Romans 12:10

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All righty. Romans 12, verse 10.
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Just verse 10. We finally, as it was stated earlier, moved on from verse 9 after four weeks.
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I'm just doing verse 10 this week. We will likely move on to verse 11 next week.
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But I did want to hang out for just a little bit in just verse 10.
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As we normally do, let's go back to verse 1 so we can read through, keep the context of what we're going to talk about today.
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Verse 1, he 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil.
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Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection.
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Outdo one another in showing honor. Very often when we come to the scriptures, as I stated multiple times last week, we tend to kind of lose things, not the translators in the scriptures, they do a very, very good job, but sometimes we don't have
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English words to express the same sort of thought that a single
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Greek word or Hebrew word might carry, so it's good that we have resources that we can go to to look up those words and find the original meaning of those words, and for the vast majority of scripture, it's almost a hundred percent accurate, but when it comes to us, we tend to have a hard time reading through these things and understanding exactly what the text is getting to.
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That's why when you go on Sunday to teaching, to preaching, there are people in the church to help you with these things, like when we discussed before that love is one of these words.
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Our culture promotes a semi sort of Greek romance kind of idea to love, that it's this feeling that you feel, and where scripture shows us that there is a feeling, but love is the action.
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Same with abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good. We're not talking about, oh
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I like Oreo cookies, they're good, let me put those in my pocket, that's silly. He's talking about those good actions that benefit you walk with Christ and benefit the body in their walk with Christ, and moving away from those things that hurt you in your walk, and hurt the body in its walk.
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Here Paul says right after that, which is kind of why I wanted to spend a lot of time on verse 9, he says as true
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Christians remember, well hang on,
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I've mixed my thoughts. The other thing that I want us to remember is that Paul here is writing to whom?
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The Roman Church. He's not writing to everyone in the Greek world.
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When he writes to the Romans, he's writing to the Roman Church. When he writes to Corinth, he's writing to the
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Church. He's talking to Christians about being
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Christian, and about doctrine, and the application of that, that can only be applied by Christians.
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No matter how bad you want to self -help yourself into loving God, you can't.
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There is no substitute for the Holy Spirit. The only people that can do what
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Paul is saying here in verse 10, and in verse 9, and in the rest of the entirety of the epistles are people who are in to what with the
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Holy Spirit. As a natural person, you can change some behaviors.
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You can change this, or change that, but you cannot change your heart. Ultimately, you still do everything from a self -serving perspective, and you cannot do what he's talking about here.
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To love one another, talking of the brethren, the body, with brotherly affection, and especially the next thing he says.
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But he's writing to a church that's dealing with infighting, as we discussed several weeks ago, close to a year ago, when we started
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Romans. They're having ethnicity problems. They deal with classism. They deal with many other things.
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They're slaves, and they're slave masters, and there are different races in Rome, so of course there is probably a really good mixture of different looking people in the church.
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Certainly Jews and Greeks at the very least, and what he's saying here is that none of that matters.
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Remember what we talked about in 9 and 10, and pretty much the whole rest of Romans, Paul is dealing with this issue.
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It doesn't matter who you are, what your stature is, how much money you have, slave or free,
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Jew or Greek, you're the same. You're in Christ. Love one another.
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He says in verse 9, as we read, that we are to do it genuinely. Not well, no.
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I own a lot of people myself, but Dave is, he's in the church, so I'm gonna treat him nice because that's what
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I have to do. No, genuinely love Dave, and if you have the
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Holy Spirit, you will. The other thing
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I want to point out here in verse 10 is that as he's directing this, this idea of brotherly love, the word here in the
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Greek is when you may be familiar with Philadelphia.
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I'm sure us in the city of brotherly love, that's what Philadelphia means, is brotherly love or familial love, that natural connection that you have with your birth parents, with your brothers or your sisters.
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We know what that's like, especially if you have siblings. You have parents, you know it much more, but between siblings, man, how angry and hateful can you be toward your sibling, and then someone say something and turn right around and defend them.
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It's a natural connection that you have. That's what Philadelphia is talking about.
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Paul is saying love the brethren, not as if they are your family, because they are your family.
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They are. They are your spiritual family.
