Evangelical Free Church of Embarass

Our Father, we give You thanks for Your word and now as we go into it, Father, we just know that You have something for us, we just know that You have something individually for us and corporately for us as a group. Give us ears to hear. Give us understanding. And then, Father, if you could give us the will to respond and to put into practice what You teach us today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Political corruption was expected. Greed was the rule of life. Self-centered, independent thinking that asked ‘what’s in it for me?’ was very common. Sexual immorality was rampant. Pornography was visible everywhere. The pursuit of popularity and personal gain was encouraged. The incurable love of amusement and pleasure was all around. Violence and bloodshed were seen as sport, as gladiators fought with each other and wild animals before standing-room-only crowds. Power and strength, action and competition were valued concepts of the time. So was life in the Roman world. You thought I was talking about your high school, didn’t you? Or America in 2001. That was a description of life in the Roman world. The apostle Paul writes a letter to Christians living in the city of Rome. They lived right in the center of that world. They grew up right in the middle of the Roman culture. What I just went through for you surrounded these people, and to that group of people the apostle Paul says in verse 2, “Do not be conformed to THIS world.” Not that world that will be some day. Not that world that someone 500 miles away lives in. But he says to the Christians living in a city called Rome in the center of a culture, of an empire, “Do not be conformed to THIS world” … this age that you live in. Don’t let it squeeze you into its mold. Be different. Be changed from the inside out, transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then he goes on in verses 3-8 to begin to give specifics of how that transformed, different life would look. And that’s what the rest of chapter 12 and all of chapter 13 contain, examples of what the transformed life will look like. It starts with thinking properly (verses 3-8). We looked at that 2 weeks ago. The transformed life involves right thinking and Paul talks about how we have to think about ourselves in the context of a group, that we are part of a body. Verse 5: “We who are many are one body in Christ.” That has to be our thinking. We’re part of a group. He goes on to say, because of that your thinking should be that you are mutually dependent on each other in that group. Interdependence needs to be the way you think. Then he goes on to say that our thinking should include the idea that we are gifted by God for the purpose of serving the others in that body, in that group. He says that’s the right way to think in the transformed life.

And now in verses 9-16, the apostle Paul, and you need only look at your Bible, glance at it in verses 9-16, goes through quick, short instructions, one after the other. Notice starting in verse 9, “Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Give preference to one another in honor. Not lagging behind in diligence. Fervent in spirit. Serving the Lord. Rejoicing in hope. Persevering in tribulation. Devoted to prayer. Contributing to the needs of the saints. Practicing hospitality. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another. Do not be haughty in mind. Associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation.” Just one after another. Short instructions. To the musician, Paul is giving instructions in staccato, just boom, boom, boom, boom. To the marksman Paul is just shooting out instructions in rapid fire. To the shopper he’s putting together a grocery list for the transformed life. To the astronaut Paul is going through a checklist right before launching into the transformed life. To the child Paul sounds like his parents. Do this, do this, do this, do this. To the cook Paul is giving a recipe, a detailed recipe for the transformed life. And to the contractor he’s laying out this blueprint for the transformed life.

I want to suggest that Paul, here in these rapid, short instructions, is giving us a quick idea, a quick picture, of what it’s like to live the transformed life of verse 2 in the trenches. There isn’t much that’s glamorous about verses 9-16. It’s very practical stuff. This is how you live the transformed life in the trenches, every day. Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. This is how the transformed life looks without any glamour, just right down there in the trenches of living life. So for the next 3 Sundays we’re going to go through this list, verses 9-16. We’ll start with the first 4, which would be verses 9-10, the first 4 short instructions concerning how to live this transformed life in the trenches of life.

The first one, verse 9, “Let love be without hypocrisy.” Or the New Living Translation says, “Don’t just pretend that you love others. Really love them.” Let love be without hypocrisy. The Greek word that Paul chooses to use here for love is “agape.” It’s that Godlike, unconditional commitment to serve others. He says let that kind of love be without hypocrisy. It’s the same love that Jesus talked about when He said, “Love one another.” It’s the love that Paul describes in the next book, 1 Corinthians in chapter 13, when he says “Love is patient, love is kind…” and he goes through that whole list. That’s the kind of love Paul was talking about there. So here he says, let that love, let that unconditional commitment to serve each other, be without hypocrisy. Hupokrisis – hypocrisy. In the Greek that was the term used to refer to actors and actresses. So if we used the same terms today as the Greeks did, we would say that all the hypocrites are coming together for the Academy Awards. Well, it might be a good use of the word, I don’t know. But that was the word. The word hypocrite meant actor, one who wore a mask, one who played a part. And Paul says, let love be without hypocrisy. Don’t just pretend to love people. Don’t just put on a mask that looks like you’re loving. Really love, genuinely love.

