NEHEMIAH 9:16–17; PSALM 63:3; ROMANS 2:4; EPHESIANS 2:7; TITUS 3:4–6

Q: How do these verses define God’s kindness?

We often confuse niceness for kindness. According to the dictionary, niceness is the quality of being pleasant, friendly, charming, or agreeable. Kindness, however, is being generous, considerate, gentle, tender, thoughtful, having concern, compassion, or care for someone. Niceness is being polite to people. Kindness is caring about people. That means it is entirely possible to be nice to someone without being kind to them. One psychologist points out that kindness is rooted in love, while niceness is rooted in fear. A nice person is often focused on himself, doing things that will make others think he or she is “nice.” A kind person is focused on others, seeking to care for them and put their needs above their own. Being polite to others is a good thing, but we must remember it is kindness, not niceness, that is a fruit of the spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is produced by the Spirit. That means that while niceness is produced by cultural standards of politeness, kindness comes from the Spirit. It is not natural; it is supernatural. When the Spirit takes cold hearts and makes them kind hearts, He causes us to be generously oriented toward other people instead of centered on ourselves. God’s kindness is connected to His love. In fact, the Hebrew word hesed, which occurs over and over in the

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Old Testament, is most commonly translated “lovingkindness,” which keeps these two characteristics together as a compound word. When God makes a covenant with the people of Israel, He makes it on the basis of His lovingkindness. When God keeps His covenant with the people regardless of their faithfulness to Him, He does so on the basis of His lovingkindness (Nehemiah 9:16–17). In Ephesians 2:7 and Titus 3:4–6, we learn that in Christ we experience the height of God’s kindness toward us. In Christ, God was not “nice” to us in the way we commonly think of what it means to be nice. He confronts us in our sin. He isn’t trying to be pleasant, agreeable, or charming. He is interested in saving sinners and reconciling them to Himself. God is interested in having a genuine relationship with us, not just making a good impression on us. It is not “niceness” that God uses to draw us to repentance, it is kindness (Romans 2:4). In fact, no verse captures the contrast between our idea of niceness and God’s idea of kindness better than Psalm 141:5. “Let a righteous man strike me—it is a kindness; let him rebuke me—it is oil for my head; let my head not refuse it.” Kindness may not always be pleasant, but it must always be tender-hearted and loving. A great example of this comes from Rosaria Butterfield’s memoir, Secrets of an Unlikely Convert. Rosaria was a tenured English professor at Syracuse University, a lesbian, and a general hater of Christianity. She tells a story of when she wrote a newspaper article about her impression of Christians—that they were closed-minded, poor thinking, judgmental, and hateful. She received all kinds of hate mail and fan mail from readers and sorted them accordingly in two boxes on her desk. One day, however, she received a letter from a local pastor. “It was the kindest letter of opposition that I had ever received,” she said. In fact, she didn’t know what to do with it. It didn’t fit in the hate-mail box, but it didn’t fit in the fan-mail box either. That’s because it was truly kind, kind the way God is to us. She contacted the pastor and eventually developed a friendship with him and his wife that lead to her conversion. It was their tenderness, consideration, hospitality, and truthfulness that were essential in her journey to faith. God’s kindness to her was expressed by their kindness, and it did indeed lead her to repentance.

Q: Discuss the difference between how niceness and kindness deal with sin. Q: Discuss the difference between how niceness and kindness approach forgiveness.

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GOODNESS GENESIS 1:1–4; GENESIS 50:20; PSALM 107:1–9; ROMANS 8:28–29; JAMES 1:17

Q: According to these verses, how does God express His goodness toward us?

