Sermon Tone Analysis

One of the recent guilty pleasures for my family and I is a show that we’ve discovered called On Patrol Live.

The concept is a simple one.

The producers have arranged with eight different police and sheriff’s departments around the nation to send cameras and videographers out to film officers as they are on patrol in their communities.

The video of traffic stops, DUI investigations, vehicle searches, citizen assists, accident response, drug arrests, taser deployments, and everything else that goes on during these shifts comes to the viewers live, while a couple of retired law enforcement officers and a host back in the studio provide commentary that’s sometimes colorful and always enlightening.

There are moments of pure adrenaline, moments of comedy, scenes of great sadness, and scenes of great heroism.

We see law enforcement officers engaging people in their worst tragedies, saving the lives of people who have overdosed on heroin, catching wanted fugitives who were stopped because of missing taillights, intervening between neighbors whose disputes must have gone back for generations, calling Ubers for people who are too drunk to walk, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Here are a few lessons from the five or six episodes we have seen so far:

• Lighting a cigarette as an officer tells you to get out of your car isn’t the best way to demonstrate that you’re cool and confident, with nothing to hide.

• The center console of your vehicle isn’t the best place to keep your stash of methamphetamines.

• The moment you hear the first bark of the K-9 that’s been released to chase you down is probably only slightly less terrifying than the moment he catches you.

• If you’re running from the police and you hear the words, “Taser, taser, taser!” you should prepare to meet the pavement.

Hard.

• And finally, you set the tone of any encounter you have with the police.

Your good manners and respectful interactions may not keep you out of jail, but they’ll get you there in one piece, with no bite marks and limited road rash.

It’s surprising just how many simple traffic stops wind up in handcuffs and tears because someone who is angry and belligerent doesn’t recognize that the people with the badges are the ones in authority.

And it’s frankly amazing that so many of those with the badges are able to maintain their professionalism and composure in the midst of the verbal and sometimes physical abuse they face on the job.

As I was thinking about the second part of our series on 13 Imperatives for the Church this week, this series, On Patrol Live, kept coming back to my mind.

And that’s because one of the things it reminds me each week is that the human race absolutely excels in creativity, especially when it comes to applying that creativity to evil.

Now, this should come as no surprise.

A quick look at the headlines confirms what we already know.

We see evil everywhere — from the mass graves of Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine to the somber museums of Dachau; from the gang-controlled ports of Haiti to the pirate coasts of Somalia; from the abortion mills to the human trafficking of the sex trade.

We see evil in the gunshot death of a four-year-old Suffolk child.

We see it in the bomb threat/robbery that shut down a North Suffolk shopping center on Saturday.

We see it in the drug trade that has generated a mental health crisis that reached the proportions of a tsunami during the pandemic.

We see it in alcoholism, in broken families, in the deaths of innocent people caught in the crossfire between gangs walking even our own streets right here in Suffolk.

We see evil in the very halls of Congress, where elected leaders are even now working to codify a “right” for a woman to have her unborn baby murdered.

And we saw it in those halls as a mob of people broke in on January 6, looting and pillaging and threatening the very people charged with protecting the seat of our government and the ideals upon which our nation was built.

We all see these things, and if you are like me, you detest them.

That’s what the Apostle Paul says is the proper response to evil in the passage at the center of this series, Romans 12:9-13.

Remember that there are 13 different imperatives or commands he gives the church in this passage.

Today, we’ll talk about the second.

But let’s read the passage together first.

Last week, we talked about genuine love as one of the two umbrella commands of this passage.

We said that the other 11 imperatives of these four verses all represent manifestations of those two umbrella commands.

The first of those umbrella commands was to let love be without hypocrisy.

And you’ll recall that we said the Greek word for love there is agapao.

This is agape love, the highest form of love in the Greek language.

This is choosing love, the kind of love that seeks the very best for another, regardless of whether that love is returned.

And this week, what we’re going to talk about is genuine hate.

Now, we don’t talk about hatred much in the church, and that’s understandable, since we follow the God of love.

But he is also a God of hatred.

He is the God who hates evil.

The Bible is full of examples of this, but let’s look at what King Solomon wrote in Proverbs, chapter 6.

Now, these aren’t the only kinds of evil God hates, of course.

