Kindness is complicated. It’s a lot different than just being nice because Jesus wasn’t always nice but He was always kind. Being nice is just being pleasant to people, but kindness is treating people better than we think they deserve to be treated. And that isn’t easy when we are angry, sad, in pain, or just plain frustrated. Kindness is going to be really important to understand when we get back to Genesis 18 and 19!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer video versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Of all the ways to be like Jesus, being kind seems like it would be the easiest when actually it can be the most complicated. I suppose the best way to describe it is how people treat us better than we have treated them, or when one person treats us better than everyone else does. There are a lot of ways to be kind, and some of them are very simple, but the truth is that kindness can be very hard when we are angry or hurting or confused. When we were learning about how Sarah and Abraham treated Hagar, neither of them were kind and they wouldn’t even call her by her name—but God called her by her name and made her promises even when everyone else was being hateful to her. We see that a lot in the Bible, where God is kind when others are cruel. Or when God is patient with someone when others want to just get rid of them.

In fact, when we get to Genesis 19 and talk about Sodom and Gomorrah, we will see a lot of kindness and unkindness. Even starting in chapter 18, when Abraham sees three men traveling and who end up in his camp, he is kind to them and gives them a feast and even takes care of them personally. It is in the middle of the afternoon in ancient Israel with no air conditioning and they have been traveling so they would have to be very thirsty and hot and he made sure that they had shade, and milk, and the best food he can provide. He didn’t know who they were until later, but showed them kindness anyway when he could have treated them like unwelcome strangers. That’s a great example of kindness. In the next chapter, two of the men who are actually angels go to the city of Sodom to find out if all the people who are crying out to God because of the unkindness and cruelty of the men of the city are telling the truth. Abraham’s nephew Lot goes out to them and convinces them to stay with him for the night because he knows how cruel and evil the men are and wants to protect them. That’s another great example of kindness. But when the evil men of Sodom try to beat his door down to get at the strangers, Lot puts his own daughters in danger instead of the strangers or himself. That wasn’t kind at all. He was kind and righteous compared to the people of Sodom, but that wasn’t saying much.

But we will see in both situations that God is kind even when we aren’t. God rewards Abraham with a son through his wife Sarah, who hasn’t ever been able to have babies. And God treats Lot with kindness by saving his life and the lives of his daughters even though he was willing to hurt them terribly in order to look like a good host. Even when God destroyed those cities, it wasn’t to be cruel but to put an end to the evil those cities were doing to everyone else. Sometimes, kindness to one person means that another person needs to have consequences. Many years had gone by since God had helped Abraham save the people of Sodom from the four kings who had taken them all as slaves. We would hope that they would have changed their ways but instead they got worse and were hurting everyone who visited the town.

The people in the Bible are very much like us—sometimes we are kind and sometimes we are cruel but God is always kinder than we deserve. Sometimes—a lot actually—when you read through the Bible you will say, “Oh my gosh, God, don’t be kind to that person!!! What are you even thinking about?? Don’t you see the terrible things they have done???” But He doesn’t listen to us, and He is really kind anyway.

But how are we supposed to know when to be kind and how kind to be? That’s super hard. In fact, that’s why this is part of the fruit of the Spirit—because we don’t know on our own and God has to teach us as we become more and more like Jesus. The way we start out, most of us really don’t want to be very kind when we aren’t happy or even when we just have a headache. It’s hard to be kind when we are only thinking about ourselves but that’s how we all start out—only able to think about ourselves. We think about our pain and our sadness and our anger and our feelings without really understanding that everyone else has all of these feelings inside them too. We forget how nice it is when we are feeling mean and someone is kind to us even though we said something nasty to them. And we realize that what we really needed was for someone to not be mean back to us and what a relief it is when they are nice to us instead. I think that’s why we as kids are so mean to our parents sometimes when we are feeling bad, because we know that our parents aren’t going to punch us out when we are mean to them.

Sometimes, being kind gets confused with being nice. A nice person is a person who is pleasant and agreeable but that isn’t always the right thing to be. If one person is bullying a smaller person and you are nice, you aren’t going to deal with the fact that the bigger person is doing something very wrong. Instead, a nice person will try to make everyone feel better so that they can be friends with everyone. A nice person doesn’t want to make enemies and so they will just try to smooth everything over instead of dealing with what is going on. A mean person might come in and beat the snot out of the bully. But what does a kind person do? A kind person makes sure that the bully stops what they are doing in such a way that the bully knows they are wrong, but the kind person also treats the bully better than they are treating the smaller person.

In the Book of I Samuel, chapter 25, we meet a bully named Nabal, a kind woman named Abigail, and a guy named David who is all over the place on how he treats people—sometimes wisely, sometimes as a selfish bully, and you never quite know what he is going to do. David is a man after God’s own heart, which means he was God’s choice for king of Israel, but that doesn’t mean that David has a heart like God’s. David loves God but that doesn’t mean he is like God—sometimes we forget that. But in this story, David has been on the run for years from King Saul—who wants him dead. David makes his living by killing the enemies of Israel and taking their stuff and wherever he is hiding out, he protects the people who own that land and the shepherds who are staying there with their flocks of sheep and goats. That’s what David and the people with him have been doing for Nabal. But when a festival day comes, David sends people to Nabal to ask for some sheep to roast for a party since they have been protecting his three thousand sheep and a thousand goats. At least, I hope he was asking—he did send ten of his fighting men and sometimes it is hard to know for sure.

But the Bible tells us that Nabal was a harsh and evil man—and that Nabal means fool. By the way, that’s generally a clue in the Bible that we are not dealing with a person’s real name because no one would actually name their kid that. The Bible does that a lot when someone is too shameful to be named—like the five kings in Genesis 14 who had the funny names pretty much calling them all evil. Like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. No one would name their kid Sneezy or Dopey—that’s just rude. Those were nicknames. But Nabal was a rich bully and very foolish and he wasn’t the slightest bit grateful to David and his men or even scared of them. He said some nasty things about David and sent the young men back to him. You see, not only wasn’t Nabal kind but he didn’t even qualify as nice! And neither was David because when he found out he told all of the men with him that they were going to slaughter every man in Nabal’s household by morning and he even swore an oath—which was every bit as foolish as what Nabal was doing. Although David had treated the shepherds well in the past, now he was willing to be even more of a bully than Nabal. Nabal was just insulting David, but David was willing to kill innocent people in revenge. Hey! That sounds just like Lamech in Genesis 4, remember?

But God wanted to teach David a lesson in kindness, so He sent Nabal’s wife Abigail to David with a ton of the best food they had to offer—two hundred loaves of bread, two huge jars of wine, five sheep all ready to be roasted, a hundred clusters of raisins still on the vines, and two hundred sweet pressed fig cakes for dessert. Wow! That was obviously what she had been planning to feed her entire household for the feast day but she gave it to David instead. Nabal, her husband, had been unkind to David and his men and David was about to be even more than unkind back but the Bible tells us that Abigail was intelligent so what she did was kindness to both sides—here is what she did:

When Abigail saw David, she quickly got off the donkey and knelt down with her face to the ground and honored David. She knelt at his feet and said, “I am so sorry, my lord, but please let your servant speak to you directly. Please listen to what I have to say. My lord, you should pay no attention to this worthless fool Nabal, because really he lives up to his name: His name means ‘stupid,’ and stupidity is all he knows how to do.I didn’t see the young men whom you sent. Now my lord, as surely as the Lord lives and as you yourself live—it is the Lord who kept you from murder and taking revenge—may your enemies and anyone who wants to hurt you be like Nabal, who is nothing but a fool. Please let this gift I have brought you be given to the young men who follow you. Please forgive everything we have done to offend you, because the Lord is certain to make a lasting dynasty for you because you fight the Lord’s battles. For as long as you live, do not do what is evil. King Saul is hunting you and wants to kill you. But your life is tucked safely away in the place where the Lord your God protects the living, but he is getting rid of your enemies by flinging away their lives like stones from a sling. When the Lord does for you all the good he promised you and appoints you ruler over Israel, you don’t want to feel guilty for taking revenge against all these men for what Nabal did when you know that God will take care of the problem for you. And when the Lord does good things for you, please remember me and do good things for me.” (I Sam 25:23-31)

