Excerpt: Love Kindness

“We can’t love kindness and love selfishness at the same time.”

"...Love your neighbor as yourself..." - St. Mark 12:31 -

When it comes to kindness, God flips this around and commands us to “love kindness,” not “do kindness.” Why? Because the command to “love kindness” has the same heart-revealing effect as the command to “do justice.”

“We can’t love kindness and love selfishness at the same time.”

My flesh would prefer (only slightly) the command to read, “Do kind things.” In this case, commanding action rather than affection is a bit more manageable and measurable (particularly when measured against others).

But the command to “love kindness” pierces to the heart of things. This is far more demanding than merely doing kind things, which can easily be reduced to “occasional kind acts.” Loving kindness demands a deep structure heart orientation that shapes all our actions.

This command is also abstraction-resistant. Loving kindness is a kind of loving, for “love is kind” (1 Corinthians 13:4). And we can’t love kindness without loving people. We might be able to get away with telling others we love justice without doing much justice. But it’s very difficult to get away with saying we love kindness if others know us to often be harsh, defensive, self-centered, impatient, irritable, critical, or willing to step on people to get our way.

We wear our love of kindness (or lack of it) on our sleeves. Loving kindness is costly. It almost always requires loving people in ways that place their needs and preferences ahead of our own. We can’t love kindness and love selfishness at the same time. So, God tests our hearts by making kindness not merely things we do, but something we love.

Source: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/lord-search-my-heart