Missy and I spent four years living in Washington, DC. When friends came to visit, they always asked what they should see that most people miss. I gave two answers. The first was the Library of Congress, because the architecture is incredible and most people sleep on it. The second sounds counterintuitive. I told people to go to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
In Arlington National Cemetery rest the remains of a soldier who died in World War I and could not be identified. We do not know his name. As a nation we built a monument anyway, and since 1937 it has been guarded around the clock. The guards are some of the most elite soldiers there are. They memorize three hundred of the graves in Arlington just to be part of it. They spend eight hours preparing their uniforms before they go on guard. Eight hours, and it is full wool, even in July. On watch, a guard takes twenty-one steps down the mat, turns, faces the tomb, and pauses for twenty-one seconds. Twenty-one, because the twenty-one gun salute is the highest honor we have.
Here is the part that gets me. We are not honoring somebody we know. But the sacrifice itself is worth honoring, and when you see excellence like that on display, it impresses on you what honor really means.
That is what I want to talk about: God’s kindness, where it leads us, and what our response should be.
Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? Romans 2:4 (NASB)
Cheap Honor
The first thing we see in this verse is that God’s kindness leads each one of us somewhere.
And if you are not sure whether God is kind, may I be the first to remind you that you have air in your lungs. Your brain is firing so fast you can hear these words and reflect on them in a single moment. People sometimes confuse God’s attributes. Is God just? Yes. Does God judge? Yes, and one day He will judge all of us. But do not conflate those things with God being mean or cruel. He is neither. He is kind. He is tolerant. He is patient. And I can be the first to tell you how patient God has had to be with me.
The second thing Paul shows us is that you can take God’s kindness one of two ways. You can take it heavy, meaning you actually value it. Or you can take it lightly, like His kindness means nothing to you. There is a Hebrew word for this: kavod. It means honor, and underneath that it means weight. To honor God is to treat Him as heavy in your life, the One you value most, with no close second.
Here is how you know when something has gotten light in your life. It starts getting your leftovers.
I love it when there is a to-go box to bring home from a restaurant. But that meal is just not as good the second time. No food is better left over. Well, maybe lasagna. Do not miss the point. Some of us are holding God’s kindness lightly. We will spend three or four nights a week at the sports league for our kids, then wake up on Sunday wondering whether we should go to church. We will read the news all day but cannot find ten minutes in a week for God’s Word. We will scroll forever, then wonder why there was no minute in the day to pray. If we are not careful, we will not bring God our best. We will bring Him whatever is left.
I know how this works because I lived it. The first year of our marriage was turbulent. Marriage is two selfish people attempting to become selfless, and I carried the selfishness for both of us. I would be on the computer late at night building things, and once or twice a week I would pop out of the room and say, hey, how are you doing? That did not work. I was producing, but I was not loving Missy well. My love was cheap. When I finally learned to give her my best instead of my last, it changed everything about our marriage.
If it is that easy to do in our earthly relationships, it is that easy to do with God. It is one of the oldest problems in history. Under the old covenant, God’s people brought animals to be sacrificed at the temple, but they were not bringing their best. They brought the blind ones, the lame ones, the animals nobody would buy. So God corrected them:
"When you offer blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong? When you sacrifice lame or diseased animals, is that not wrong? Try offering them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you?" says the Lord Almighty. Malachi 1:8 (NIV)
Here is a modern translation. Pretend it is April 15 and you owe the IRS a thousand dollars. So you write a letter: Dear Internal Revenue Service, I cannot pay my tax bill because I have spent all my money. I do have twenty dollars left. Once I get back from McDonald’s, I will send you whatever remains. Is that okay?
You would not dare, because you understand exactly what you owe and to whom. That is what God wanted His people to see. Look at how He framed it two verses earlier:
"A son honors his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me?" says the Lord Almighty. Malachi 1:6 (NIV)
Where is the honor due me? There is that word again. Kavod. Where is the weight? Hold onto that question. It gets answered before this is over.
The Ultimate Kindness
So what does it look like when somebody takes God’s kindness seriously? One of the best examples in the Bible is King David, the man God called "a man after my own heart" who "will do everything I want him to do" (Acts 13:22).
Some of you love a good documentary with a juicy backstory. The Fyre Festival, where people paid twelve thousand dollars to eat a cheese sandwich in a field. The one about the leggings. Tiger King, which cost some of you brain cells during the pandemic. King David has a backstory like that, and it is in the Bible. David was an adulterer who murdered the husband of the woman he wanted. And that is the tip of the iceberg. Yet God says, this is a man after my own heart. How does a man with that record end up with that testimony? One chapter near the end of his story shows the whole thing.
Israel was in sin, and their hearts had grown hard toward God. Then David decided to count his fighting men. Counting the army meant trusting the army. He was measuring his security in numbers instead of in the God who gave them.
Honoring God takes repentance
David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord, "I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, Lord, I beg you, take away the guilt of your servant. I have done a very foolish thing." 2 Samuel 24:10 (NIV)
Nobody confronted David about this sin. God did send a prophet, but not until the next day. Before the prophet ever arrived, David’s own heart had felt the pain of it, and instead of running away from God, he ran to God.