Wow! And this is why Abigail is one of the wisest people in the whole Bible. Her parents in choosing Nabal as her husband? Not so much! But when she found out the trouble that Nabal’s unkindness had caused, she fought back with so much kindness that David didn’t even know what had hit him. She gave him more than he had asked for and she even apologized for not being there to greet his men even though it wasn’t her fault. But even though she was kind to David, she still talked sense into him by reminding him that he is God’s choice for king of Israel and so he doesn’t have to fight against people like Saul and Nabal—that God will fight those battles for him. Abigail tells David that murdering Nabal and all the men in her household isn’t right or even reasonable and that he will regret it if he does it. She was very smart with how she said it, and very kind and wise about how she handled the situation. If she had just walked up and yelled at him for being prideful and a murderer, probably he would have been angry enough to kill her too but she was kind and so her words worked their way into his heart and he turned around and even though he had sworn an oath to kill all the men in her household, he didn’t do it. In fact, David even thanked her for stopping him from killing everyone. Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons against evil. What would Abigail have done if she was just nice?

Well, maybe she would have gone to her husband Nabal and said, “Oh honey, do you really think it was a good idea to make those soldiers angry? Couldn’t we give them something to eat? I am not saying you were wrong or anything, just that we have a lot of food to spare and they are probably pretty hungry…” and while she was trying to be nice to her husband, David would have marched up and killed everyone. No, with a man like Nabal, being nice doesn’t solve anything. In the Proverbs, it tells us that we have to know when someone who is foolish should be spoken to and when they should be left alone entirely. In Nabal’s case, Abigail knew that it would be foolish to even talk to him about it and that kindness to her household meant going behind his back and taking care of the problem herself.

What if she had just been nice to David and hadn’t told him that murdering a whole household of men just because he got insulted by one guy is really, really evil? Well, David might not have killed her family but he wouldn’t have learned the lesson that God sent her to teach him and the next time it happened he would have just killed someone else instead. God sent Abigail to David to teach him a lesson about trusting Him and not taking matters into his own hands and especially not when he is feeling too emotional to think straight. This wasn’t a war where David was protecting farmers and ranchers from the Philistines or anything, this was just David being ticked off because he got disrespected. David wouldn’t ever be a good king if he didn’t learn from Abigail how to be kind and merciful to the people who weren’t being kind and merciful to him. And we see later that there were a lot of times when David could have lopped off the head of someone who was being nasty to him but he didn’t because of the lesson God taught him through Abigail—who became his wife when her husband died. She was right about everything—God took care of Nabal just like she said He would. David would have murdered all those people for no reason at all. Abigail turned David to kindness on that day, so that he and his men weren’t guilty of murdering innocent people.

What about Jesus? What did Jesus tell us about being kind and how was He kind? Jesus was always kind, even though He wasn’t always nice. Abigail called her husband names when she was talking to David because she knew it was true but also knew that it would help calm David down, but calling her husband a fool to his face wouldn’t have accomplished anything at all. Sometimes, Jesus was harsh with people who were hurting others because they had the power to do a lot of damage and Jesus wanted them to stop. Jesus is different from us because He knows what is actually in people’s hearts and on their minds but we can only guess and usually we get it wrong and call people names just because we are angry and impatient and offended like David. But Jesus proved His kindness through the things He did to help the people who were hurting and by confronting the people who were hurting them. He healed people without blaming them for being sick or injured. He cast demons out of people without telling them it was their fault. He fed people without blaming them for being poor. Jesus did good things for people without embarrassing them for needing help—and we all need help sometimes. It’s hard to get help when people make us feel bad for needing it or when they only help us so that they can look good for doing it. Jesus helped people because they needed help and because that’s what God’s love looks like. Sometimes, He even told them not to tell anyone!

Jesus told His followers that if they were kind then they would care for the sick, get clothes for the people who need them, visit people who are in prison, and take care of the people who have no one to care for them. He said that being kind to those people was the same thing as being kind to Him and not being kind to those people was the same thing as not being kind to Him. But He went even further than that by telling us to pray for the people who do bad things to us and to be kind to them. He told us to be kind by forgiving people. Kindness is always an action word—kind people do kind things. They don’t just think kind thoughts. Kindness means doing whatever is needed for someone who has a need. In the ancient world, kindness meant hospitality. Like when Abraham and Lot took care of the angelic visitors who came to them even though they just seemed like strangers. They treated them like important people and not just like random strangers. That’s what kindness does—it treats people better than they deserve to be treated just because they are made in the image of God.

That’s what Jesus did when He ate meals with the people whom no one else would eat with, or when He touched the people whom no one else would touch, and spoke to the people whom no one else would talk to. Even when Jesus was angry, He was still kind and wanted to turn people around. When He died, it was for everyone He was ever frustrated with or angry at and everyone who ever insulted Him or hurt Him or even killed Him. Without the kindness of Jesus, absolutely everyone who wasn’t a Jew would still be worshipping idols. Jesus changed everything with His kindness, which is His Father’s kindness toward us. Jesus could have just saved the Jewish people—His family—but that wasn’t enough because He is too kind and loving to stop there. Jesus died so that everyone could be saved, no matter who they are and what they have done. No matter who you are and what you have done too. And not just to save us but to change us and heal us and help us in every way.

Jesus takes gang leaders and drug dealers and makes them into preachers and teachers and missionaries. Jesus takes murderers and makes them into the gentlest of people. Jesus can change anyone into anything because there is nothing that His Holy Spirit can’t do in the heart of someone who is willing to change. And God is really persuasive when He wants to change us into someone entirely different. The Bible is full of people who did great things only because of the kindness of God or who are alive only because of the kindness of God. God has been proving His kindness since the beginning when He didn’t kill the man and the woman in the Garden on the spot but just kept them away from the Tree of Life, and even gave them clothing as a gift. God was kind when He didn’t kill Cain, but protected him instead. God was very kind when He saved the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt along with everyone else who listened to the warnings of Moses and did what he told them to do. Our God is a god of kindness, even when He has to hold us responsible for the bad things we sometimes do—that’s what He told Moses when Moses asked to see Him. Because He is kind, He gives us a lot of chances to get our act together—way more than we wish He would when it is someone else doing the bad stuff. But because we can trust Him to be kind to our enemies, it means that we can also trust Him to be kind to us. If God was as mean as a lot of people make Him out to be then none of us would still be here and the human race would have been gone a long time ago because we are really annoying.

Kindness is one of God’s secret weapons. And a lot of people are scared that if they are kind that people will just walk all over them and hurt them—because we don’t trust that God knows what He is talking about. We have to always treat people better than they deserve to be treated—the way we would want to be treated. Kindness can look like a lot of things. Kindness can mean sending a murderer to jail so that they can’t hurt anyone else but making sure that they are treated fairly while they are there. Kindness can mean forgiving someone who is starving for stealing a loaf of bread and making sure that they get the help they need so that they can stop stealing. Kindness means getting people the help they need when we can. Kindness is standing up to bullies without becoming bullies ourselves. Kindness means winning over people with God’s love instead of getting revenge. Kindness is always about showing people how different God is from everyone else.

There are many people out there who want to get their own way and do whatever they want to do however they want to do it no matter who gets hurt, and sometimes they do that while saying that they are really serving God. But God never acts that way even though He can and there isn’t anything we can do about it. Really knowing and serving God is about becoming kinder and not meaner. Meaner means that we are heading in the wrong direction and we need to turn around. It means that we are following the wrong sort of god because our God fights evil through being kind.

