HUMAN(KIND): A 5-Day Devotional on KindnessSample

A Sacrifice Worth Making

One of my favorite Scripture passages talks about what will be required of us if we choose to pursue sacrificial living the way Jesus did: 

Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don’t be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. (Philippians 2:3–6, msg) 

What if the key to being brave and defying the divides that have formed in our families, our neighborhoods, our churches, and our friend groups has something to do with forgetting ourselves? What if we hold our stories with confidence and tenderness, appreciating what we’ve learned, but don’t consider them or our values the most important thing? 

This is the journey of humankindness: knowing and loving ourselves fully and honoring the hand life has dealt us, emptying ourselves for others, seeing the fullness of joy and hurt and pain in every interaction, and then choosing to regard another with humility and selflessness anyway. 

I have a long way to go to live a life that reflects Paul’s charge in Philippians 2, to extend kindness as he challenged in Ephesians 4. But the unity of our humanity— achieved not by our own striving but because of a good God’s perfect love and kindness toward us—is worth the continued pursuit. 

Because at the end of the day, we must ask ourselves, Is our human unity worth our sacrifice? I’m not talking about unity that is tolerant or fake, ignoring conviction and diluting identity. Mere tolerance and ignorance aren’t kind. I’m talking about unity that rallies us together around our imago Dei and calls us to pursue relational healing with a higher purpose, anchored by the freeing power of the good news of grace. After all, in the beginning what united our humanness was that God considered it very good. And that is still true today.

What does humility have to do with acknowledging that each person you know is made in the image of God?