Book of Romans - Unity in the Church | Christian Character, Pt. 1 (11/14/2021)

Yes, we got our pulpit back and we've rearranged things where I don't have to do any tech. There's one thing I need to check. Like, is the camera working, Dave-O? Okay, so that's it. So I don't have to do any tech and I'm preaching from this right here instead of a PowerPoint.

And Dave's preaching from a PowerPoint back there. So if you want to see the notes, you can put it on your phone, go online and you can still watch it on your phone if you want to, but you probably won't need to.

You could just bring a Bible and I'll tell you what to turn to. That works pretty well. So I think we've had quite a few folks that would be happy we made these changes. And I hope it works well for you guys too.

I started not to even put the PowerPoint online and just let everybody follow along in their Bibles. Might be healthy, who knows, but at least for this service, there's a PowerPoint out there. So if you do want to...

Here's another good thing too. You can go back after Ben gets it loaded in three or four days. If you did want to catch the notes, you could always go back and watch it on the website and get the notes.

So you don't need to watch it on your phone today because you'll have the notes later. Seemed like I had one other thing I wanted to say about all of this. Yeah, I apologize a little bit for Sunday school.

We got a little bit late because as you know, we kind of started preaching a little bit on demonology the last three Sundays. And so our PA system blew up right in the middle of it. Ben said it almost caught on fire.

And so I think we found the problem was just the mixer and that was a blessing. So we got a new mixer and right before Sunday school, we couldn't figure out how to make his sound. It was coming through this speaker, but it wasn't going out to you guys.

So finally, Dave and I are back there hitting buttons because it's not user-friendly. Finally, we hit one and Ben said, yep, it's working. So we got it. So we apologize for the late start on Sunday school, but I think that may be the last.

I shouldn't say that. I'm not gonna say that. We may have further glitches, but it won't be my fault anymore, hallelujah. All right. Well, turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 12 and just I'll review while you're turning there.

Unity in the Local Church and the Call to Christian Character

This morning, we're gonna start out. My biggest technology problem, Dave, you're grabbing the pages off my notes. Get that to work. We're gonna start off with verse nine in chapter 12 here in a moment, but let's review just a second.

So far, we've talked about six ways in which we can help have more unity in a local church. And all of this is in chapter 12. I think the big idea of chapter 12 is how to have unity in a local church.

It's one big idea anyway. And so the first step is to be a people of prayer. We talked about that. Second step was to walk in God's will, to take steps into God's will. The third step was to contemplate God's awesome nature and being.

Think about how awesome he is. It will draw you closer to him. The next one was to get unconformed to the world by being transformed, having our minds transformed. And the fifth one was to understand your place, your calling and your measure of faith and understand everybody else's is different and that we're all part of the same body.

And every part is just as important as the other part. And then the sixth one that we just finished up was understand which gifts have ceased and which ones are still operating in the church and which ones will come back the last three and a half years of the tribulation period.

In fact, the same ones that ceased, those are the ones that will come back the second three and a half years of the tribulation period. So we discussed that in quite detail. Unfortunately, we played a video last week that made some people sick, including myself.

Luckily, it was brief and we had a glitch there. The sound didn't come through. So Ben Mitchell is grabbing the sound. And when he loads last week's sermon on our website, it'll have the sound. Because I want you to hear this young man named John Henry, he's a young pastor from Haiti who discusses the equivalence of the modern tongue movement and what's going on there to voodoo.

Because Haiti is all about witchcraft and voodoo. And that's one reason they're the hell hole of the world. They have more trouble than anywhere in the world. And people feel it's okay to feel compassion for them, I suppose, but it's a big island and separated by a mountain range.

And on the other side is the Dominican Republic. And I had a taxi driver there. I said, why is it so peaceful and beautiful here and like a hell hole right across the mountain? He said, because they chose witchcraft and we chose Jesus.

So you reap what you sow. And it's not that I don't have compassion, but they made the wrong choice and they taught their kids the wrong things. And we're doing that in America now, right? So what's the metaverse?

Didn't say it right. The meta, it is metaverse. So are you familiar with a new company that just came out called Meta? It's actually Facebook changed their name to Meta. So now what they're gonna do is get your kids to where they live in an imaginary world online.

