Care (Give Away Your Faith #2)
A few years ago a short video went viral, first on TikTok and then on just about every other platform out there. It showed a little boy, maybe three years old, sitting on a hospital bed. I won’t try to describe the whole thing here, but the reason it stuck with so many people is the reason I want to talk about care. We show care to others because God first showed that kind of care to us.
We are in week two of a three-part series called Give Away Your Faith, and our key passage is Colossians 4:2-6. Spoiler alert: we’ll come back to it again next week.
“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison, that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”
Between Prayer and Share
When we kicked off this series, we saw that giving away your faith starts with prayer. Verse two says to continue steadfastly in prayer. If you follow Jesus, prayer is expected, and you are to keep at it whether life is going really great or really awful.
We also saw who to pray for. First, ourselves. The very things Paul asked prayer for are the things we can pray about in our own lives. He asked for an open door, so we can ask God to open doors into the lives of others. He asked to make the word clear, so we can ask God for clarity. And that clarity isn’t only about what to say. It’s also about what to do.
Then, from Ephesians 3, we looked at how to pray for the people we want to know Jesus: that they would be identified with God the Father through Christ, that they would receive the Holy Spirit and his strength, and that they would have the spiritual comprehension to understand the gospel. We’ve been asking the Riverwood family to pray for four people, one of them yourself, for four minutes a day, for four weeks, and then watch what God might do in them and how he might use you in their lives.
Next week is all about the words we share. But Paul slips something in right before he talks about our speech. Between prayer and share there is care.
The Night Moody Told Them to Wait
Look at verse five: “Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time.” The New Testament writers use the word walk a lot. They aren’t handing out exercise advice, even though that’s good advice too. It’s a poetic way of saying your whole life makes a difference. You could translate that first phrase as, live your life wisely in front of others.
Why? Because you are to make the best use of the time. I preach from the ESV, but most weeks I check other translations, and almost every one of them puts it this way: make the most of every opportunity.
Some of you know the name D.L. Moody. There’s a Bible institute named after him. He was a pastor and evangelist in the mid to late 1800s, and in 1871 he was preaching a series on biblical characters in Chicago. It got so popular they couldn’t fit everyone in their church building, so they rented a hall down the road, and hundreds of people came to hear him.
The fifth sermon in that series was on Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor over Israel in the days of Jesus. Pilate takes Jesus aside, has a private conversation with him, then comes back out and basically tells the crowd, I don’t see anything wrong with the guy. Let’s flog him and let him go. The crowd works itself into a frenzy, and in Matthew 27:22 Pilate asks them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?”
Moody posed that question, paused, looked at his audience, and said that is the question all of us need to consider. Then he sent them home. Take that question with you, he told them. Think about it all week, and next Sunday we’ll consider it together.
As he walked home that night, he smelled smoke. It was the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It decimated much of the city, including the hall where he had just preached and his church building a few blocks away.
About twenty years later, speaking to a totally different Chicago audience, Moody said one of the biggest regrets of his ministry was inviting people to wait a week to consider Jesus. He had gotten caught up in his own cleverness. After that, he said, he never gave people another week. He invited them right then and there. And that night he invited that audience to put their faith in Jesus.
God had answered Moody’s prayer for an open door. Hundreds of people showed up. God had given him clarity, and he was clearly putting the gospel in front of them with Pilate’s question. But he didn’t make the most of the opportunity.
Now, I’m not telling that story so that tomorrow you climb up on your desk at work or school and start preaching fire and brimstone. For Moody, in that hall, that would have been the right moment. For you, today, it might not be walking in wisdom toward outsiders. What I want to argue is that a wise way to walk toward outsiders is to show them you care. The old cliche turns out to be true: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Living Sacrifices Keep Crawling Off the Altar
To make that case, I want to go to Romans 12:9-21. When you walk into our building, there’s a wall that says Riverwood exists to invite people to live like Jesus lived and love like Jesus loved. If you’ve ever wondered what that actually looks like, look no further than this passage.
Romans 12 opens with Paul telling the church in Rome, and us by extension, to be living sacrifices. In other words, we willingly climb up on the altar and let God slay in us whatever he needs to. We surrender our wallets, our futures, our pasts, our identity, our sexuality, our everything. It all belongs to him, because Jesus died on a cross and we’ve been purchased by his blood.
