Romans 12:9Scripture
Turn your Bibles with me to Romans chapter 12. We are almost through. We have this week and next week and then we move on to chapter 13. And how many of you feel like things are lightening up a little bit in Romans 1? That's good. How many of you feel that it's still difficult? Some of you don't even have an opinion. Most of you, in fact. That's okay.
I think the reality is
Pastor Shawn Gray · 0:24
Point 1Loving this way should feel impossible
It should feel impossible. Yes, I mean, that's the point, right? Because this is a work that the Lord does in our hearts and lives. If you've lived any amount of time, you've wrestled with the idea, and maybe experienced the reality, that it is not possible, but you've wrestled with the idea that if you set your mind to a thing, you can accomplish that thing, and then along the way, the longer you live, the more you realize regardless of how much you set your mind to something,
Without God's help it is simply impossible. Only God does the work.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 1:11
And so actually, as we go through Romans, I think really the mindset in the heart of the writer, the apostle Paul, is to help us understand that the work that God has done and is doing and will do in you is his work and his work alone. That should encourage our hearts, because if you are like me, you feel like a failure every once in a while. You have the best intentions in the world, but you get irritated, you show love for a season, but then you don't, and there is an erratic nature to the way that we live. Paul actually speaks of this in one of the chapters when he talks about how the flesh, he's contending with the flesh, but the Spirit of God is doing a greater work in him than the flesh could ever do. So if you feel burdened and trapped by you, good news, God has set you free and is setting you free day by day, and that's the good news, that's really what we're celebrating. So if we turn to 12, we're going to look today at verse 9. I really won't be able to get out of the first portion of verse 9. There are actually three exhortations in verse 9, and we see here a list of probably 13 of them where Paul is basically telling us what it is like to live a holy, God-centric, selfless, non-hypocritical, loving life. Now, this is very important, because in the world in which we live today, even in Super Bowl halftime commercials, there is an agenda to tell you how you should love as a Christian, how you should love as somebody who is in our culture, how you should love as a human, and there are narratives being pumped out to your children, to you on the radio, in syndication, through blogs, through videos, constantly we are being inundated
Point 2What culture calls love is often lust
By an idea of what it is to truly love, yet the Bible often contends for true love, a biblical love.
I would actually propose to you that any love that is marked by culture is not actually love.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 3:28
I believe, and you need to know this before we even move into this, because I believe that what we often call love is actually lust. Now, that can play out in a multitude of different ways. When we think of the word "lust," we think of all kinds of improprieties, all kinds of nasty behaviors, all kinds of wrongful living, but the reality is we can be lustful for things that are not fleshly necessarily, not people-centric, but we can lust for money, we can lust for fame, we can lust for self, and the reality is a lot of times we demarcate what is actually lust and we call it love, and in our culture it has been so twisted and manipulated that we no longer can even discern what is true love and what is not, what has been called love but is actually not love. So then Paul actually, and I believe because he's speaking to the Romans, in Greek culture, they thought agape love, which is spoken mostly of when it's talking about true biblical love, this selfless kind of love, this gentle and caring and long-suffering and not self-focused love that puts the concern of others ahead of yourself, this kind of love was weak to the Roman culture. They did not like it. Matter of fact, it was offensive to talk about this type of love. It was anti-culture. They were supposed to be warriors for Christ. Why are we going to engage in warfare, specifically spiritual warfare, with a weak, limp-armed love that is ineffectual and does not have power? So he begins to really talk about this love, and he begins to say, in the beginning of chapter 12, verse 9, to let this type of love, which you think is weak and ineffectual, begin to do its work in you and see the power of this love as much greater than the love of your culture. Now, I think that fits today, right? Because our culture is trying to do very much the same thing as the Greek culture in that day, is to try to weaken a biblical love and elevate a love that is actually lust. So I think all of us could align with that and at least say that. So my assignment today is 12:9 through 13, I'm only going to talk about the first part of 9, one of three exhortations in there, because we can't really get past love, and honestly all of the rest of this is basically indicating markers of what true love is. So I'll read the whole thing and then we're going to talk about the first four words. Okay: "Let love be genuine." The actual word there is "without hypocrisy," that's the Greek word, that's important. "Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection." Notice that it attaches it to believers, those who are brothers in Christ, sisters, brothers and sisters in Christ. Okay, that's 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." This is a lot of things. "Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality." It is amazing what we mark as love but is actually selfish and really lust. So much of our engagement with people is unloving, but we call it love. According to the apostle Paul, a distinguishing mark of true believers is to "let love be without hypocrisy." That's the literal translation, because
Love and hypocrisy are incompatible attitudes that don't gel, it's like oil and water.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 8:15
Now, let me just stop here for a second and say this: without understanding the reality of hypocrisy and love and how they are opposite of each other and they don't mix, in my earlier years of ministry, without understanding the fullness of that as I do now, there was something innately in me that desired for us to get real. So from very early, when I started in youth ministry, I began to really just really challenge students to be authentic.
