Gospel-Shaped Love: Part 1 (Romans Week 27) by Michael Williams

We are in Romans, and that's where we're going to be this morning.

But if you have your Bible, we'll be in chapter 12.

But before we get that, um before we get there, I do wanna give a little shout out.

I was actually saw this the other day and thought of some people in my own life, but we are actually 75 days away from something important, and this is really gonna make you feel like the end of summer is is here.

We are 75 days away from the kickoff of the Hallmark Christmas season.

Um yes, so Nana is everywhere rejoicing.

There will be a movie on every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday on the Hallmark Channel.

They'll all have the same plot, you won't have to be kept wondering.

There'll be a rich city slicker, there'll be the hometown guy that's gruffy and wears flannel.

Uh it'll turn out by the end that he is Santa Claus's nephew and also the owner of an oil company, so she makes the right choice.

So Merry Christmas in August.

It's coming up.

Um we live in a culture though that loves love.

I was looking up some stats for this sermon.

There's actually a hundred shows currently, over a hundred shows, on streaming services of dating.

Love is blind, love on the spectrum, Love Island, Bachelor, Bachelorette, over a hundred shows, married at first sight.

Um, some of them are better than others, but but we love romance, we love love as a culture.

We like things like 90-day fiance and wondering if they're gonna make it.

And that's just a hundred shows, that's a hundred shows of like just about love explicitly, but there's about 80% of our TV shows, one of the main plot lines is whether or not a couple ends up together.

We love romance, we love adventure, we we live in a culture that's addicted to it.

Kind of interestingly, um, Gen Z is a bit of an outlier, um, as they are in many ways, but but over half of Gen Z thinks there's too much romance on TV and there needs to be more TV shows that have platonic relationships and friendships.

And and I think part of why they feel that way is there's also this awareness in our culture that love feels hard.

Um, about 75% of people think dating is harder now than it's ever been before.

About 85% of people think true love is extremely rare.

True love is extremely rare.

It's a very difficult thing to find.

We're more obsessed with love than ever, but it feels more rare than ever.

And this morning we are gonna be talking about love.

We're gonna be talking, though, about love in a little bit different context.

We're gonna be talking about the real thing, genuine love.

We're gonna be talking about, you know, the thing that we all crave and are looking for.

Not necessarily romantic love, although what we talk about today will certainly impact our romantic loves, but but we're gonna be talking about a love that's produced or formed in us.

Not a love that we manufacture, but something that that happens to us and we we love from a different place.

So that's where we're gonna be going today, and that's where the text is gonna take us.

So if you would, let's pray together for our message, and then we'll get right in.

Lord, we welcome your presence.

We ask that you would speak to us.

We ask that your word would convict and form and straighten us.

We ask that it would produce fruit in us, that we would be repentant and that we would be changed more and more into your image.

We thank you, Lord.

It's in the name of Jesus we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

So I'm gonna do a bit of a review.

If you don't know, we've been in the book of Romans for a while as a community, uh, since January, and it's been a wonderful journey, and we're already in chapter 12, so it's going fast, at least from my perspective, and so it's it's been wonderful.

And one of the things that I love about the book of Romans is that Romans is all about the gospel.

It's all about the good news of Jesus, or as Paul uses in Romans, the gospel of God.

And Romans is Paul's longest letter that we have, it's the first letter of Paul in your New Testament, and in Romans is written, believe it or not, to the church in Rome by a person named Paul.

And Paul himself is just a miraculous story.

Um, if you want an apologetic for Christian faith, the best apologetic is always changed lives.

And when you think of somebody whose life has changed, Paul is right up there at the top.

This was a man who hated Christians, a man who persecuted Christians, and he encounters Jesus and he goes on to become this incredible missionary of the faith.

He goes on to plant all these different churches around the Mediterranean, and he also goes on to write these letters that make up much of our New Testament.

And as we think of Paul and the life that was just radically transformed, and we come to this letter of Romans, we we pause to think about what he has to say to us about this gospel that changed him and can change you and me.

And part of why we're in Romans together as a community is that we we really do believe that the gospel is foundational, that the gospel is what everything is built on, that we don't move on from the gospel.

The gospel is not like an entry point to get in.

It's actually the way further on.

That we need more and more of the gospel, that the saints of the church are people that have more of the gospel, that burn through more grace, that are more aware of their dependence.