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You're all connected in one body with Christ as the head. You're the spiritual family of God.
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Act accordingly. This is one of the things that persists in most cultures throughout the world is the idea that family bonds are the most solid bonds that one can have.
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Now certainly there are exceptions to that rule, but many cultures throughout history have promoted family, the family unit, family ties, your name.
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They've promoted it over everything else. A great example of this in our Western culture, not so recently, would be the history of Northern Scotland with clan wards, and then that culture came here to the south.
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You had massive, massive clans that shared the same name, and your greatest thing in life you could do was to bring honor to that name.
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Everything you did was in service to your family. As I said, there are exceptions to this rule.
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There were nation states and countries like today that promote a nationalistic idea or nationalistic culture rather than a familial one.
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Notably in the ancient world, Spartans. You were a
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Spartan before you were anything else. Your citizenship mattered far more greatly than anything else.
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Germany in the 21st century. Your citizenship in the early 21st century, your citizenship as a
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German mattered more than your familial ties. How do you think so many people ratted so many other people out?
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They cared about being German more, and I'll say this, not necessarily
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German. They cared about the nationalistic idea of what they wanted
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Germany to be. Make no mistake, and I'll end what
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I'm saying on this, regular Germans were just as copable for what happened in the 1930s and 40s as the
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Nazi Party was, especially those left toward the end of the war, with the exceptions of the ones who fought against it, because you either said nothing or you said a lot, period.
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You either hid in the shadows to keep the government's eyes off of you so you wouldn't get in trouble, or you gave someone up to save yourself.
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Anyway, we have other countries like that that exist today. The same nationalistic idea.
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China is one of them. There are several others, including this one, who grew up in the school singing the national anthem.
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Did you know that's not something that we originally did in public school? That was instituted along with the idea of nationalism.
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The idea that it didn't matter what color you were, where you lived, how much money you had, or how dirt poor you were, by goodness you were an
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American. That starts at the end of the 1930s all the way through to today.
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Heavily influenced through the 1940s and the war effort, and then the 1950s and the Soviet War. The most important thing is that you're
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Cold War with the Soviets, is that you're an
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American. That's nationalism. Now we deal with that in the church.
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It's called Christian nationalism, as if the word Christian needs any sort of adjective to help describe it.
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You know, being a people of a nation, not of this earth and all. But these are the exceptions to what
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Paul is talking about. This idea of familial ties. In the ancient world, it was very, very prevalent that you would show honor to your family, that your ties were more important than anything else.
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Greco -Roman culture is indeed, or did indeed, subscribe to this.
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So here in this passage, and in others, when Paul says what he is saying, to love each other, as in the church, love each other in the same way that you love your mother, and your father, and your sister, and your brother.
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Love them the same way, not as the people that you just see once a week.
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Keep in mind, when you were in the body in the first century, when
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Paul is writing this, it wasn't a meeting you held once a week. You were legitimately a community.
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People didn't hold themselves up in a compound somewhere. That's not what I'm talking about. But the body of Christ supported the body of Christ, because they were the only people that you could go to.
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Go to your aunt. The problem is, is that she pays homage to Caesar.
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Is she gonna tell on you? But you know that Titus you can go to.
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He is your teacher. He's the leader in the church. Of course, I can count on him.
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It was easier. It's easier in places where the church is persecuted.
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We are hindered by our ease of living here. And I'll say this, and some people may disagree.
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Hopefully you won't disagree, but in light of this verse and others from Paul and the other
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Apostles, I dare say that you ought to love the body of Christ more, and know them more than you do those family members that are not in the body.
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Now, does that mean that you should not love your family at all if they are not saved? No, that's contrary to the
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Word. But it does mean that there should be a shift in your priorities and how you prioritize the people in your life.
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Absolutely show honor to your mother and your father. Absolutely love those who hate you.
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But your loving kindness that you show to the body, to the spiritual family of God, should in no way shape or form be less than that that you show anyone else.
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Having said that, obviously I want to point out the great lack of this in the church today.
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Now, what's bad is that cults do this way better than we do.
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They do it wrong, but they do it way better.
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They support each other. And I don't mean in, hey, someone needs a thing, let's all come together and give them some money.
