Romans 12:11

All righty, get rid of distractions.

Here we go. All righty, as we normally do, let's start in verse one.

Paul says, I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Do not be conformed to this world. But be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned for as in one body, we have many members and the members do not all have the same function.

So we though many are one body in Christ and individually members one of another.

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.

If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.

Let love be genuine, abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with brotherly affection, outdo one another in showing honor, do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the

Lord. As we read that passage in first Peter earlier, and as I mentioned the sections that I did not include as well, everything that we do as a

Christian, as Paul says here in the very first verse of Romans 12, is our spiritual worship.

And that while we do recognize that we do live in the flesh and that we will continue to sin in this life, up till the day that we're glorified, that worship that we present can be good and acceptable and perfect, so long as we can discern the will of God, or we can flagrantly go through our lives with disregard and idleness.

In verse 11, Paul says, do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the

Lord. One of the biggest things that we tend to fall into as human beings right from the beginning is a spirit of laziness.

We know this to be a fact just from reading the scriptures. How often do the scriptures, just Proverbs, we'll just take

Proverbs. How often is laziness or being a sluggard brought to the pages of Proverbs?

It is something that God abhors. An idle person, someone that does nothing.

We were created to work. The first thing,

God creates Adam, picks him up, sets him in the garden, tells him what? Work it and keep it.

That is Adam's purpose. Our purpose is to work and to keep

God's creation. In the new world, when

God makes everything new, we will not be idle.

There will be work to be done and we will do it and it will be perfect work and we will do it perfectly.

But as for now, we deal with sin and regardless of that sin and how much we don't want to do things because of this or because of that, we cannot let ourselves fall into some kind of slothfulness or idle, especially when it comes to what

Paul is talking about in our work in the church. Remember who he is talking to.

He is talking to the church. Certainly, natural man has its proclivity for laziness.

That's why we have it. But you can still look out at churches today and see it.

You can see idle Christians and you can see idle churches. That's why the

Bible warns again and again and again and again against slothfulness. But in the application of our work, the work that he just described, we certainly should not be slothful in caring for one another, in lending the gifts that God has given us to each other.

He says the same thing in multiple places. He says the same thing to slaves.

If anyone in the world has a reason not to work, would it not be someone who has owned this property?

There's a specific book in the New Testament that deals exactly with that. It's called Philemon. A slave who ran away and Paul tells him what?

Go back because this is where God has put you.

And he writes the letter to Philemon, telling him, accept him back. But even in that position that we don't work for man, we work for Christ.

In Galatians 6, 9, and 10, he says, and let us not grow weary of doing good.

For in due season, we will reap if we do not give up. So then as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.

Generally, in respect to Christianity, and more so we would be familiar with in respect to once someone is, their mind is open to the doctrines of grace.

We have a name for that, it's called cage stage. There's generally a fire that is lit in the

Christian. Generally, it gets annoying.

It does because they're young, they don't have any direction in which to aim that fire.

But given the right circumstances by the grace of God with someone to guide them, it can be there.

The reason I bring that up is because we have that fire, it's there. In older Christians, it's just tempered,

I hope. But that fire that we had when we were first saved, when our eyes were first opened to the truth, that fire, that feeling that we had, that zeal for the

Lord, we should still have that. It should just be tempered with age and experience.

Unfortunately, more often than not, what happens is idleness.

We join a church and we get comfortable. And in that comfort, we tend to lose the urge to go and share the gospel, to go and do this evangelism over here, to go and help over here, to go and do over here, unless we're encouraged.

The problem is that most churches don't encourage each other because it's more of a social club.

But that's not how it ought to be, that's not how it's described here in the pages of scripture.

In 2 Thessalonians 3, verses six through 15, he says this, "'Now we command you, brothers, in the name "'of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away "'from any brother who is walking in idleness "'and not in accord with the tradition "'that you received from us.

"'For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us, "'because we were not idle when we were with you, "'nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it.

"'But with toil and labor, we worked night and day "'that we might not be a burden to any of you.

"'It was not because we do not have a right, "'but to give you in ourselves an example to imitate.

"'For even when we were with you, "'we would give you this command, "'if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.

"'For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, "'not busy at work, but busy bodies.

"'Now such persons we command and encourage "'in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly "'and to earn their own living.

"'As for you, brothers, do not grow weary in doing good, "'if anyone does not obey what we say in this letter, "'take note of that person and have nothing to do with him, "'that he may be ashamed.

"'Do not regard him as an enemy, "'but warn him as a brother.'"