It would be better for you to be authentic and be nasty than to be disingenuous and pretend like you're not nasty when you really are.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 9:02
And I think the church has forgone this idea of authenticity, so we put on masks, we play the part, we act a certain way because we don't want to come across as somebody who is, somebody we really are. The reality is we would rather paint a narrative in our life that is not like us than be us, and this causes us to never really come to grips with the idea that all of us are sinners in desperate need of a Savior.
This is important, right? All of us are sinners in desperate need of a Savior. So if you're someone here today who can look back in your life, and maybe look in your life as soon as yesterday or even this morning, and see the nasty parts of you, the broken parts of you, things in your life that you struggle with,
I just want to encourage you today, you're in good company.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 10:17
Today, contrary to what you might believe, when we think we walk through the doors of the church and we're the only nasty individual in there, the reality is all of us are filthy rats, and we bring disease-ridden damage to our world if not for Christ. Amen. He's the hope. So I've always encouraged people to be genuine. Now, I'm not saying we should glorify the sin and stay in the sin and make it a habit and then make an excuse for our sin, but I am saying that if you're struggling with the sin, it'd be best to struggle with the sin in daylight than to hide it, because if you hide it, some people have lied, have presented a narrative of hypocrisy so long that they don't even realize that they've got a problem, yet they live in bondage to a problem because they've lied about the problem so long they don't even know they have
Point 3Genuine love is sincere, never pretended
It. This is a problem, hence that's why it's a problem. The Greek word literally is this, so you know: anupokritos, that's how you say it's spelled A-N-Y-P-O-K-R-I-T-O-S, that's the Greek word for love "without hypocrisy." So he says here that we are to love without anupokritos, which is without hypocrisy, illustrating that love that is sincerely felt or expressed, not pretended. Don't just pretend to love others, really love them. Now, let me stop right there. Some of you are like, okay, now let's go to work. All right, the problem is, are you going to work lusting people or loving them? Because oftentimes what we call love is not love.
Sometimes calling sin out is love, but never calling sin out in a brother is lust.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 12:38
It's you caring more about what they'll say about you because you called sin out, so you care more about your flesh and how it's going to affect you, so you don't say anything.
That's lust, that's not love. You call it love, it's lust. It's you being flesh-focused, self-focused: how's this going to affect me, how's this going to affect them? And honestly, at the end of the day,
Love does what's right in spite of how you feel.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 13:10
All right, so don't just pretend to love people. Don't paint this narrative that seems loving to our culture but is actually allowing people to run in the street and be smashed by an 18-wheeler. Are you with me?
Don't love people to hell, because that's not possible. You lust them to hell.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 13:33
All right, first things before we even talk about love, and this is a daunting subject, I don't even know, seriously, 9 through 13, seriously, right? Okay, so you're going to have to do work on your own, but let's just talk about first things, a couple of statements that I want to make before we get in here, and this is my personal thoughts, there's way many more than this, I would encourage you to go in your journal and consider the many things that love is not. But what love is not: it is not an exhibition. It is not something you do to put on display before men to exhibit your great acts of kindness, but in our culture it's become an exhibition. Let me just, I wasn't going to do this, but let me just, this is perfect, I think he gets us right, this seems to be a highly debated topic today.
