Living Hope Church

Phil Steiger: If you open your Bibles with me, we are in Romans chapter 12. We're going to start reading here in verse 14 in just a couple of minutes. As we continue to walk through this section of Romans chapter 12, there are a couple of other sister passages in the New Testament that work like this one. We have Romans 12, Colossians 3, and 2 Peter chapter 1. I continue to encourage you, as this strikes your interest in what the Word has to say, to put these three chapters together in your own devotional life.

As we do so, we continue to read what the Christian life ought to look like. We really are talking about the Christian ethic and Christian morality. It's good for us to spend time on this and hear how it is we are supposed to live with each other as followers of Jesus Christ. One of the reasons this is so important is that there are a lot of moral systems out there—ideas and ideologies—that are vying for the attention of your soul. I don't just mean they're vying for your attention because they want you to behave in certain ways; they're vying for the attention of your soul and who you are at your very core.

A lot of people and ideologies want you to see the world as they do and to live the way they want you to live. These things are powerful because a couple of the most fundamental questions in human existence are questions like, "What is good? What is the good life? How do I find it, pursue it, and know what it is?" Another question is, "What is the difference between good and evil? Where do I sit in that spectrum, and how should my life reflect goodness instead of evil?" These things drive our souls in so many ways, even if we don't consciously think about those questions.

But unless a way of life or a moral system is grounded in Christ, it will lead us astray and eventually break us into pieces. Put up with me for a moment or two while I spend a little bit of time explaining or describing some of the more powerful moral systems and ideologies that are at work in our world today. One of them comes from one of the most influential philosophers in the last 150 years; his name was Nietzsche. He's best known for his proclamation that "God is dead." Alongside that notion, he wasn't just an atheist philosopher who didn't think God existed; he believed that had moral consequences.

He argued—and very powerfully as far as the 20th century is concerned—that the morality that came out of the Bible is what he called, literally, a slave morality. He believed that the morality of the Word of God is from a group of people who lacked power, ability, intelligence, and capacity. They literally came out of Egypt as slaves. If you do not have the power to develop things, what you do then is just take this weak form of morality and call it good and righteous. He considers the kinds of things that we're reading this morning to be literally slave morality.

One of his responses to this is that individuals should become—or there may even come a day when one person, whom he called the Ubermensch—would show up and just have enough power to inflict his will however he wants. He wants you to become the Ubermensch so that you can inflict your will and the power that you have. Ubermensch translates as "overman" or "superman." You should become a superman and inflict your will on other people. You may have never read a single word of Nietzsche, but you don't have to; his ideas have permeated and soaked into the soil of the human condition over the last 150 years.

And there's more. Another one of these influential individuals is Karl Marx. He created this system that was built on the envy and division of economic differences. He says that revolution must occur in order to take things away from people who have more than you do. It's built on envy, it's built on revolution, and it's built on division. It's all economic; someone has more money than you do, they're bad and you're good. As that idea developed through the 20th century, it turned into a little bit more of what we might call cultural Marxism.

Where the economic piece is still there, now we have social division. We have to divide people along certain kinds of social lines. If we can find differences between any of you, we're going to turn that into a power dynamic where one of you is an oppressor and the other one of you is a victim. This is how this gets pulled into our system again. Maybe you've never read a single word of Karl Marx or any of his disciples, but you don't have to because this ideology is running our culture right now. We often call it wokeism.

It's not just economic differences and social differences, but there's this hyper-sexualization of our culture that comes out of this and a hyper-stratification of the value of different human beings. It is designed to divide you from your neighbor. That's what these systems are designed to do. So this makes the way of Jesus Christ completely different than all of these other things that are in the air we breathe, the phones we scroll through, and the people we listen to. The way of Christ is so much different, and it is the only one that is grounded in truth and in our created order.

All of these other ideas and moral systems only destroy. None of them actually replace Christ with anything positive. They want to get rid of the existence of God, they want to get rid of the authority of scripture, and they want to get rid of the notion that God has created us in a certain kind of way. They just want to destroy it. They want to destroy the city and rule over the ruins. There's nothing left to rebuild; we just want to tear down what was the case. But Christ comes to build, heal, transform, and put things together the way that God designed them to be.