Irrefutable that we are to be at work, active in the church. Sunday service doesn't cut it with Paul.

We are to be active participants. We are to actively better each other's lives and everyone else around us.

We are a community. Unfortunately, the church, both the visible and the invisible church in many, many, many places has lost touch with that.

Remember what he says in the first verse that we are to present ourselves as living sacrifices. If you're doing nothing, what are you not doing?

You're not presenting yourself as a living sacrifice. If you're just sitting on your hands, then how can you be?

This goes for our leisure time as well. How often, myself included, how often is our leisure time mind -numbing versus edifying or feeding our spirit?

That goes for video games. That goes for reading other books.

That goes for reading things we shouldn't read, watching things we shouldn't watch. That goes for baseball, football, soccer.

Even our entertainment shouldn't be idle. It doesn't mean that we can't enjoy things in the world, but we are saved and set apart to be markedly different.

I think certainly that one of the things that Christians and churches should fear with the utmost is idleness, slothfulness, the loss of their zeal, and being wholly ineffective in the kingdom of God.

Previously in this chapter, we've been admonished to use our gifts in service to the church, which is service to the

Lord. Now here, Paul says, never lacking in your zeal. We just said, in our service, whatever your gift may be, do it with your whole self, with everything that you have, just as we are commanded in that greatest commandment to love the

Lord with all of our hearts and with all of our minds and with all of our strength. We should act in a similar fashion in lending our gift in service to the brethren and then to others.

Everything that we do in that situation, we should do with everything that we have.

Lackadaisically doing things, especially for the brethren, is, as it says in the pages of scripture, unacceptable behavior for the

Christian. Paul also says previously, let love be genuine.

If you're half -heartedly doing something, are you genuinely being loving in the doing of that thing?

Is it genuine? Those things that are evil, that we should abhor, that we should separate ourselves from and throw them away, ought we to be half -heartedly doing that?

Ought we to be half -heartedly cleaving ourselves to those things that are good?

Moving about our life in any manner, half -heartedly, is no life at all, especially the

Christian life. Would you advise someone who is not in the church to half -heartedly go through their life or to give it everything they got?

You tell them to give it everything they got. You're gonna fail at some point and that's okay.

You're gonna learn from it. We as Christians are going to fail.

We're going to sin. We're going to miss an opportunity. We're going to fail here in doing this for that person or pass this person or we're gonna do something.

But when we do it, do it with everything you got. Paul uses this word.

He says, be fervent. Be fervent in the

Spirit. A lot of people nowadays might not really understand what the

English word fervent means. In the Greek, word means basically boiling point, to the point of boiling over.

Be boiling over with the Spirit. Don't be slothful in your zeal.

Be boiling over with the Spirit. That doesn't mean run around like a crazy person during church.

That means give everything you can possibly give. Put all of yourself into the giving of that gift.

It is a service of Christ. Keep that drive that we talked about. Continue to push forward with whatever it is that you're doing.

Proverbs 13, four, it says, the soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing.

They sit around and they want things, but they never do anything to get them. While the soul of the diligent, that person that works persistently, is richly supplied.

How many times in our walk so far have we wanted to be better Christians, better people, and never did anything to make it better?

We didn't spend time in the Word. We didn't spend time in prayer. We were idle in our sanctification.

Now, our sanctification is worked out by the Holy Spirit. Do not mistake me in saying that your works sanctify you.

They do not. They are the fruit of sanctification. But you should be spending time in prayer.

If you're not, I hope that you're convicted about it. You should be spending time in the

Word. And I don't just mean to study Greek, to study Hebrew, to study for this thing, to do this thing over here.

What I mean is to just spend time with your Father.

That's it. When we pray, we talk to Him. The Holy Spirit takes our jumbled little words and He makes them something that is pleasing to the

Lord. And the only way that we can hear His side of the conversation, the only way is to read

His Word because He's already said everything that He would ever need to say in that.

To keep it simple, or well, let me complicate it first.

The more we are living in God's Word and the more we're living in prayer, the more we do well in good works.

There's more fruit. The more we're sanctified, the more fruit we have. The more we love doing those things, the more we love sharing those gifts.

Sanctification isn't necessarily something that is completely linear. It's compounding.

The more fruit we show, the more fruit we'll show, if that makes sense.

And at some point, we will reach a point in our sanctification where our Father in His great will and providence has said nothing.

And then He will glorify us. Let's go back.

Let's read what Paul said, remembering what Paul said in verse six concerning these things.

