Sermon Tone Analysis

One of the great things about traveling is the experience of culture shock.

It’s positive and useful for us to find ourselves challenged by the differences in how people of various cultures live and thrive.

Visiting New York City, for instance, one gets a new appreciation for public transportation, especially after having spent stressful hours navigating the traffic of that city.

Visiting Europe, one learns to appreciate the various bakeries and butcher shops that can be found throughout even the smallest towns.

There’s something wonderful about being able to walk from your house to a couple of shops just a few minutes down the street and gather the ingredients for a simple picnic lunch or even an elaborate feast without having to navigate the aisles of a supermarket.

In Dallas, I experienced the joy of public parks devoted to the enjoyment of art.

In the deserts of New Mexico, we marveled at the ability of people to thrive in the most inhumane of environments.

When I’m doing travel well, I learn new lessons about life from every place we visit.

I gain new understanding about what’s important.

I gain new appreciation both for what we have here in America and for those who are perfectly content without all the trappings of our lives here.

As you might imagine, there were many such cultural lessons to be learned during my time in Haiti.

I learned to measure the pulse of the community by sound of cheering coming from a palm-leaf hut, where dozens of people sat watching from uncomfortable wooden benches as World Cup soccer was projected onto a sheet.

I learned to love the sense of community that comes from being able to shout greetings over the wall to your neighbors as they are getting their children ready for school.

I learned great respect for the moto drivers, who could arrange two women, three children and a 50-pound bag of rice on their little motorcycles and then weave their way through dangerous traffic on their way to dropping everyone off where they needed to go.

I also learned the value of LESS.

And Annette and I returned from our first trip to Haiti with a commitment to managing life with less stuff, fewer anchors.

There were also some ways that Haiti taught me to appreciate my life here in the U.S. I gained a great appreciation for running water that we can drink straight from the tap.

I learned to be thankful for traffic laws and the police officers who enforce them.

And, strangely enough, I learned to appreciate mortgages.

You see, in Haiti, there’s really no such thing as a mortgage.

Just as here in America, if you want a house, you either have to buy it or build it.

And Haitians very much like to build their own houses.

But they can’t go to the bank and get a 30-year loan like we can.

They have to build what they can build, as they can afford to do so.

So all around that nation, you see partially built houses, and you can sort of track how well a person is doing financially by keeping track of how his house is coming along.

Sadly, it’s all too common to see foundations dug and poured, with reinforcement steel sticking up to support walls that will never be built, because someone who was able to pay for the work to start then fell on hard times and was unable to finish it.

That’s the image I want you to remember today and in the coming weeks as we transition from our long series on church fundamentals into a new series on the church’s imperatives.

What you heard during the previous series was the sound doctrine regarding the church’s institution, its defining characteristics, its purpose, its responsibility, its relationship to the Trinity, and its structure.

But all of that is only the foundation.

All of that is just sound doctrine.

And sound doctrine doesn’t exist for its own benefit.

I don’t teach sound doctrine just so you can all gain new knowledge.

Sound doctrine, as we saw when we studied the Book of Titus, should result in changed character, in proper behavior.

The sound doctrine of Scripture should result in righteous behavior by those who follow Jesus in faith.

The Apostle Paul talked about some of that righteous behavior in his letter to Titus.

But there are four verses in the his letter to the Roman church where he gives his most concise instructions for “effective Christian living.”

(Robert H. Mounce, Romans, The New American Commentary series, [Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995], 236.)

There are 13 statements here, 13 exhortations, 13 imperatives or commands for the Christian.

As we seek to build on the foundation of sound doctrine by allowing that doctrine to change our character and cause us to behave properly as followers of Christ and as the church that is the body under His head, these 13 imperatives will be a good place for us to dwell for a while.

Indeed, my plan is to spend a week on each of these imperatives, finishing this new series by the end of the year.

Coincidentally — though I don’t believe it’s a coincidence — this is exactly the place where the Wednesday night Zoom Bible study finds itself in our study of the Book of Romans.

So, for those of you who haven’t joined our study, you’ll get a window into what we do during those evenings together.

And perhaps you’ll find that you’re interested in joining us.

I believe I speak for most of the group when I say that this study has been a source of rich blessings for us all.

So, let’s take a look at the passage as a whole, and then we’ll dive deeper into the first of the 13 imperatives.

We’re picking up in verse 9 of chapter 12 in the Book of Romans.

Now, to give you some context for what we’ve just read, Paul spent the first 11 chapters of this letter to the Roman church explaining the doctrine of the righteousness of God.