But as the joke goes, the problem with a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar. That’s why verse two says we have to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. We can’t keep looking at life through our own selfish minds. We need a selfless mind, or as the end of 1 Corinthians 2 puts it, the mind of Christ. The more your mind is transformed, the more your actions, your attitudes, and your perspective change. It changes the way you see people, and you start to love them like Jesus loved them.
So in verses 9-21 Paul spells out what that looks like. I’ve broken it into five parts and put them in an acrostic to help you remember: G-R-A-C-E.
Genuine Love
Verses 9 and 10: “Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”
If someone has ever loved you but you sensed they just wanted something back, you know that isn’t genuine. Real love is selfless. It isn’t about what you can get from someone. It’s about what God wants to give to them through you.
Notice that loving genuinely means you have to abhor what is evil. That sounds strange at first. We’re talking about love, and now we’re supposed to hate something? But think about it. Evil tries to destroy. Love tries to build up. Evil wants to take and ruin. Love wants to protect and restore. Evil wants to destroy anything that is the work of God, and love is the very definition of God. This doesn’t mean we hate evil people. In a moment we’ll see we’re even called to love our enemies. It means we hate the evil that has infected this world and is done against God.
Then hold fast to what is good. Jesus makes it clear that what is good is really who is good. God alone is good. So hold fast to him no matter what is happening around you or in you.
I’ll admit, this is beautiful when life is going great. But when you feel unloved, alone, depressed, unwanted, or unseen, it’s hard. It feels like all you do is give, give, give, and you’ve got nothing left. That’s why you have to keep your eyes on Jesus. When you look at the love God showed you through the cross, you realize you are more deeply loved than you ever hoped or imagined. When he is the center of your life, you’re receiving love from him, and now you have enough to give. It’s wonderful when God uses the people around you to pour love into you. But if you have faith in Christ, you already have everything you need to love others genuinely.
Responsive Action
Verses 11-13: “Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.”
Something I’ve noticed about our culture here in Iowa is that we’re a little introverted. We don’t want to impose. We let people be. I’m guilty of this, and a lot of us are, because crashing into someone else’s life can feel rude. And yet when you see a need, don’t hold back. Step in. Respond.
Christ didn’t wait for us to ask him for help. He didn’t wait until we did a little better or showed some effort. We were dead in our sins and helpless, and Jesus came to us. He responded to the need.
Obviously you want to do it appropriately. If there’s a private issue, you don’t go blab it to everyone. But when you see the need, jump in. Honestly, this is really hard. I think part of the reason we struggle is that our minds and lives are so full we don’t feel we have the space. We’re scrolling on our phones, taking in so much that we have no brain or heart space left to notice a need. Our calendars are packed. So maybe the way you prepare for this is deleting a social media app or setting time limits on your phone. Maybe it’s freeing up a couple things on your calendar. That thing might be good, but is it keeping you from something better?
Even if your life is full, it isn’t an excuse not to help. Jesus didn’t sit up in heaven and say, those poor humans need help, but I’ve got stars to maintain and plants to keep growing, I just don’t have the time. No, he entered into time, took on a human body, and lived a fully human life so he could do for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Authentic Kindness
Verses 14-16: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another.”
You’ve noticed AI is getting scary good, especially with images and video. A few years ago someone tried to make an AI video of Will Smith eating spaghetti, and it was the creepiest thing you’ll ever see, worse than anything you saw on Halloween. We all looked at it and thought, I’m not worried about AI taking over. Now it’s improved so much that people ask, wait, is that AI? And yet somehow, deep down, we can still tell. It’s too clean. Too perfect. It feels fake.
That’s what inauthentic kindness feels like. It feels like AI slop. It’s walking up with a big smile plastered on your face asking, can I help? while everything else about you screams, I don’t want to be doing this.
But don’t let that become an excuse not to care. Don’t tell yourself, well, I’m not feeling very kind, and I’m supposed to be authentic, so I’ll pass. When God opens the door and the Holy Spirit gives you clarity, serve. If you know in your heart you don’t want to, pray: Heavenly Father, change my heart. Help me serve this person, because you served me through the cross. Often, when you step in and start serving, the authenticity comes right along with it.