I see some problems with the love that's being demonstrated in these commercials. That is hypocrisy, but not biblical love. I mean, beyond the fact that it's not even, it's Scripture out of context, because the story of Jesus washing feet was a declaration of what he was going to do for lost people, but specifically it was commissioning people to go out and wash the feet of others with the gospel. It wasn't going and showing an act of love to a non-believer so that they can stay in their sin, and it certainly, listen, it certainly, it is not an exhibition. Did you know that the people who are over here picketing, we can have a conversation of what's an appropriate way to minister to people and call truth out, but picketing an abortion clinic, that they can still love the girl who just came out of the abortion clinic as much as the person washing the person's feet who works at the abortion clinic, just because you have an opinion that's different, right? And we should, when we realize the damage that it not only causes for life, but when we realize that abortion causes damage for the women who have abortions, and there's a lot, they have entire ministries dedicated to help women be healed from that act. Listen, it seems loving to be accepting in all things, but Jesus was doing this to the apostles. He didn't go out into the street to the harlot and wash her feet. That's not the point of that message, right? But what we do is we want to attach a cultural idea of love, right, and we want to villainize people who might actually have biblical love, who might not, who might, this is problematic, and what it is not, it is not an exhibition. PS, it was done in an upper room in private with people he had relationship with. It was not an exhibition. Are you with me today? Love is not an exhibition. All right, another thing love is not, it's not transactional. You get, he gives. You don't get because you give. It is not transactional, meaning you you're saved and you have received grace, so you must work because there's a transaction that has to happen, definitely has to be reciprocity, right? Not with Christ, not with love. Now, I will just say, for the sake of your sanity today, biblical love, because some of you believe there is love outside of biblical love, I'm here to tell you there's not. It's lust. All right, now so if you don't agree with that's okay, no need to leave our church because you don't agree with that, just know there is a biblical love, and if you want to call it love an unbiblical way of going about this, I would say, for the sake of you understanding where I'm coming from today, there's love and there's not love, and the reason I can say that is because the Bible clearly tells us in First John 4:16, "So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us," and then he defines love: "God is love." So anything in your culture that is not godly is not love, it's lust. He defines it. In case you didn't know, he made you, so he gets to define it. All right, love is not self-seeking. We talked about that earlier, right? It is not self-seeking. If you go back to verse 3: "For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned." Notice here, it's moving the focus away from self to God. Love is not self-seeking. Love is impossible for unbelievers. Why? Because God is love. In First John 4:16, "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." There is a connection between love and who God is, and if you're a rejecter of God, then you don't know love and you don't know God. So what is, so then what is everything else? Well, you can call it cultural love, but it ain't, definitely ain't biblical love. I would just say it's lust. Okay, so that helps you get a framework of how my mind thinks, so that we can move into the second portion of what's going on here. Romans 12:9, of all the things he could have said that love should be, he says "let love," he could have said let love be great, let love be earnest, let love be joyful, let love be constant, let love be bold, but he says let love be without hypocrisy. Can we just start with the first word, "let"? In other words, if you are his child, you are made a new creation, you are in him and he is in you, then love is doing its work in you. It is already doing its work. Love is the natural outflow.
Let me just say it this way: if God is love is attached to being, not doing.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 20:49
Yeah, amen. All right, so love is not necessarily an action you do, it's who you've become in him. That's important. So if God gets to define love and God defines love as who he is, then guess what love is when it hits you? It is who you are as a new creation. All right, so let it do its work in you, it's who you are. Why is this even on his mind? I think it's on his mind because it is the dead opposite of verse 3, which we just read, when it says not to think of yourself too highly but to think with faith, that is, to think with our minds and hearts looking away towards Christ for our peace and our satisfaction. How many of you ever get into a stressful moment and you turn to a vice rather than Christ? That's lust, that's not love. That's lust. We want to attach lust to specific things, but guys, it could be TV, and it could be an Oreo cookie, it doesn't have to be all the bad things you're thinking in your head, because anything that you turn to opposite of Christ, guess what it is? It's you worrying about satisfying, I like that, satisfying yourself. It's self-focused, it's not God-focused. Verse 3 is about wonderful self-forgetfulness, I love that, in the service of Christ, and the exact opposite of that is hypocrisy. So we say "hypocrisy," and a lot of things we think about in the church is, we have these definite mindsets of, yeah, Christians are hypocrites.