He talked about the fact that none of us is righteous.

We are all sinners.

We have all gone about our lives as if we are the final arbiters of right and wrong, as if the perfect and righteous God who is the only one worthy of declaring right from wrong does not exist.

That’s the state of the world today.

And in the arrogance of denying God, we break pretty much everything we touch.

Our foolishness in this regard actually amounts to rebellion against Him as our Creator and King.

That rebellion brought death and destruction into a world that He created to be a place of life and contentment.

Paul puts it this way: “The wages of sin is death.”

In other words, we’ve earned the proper wage for our works of sin, for all those ways we fail to demonstrate the perfect, righteous character of the God in whose image we were made.

And we see the destructiveness of our sins in the relationships we ruin, in the wars we fight, in the funerals we hold, and even in the very environment we destroy.

Sin has broken everything, and we are powerless to fix it all.

Indeed, we are powerless to fix the most important thing of all — the broken relationship with the one who created us to be in fellowship with Him.

And so, having shown us just how badly we’ve broken everything, Paul goes on to tell us how GOD stepped into history to provide a solution where we could not.

He sent His unique and eternal Son, His beloved Jesus, to live here as a man so we could see the beauty and joy of a life lived in perfect obedience to God.

And then, in order to provide the solution to our sin problem, Jesus gave Himself as a sacrifice on the cross.

There, He took upon Himself the sins of all mankind, bearing the just punishment for all our sins, so that all who follow Him in faith can be reconciled to God.

We can only stand before a righteous God in righteousness, and since we have no righteousness of our own, God gives followers of Jesus HIS righteousness.

And His promise of eternal life for Jesus-followers is confirmed by Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

God has shown throughout the pages of history that He is a promise-keeper.

And so we can be certain He will keep THIS promise to those who put their faith in Jesus.

That’s a very brief summary of the first 11 chapters of Romans, of the doctrine of the righteousness of God.

But sound doctrine doesn’t exist simply for us to gain knowledge.

Sound doctrine should result in changed character, in proper behavior.

And so, Paul shifts, beginning in chapter 12 of this book, to the application of that doctrine.

For we who have followed Jesus in faith, we are now called into a right relationship with God, one in which we devote our lives to Him — one in which we give ourselves to Him as living sacrifices.

And to the extent that we do that, then we can begin to live among one another in the way that is proper.

And that’s what these 13 imperatives of verses 9-13 are all about.

And what I’ll suggest this morning is that the first two of those imperatives — “let love be without hypocrisy” and “abhor what is evil” — provide the framework that supports the other 11.

The sound doctrine was the foundation.

The first two imperatives are the structural steel.

And the other 11 imperatives are the walls and roof of this structure.

Put another way, these first two commands are general in nature.

They are the guidelines we should use to determine the right way to act in any given situation.

And the 11 that follow are examples of how those two broad commands or imperatives should look in the lives of Christians.

We’ll spend the rest of today’s time talking about that first broad imperative — “Let love be without hypocrisy.”

Now, in order to understand what Paul is telling us here, we have to understand what he means by “love.”

I think we’re much too careless about this term in our modern society.

We use “love” to describe everything from how we feel about our favorite sports teams to how we feel about husbands or wives to how we feel about our pets to how we feel about bacon.

Part of the way the Greek language dealt with this range of emotions was to give different words for different types of love.

There are three different word groups, for instance, that deal with interpersonal love — agapao, phileo, and eros.

Eros deals with sexual love, and it’s not used in the New Testament — not because it’s not important, but because it’s not the topic of concern for the New Testament writers.

Phileo is brotherly love.

Phileo describes an affection for someone, often a friend.

Phileo is the word that’s translated as “brotherly love” in verse 10 of our passage.

But the highest kind of love in the Greek language — and the one with which the New Testament most often concerns itself — is agapao, agape love.

Agape love “refers to a kind of love that expresses personal will and affection rather than emotions or feelings.”

[R.

P. Nettelhorst, “Love,” ed.

Douglas Mangum et al., Lexham Theological Wordbook, Lexham Bible Reference Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014).]

Rather than an emotion that can be subject to change based on circumstances, agape love describes a choice.

THIS is the term that’s used to describe God’s love for mankind.

God CHOOSES to love us, and that’s good news for we whose sin might very well destroy any emotional bond God might have with us.

Since He CHOOSES to love us — even though He knows we are sinners, rebels, deniers, and betrayers — we can be confident that He will go on loving us, even when we fail to be whom He created us to be.