They can go into stores, they can get anything they want and they probably actually pay money to buy stuff on those stores. They won't live in the real world anymore. Japan's already had a problem with that for better part of a decade.

The young men there don't even have an interest in dating young women in Japan. Their birth rate is way down and they just live online. They don't have any interest in the women and the young women don't have interest in them because they say they're like boys.

They don't grow up. They're little eternal boys and they'll marry guys if you're single, 50 year old men, 60 year old men, because they want a real man. They don't want these boys that are living their lives.

Well, imagine when you got the metaverse going on here and you say, well, it won't work. They can't make it happen. Well, then why is Google and Microsoft and Apple all working on this thing because Facebook took the lead on it?

They're trying to catch up. Well, when they all start trying to catch up, they're gonna make it happen. So you're just probably gonna just have to not have a laptop in your house or a smartphone anymore that your kid can get hold of.

And adults will do it too. It's gonna be the young 20 to 30 somethings that'll just be living in that world. And well, at least it will help with population control. It's frightening, but I mean, we're in the foothills of the end times if we're not already in them, right?

We're moving that direction at an accelerated rate. We have to be so careful to guard our kids. Thank God for this school, you know, and our homes because such a great thing to put kids in a greenhouse.

People have mocked me for years for having a Christian school saying, well, you just put your kids in a greenhouse. They won't even know how to act. Well, you know what? Actually, Jenny and Katie and Paul, Ben and Matt do pretty well.

They figured out the stuff going on in the world without me having to teach it to them, right? They figured that stuff out. They know how to interact with other human beings, but they didn't get a whole bunch of terrible habits before they grew up.

So think about it, guys. It's that we need to do more and more of that. They need to be stronger. All right, well, let's go into Romans 12, verse nine. And we're gonna start today talking about the seventh step in having unity in the church.

And it goes like this, grow in grace and exhibit strong Christian character. And so this point has a lot of little sub points because it's gonna list some of the Christian characteristics we need to grow into.

Now, this is very important. It goes through and it lists them. And if you're not careful, you think that what God intends us to do is to make a list and try to be good and follow it. And I think you'll see by the end of the message today, that's not how it works, but we do need the list because the list basically is painting a picture of Jesus Christ.

If he walked in this room and walked with us for about a week here, he would just exhibit these characteristics and you would just see it in his person. And so let's start here. Look at verse nine, let love be without dissimilation.

Now, remember this is in the context of how to have unity in the church. This is how we should treat one another in the church, okay, and in our homes. All right, so let love be without dissimilation.

Now that's a big word, isn't it? That's a good one to learn. Dissimilate, fake something or feign something. So don't act like you love each other when you really don't in church. Like don't play like, don't come to church and be all acting like you like everybody and you love everybody, but in your heart, you don't.

Now, how do you make your heart love somebody though? Well, I don't think you can, but I think the Holy Spirit can because he connects us to Jesus and the Father and each other. And so it comes down once again to being willing to walk in the Spirit more than in the flesh.

It always comes back to that. It's not a set of rules, but it is good to name the characteristics that Jesus Christ has. So the first one is that when Jesus walked up to you or me, he didn't just act like he loved us, he loved us.

He loved us so much that he put his hands out and let him nail the nails in his hands and he died for us. And that's not fake love. And we need to have that kind of love for each other. Then it goes on and says, abhor that which is evil.

Now we know what abhor means. It's like the strongest English word for hate that there is. Hate with special hatred, that which is evil. Now I do think the Greek word evil here is kind of interesting.

Poneros, because here's what it means. It does carry the idea of evil. It can mean hurtful, but actually what it means is evil in effect and influence. I'm glad I brought this, excuse me just a second.

Evil in effect and influence. So it's a little bit different than a couple of other Greek words. Kakos is a Greek word that means depraved, like someone that's so evil, they're just depraved. It's not that meaning here.

Another Greek word is sapros, which means degenerate, degenerated from the original value of something, rotten or worthless. It's not really that word either. This word actually means an evil influence.

So it's not talking about avoid pure evil. I mean, obviously there are other scriptures that would say we should avoid evil, right? But that's not what this is saying. This is a little deeper if you think about it.

This is saying avoid and hate, actually the word is hate the influence, any kind of evil influence on your life, your family, your kids, your spouse, each other in the church family. Hate any worldly negative influence that's on the ones you love.

