Living Hope Church

Pastor Phil Steiger: If you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Romans chapter 12. Here in just a minute we're going to pick up in Romans chapter 12, verse 9. That's where we're going to start reading.

This passage of scripture in Romans chapter 12, I've been looking forward to it. It's a magnificent passage. The rest of what's happening inside of this chapter and there are a handful of passages like this in the New Testament. The more we go through this section of scripture, we're going to find those and read those and pull those in as well. We're in a passage that is answering this incredibly important question for us: what does it mean for us to actually follow Jesus?

We say those things. We talk about the change in lifestyle and perception and the way we deal with life. What does it mean for us to actually do that? I'm saved, I've surrendered myself to Jesus Christ. He's my Lord and Savior. Now my life needs to change, so what exactly does that mean?

One of the pieces of vocabulary that we're going to run across a lot this morning and throughout this section as we go through this passage of scripture is an image that the New Testament uses a lot. It's an image that you can find often inside of the Old Testament. This is just simply the image of walking in the way of Jesus Christ. It is actually as straightforward an image as a biblical image could be.

Before we found Jesus, before Jesus came into our lives, we were walking in a certain direction. That direction was compatible with this world. It was in tune with my own sin and walking away from Christ. As soon as Christ gets a hold of our lives, we realize that we need to turn around and literally walk in a different direction. We were headed this direction and now with Jesus, we start walking in this direction.

One of the places where the Apostle Paul uses this language is in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 1. He says, "I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ, I urge you to walk in a way that is worthy of your calling." It's tremendous. Christ has called us, He's saved us. The Holy Spirit is transforming us. But we're not there yet. He says, "What I want you to do, Christian, is to begin to walk. Live a life that lives up to what God has called you to be, what He's doing inside of our lives."

When we talk about this over the next few weeks here in Romans 12 and other passages, the point of this is not even really perfection as much as it is direction. Where is the direction of my life? What is the direction of my emotions, my feelings, my thoughts, my priorities, the things I do in my life? What direction are they headed in? Am I walking in the way of Jesus Christ?

Before we dig through the rest of this passage, I want to remind us of the first two verses of Romans chapter 12, because Paul uses this as a heading to lead us into the rest of the book. 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. 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."

We were walking in a way that was perfectly conformed to the world. Now because of Jesus, He says, "Let's not be conformed to that anymore, let's be conformed to the image of Christ." We're presenting our bodies as living sacrifices. Now our minds are beginning to change, our wills are beginning to change. Our minds need to be renewed. The very language itself is strongly telling us that our minds need to change. The way we think, the way we react, what we pay attention to has been going in one direction, and now they need to be renewed. It needs to be changed.

Another passage of scripture that is going to parallel a lot of this one comes from Colossians chapter 3. I would encourage you, if you want to do this study yourself week after week, read Colossians 3, verses 1 through 17 alongside this passage. The first two verses of Colossians chapter 3 put it like this: "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, and not things that are on earth." We're going to begin to learn how to change what we think about, how we think about things, what we put into our souls through our eyes and our minds.

As we learn to value this life and live out the kinds of things that we're going to read here, we're learning how to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. What physically needs to change? How do I offer myself to Christ? We're learning what it is to actually take time to renew our minds. Our focus this morning consists of a couple of things that will help us through our passage. The first is this: our love should be without hypocrisy.

This is a word in the Greek we talk about from time to time that he uses. This is agape love. There are three significant words in the Greek for love. This one is agape love. It's the word in the New Testament that the writers use to describe God's kind of love. It's the love that God shows us. We learn what that means, and we are learning what it means for us to show that kind of love to others. We are looking to live lives that love without hypocrisy. This is the kind of love we're learning to live out.

Our love should be without hypocrisy. The other thought is this: what do we do with good and evil? Paul puts these three thoughts together, and I love the fact that he puts these three things together for us this morning. What do we do with good and evil? There is a connection—a significant connection—between Christian love and what we do with good and evil. How we understand what is good, how we understand what is evil, and what love has to do with any of that. Paul puts these things together because these things belong together.

It's going to be good for us to spend some time on it because there's a lot of confusion in the world around us. One way of looking at a lot of the brokenness and the confusion that's going on in the world right now is a misunderstanding of all three of these terms. What is love? How do I show love? What does it mean to be loving? What is good? What do I want to promote in my life and in the lives of others? What is evil? What am I going to fight against? What am I going to work against? If we misunderstand all three of these words, things are going to fall apart. It's good for us as Christians to dig into the word of God and make sense of all three of these terms.

We're going to read Romans chapter 12, verses 9 through 13, and we're going to spend time on verse 9 this morning. Friends, this is the word of the Lord: "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. Rejoice in hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality."