It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to us, right? But what about people who are just plain nasty? Jesus said that anyone can be kind to the people who are kind to them—even the worst of sinners can manage that. And so we can’t go patting ourselves on the back when we are kind to the people who aren’t giving us any reason not to be. It’s easy to pray for the people we love, and hard to pray for people we hate. And not those nasty prayers we want to pray, “Oh Lord, make that dude suffer, please.” That isn’t praying for someone—it’s praying against them. It’s perfectly alright to pray that they stop hurting people—in fact, that’s a great prayer because God doesn’t want them hurting people any more than you do. But an even better prayer is that our enemies come to know and love Jesus so that He can change them from people who do things that are terrible into people who do things that are wonderful. That’s what Jesus was talking about when He told us to bless our enemies and not curse them—to make sure they are always in our prayers and so if we ever get a chance to hurt them, we won’t do it. And when they need help, we will be willing to do that instead. Just like Jesus does for us.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to know that being kind isn’t easy, but God will always teach kindness to the people who want to learn it.

Well, whenever someone says goodness is how to be like Jesus, it makes me want to say, “Well, duh…” but what does goodness even mean? It means so many different things in English that it makes your head spin. This week we will talk about what “goodness” means in the Bible and how the Holy Spirit works in us to get us closer and closer to being good.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions.

Goodness is a confusing word in English—I mean, what exactly does it mean? Is it the opposite of badness? How can we be good when Jesus said that only God is good? And how is it different from the other ways that we are supposed to be like Jesus? Is self-control goodness? How about gentleness and faithfulness and kindness? Goodness seems so vague that we aren’t really sure what to make of it. Adults tell kids to “be good” or “on your best behavior” when relatives come to visit or at the store or school or whatever. But what does all that have to do with Jesus? How was Jesus good as opposed to being somehow bad? What did the word mean when Paul used it and how would the Galatians have understood it? What did it mean to the Jews whom Jesus was preaching to when He said that no one is good except God? What does good mean to us now? Out of all of the fruit of the Spirit, goodness is definitely the most confusing.

Good grades. Good hair. Good dog. Good Morning. Good news. Good enough. Good grief. Good is a word that can mean so many different things in English. But when we are told that the Holy Spirit will teach us and change us to make us “good” it’s sort of like hearing that we’re expecting good weather during a drought. Does that mean sunshine or rain? Which one is good? Does good simply mean nice enough to go out and have a picnic at the park or does good mean that rain will fall and the plants won’t die? And what does it mean if we are being good? Does it mean that we are just behaving ourselves or that we are doing things that are actually good and helping others? Paul was talking to a bunch of grownups when he said this, and so we have to take that into account too. In fact, Paul was talking to a group of people who weren’t being allowed to sit and eat at the same table with other people. There was an in-group and an out-group and these people were on the outside and not allowed to sit with the in-crowd because they weren’t considered to be good enough. Unless they did a certain thing, they weren’t considered to really be fully a part of God’s family. Paul was telling them that the thing they were being asked to do wasn’t really a sign of belonging to God’s family at all. Let me tell you a story of something that happened to me this week that made me very sad.

I know someone whom I like very much. Recently, he changed denominations—which means he is going to a new church now, which is fine. He was asking me some questions and at one point he told me that unless I also go to his church, that I am not fully a member of the family of God with him. I was very surprised. That’s the same exact problem that Paul was dealing with, when one group wouldn’t have anything to do with another group unless they did a certain thing. And it wasn’t like that thing was believing Jesus or worshiping God. But, do we get to decide who belongs in the family of God and who doesn’t just because they aren’t doing a certain thing that is important to us? Paul said no—he said that the Holy Spirit would make the people who belong in the family of God to be more and more like Jesus. That’s how we know. We look at who people were before they believed and we watch God change them for good. If only God is good, like Jesus said, then as we keep following and believing Him, we will never be entirely perfect but we will get closer and closer to being good and further and further away from being bad. And that’s because the word that Paul used that we call good actually meant excellent.

To be excellent is much different than simply being “good” and behaving ourselves. To be excellent means that whatever we are doing, we do the very best we can. That doesn’t mean that everyone is going to get straight A’s in school because sometimes, a person’s best is B’s or C’s. Just like not everyone is going to get an A in Gym class or get chosen for the choir or to have a role in the dance recital. Goodness, or excellence, means that we are determined to be the best we can be in those things that God has given us to do. It means that we aren’t out there setting a bad example by being lazy or treating people badly when we know very well how to treat them well. Imagine if Jesus had only made enough bread and fishes for half the people who were listening to Him preach—that would be so mean! There would have been a riot when the people who didn’t get fed found out about it. Jesus could make enough bread for them all so He did. Imagine if that poor man with all the demons only got half of them chucked out of him! So he still had to live in the graveyard hurting himself and others! What would be the point of getting rid of any of the demons at all? What if Jesus only healed one of the legs of the paralyzed man?

Of course, Jesus could do it all and so He did. Jesus was always excellent. He preached the best sermons anyone had ever heard. He prayed the best prayers. He gave the best answers and asked the best questions. Of course, let’s be honest; He had a huge advantage over us, right? But that doesn’t mean that Jesus couldn’t have decided to just do a little bit for us when He could do a lot. Jesus was often very sad when He saw how much people were suffering, and so He helped the people who were in front of Him when they came to Him. Jesus was very generous with His power to heal and feed and teach. That’s another definition of goodness—to be generous. Being generous means that you share what you have with others and don’t keep it all to yourself. God made me to be really smart with books but a terrible dancer—you just have no idea how bad. He made it so that I love history and the Bible. And then about ten years ago, He gave me the gift to teach people. And then He told me to teach you. But what if I just read my books and enjoyed learning but didn’t share that with anyone? What if I just used what I know to make people feel bad? I’d be showing the opposite of goodness, that’s for sure. All of that is what God gave me and so I give that away to you. It doesn’t mean that I know everything or that I am the best teacher in the world—not by a long shot. But I work hard and study because I want to be excellent in this. I can’t be an excellent dancer and I can’t play musical instruments or read sheet music, and I am so bad at sports that it’s just sad. Even trying would be a waste of my time. But I can become more and more excellent, or good, at what God created me to do. The Holy Spirit helps me with that.

Have you ever wondered how the Holy Spirit works to make us less bad and more good? The Bible says that we are God’s images. All of us. Every human being in the world is created as God’s image. Not animals—just people. All people. In the ancient world of Abraham and even later with Jesus, an image was usually an idol. Someone would make a carving or a mold of something that made them think of their gods and goddesses and then they would perform a ceremony with a knife (I don’t know why they used a knife) and they would touch it to the mouth of the idol and they believed that the spirit of the god would go into the idol—which would turn the idol into a real representative for that god. Because before that, they knew it was just a worthless chunk of clay, rock, wood, or metal. That’s what an image of a fake god or goddess is—something dead that they believed had part of the god or goddess living inside it that they could talk to, worship, feed, take to the bathroom, dress up in fancy clothes, and put to bed at night.

When Moses taught the children of Israel in the wilderness about how our God is different, he used the same exact words to describe how we are the real images of God. That He made us like Him in how we think and in a lot of what we can do. We aren’t God, but we are living, breathing reminders of God throughout the whole world. That’s why Genesis 2 says that God made man out of clay and breathed into him—because that was something they could all understand. They understood that unlike the gods and goddesses of the other nations who were just rocks and wood and clay and metal who couldn’t think, talk, hear, or walk because there was no life at all in them, that we are different. We are made by God and He did put part of Himself in us. Not so that we can be worshiped but so that we could show the world how wise and wonderful He is. He did it so that we could be excellent and rule over all of the things He has created like He would if He were us. That’s how it should have worked but the whole Bible reminds us that it never did. We are always being bad, and sometimes as bad as possible, instead of allowing God to make us excellent in ways that tell creation the truth about who He is and what He is like.

