Love In Action

How far we'll get, but we're gonna um begin in verse nine.

But before we do that, last um time we looked at Romans 12, we looked at the first eight verses of the chapter, and the key verse there in number three where Paul tells us, do not think of yourself more highly than you ought.

But rather think of yourself with sober judgment.

You know, the key ingredient to serving effectively in the body of Christ is humility.

Each one of us has a part to play, each one of us has a gift and abilities that God has given us that we can bring to the table to serve the church.

And when we do that, we work together in harmony as God has intended us to do.

When that is all done in humility, things run smoothly.

But where pride enters the arena, you begin to have division, strife, and disruption.

Think of the verse there in James 4.10.

If I can get this to work.

And truly that is the truth this morning as we think about that.

Today we're beginning at verse 9 and go through verse 21.

Um and I just simply titled this Love in Action.

Love in Action.

Let's read chapter 12, 9 through 21 at this time.

Love must be sincere, hate what is evil, cling to what is good, be devoted to one another in love, honor one another above yourselves.

Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord.

Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

Share with the Lord's people who are in need, practice hospitality.

Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn.

Live in harmony with one another.

Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position.

Do not be conceited.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil.

Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone.

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.

Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, It is mine to avenge, I will repay, says the Lord.

On the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.

If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.

In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head.

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

I believe this morning that we could divide this passage possibly in three parts.

First of all, Paul is talking about love within the family.

This is focused on how we are to love within the body of Christ, or the family of Christ, or fellow believers.

The second part is talking about how we are to love those outside the body of Christ, people of the world, if you will.

Thirdly, Paul addresses how we are to love our enemies or those that aspire evil against us.

Today we are going to address this passage from these angles as we look at some very practical ways to live out the love that God has put in us or has given us.

As we think about the word love, I would say that love is a word that our society, in our society, that is overused and underpracticed.

You know, we tell our spouses we love them because we care for them, we provide for them, we protect them, but we also say we love ice cream.

Or we may say, I love your dress.

Obviously, our love for ice cream or a dress is less than we care about.

Less than we care about, or we love someone that is close to us or means a lot to us.

So it's very different.

The word love is used very easily, it's used pretty loosely in our culture and has probably lost some of its meaning due to being watered down.

But Paul says here, let your love be sincere.

What is Paul saying in these verses about having sincere love?

You know, sincere love represents affection stripped of pretense.

It's a commitment to another's genuine well-being rather than just a performance designed to benefit yourself.

This matters because too often it's easy for believers to mask selfish motives, jealousy, and even manipulation behind displays of care.

If you've ever been a recipient of selfish motives and manipulation, mask as love, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

And I'm sorry you face that.

You know the hurt that that can bring.

Sincere love operates on two fronts.

First, it involves genuinely desiring God's best for others and speaking and acting towards that end or towards that goal.

Rather than expressing care through words alone, sincere love demonstrates itself through actions and truth.

There's a verse in 1 John 3:8 that tells us, dear children, let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and truth.

1 John 3:8

So Paul is not calling us to verbalize our love to one another, although that is a part of it.

Paul is calling us to a life of action.

The believer must love others with pure motivation, free from desires of gain, advantage, position, or attention.

And sincere love emerges from a pure heart, good conscience, and sincere faith.

We see this in 1 Timothy 1, verse 5.

1 Timothy 1:5

The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

The second part of verse 9 says, Hate what is evil, cling to what is good.

Practically this begins with guarding your inner life.

Everything you do flows from your heart.

You can turn to that if you like.

I think it's on the on the slides there.

Um, Jared, if you want to turn to that.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

Keep your mouth free of perversity, keep corrupt talk far from your lips.

Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.

Give careful thought to the past for your feet, and be steadfast in all your ways.

Do not turn to the right or the left.

Keep your foot from evil.

If I would have any encouragement to you young men, young ladies this morning, highlight these verses in your Bible and commit them to memory.

Because one day when you're old and gray, you will thank God for the wisdom and direction they give you or have given you in your past.

These are powerful words if we heed them.

These verses are telling us to be intentional about the content that we let in our hearts.

Keep our speech clean.

Be careful where you look, and pay close attention to the path on which you walk.

Protecting your speech, fixing your attention on what really matters, and deliberately choosing paths away from evil creates the conditions where hatred of evil becomes genuine in your life.

The more you walk away from that, the more clearly you see it.

You know, it's amazing as we begin to make right choices in our lives and begin to walk the path that God has for us as an individual.

How our vision clears when we begin to make the right choices.

And we begin to see the truth and we begin to see the lies.

Moving on to verse 10.

Be devoted to one another in love, honor one another above yourselves.

This means cultivating the kind of affection that binds families together.

Not a mere obligation, but genuine warmth and tender care for one another.

The Greek term refers to a special family affection, particularly towards precious family members, suggesting that believers should relate to each other with the natural warmth of siblings.

Maybe siblings don't always relate together with the warmth that they should.

But you get the idea.

It speaks of family warmth and friendship and love.

Have you ever heard the expression, if you mess with one in that family, you mess with all of them?

Should this be how it is within the body of Christ?

We're there for each other.

Maybe that should translate into the family of God.

Honoring one another above yourselves completes this picture that we have here.

This means striving with all your strength to show honor and respect to each other.

Not centering on our own personal status or agenda, but going out of our way in esteeming others above ourselves.

That's what Paul's speaking about here.

Verse 11.

Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord.

Zeal represents energetic commitment to your calling.

