Kindness With a Date on It
Titus 3:4 - But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared,
Around 9 BC, the province of Asia moved the start of the year. A proconsul named Paullus Fabius Maximus proposed that the year should begin on the birthday of Caesar Augustus, September 23, and the assembly voted it through. The decree was carved into stone and set up in the marketplace at Priene, on the coast of what is now western Turkey.
The words on that stone call Augustus a savior. His birth is described as the beginning of good news for the world. They carved these things because that’s what a province did for a benefactor. Cities honored emperors, emperors sent benefactions back to the provinces that honored them well. The honor ran uphill, toward a man whose favor they needed and whose attention they could never assume they had.
Now read Paul, writing decades later to a pastor on a rocky island in the Mediterranean: “But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared...” That phrase, loving kindness, is one Greek word. Philanthropia. Love of human beings and plain kindness toward people. And it’s the word you reached for when you wanted to praise a king who was generous, or an emperor who was humane, or a governor who treated a province decently. Paul takes the word the world used for its rulers and hands it to God.
Then there’s the verb, appeared. Paul leans on that word all through his letters, and every time it points the same direction. The grace of God has appeared, he tells Titus one chapter earlier. Christ Jesus our Savior appeared and abolished death, he tells Timothy. He’s describing an arrival. A first advent. His kindness showed up in a place, close enough that you could have stood there and heard it breathe. See, we tend to treat the kindness of God as something in the air, something we sense on good days and doubt on hard ones. Paul says it arrived. It has a birthday, a hometown, and eyewitnesses.
And here is where the Priene comparison falls apart. That whole first century economy ran on return. You honored the emperor because the emperor could do something for you. But Crete had nothing to send back. Paul has just finished describing the people who received this kindness, and the list runs foolish, disobedient, enslaved, hateful. There was no honor headed God’s way from that province. No calendar reset. No marble in the marketplace. And yet, He appeared anyway.
This is where a believer becomes a Joyful Worshipper, glorifying God by delighting in who He is and what He has done, because you finally see there was nothing in the arrangement for Him. We keep score in our friendships without meaning to. We know who owes whom. We know which relationships are running a deficit and which ones are carrying us. And somewhere underneath all of it, most of us quietly assume God runs the same ledger, that His warmth toward us rises and falls with our usefulness to Him.
But His goodness appeared while the list in verse 3 was still true of us! His kindness has never once been a response to something we brought Him. God set a date on the calendar and showed up like He said He would. Not because He had to, but because of His loving kindness.
Head: God's kindness toward me is an event with a date on it, not a mood that rises and falls with my week.
Heart: Ask God for joy and delight today as you consider what He did.
Hands: Say one sentence of thanks out loud that names something He did, not something you feel.
Prayer: “Father, You are kind in a way this world has no category for. I praise You that Your goodness came looking for people who had nothing to give back. Thank You for appearing when I was no use to You at all. Let me delight in You today. In Jesus' name, Amen.”
-PK