I hope when we read something like that, there are two things happening inside of our hearts at the same time. There's conviction and there's hope. We read this and we go, oh, my goodness. We read this and we think, I want that. I need this so much. Verse 9, this passage of scripture I want us to spend time with this morning is, "Let love be genuine, abhor what is evil, and hold fast to what is good."

If there is one thought that flows like lifeblood through the church of Jesus Christ, it is the notion of the love of God. What that means, who He is, how He's revealed that to us. What it is for Paul and the rest of the New Testament to talk about what it means for us to learn how to love one another and love the world and to show this kind of love. Paul deals with it a couple of times in this passage that we just read. This notion is at the core of who we are as believers.

In fact, when you read that passage in Colossians chapter 3, the Apostle Paul is talking about the kind of life that we're getting rid of. He uses the image of taking things off. So take off this kind of life and put on the life that belongs to Jesus Christ. In the middle of that, he says, "And above all things put on love, because love binds all of this together." This is what makes sense of everything that we've read here, everything we will continue to read. It is the love of God.

Jesus says this to his disciples in John chapter 13, the night in which he washes their feet. He's preparing them for the cross and the resurrection. One of the things he tells them is this, in John 13:35, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." It's easy to grow very confused about love and about what this means when we let other definitions of love creep into our faith and change how we live lives for Christ, change how we express this, change how we live this out with one another. It's very easy to allow other definitions and senses of what it means to love to erode what scripture means by love.

All in all, friends, it's important to understand this is just our baseline: God defines love. Love is, in and of itself, not an emotion. It is expressed with emotion, it involves our emotions because we are these kinds of creatures, but love is defined by the character and the work and the will and the action of God. That's what we're learning to figure out; this is what we're learning to live.

God defines love, and we see it in our lives most clearly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Son of God who came as an infant is Jesus Christ, sacrificed Himself for sinners, and makes salvation possible for everyone who believes. This is how we watch love unfold among us. Even inside of this, we begin to see why Paul talks about love, evil, and good in the same breath, in the same verse.

God hates sin enough to conquer it. God loves sinners enough to save them. Does that make sense? That's an important thing here. This is the pure love of God without any hypocrisy whatsoever. It is not two-faced. It is not one thing in one scenario and one thing in another scenario. The Apostle Paul is saying if we are learning what agape love is from God and who He is and what Jesus has done for us, it is absolutely and completely pure. Now you and I are trying to figure out what it means to live that out.

It's very easy to play acts sometimes. It's very easy to put on a face from time to time. But Paul says the direction we're headed is that the love that we learn to show one another is without any of that. It is as clear a representation of the love of God as we can possibly make it. Our love needs to be genuine, he says. John the disciple puts it like this in 1 John chapter 3, verse 18. He says, "Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth." This is both our love for God—that it would be without hypocrisy, that it would be pure—and our love for one another as well.

There's this chapter in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. It's often called—anybody know when I say 1 Corinthians 13 what chapter we're talking about? We call it the love chapter. 1 Corinthians 13 sits in a really, really fascinating context. When we went through the gifts of the Spirit here in Romans chapter 12, the previous passage, we went through those gifts. We read a couple of chunks from 1 Corinthians 12 because the Apostle Paul is talking again about the body of Christ. God gives all these different gifts to the body so that then we can minister to one another. We can bring the kingdom of God to bear inside of the local church and inside of our communities as we bear witness. This is why God gives the gifts.

In 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, Paul talks a lot about tongues and interpretation and these lists of gifts that he gives. As he closes 1 Corinthians chapter 12, he literally says this: "But now I want to show you a more excellent way." He starts to talk about love. It's important for us to see that because it's what Paul does in his own way here in Romans chapter 12. He just talked about the gifts that the Spirit gives to every member of the body so that we can act them out well in ways that glorify God and encourage the body of Jesus Christ. The very next thing he talks about is love.

It's incredible how the Spirit is at work amongst us in different kinds of ways so that the love of God may be manifest among us. In that passage in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, "I want to show you still a more excellent way." I want to read bits of this. It's a beautiful passage, but you should spend some time with it in sackcloth and ashes. You should spend some time with it in repentance and looking for God to lead you in this direction. If this is the love of God, this is the kind of thing we're talking about.

In 1 Corinthians 13, I'm going to read a couple of sections of this. Paul says, "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. Does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

This is essentially a description of Christ. It is a description of the kind of love that God has shown us. Then Paul lays that in our laps and says, "This is the direction we're headed." I may have these other gifts. I may excel at the other gifts that God has given me, but if I don't have the love of God at work within me, then I'm just banging cymbals. I'm doing what Pastor Phil does on Sunday mornings; I just hit cymbals. That's all I do, making noise.