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That's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is knowing one another so intimately that you know something is wrong when it's wrong.
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There should never be an instance where something happens or someone does something to themselves in the church and everyone is left to wonder what happened.
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That means that church didn't do what it was supposed to do. Now there is some accounting for someone hiding something.
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Absolutely. But everyone who has dealt with that in their life has been able to look back and see where the signs were.
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We just didn't see them until after the fact. Whether it is the murder of oneself or whether it is financial aid or mental health or whatever it is, we should know one another intimately enough that we can spot it immediately.
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How often are you with your significant other and they're just a little bit off in mood and you go, okay, what's wrong?
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What's the deal? Can you do that with everyone else sitting around here in this room?
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That is what Paul is talking about. Obviously, you're gonna spend more time with others, with some rather than others.
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That's going to happen in the daily movement of life but make the effort to know them and know them intimately.
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How else are we supposed to confess our sins to each other? If I don't know
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Sean intimately, as in friendship, brotherly love, why would
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I confess the things that I want to keep hidden to him? Why?
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I ought to be able to because I know him well enough and I trust him well enough but here, as I said before, it is admittedly easier to skate by without having to do that.
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We live in a time that the church hasn't really experienced until about,
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I don't know, say 200 years ago maybe and I mean legitimately because even during the creation of this country, there was persecution between Christian to Christian.
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Baptists ought to know this. If you don't, read the history of the
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Baptist Church. The lack of need to rely on the body has contributed to the lack of practicing this.
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Paul in Galatians 6 in verse 10, funny enough, he says, so then as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, everyone and especially of those of the households of faith, especially to the brethren.
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Oddly enough, as I was talking about before, the word Philadelphia here is love one another with brotherly affection.
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The root word phileo is actually used twice, Philadelphia, and the other one
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I can't pronounce, so I do apologize, but it starts with philea.
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It also means brotherly love in an actionable sense. There's no getting away from this.
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As I said before, don't stop loving those around you. That is the first thing that people should say about you, that you are kind.
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That should go before any of us in our reputation. Before they say, well he knows Scripture really well, well he does this really well, well he preaches really well, well he knows he's memorized a lot of stuff, he really loves doctrine.
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The first thing that anyone should say about you, especially in the body, is they are kind, more especially in the sharing of the gospel.
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Now you may not remember it as someone being kind, perhaps they weren't when they shared the gospel with you.
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Maybe they were crass and perhaps a little overbearing for their cage stage when they shared it with you, and they beat you over the head with it, until the
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Holy Spirit and loving kindness and grace and mercy opened your eyes to it.
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There is no reason that we should take a thing that to natural people is overtly offensive.
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It is, and it should be. You should not attempt to soften the words of the gospel or change them out to make them more acceptable.
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You shouldn't do that. However, your delivery of them can be better.
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Share it in loving kindness. Love them with the greatest gift that they can ever receive.
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It is offensive, and it is exclusive, which in and of itself is offensive.
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There's no reason that we should make it worse with our behavior. Paul goes on and he says, outdo one another in showing honor.
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In the NIV it says, honor one another above yourselves. The New King James, it says, in honor giving preference to one another.
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The NASB says, give preference to one another in honor. What Paul is saying is that we need to be the first at putting others first, if that helps.
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Don't wait for someone to show you a kindness to repay that with kindness.
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Be the one that is first showing the kindness. You will not hear me say this about a lot of things.
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Most of the time I will tell you not to be an instigator. Absolutely be an instigator of brotherly love and affection.
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Prioritize it. Really high on your list. We'll go this route.
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What is the summary of the law? You don't have to say it. I'm fixing to read it. Luke 10 verse 27.
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You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
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Love your neighbor as yourself. This is the second greatest commandment.
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It sums up the entirety of the law and the prophets. Right after Jesus gives this answer, the man asks, who is our neighbor?
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And he answers with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The answer to the parable, because at the end of it, he asked the questioner, who was the neighbor?
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The neighbor is the one who acted with mercy toward the man. The one who acted neighborly.
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A Samaritan. Someone that the Jews really didn't like. The reason that I bring this up is that in the summary of the law, as our
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Lord and Savior puts forth, is to love one another as you love yourself.
