The tenderheartedness of Jesus leads on to the forgiveness of God. At the very heart of the Christian faith is the fact that God forgives us of our sins through the death of Jesus and makes us willing and able to forgive those who sin against us. We are to be a people quick to forgive others their faults and offenses against us because God in Christ has forgiven us. If we do not forgive those who have sinned against us, “from the heart” (Matt. 18:35), then we reveal that we have not been forgive by God.

My parents frequently quoted Scripture to my sister and me when they overheard us fighting with one another as children. Ephesians 4:32 had to be the most cited. While writing the church in Ephesus, the Apostle Paul urged the members, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” It should strike us as strange that professing believers need to be told to be “kind,” “tenderhearted” and “forgiving.” However, just as they were often missing in the interactions between my sister and me growing up, these three family graces, as we might term them, are so often missing in the church and in our interactions with one another.

In a day of indifference, coldness, selfishness, opportunism, malice, harshness, brutishness, mean-spiritedness and revengefulness, kindness is a rare commodity. Of course, true kindness has its source in God Himself. Kindness is a subset of goodness as an attribute of God. The kindness of God ultimately finds expression in the person and work of Christ (Rom. 2:4, 11:22; Eph. 2:7; Titus 3:4). Kindness then becomes part of the fruit of the Spirit. It is one of the marks of a true believer (2 Cor. 6:6; Col. 3:12). A Christian man or woman is a man or woman who has been justified in Christ. He or she is also being conformed more and more into the image of Jesus Christ, the righteous One. Jesus was kind and merciful to men. The prophet Isaiah equated “righteous” persons with “merciful” and kind persons (Isaiah 57:1). John Owen wrote,

“[Isaiah] speaks of ‘merciful men,’—men of benignity, men of kindness, men of goodness, good men, useful men, men that exercise kindness in the earth, who are peculiarly the lovely and desirable men in the world.

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