This is love: it's not arrogant, it's not rude, it doesn't insist, it's not irritable or resentful, it doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing, but it rejoices with the truth. Is Christian love the same thing as making no judgments at all? Paul just told us no. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing; it rejoices with the truth. Let love be genuine, and when you do that, you can abhor evil and you can cling to what is good.

Does Christian love mean then that we should not make decisions that the world around us doesn't like? Does it mean that we should not take unpopular stances so other people will feel better about what the church thinks of them? It does not mean that. Yesterday was the Walk for Life. Lots and lots and lots of people inside of a park raising money for and encouraging the belief that the unborn deserve just as much life as anybody else. The church should say that. The church should say that out loud.

It's murder. They deserve life. Even if that doesn't feel loving to some, we abhor what is evil, we cling to what is good. We do not rejoice in wrongdoing, but we rejoice in the truth. I'm old enough to remember an era on TV during the day where there were talk shows that turned into fistfights. Does anybody remember these kinds of shows in the middle of the day? At that time, the most popular phrase that was screamed over and over again is, "Who are you to judge me?"

We are so far beyond that. It's no longer, "Who are you to judge me?" It's, "You have to accept and love everything I do and approve of it all the time." We've gone from one to the next. But Christian love is clear on what glorifies God and what does not glorify God. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but it rejoices with the truth. Let love be genuine. That word literally means without hypocrisy. Don't be two-faced. If this is what the love of God is like, this is what our love needs to be like as well.

Without even breaking pace, the next thing he says is abhor what is evil. I love how the ESV translates that word. The word just means fundamentally to hate it, to have disgust for it, to have horror for it. In some contexts, that word can literally mean to shudder at something. This is a strong term that he uses when he talks about our reaction to evil.

We're not used to this kind of language when we often talk about how Christians are to love or to live with the world around us, how Christians are supposed to handle their own internal lives and encourage brothers and sisters. We're not used to this language of the hatred of evil. But scripture talks a lot about what God hates, and scripture talks a lot about what the followers of Jesus Christ should hate.

I've got just a little snippet of some of these passages that use this language. Psalm 11, verse 5 tells us that the Lord hates the wicked and those who love violence. Psalm 45:7 says the Lord hates wickedness. Proverbs 6:16 has a list that begins with this phrase: "There are six things the Lord hates." In Proverbs 8, verse 13, the fear of the Lord is the hatred of evil. Isaiah 1:14 tells us that God hates hypocritical worship. Isaiah 61, verse 8 says God hates robbery and wrong.

This is just a snippet of these kinds of passages inside of the Old Testament. That's from the Lord's point of view. From the believer's point of view—those who are writing in scripture, those who are telling us how to live in this world—Psalm 26, verse 5 says, "I hate the assembly of evildoers." Psalm chapter 97 says, "O you who love the Lord, hate evil." Psalm 119:104 says, "I hate every false way." Psalm 119:113 says, "I hate the double-minded." Ecclesiastes—everybody's favorite devotional book—Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 8 says, "There's a time to love, and there is a time to hate." Amos chapter 5, verse 15—it's almost as if the Apostle Paul might be just citing this passage of scripture—says, "Hate evil and love good."

Why? Evil is everything that twists the goodness and the good gifts of God for its own destructive purposes. Consider everything that God created in Genesis chapter 1. Every single day He created everything that exists. At the end of every day He said, "It is good, it is good, it is good." At the end of the last day, He said, "This is very good." All that God created is good. The only thing evil can do is take what God has created and twist it for evil ends. That's what evil does.

It takes who we are, created in God's image, and begins to tear it to shreds: psychologically, physically, relationally, and morally. All evil can do is corrode what God has done that is good. Why should we hate evil? Because it is the destruction of what God has created and the goodness He wants in our lives and the lives of the people around us. Evil is just rebellion against God, against His will, against His character. It goes against—remember again that original thought—the direction of the will and the goodness and the glory of God. Evil can never glorify God.

Evil in my life can never bring me closer to Jesus Christ; it's just the very nature of these things. Friends, these kinds of things we don't often think in these terms, but the Apostle Paul is trying to help us with this. If we do not hate evil, we cannot love our neighbor the way God wants us to. If we begin to love the evil that's in their life, we begin to think that to love them is to allow that evil. We think to love them is to coddle that evil because it makes them feel better or it makes it easier for them.

