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Turn with me please to Romans chapter 12 this morning. This morning we'll be looking at uh verses 9 through13 of Romans chapter 12.
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I'm going to read that passage and I'd like to ask James if you would pray for the ministry of the word this morning. Romans chapter 12 beginning in verse 9.
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Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhore what is evil. Cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Give preference to one another in
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honor. Not lagging behind in diligence. Fervent in spirit. Serving the Lord. Rejoicing in hope. Persevering in tribulation. Devoted in prayer. Contributing to the
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needs of the saints. practicing hospitality. Let us pray.
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For all his fame, Charles Dickens is a novelist that people either really love or really hate. Those who hate him, one of the problems was he was paid by the word. So his novels are long. But another
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problem that people have, actually a characteristic of his novels that I find very enjoyable, is the way he sets up his characters. If you've read any of Dickens, you realize that his
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protagonists, his heroes, are absolutely the most bland individuals in the entire book. And then what he does is he puts together a supporting cast into each
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individual. He concentrates either normally a vice but sometimes a virtue. So just to summarize a few of his characters, for example, you you have in
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in his novel Little Dorit, you have Amy Dorret and Arthur Clement, two pieces of white bread, absolutely bland. But then you you also have in others, for
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example, um Esther Summerrson in Blee House, who is again the the hero heroine of the of the book, but is really kind of without
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personality. What everything seems to focus on around these protagonists are the Uriah Heaps in which all of the vice of Avarice has been concentrated into one character or
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in David Copperforth you have Steerforth who is duplicity incarnate and then in Martin Chuzzawit you have a character by the name of Pexniff
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and Pexniff's vice concentrated again into the in the most powerful form is hypocrisy. And through the book, you hear old Mr. Tresowit saying, "Don't be a hypocrite,
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Pexniff." Well, Pexniff couldn't help it because that's exactly the way Dickens wrote him to be. He was a hypocrite. And he comes to mind when I read this
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passage because Paul starts out by saying, "Let love be without hypocrisy." Now, as we consider the nature of the
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gifts within the body of Christ, as Paul is teaching us in Romans 12, I want to ask the question rhetorically, what are the most dangerous vices within
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the body? What are the most dangerous sins within the church? Now, we tend to focus I I want to give a caveat here.
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There is no sin that is healthy for the body. And and I don't want to come across as as promoting a relative morality that some sins are worse than others. I'm
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asking a specific question and that is whi which sins cause the greatest damage to the health of the body of Christ to the community of faith, the church.
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We tend to focus in western Christianity and modern Christianity on sins that we can see outwardly and indeed the scripture deals with them
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as well. We see in 1 Corinthians, for example, some grievous sin going on. Not just the the man in 1 Corinthians 5, but also the way they were um
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perpetrating their love feasts in 1 Corinthians 11 where the rich would come and and eat all the food and the poor would go hungry. There was a great deal of outward sin and and in 1 Corinthians
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we see the the remedy for that and and that is church discipline. We read it in Matthew 18 and we we see that when there is a sin that manifests itself, the
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church has a responsibility to deal with it. And even in the in the dealing with it, the the the disciplining and hopefully the repentance, but if
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necessary also the excommunication of the offender. the offender. As painful as that whole process is, it is actually very healthy for the body
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to do so. I would submit to you the most dangerous
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vices or sins within the body of Christ are analogous to the most dangerous illnesses within the human body. The silent killers. silent killers. The ones that we are not aware of until
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it's too late. diabetes, cancer, the ones that do not necessarily give any outward indication of their presence but spend their time silently,
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quietly, and in a hidden manner killing you. Hypocrisy is just that sort of vice. It is a silent killer.