God is good all the time; All the time, God is good. This popular worship song gives us a great framework for thinking about God’s goodness and what it means. The first line gives us a big-picture view of God, and the second line helps us apply that truth to our vantage point. The Bible opens with the account of creation. Right away, we learn that God existed before the world, and He is its Creator. The very next thing we learn about God is that He is good. God created light and saw that it was good. Jen Wilkin writes, “God sees that the light is good, not as an act of recognition, but as a reflection of his own goodness, originating in him and issuing from him. God is the source of all good and is himself wholly good.” In its very first chapter, the Bible tells us that goodness exists because God exists. All good things are real because God is real. Goodness is not just a description of God, it comes from God. God does not get His goodness from an outside source. God is the source of goodness. The psalmist says, “O, give thanks to the Lord for He is good…” (Psalm 107:1). God doesn’t just sometimes do good things when He feels like it. Goodness is true about Him all the time and in all circumstances. That means God’s goodness is infinite. There is no limit to it and no way of exhausting it. Psalm 33:5 says the earth is filled with the goodness of the Lord. Genesis 1 describes a creation saturated with the goodness of God. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Even in our fallen, broken, rebellious world, God’s goodness is still not removed. Matthew 5:45 says God makes the sun to rise on the evil as well as the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. Psalm 145:9 emphasizes the Lord’s goodness to all and His compassion on all He has made. Regardless of who it is, God can’t help but extend His goodness to them because that is just who He is. God’s goodness even to sinners does not mean He doesn’t deal with sin. On the contrary, it is because of His goodness that He does deal with sin, and He does it in the most remarkable way. In Romans 5:7–8, Paul writes,

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“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God’s goodness is manifested in creation, but the place where it is maximally put on display is the cross, where it is directed toward not just the formless and the void, but toward sinners—toward those who are not good. Since God is the source of goodness and is wholly good, everything He does is good. He never does anything that is not good. Ever. This is a really hard truth for us to grasp, partly because we live in a fallen and complicated world, and we have a very finite perspective on reality. We see things that don’t appear to be good, or maybe even appear to be decisively not good. We wonder how a good God could allow such horrible evil in the world, or, more personally, how He could let such hard things happen to us. In the book of Genesis, we read about Joseph, who experienced his fair share of evil things. If anyone had a reason to doubt God’s goodness, it was him. Yet, at the end of his story, he was able to look back and declare that what others meant for evil, God meant for good, and even used it to extend His goodness far beyond Joseph (Genesis 50:20). God’s goodness is not stopped by the evil of others or the misfortune of circumstances. Some have suggested Romans 8:28 is the New Testament version of Genesis 50:20 but giving an even bigger picture in light of Christ. God’s purpose for those who are in Christ is not just to save them, but to conform them into the image of Christ. That purpose is not touched by anything that happens in this life. In fact, Paul tells us that God takes the horrible things that “should” destroy us and uses them to make us more like Christ. What we fear will hinder His purpose turns out only to further it!

Q: Do you struggle to reconcile a belief in God’s goodness with very real suffering in your life or in the world? What specific questions do you have? What truths from the Scripture verses above speak to those questions? Q: Can you share a story of when God furthered His good purposes in your life despite the circumstances? Were you surprised or amazed at the way He did it?

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PATIENCE PSALM 37:7–9; ROMANS 8:18–25; JAMES 1:1–4; 2 PETER 3:9

Q: According to these verses, why is God patient with us? Q: According to these verses, why should we be patient?

An old Dutch proverb states, “A handful of patience is worth more than a bushel of brains.” While this is a pithy saying, it holds quite a bit of truth, especially for us as we study the attributes of God. What use is knowing all the right things about God if we don’t become like Him? Becoming like Him in patience is neither easy nor glamorous. In Scripture, God is always right on time. He is neither hasty, nor is He late. He does not forget about time, nor does He race against the clock. He orchestrates things “in the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4–7), “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14), and makes everything beautiful “in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). When people wanted Jesus to speed things up, He told them His time had not yet come (John 2:1–5; 7:1–8). In our society, we feel the need to race against time, to try to outwit it. But God does His best work not by cheating time, but in working through time. That means that we need to change our perspective on time too. When reading the stories of people in the Bible, have you ever noticed that the points of maximum fruitfulness in their lives are not generally associated with youth but with old age? In our society we think youth is the highpoint of life, and old age equates to degeneration and decreased worth. In Scripture, however, the aging process is associated with glory (Proverbs 16:31), wisdom (Job 12:12), and fruitfulness (Psalm 92:14). The passage of time is not a bad thing, but a good thing. To be sure, we are called to make wise use of the time given to us and not waste it by being immature (Ephesians 5:15–16). Wasting time and immaturity are their own kind of resistance to time. The passage of time is not something to resist, but a tool God uses to grow us and to advance His purpose. Impatience is often fueled by a wrong idea of time, one Scripture doesn’t share. Sometimes we make judgments about God’s actions based on our own ideas of time. We think God is slow to act and interpret that as either forgetfulness, apathy, or even negligence. We assume because He hasn’t done something yet that He is a noshow. 2 Peter 3:9 addresses our tendency to interpret God’s actions and intentions on the basis of our own