Compassionate Humility
Pick it up in the middle of verse 16: “Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.'”
Don’t think so highly of yourself that you believe you’re better than others. If you need an example, look at a good mom or dad. A good parent can’t think, I’m so much better than this pathetic little three-year-old sitting on the bed saying he doesn’t care. No, a good parent gets down on the floor and plays Legos or Barbies, gives them a bath, gets dirty with them in the backyard. They get into their kids’ lives and aren’t offended to be associated with the lowly. And children are the lowly. They don’t contribute any income. If anything, they suck all our money away. And yet they are precious. They have value and worth.
That isn’t just a call to parents. It’s a call to anyone who follows Christ. We associate with the people society might say aren’t as valuable, because they carry the image of God.
Then Paul says not to repay evil for evil. When someone screams at you, you don’t have to answer in kind. You can respond with love and kindness. Philippians 2:3-4 defines humility simply as putting the needs of others before your own. It isn’t thinking so lowly of yourself that you’re nothing. You’re worth the blood of Christ. And so are they. That’s why you don’t need revenge. Seeking revenge makes it about you. Let God take care of that, and instead show compassionate humility.
Eyed Dignity
I know that E is a little strange, but I looked it up. To eye something is to see it, to recognize it. So when I say eyed dignity, I mean I see and recognize the dignity you have.
Every human you have ever interacted with has dignity because they bear the image of God. Your atheist friend has the image of God in them, even though they don’t believe there is a God. Someone of a different religion who doesn’t believe Jesus is the Messiah has the image of God in them. Even that person at school or work who just rubs you the wrong way has dignity and worth.
That’s how Paul wraps it up in verses 20 and 21: “To the contrary, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
If you have an enemy, you don’t get your vengeance. You love them. You give them care. If that boss or teacher who you sense doesn’t like you is thirsty, give them something to drink. That teammate, coworker, or neighbor who rubs you the wrong way is made in the image of God. When that sinks in, it changes the way you speak to them and act toward them.
Everything Here, Jesus Already Did
Genuine love, responsive action, authentic kindness, compassionate humility, and eyed dignity. As I’ve been hinting all along, everything in this passage is exactly what Jesus did for us.
He showed us genuine love through the cross. He didn’t wait for us to clean up our act or ask him to come. He responded with action. He displayed authentic kindness. Read the Gospels and you’ll see him feeding the 5,000, helping the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk, and raising a little girl from the dead and giving her back to her parents.
He did all of it with compassionate humility. Right after Paul tells us in Philippians 2 to consider the needs of others before our own, he gives us the example in verses 5-11. Jesus, who was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself, taking the form of a servant, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.
And he eyed our dignity. Sin tried to scratch and mar and twist the image of God in us, but it could not take it away. He still saw it, recognized it for what it was, and decided you were worth coming to restore to a relationship with him and his Father.
So this whole idea of showing care as part of giving away your faith is simply living like Jesus.
Here is my prayer for you this week. Lord, help us become people who genuinely care for others, who aren’t too proud to be associated with the lowly, and who don’t answer evil with evil. Some of us are worn out. Life has been hard and heavy. Meet us in the middle of our schedules and remind us that you know us, love us, and are with us, so that we can give out of the love you’ve given us. Help us get our eyes off ourselves and onto you and the people around us. They matter to you, so help them matter to us. Keep opening doors, keep giving us clarity about what to do and what to say, and help us make the most of every opportunity with our friends and families, at school, on our teams, at work, and in our neighborhoods. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Thanking Him at the Table
At Riverwood we celebrate communion nearly every Sunday, and it’s an open table. If you have faith in Christ, if you believe Jesus died on a cross for your sins and rose again from the dead, you are invited to take the bread and the cup and thank him for the immense care he gave us through the cross and the empty tomb. As you do, think about the one who did all these things for you, and ask him to work in you so he can work through you.
If you aren’t a follower of Jesus yet and still have questions, I’m so glad you read this far. Communion says that what Jesus did on the cross was done for me, so if that isn’t you yet, I’d ask you to hold off on the elements. Instead, have a conversation with God. Ask him, is it true? Did Jesus really come to this earth to die in my place so my sin could be forgiven? If so, you can come to the cross right where you are, praying and giving your life to him.