In the book, Paradise Lost, John Milton says, “Neither men nor angels can discern hypocrisy. It is an evil that walks invisible except to God.” It’s very difficult to know if someone is really loving you or pretending, because some people are very good at even pretending love, to the point that it may be only God and that person who knows what’s really going on. Here are a couple prayers about hypocrisy.

Lord, I size up other people in terms of what they can do for me, how they can further my agenda, feed my ego, satisfy my needs. I serve people seemingly for Your sake, Lord, but really for my own. (pretending to love for personal gain.)

Lord of reality, make me real. Not plastic, synthetic, pretend, phony, an actor playing a part, a hypocrite. I don’t want to keep a prayer list, Lord. I want to pray. I don’t want to agonize over finding Your will. I want to obey what I already know. I don’t want to argue about Your word. I want to submit to it and live it. I don’t want to just explain the difference between eros and philos and agape, but I want to really love.

Paul says in the transformed life, in the trenches of daily living, there has to be genuine love, not pretend. Genuine, unconditional commitment to serve each other.

At the end of the movie “Ever After,” which is kind of a takeoff on Cinderella, the character like Cinderella is named Danielle and she’s talking to her stepmother, the evil stepmother. And she says this, “I only wanted one thing from you.” And the stepmother asks, “What was that?” Danielle says, “Was there ever a time when you actually loved me?” And the stepmother responds, “How do you love a pebble in your show?” And there is a shot of Danielle’s face, hurt as she finds out it was never real all those years. Have you ever experienced that? There’s a lot of hurt when the day comes that you find out someone was pretending, that it was all an act. Maybe you’ve been there. You know what it’s like to find that out. I’ve been there. Paul says, don’t be conformed to the world. They put on a mask. They pretend for their own gain and benefit. You be transformed and love genuinely without hypocrisy. Really love each other.

Then he goes on with the second instruction. At the end of verse 9 he says, “Abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.” Two very strong words being used here by the writer. Abhor and cling. Abhor means to hate, so he’s saying ‘hate what is evil’ but really, abhor goes beyond that. Literally, the word “abhor” means “to shrink away in disgust, to turn away from in horror.” That’s what it means to abhor. A few weeks ago on an episode of “Survivor…” Yes, I’m watching it! … in one of the tribes, a wild pig was killed and butchered. And there was a gal named Kimmy who’s a vegetarian, and she was abhorred by what was happening, by the killing of the pig, by the butchering of the pig and all the blood, and by the thought of eating it. She was so abhorred by that that she made a comment about how it disgusted her and she walked away. See, that’s what abhorring something is. Some of you abhor snakes, or mice, or spiders right? So you know what the word abhor means. It is to be so disgusted, so horrified, so hateful of something, that you turn from it. And Paul says part of the transformed life in the trenches is to abhor evil. It’s to be so disgusted with evil that you’ll turn from it, and then cling to what’s good. And the word, “cling” is very strong. It’s the word in the King James “cleave.” It’s the same term in Genesis 2:24 and then again by Jesus and again by Paul dealing with marriage, how a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. It means to be bonded together, glued together, united. And that’s the word he uses here. It’s strong. And he says you must cling to what is good. Glue yourself to what is good. Hold on to it. Abhor evil. Hate it so much and be so disgusted by evil that you will turn from it and then just hold on tightly to good. Glue yourself to it. Isaiah 5:20 is in the context of a whole list of woes of the people of Israel, and this one says “Woe to those who call good evil and evil good.” You see, Israel had gotten to the point where that’s what they were doing. They were calling good bad. They were calling evil good. They weren’t abhorring evil and clinging to good. They got it all mixed up. And that’s the way it was in the Roman culture. That’s the society that these Roman Christians lived in. Good was being called evil, evil was being called good. There wasn’t any distinction anymore. Evil was being celebrated, encouraged. People were being put down, ostracized for good. And Paul says to these Roman Christians, ‘You be different. Don’t conform. Be transformed. You abhor evil and cling to what’s good.’ See, what happens is we get used to evil don’t we? We get used to it. And pretty soon it doesn’t bother us anymore. We can handle it. So we start watching it and listening to it and we start laughing at it and then we embrace it and then we start doing it. Then we start defending it. And then we start putting people down who don’t do it. There’s an interesting progression there. Paul says ‘Don’t conform to that stuff. Don’t be like the world around you. You be different. Abhor evil and cling to what’s good.”