This is meant to be a representative list of the kinds of things that are evil in God’s eyes and hated by Him because they are directly opposed to His perfect righteousness.

And most of us this morning would probably agree that all these things are detestable.

All of these are things that we should abhor, as Paul puts it in our passage today.

And you might expect that from here I would launch into a long denunciation of evil in the world.

That I would go back to those episodes of On Patrol Live and give you some examples of the kinds of evil we are to hate.

That I would delve into today’s headlines and show you that the world is going to hell in a handbasket of evil.

But if I did that, I’d be missing the point of what Paul has to say here.

If I did that, I’d be missing the point of what Jesus said in His parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector.

We see it in Luke, chapter 18.

“God, be merciful to me, the sinner.”

God, be merciful to ME, the sinner.

We all should, of course, hate sin wherever we see it.

And the world IS going to hell in a handbasket of evil.

But I think that Paul’s imperative in Romans, chapter 12 is not so much a command to detest the sin of the world, but to detest the sins that we as Christians continue to allow in our OWN lives.

We are not called to have the attitude of the Pharisee — “God, I thank you that I am not like all those people we see on television and in the headlines.”

Rather, we are called to have the attitude of the tax collector, unwilling even to look up to heaven in the shame of knowing who we still are and crying out, “God have mercy on ME, the sinner!”

We are called to the humility of self-knowledge that led Paul to call himself the chief of sinners.

It’s important to note that Paul wrote those words to Timothy near the end of his life, after he’d spent years learning from Jesus in the wilderness, after he’d planted churches and suffered for the gospel and led many to a saving faith in Christ.

He had spent many years by then growing in faith and in holiness.

Just when we might expect Paul to say, “Hey, look at me! Look how righteous I’ve become!” instead we hear him say, essentially, “God, be merciful to me, the sinner.”

You see, Paul was not only wise in his own self-estimation.

He was also wise in his understanding of people in general.

And one thing he seems to have understood about people is our fascination with evil.

It’s what drives the horror movie industry.

It’s what drives the nightly news.

It’s probably what drives the popularity of shows like On Patrol Live.

And it goes back to the Garden of Eden.

God had created this place of perfect shalom, this place of perfect peace, where Adam and Eve had everything they would ever need to be content and fulfilled.

Where they enjoyed the very presence of God in their midst, walking through the Garden in His perfect righteousness and love.

In the Garden, Adam and Eve were surrounded by the things that God had created, and every thing that He had created, He had declared good.

They were surrounded by goodness and life.

In fact, in His presence, they were in the presence of goodness personified.

He is the good God who creates only good things.

As Moses wrote, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.”

But Adam and Eve were not satisfied to be surrounded by goodness.

And so, when they found themselves standing below the branches of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and when the serpent tempted them with the knowledge of evil, they ate the fruit from the one tree in the garden that God had declared off limits.

From the beginning, we have had a fascination with evil.

Indeed, what was going on in this interaction with the serpent was the desire to declare for themselves what was good and what was evil.

It was their desire to put themselves in the place that only a perfect righteous and holy God deserves to occupy.

Instead of being satisfied with the goodness that surrounded them, they chose to pursue evil.

Instead of eating from the Tree of Life, they had chosen to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

They had chosen to satisfy their fascination with evil.

And instead of life, they brought death into the world.

The physical death that we will all experience, as well as the spiritual death of separation from the God who made us to be in fellowship with Him.

But let’s not be too quick to pass judgment on Adam and Eve.

This has been the history of the world ever since.

It is the universal story of mankind, this desire to decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong.

This fascination with the things that God has told us are destructive, the things He has warned us would bring death.

Every one of us does the same thing as Adam and Eve when we fail to demonstrate the righteous character of the God in whose image we are made.

From the time a baby learns to manipulate his parents into giving him something he doesn’t need.

From the first time a child steals a cookie from the jar her mother said was off limits.

From the time a young boy searches for pornography on the internet.

From the day a group of girls bullies the new girl at school.

From the day a boy cheats on a test.

Every one of us reveals the same fascination with evil — the same desire to decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong — that Adam and Eve demonstrated in the Garden of Eden.

We are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, and we all demonstrate their sinful character, rather than the righteous character of God.