If we don't hate that evil, we can't love our neighbor the way that God wants us to, because evil brings destruction to our family, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, and it cannot glorify God. According to what Paul is telling us: let your love be genuine without hypocrisy, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good, hold fast to what is good. Evil in the heart of the Christian and in the life of the church cannot be tolerated. The good is not relative to what I want it to be.

Just as we learn that love is from God Himself, we understand evil in relation to God, and we also then understand goodness in relation to God. We need to get our sense of good and evil from the word of God and from the character of God. These are again some very practical questions and things that we lay in our laps. Do I know enough about the word of God?

Have I worked it through enough? Have I spent enough time with it? Do I believe it is the authority of my faith and practice, the way that I live my life? What I believe and how I live. Do I believe the word of God is that authority, and do I know enough about it to have a sense of what God says about this or what God thinks about this? Do I know enough? There was a survey that hit the surface just a couple of weeks ago. The American Bible Society does this survey on a regular basis—"The State of the Bible," I think is what they call it.

In the latest survey, they recognized that only 17% of Americans open up their Bible on a weekly basis. That includes a lot of Christians. I know this isn't you guys; you guys are constant in prayer in your Bible reading. I know that of all of you. It's them, right? No, it's us. Only 17%. If only 17% of people open their Bibles on a weekly basis, do we know what God thinks about this?

Do we know how God would react to this? Do we know what God thinks about any of these things, whatever they are, going on inside of our lives? We have to be close to the word of God. We need to understand that the only useful idea of what is good is based on the character of God. There is no other stable place in the universe for our understanding of what is good. God Himself is perfectly good. There is no standard above Him. There is no standard of moral goodness beside Him. He Himself is it. He is perfectly good, and He is unchanging and eternal.

That means then that our sense of what is good—what we can cling to, what we can hold to, what we can pour our lives into—is eternal and unchanging. What is right and wrong morally and right and wrong theologically is not going to change tomorrow morning. It's not going to change with the next election. It's not going to change with the next gigantic issue. It is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We ground ourselves in God. There is no other source in the universe like this. It is certainly not up to you and me to determine what is good.

We can cling to what is good because we're clinging to the very character of God when we do so. We cling to God for what is good, and we recognize that He is the only justification for what is good. Why is this good? Why is this good and this evil? It's the character of God. It's the work of God. It's what He is doing; it's what He's revealed to us in His word. So we hold fast to it. Friends, we defend it. We live it. We advocate for it.

Listen to what Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10 says: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." There's that image again: that we should walk in them. This is why God has prepared us. This is what He's done. This is why He has saved me, so that I can learn what it is to walk in the goodness of God. None of us are perfect, but all of us are walking in this direction.

When we live God's good, we're bringing a part of the kingdom of God into our lives and into the lives of those around us. When we actually do this, this is what we're doing: participating in the work of the kingdom of God. When we stand up for God's good, we are helping to bring God's good into the lives of those around us whether they like it or not. We are looking for the good of God for our neighbor because that is what is good.

Yes, the church can advocate for these things. Christians can say these things out loud. A love of what is good in my life will inevitably lead to a Christ-honoring order of every other love in my heart. It's going to put everything else into its appropriate place. When the love of Christ has its way inside of me, it's going to train me mentally, emotionally, and physically. Again, we're offering our bodies as a living sacrifice. As the love of God has its way within me, it's going to begin to train me to see and discern what is good and what is evil.

I'm going to learn to actually despise that for the damage that it does, and I'm going to learn to love this for the good that it does. This is what happens when the love of God has its way within us. The strongest force in the human heart is attraction, not rejection. The strongest force in the human heart is what we want, what we think is right, and what we think is good. We're repulsed by plenty of things and we dislike plenty of things, but we will act in a way that reflects what we think is right and good. The strongest force in the human heart is what we're attracted to, not necessarily what we're repulsed by.

What we think is good, what we think is worthwhile, what we think deserves our time and attention will get exactly all of our time and attention. Every now and then, I get to use words like this from behind the pulpit. I apologize, but it's all right; maybe it makes you feel a little bit smarter, who knows? Aristotle wrote one of the most influential books in the Western canon: Aristotle's Ethics. In this Greek pagan philosopher's work, the very first sentence of that book is a long version of this: every action aims at the good.

Everything we do is in the direction of what we think is right, of what we think is good, or of what we think we need to do. That's every one of those actions. A pagan philosopher in ancient Greece hits on something that is deeply and profoundly true inside of the human heart because this is how God created us. Augustine, the Christian who had this powerful conversion experience in his adult life, wrote a book called The Confessions. Very early on, reflecting on his life as a sinner and now his life as a follower of Jesus Christ, he says this: "Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you." Our hearts stir and churn in desire, seeking, grasping, and clinging until we find the one thing we can cling to for our lives: the very goodness of God. Isn't that incredible?