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criteria. “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” No, God is not slow, He is patient. He is not passive, He is waiting for something in particular. He is waiting for repentance. God’s delay is not neglect, but mercy. Not only is He patient in general, He is patient toward you. What you interpret as slowness is immensely purposeful. One of the clearest examples of purpose in Jesus’s timing is in the story of Lazarus in John 11. In verse 6, we are told that when Jesus learned Lazarus was ill, He stayed two more days where He was before going to him. This delay seems odd. What’s even more puzzling is that Jesus knew Lazarus had died. Did He intentionally wait around until it was too late? If so, how do we interpret this? Did He just not care, or is He cruel? When Jesus arrived, Lazarus’s sister Mary ran out to Him and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v. 32). Mary was in despair. Had He come earlier, Jesus could have healed Lazarus before death took him. Then, Jesus ordered the stone to be removed from the tomb. Martha, Lazarus’s other sister, made an obvious but valid point. “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (v. 39, emphasis added). By all accounts, it looked like Jesus was too late. But then, Jesus performed a great miracle. Instead of just healing a sick man, He raised a dead man. Jesus did not delay, nor was He too hasty. Every moment was accounted for and was part of God’s greater plan. Jesus’s patience is not passivity. It is fraught with purpose. In Romans 8:18–25, Paul tells us what it means for us to have patience. He connects patience with hope. The need to practice patience means we are experiencing some sort of lack or absence. It means there is something unresolved or unfulfilled. Yet, for the Christian, lack, absence, or unfulfilled longing is not a “not ever,” but a “not yet.” God’s redemptive plan is not over. Christ has come and made it possible for sinners to be reconciled to God. Now we are awaiting the final redemption, when all things will be made new. That means the future awaiting us is something good, not something bad. We are called to wait not with our heads down in defeat, but with the courage that comes from hope. Godly patience is fueled by hope in His promises and in the future that awaits us. While we patiently wait with our gazed fixed on our future hope, James 1:1–4 tells us that God is working in us. We aren’t just passing time. God is using that time to form us into the likeness of Christ. Charles Spurgeon said, “Isn’t it true that in our lives today we have a great need of patience? Most of us are deficient in this excellent grace, and because of it we have missed most privileges, and have wasted many opportunities in which we might have honored God, might have been an outstanding example of Christianity, and might have greatly benefited our own souls. Affliction has been the fire which would have removed our imperfections, but impatience has robbed us of its purification. Impatience is unprofitable, dishonorable, and damaging; it has never brought us reward or any good, and never will.”

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Q: Do you tend to replace patience with productivity or passivity? Or, in which environments do you fall into productivity and in which do you fall into passivity? Q: Today we believe we are entitled to not wait and definitely to not be bored. Discuss the ways you are bombarded with that message today and how it is promoted in our culture, especially by technology.

+ Connect the truths from God’s Word to your daily life. Process how what you’ve learned this week will impact the way you live beyond today and into the future.

Q: What is the kindest thing someone has ever done for you? Does it resemble the kindness of God? Q: How can your community help you not lean on your own understanding but trust in God’s goodness when you are experiencing suffering or bewildering situations? Q: Does the passage of time give you anxiety? How do you try to beat, outwit, resist, or even stop time in your life? Q: How can you embrace the flow of time as a way God works in your life instead of pushing against it through passivity or immaturity or by racing against it? Q: If society bombards us with rhythms and practices that “protect” us from needing to practice patience, what are some counter rhythms and practices you can adopt to help you practice it?

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Q: Based on what we have learned, what does it mean to show kindness, goodness, and patience with others?

+ Use this prayer point to connect your time in prayer to this week’s focus.

God, thank You that You did not leave me as an orphan or as an enemy, but in Your kindness and goodness, You made a way for me to be reconciled to You and adopted by You. Thank You for Your patience with me as You are working to draw me to repentance and transform me into the image of Christ. I pray that You would continually change my cold heart to a kind one. Make me quick to seek the good of others and be patient with them as You are patient with me.

*All exegetical content and commentary resourcing for this lesson was provided by In His Image by Jen Wilkin, Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem, and The Attributes of God by A.W. Pink.

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