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And when Paul starts out with this list, he says, "Let love be without hypocrisy." we we're really getting to the heart of what it means to live
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together as a body of Christ within the community. And what he says in verse 9 actually serves as a heading for what he goes on
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to say in verses 10 through13 as I want to lay before you today. So hypocrisy is that silent killer. It's it's kind of like hardening of the arteries. There's
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a a plaque of insincerity that's masked often by ritual and language. For example, it's very popular among
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some churches for the members of the church to refer to one another as brother or sister. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that as long as
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it's sincere, as long as it's without But we all know our hearts at least to some extent. We all know that sin still
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dwells in our members. We all know that we're not always really meaning it when we we say I love you. And so is is that what Paul is talking
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about here? That we really need to feel what we say? Well, I don't think so. In fact, I think in verses 10 through13, he is specifically telling us what love
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without hypocrisy looks like. And that's what I want to try to unfold before you this morning. He says, "Let love be without
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hypocrisy." But the question I think that we all ask is, can we really do this? And for Paul, there's actually no other alternative. And I want to point out
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that just about every place that Paul mentions the gifts, the charismata, he immediately follows with a discussion on love. So here in Romans 12, he's
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given us a list of the charismata and then immediately says, "Let love be without hypocrisy." without hypocrisy." Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 12, it's
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often known as the gifts chapter. Well, what follows? The love chapter. 1 Corinthians 13. Corinthians 13. And so it seems to me that Paul's teaching is very clear that to exercise
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the gifts without love is actually damaging to the body. And it's damaging in a hidden and silent way that Paul brings to the surface in his
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letter to the Corinthians. Certainly, he says, "In this, I do not praise you." He says, 'You more spiritual than all the other churches, but I'm not going to praise you because what you're doing is
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just a a a clanging symbol, a gong. It's just empty because there is no love. If I have not love, though I speak the tongues of men and angels and have not
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love, it profits me nothing. It also profits the body nothing as well. And so this is kind of at the at the root of Paul's teaching throughout his letters
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concerning the behavior of believers toward one another, love. And yet that's something that we definitely struggle with. Martin Luther famously struggled with the commandment
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to love the Lord his God. And he wrote in his somewhat autobiography, he said, "Love God? I hated him." until he realized that his understanding
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of love of love was incorrect. was incorrect. And our understanding of love in our culture is I would say very very
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incorrect. Love is quoting Andrew Nigron. Love is, so to speak, the circulation of the blood in the body of Christ through which all its parts and members are
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immediately related to each other and bound together in oneness. I I love that quote because he ties in to the metaphor that Paul uses so much of the body,
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which is why I want to present these verses as that hidden killer, that cancer that has a cure. And and while the church so often both
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inwardly and outwardly focus on on the outward behavior of believers, how they look and how they talk and where they go and rails against the visible sins of
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the culture around us, can it be said that this silent killer is not at work sapping the life of every individual body?
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individual body? that the love that is ostensibly displayed among believers is really
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Well, I think Paul was very worried that that would in fact be the case. And so when we look at a passage like first like Romans 12:9,
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we have to ask ourselves the questions, can can we really do this? How do we prevent this hardening of the arteries? How do we prevent this hidden silent killer? As
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individuals, if if we go to the doctor and we find our A1C is high, then wisdom would indicate we change our diet and perhaps even take medication.
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We find our our blood pressure is high or our cholesterol level is high, we know better than to keep on keeping on in the same way.
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But does that make it easy to change No. When you take Italian bread away from an Italian,
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it ain't easy. But you have, and this is very minor and trivial compared to the life of the body of Christ, you have the joy of going back to the doctor and seeing your A1C
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number within range. You know, there's a sacrifice that Paul is he he's not just saying, "Oh, this is easy. Yeah, just go ahead and let love be without hypocrisy.
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No, actually what he's saying is Christian don't be a hypocrite Christians that that is our nature to be looking outwardly
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fine but inwardly we're really not we're not feeling it. We're kind of faking it. And so I think there's a major question at least in my own life as I read a passage like this like how on earth do I do
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verse 9? verse 9? Well, Paul is telling us both in verse 9 and then onward verses 10-13. First, what is really important is to
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understand what scripture means by love. One commentator says, "We should assume that this word refers not just to the feeling or the feelings that Christians
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have toward one another." Love has been variously interpretated in different cultures from the ancient
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world on to the present. And I don't know that at any time any particular culture got it right in terms of what the Bible says concerning love. And so I
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think as we look at this, if you if you compare the love of which Paul admonishes the church to live one
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another with the love of God. And you remember what John said that we love because God first loved us. Then we realize that whatever this love looks
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like within the body, it must look something like what God has or how God has loved us. And we read passages like
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for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son or that God commends his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
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for us. and and you begin to realize from both the Old Testament and the New Testament that God's love is never not displayed in some good action.