That kind of changes it a little bit, doesn't it? Brings it into clarity a little bit. And then it says on the contrary, cleave to that which is good. Now this word good can be translated benefit. So we want to abhor things that have a negative bad influence.

Kind of like you were saying this morning, Ron, we got a lot we can think about negative, especially for a few years in our country. Enough to say about that. I thought you were gonna say it, but you didn't.

But anyway, you had great self-control. And so think about the good things, right? So this says we ought to hate anything that has evil influence on us and our loved ones, but also we ought to cleave to that which is beneficial to us and loved ones.

So that's a lot of things, isn't it? Good things. Things that are a good report and so forth. And then it says in verse 10, we'll move on to the next concept here. Be kindly affectioned one to another.

And then it says with brotherly love in honor of preferring one another. That is such a great verse. Think about Jesus, how he treated all human beings, especially his apostles, his little lambs, but all human beings with one exception where we talk about kindly affectionate, be kindly affection one to another.

There's one exception, one group of people he did not treat that way, who was Pharisees. I mean, he didn't treat them that way at all. He looked at them and said, you're a whited sepulcher filled with dead men's bones.

He said, where I go, you cannot come because I'm of my father and you're of your father, the devil, and his deeds you will do. He said, if I said that I know not him, then I would be a liar like unto you.

Wow, but he didn't talk only to false religious leaders did he speak that way. All other human beings, whether they were saved or lost, he spoke with kind affection. That was just his character. That was not something he had to think about.

Now, you and I are different because we grew up all different ways, didn't we? And we still have the flesh and we have the new man. Our old man doesn't just naturally treat other people with kindness and affection.

But I want you to think about what this is actually talking about. Well, let me give you the Greek definition then I'll give you my thoughts on this. Cause this is huge. This one is huge, kindly affection.

All right, so it comes from kind of a big Greek word because it's two little Greek words put together. And it's philo-storgos. The first part of the word is philos, which if you ever heard brother Otis teach, you heard him talk a lot about phileo and this concept of, you know, friendship love.

And we know there's three kinds of love in the New Testament. There is agapit and there's phileo. And phileo means friendship love. Like, I not only love you, but I like being with you. I like doing things with you.

I like talking with you, doing things together. We're friends. It's that friendship love. So that's the first part of the word. The second part of the word, which is stoge, which is really interesting because what it means is cherishing another person as if they were your child or parent.

That's literally what the Greek word means. Isn't that interesting? So imagine putting those two into one word where you have, like, when you walk up to one of your brothers and sisters in this building or out here in the internet world, all of our friends that we know everywhere that are born again people, that we not only love them as a friend, but we love them as my child that I cherish so much.

Isn't that interesting? That's what the word means. Now, when I see this be kindly affection one to another, I think about a lot of things because there are a lot of us, because of our personalities, that that's not easy.

There are some people, why are you laughing? I did not look at you when I said that. I was looking at John up here on the front row. Not really, he'd be the last one I'd look at. But some of us have to work at that a little harder.

So let me give you some opposites. And this is kind of interesting. There's a big move in a lot of these mega churches, which last week we watched a video that tells you you probably don't want to go to one of those, especially not the kind that believe that those gifts that Paul said ceased, they believe they're still going.

So obviously if the Holy Spirit said they ceased when the perfect came, which is the canonization, may not be the canonization, but it's having the whole word of God. When the church had the word of God in its hand, those gifts ceased.

And so any gift that is supposedly, apparently those is being feigned, is being faked by a different spirit. And as we saw John Brown, this wonderful young man say so clearly, and you'll hear it when you play it back because we didn't catch the sound, at least in the internet world, we didn't.

But he said that is, I loved his accent. He said, it is not the Holy Spirit. It is an unclean spirit. They are filled with demons, just like that. He said, first they go into a trance and they blank their mind out.

Once they lose control of the mind, they're all filled with unclean spirits at the same moment. You can see it, watch. And he played it back in slow motion. It gives me chill bumps right now thinking about it.

And he said, they don't have a schedule. And so these services last for hours until the bodies are worn out and then the demons leave. And then the service is over. Everybody goes home happy. Is that amazing?

So you think about the state of this poor old United States of America, where now the last bastion that we still held was the churches. They've already taken Hollywood. They've already taken the music industry.