Now, even better than being created as His images is what happens when we believe that Jesus is Lord and we give ourselves over to Him forever. That’s when we receive a special gift—the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit moves in, bad stuff has to start moving out so that goodness can take over more and more. Of course, the bad stuff doesn’t just leave right away because with some of us there would be nothing left. The Holy Spirit works inside us to teach us and to help us want to get rid of the bad and to become better and better so we can be filled with more and more goodness. Somedays, I feel so surly that I am surprised the Holy Spirit doesn’t just move right out but as God is patient and gentle, so is the Spirit. The Spirit can’t be anything that God isn’t, which means that we don’t have to worry about the Spirit hurting us or changing us in ways that will hurt us. Sometimes the Spirit asks us to give up things that are very difficult to give up—like if we hate someone or don’t want to forgive someone we are really angry at. You know, sometimes hating people can make us feel like we are safe from them hurting us ever again but all it really does is make us miserable. But I can promise you that every change the Holy Spirit wants to make in you is a change that will make your life a whole lot better.

I guess we can say that the Holy Spirit is sort of like a balloon that gets bigger and bigger. Inside the balloon is goodness and as we learn to trust God more and more, the balloon gets bigger. That’s going to leave less and less room for the bad stuff that God wants to get rid of. I probably shouldn’t tell you this but before I knew Jesus, I was swearing and cussing all the time. The really, really bad words, even. Then two weeks after I gave my life to Jesus, someone at work noticed that I had stopped swearing. I hadn’t even noticed! That’s what we call a wonder—proof that God is real and working in our lives even if we can’t see Him. There was no reason why I would have ever stopped swearing because I didn’t think anything was wrong with it. I never even tried—just all of a sudden I stopped because I had a Holy Spirit balloon beginning to grow in me and that’s the first thing God wanted gone, I suppose. But it was only the first. I have been a Christian for twenty-five years now and the Holy Spirit has pushed out so much bad stuff that I can’t even hardly remember what I used to be like. That’s probably a good thing. I wasn’t totally bad or anything, but God wants me to be good and so He keeps working on me to make me better even if I never will be totally perfect.

The idols of all the fake gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk—but we can. Of course, their gods couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste, talk, breathe or walk either so I guess stone and metal and wood and clay did a pretty good job of representing them! But our God is real and created everything—if something is going to represent Him it needs to be able hear Him and talk about Him. Only humans can do that, and it’s why He made us different from the animals. Only humans can teach others about God and show them what He is like. Of course, there is one perfect image of God and that’s Jesus. Not only can Jesus teach about God but He can do it perfectly. Not like me because I get stuff wrong. I haven’t been with God forever. I didn’t create the world with Him. I can’t hear God whenever I want to and I haven’t ever seen Him. But Jesus has. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the one and only perfect image of God, who we can’t see. But Jesus could be seen and when He did things, people were seeing what God would do and what was important to God and how loving, and kind and amazing He is. When He talked, it was God talking. Wouldn’t it be great if we could be like that too and we wouldn’t ever be mean or wrong?

Jesus told a story once about God’s goodness—how generous and kind He is and how angry that can make people:

The way things are in God’s Kingdom is like a landowner who went out very early one morning to hire people to work in his vineyard where his grapes were ready to be harvested. He told the men standing around that he would give them a denarius (which was a fair wage for a day’s work), and he sent them to work picking grapes for the day. He went back three hours later and found some people just standing around with nothing to do and so he told them that he would hire them too and pay them fair wages. He went again at lunchtime and late in the afternoon and gave jobs to everyone he found standing around. When it was almost quitting time, he found even more people and asked them why they weren’t doing anything and they said it was because no one had given them any work to do. So he gave them jobs too.

When the sun was beginning to go down, very late in the day, he told the man who managed his fields to bring to workers to him—starting with the people he hired when it was almost time to go home for the night. Everyone was surprised when the landowner gave them pay for an entire day’s work! The landowner was a very generous man, paying them that much money when they had hardly worked at all. And the people who had been hired very early in the morning, when they heard about it—boy oh boy did they get excited. “If that is what he gave those slackers who hardly did anything, just think of how much money we’re going to get!” they said to one another. But when they came to the landowner, he paid them exactly the same amount as the people who had only worked an hour. And boy were they angry about it and started complaining!

“What the heck is going on here? We worked our butts off all day long in the hot sun and we’re getting the same amount as those guys who only worked an hour? This isn’t fair!” But the landowner was very kind and replied, “My friend, I haven’t hurt you. I paid you exactly the amount I said I would and you agreed it was fair at the time. Take your pay and go home. I really wanted to give these other guys the same amount of money as you got—and the money is mine so shouldn’t I be able to do with it whatever I want to? Are you jealous of them because I was kind and generous to them?”

That’s a really good story that shows us how good God is. If that had happened in real life, those men wouldn’t have had enough money to feed their families that day if they had only gotten paid for an hours’ worth of work. We don’t know why they hadn’t been hired or what they were doing all day and all the landowner cared about was making sure they got paid what they needed to survive. And that’s what God’s goodness is like. He is just as concerned with the person who became a Christian today as He is with the person who has been a Christian for fifty years. And they will both get the same reward when they die—they will live forever. When Jesus was talking to the thief on the cross beside him, and that thief asked Jesus to remember him when He became King, Jesus told the man—even though he was a criminal—that he would be with him forever in paradise. Some people don’t like that—it’s the bad inside us that wants to be jealous and mean. But goodness wants for everyone to be saved and to be changed to be more like Jesus. Just think of what would happen if everyone in the world who does bad just keeps doing bad and no one ever changes? I suppose the world would be like it was before the flood when everyone was just evil all the time and no one was safe. But that isn’t a good world—that’s a terrible world. We shouldn’t ever want Satan to win, and that’s what happens when people who do terrible things never change. Just think of how angry it makes Satan when one of his favorite bad guys totally changes into a good guy! Yikes! It’s like someone came into his house and robbed him! We can imagine a world where Hitler changed before so many people were killed. Wouldn’t that have been better? Satan really won big time with Hitler. I hope they enjoy each other’s company.

Goodness is always a challenge that never ends—whether it means being generous, or being excellent in what we are doing to serve God, or in being less and less bad all the time. Jesus was once called, “Good teacher,” and He said, “Why are you calling me good? No one is good except for God!” Does that mean that Jesus was disagreeing with the man, that he wasn’t really good? Not at all. Jesus knew that the man was about to ask Him a question that went something like this, “What do I have to do to be good enough to have eternal life?” Jesus knew that “good enough” is not what we should ever be aiming for in our lives because when we reach “good enough” we don’t have to continue to be better anymore. Jesus wasn’t saying that we can never be good enough to make God happy, but that there is no such thing as good enough except for God. If God is changing us, we will always be getting better. Good enough for that thief next to Jesus on the Cross meant seeing that Jesus really was the King of the Jews and God’s unique Messiah. He was dying and so he wasn’t ever going to be any better than he was. If he had lived longer, then he would have become even better than that. He would have developed more goodness as his Holy Spirit balloon got bigger and bigger inside him.

God never stops changing us, not ever. Sometimes, there are a lot of changes. Over the last two months, God has majorly changed me three times. I mean, like, dang. I have more goodness in me and less badness but that badness surprised me when I finally saw it! Yikes! And then sometimes a lot of time goes by and things seem to stay the same but probably God is letting me rest and get used to my new normal before He starts finding new badness to get rid of. And sometimes my badness fights back and doesn’t want to go and I get all stressed out and start playing video games all day. That’s how I always know that God is trying to fix something—I get really irritated and start avoiding Him. Aren’t people just funny like that? It’s like I can tell He wants to fix something but I have no idea what it is and not knowing is the worst thing about it so I just go and hide. Maybe you think that Bible teachers aren’t just like regular people and that we don’t do silly, ridiculous things when God wants to change us but I can tell you for sure that we aren’t any more reasonable than anyone else is. We’re all pretty much the same. So you don’t have to be perfect—you just have to let God make you more good than you are right now.

