Sinclair Ferguson

But I wonder if it has ever dawned on you how much, humanly speaking, the Christian church owes to one man's kindness long ago.

When Augustine's wanderings and searchings eventually led him to Milan, he encountered the figure of Ambrose, the bishop, one of the great preachers of his day.

He was tremendously impressed by his eloquence.

He says he hung on his diction with rapt attention, but he was pretty bored by what he said.

What he loved was only the charm in his language, and as a result of that, he was relatively indifferent to what he said.

But then, as he got to know him, things changed.

Listen to what he says towards the end of Book 5 of his Confessions.

I began to like him, at first indeed not as a teacher of the truth, for absolutely no confidence in your church, but as a human being who was kind to me.

Isn't that something?

The milk of human kindness in Ambrose, not his great preaching, was what God first used to bring to faith in Christ, a man whose Christian life, witness, and writings have shaped the history of the Western world for 1700 years.

So, who knows what your kindness today to someone might mean?

We've been thinking all week about the fruit of the Spirit as Paul describes it in Galatians chapter 5, and I've been reading out the verses because that way, I hope, we'll memorize these wonderful words of the Apostle Paul almost without effort.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And so at the end of the week, we've come to the second triplet of these Spirit-nurtured graces, patience, kindness, and goodness.

And they do seem, don't you think, somehow or another, to belong together.

Patience.

The New Testament has two different Greek words that can be translated by our English word, patience.

The word Paul uses here is the word makrothumia.

It's a compound word from makros, which means long, long in time or long in space, far away, and thumos, which means anger or passion.

The Bible teaches us that God is patient.