Only Jesus Christ can regenerate the heart and change us from the inside out. As we read these things, recognize how radical these things are this morning. In our passage, one thought that's going to kind of help hold all of this together is that we're going to talk about compassion and humility instead of envy and pride. So much of what the Apostle Paul does in this passage is go straight for our pride. Wherever it sits in our hearts and minds, he goes straight for our pride.

We see that there are ways of living with each other in which we are rivals and we are deliberately divided. We are better than, we are worse than—there are ways of living that are like that. In our arrogance and pride, we harm the things that God has designed for us. We talk about envy and jealousy; these things are used as manipulation tools to divide and conquer. If there is any part of your soul that engages with this world politically or relationally, and part of it is envy or jealousy, you are an easily manipulated human being.

This is how these tools are used: to divide you from someone else and to get you to do what they want you to do. Christ at one point tells his disciples, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." That means if you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you are set free from your sins and you will be with him for all of eternity. It also means you're going to make yourself free from the manipulation of falsehood. It's a stunning thing.

So we are interested in what Christ teaches and what the Word of God teaches about what our lives should look like. Let's go ahead and read our passage this morning from Romans chapter 12, beginning in verse 14 through the end of the chapter. Friends, this is the Word of the Lord: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight."

"Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.' To the contrary, 'if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.' Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."

Last time we dealt with verse 14: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them." This morning, I want to spend time on verses 15 and 16. Here we get this wonderful little verse: "Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep." We've been talking about ethics and morality and what it means to live well in Christ and what that life is like. It's almost curious that we get this verse about rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.

It has been noted that it may seem that Paul, with these two commands that he gives us, starts with the easy one because, after all, everybody loves rejoicing. Then he goes to the hard one. Nobody wants to sit around and just sort of weep with somebody else. But just a couple of moments of reflection, I think, shows us that Paul started with the harder one and then goes to the easier one. To rejoice with someone else means that we take joy in the godly success and blessing in someone else's life.

When we see God show up in good ways in the lives of other people as followers of Jesus Christ, when we see that they have reason for rejoicing, then our job and our command is to rejoice with them. Doing that will expose some of the darkest corners of my heart. Being commanded to do that will expose pride, envy, and jealousy. "Why them? Why not me? God, don't you know who they are? Don't you know what they have done? Why haven't you answered my prayer? You healed them, but you haven't healed me."

God says to rejoice with those who rejoice. We speak of rejoicing and we speak of envy as well because it's exposing pride and envy. Envy and jealousy are basically the same kinds of vices inside of our hearts. We're angry that someone else has something we don't have, and we want it for ourselves. To be able to rejoice openly and freely is going to expose where that sin sits inside of my heart. Envy in the Word of God is often spoken of as a work of the flesh or a vice, a way in which our sin works within us.

One of those passages comes from Titus chapter 3, verse 3: "For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another." Welcome to social media, right? We ourselves were once like this. This is what we lived in, what we valued, and how we thought life went best. We spent our days in malice, anger toward somebody else, and envy. "They don't deserve that, I deserve that."

It turns into, so quickly, being hated by other people and hating other people. Part of what's happening when we engage with the act of learning how to rejoice with someone else whom God has blessed is part of our transformation into the image of Christ. This is actually an act of discipleship. Even if I don't feel like it, if God is being glorified, then we should rejoice with them in that. In so doing, God is aligning not just our thoughts with His, but our emotions with His as well.

The way that we feel, the way that we respond and react to things, those things that sort of well up from within us, God is aligning that with His Word and with His will. We're not just having our minds transformed; we're having our hearts, so to speak, transformed as well. Our emotions, where we find joy and where we find sorrow, need to be trained in righteousness. We need to learn how to show joy at the right times and to show sorrow and brokenness at the appropriate times as well.

Part of what we see around us—and this just continues to amaze me—is that so much of our current cultural momentum and so much of our current political momentum is driven by envy. It requires envy and malice and even hatred. If others have more than I do, then that means, automatically, they are evil and corrupt and we have to do something about it. That's a politics of envy. That's a culture full of jealousy, spite, and division. So the Christian listens to the Word of God, and the Apostle Paul just very simply says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice."