I love you. I am praying for you. Goodness isn’t something we will ever get right but we can get a whole lot better. Better is what God wants. He wants it for us and He wants it for everyone around us too.

What faithfulness means to us today and what the Greek word pistis meant to Paul are sort of the same but also very different. Fortunately, what Paul meant will teach us how much we can trust Jesus and how we want to become people who can be trusted by Jesus.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week is from the MTV, which is the Miss Tyler Version, which tweaks the CSB in order to be more understandable to kids.

If I am telling you that Jesus is faithful—what does that even mean? In modern society, faithfulness means that if you have a husband or a wife or a serious girlfriend or boyfriend—that you can’t have another. That’s what being faithful means to us and that is a good word and a great thing to do. But is that what the apostle Paul was telling us? In ancient times, what we call being faithful in your marriage was actually part of self-control instead. That was one of the main definitions, and some types of philosophers preached it as being very important—while others didn’t care nearly as much. Philosophers were men who thought deep thoughts about the world and how it works in ways we can and can’t see, and how people should behave and treat one another, and what does and doesn’t make sense. And they usually taught rich kids how to think about the world, but they would also speak in public to big crowds. There was no television and most people couldn’t read and there were no bookstores anyway, so they were very interesting to listen to. They would debate each other in public to show how smart and wise they were. But they weren’t generally very nice about it!

Paul used a word, pistis, that we translate as faithfulness in English Bibles because there is no English word that means exactly the same thing. I want you to think about a big army with privates, sergeants, colonels and generals. That army needs generals who know how to win their battles, okay? So that they can win the war they are fighting. But the truth is that they can do all the planning in the world, but it won’t mean anything unless they can trust the colonels to honestly give the right orders to the sergeants, and to be able to answer any questions the sergeants have. And that colonel has to trust the sergeant to tell the privates what they need to do. And the sergeant has to be able to trust the privates to follow orders. But that isn’t all. The privates have to trust the sergeants, colonels, and generals to know what they are doing so that they can obey orders. A good army has a bunch of people who trust and who can be trusted. A bad army is one where no one trusts anyone. Pistis means that kind of trust and also being trustworthy. And we have no word for that in English—it took me an entire paragraph to explain.

And so, when Paul was telling the people in Galatia about how the Holy Spirit trains us to be more like Jesus, that’s the word he used. Faithfulness, which we see in our bibles, is a kind of pistis and a part of pistis, but it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what pistis means. Translation from one language to another can be very difficult that way. If you only have one word, faithfulness is probably the best because a faithful person is very trustworthy but that isn’t enough because trusting God is the most important thing the Spirit teaches us. We can have self-control and be gentle like Jesus even if we don’t trust God, but it makes it really hard to obey Him when He asks us to do something difficult. We have to learn that He is worthy of being trusted—that isn’t just something we can decide to believe. So, if you don’t always trust God, that’s okay. You aren’t evil or malfunctioning. You are a normal human who has to figure out through experience that God isn’t out to get you but wants to save you. That comes in time. He really does understand.

Our best bet in learning to trust God is by being so familiar with who Jesus is and what He does and doesn’t do that we begin to see that Jesus showed us exactly what God is and isn’t like. Everyone else in the Bible was less than Jesus—way less than. Abraham didn’t trust God to save his life—twice—and so he lied and put his wife Sarah into terrible danger. Moses didn’t trust God enough to go to Pharaoh and so God had to send his brother Aaron to do the talking for him. And they aren’t the only ones—the Bible is full of people who didn’t trust God enough to do what was right and it is the same today. People still want to lie instead of trusting God. But I am going to tell you a secret. God works best when we are honest and there are only a few times when lying is a good idea. If you have ever watched movies about the Underground Railroad here in America or about Nazi Germany, then you have seen people who lied in order to protect people who were innocent from slavery and from dying. The Bible commandment about lying tells us not to lie against others in such a way that would hurt them. But when Rahab lied to protect the spies from being killed, she was rewarded because she trusted God and she was even one of the grandmothers of David and Jesus!

So, one of the most important things we can do is to learn all about Jesus because only Jesus can truly teach us about God the Father. Anyone else you listen to, including me, is going to get some things wrong. And let me tell you that Jesus loved and trusted His Father absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it was always easy to obey. In fact, on the night of the Passover, Jesus was having a hard time getting Himself ready to do what needed to be done to save us. Does that surprise you? A lot of times, we forget that Jesus laughed and cried and had all of our emotions—He just didn’t do terrible things when He had them like we do sometimes. But that night, He was so anxious and terrified that he was begging God to find another way to save us. Even though it was their plan, together, Jesus was the one who had to be arrested, humiliated, beaten, whipped, and crucified to death. If Jesus hadn’t been upset, then He wouldn’t have been human—and even though Jesus is also God, He was still totally human. That means He felt all the things we feel, and it means that when we are worried or scared or sad, that we aren’t alone.

Have you ever had something really sad happen to you? Did people try to comfort you and make you feel better? In some ways and for some things, we can feel better but with others there is just nothing to do but be sad and angry and to accept that those emotions are huge—too big for us to handle. And what’s worse is that no one else can really understand because even if they can hug us on the outside, we still have so much going on inside that no one can see or make any better. That’s one of the reasons that Jesus came here to be with us, live with us, live like us as one of us, and to feel everything we feel—so that when we don’t have anyone in the world who can understand because they can’t see or hear what we are thinking—He can. When we can’t describe how we are feeling to other people, He already knows. So we are never really all alone even when the people around us don’t understand. And when someone understands everything that is going on inside us and still loves us, we know that we can absolutely trust them. Jesus is the only person who can do that—and Jesus trusted God absolutely and so we can too.

Jesus had been telling His disciples for weeks that He was going to be turned over to the Romans to be killed like a criminal, even though He was innocent. But they just weren’t really understanding Him. Maybe it was because He taught them so many times in parables and riddles, and they were too embarrassed to ask questions. Maybe they didn’t want to know that He was serious. After all, they had been trusting Him all this time—following Him everywhere, even leaving their families and their jobs. They believed that He was going to be the next King of the Jews—like King David but only better because they wanted rescued from the Romans who were very cruel and greedy. They believed it because of everything that He could do and they knew that the only way Jesus could do those things was if God was with Him, just like He was with the greatest prophets of the Bible like Elijah and Elisha. They knew that big things were ahead and they trusted Jesus—usually. When they got scared, sometimes they stopped trusting Him. You know, just like we do. But Jesus kept proving to them that He was trustworthy. He didn’t hurt people and He didn’t steal from them like the powerful people did. He healed them and gave them food to eat. He kicked demons to the curb and worked so many miracles that when they saw Moses and Elijah come to prepare Jesus for His death, that they probably thought he was being anointed as King of the Jews at last, and they would be His councilors and generals—big, powerful people in the Kingdom of Heaven. When He told them things like, “The chief priests are going to turn me over to the Romans and they are going to kill me,” that just didn’t make any sense to them. It just wasn’t possible. That would put them in danger, and they wouldn’t get to be mighty men in the new Kingdom. They were confused, but they also knew that Jesus was the real deal—working miracles and doing battle against demons and winning every time. They hadn’t learned yet that it is okay to be confused, but that God is still trustworthy. God is like that general I told you about at the beginning of this lesson—the one everyone has to learn to trust and believe that He knows exactly what He is doing even when everything looks wrong. People mess up but God never does.

