The one another commands

Be Kind to One Another

A command of Christ for his church · Ephesians 4:32

Be kind to one another is the call to treat each other with gentleness, warmth, and tenderness of heart. Kindness is love in its everyday clothes, showing itself in a soft answer, a helpful hand, and a heart that feels for others. Paul sets it directly against the bitterness and harshness that tear the church apart.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.Ephesians 4:32 (KJV)

What this command means

Paul writes, be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, and he places it right after a list of things to put away: bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking. Kindness is what fills the space those things leave. It is a disposition of goodwill that shows in how we speak, how we touch, how we make room for the weak and the young and the awkward.

Tenderhearted means our hearts are soft toward each other, quick to feel, slow to harden. Kindness is not weakness or mere niceness; it is strength under control, the deliberate choice to be gentle with people who, like us, are carrying more than we can see.

Why it matters for the church

Kindness is the ordinary weather of a healthy church. Grand acts of love are rare, but the tone of daily life together is set by a thousand small kindnesses or unkindnesses: how we greet, how we disagree, how we speak of the absent. A community marked by kindness is one people want to belong to and are safe to be weak in.

The opposite is corrosive. Harsh words, cold shoulders, and cutting humor wound quietly and drive people away. Many have left the family of God not over doctrine but over unkindness. To guard kindness is to guard the atmosphere in which faith and fellowship can grow.

Kindness is named as part of the fruit of the Spirit, set between longsuffering and goodness, which means it is not a personality trait some are born with and others lack. It is grown in every believer by the Spirit of God. That is good news for those who feel they are naturally harsh or impatient, for kindness is not finally about temperament but about the Spirit who is at work to make us like Christ.

How we fail at it

We fail at kindness most in the small moments, when we are tired, hurried, or annoyed. We snap, we dismiss, we let sarcasm cut. We reserve our best manners for strangers and give our worst to those closest to us. We excuse harshness as honesty and bluntness as a personality, when Scripture simply calls us to be kind.

We also fail by hardness of heart, growing numb to others' struggles, too preoccupied to feel. A hard heart cannot be kind. When we stop letting others' pain touch us, kindness dries up at the source, and we become efficient but cold.

How Christ enables it

The kindness we are to show flows from the kindness of God toward us. Paul grounds it in the gospel: forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. God has been kind to us when we were his enemies, patient with our failures, gentle with our weakness. His kindness leads us to repentance.

Jesus is the very picture of tenderheartedness, a bruised reed he would not break, a smoking flax he would not quench. When we come to him and taste how gentle he is with us, our own hearts soften. Kindness grows in us as the fruit of the Spirit, not as a strain we manufacture but as a life we receive from him.

The kindness of God is what saved us. Paul says that when the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, he saved us, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy. We were the undeserving objects of divine kindness. Having received such kindness at such cost, we have both the pattern and the power to be kind to the brother who has not earned it either.

How to live it

Watch your words, especially at home and with those you know best. Choose the soft answer. Speak of others as you would want to be spoken of. Let small courtesies become habits: a warm greeting, a thank you, a note, a door held, a person noticed.

Aim your kindness at those who can least repay it: the child, the outsider, the difficult, the overlooked. Ask God each morning for a soft heart, and each day for one deliberate act of kindness to a brother or sister. Small kindnesses, repeated, become the climate of a church.

Guard your words most carefully with those you know best, for we often save our sharpest tones for home and family. Choose the soft answer when you are tired or provoked, and let small courtesies become habits: the warm greeting, the thank you, the note of appreciation, the door held open. Aim your kindness deliberately at those who can least repay it, the child, the newcomer, the difficult, the overlooked. Refuse sarcasm that wounds under the cover of humor. And begin each day by asking God for a soft heart and one concrete kindness to do, for kindness is grown by practice. A church becomes gentle not through grand programs but through ten thousand small mercies, quietly and faithfully repeated among ordinary people.

Related commands: Forgive one another · Be humble toward one another · Be devoted to one another · All the one another commands