They've already taken the East Coast, West Coast colleges and all in between and most of the seminaries. And now they've taken the church. I mean, literally indwelling demons, indwelling bodies of church going people by the thousands across America right now while we're speaking.

Think about that. And so that blew up one PA system. So I'm gonna get off that for now before we lose this one. But in these very churches, if you study church history, like I have spent 40 years studying church history, I read the best books I can find by the best church historians.

And if you do that, you will find out that from the time that the tongues, the true gift of languages, it doesn't mean tongues by the way, it's the only Greek word for language is tongues. So you should never translate that in my opinion into tongues in English, it should be languages.

That's the best translation. But when that true gift ceased, there have been a few spurious uprisings of what people call tongues, which is gibberish, which is not what it was, it was languages. And everywhere you see it in history, it's associated with false doctrine.

So these mega churches today have that going on. For example, most of them don't believe in eternal security. Some do, but many don't. But here's a teaching that I got familiar with through a friend that I helped counsel a little bit, who said that he went to a class at a big church in California, where they taught the young people to be totally transparent with each other, especially if they're husband and wife, to be totally transparent and tell each other everything that you're thinking.

That is not biblical. And anyone's been married more than like a year would know that if you did that, you wouldn't be married more than like a year, all right? So, because the way men think would scare women to death, and I'm scared to death think how women think.

I don't know what they think, don't want to know, don't care about it, all right? That is the most ridiculous doctrine being taught out there and it's causing divorces, because it's false. And anytime you introduce false doctrine in a church, it hurts people, okay?

So, here's the thing. When you, if you have a spectrum here of kindness and gentle heartedness, and over here you have transparency, which I would call rudeness, okay? You need to be somewhere in the middle and you need to lean towards the kindness side, even if it's not natural for you, because it's spiritual.

It's the side Jesus leaned toward. Do you see what I'm saying? He leaned towards being kind. Now, you can be truthful. Transparent doesn't mean truthful in the way they're using it. I mean, you can be truthful in a kind way, can't you?

But when you say transparent, what they're saying, just tell it like it is. You don't do that with humans. No human likes that. There's not one example of a human that likes to be told like it is. You need to make it kind if you have to say it.

And like brother Otis, he was so wise. He said, brother David, here's what I want you to do. If you have a problem with somebody in the church, he's for two or three days, and just ask yourself, can I just be big enough to just let this go and not even bring it up and would it be okay?

If the answer is yes, don't say a thing to him. He said, if the answer is no, and you feel yourself building up bitterness inside, then you need to go to the brother and in a kind way, tell him they hurt you.

He said, otherwise, just don't bring it up. Now think about that wisdom. What if that were taught in the mega churches? That would help some human relationships. So I'm just simply pointing out that kindly affection is on this side of the spectrum and rudeness is on this side and Jesus is over here.

Doesn't mean he's not truthful of all people. He's the most truthful human being in the world. But more often than not, I mean, I can think one example when I doubt if he even raised his voice, but he said, Peter, you know, he looked at Peter and he said, Satan, get behind me.

He didn't even rebuke Peter. Did you notice that he rebuked Satan? So other than that example, I can't find any other example where he wasn't kind to his little flock. And so we need to follow his example and always be on the spectrum over here by kindness.

Forget about this over here. It doesn't work with humans anyway. I mean, it may make you feel like a big dude, like you could just tell it like it is and I'll be like a drill sergeant and everyone will follow me because I'm so strong, but they'll hate you.

They'll hate you while they're following you. They will not have fun following you. They won't have fun with you. They won't like you. And really they'll leave eventually. You won't build a good organization or a group of friends.

Just doesn't work. And funny, Katie, I mean, you and I were talking about a business person we know that is struggling with that right now. Just a person who can be mean. It doesn't work. All right, kindly affection one to another.

And this brotherly love, now we already kind of talked about like the word for kindly affection is one we kind of broke down into two little words. Pretty amazing. And if that weren't enough, the very next phrase it says brotherly love.

Well, so you're supposed to love people like they're your mom or your kid. And on top of that, you're supposed to love your sister. All right, so it's doubly emphasized. But now then it kind of gives an adjective, a phrase here.