So, in the middle of the night, after their Passover meal, Jesus and His followers went to a place at Gethsemane where there was an olive orchard and a cave that they sometimes stayed the night in when it wasn’t olive harvesting season. They were all very sleepy because they had been eating meat and drinking wine—which wasn’t what they usually had to eat. And they hadn’t gone to sleep yet. They were probably about to drop. While the others wrapped themselves in their cloaks and went into the cave (it can get really cold outside at night during the Passover season), Jesus asked Peter, James and John to stay up and pray with Him. Jesus knew what was about to happen and He didn’t want to go through all of that, and especially not alone. He went a short distance away from them and began praying to God and asking Him to find another way. Jesus knew that it was going to be a terrible thing, and incredibly painful and humiliating. He knew that all of the young men following Him would run away and leave Him to deal with it alone. Only God would be with Him, and some of the women who also were His disciples. His mom would be there but I bet He didn’t really want her to see what was about to happen. Jesus trusted that this had to happen but He asked if there was another way to do this. It was just too terrible. Jesus knew that it would work, and that we would all be saved from our sins and that we wouldn’t stay dead forever, but it was a horrible thing to have to go through. He wanted to save us, but no one would ever want to be crucified.

Three times, Jesus prayed and begged His Father to find another way, but finally He said, “if this is the only way it can be done, then I trust you and I will do it.” That’s a lot of trust. Even though God will never ask us to save everyone in the world, we do know that when He does ask us to do something that it is needed and necessary. And it can be scary. The overwhelming majority of things God will ask us to do aren’t even remotely dangerous—they just scare us. And that feeling of being scared never entirely goes away because we still have our emotions and we are very often scared that God isn’t actually asking us to do it at all! That can be really hard, learning to hear God’s voice while still knowing that we aren’t always right about what we think He is saying. Many people in the world have done terrible things and believed God told them to do it. That’s why it is so important to know Jesus and what He would and wouldn’t do. If you see someone treating people badly or hurting them, then you can look and see that Jesus healed people and fed them and taught them and showed them mercy. He never turned into a rage monster—He had total self-control. That’s why we learn about what it takes to be like Jesus so we can spot the people who want to fool us into thinking that being cruel is okay.

When Paul wrote the list of how you can tell if a person is following Jesus or not, He was speaking from experience. He knew exactly what it was like to be so sure that He was right that He was willing to hurt the people who followed Jesus. He believed that He trusted God, but he didn’t really know Him as well as he thought. He believed that God wanted him going all over the land of Israel and even outside of Israel to places like Damascus, to arrest the people who believed that Jesus is the Messiah and God’s one unique Son. He even found Himself part of an angry mob that killed a man named Stephen, just because he said he had a vision of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God. That made them so furious that they killed him and they believed with all their hearts that they were obeying God. But what they were doing was based on anger and not on love. When Paul later became a believer, he called himself a murderer because he knew he had been wrong even though he was sure that he was right at the time.

When we trust God, we know that if He really wants us to do something that He will let us know and if we still aren’t sure then He will help us. But we have to know what He does and doesn’t expect from us. That’s the thing that is hardest. Paul knew that better than anyone, and when God changed His heart, He had to become a different kind of person even though He was still worshiping the same God. Paul wasn’t wrong about everything and He didn’t have to get himself a different religion, but He did have to learn that the hatred and anger he had grown up with as part of a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire, wasn’t going to work in God’s Kingdom. Paul had been an important man. He was a genius—incredibly smart and determined and hard working. He knew the Bible backward and forwards and he had one of the greatest teachers in all of Israel. He had huge parts of the Bible memorized because there was no way to carry one with him. He probably knew it in Hebrew and in Greek and in Aramaic. Of course, all he had was what Christians call the Old Testament because nothing about Jesus was written down yet. And the Bible was originally in Hebrew but it was translated to Greek about two hundred years before Paul was born and they also had Aramaic versions in the synagogues because most people in Israel understood that better.

Isn’t it crazy that Paul was a Bible expert but didn’t see anything wrong with what He was doing? And that He thought trusting God meant going and hunting people down? And how much can we trust God knowing that although He could have killed Paul, He loved him and changed his mind about Jesus instead. Knowing the Bible isn’t enough. We have to know God, know Jesus, and know what they are really like or we can make the Bible mean whatever we want it to mean. Which lets us do whatever terrible things we want to do. The Bible is a rescue story, and when we don’t understand that, we will do things that make it harder for God to rescue people. But Jesus knew all of that—it was their plan from the very beginning to rescue us. So, if we are doing anything that makes people want to run away from God, then we aren’t being like Jesus at all. Paul believed that He was serving God and that He was doing everything right. And I’ve done things like that too. Nobody ended up dead, but I know I have made it hard for people to trust God when I am not trustworthy and when I make God look like someone who couldn’t ever love them.

Jesus even told one of His stories, a parable, about a father being able to trust his children near the end of Matthew 21 when the chief priests (the guys who ran the Temple) were demanding to know why He was doing what He was doing and saying what He was saying.

Tell me what you think! A man had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go work in the yard today.’ And the son answered, ‘I don’t want to, I am beta testing the new Call of Duty game and we’ve got a huge boss battle that will take all day’ but later he felt sorry and changed his mind and did the yardwork. Then the man went to his other son and said the same thing. ‘Yep, I’ll go do that right now, sir,’ he answered, but he got busy playing video games and didn’t go. Which of the two was trustworthy and did what their father wanted?” They said, “The first one.” Jesus said to them, “You know, all the people you look down on because of how they are living now will be part of the Kingdom of God before you will. When John the Baptist came and told everyone that they had to clean up their act, all those people you look down on were waiting in line to be baptized and believed him—while all of you didn’t.”

Jesus was telling the highest of the priests that they weren’t trustworthy because they were telling God that they would serve Him and be faithful but they really weren’t. But all the people whom they looked down on as the worst of sinners and traitors and rebels because they weren’t living right?–When they heard John, they began to be different because they believed God. But Jesus? He is way greater than John, and the chief priests didn’t believe either one of them, or the miracles, or anything that was happening. They lived at a time when there hadn’t been a real king of God’s choice in a long time, and so the priests were running most of the country and getting very rich doing it. They had to keep the Romans happy and so when they had a choice between obeying God and obeying the Romans—they did whatever the Romans wanted them to do. They knew they could be replaced, and so they were doing whatever they had to do so they could stay in power and keep making money off of the people who came to visit the Temple. They were trying to serve two masters—God and the Roman Government. They went through the motions pretending to serve God by running the Temple and making sure the ceremonies happened like they were supposed to, but in their hearts what they wanted was the power and money and for that, they had to do what Rome wanted them to do. They were more afraid of the Roman Emperor and Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas than they were of God. And so, they could do all the sacrifices and ceremonies all they wanted but Jesus was telling them that God didn’t trust them at all because they weren’t doing what they said they were doing, and what they were doing, they were doing for the Romans and not for God. They weren’t faithful.

It’s strange isn’t it? What we are saying we are doing isn’t always what we are really doing, and the people who say they are going to do something don’t always do it while some people who seem like they will never do the right thing end up doing it after all. So, we can’t ever trust people based on what they say about themselves. Mostly, the people who go around telling other people how awesome they are, are fooling themselves. People who are really awesome don’t need to go around telling it to everyone. People do figure out who they can depend on after a while. Who says they will help and then helps? Who says they will help and then just never shows up when they are needed? One thing for sure about Jesus—if He said He was going to do something then He did it. He didn’t go around making empty promises that He didn’t keep. He said what He meant and meant what He said. He isn’t waiting across the street watching us through binoculars waiting for us to screw things up. We can trust Him. We can trust Him when we are doing things right and we can also trust Him when we are on the wrong track. The Bible is full of people doing things wrong who could still trust God to keep His promises. Just because they weren’t trustworthy and faithful, doesn’t mean that God acted the same way.

And it isn’t until we understand how much we can trust God that we can really start to be trustworthy in what He asks us to do. The chief priests went out and did their jobs in the Temple everyday but that didn’t mean anything. God wanted more from them. He wanted them to love people the way He loves people—the way He loves me and the way He loves you.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I want you to begin to learn more and more about Jesus so you can see what God is like and how much you can trust Him to keep every promise.