When I was about eight, my siblings and I were roughhousing in my parents’ room, and I broke one of the big spheres off the bedpost. No fixing it. When Dad got home, he lined up all three of us and said, if the one who did this confesses, only that one gets the spanking. Otherwise all three of you do. You know exactly what I did. I did not confess a thing. If I was going down, we were all going down together. And all three of us got the spanking, though now that I am a dad myself, I am pretty sure he went easy on the innocent parties. Parents just know.
That is the opposite of what David did, and the opposite of what God’s kindness makes possible. You might be running from God right now, convinced He could never receive you because of what you did. Hear me: we serve a God who is ready to receive you. He will cast those sins as far as the east is from the west.
So here is some homework, the good kind. Before you go to sleep tonight, tell God the one thing you have been carrying. Name it out loud. Do not wait for the confrontation. Just return to God, because what you did is not who you are. Bring it to Him and let Him define who you are.
Honoring God takes reverence
God sent the prophet Gad to David with three possible outcomes: three years of famine, three months of fleeing his enemies, or three days of plague. David answered, "Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into human hands" (2 Samuel 24:14). Facing judgment, David bet everything on the character of God. And he was right.
When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the Lord relented concerning the disaster and said to the angel who was afflicting the people, "Enough! Withdraw your hand." The angel of the Lord was then at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. 2 Samuel 24:16 (NIV)
I will not skip the hard part of this chapter. Seventy thousand people died in that plague, and you cannot read that and shrug. But the chapter opens with God’s anger against Israel before David ever counted anybody. A whole nation had walked away from God. Sometimes we focus on the seventy thousand and think, look how cruel God is. No. Look how just He is, and then look how kind He was to stop.
Because here is the thing. If our sin had no weight to it, then the kindness of God would not be very weighty either. If God shrugged off sin, He would have no kindness worth honoring. But sin separates us from God, and He knew the only way to bring His people back was mercy. One word, enough, and the plague stopped. And look where it stopped. At a threshing floor. Remember that location.
The prophet told David to build an altar on that spot. One of the best things we can do in our lives is make an altar. A place to repent. A place to revere God. A place to say thank you. So find a place this week. The chair you already have, the porch, the drive to work. The spot matters a lot less than the fact that you show up to meet with God. Carve out the time, and make extra time for Him.
Honoring God takes sacrifice
Now watch the most expensive sentence in the chapter. David went up as the Lord commanded, and Araunah offered to give the king everything for free: the threshing floor, the oxen, even the wood.
But the king replied to Araunah, "No, I insist on paying you for it. I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing." 2 Samuel 24:24 (NIV)
David turned down free worship with the sentence that tells you why God called him a man after His own heart. If it costs you nothing, it is not sacrifice.
We see that same costly worship every time somebody goes public in their faith through baptism. A precious family in our church, Chris and Jess White, shared their stories from our platform. Chris was bullied as a kid and carried weights he did not even know were in his backpack until he gave his life to Jesus and felt them come off. Jess had put her faith in a substance instead of a Savior; when she committed her life to Christ, God redeemed her, and she has not had a drop of alcohol since. When they decided to be baptized at the lake, their son Gettys, who had already put his faith in Jesus, asked to be baptized too. All three went into the water. Going public costs you something. A little comfort, a little pride. That is exactly what makes it worship.
And here is where the story pays off. The Bible returns to that threshing floor:
Then David said, "The house of the Lord God is to be here, and also the altar of burnt offering for Israel." 1 Chronicles 22:1 (NIV)
David is standing at the place where God’s judgment stopped and His mercy started, and he says, this is where the house of the Lord will be. The threshing floor became the temple. And when Solomon dedicated that temple a generation later, on that same ground, listen to what happened:
When the priests withdrew from the Holy Place, the cloud filled the temple of the Lord. And the priests could not perform their service because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled his temple. 1 Kings 8:10-11 (NIV)
The word for glory there? Kavod. The weight of God filled that house, so heavy the priests could not stand up to do their jobs. Remember God’s question from Malachi? Where is my kavod? There is the answer. God showed up at the temple, on the ground a king bought because he refused to worship cheap.
If you choose to honor God by giving Him something that costs you, and I will tell you in advance, it is your whole life, He will make you His dwelling place too. Our greatest response to God’s kindness comes when we give ourselves back to Him. Paul said it this way:
And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Romans 12:1 (NLT)
He Gave You His Best
At the start, I said I would prove that God is kind. Here is the proof.
God has seen every sin you have ever committed, and He did not shrug. Sin is a big deal to God. He knows it separates us from Him. But He loved you too much to leave you there. So He gave the thing that cost Him the most. He gave His Son. Jesus went to the cross for you and died in your place. That is what your rescue cost.
God did not give you His leftovers. He did not give you His second best. That is the proof of how kind our God is. He did not want to lose you.
If there is something stirring in you right now, that is not these words doing it. That is the kindness of God leading you to turn. You can have a new life in Him, and it can happen right now, if you put your faith and trust in Him. It will cost you everything. And you will gain everlasting life.