It's not like I believe the gospel, I say a prayer, and then I go to endless classes at church for the rest of my life on three steps to a good marriage or how to parent.

It's not like that at all.

The gospel changes us and shapes us in an ongoing way.

And so in Paul's letter to the Romans, it's written to a church in Rome that's made up of Jews and Gentiles, and it's a unique moment in history.

They've experienced persecution.

The Jews were actually kicked out and then brought back.

It's under an emperor that that doesn't love them at all.

It's a difficult moment, and yet it's a church that's growing like the church around the Mediterranean at this time.

It's it's got something explosive, and Paul is writing them.

And if you wanted to summarize his purpose, the purpose Paul's writing for is he wants them to know that God is making one people.

That he's making one people to worship him.

Between Jews and Gentiles, there is one people of God that's being formed.

And he gives in Romans there's two parts, the first 11 chapters, and then 12 through the end.

And in the first 11 chapters, he gives what we like to think of as like the theology.

It's not really super accurate to divide Christian teaching between theology and the practical parts, but but it is simplistic, and the first 11 chapters seem to be kind of dense, and you guys did a great job making it through the first 11 chapters.

You waded into the depths some of the most brilliant stuff ever written about God and the gospel.

And now we've come to chapter 12, and in chapter 12 through the end, it sometimes talks what we would think of as like ethics, like how do we live, or how do we live in light of everything that happened?

And a couple weeks ago, Pastor Sarah was here, and she really honed on how we have to look back in the light of God's mercies, is how he starts in chapter 12.

And so I just want to review really briefly what we talked about in chapters 1 through 11, because we aren't going to graduate on from it.

It's actually going to be the ground of everything we talk about today and through the rest of this series.

And so, if you remember, he talks in chapter 1 of Romans how the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe.

That the righteousness of God is revealed in Jesus Christ.

And he calls it the gospel of God, and it's the power of God unto salvation.

And then immediately, though, he says that the wrath of God has been revealed.

So the backdrop of this message is that the world has gone haywire.

We know from Genesis that God made the world and it was good, that he made people in his image, and that there is this thing called the fall, that things went wrong.

And Paul's explaining the fall in chapters 1, 2, and 3.

He says the wrath of God's been revealed, everything has gone wrong, and he builds this case like a lawyer in a courtroom.

And the case he builds is that whether you're religious or not religious, none of us can stand before God.

That all of us have violated our conscience.

All of us have violated God's law.

All of us have violated what creation would even teach us about God.

That nobody is righteous, no one not one.

And not only have we not lived up to an impossible standard, we've also got this thing in our heart that's pointed in the wrong way.

The trajectory of our heart is pointed in the wrong way.

That we are innately selfish.

We are like little kids that say, mine, mine, mine.

We want to be at the center.

We don't want God to rule over us.

We want to be autonomous, to be our own lords.

And he leaves it off in chapter 3 with us standing before this judge with nothing to say.

And as we have nothing to say, it's in that moment that the gospel good news breaks in.

He says that we are justified freely by our faith in Jesus Christ, that Jesus is the righteousness of God, and that we get his righteousness to be justified means not only are we forgiven, we are forgiven, but that everything that was Christ becomes ours.

We go from being in detention to being on the honor roll, from having nothing in our bank account to having our debts erased, but also having the family credit card.

That all the rewards of heaven are ours, that we are declared righteous, that we are his.

And then he goes on to say, this is actually the only way God can relate to any of us.

If you go all the way back to Abraham, even Abraham only related to God, based on God's generous mercy.

That God counted Abraham as righteous, it was a righteousness not his own.

That no human, not me, not you, not the most spiritual person you know, not the person who you think is the worst in the world.

None of us stand before God with our own righteousness and are accepted.

That we receive the righteousness of Christ and He declares who we are, and it's because of what Christ has done.

Salvation is entirely the Lord's.

And not only is it entirely the Lord's, but it answers a problem he shows us in chapter 5 that we could not even begin to address.

He tells the story, if you remember, of the two atoms, of Adam in the garden and Jesus, the second Adam.

And one of the points of the story is that the scope of our problem is not that you and I have just messed up.

It's that we are under this power called sin.

That we are dead, that we are helpless.

It's not that I've messed up here and there, and maybe God's nice and I'll be forgiven.

It's that all of humanity is under the wrong master, is under the wrong citizenship.