It may be harder than you think it is to do sometimes. Instead of what's normal often around us or inside of our own hearts, we're commanded to rejoice with them. In fact, our hearts can be regenerated by that act. When we rejoice in God-honoring good, our hearts reach out, our hands open up, and our values align with the good work of God. Do I want to see God's good at work? Do I want to see His kingdom at work, even if it happens over there where I just don't like that?

Rejoice with those who rejoice. Instead of grasping and clinging, we release all of that to God and we take joy in whatever good God has done. We rejoice with those who rejoice and we weep with those who weep. One of the well-known gospel stories happens in John chapter 11. Jesus and His disciples hear that a friend of theirs by the name of Lazarus is sick and he's about to die. Jesus eventually makes His way to the tomb of Lazarus.

If you know the story, you know part of what's so amazing about it is that Jesus calls him from the grave and he walks out of that grave and he is alive again. He raises Lazarus from the dead. But there are so many things inside of that story that are so fascinating, including this one little verse: John 11:35. "Jesus wept." He knew He was going to raise him from the dead, but He weeps with those around him. The disciples and He were friends with Lazarus and his sisters.

His sisters are there with family and mourners, and people are mourning the death of Lazarus. Jesus is mourning the loss of His friend in that sense. He is also doing exactly what the Apostle Paul tells us to do: He's weeping with those who weep. They've suffered real loss and He weeps alongside them. It's an amazing thing to watch happen. We see it in the life of Jesus Christ in that dramatic moment. We read it also in other places where the Apostle Paul talks about the kind of connection the body of Christ has to one another.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 12, as Paul gives us similar teaching about the body of Christ, here's part of what he says in verse 26: "If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together." This is the kind of connection that the Holy Spirit is building inside of the body of Christ. Weeping with one another is often one of the best things that we can do in the middle of the darkest hour—to show up, to be with, to call, to text, or to simply commiserate with somebody and be there to weep with them.

Many of us in this room are what we would call fixers, right? Our first inclination is to say something like, "I know exactly how you feel." Be careful with that one; be really careful with that one in that moment. Some of us are also inclined to say things like, "Well, here's what you need to do next." Be very, very careful with that, especially in that moment. When we weep with one another, we learn compassion and we show the biblical love of friendship.

Paul started this chapter by saying we're offering our bodies as living sacrifices. We're learning how to physically walk the way of Christ and that we're not to be conformed to the image of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Our minds are working in different ways so that we can know what the will of God is instead of the will of my own soul and brokenness. Again, this is part of that process of transformation, obedience, and discipleship. Learn how to weep well with brothers and sisters in Christ.

Some of the most comforting moments in my walk with Jesus Christ have been when a brother or sister of Christ has simply come alongside me and just sat there, maybe even wept with me or just prayed with me. Those are powerful moments. Then you can walk through that and you can start doing things on the other side. We just learn how to weep with those who weep. All of this is happening in the context of the body of Christ, the work of Jesus Christ amongst us, and the power and presence of the Holy Spirit inside of His church.

So we recognize our rejoicing is in Christ and it is in the good that Christ has done, and it is the good of the kingdom of God being made manifest among us. We rejoice in Christ and we weep with one another in Christ as well. We recognize pain or loss and we anticipate the kind of comfort that Christ and only Christ can bring. We rejoice with those who rejoice and we weep with those who weep. I want to read another verse and put all these together for us here.

In verse 16, the Apostle Paul says this: "Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight." One of the things that should be happening when we read passages like this is that some of us are just kind of going, "Oh, that one hurt just a little bit." This is what conviction is—that we're finding ourselves in this and how the Holy Spirit wants to work inside of us.

Our rejoicing is in Christ, our weeping is in Christ, and our harmony and unity is in Christ as well. Live in harmony with one another. Unity—this notion of harmony, being alongside each other, pointed in the same direction—unity is only as valuable as the thing that we are unified over. It's not just that we're walking in the same direction; we're headed toward the same goal. Christ-followers are headed toward Jesus Christ. We believe the things of the Word of God to be true, and in that, we find blessed unity in the body of Christ.