Mercy is a huge thing in the Bible and so we would expect Jesus to not only teach about the importance of being merciful but also that He would be merciful. Mercy is a big step up from showing self-control. To show how mercy works, we’re going to look at one of the funniest parables about the Ungrateful Servant. It doesn’t seem funny at first, but believe me, it’s really hilarious once you stop to think about what is going on and how crazy the situation is.

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Bible verses are taken from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the Christian Standard Bible tweaked to make the content and the context more understandable to kids.

Last time, we talked about Jesus’s self-control which not only means what He did do but what He could have done but didn’t. He could have done anything He wanted, including kill people. After all, it’s easier to kill people than raise them from the dead, right? And He raised a few people from the dead—including Himself so killing everyone who irritated Him with the snap of His fingers would have been—a snap. But Jesus isn’t Thanos—Jesus came to be an actual Savior and not a fake one. That required a lot of self-control. I can think of times in my life where I might have used that kind of power to kill people who don’t use their turn signals on the freeway. That’s just one difference between me and Jesus but if you stick around, there are enough to fill a thousand books.

Something very much related to self-control is another one of Jesus’s character traits. A trait is something that you notice from someone all the time. It doesn’t change in that person and not everyone acts like that. Last week, we talked about when Jesus went up on the Temple Mount, saw what was going on, went back to the home of Lazarus, Martha, and Mary for the night, and after thinking about it all night, went back and forced all the people making a ruckus by buying and selling animals and money for the tax and all that to close up shop and go somewhere else to do their business. People were there to pray and worship and listen to the singing of the Levites. Some Jews had to travel up to a month or more just to get there and then had to do the same to go back home. And there were also Gentiles who had traveled long distances to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What kind of an example was this to them? Or to the Roman soldiers watching everything from the Fortress Antonia when the Temple grounds looked like a barnyard? It looked like the Jewish High Priestly family didn’t care about God at all and just wanted to be rich—which is what history tells us was the truth—while the families of normal priests were just barely able to survive. Of course Jesus was angry about it but He didn’t kill them. He didn’t whip them—He used the small flail to herd away the animals. I mean, He had to make it there on the spot so it isn’t like He had anything other than cloth or a belt to work with, right? Not like this was Indiana Jones and the Temple of God.

Jesus saw a problem—a terrible problem that was disrespecting God and keeping people from being able to worship Him. And not in a synagogue or anything, but at the Temple, which is actually holy ground. So holy that the priests walked barefoot. So holy that people weren’t allowed to carry stuff up there or use the grounds as a shortcut through the city. The prophet Hosea, who had to deal with some really messed up nonsense in His life, tells us that the Lord says it is mercy God desires and not sacrifice. That means gentleness—it is just another part of not doing the worst we can do. Sure, we can insult people, but is it going to make a situation any better? We can hit them, but is that really going to help or make things even worse? When we take what we really want to do and maybe even think we should do and we take it down a notch, or go home to have a cup of chamomile tea while we think and pray about it, or sometimes don’t do anything at all because we are too angry to do what is good—that’s mercy.

Jesus told a story once about the importance of being merciful, and that when God judges us it isn’t about a lot of the things we might think are important but about how we treat others as we want to be treated.

“For this reason… (wait! For what reason? Let’s backtrack or we won’t understand what is happening here! Peter had just come up to Jesus and asked how many times he has to forgive his brother—and no, we don’t know if he was talking about Andrew or about people in general. Maybe Andrew told the other disciples about the time that Peter…oh nevermind. Peter thought he only had to forgive another person seven times but Jesus said something like, “Um, no, actually, you have to forgive him so many times that you will lose count. Unless you are taking notes about how many times you have forgiven him, which is messed up and totally missing the point”)…

…the kingdom of heaven can be compared to a king who wanted to get back all the money his slaves owed to him. When he looked at the books, a guy who owed 10,000 talents was brought before him… (hold up! How much money is that? Well, it was what a person would earn if they worked for 160,000 years. So, it was a lot. Maybe as much as four trillion dollars today.) Since he had no way to pay it back, his master gave an order that the man, his wife, his children, and everything he had be sold to pay the debt. (which wasn’t even going to come close, right? Remember that parables are stories that paint pictures—they aren’t really very accurate) “When the slave heard all this, he fell down on his face before his master and begged, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything!’ (yeah right, four trillion dollars? I don’t think so) Then the master of that slave had compassion, set him free, and said, “You don’t owe me anything anymore.” (wow, right? How much money does this guy have if he can just forget when someone owes him 160,000 years worth of work?) “But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him only a hundred days’ worth of work money. He grabbed him, started choking him, and said, ‘Pay me what you owe me!’ (seriously, does anyone think this was a good idea?) “At this, his fellow slave fell down and began begging him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he wasn’t willing. Instead, he went and threw him into prison until he could pay what was owed. (and who exactly can pay back money when they are in prison? Does this sound like a good plan?) When the other slaves saw what had happened, they were really upset and went and told their master everything that had happened. Then, after he had summoned him, his master said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that money because you begged me. Shouldn’t you also have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And his master got angry and handed him over to the jailers until he could pay everything that was owed. So, My heavenly Father will also do the same to you if each of you does not forgive his brother from his heart.”

And if you miss the point of this, you’re going to be having nightmares about how mean God has to be. But this sort of story was only meant to be scary to the sorts of people who aren’t changed by God’s forgiveness and mercy. At all. In fact, this guy was what we would call an oppressor. The Bible has a lot of stuff to say about the people who aren’t just mean because they are hurting or have a headache or because God is still working on them to make them more like Jesus. Nope, this guy owed so much money that you have to ask yourself what on earth did he do with it? Right? When Jesus was here on earth teaching the people, they talked about sin like money owed to God. That was how they explained it. So much money that you couldn’t ever pay it all off no matter how hard you worked. The only thing anyone could do to be forgiven was to ask God for mercy and to be loyal to Him forever. That’s what God wants. God doesn’t want to punish us—He wants to forgive us and change us to be more like Jesus. God wants us to see that we are His servants and that we need His mercy. But what is mercy? Mercy is when someone has the power to punish you but they decide to forgive you instead and give you another chance. Mercy is when I got caught daydreaming and was driving 35 mph in a 25 mph zone and the officer didn’t give me a ticket because I admitted that I was speeding and said I was sorry. Mercy is when an orphan steals a loaf of bread because he is starving and the grocery store owner doesn’t press charges. Mercy is when we are really angry at someone else who has done something wrong and we don’t hurt them. Mercy is when we ask God to forgive us for the terrible things and the small things we have done and He does.

God is God and God is absolutely perfect. He has absolutely no reason to forgive us and He doesn’t even owe it to us to forgive us. But He does forgive us because of His mercy to us. He knows that it is hard to be a human being and that sometimes we make bad choices and at other times we make very bad choices. He forgives us because He wants us to be able to start over again with Him even when we can’t start over again with the people we have hurt. He wants us to change. He knows that we can’t be more like Jesus when we aren’t forgiven. Being merciful to us—being gentle with us—is how He helps us to learn to be different in a world that tells us that being merciful makes us weak and wimpy. But God is gentle with us and so we are supposed to learn how to be gentle with others. And especially gentle with people who are weaker, poorer, and sicker than we are.