That we have all participated in it, but we've also been born into it.

And the work of Jesus Christ is this liberating work.

In chapter 6, he talks about how when God justifies us, it doesn't just give us a new status.

It's not a cosmetic, I declare you innocent, but you're still really a scoundrel.

We talked about it being a speech act, like when we say I do in a wedding, it changes our status.

Justification, God speaking in to us, it changes us most fundamentally.

We move from being under the mastery of sin to being under the lordship of Jesus.

We have a change in masters.

We have a change in citizenship.

We move from being in the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of life.

Something fundamentally happens to us, and we are changed.

He goes on to say that the rule book, the law, it actually only exposes our sin.

We have the rule book, but what happens is we break the rules, and now not only are we bad, but we're rule breakers.

That there's something at work inside of human beings that we do not do what we want.

There's a Jekyll and a Mr.

Hyde.

There's something inside of us deeply broken that we cannot save ourselves, that you and I we need to be rescued.

In chapter 70, he ends with this lament about his body of death.

Who can save me from this body of death?

And then he begins with the rejoicing, the ascent up the mountain.

He says, Praise God for the Lord Jesus Christ who has saved us.

In chapter 8, he shows that when we are justified, it's not just a legal thing, but it's a relational thing.

God puts his spirit inside of you and me.

We have a new life principle at work inside of us.

There's no condemnation.

That we are set free, we can set our mind on the things above.

Not only that, we're brought into family relationship.

We have the Spirit of God that cries out inside of us, Abba, Father, you are declared righteous, and you are called a son.

And then he goes on to say, Nothing can separate you from the love of God.

He takes a breath and then he begins to expand it.

Talking to the Jews in the community, he says, What about you?

And this is where it gets even more beautiful and expansive.

He says, Yes, they were elect, and God used even their disobedience to bring the Messiah.

But God's not done with them.

There's a remnant now, but in the end they too shall all be saved.

It's this Houdini act where he says, I am going to accomplish my purposes.

That the gospel is going to bring together one people between Jews and Gentiles.

This is what God has done.

He's used even our disobedience for his glory and his purposes.

The gospel is the Lord's work.

It's the Lord's purpose.

It's where his power is found.

It's what God is doing in the world.

And it's the gospel that changes us, liberates us.

And so he pivots, if you remember, a couple weeks ago in chapter 12, he says, What do we do in the light of all this?

We give ourselves completely to God.

We give ourselves completely to God.

And we have our mind renewed, washed, made new in these truths of the gospel.

And notice it's a it's a reversal of chapter one.

In chapter one, we we have our minds darkened, and now our minds are renewed.

In chapter one, we we are given over to this false worship.

And now we are worshiping God purely and in truth, true spiritual worship.

In chapter one, we are continually in this place of a darkened heart with suppressed truth, and now we know the will of God.

Everything that spiraled down in chapter one, he's saying, is going to be built back up in Christian community in chapter two.

And how, or chapter 12, and how is it going to be built back up?

It's going to be built back up by the gospel.

And then last week, Pastor Eric talked about the very first thing that the gospel affects.

It affects how we see ourselves.

Let us see ourselves with sober judgment.

Notice the contrast, sober judgment.

Verses in chapter one, how we see ourselves, the darkened heart and mind.

Now we see ourselves soberly, and how do we see ourselves?

He says, we see ourselves as part of a community.

That our fundamental identity is that we are part of a community.

And so the gospel, it takes individuals and brings them into community.

And it doesn't, if you remember last week, send them to the community empty-handed.

It's like a church potluck.

Everybody brings something.

You come to the community with something.

He says, You've been graced, you've been given gifts.

The gospel takes you, it brings you back into the family of God, and it puts something in your hands so you have something to contribute to the family of God.

It brings us back together.

And then this week and next week, we're going to look at the next few verses, and it's all about how are we together?

How are we going to be together?

And I broke it into two weeks because in these short four verses, nine through thirteen, there's 12 or 13 commands, depending on how you parse them up.

And it felt like too much to get through in one week.

So we're going to break it into two weeks, but but all of them can be summarized in the first one, which is about genuine love.

How is the community of God to be together?

How is it to be marked?

It's going to be marked by genuine love.

Some of you know that my wife and I, we had our first kid.

I have, I think, a picture up here for you.

There you go.