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Paul here in verse 10 is saying what? Love one another with brotherly affection, and more especially those in the church.
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Outdoing one another in that love. The only people capable of what
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Paul is saying are people indwelt with the Holy Spirit. I challenge you to show anyone otherwise in the
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Scriptures. Fulfill the law?
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You argue that a natural man can fulfill the law? Do we need to go back and start in Romans 1?
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Now does that mean that you're gonna do it all the time? Nope. You're gonna fail at it most of the time.
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Unfortunately, what we tend to do is we end up treating others like they treat us.
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The exact opposite of that second commandment, and the exact opposite of what
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Paul is talking about. Well Dave, he shorted me, so I'm not helping him anymore, or it's coming at a cost.
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Frank is a liar. I don't think I'm gonna help
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Dave anymore, or Frank. I can't keep track of these made -up people that I keep talking about, but we act in a reactionary manner toward one another, and Lord help us if we're alone and thinking about it, because more especially when a person isn't there, have you noticed that you think about them worse than you normally would if they were in the room?
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You give them zero grace, especially at the beginning of that thought.
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Where they say, hey, you know, so and so said such -and -such, and this is what I have to say about that, and it takes someone else maybe going, well hang on a minute.
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Think about it from their perspective in the way that they're looking at things, and then you have the ability to go, oh yeah, you're probably right.
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Paul is saying, don't do that. Stop it. That's your flesh.
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The first thing that we ought to do, that we should strive to do, is to love one another like we love our mothers, and our fathers, and brothers, and sisters, and not only that, we should be the first to do so.
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We should strive to be the one leading everyone else in brotherly love and affection.
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Outdo one another, not in a sense of pride, but out of affection for the brethren.
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To do so genuinely, to move away from those things that are evil, cleave to those things that are good, to those behaviors that benefit the body, and don't only cleave to them.
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Show everyone else what that thing was. Be the first to step forward, and in loving kindness, do that thing.
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It's kind of like similar to what I'm talking about is similar to do you remember being in school, and the teacher would ask a question to the entire class, and no one would raise their hands until the first one did, and everybody's like, oh yeah, especially if the first one got it wrong.
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You're like, well my odds have gone up. Here's another example.
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How many people have heard a story about someone getting robbed and no one helping until someone does, and when the first person starts to move to help the victim, then everyone comes in.
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There's a syndrome. There's an actual name for that kind of behavior.
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Don't be like that in the church. Don't be the one waiting to help because no one else has done it yet.
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Be the one to lead the group in brotherly love and affection, and if everyone is striving to do that, how much better will everyone in the church benefit, and not only those in the church, but also everyone else.
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We help a stranger as the Samaritan did. We share with others the truth of the gospel as it was shared with us, the example of Christ given to us, and the fact that he died for us while we were yet sinners, and the fact that he did not wait for someone else.
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There was no one else, but irregardless of the fact that we'd all deserve wrath,
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God and in his infinite wisdom and sovereignty took upon himself what we could not do.
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Go this week, and when you go about your daily life, your humdrum day -to -day, do not see, don't look at it as your normal weekly routine.
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Lead in loving -kindness toward the body, toward those you know, those you work with, those you meet on the street, and please, please remember what
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Paul said earlier, that the humdrum daily life that you rarely consider, that you just do to get by to the end of the day or to the end of the week to collect your paycheck, that is your spiritual worship.
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How well do you think it's being received? It's a question to ask yourself.
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Do you consider that, not every minute of every day, but even at all, that you getting up in the morning and reading your
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Bible and maybe doing a devotional or something, singing maybe in your head or in the shower, brushing your teeth, going to work, eating lunch, coming home, watching things or reading things, that is your spiritual worship.
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What Paul says, very part of verse, very first part of verse or chapter 12, do your best to lead in loving -kindness.
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Work out your salvation in showing the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Share the gospel.
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Most loving thing that you can do to anyone. They may not like it.
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In fact, they will probably definitely not like the conversation, but it is the most loving thing that you can do, and just as it says to work out your salvation, the fruit of the
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Holy Spirit, he also says that there is no law against these things.
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There is nothing that limits the amount of kindness and love that you can show to the people around you and more especially to the body.