When Lovingkindness Becomes a Way of Life
There is a difference between admiring mercy and practicing it. One can speak warmly about compassion, sing about grace, and still remain largely untouched by the inconvenience of loving another person. Scripture presses beyond admiration. It presents lovingkindness not merely as a quality to be appreciated in God, but as something meant to take shape in human lives.
The old Hebrew word hesed has often been rendered “lovingkindness.” It is a rich word, difficult to flatten into a single English equivalent. In the Psalms, it appears as the ground of trust when everything else seems unstable. In moments of lament, when the psalmist asks where God is and why relief has not come, the final word is so often not despair but confidence in God’s lovingkindness.
“I have trusted in Your steadfast love.”
That confidence is not sentimental. It is what carries a person through grief, fear, and bewilderment. Psalm 77 asks whether God’s steadfast love has ceased forever. Psalm 69 appeals to God because his lovingkindness is good. Again and again, divine hesed becomes the answer to human distress.
The likeness of God
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, the answer came not in abstraction but in a declaration of God’s character.
“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.”
That passage in Exodus 34 has long been treasured for the way it describes God’s own nature. Mercy, grace, patience, goodness, truth, forgiveness: these are not occasional moods in God but enduring attributes. If lovingkindness is central to who God is, then the life of faith cannot be reduced to belief alone. It must involve resemblance.
Human beings are made in the image of God, but Scripture presses toward something more demanding: the likeness of God expressed in conduct. Paul writes in Ephesians that believers are to be renewed in the spirit of their minds and to put on the new self, one created after the likeness of God. The movement is from being made by God to being formed after God’s character.
This begins with a sober recognition of our own unworthiness. The clearest posture before divine mercy is not entitlement but humility. That is why the faith of the centurion stands out so sharply. Others insisted he was worthy of help; he knew better. He understood that he was not worthy, and yet he still asked. That is a profound vision of faith: to know oneself undeserving and still trust the goodness of Christ.
Such humility changes the way a person sees everyone else. If all stand in need of mercy, then the question of who is worthy of care begins to lose its power. Lovingkindness is no longer reserved for the deserving.
More than charity
There is also a difference between charity and lovingkindness. Charity can be reduced to a transaction. Lovingkindness is harder to contain. It requires presence, interruption, attention, and often discomfort. It engages the heart and mind in the well-being of another person.
That is why the most meaningful acts of lovingkindness are rarely abstract. They are concrete and relational: visiting the sick, comforting mourners, showing hospitality, bearing burdens, providing for people as they enter new seasons of life. These are not gestures performed at a safe distance. They draw a person into the actual conditions of another life.
“Be hospitable to one another without grumbling.”
The command is honest enough to acknowledge how difficult this can be. Hospitality can disrupt a schedule. Care can cost time, money, emotional energy, and convenience. Lovingkindness has a way of becoming, in the best sense, a bother. It asks something of us.
Still, this is the terrain where Christian life becomes visible. Scripture’s “one another” language points in precisely this direction.
“Be kindly affectionate to one another in honor, giving preference to one another.”
“Owe no one anything except to love one another.”
“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
These are not vague ideals. They describe a community in which people are sufficiently involved in one another’s lives to notice sorrow, need, and weariness. Lovingkindness cannot flourish where lives remain carefully sealed off from one another.
The neighbor we would rather not choose
The parable of the good Samaritan remains one of Scripture’s clearest pictures of lovingkindness because it dismantles the instinct to calculate worth. The lawyer’s question is revealing: who is my neighbor? He wants a boundary. He wants definition. He wants to know the limit of obligation.
Jesus replies with a wounded man, religious passersby who keep their distance, and a Samaritan who does not. The Samaritan sees, has compassion, binds wounds, lifts the man onto his own animal, takes him to an inn, pays for his care, and promises more if needed. The response is costly, excessive, and personal.
At the end, Jesus does not simply identify the neighbor. He redefines neighborliness as the act of showing mercy.
“Go and do likewise.”
That command reaches far beyond one dramatic story. It resonates with Christ’s teaching elsewhere.
“Love your enemies, do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return.”
This is the kind of instruction that exposes how far divine lovingkindness exceeds ordinary human decency. It is difficult enough to care for those who love us. To love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, to refuse retaliation—none of this can be managed by mere willpower. It requires a deep remaking of the self.
And yet that is precisely the shape of mercy as it comes from God: abundant, undeserved, and extended without guarantee of repayment.
Comfort received, comfort given
Some of the clearest opportunities for lovingkindness arrive in moments most people would rather avoid. Grief, sickness, and death make many unsure of what to say or do. But Scripture speaks plainly about God’s nearness in such places.
“The Lord is near to those who have a broken heart.”
To be present with the grieving is not to solve sorrow. It is to enter it reverently, to make room for another person’s pain, and to let the nearness of God become tangible through human care. Paul describes this movement in 2 Corinthians with unusual tenderness.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
Suffering is not made simple by that promise, but it is given a relational meaning. Comfort received is not meant to terminate with us. It becomes comfort offered.
The world is disjointed enough for everyone to see. What Scripture offers is not a program of vague benevolence but a way of life shaped by divine lovingkindness. To practice hesed is to give another person, however briefly and imperfectly, a glimpse of how the world was meant to be. Not because anyone has earned it, but because that is how God has dealt with us.
We remain unworthy of such mercy. That is not a reason for paralysis. It is the beginning of resemblance.
This article is based on a sermon delivered at South Penn Church of Christ. Watch the full sermon on YouTube.