That's James.

One of the great things about having a kid is the endless conversations of who does he look like?

Who does he look like?

James is actually here today, diligently taking notes, listening to everything his dad's going to preach.

It's his first sermon, so I think it'll be a trait he carries his whole life.

But what does he look like?

What is the resemblance?

And the question that we're really asking today is what does the family of God look like?

What does a community saturated in the gospel look like?

And I want to challenge you before we get into the commands.

I want to challenge you.

Some of us, I think, we've we've dipped our toe in the gospel.

We were at a church camp.

The third song was emotional.

We said a prayer with the pastor, and it's like we put our big toe in the gospel.

And if we've only done that, if we've only dipped in the gospel, these commands are going to be utterly impossible for you to keep.

The only way to obey what Paul's about to instruct us, the only way to be marked by what Paul is going to instruct us with, is if you are baptized in the gospel, totally immersed, soaked and drenched.

If you stay and you linger in it, if it's continually renewing your mind, then and only then will these commands be true of us.

So let's begin in chapter twelve.

We're going to be in verse nine.

Let love be genuine.

Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with mutual affection, outdo one another in showing honor.

And so we're going to begin with let love be genuine.

If you're following along in your notes, it's the first point.

Gospel-shaped love is without hypocrisy.

Literally, the word genuine is connected with the word hypocrisy, which was a word actors would use.

That's where the concept of the word comes from.

It's like you wear a mask when you're an actor, you're pretending.

Paul's first command and the summary of all twelve to follow are let your love be without any hypocrisy.

Let it be genuine, let it be true, let it be the real thing.

Let it not be, you know, faked, but let it come from deep within.

He's saying this is what the gospel produces.

It produces a genuine love.

The gospel produces a genuine love that has no hypocrisy.

This is fascinating because genuine love is what every human is looking for.

Whether you're here and you believe in God or not, and I know there's some here that probably don't, and you think the world is run by mathematics and things are biologically determined.

And whether you believe that or not, one thing I do know is you will spend your entire life looking for genuine love like a thirsty person in the desert.

And I've seen this happen multiple times.

I've seen multiple people that say, I don't believe in love.

I think it's a chemical reaction, it's not real.

I've seen them fall in love.

And guess what?

Their heart doesn't change, their brain changes.

They have different beliefs in a couple months, right?

We chase and crave love.

But we live, like I mentioned, in a culture where love feels more rare than ever.

In 2015, the the word of the year was actually, the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year was actually an emoji.

I think I have it up here.

And it's the laughing crying emoji.

I don't know what the emoji would be for 2026.

There probably isn't a good one, but but we live in a world where we have emojis and texting.

It's easy to like people's messages, it's easy to send Ascend a heart.

We have online dating, we're more connected than ever, but love feels more rare than ever.

There's a philosopher and sociologist named Charles Taylor, a Canadian, who writes about the buffered self.

The idea with the buffered self is in this secular individualistic society, the buffered self draws this line between me and everybody else, between the outer world and the inner world.

And all meaning and truth and authenticity comes from looking within.

To be authentic is to look deep inside and to somehow see some raw desires inside and to be faithful to that, to be faithful to who you are.

There's a number of problems with that.

We're not going to pick that apart today, but one of the biggest ones is certainly that our raw desires are mostly shaped by our culture, not who we really are.

But aside from that, the problem with it in love is that we end up thinking that true love is being true to my feelings.

And it's a transactional sort of love where I'll love you as long as that's what's most true to me.

That genuine love is being true to yourself.

And of course, the problem is we change.

And Paul, when he says to have genuine love, he uses this word agape.

Agape is self-giving, it's sacrificial, it's I'll love you when I don't feel like it.

And if you think about what kind of love could commitment be built on?

What kind of love could weather the storms of life?

It's very clear that the buffered self, it doesn't give us solid grounds.

If we determine our own meaning, if we think love is just being genuine to what we feel, if there's no component that's outside of ourselves, I will serve you when I don't feel like serving you.

I'll be kind to you when I'm grumpy.

I will love you when it's hard.

And we live in a world where that love it's rare.

We're told that we are to love each other.

And often in the church we don't escape it.

There's lots of phony love in the church.

Not this church, of course.

But lots of politeness.

I went to college in the South and I learned really quickly that bless your heart was an insult.

The one I hear up here all the time is all due respect, followed by the most disrespectful things, right?