Well, what kind of brotherly love? Well, we need to honor them and prefer them above other people. We honor our brothers and sisters in Christ and prefer them above all other people on the planet. Now, this is pretty sweet because honor here in the Greek is a very strong word.

It means to esteem. It means esteem of the highest degree. Esteem of the highest degree is what this word was translated into honor. So we ought to be kind to each other, gentle hearted. We ought to love each other like a mom or a child.

And then we ought to have brotherly love for one another too. But we ought to esteem each other more highly with the highest degree that exists in our hearts above all other people on the planet, it says, preferring one another.

Now, I found one other interesting thing about this word. You see, you can take my PowerPoint away, but you can't take the teach away, all right? Because I like word studies and nobody tried to take the teach away, by the way.

I don't want you to think anybody wants to do that because if they do, they'll just need to leave. But anyway, or have me go away, which probably isn't going to happen in a while anyway. So look at this one.

Look at this last phrase, preferring one another. I like it. I like it in the English. I love the concept of preferring one another, but it's not, there are other colors of meaning in the Greek that you miss if you don't look at it.

And so it actually comes from a Greek word that means to lead the way for others. Isn't that interesting? To lead the way for others. So you're preferring them by showing them the right way to walk so that they'll be encouraged to walk right rather than your life, encouraging them to be a little lax, be a little carnal.

You know, your life is leading them in the right way. And so, you know, that's pretty incredible when you think about it. Well, what's interesting about it, if you go to verse 11, it's going to start putting some little A, Bs and Cs underneath how do you do that?

How do you lead people? How do you prefer them in so much that you're willing to live your life so that you lead them in the right way? What is that? Just click the offer button there. You know how to do it.

If you don't throw it today, he can do it, or Matt, anybody, Noah, someone younger than me and you, John, they can do it. All right. Okay, so now when we get to verse 11, it's going to tell us the how, how do you lead others in the right way?

How do you prefer, you know, picture Jesus here because I love this Greek word because it means prefer one another over all other people, like picture him with his little flock, okay? And, but it also means while he's preferring them and loving on them and showing the kindness, he's showing leadership.

He's leading them in the right way and they're just going with him. Wherever he goes, they go. So they're not going to be in the wrong place. They're not going to be listening to the wrong thing. They're not going to hear bad words because they're with him.

That's how we're supposed to be with each other. That's pretty deep. That's the Christian life, a big part of it right there. And so how do we do that? Well, look at verse 11. Number one, don't be slothful in business.

Do you find that interesting in this context, Bill? Doesn't it like it just changed the subject? It sound like it, but it didn't. But the modern church has avoided looking at scriptural principles of economics and finance for the last 200 years.

And it's really sad, maybe longer. I was trying to think back before we were part of this church, when we ever in our lives, ever heard a preacher mention anything about what this book right here says about how to build wealth for your family, how to create generational wealth down through the generations and how economics works and finance and how money works and how God wants to bless you with it.

And that when you get it, it's a blessing. It's not a bad thing, as long as you see it as a tool to help your family, yes, but others also, then it's a good thing. When did you ever hear a sermon about that other than on TV?

And the TV preachers usually get it wrong because they just say, God wants everyone to be rich. And the way you do that, that I'm going to send you a prayer cloth and you're going to send me $50. And then I'm going to take your prayer request and put them in the dumpster unopened.

Not all of them did that, but one of them did. What was that? Sharon knows. What is his name again? Bob Tilton. That's him. So he, did he go to prison for that? There will be a prison that he probably goes to.

But anyway, you see, that ain't the way to handle it. It says be not slothful in business. In other words, one of the things, when God talks about creating wealth, for one thing, you can't, like if you're the first person in your family to decide to do that, and you came from a family that's middle-class and just doesn't have wealth, you might not achieve it in your lifetime because there is no get rich quick scheme in this book right here.

It's all about diligence, hard work. But so when God says, I will make you wealthy, and it's a blessing for me when I do it, I'll make your family wealthy. He always says, if you do this, this, this, and this.

So it's a conditional promise. It's an if-then proposition. And one of the things you have to do is be closer to him now than you were last year or last week. You've got to keep a close walk with God as one of the conditions for wealth creation.

A second one is you've got to be diligent and work hard. And a third one is you've got to learn skill sets and the style of business that you're going to ask God to bless that's going to be your family business.