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them. Do we think that He meant half -heartedly?

Use them. If prophecy in proportion to our faith, if service in our serving, to the one who teaches in His teaching, the one who exhorts in His exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal.

There is nothing that should make anyone who stands in this position more angry than someone else who does and doesn't do it with zeal.

The job of leaders is to have the zeal to one, teach the word of God, lead the flock where they should go, and to protect them.

And if you're not doing that, stop. My apologies.

The one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness, not begrudgingly, well, it's time to go to work.

I guess I'll get on a truck or I'll put my scrubs on or I'll go do this or I'll go do that or I'll go run this call or I guess

I'll go to the prison this weekend and preach the word. With cheerfulness, you're getting to do something that Christ did physically.

The second person of the Trinity came to earth to what? Show His mercy to a bunch of enemies.

Mercy isn't justice. Mercy is something completely different.

Justice is what we deserve. That is what we deserve. And I know I'm getting off track here a little bit, but justice is what we deserve.

Mercy is something completely different. It is something that is freely given. And if God can give mercy to us, the people who deserve it the most, who deserve justice the most, then when we give mercy to others, even if they're not in the church, then we can absolutely do it with cheerfulness because it was done to us first.

Now back to what we were talking about. But we have been given these gifts to use.

Use them with the fullness of your absolute capability. They're not slack and showing brotherly affection either as we talked about last week.

Our confession has something to say. In the section on the communion of the saints, it says this.

All saints that are united to Jesus Christ, their head, by His spirit and faith, although they are not made, thereby one person in Him have fellowship in His graces.

Sufferings, death, resurrection, glory. And being united to one another in love, they have communion in each other's gifts and graces and are obligated to the performance of such duties, public and private, in an orderly way as to conduce to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward man.

Remember, let it be genuine. Here's another one.

We've dealt with recently. Y 'all haven't dealt with recently. Saints by profession are bound to maintain a holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God.

We do not get a say on church. We do not.

There is zero evidence in scripture to support the lone wolf Christian.

That is not a thing. It was pointed out to me recently as we have begun to go through the pilgrim's progress.

How does Christian start out? Alone with his burden.

But at a certain point in his walk, what happens? He's introduced to others like him.

And from that point on in his journey, though his companions change, he is never alone ever again, ever.

That is how we are supposed to be. And in performing such other spiritual service as tend to their mutual edification, as also in relieving each other in outward things according to their several abilities and necessities, which communion according to the rule of the gospel, although especially to be exercised by them in the relation wherein they stand, whether in families or churches, yet as God offers opportunity, it is to be extended to all the household of faith.

Even all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. Nevertheless, their communion one with another as saints does not take away or infringe the title or propriety which each man has in his goods and possessions.

What they mean by that is don't be a cult. The church does not own your property.

There's a very specific reason that's in there. We can talk about that later.

You are not to give absolutely everything that you own and everything that you have to the church.

That's not what they're saying. No, that's not what we're talking about here. But the giving of the gift that God gave you to serve the brethren and to glorify him that we are to be boiling over and eager to be of service.

So why do all of these things with such fervency and such zeal? That's at the end of the sentence, serve the

Lord. There's a note or not a note.

There is something that is said that we've gone over before. It's at the very end of the book all the way to the right side in Revelation where Jesus talks about how much he detests people who are lukewarm.

Now the question then becomes, in the Christian life led by the

Holy Spirit, does the Holy Spirit allow for those he is sanctifying to be idle more than a season?

No. Now you can have short seasons and you can have long seasons and you can have seasons that are kind of broken up.

But for a very, very long extended period of time, years, decades, so on and so forth, a

Christian will not go, someone indwelt with the Holy Spirit will not go to their deathbed having been idle the entire time.

That's the lukewarm people. Those people who are comfortable in just having heard a little bit, just having prayed the

Lord's prayer, having prayed the sinner's prayer, patted on the head every

Sunday when they went to church, but aren't actually saved, false converts. The Christian may be able to be idle for a season, but not forever.

Why? Because we serve the Lord. He is the one who saved us.

He is the one in charge of his salvation. The Holy Spirit carries it out for him as his representative on earth. And he will not allow his people to do nothing.

What we should do is encourage each other to one, find our gifts.

That is the job of the church. It is the job of the leadership of the church to find out each and every person's individual gift that they have been given and to show them and guide them how to put it to best use in the church for the brethren, the service of the

Lord. So first we have to do that. Then we also have to encourage each other to actually use our gifts because our natural proclivity in the flesh is to just kind of be quiet.