Like it's somehow the code to say anything I want that's mean and dishonoring.

The church is often filled with this fake love, these platitudes, this you know, surface sincerity.

I had a friend in college who went out to start his car one morning, and the car like took a little while to get started.

It was like coffin.

Finally, it did start, but it just felt like it was running weird.

And the next day when he was out, I was getting a ride with him, and and we both noticed the car smelled a little bit weird.

Didn't think much of it.

We're college kids, we're guys.

It's like whatever.

A couple days later, we noticed, especially when you turned the heat on, the car really smelled.

And so we thought, why not choose a surface solution?

Uh let's get a Febreze thing, right?

And we hung the Febreze thing.

And by like the end of two weeks, it smelled so bad that he took it to a mechanic and found out there's a dead animal inside, a dead rat in his car.

And that's what phony love is like.

It's like I'm gonna hang some Febreze to keep the rotten rat from getting out of my heart, right?

I'm just gonna hang it.

And what Paul is talking about is love that goes all the way down.

It's not a phony sincerity that that covers how I really feel, so you don't smell it, at least when you're around me.

Right?

And so the question is, how does the gospel, how does the gospel produce this kind of love in you and me?

I think the first way the gospel produces this kind of love is the gospel humbles us.

The gospel humbles us.

The gospel teaches that you and I, we are both sinners before a holy God.

That there is no grounds for boasting.

The gospel says we are both valued by God.

It humbles me.

Second, the gospel secures me.

When I'm secure in my identity, I know who I am.

Then I don't go to other people needing them to complete me.

I don't go to other people needing to manufacture how they respond to me.

The gospel says I am secure, the gospel says I am loved, the gospel says I am treasured, the gospel says I am honored.

The gospel gives me assurance.

And when that takes root in our hearts, when that renews our minds, it changes how we relate to other people.

We don't need to be fake in order to be liked, because we don't need to seek approval everywhere, because we've been approved.

It changes how we relate to each other.

The gospel burns in my mind an image of love.

In Romans 5, it says, this is what love looks like.

It's cruciform.

What does love look like in the gospel?

It looks like Jesus going first.

He loved before he loved us.

My love is in response to you being nice.

Love flows first, it's free.

He doesn't do it while we're paying him back.

It's love for enemies, it's while we're opposed to him that he loves us.

It's sacrificial.

He dies on our behalf.

The gospel, it imprints on my mind what real love looks like.

It shows me that love can't just be affirmations, which we'll get to in a minute.

The gospel shows me who other people are.

They are loved, they are treasured.

Paul is not saying, fake it.

You've been faking it, but fake it a little bit better so your love looks genuine.

He's saying if you renew your mind in the gospel, you will have genuinely new affections begin to form in your heart.

Fifthly, the gospel gives us the Spirit of God who begins to awaken in us new desires.

We begin to love others because He loves others.

The second mark we see, the second command, and the second mark flows under genuine love.

It's hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.

Hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good.

The point in the notes is that gospel-shaped love is grounded in truth.

It's grounded in truth.

This is fascinating.

This is connected to love.

And what Paul's doing here is he's adding an ethical or a moral dimension to love.

There's a moral dimension to loving somebody.

Now, if you think about your definition of love, this might begin to make sense.

Most of the good definitions of love say something like seeking or pursuing the highest good of another.

And right away, good is a moral word, and so in order to love somebody, I have to have some idea of what's good.

Now we live in a culture that's that's totally against this.

In our sort of modern therapeutic world, we we believe that we are supposed to let other people determine what's good for them, and that we are to support them, even if we know that what they're doing is destructive.

Even if we see them happy.

We you know we we feel this.

This this soaks in.

It's not just the world out there, it's us.

Like we know that the person's doing something wrong, but they seem happy, and so something in us hesitates.

Is it really my place to disrupt their happiness?

Is it really my place to speak the truth?

But gospel-shaped love, it has this moral dimension where we seek the highest good of another, and and in doing so, the truth has to be involved.

The truth has to be involved.

And notice what he says.

He doesn't say reject what's evil, he says to hate it.

Now that's a that's a word that's uh an affection word.

He wants us to feel a certain way about bad things, and to feel a certain way about good things.

The word hate in this passage literally means to like abhor, throw off the word good, the cling to what's good, hold on, glued to it, grab it.

