Overcoming Evil With Good Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

ENGAGE

About a month and a half ago, I shared a post on Facebook in which I addressed some of the name calling and hateful rhetoric that is tearing our country apart right now. In that post I quoted this verse from 1 Peter:

Finally, all of you, have unity of mind, sympathy, brotherly love, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called, that you may obtain a blessing.

(1 Peter 3:8–9 ESV)

In my post I suggested that we, and especially those of us who call ourselves Christians, ought to apply this principle in our lives, particularly when it comes to those who disagree with us politically. A number of people shared that post on their own timelines and quite a few people also commented, almost all of them in a favorable manner. But one particular person, who I don’t even know, used that platform to do exactly what I was arguing against and basically argued that one political party was superior to the other and resorted to the same name calling and hateful rhetoric that I had written about. Needless to say, I think he missed the point of my post.

Now I’m not going to lie, my first reaction was to respond and ask this person if he had even read what I had written, but I’ve learned not to respond immediately in those situations. Fortunately, before I had even considered how I might respond, another of my friends had the perfect response: “[name deleted]. God bless you”. My only regret was that I hadn’t thought of that first.

TENSION

I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one here this morning who has a natural tendency to seek revenge or to strike back at another person when I am attacked. But Jesus has a better way – a way that is certainly not practiced a whole lot in our world today, but one that is completely consistent with His nature. I’ll be honest with you, that way is not easy, but it is possible.

TRUTH

This morning, we’ll continue our study in Romans chapter 12. And since this morning’s passage builds on what we’ve already covered in that chapter, let me take a moment to review what we’ve learned so far.

Paul begins the chapter by appealing to his fellow disciples to offer their bodies as living sacrifices to God. And the way that they are to do that, and the way we also do that, is by not conforming to the ways of this world, and by allowing the Holy Spirit to transform us by renovating the way we think. And certainly applying what we’re going to learn this morning does require a whole new mindset.

Then last week, we saw that God provides every disciple with spiritual gifts that are to be used for the good of the entire body. And we determined that the church only functions as God desires when every single person is using their gifts. Obviously we have quite a few of you who are putting your gifts to work here at TFC. And I’m grateful for that. But honestly I was pretty disappointed that not even one person responded to the call to talk to me or one of the Elders about how to put your gifts to work here at TFC. The good thing is that it’s never too late to do that so that invitation remains open.

Paul is now going to address how disciples of Jesus are to relate to others – both those inside and outside the church.

[Read Romans 12:9-21]

In some ways, this section is so different from Paul’s usual writing style. In some of his letters, like Ephesians, he writes single sentences that comprise 10-15 verses in our English Bibles. But here, he writes several short, almost pithy exhortations with little or no explanation or elaboration. So there are two ways we could tackle this passage:

• We could address each of the 30 sayings one by one. That would require either a really long sermon or for us to break this into a number of messages and still not finish this chapter by the end of the year. One of the things I read this week suggested that it would be possible to use this as a checklist to evaluate our relationships each month since there would be roughly one for each day of the month.