You know, a refusal to coast through life with apathy or half-hearted effort.

Paul calls believers to maintain spiritual fervor in their life while serving the Lord.

We could contrast this with indifference and the spiritual danger that indifference brings in our life.

Whatever work we undertake as a person should be pursued wholeheartedly as in service to Christ, rather than merely for human approval.

And we could all point to individuals that we know in our lives that give everything they do, they just give it all they've got.

That's the picture we see here in our service and our fervor for the Lord is give it all you have with intensity.

You know, this principle extends beyond religious activities into ordinary labor, also.

Your job, your studies, your responsibilities all become expressions of devotion when pursued with full intensity.

Your labor in the Lord carries genuine weight and consequences.

It's never wasted or meaningless, no matter how small or how great the task is.

It is never wasted or meaningless.

Zeal also means perseverance against weariness.

And don't we all grow weary sometimes?

But zeal means perseverance against that.

Believers are urged not to grow exhausted in pursuing goodness with the promise that persistent effort yields a harvest.

And we see this in Galatians 6, verse 9.

Galatians 6:9

It says in Galatians 6, 9, let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

You know, maintaining diligence throughout your life ensures that your hopes become fully realized.

While laziness undermines the inheritance promised to those who combine faith with patience and perseverance in their lives.

This isn't about frantic activity or burnout in our lives, but it's about sustained, purposeful engagement rooted in the conviction that our efforts will make a difference in eternity.

And they will.

And when we believe that with our whole heart, it makes a difference how we approach those things.

Verse 12 says, be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

These verses are gold mines of spiritual wisdom for us as believers.

They give us wisdom, they give us instruction.

And in many ways, I'm just scratching the surface of these things as we go through them.

Maybe it'll generate an appetite for you to dig deeper into these issues and these encouragements, these instructions for us.

Be joyful in hope.

Be joyful in hope means anchoring your happiness, not in present circumstances, but in the certainty of what God has promised us.

You know, your joy will rise and fall when it depends on your circumstances and what you're facing.

But when we anchor our joy in the promise of God and the promises of God, it is unmovable.

This joy operates differently from happiness, dependent on favorable conditions in our life.

It persists through difficult things because it rests on an unshakable foundation rather than events that come and go, maybe good or bad.

The Christian's hope emerges from Christ's resurrection, which creates a living hope.

And we see this in this scripture in 1 Peter 1, 3 to 6.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In his great mercy, he hath given us new hope, new given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade.

This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.

There's nothing that gets me more excited than to think about the living hope that we have in Jesus Christ.

If you have ever experienced any hardships or trials in your life or times that you thought that you would not be able to survive, then you know what the living hope of Jesus can do for you in those dark moments, in those difficult moments that you face.

This isn't just wishful thinking or optimistic speculation in our life.

It's a confidence rooted in God's character and his demonstrated faithfulness in each of our lives.

Because God cannot lie, those who trust, his promises find great encouragement, with hope functioning as the anchor for the soul.

Hope is our anchor this morning.

Firm and secure in Christ.

I think of the words of the hymn that we sing.

We have an anchor that keeps the soul steadfast and sure while the billows roll.

Fastened to the rock that cannot move, grounded firm and deep in our Savior's love.

That is our anchor this morning.

Praise the Lord for that in our lives, that anchor that we can have.

The connection between hope and joy becomes clear through understanding what you're actually hoping for.

Christ dwelling within you constitutes the hope of glory.

In Colossians 1 27, we have the verse that says, To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of his mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

If you look at the second part of verse 12 here, it says patient in affliction.

Patient in affliction.

How many of you are naturally patient when it comes to affliction?

Raise of hands.

No takers?

You know, oftentimes when we face affliction and con or like um troubles in our life, patience is the first thing out the window, isn't it?

Oftentimes.

We think we don't have time for this.

Why is this happening to me?

Suddenly we have so many questions about why we're going through this affliction, this trouble, this hard time.

Present sufferings pale in comparison to the glory that will be revealed.

We've seen that in chapter eight of Romans in verse eighteen.

This means joy and hope involves a realistic assessment that temporary trials cannot diminish eternal realities.

Temporary trials cannot diminish eternal realities.

If we can get a hold of that truth, it changes how we see our trials and afflictions.

Because of this, we can greatly rejoice, even while experiencing grief in various trials.

As we've seen in 1 Peter, those verses in chapter 1, 3 through 6.

Our joy, our hope, our patience is based on eternal realities rather than our temporary circumstances, our temporary distractions.

Suffering itself becomes a pathway to hope.

We see this in Romans chapter 5, verses 2 to 5.

Romans 5:2–5

Through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God.

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance.

Perseverance, character, and character hope.

And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

We often look at suffering and affliction as something to be delivered from.

Maybe we do not understand what God is working in our lives when we take that approach.

Our joy and hope transforms how we interpret, how we interpret difficulty.

Trials become instruments refining us, refining our faith rather than evidence that God has abandoned us.

I see the time here is to close.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That is my prayer for each one of us today, as we go from here, as we learn as we walk in love, as we allow the Holy Spirit to transform us.

This joyful hope isn't something that you manufacture out of positive thinking.

It flows from allowing God, Spirit, to reshape our perspective towards eternal realities in our life.

And may we see, learn to see the eternal realities rather than the present circumstances that we face day to day.

May God bless you, may God keep you, may his face shine upon you.

Would you please stand as we close in prayer today?