We're supposed to have different affections.

We're supposed to have different affections.

Now, in our culture, this can feel superior.

I'm deciding what's good for you, I'm determining this, and I want to say this as Christians, how we know what's good is not determined by our moral sensitivities.

It's determined by the commands of Scripture.

That we are not saying to another person, I think I know better than you what's good for you.

We are but witnesses to say, I think the way of Jesus is what we were all made for.

That you and I, we do not have the freedom to completely define ourselves, that we are made, and because we are made, we have a purpose, and that purpose is shown in the way of Jesus, in the commands of Jesus, that we actually show love when we obey the commands of Jesus, and we help others obey the commands of Jesus.

It's not my opinion, your opinion, but rather it's it's grounded in the person of Christ.

Another way to say this is the gospel gives us a picture of the moral beauty of Jesus.

That fundamentally, one of our human problems is we love the wrong things.

Anybody who's ever tried to diet knows this.

We love the wrong things.

And Paul is saying the gospel, it's going to change your loves.

It's going to change your loves.

How does the gospel do this?

How does the gospel change our loves?

First, the gospel shows us our own evil.

The gospel shows us our own evil.

When we have a conversion experience, like the Apostle Paul, what happens?

We're confronted with the fact of our sinfulness.

We see our sin in a different light.

Paul was walking on the road to Damascus and he encounters Jesus and he's undone.

And what happens to Paul?

What does Jesus say?

Why have you been persecuting me?

In a moment, what Paul thought was his righteousness, helping in stoning Stephen, he finds out was his greatest sin.

He finds out that in stoning Stephen, he had been stoning Jesus.

In all true conversion, we we realize we have sinned against God.

And it changes how we see our sin.

It exposes how we see our sin.

It creates a distaste in our mouth for our sin.

Second, the cross shows us the cost of evil.

At the cross, we see Christ crucified because of our evil.

Because of the wrong things we have loved.

The Son of God has to die.

When we look at the cross, the gospel, it gives us the cost of our evil.

So many of us, we we dabble in things we know are not right.

And the truth is the affections of our heart have not changed.

But when we begin to see what it costs Jesus, we begin to see that this is awful, this is bad, this is worth hating.

No amount of guilt will get you to hate sin.

No amount of guilt.

But to see Christ crucified, to see the cost put upon him, to see the consequence, to see the fruit of what seems so benign, begins to change our affections.

The gospel also shows us that love is not merely affirmation.

The cross is not merely affirmation.

It is love opposing what is evil.

It is love overcoming what is evil.

At the cross we see that Christ died to overcome what is evil, and so our love should overcome what is evil.

That what is most wrong must be overcome by his cruciform love.

And fourth, the gospel gives us his spirit, the spirit of Christ.

And the spirit of Christ does give us new desires, but he also shows us Jesus.

He exalts and lifts up Jesus in our heart.

And when we look at Jesus, we we begin to desire differently.

I want to encourage you, if there's some evil in your life that you're like, honestly, my problem is I I still like this, I still love this, then the answer is not to heap guilt and shame on yourself.

It's to look at the cross, but then also let the Holy Spirit show you the moral beauty of Jesus.

I'll give a real tangible example.

If you're here and you're dealing with lust and you hate that you don't hate it, what would it mean to meditate on the purity of Jesus?

To look on Jesus until you found his purity attractive, until the idea of it, the image of it, the perfection of it, it grew in your heart, becoming something that you actually wanted to attain.

And because you have the Spirit of Jesus, that can happen in you.

The Spirit of Jesus in you, one of the primary things the Spirit is doing in you and me is changing our loves.

Continually winning, becoming more and more the Lord of every area of our life, and doing so not through force, but through wooing us, through showing us the beauty of love.

I think for many of us, we we think that through willpower we're gonna somehow become the kind of people, you know, I'm just gonna grunt it, and at the end of the day, I'm gonna hate gossiping.

No, it won't work.

What will work is to look at how Jesus talked to and about people.

To read about it, to think about it, to meditate on it, to chew on it, to let it renew your mind, and to find yourself wanting to talk like Jesus.

To want to see people like Jesus sees people.

There's a moral element to love.

In Christian community, we're called to genuine love.

And a gospel-shaped love is grounded in the truth.

The third we see is gospel-shaped love leads us to relate as family.

Look at the next verses.

