Overcome Evil With Good Series

So overcoming evil with good starts in your own personal life, it plays it self out in obvious ways within the church, and next it needs to happen in all your relationships. Look at 14-16 again…

So far everything up to this point has been pretty simple. We need to avoid evil and cling to good, OK that makes sense. I need to be loving to my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, yeah, I can do that better. But now Paul takes things outside. Now he starts to give us instructions on how we deal with people outside the church. People who we might not get along with too well.

The first instruction is to bless those who persecute you. Bless them and do not curse them. Be honest, how many of you have ever prayed, “Dear God, please give that person who wronged me a bad case of shingles”? When someone hurts us our natural response is to want to hurt them. But instead we are to bless them.

We are to bless them and not curse them. We are to pray for them, speak well of them, maybe even want the best for them. This is just plain weird. The ability to bless those who have wronged you is a superhuman gift. It is not natural. It is supernatural.

Hatred and malice and bitterness are not to be characteristics of Christians. Instead we are to be marked with grace and forgiveness and love and gentleness. Give this a try this week. The next time someone wrongs you, and I’m sure it will happen, instead of expressing your feelings with a finger, stop and pray for them.

Next, Paul wants us to be able to empathize with people. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Empathy is the ability to enter into the emotions and feeling of others. It is more than sympathy. It is an ability to genuinely join them in their joy or in their sorrow. Paul wants us to be people who actually care about others.

We need to be able to come alongside those who are hurting and give them comfort. We need to be able to relate well with the world around us.

Finally, we need to practice humility. Paul says be of the same mind with others, don’t be arrogant, be willing to associate with the lowly, don’t be a smarty-pants (that’s my paraphrase)

We spent all last week talking about the dangers of pride. Don’t act in an arrogant way towards others. I could spend more time here, but I think we all clearly understand this, we just need to do it.

The final way in which we can overcome evil with good is in our interactions with our enemies. Look at 17-20…

First of all, make every effort to be in the right. Never pay back evil for evil. Your mom was right, two wrongs don’t make a right. Have a healthy respect for what is right. Always take the high road. Always be the bigger man or woman. Always do right by people, even when they do you wrong.

We have two little girls, and often my little niece is in the mix. All it takes is for one of them to get frustrated and start pulling hair, and immediately the other one will grab a handful of hair, and then they will trade slaps, and then usually follow it all up with a set of heartfelt raspberries at each other.