That's where we're going to find Him. To build Christlike love into our lives and to learn how to discern good from evil, friends, we need to be able to pay attention to what goes into our hearts and minds. This is where, inside of our lives, this becomes enormously practical and enormously personal. What goes into my eyes, my ears, and my life builds the storehouse of my soul. When it's time for me to open my mouth and act, the only things that can come out of there are what I put in there.

We need to pay attention to what I've put in, so that what I've put in is the love of God and glorifies and honors Him, so that more and more what comes out of me is the love of God. Paul said in chapter 12, in those first couple of verses, that we need to renew our minds. In Colossians chapter 3, he said we need to set our minds on these things. He says this in Philippians chapter 4, verse 8: "Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

He didn't say, "Just like them, love them, aren't these beautiful words?" He said, "I want you to figure out what these things are according to the character and the word of God, and I need you to start thinking about them." If you want to do something practical, this verse gives you one of those roadmaps. What are these things? I'm going to start paying attention to these things more and the other things less and less.

Psalm chapter 1, verses 1 and 2 of the book of Psalms opens like this: "Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night." Did you notice all the bodily language in there? Blessed is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked. I don't spend time there.

I'm very careful with what goes into my ears through my podcasts and my YouTube channels and the things I spend time with, because if I walk with that, then I'm going to begin to reflect that. I'm not here to be conformed by wickedness, so I don't walk in that way. I'm here to bear witness to wickedness; that's why I need to walk in a different way. So don't walk there. He says don't stand around with sinners, because that's going to begin to affect the way that we see things and figure things out and the decisions that we make. Don't get so comfortable with wickedness that you just sit down in its company—this sort of resolve of, "Well, I walked there, then I stood there, then I sat there," and then my soul just became overwhelmed with wickedness.

Instead of that, our delight—what we're drawn by, what we love, what gives us joy—is in the law of the Lord, and on that we will meditate day and night. Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in scripture; it's longer than a lot of books of the Bible. In Psalm 119, verses 15 and 16, it says this: "I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word." I'm going to fix my eyes on it. I'm going to find joy and love in it so that I don't ever forget it.

Friends, I have a couple of questions this morning—questions that only we can answer for ourselves. What is it that has influence over my mind and my emotions? What has influence over those things? Who has influence over those things? Recall Psalm 1:1. Who am I walking with? Who am I literally learning life from? Who am I standing around with who is forming and shaping my opinion and my priority? Who do I sit down and soak in? What are those influences?

What might somebody else tell me I sound like? Sometimes we're a little bit blind to how that works inside of ourselves. Someone else might say, "Oh, that sounds like this over here," because I've been walking with it. I've been standing with it; I've been sitting with it. What are our most common reactions to the most difficult situations in life? Where do those things come from? They come from where our minds have been, where our souls have been.

I'm a pastor; I have to keep asking this question: are you in the word of God? Are you actually in the word of God? Are you spending time with it? I'm just old enough to remember—and this generation is dying off, which is a little sad to me—I'm old enough to remember a generation of saints that sounded like the King James Bible. Do some of you remember what that was like? You talked to them in normal life, and they're ordering a burger at Chili's and they sound like the King James Bible.

They're talking to you about normal life, and what comes out of them—because that's what they had growing up was the King James Bible and they were saturated in it—so they're giving you life advice and they sound like the King James Bible. Is there anything about me that sounds like the Bible? Is there anything about me that sounds like the word of God? It has to be the case. This habit has the promise of doing genuine good in our hearts and minds. It is what we often call spiritual formation: our spirits are being formed by the things of God.

And then this question—this is the question we leave ourselves with because this is something that all of us need to work on: do you love it? Do you love the things of God? Do you love the word of God? Do you love what Christ has done for you? Do you love who He is? Do you love the thought of being able to walk in that way and looking more like Him? Walking in this path is going to lead us—and we are sinners all—to a place that is closer to a love that reflects the love of God.

The more I thought about this, the more I thought I want to leave us with one thought with this notion of: do I love the word of God and the things of God? I'm going to tell you from experience that one of the ways to find that, one of the ways to be there, is to read the word of God more when you walk in darkness. It really is true that we can walk through life and it doesn't feel dark, things feel right and good, God is a blessing, and we smile more than we don't. We read the word of God, and the word of God resonates with us; it sticks in our hearts and minds, and it's great.

But let me tell you, friends, there is nothing like learning from the word of God when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Don't neglect the word of God, the things of God, or the people of God when you've got nothing else to hold on to. You can cling to it. You're going to find out that you love it even more on the other side.