Gospel-shaped love leads us to relate like family.

Love one another with mutual affection.

It can be translated as brotherly love or family love.

It's one of the most radical teachings of Jesus.

Jesus had a lot of radical teachings.

Turn the other cheek, tells us to love our enemies.

But one of his most radical teachings was that we are to relate to one another as family.

He has that story, you might remember it, where he says, Who's my mother?

Who's my brother?

And in a culture like that, family was everything.

We live in a world that's more defined by, you know, we're grouped with what we do or what we've accomplished, but but in that context, family was everything.

And what is he saying?

He's saying that the gospel, it's going to produce this family love in the church.

This doesn't happen by slogans or by pasting it on all the walls.

I think sometimes church, especially, we we have this sort of false intimacy.

We think if we put it in our mission statement, and if it's on every wall in the kids' area, and if we sing about it a couple times a month, how we're all a family, then maybe it'll like sink in and we'll treat each other like family.

And a lot of times people come into that and they think like, this is just like a word salad, this is platitudes.

I clearly don't care about the people in my row like I care about my family at home.

But the gospel, it does produce, Paul is saying, it produces this genuine brother and sisterly love, this care for each other.

The context for this is probably not always Sunday morning when we're in a big crowd.

It's probably in our small groups or people we're gathered in everyday life with around a table, but but we are growing in this love for each other.

That we live in a world that craves it in the gospel it produces.

How does it do it?

How does the gospel produce familial love?

Well, one, it gives us one father.

How does it produce this love?

It puts you in a family.

See, this love is actually coming into alignment to what has happened to you.

When you said yes to Jesus, when you accepted Christ, when you gave him your life, you were adopted into the family.

And many of us we have an idea that we are sons or daughters of God.

But we've never carried the implication on.

That means I'm also a brother or sister.

We maybe have heard that Jesus is our older brother.

But one of the primary implications of the gospel is that I have this extended family now.

I have these brothers and sisters now that I never knew that I had.

When I was in the Middle East, I have told this story, I think, before, but when I was in Yemen, we were in the country looking for believers, and one of the reasons we were looking for believers is because we didn't know of any, but we thought there were some, and we had there was no gatherings, no churches in northern Yemen.

And I think one afternoon, after we had been praying and fasting, looking for months, I remember meeting this guy in a banana juice shop, and we're at this juice shop, and he I sort of saw him out of the corner of my eye.

Um his name was Ahmed, and I saw him and he was smiling at me, which was kind of weird, but it caught my attention.

It felt like maybe the Lord.

And I went up to him and he handed me this Microsoft Word document of the book of Genesis, all typed out in Arabic, and my Arabic was good enough to realize this is this is Genesis.

And I don't know why.

I think it happened in my gut faster than in my head, but like but there was this moment, it was like a click, an intuition, whatever you want to call it, where I realized, like, I just met the first Yemeni Christian I'd met.

And and the very first thing I said to him in broken Arabic is, you're my brother.

You're my brother.

And I didn't think about those words, it just like slipped out.

Like I just found a sibling.

I just found a sibling.

That's what the Spirit of God does in us.

It it causes us to see each other as sisters and brothers.

Do you see people like that?

Is there ever that moment maybe you meet somebody at church or in your small group?

That moment, I think, I just found a family member.

Not because we both like skiing and vacationing at Hiltonhead, but because God has done something.

The gospel produces this familial love because it brings us into one family under one father.

We share a father.

Second way the gospel brings this familial love is it removes all grounds for distinction.

It removes all grounds for distinction.

Before the gospel, all of these sub-identities become who I am.

Maybe I'm white or I'm black, maybe I'm rich or I'm poor, maybe I'm an Ohio State fan or a Michigan fan.

I have these categories for myself and for people.

And that's predominantly how I see the world.

I see it through distinctions.

I see it through categories.

The cross wipes out distinctions.

If you remember as we went through Romans two times, Paul says there's no distinction.

One, when he's talking about our sin.

We are all equally guilty.

There's no distinction.

If I were Pastor Eric, I'd say, tell the person next to you, you're as equally.

Bad as me.

We don't have to do that.

Don't have to do that.

But there's also no distinction because you and I have the righteousness of Christ.

We don't stand before God based on our performance.

Christ has done for him what he has done for me.

He's done for her what he has done for me.

And because there's no distinction, the barriers fall down.

