Quiet time

It's somewhat quiet in my house right now, since the little ones are laying down. It would be a great time to get the dishes done and the laundry finished, but I haven't had my devotions yet. Devotions for me have to be at naptime, because I'm usually at work when I get up in the morning.

I'm studying the Sunday School lesson, Beth Moore's "Living Beyond Yourself". It's about the fruit of the Spirit. I'm behind so I'm on Day 4 of the Kindness and Goodness fruit. Ephesians 2:1-10 - We were dead and yet He (God) still chose to make us alive. Amazing! Grace beyond comprehension! We were created and made alive to do good works. And Ephesians 1:5 says it was His pleasure to do so.

2 Timothy 1:14 - Guard the trust that has been entrusted to you with the help of the Holy Spirit.

I enjoyed studying this in Sunday School last week and thinking about the fact that kindness and goodness go together and the goodness part of it has to do with even things like rebuke and correcting a brother. The thing is that it goes with kindness hand-in-hand and needs to be tempered with love. It's one thing to rebuke a brother because you want them to know they are wrong and another completely to do it with kindness because you love them. If the main goal is pointing out faults we haven't tempered our 'goodness' with kindness and then it isn't even goodness at all anymore. But when we seek to build another up and that requires some confrontation, if our main goal is building up a brother, I think then, we are seeing kindness and goodness meshed in a proper way. We aren't doing our brother/sister any favors if we leave things that we see for them to discover on their own. It reminded me about how I feel when someone tells me that I have something in my teeth. Usually I'm embarassed at the thought of walking around for who knows how long with this thing stuck in my teeth. But I'm thankful as well that someone (usually my husband) was brave enough to 'confront' me about this. It takes me a bit longer to get to the thankful part when it's my husband rather than when a friend does it. I'm thankful because now I won't go off talking to more people and embarassing myself further. How many people had I already talked to, who didn't feel like they could say, "Hey, you've got something between your front teeth. "