We're nothing. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves. Well, some do, and that's equally as bad, but we should do so with fire in our hearts, boiling over with the

Spirit. Remember what the

Lord says, as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me.

We should encourage one another never to be idle. And when we see idleness, we should immediately pointing out that is the loving thing to do.

Now, even in that, there are many things that we have to watch out for. But the one I want to talk about right now, just before we end this thing is making sure that we start with those around us as we talked about before in 2

Thessalonians. It is a great thing to bless the world with the gift that God has given us, whatever that gift may be.

It is a great thing to bless the church, the church, with our gifts.

It is a great thing to, even still, to bless your local church with the gift you have been given.

It is the greatest thing that we bless our families with those gifts.

There is an ordained order to our lives that we cannot lose sight of.

We see this in the qualifications for leadership in the church. So first thing, husband and one wife, obedient children.

It means children, not someone in their 30s, children.

The first thing that you should be good at is being a husband, being a father, being a wife, being a mother.

It is a picture of the church. Do not let our work in the blessing of the church get in the way of us blessing our local church.

That does happen quite often. You have people that are in churches and they're doing work, they're doing very good work, and they're doing good work for the

Lord, and their local church benefits nothing unless they go out and they get it like everybody else.

Do not let your work in the local church get in the way of you blessing your family.

Two letters, P -K, I know what that means.

Preacher's kid. Not a nice connotation that we give to people, is it?

But generally it's given to unruly and unsatisfied children of pastors who neglected them.

Now, once a child is an adult, they ain't a whole lot of that person can do.

Not a whole lot you can do as a parent for a 38 -year -old or a 28 -year -old or someone who's no longer living under your roof.

They're their own person. But P -K is reserved. We learned that very early on in elementary school.

Why does he act like that? What is a P -K? He doesn't get disciplined because he's a preacher's kid.

He can do no wrong. And Lord help the person who does try to discipline him because you're gonna get it when you go to church.

That is a real thing that really happens in real churches.

And it happens because these men may have very well, in all good intention, devoted their lives to the flock that God has set them in front of and absolutely neglected to turn around and do the same thing for their family.

There is a reason that the order is the way it is in creation.

And there is a reason that Paul points that out in the qualifications. You have to be a good parent and a good spouse before you can be a good anything else.

And to be good at those, you have to be a good servant. So generally, as I usually say, regarding that, stepping off for just a moment again, when

I hear people say, I wanna get married, I wanna be a wife, I wanna be a husband, the first question is, are you a good servant?

Because if you're not, you will not be a good husband or a good wife.

So let's start here in our daily devotion to our

Christian lives, playing the part of our sanctification that we can participate in in the doing of good works as fruit.

And let that be your time with the Lord. Just start there.

The general time you spend with your Father and from there to your family and from there to your local church and from there, the universal church and from there, everyone else.

Remember, we're called Christians. This is called the church. It is not top down.

It's the true church. It's bottom up. There wouldn't be a church if individuals weren't saved.

This is not Catholicism. This is not an -ism, period. There is no ism.

There is no top down rule. There is no, well, just move on.

If you neglect your relationship with Christ, then your work will suffer.

Your family will suffer and thusly the church and then the world will suffer. Who benefits from the idleness that Paul is describing?

No one. So prioritize these things correctly. Now, on that subject, this is also a stopgap for bad works, for those things that we should abhor because first your wife, your family is going to point them out.

Then the church is going to point them out. Then the church is going to point them out. And if you get to the level of pagans being able to point out your sin, then

I hope you have been through church discipline. There's a problem there.

But we're given these things not only to benefit us, but also as a stopgap to benefit us in our walk.

This goes for bad behavior and it goes for bad ideas as well. So let's prioritize these things as we should, that we may serve the

Lord in his created order of things. We take these things, as he said before, and scrutinize them, that we may discern them.

Our actions, our ideas, our thoughts, everything, scrutinize them by the word of God that he may call us out on these things and say yea or nay.

Let us not lose sight of one another. Let us go forth and present ourselves as living sacrifices to God, working and blessing those around us, not for their sake, for certainly their sake, but more so for his sake, because he did so for us.

We do not do works as the pagans do. We do not do them to earn merit.

There's nothing to earn. If you're doing good things in the church and you're doing good things in your family because it's going to earn you something, there may be merit here.

There is no merit there. There's absolutely nothing that you can do. Keep that in mind.

Rather, we work, as I said before, because he first did for us.