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His love is not a feeling nor as we all know is his love drawn out of our loveliness.
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It it's a love that acknowledges the the lack of loveliness. And yet that love seeks the good of the object of its affection. It's an active term more than
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an emotional one. Love in the biblical and therefore true sense seeks the good and the growth of the one who is loved.
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It is to do much more than it is to feel. Now that's very brief. Obviously much more can be said about the biblical term
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for love. But we also have heard many of us probably all of us that there are two basic terms used in the New Testament for love. One is agape and the other is
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fileto. And you have probably heard sermons where wherein those two words have been kind of hermetically sealed from one another. And agape we're told
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is the the God love and fileto is is just kind of the affection of one another. Well, that is not a good
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exugesus of scripture. Nor is it a good handling of words. Greek and Hebrew are really no different than English or French or German in which words often
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overlap and word usage rarely indicates some hermetically sealed category of this kind of love versus that kind of love. Very simply, all we need to do is
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remember that Deeus loved the world so much that he abandoned both Paul and Christ. The verb used is agape. Okay, we always say in a very very poor
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transliteration, he agapeed the world so much that he abandoned Paul and he abandoned Christ and he abandoned his faith. Agape is, I think we can say, an intense
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love. And that's the word that's used in verse 9 verse 9 when he says love without hypocrisy. It's agape. And and I will submit to you
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that this is a heading for what follows. and and there is a distinction made but he also uses the fileto word twice in
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this list in verses 10 through13 and actually bracketing because verse 10 uses the the very familiar Philadelphia you know the city of brotherly love
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those of us from Pennsylvania kind of choke when we say that but Philadelphia but then in verse 13 he uses a philosenon the love of strangers
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And so he's bracketing agape, the one maybe overarching self-giving love. And and I think we can say that that Deeus did in fact agape
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the world. He gave himself to the world to the exclusion of his love for Christ and his love for Paul. So if we look at agape as that intense self-giving love,
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how does it manifest itself? Well, very much manifests itself in fileto, fileto delia, love to the brothers, but also fileto zenon, love to strangers.
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And again, those bracket this list, verses 10 through13. And I think that is significant. But I want to point out before we get into that list another aspect of what
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Paul is saying here in verse 9 because it seems to us that the second clause of the verse is separate from the first
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when in fact it's actually how the first statement is achieved. He says, "Love without hypocrisy, abhore evil,
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cling to what is good." Now, if your English version has hate evil, that is way too weak for the Greek word that is used here. Loa
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is a better word. Abhore, I think, is is also it's it's something like you you look upon it as if it were the plague
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evil. And and I want to point out that that what he's doing here in verse 9 is not two separate little bullet points that he's going over what what you all ought to do and what you all ought to be
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like. No, he's he's actually tying together. The second clause is the nature of the first and it is also the means by which the body of Christ achieves
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sincere love because love is not a feeling. Love is a moral judgment. That is where the biblical doctrine of
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love and definition of love is so often gone astray. There's no element of personality or emotion involved. It is in fact strictly moral.
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We abhore the evil. We cling to the good. Now, this is counterintuitive in our culture. I'll grant that. What we are told, what we read about, the songs that
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we hear, and the songs that we sing definitely speak of love as an emotion, as a feeling. Certainly though, in our wedding
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ceremonies, we speak of love as a choice, as a commitment. That's getting a little bit closer to the truth. But what Paul is doing, he's taking us the final step and he's saying love,
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the love with which God has loved us once first of all wasn't a feeling and again as I said it wasn't drawn out of us by our own merit.
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It was a moral judgment and that moral judgment brought about the redemption in Jesus Christ. It brought about the sending and the
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suffering and the death and resurrection of his beloved son. He did not wink at sin out of his love. He did not say, "Well, I I'm not going
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to punish them because they they may not love me anymore." Or, "No, I I love them too much to to send them away. I I want to be there for them. I want to I be, you know, I love
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my children and so I want to be there for them. So, I'm going to wink at their sins and I'm not going to call them to task for their disobedience to the Lord, though they profess to be believers. No.