No, all of us are hypocrites until Christ completes his work in us, and Christ is doing a work in those he saves.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 23:18
Because a hypocrite is totally concerned about yourself. How will I appear is the driving question to hypocritical love. How can I create a good impression for me is the consuming desire. Oh man, come on now, that moved it out of the pornographic traffic, you know, sexually explicit lust, into the more of a common, we all want to look good and appear to be awesome. How can I create a good impression? We go to work with this in mind, we get dressed with this in mind, we take selfies with this in mind, we apply filters with this in mind, we take pictures of ourselves 15 times before we get one we like with this in mind. Are you with me? It's self-focused, not Christ-exalting, and we have a problem with it, and so then Paul is challenging us in the midst of our problem and cultural appropriation for love: let love be without this type of self-focus and hypocrisy. So let's linger here and meditate on what hypocrisy is, because I think sometimes we get it wrong and we apply it to these big things of ultra-religious people who act religious but are actually hateful, when it's much more
Point 4Hypocrisy hides sin and exalts self
Than that. So let's linger here and think about it. So two, here are two ways that hypocrisy is manifested, right? Hypocrisy shows itself, in my opinion, in two different ways. Here's the first one: it tries to make the outside look better than the inside. Get real, people, get real. We put forward what looks like a loving behavior that does not really signify what we feel inside, just as Paul said in First Corinthians 13:3, "If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." So here's the thing: you can give away everything you own, you can sacrifice everything unto your very life, and you might call it love, but it's not. That sounds really godly. Matter of fact, I'm just trying to make it through the day without cussing someone, that might be some of you, but these people give away everything and give their very life and God goes, huh, that's not love, that's lust. That's shocking to me. So that means that things that look good that might be good, if it came from a good place through the Spirit, can be done and manipulated for your good pleasure, not his. Entire church movements have been based on this type of love, acts of contrition, acts of sacrifice to earn yourself a better spot in heaven. You hear it in multiple world religions, not just Christianity, and it's a problem. So you can do some remarkable external acts of sacrifice and it not be loving, it be lusting. The classic statement of this form of hypocrisy is seen in Matthew 15:7, and you can read it later, where Jesus said this: "You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.'" What is this? What is this? It's looking one way on the outside and being another way in your heart. Oh man, if you can't relate to this, you're dead. You're dead. All of us should be able to connect on some way, on some level. "For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence." We are gluttons for self in our society. Oh, come on now, why do you think social media has become so popular? Because we love ourselves. We love ourself, we love ourselves. Oh, I love myself. Some of you are like, well, no, I don't, I feel bad about myself, I feel negative about myself, I feel down about myself, I don't like myself. You know what it means when it says love others as you love yourself? It means give preference to, we give preference to ourselves. That's not love, that's lust. Okay, so the first way that hypocrisy shows itself is when we hide internal sin by putting up a moral external front that is disingenuous. So you got number one. Number two, here's another way hypocrisy reveals itself: we hide our own flaws, sometimes even from ourselves because we've done it so long, by drawing attention to other people's flaws so that ours don't show up so clearly. Come on, man, that one stung a little bit. That one stings. That one really stings, because it's easy for me to get mad at someone else because they don't function on a level I function and they don't do as good as things as I do, and what it does is, by me focusing on all their failures, I'm now prohibiting and creating a way for me to not focus on my problems. I found that the people who wrestled the most in life and struggled the most in sin and vices and attitudes and behaviors are the most judgmental people online, and what it really is it's an individual being hypocritical, it's an individual who doesn't want to allow the Holy Spirit to do its work in them, so they focus on someone else's problem so they don't have to admit their own. It's a problem. This is hypocritical love. This is not the love that Paul is saying to let have its work done in you. This, I would suggest, is most frequent in marriage troubles. Just listen to me for a second. I have been in so many marriage counseling sessions and it's always somebody's more of an idiot than the other person. It's inevitable, someone's idiot quotient is always higher in any given situation, but the reality is both of you are idiots and both of you got problems that are contributing to the frustration. Amen. Now, if you're married to Pollyanna like I am, I take the bigger idiot portion and I contribute more of the problems, but no matter how Pollyanna, how kind, how gentle, how wonderful Brook is, she's got problems that she brings to the equation. Wow. Yeah.