The third instruction in verse 10 says, “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.” If you were to take a Greek New Testament and read this statement, you would have 2 words for love on each end of the statement with the word for ‘one another’ in the middle. So you would read, ‘philostorge one another philadelphia.’ Two words for love with one another in between. The first word is philostore. It means kindred love, love of family. It refers to the devotion and loyalty of a family because of their bond. Because of the common blood of family there is this connection to one another, this devotion. That’s why some of your translations say ‘be devoted.’ It’s the word for kindred, family love, devotion and loyalty. So he says have that kindred love for one another with brotherly love. Philadelphia, brotherly love. Philos means love, adelphia means brother or from the same womb. It’s that brotherly affection, that fondness for one another. It’s actually an emotional attachment. It’s different from verse 9. Verse 9, the love that is to be without hypocrisy, there it was agape, that unconditional commitment to serve. Here it’s the kind of love that has more of an emotional connection and attachment where there’s a devotion and loyalty to each other, a fondness and affection. Paul says to these Christians, ‘Be devoted to each other like a family, like brothers and sisters. Have that kind of affection for each other, that kind of connection.’ It makes sense because it’s called the family of God, isn’t it? So we’re to have that kind of love in the trenches, everyday.

I would treasure your prayers on Tuesday. I’m going over to Oak Hills Christian College in Bemidji. I’ve been asked to lead a workshop with pastors on the subject of long-term pastorates, and I guess since I’ve been here 21 years I qualify, so they called me and said ‘could you come and give your perspectives on long-term pastorates.’ So I’ve been preparing that and what I’m going to say. Of course it’s going to be a biased presentation, heavy toward long-term pastorates. But I’ve also read a book as I’ve been preparing. It’s called The Vow of Stability and that’s how this author puts it, that there needs to be a vow taken on the part of a pastor and a church body up front. And he calls it the “vow of stability.” Through the book, then, he is telling why he believes that is the most stable situation for a pastor and for a congregation – long-term. I was thinking, you know, we must have done that. I don’t remember us consciously doing that but at some point early on in ’79 I must have made a vow of stability and you must have, those of you who were here. As I’ve had a chance to think about 21 years in the same place, I couldn’t do that without the thoughts of family and this kindred love, this brotherly affection being a part of my thinking. It was hard for me not to gather with you last Sunday (because of the snowstorm). I don’t know if anybody else suffered through the morning but I did. Not because I missed out on a weekly activity, I missed the family. I really did. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We are to be loving each other with a family kind of love. Be devoted to each other with brotherly love, just like a family. Yes there’s to be the unconditional commitment to serve each other and we’re to do it genuinely and without pretending but there’s also supposed to be that dynamic of a family affection and connection and fondness where we’re devoted and loyal to each other because we’re from the same womb. We have the same Father. We carry the same family name – Christian, and in the trenches on Mondays, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays, not just Sunday, we are to be living out that family kind of love.

The fourth instruction is at the end of verse 10. He says, “Honor one another above yourselves.” Honor one another. To honor someone means to recognize their value. It means to appreciate, to have high regard for and respect, to view as important, to put first as a priority. That’s the idea of honoring, and the instruction is that as Christians we’re to be honoring each other, and that people in the Body of Christ should be able to feel those things. They should feel like they are valued by others. They should be able to feel like someone has high regard for them and appreciates them. They should feel like someone is interested in them and sees them as important. If those things are what honor is, then if it’s happening, people should be feeling those things coming toward them from others. We’re to honor one another above ourselves. Philippians 2:3-4 says, “Regard one another as more important than yourself.” Honor one another, even above yourself. Scripture doesn’t say that you and I are to expect honor from others. It doesn’t say we are to demand honor from others. It says we are to give honor to others. There’s too much expecting of that stuff in the Body of Christ. There are too many Christians who are going around expecting love, expecting service, expecting honor, expecting … No, the scripture doesn’t say expect it, the scripture doesn’t say demand it, the scripture says do it, give it! And here it says honor each other. In Ephesians the wives are told to honor their husbands because of the position God has placed them in. In 1 Peter 3, the husbands are told to honor their wives as fellow heirs of the grace of life. In 1 Corinthians 12, Christians are taught to honor each other because of the gifts we all have and whether someone has a gift that’s up front and seems so dynamic or they have a gift that’s behind the scenes and doesn’t seem that important, we’re to honor every person because of the gift they have and what it brings to the Body. In 1 Peter, Christians are taught to honor those in authority. Basically we’re taught to honor everybody and that’s what Paul says here. Just honor each other above yourselves.