And another one that the church has done such a terrible job of teaching is that a job, funny isn't it, bad job of teaching, a job is not the end, it's a means. Jobs are noble, working for a wage is noble, but it's not the end result of the life biblically.

Biblically, it's a family business. Check it out, if you disagree with me, show me. But I think what you'll find in the Bible that working for a wage, when the Bible talks about it, the only thing worse is slavery.

And it's right next to it. In everything else where God blesses with abundance, it's a family business of some kind. Now back then, a lot of were agricultural, but they can be any, but that's not all.

The Bible talks about merchants. The Bible talks about buying at wholesale, selling at retail, profit taking, all of that's in the scripture. Capitalism came from the Protestant ethic from the Bible in John Calvin.

So what is it then? So what we should do is lay aside every couple of weeks some savings. And with the goal in five years, 10 years, start my own business of some kind. And then you can leverage money, you can leverage work hours of other people, pay them a fair wage, because maybe they're at the starting stage.

There's always a group of people at the starting stage that need a job. So you're providing jobs to get them to the next level. And if you're a good boss, you're teaching them how to make money on their own someday and they'll quit and you'll have to hire someone else because they'll go start their own business.

And you're okay with that. You see, that's how economics used to work in this country. And now the universities and the big corporations have colluded to dumb down the education so it never talks about money.

Some of you never even heard this stuff I'm saying this morning. It used to be in school. They dumbed it down, took it out so they could create a bunch of worker bees. So now even if you get an MBA, if you get a PhD in engineering, you have just been trained to work for a boss.

You're trading your infinitely valuable time for a little bit of someone else's money. That never creates wealth. God wants you to have wealth. So what you do is you may not be the person that has enough time in your life to make that happen, but you start teaching your kids and your grandkids these concepts and you even help them figure out, well, what kind of business could we learn together?

And you may just barely get it started. And then they may find the way to boom. It just blows up and creates wealth for the family. But I guarantee if you do that for your family, your great-great-grandkids will remember your name.

How many of you can name your great-great-grandparents? If they had done it, you would. We all know Captain Brown in my family. He's the one, he was a junk dealer with a sixth grade education, drove from Baltimore to Texas, worked his rear end off in the oil field till he was 65 or so.

And then he bought the oil field. So he took our family from poverty to wealth in his lifetime. And he only got to enjoy the wealth maybe for 10 years and he died of lung cancer. But my mom, well, actually his daughter, which was my grandmother, my mom's mother, and my mom and my family and my kids and grandkids are still benefiting from what that one man made a choice, that I'm not gonna live in poverty just because I don't have an education and just because everyone in my family was poor as far back as I can remember.

I'm gonna change that. Well, listen, don't you find it interesting that the first thing it says here as far as preferring one another and leading others in the right way to live is be not slothful in business.

Now that, you know, it's not just saying don't be lazy. I don't know anybody in this room that's lazy. And it's small enough church where I know you pretty well. It's not just that, but it's not talking about laziness.

It's talking about laziness in business. That can mean that you didn't put enough time in reading books about how money is made. You didn't spend enough time reading books about marketing, how that works, sales, how that works, building teams, how that works.

And so you were lazy in that. You didn't wanna read that stuff. You didn't wanna spend time at that stuff. And you can't, listen, God put a condition on it. He said, you gotta get skillsets. So now here's what's cool.

There's people like my friend Myron. You've all heard Myron Golden preach. I need to have him come back here. It's been a little bit too long this time. We get him coming pretty soon. But he spent years and years in reading.

He probably had, when this was in money, you know, like 1980 and 90 money, he probably had $5 ,000 worth of books in his library on selling, business, you know, how to market things, how to price things, how do you talk to people in such a way to open their mind?

How do you know what to sell in your business? He taught me, I had an MBA degree and my two kids, Katie and Dave had, sorry, only my kids, but they had marketing degrees. And we sat in his four-day seminar.

And in four days, he taught us maybe 20 years, 25 years worth that it took him to learn the knowledge, reading all those books, trying things. That's called time compression. And one thing Proverbs says is, you ought to have an instructor.

It says, wise people get an instructor because in four days they can teach you what it took them a lifetime to learn. We kind of do that with the stock market stuff. We teach people and we have four two-day seminars and a bunch of other support, but we can teach them what it took me 40 years to learn how to trade.