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No. Because that would not be loving. That is not biblical love. In fact, it is a form of hatred.
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Whereby you deceive the object of your love into thinking that they're okay living in sin. God didn't do that. He he never winked at our sin and said,
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"Well, you know, it's okay. I love you. I'm going to let you in anyhow." No, he paid for it. Now, I'm not suggesting that we can pay for the sins of our loved ones. But I am
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saying and and this may be a very hard thing when you say that you love someone and and therefore you basically condone their sin. This is not love.
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experience most often most often when the professing children of believers marry unbelievers.
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And what I often have heard over the years is I I've told them I don't agree with this and then I I told them it's not right, but you know, they have to live their lives and I love them and I want to be there for them when they need
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me. They're disobeying the Lord. We cannot condone that. We're not abhoring evil. We're not clinging to what's good and therefore we're not loving without hypocrisy.
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We have to again I know this is hard when we have children but when we wink at disobedience out of love it this is not biblical love and and I guess what I want to try to
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convey is that if we do not abhore evil in all its form then two things are happening first of all we are not loving God and secondly we're actually hating our loved ones
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we're we're like the watchman on the wall that fails to warn and the Lord says when that city is overrun and the people are killed, the blood will be on your hands.
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We need rather to be like the watchman who does blow the trumpet and warn and and and counsel and even cry, plead,
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obey the Lord rather than your own feelings. There is no way. And I I've heard this so many times in counseling.
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I I love this person and I know that God has given me this love. A and I believe that by loving and marrying this person
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that I will be able to lead them to the Lord. That is nothing but justification and rationalization of what is forbidden in scripture. And it is not really love.
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Do you not think it was painful for the father to send his son to the cross? Even Jesus in Gethsemane crying out, "Father, may this cup pass from me."
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You see, biblical love is not easy. It is not painless. It must be, however, without hypocrisy or it isn't love. We could call it
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pexnifian love. A form of outward love that is in fact a manifestation of hypocrisy. We don't really believe what the scripture says.
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Again, I I know that that is a very difficult place, especially for parents, and I'm not insensitive to that. But I do think that we need to hear the
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scripture and the spirit and know that God's love paid a heavy price and did not condone sin in order to redeem the object of his love, but
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rather gave sacrificially. We cannot condone sin ever in the name of love.
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of love. And so Paul goes on to describe what that love means. That love is a moral work, not an emotional
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feeling. And I want to spend a little bit of time. Now, nobody loves grammar or the ones who do are often called the grammar gestapo. And there's only a few
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in any language that love the grammar. And they spend their whole lives lamenting how their language is butchered. So the common man uses the language
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however he or she wants to. But grammar is important in terms of understanding what is being written. And Paul, what he says in these verses is is just
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fantastic for a for a Greek geek because what we have in our English Bibles has been massaged and and and and almost
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in some respects u well manipulated to make it sound better for us. But what we have here have here is so grammatically awful
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that one wonders how it was inspired. But we know it was. In fact, we know from the Greek that Paul often didn't pay much attention to grammar,
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especially when he was either agitated or excited. And when he was intensified in his in his emotion in getting a point across, it was also like he was using
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words coming out of a machine gun. So what we actually have in verses 10 through13 is a list of what are known as adverbial participles or we might call
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them participial adverbs. Now most of you can remember noun verb, right? And then adjective modifies a noun. Adverb modifies a verb. Some of you have gotten
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so far in your grammar that you got to those verbal nouns called participles. Well, everything here from verses 10 through 13 is a series of participles
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that form that that are in the force of an adverb. an adverb. But guess what? From verses 9 through13, there is not one single verb.
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Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Paul. We say love. Let love be without hypocrisy. That is a gloss. There's actually two words there. Love
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and it's a noun. It's not a verb. Followed by without hypocrisy, which is an adverb modifying a noun. And
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then he says a evil, cling good. We're our English is filled in so many of the words that that render it the way
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we speak that we I think are losing the force of what he is saying here. The noun love agape. He just kind of shouts it agape
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it agape without hypocrisy. And that's in fact just one word there without the the insincerity of hypocrisy.