Gary Smalley is big on honor, if you’ve read anything by him or watched his videos. Big on honor. He says that honor is a gift you choose to give. And he claims that if you will consistently honor someone for 3 weeks straight, you will turn around that relationship completely. It is so powerful, this idea of honoring each other. So how do we honor each other? Can you think of ways that others have honored you, made you feel valuable, showed appreciation, expressed the view that to them you’re important? Maybe it’s complements, maybe it’s applause, maybe it’s just saying, ‘Hey, I really appreciate this about you.’ Maybe it’s making a choice to put you before themselves and their interests. Maybe it’s the giving of a gift. There are many ways to express honor, but we’re to be honoring each other. That’s how we live the transformed life in the trenches. Paul says don’t be conformed to this world. In the world, they want honor for themselves and they’ll do anything to get it. He says in the transformed life, in the different life, you GIVE honor, you honor others above yourself.

And there’s the start, then, of this list of quick instructions, what the transformed life looks like down in the trenches of life. So far, we see that the transformed life involves genuinely loving, not pretending but genuinely loving. It means going beyond that and having a kindred, family love for each other, a family type devotion and loyalty and affection for each other. And then it moves to honoring each other and communicating honor. And the transformed life also involves abhorring evil. Getting evil and good straightened out so you know the distinction and you abhor evil and you hold tightly to what is good. That’s the transformed life and it makes a difference, because it is different.

I’d like to close by having you look at John 13:34-35 and I’m going to read from the New Living Translation. Jesus speaking, “So now I am giving you a new commandment. Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are My disciples.” See, it makes a difference. When we love each other genuinely, no pretending, when we relate to each other with that family devotion and affection, when we honor each other it makes a difference. And it proves to the world that we belong to Jesus. If you decide to conform to the world and just fake love and refuse to get too close to people and have that family-type feeling and choose to continue to demand and expect honor instead of getting out there and giving it, you’re going to be just like the world. That’s how they are and they’re not going to identify you as being someone who belongs to Christ. But in the transformed life when we love each other genuinely, when we’re devoted like a family and we honor each other, the world sees that as different. If you love each other, Jesus said, you’ll prove to the world that you belong to me. It’ll make a difference.

And then in 1 Peter 2:11-12. Peter’s writing to Christians. “Dear brothers and sisters, you are foreigners and aliens here so I warn you to keep away from evil desires (remember, abhor what is evil) because they fight against your souls. Be careful how you live among your unbelieving neighbors. Even if they accuse you of doing wrong, they will see your honorable behavior (clinging to good) and they will believe and give honor to God when He comes to judge the world.” You see, when we abhor evil and cling to good, it makes a difference and the world notices. And it could cause them eventually to turn to God. But if we conform to the world and even in our own minds and lifestyle evil and good are all mixed up and we are clinging to evil and turning away from good, that’s just like the world. That won’t make them turn to God. Peter says you stay away from evil and you cling to good and those unbelieving neighbors, if they want to accuse you, are going to have to make up something. And maybe they will even someday honor your God because they saw a transformed life, a different life.

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed because it makes a difference. Let’s pray.

Father, I pray that You would take these words and cause them to just continue to remain in our minds. As we go, Lord, show each one of us very clearly how we need to respond. Father, we want to live this kind of life. We know it’s different. We know it’s hard but we know it’s right, it’s the proper response to what you have done in our lives. So Father, this week show us what we need to do to love without hypocrisy, to be devoted to one another in brotherly love, to honor each other above ourselves, to abhor evil and cling to what is good. And may it glorify You and may it draw the attention of others to Your Son, Jesus Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.