For the church of Jesus Christ, it has to be Him and it has to be His Word. So we find this harmony, and then these other phrases are not different than; they are actually part of how these kinds of things can happen in the body of Christ. He says, "Do not be haughty." Don't be haughty. He says later in the verse, "Never be wise in your own eyes." To be haughty is to be caught up in prideful things. It is to be the kind of person who interacts with others in prideful and arrogant ways.

Paul just says, "Don't be that person. Live in harmony with one another and don't be haughty. Don't think of yourself more highly than you ought to." We remember that earlier here in the book of Romans as well. Paul goes straight for those points of pride and arrogance in our hearts. "Never be wise in your own eyes." This is a fascinating topic inside of scripture. We have entire books in the Old Testament devoted to godly wisdom, right?

And here the Apostle Paul says there are people running around out there who, in their own minds, are wiser than everybody else. That wisdom, however, is completely disconnected from the truth in Jesus Christ, the truth of the Word, and the truth of how God has created reality itself. What they call wisdom is exactly the opposite of what is good for humanity. Don't be wise in your own eyes. To believe yourself to be wise apart from the truth that is in Christ.

Again, the New Testament has a lot to say about stuff like this. We go back to Romans chapter 1, verses 21 and 22. The Apostle Paul says, "For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him." They thought they were God. "But they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools." Paul also writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, talking about how the Word of God is and is not accepted by the world around us.

In 1 Corinthians 1, verse 20, he says this: "Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" Part of his argument is actually the point that when people believe that they are wise in their own eyes, it becomes an immediate roadblock between them and the Gospel of Jesus Christ because the things of God just look like foolishness to them.

Paul even says in that passage that those who do not have access to the Spirit of God are not going to get it; they won't hear it until the Word of God has its effect in their lives. So there's this wisdom of God that looks like foolishness to those who think they are wise. So he goes straight for our pride in how we interact with one another. So the other phrase that is inside of this verse is a way of saying, "So here's how you actually show that you're working on this. Here's how you actually live this thing out, not being haughty, not being wise in your own eyes."

The other phrase inside of that verse is "associate with the lowly." Earlier in the book of Romans, Romans chapter 2, verse 11, Paul simply writes this: "For God shows no partiality." So when we hit these passages like this, when Paul says this, when we hit passages in the book of James where James says, "You walk into a place and if you are wealthy and well-fed and you've got rings on your fingers, the front row's been reserved for you."

James says don't do that. Don't do that. Don't show partiality when the body of Christ gets together. This is one of the ways in which we are supposed to be different than the world around us. Someone who walks in these doors, who out there has nothing but division and partiality, walks in here and none of that exists. The church is different. The church is different, friends. For God shows no partiality. The Apostle Peter in the book of Acts, chapter 10, is challenged by God to prepare his heart to bring the Word of God to a Roman centurion.

Not just a Roman, but a Roman centurion—one of the bad guys of the bad guys. But God has prepared his heart for this moment because God has saved the soul of this centurion and his entire household. When Peter shows up and things begin to unfold and he sees what's going on, here's what Peter says: "Truly I understand God shows no partiality." God shows no partiality, but my goodness, we do. We are hooked on dividing people into categories and dealing with them through partiality.

Who's better, who's not? Even in their world—the world that is first reading the book of Romans and 1 Corinthians and James—the Jewish world made strict distinctions between men and women and children. Men could get closer to the temple than women could get to the temple. Gentile converts were even further out. There were literal walls between people when they worshipped and how close they could get to the presence of God. There's partiality in that Jewish world that some of these people have been saved out of.

There's extreme partiality inside of the Greco-Roman world as well. Those men who had power and money and land were at the top of the ladder. Their wives, their concubines, their kids, their slaves, and on down the ladder that goes. And all of a sudden, here's part of what's going on: the Gospel of Jesus Christ starts to spread and a lot of slaves in that world get saved and they start coming to Jesus Christ. Paul and his missionary team and other apostles are putting together house churches.