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of hypocrisy. And then again up evil, cling to the good. But he goes on and the staccato kind of
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rapidfire nature of verses 10 through13. Again, this is just this is this is absolutely icing on the cake for a Greek geek because I want to read a literal
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translation. Consider verse 9 as a heading. Agape without hypocrisy. Abhore evil, cling to good. Then he says this,
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in brotherly love toward one another, loving tenderly. loving tenderly. That's a noun and an adverbial participle. There's no verb. Okay. So,
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in brotherly love toward one another, loving tenderly, loving tenderly, in honor toward one another, overachieving, in other words, outdisting one another
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each other in showing honor to one another is what he's saying there. in zeal, never flagging. In spiritual things, being in full vigor to the Lord,
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serving in hope, rejoicing in tribulation, bearing up patiently in prayer, persevering prayer, persevering in the needs of the saints, participating, by the way, it's actually
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a form of the familiar word coinia. in the needs of the saints, participating in love toward strangers, pursuing vigorously.
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Actually, it's the same word that's used and translated persecuting. But I think we know that he doesn't want us to be persecuting strangers persecuting strangers in love towards strangers, pursuing
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vigorously this this it's a whole sermon right there in in just those those nouns participle noun participle noun participle. And every one of them is describing as a
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whole what it means to have agape without hypocrisy. without hypocrisy. At the center of this list is the the middle one to the Lord serving. That's
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right in the center of this list. And I think again that's not by coincidence. This is all done to the Lord. That's going to come out. He's going to unpack that in Romans 14 again talking about
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how we live life together. And so these rapid fire nouns, participles, noun participles are are Paul's uh
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intentional effect or effort to describe to us what it means to love without hypocrisy. without hypocrisy. A Lord willing, in a couple of weeks, I
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want to look at the two that bracket this list. as I mentioned earlier, Philadelphia and Fellow Zenon, love to the brethren and love to
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strangers because I think those two intentionally form a a bookends of of what it means to be the body of Christ in a dark and dying world. That within
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the walls of the fellowship, there is love, tender love toward the brethren. But when we look outside the walls, when we go outside the doors, there is a
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pursuit of love toward strangers. And that last one, I would submit to you, is what makes us so different from all other human institutions, human
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And so these participles, these nouns that we read in verses 10 through13, these are the ways that true biblical love shows itself to be without hypocrisy. The arteries when when these
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are present in the body of Christ, the arteries are clear. The blood of the love of the Holy Spirit
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flows to all of the members of the body. Every joint and ligament receives the nutrition and the sustenance through that blood.
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that blood. It's love, but it's love without hypocrisy. This is not a checklist. This is not uh well, I'm pretty good at
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that one, but I I don't do so well in that one. Praise God for his grace. It that's not how it works. This is actually a more of a multiaceted gem that as we hold it in our hand and this
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is agape. This is the love wherewith we are loved by God and we are admonished to love in the same manner toward one another. We hold that in the light of
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God's grace. And we see shining these different facets that are all pure. And yet there's one major facet that's right
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there in the center of it. To the Lord serving it is all to Jesus Christ.
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This is a fuller picture of the fruit of the spirit which of course as we know from Galatians 5 begins with love. And so let me close with those verses. But the
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fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law. Let
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us pray. Father, we do ask that by your spirit you would plant these words of Paul very
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deeply into our hearts. And as we have sung and as we have read in Psalm 139, we pray that you would search our hearts and show us what is there and how we may
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bring our thoughts and our intentions in line with your will. Help us to understand the love with which you have loved us.
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Knowing that we love because you first loved us, help us to imitate your love toward us in our love toward one another. Help us to understand the nature of this
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love and and help us to recognize the false characteristics characteristics that we have been taught and that we so often believe.
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often believe. Most importantly, help us to love without hypocrisy. without hypocrisy. teach us to abhore evil and to cling to what is good that we might indeed be seen as servants of the Lord Jesus
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Christ by our love for one another. We ask this in his precious name. Amen.
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Please stand for the benediction this morning from 2 Corinthians 13. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