I was waiting for confirmation before I made eye contact. You, although little, she has some. What I love is, in later years, the older you get the more tired you get, unless you fight, not because you're holy but because you're tired. Amen. All right, what I've found in some of the recent years as we have gone through Romans specifically, it sweetens your heart because you see your brokenness. Oh,
I think the sweetest people realize just how broken they are, and appreciation is always attached to the present reality that we have issues.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 32:54
So Paul is saying real love doesn't act this way. Let love be without hypocrisy. It isn't love if it's hypocrisy, it's lust. He said in First Corinthians 13:6 that love rejoices with the truth, but see, hypocrisy is a bunch of lies. Hypocrisy is all about falsehoods and concealment and deceit and cloaking and misleading and hiding. Hypocrisy is about, it's the opposite of loving the truth, it is loving the version of the truth you have presented before men and you've tried to present before God, but it's hilarious because he sees all things. So it's the opposite of love, and Paul is calling us to truth, the truth, not hypocrisy. There are two things that hypocrisy works in our hearts. So we have seen two ways
Point 5Hypocrisy craves praise and covers sin
Hypocrisy shows itself. Now ponder where the evil comes from. What is going on? Why do people do this? Why do we do this? There are two reasons why hypocrisy, that I see in the New Testament, why we do this. First, there is an aim to get and keep the praise and approval of others rather than God getting the praise and the approval. That's where hypocrisy is birthed. Oh man, pastors are really bad culprits of this, right? If I can get the praise and adoration of men, I'll feel complete. Some of you, some of you unnaturally burden those you're in relationship with because you need their praise so much you've burdened them and you've imprisoned them to your need, and they were not wired to carry the burden with you of your need. Christ was. That's why you take his yoke, that's why he comes in. Stop yoking your marriage and your friendships and your relationships and your church friends and your family, stop yoking them to your desperate need to be approved. It's hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is driven by the craving for other people to make much of us, and in that they make little of Christ.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 35:44
That's right. Amen. And it's a problem.
Your greatest witness could be to be not so self-facing but to be God-facing. Okay, in
Pastor Shawn Gray · 35:57
case you didn't know, you see needs in your life that you need rectified, and so you will go take the path of least resistance. The reality is oftentimes God uses needs as thorns to accomplish in you what he wants to, or he uses needs in your life as thorns to get you to be dependent on him and not man. So sometimes, you may not like this, sometimes the things you're praying that God would get rid of, he put it there to get you to a place where you'll stop turning to men to get needs met but you'll turn to him. Some of you stay in a need-ridden, broken state longer than you need to because you would just rather have men satisfy the flesh and appease you. You would rather unnaturally burden men, you, for a season, we use people and relationships and the adoration of men much like a crack addict turns to crack. Okay, it's a problem, and this is hypocritical love. Jesus said, "When you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward." And then in verse 5 he says, "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward." In other words, they crave the rewards of men, the approval and the praise of men, and they got it, and that is all they got and all they will get. Love is not like this, Paul says. It's not hypocritical, it's not self-facing, it does not crave the praise of men. It has been set free from that type of bondage. In fact, that is close to the essence of love:
It doesn't think highly of self, it doesn't think much about itself at all, it is riveted on Christ and all that God is for us in him.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 38:27
The command to love without hypocrisy is really a command to know Christ and to love Christ and to find your satisfaction in Christ so that you do not crave the praise of men any longer. But there's another evil that hypocrisy sometimes aims at. Most commonly we think of hypocrisy aiming at praise of others, so there is this kind of posturing and posing, but there is a more subtle aim, namely to cover sin in our own heart. So one way we do this is we seek self-praise, and the next way we see that hypocrisy manifested is that we try to cover sin in our own heart. For example, in Luke 13, Jesus heals a woman who'd been bent over for 18 years, and it was a Sabbath, so the ruler of the synagogue was angry and said this, and I quote, "There are six days in which work ought to be done. Come on those days and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day." Then the Lord answered him, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it away to water it?" Jesus called this man's zeal for the Sabbath hypocrisy. Why? Why did he call it that? It wasn't so much that he was seeking the praise of men, that wasn't what he was after, he was concealing something broken in his own heart. He was a hypocrite because his religious zeal was hiding something. What was the man concealing? "Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey," Jesus says, "and lead it away to water it?" Bottom line, don't you need to make money? So if it benefits you, then love, which is actually lust, you know. In other words, Jesus is saying, you don't give a rip about this woman, but you only care about yourself, your ox, and how that ox is going to make you money. Your zeal for the Lord's Day is sheer hypocrisy.
It is amazing how much we use zeal in a way that benefits us to the destruction of others.
Pastor Shawn Gray · 41:16
That's not love, that's self-facing lust. So then Paul says, let love not lust. Let love be without hypocrisy.
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