Now, the people who have houses are the people who own slaves. The people who own houses are the guild members, and so now they all walk into the same building. Those who run businesses, those who are in the Senate, those who have power are sitting at the same table with those who have nothing but no power. So Paul has to tell this group of people that in Christ, we do this differently. The Jewish world is run on distinctions. The Roman world is run on distinctions.

Our world, the further it goes down the path of rejecting Jesus—the Jesus of the Bible—and the truths of God's creation, keeps showing more partiality all the time. We love drawing lines between people and labeling some as more valuable than others. We love doing it; it's how we make sense of this world. And all of it is pride. All of it is envy. All of it is being challenged by the Word of God. Worldviews that are disconnected from the God of the Bible can only create layers of less valuable people.

Just hang on to that thought. Even if you disagree with me right now, just hang on to this thought: any worldview or any religion that is not rooted in the Word of God will only create layers of people who are less than. That's what it will do; that is what it does. Where do we find the goal of getting rid of pride and envy and associating with one another in ways that the world just does not do it? Where we find this certain kind of equality and dignity amongst each other?

There is only one place to find this goal. As I was thinking about this, I was thinking as well of the 250th this weekend. Pastor R. prayed about that this morning—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I want you to know if this sounds familiar to you and what this language is like and where this language comes from: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their government with certain"—no, "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

This truth that every human being has been created in the image of God and given certain rights because they've been endowed those rights by a Creator—it's self-evident because it's true. Because this story is true, this God really did design and create all of this and all of us. So in that sense, it is self-evident, but recognize this: it is only self-evident to people who are steeped in the Word of God. It is only self-evident to people who believe that this is true.

We are equal, friends, biblically—not because we all make the same amount of money, not because we all live in the same neighborhood with the same house, not because we all have the same skin color. We are equal because we have all been made in the image of God and are of infinite value to Him. And if that is true of what God has done and I love this God and I want to follow this God and I want to know this God and I want to live in a way that the world can see this God, I also need to learn how to see every other human being is created in the image of God and of infinite value to God.

That's where this comes from. Friends, there is a direct connection from Genesis chapter 1 to Romans chapter 12. A direct connection. You get rid of one of those, and everything else is just going to start falling apart. Now a lot of people, even when we think about the nation itself, the complaint, the gripe is, "Well, we've never lived up to it." Maybe that's the truth in a lot of cases, but recognize this: this is the only point of view that actually has this value to live up to.

You've got to understand this. There's no other system that even has this value in it, that we are created equally and given rights by God. So yeah, if we fall short, it's because we're falling short of the goal that God has given us. No other idea on this planet—no other religion or philosophy on this planet—has this idea. One of the constant ironies of anti-Christian systems on the rise among us is that they preach tolerance and equity and they deliver envy and division.

We spent our days in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another, right? None of them can produce what they promise because they are disconnected from the source—disconnected from Christ Himself. Remember how chapter 12 began. Paul is saying, "I don't want you to be conformed to this world anymore. I need you, follower of Jesus Christ, to learn how to present your body as a living sacrifice, to live this new way of life out."

We don't want to be conformed to the thought patterns and emotions of this world anymore, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we can know more clearly what the will of God is—every piece of the will of God. That's what we're aimed at. We're aimed at the will of God, not the spirit of the age or the latest political or cultural or social fads. We are aimed at looking like Jesus Christ. That's why this is so radical.

Friends, something I find so interesting about these kinds of things is that deep down inside of our hearts, we want our neighbors to live like this, but we feel like we don't have to live like this. Here's what I mean by that: "Boy, wouldn't it be great if they treated me like this? I don't necessarily have to do that, right?" But listen: the world we want to live in, the world that reflects the values of Jesus Christ where people rejoice at good instead of evil, who show genuine compassion instead of morally empty empathy, where humility and genuine wisdom are valued, where the broken and lowly are treated with dignity and value, can only happen where people are transformed by the saving work of Christ and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.

So church, we cannot be afraid to follow Christ. We cannot be afraid to walk this way in a world that's walking in another direction. We can't be afraid to proclaim the truth of this gospel to the world around us. It will bring light into our lives and it will bring light into the world around us. Amen? Amen.