And that affection begins to emerge.

This is not something you can manufacture or fake, but it is something that grows in you if you immerse yourself in the gospel.

A third way we see this affection grow in us is it changes who we think our people are.

We begin to identify with the family of God.

We identify with the family of God.

We have a tribe, a people, and love grows in our hearts.

Finally, the fourth and last command we'll get to this week, and then we'll pick up part two next week.

Outdo one another in showing honor.

Outdo one another in showing honor.

We live in a culture that does not honor.

And we might talk a little bit more next week about the different ways that honor has been malformed in our culture.

We live in a culture of contempt.

Honor is showing and recognizing the worth and the value in somebody else.

It originally had like a financial connotation to where you get like honorarium.

But it's seeing the worth and value in somebody.

Glory is innate worth and value.

God is glorious whether we honor Him or not, but honor is recognizing it.

And notice what He says: if you're competitive and you're here today, here's something you can compete in.

Compete, outdo one another in showing honor.

Show more honor than anybody else.

One of the things that made the early church explode in growth is that honor was not just passed up, but it was passed down and out to the sides.

People we would not think of honoring were honored.

The inherent dignity and worth in people were seen.

People were valued.

The Christian community is meant to be a haven of honor.

We're to outdo each other in recognizing what we see, the good, in other people.

This requires a certain vision, a filter, if you will.

We have Instagram filters.

We have an honor filter.

When I look at other people, what is the filter I see?

Do I have these categories where I immediately have them in this box?

Or do I look at them with fresh eyes?

Do I look for the good first?

David Hume writes about in a culture of contempt, people do two things.

One, they they categorize people.

They take a flaw when they make it the whole person.

And then two, when they look at them, they demonize just that flaw.

It's uh in another another idea in sociology that like similar is this idea of pure evil myth.

It's this idea, we see it in politics.

One thing we don't like becomes the whole thing about the person, and then they must be evil.

If you want to feel if this has affected you at all, think of the political party you didn't vote for.

And then when you think about the people who did vote for the people you didn't vote for, is your first thought.

These are well-intentioned, honest, informed people that just came to a different view than me.

Probably not, right?

Probably think of words like stupid, dumb, ill-informed, right?

We we characterize them and we compare ourselves to a caricature of them.

Honor, filter, it's the opposite.

It says, I'm going to look for the good.

I'm going to honor them for what I see, what I recognize.

It's not fake, it's not brown nosing.

It's not making things up.

You actually see this, you actually are calling out the truth.

It's not flattery.

But it builds people up.

So often in the church, honor has become sort of a taboo word because of things like honor culture and some Pentecostal and independent churches where really honor means just honor the pastor.

And if you guys want to honor me, I'm just kidding.

No, no.

It's not honor going up, it's honor going out and down.

It's the upside-down kingdom of Jesus.

How does the gospel produce that in us?

How does the gospel produce honor?

Well, the gospel says that all the boasting of heaven, all the honor that came upon Jesus, the applause, the roar, the achievement, all of it has been put on you.

You're honored by God.

God died for you.

He served you.

He became naked and nothing for you.

That you might be honored.

When you struggle to honor somebody, you have to let go of the caricatures.

And you have to see them as a person that God has died for.

See them as a person that has been honored, and you have to see yourself as somebody who all the honor of heaven has been given to.

We oftentimes do not honor when we most feel dishonored.

When we most feel wronged, when we most feel ashamed.

A lot of times contempt, it's passed on because we feel like that's how we've been treated.

In the gospel, it stops the cycle.

It stops the cycle.

Look at what Christ has done that you and I might receive honor and praise and love from the Father.

It's almost hard to believe.

It's almost hard to believe.

The gospel tears down the proud, but it also lifts up and gives more honor to the lowly than anything possibly could.

And when you receive that, when you feel that, when you marinate in that, the natural thing will be I want to pass that honor on.

It's difficult to dishonor somebody when you are filled with the love and honor of God.

When you are filled with his approval, when you know you have his affection, when his righteousness clothes you and you don't feel inadequate, from that place, the natural thing, honor is like a fountain.

It'll flow out of you for other people.

We're going to pick up this message next week, because like I said, there's there's more commands to go, and all of this is about genuine love.

But if you would, let's let's close with just this simple thought.

What is the gospel producing in you?

What is the gospel producing in you?