That’s actually the message of that parable. A master is more powerful than their slave, right? A master has the law on their side and can do whatever they want to their slave (which is why we can’t have slaves and still be loving our neighbor because a person who has been taken as a slave is still our neighbor but we aren’t treating him like a neighbor when we make him a slave). In Jesus’s world, slaves could be crucified for any reason at all. A slave who owed their master money was lucky to be thrown in jail because the alternative was way worse—being nailed to a cross! That’s our first clue that this master is merciful. Two, this master actually gave his slave almost four trillion dollars in today’s money. That’s not just a one-time loan—he had been giving this slave money for a long time. He had been giving this slave a lot of chances but never getting paid back. Three, when the slave was never going to be able to pay him back and begged him for mercy and promised to pay him back anyway, even though they both knew it was impossible, the master let him go and crossed the debt off his books. The master didn’t just let him go, he let everything go. He was never going to get that money back. It was gone and no one would be punished for it. Wow. That master was awesome. He was gentle and merciful. He didn’t do what he had the power to do. In fact, no one would have blamed him no matter what awful things he did to that slave. His friends would even call him a fool for doing it and say that he was just asking for trouble. And that’s exactly what God is like. As you read the Bible, you will go through the stories of the kings of Israel and read about Manasseh and say, “Excuse me, He forgave Manasseh??? Don’t do it!!!” The master in this parable is very powerful and very wealthy, but he isn’t unfair. He’s someone who can always be trusted.

What about his slave who owed him 160,000 years’ worth of work wages? What kind of person is he? One, he isn’t really responsible with what people give him, right? Oh my gosh I could live forever and still never spend four trillion dollars. He’s the kind of guy who is given a million chances and just wastes them all. BUT, that doesn’t mean that his master is heartless. After all, it was the master who gave him all that money, right? His master is very generous, so generous that it’s just crazy! He has a wife and kids, we know that. He doesn’t want to go to jail and so he begs for mercy, and promises to pay back the money even though he’s lying because it’s not possible. But when his merciful master lets him totally off the hook, what does this guy do? Does he go around telling everyone how merciful and generous his master is? Well, that’s what he was supposed to do in those days. If someone did something amazing for you, you were supposed to make them famous for it. And frankly, four trillion dollars should have bought a lot of positive PR. But it didn’t happen. What happened instead would have shocked Jesus’s audience.

Instead of being happy and dancing and singing in the streets of Jerusalem and making his master famous, he went to another slave, okay? This slave had borrowed like, six-thousand dollars from the guy who had just been forgiven. AND WHERE DO YOU THINK THAT 6,000 CAME FROM? That’s right—it came from the money he had borrowed from his master. Which he now didn’t have to pay back. Which should have meant that he needed to forgive everyone who borrowed money from him because who they had really gotten it from was their master who gave it to him in the first place. He didn’t have any personal money to loan. He was what we call a middleman, just passing money from his master to other people. That’s how crazy this all is.

And did he ask for the money nicely? You know, like his master had asked him? No, first he grabbed the dude and then he started choking him and then he demanded the money back. Money that wasn’t his in the first place. You know how they say that violence isn’t the answer? Actually, Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount when He tells us to turn the other cheek when we get smacked. Not only isn’t violence the answer, but he gets violent before he even asks for the money. This guy ought to be working for the mob and not such a merciful master. Of course, the guy doesn’t have that much money to pay him back the money that wasn’t even his in the first place—are you confused yet?—and asked for forgiveness and time to pay back the loan. Payback on this loan would be hard but not impossible. But nope, the forgiven slave chucked that poor guy in jail after beating him up. He went from zero to total rage monster in less that sixty seconds, okay? Well, of course the other slaves were really upset about that. The other slaves knew their master, obviously, and knew this would upset him too otherwise they wouldn’t bother him with it, right? Remember how the people mostly tried to avoid dealing with the false gods of the nations because it was better if they left you alone? It’s the same thing with slave masters. Of course, our God isn’t a slave master. In the Bible, we see He is the god who sets slaves free. Parables show what God is like and what He is not like. So there will be things that do and do not fit in the story but because this story is about gentleness and mercy, that’s the part we have to pay attention to.

Well, the master was really torqued off and in the Roman Empire, he could have the slave crucified as easy as one-two-three. But He doesn’t—He is still merciful. He isn’t violent, doesn’t grab him and choke him either but he does send the man to prison for not being merciful when he was shown such amazing mercy. He doesn’t even do to that man as much as he did to his fellow slave. Even though the punishment is harsh, life in prison, it is way less than what he did to the guy who owed him the much smaller amount of money. The master was merciful, because he didn’t do all the same things, but he was also just because his slave was what is called an oppressor and needed to be put somewhere that he couldn’t hurt anyone anymore. Oppressors aren’t merciful. And so, to understand mercy and gentleness, we have to understand the opposite.

An oppressor is a bully. How terrible an oppressor is depends on what the bully has to work with and how they can use it against others. Men and women and boys and girls and old people and young people can all be oppressors. People can use money, food, weapons, power, and their bodies to oppress other people. An oppressor uses whatever they have to keep other people under control. Someone who is big and strong can use their strength to keep everyone else too afraid to stop them from whatever it is they want to do. Weapons can be used the same way. If you have money then you can hurt people who don’t have it. If people are starving and you have all the food then you can make them do whatever you want before you give them any. During the life of Jesus on earth, the two big bullies in the neighborhood were the Romans and the High Priest’s family. They used what they had to get richer and more powerful while everyone else got poorer and less powerful. The Romans used their soldiers to get what they wanted. The High Priest’s family was even more shameful because they used the Bible to hurt the people. Did you know that people can use the Bible to hurt others if they ignore all the commandments that tell them to love their neighbors? When the Romans took over the province of Syria, it gave them total control over all of the people living in the Holy Land. And they demanded to be paid 25% of all the food people produced on their lands—plants and animals. That’s a lot. That means for every four figs or almonds they picked, they had to give one to the tax collectors and it was all taken far away to feed the people in Rome. But that wasn’t the worst part because we would expect them to be evil and not care about the Jewish people (or anyone else either). The worst part was that the High Priest’s family had gotten rich from the tithes that the people paid—another ten percent a year, so one out of ten of everything. They didn’t need the money and they could have returned it to the people because the tithe also belonged to the people who were poor but they weren’t getting it. They were having to sell their land because they couldn’t make enough to pay all the taxes and still have enough left over to feed their families.

What could they do? The regular priests weren’t getting that food either and they were losing their lands too. Since the chief priests didn’t need it, the Pharisees who ran the court system could have made a law to help out the people but they were so determined to keep the law perfectly that they were making it impossible for the poorer people to survive and keep the commandments. Jesus was really harsh with them about it—He told them that they were all anxious to tithe even their tiny garden spices, because they could afford it, but they weren’t being fair to the people who were the most vulnerable—the people who would die if they just made the rich priests richer. The Pharisees were what we would call fundamentalists today—they were determined to do what the Bible literally said even if people got hurt although sometimes they interpreted the Bible in ways that let them do whatever they wanted, like divorcing their wives for whatever reason they wanted to and marrying someone else.

Jesus said that it was great that they were tithing and all that, but they weren’t being faithful to what is most important to God–mercy, justice, and faithfulness (Matt 23:23-24). Those words meant something then that is different from how we would use them today. Faithfulness is about being trustworthy—it was the word used to describe how soldiers trust their commanders to make good decisions and how commanders trust their soldiers to do what they are told. Jesus was telling them that they weren’t obeying God just because they were tithing everything they grew. Justice and righteousness were two words in Hebrew that meant taking care of the people who were vulnerable—the poor, hungry, widowed, orphaned, sick, and wrongfully in prison. And we’ve been talking about what mercy means—being gentle to people who have less strength, power, and resources than we do. They could keep the Sabbaths and go to Jerusalem for the festivals and never eat pork and that was great but if they were causing poor people to lose their land and starve then they weren’t doing what is important to God. Jesus called them blind because they saw what the commandments said but didn’t see the suffering people around them. They didn’t know God well enough to see what He cared about most.

I love you. I am praying for you. And I hope that you will spend time thinking about mercy and gentleness. Are you gentle when you have things that can be used to help or hurt? Are you gentle with your words and with your body when you are angry? Are you as merciful to others as God is with you?