Sermon Tone Analysis

When we moved into our new home a couple of years ago, we replaced our crummy old refrigerator with a new model that has all the bells and whistles.

We were trying to figure out what model we should get, and it occurred to me that the refrigerator is the one thing in your house that you use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You want a good mattress, but you only use it 8 hours a day or so.

It’s a good idea to have an HVAC system you can rely upon, but they’re made to be off and on throughout the day.

In fact, if your heater or air conditioner are running all the time, there’s something wrong.

So, since this refrigerator was going to run continuously, I wanted to be sure we got one that would be reliable and include everything we wanted.

Annette wanted one with a water dispenser in the door, so we looked only at those models.

I wanted one with a screen that connects to the Internet, because I love technology.

So, the one we chose has those features and some other cool stuff, as well.

And as I was watching the guys who delivered it set up our new refrigerator in the kitchen, I noticed a couple of things I’d never noticed in our old refrigerators.

Did you know your refrigerator has a couple of special drawers that are supposed to be for keeping produce and meat especially fresh?

Ours has those special drawers.

But it also has a drawer that’s even more special, one that your refrigerator probably DOESN’T have.

I call it the Res Spears, Stay Out of This Drawer, drawer.

That’s where Annette puts the things that are off-limits to me.

Apparently, we’ve had problems in the past with someone eating things in the refrigerator that were intended for someone else.

I don’t want to embarrass anyone, so I won’t mention names here.

Let’s just say that there have been certain moments of tension related to Annette preparing to make dinner and finding that a key ingredient was missing from the refrigerator.

So, that drawer in our refrigerator is like the closet that you can’t go into during the weeks before Christmas.

What’s in there is a secret.

It’s off-limits.

It might get shared, but then again, it might not.

Now, someone pointed out to me that during the past couple of weeks of Advent, it has taken me a long time to connect the topic of my sermons to that particular week’s advent theme.

This week’s theme is joy.

So, let me make one connection here and now.

It brings me great joy for my wife not to be mad at me.

So, I’ve learned to stay out of the Forbidden Drawer.

There are better and more theological connections between this week’s Advent theme and today’s text from Romans, chapter 12, but let’s talk about that text for a bit, and then we’ll see the connections.

Remember that we’ve been studying through the Apostle Paul’s 13 Imperatives for Christians and the Church during the past couple of months.

You’ll find these commands in verses 9 through 13 of that chapter.

Let’s read them together now.

I hope that by now you’re already expecting me to point out that the umbrella imperative here is the command to love one another genuinely.

All of the other 12 commands in these verses are manifestations of this command to “let love be without hypocrisy.”

What Paul is saying is that followers of Jesus are to seek the best for others, even if that means sacrificing what might seem best for themselves.

Even if that selfless love is not returned.

The love that Paul calls Christians to demonstrate isn’t love that waits until someone shows that they deserve it.

It isn’t love that’s given because it might be returned.

It isn’t love that’s based on emotions.

This agape love is the same kind of love that God showed mankind when He sent His only begotten Son to live among us as a man so that we could see the character of God in human form.

This agape love is the same kind of love He showed in that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

This agape love is the same kind of love by which we rebels whose sins made us enemies of God can now become adopted sons and daughters of God by faith in Jesus and because of His death on the cross for us and in our place.

What Paul commands Christians to demonstrate is a choosing, self-sacrificing love that seeks the very best even for those who might persecute us.

And then, he gives us examples of how such a genuine love should play itself out in the life of a Christ-follower.

We will hate what is evil, especially when we see it in ourselves.

We will cling to what is good, knowing that the abundant life Jesus promised His followers depends upon doing so.

We will be devoted to one another as members of a family, the family of God.

And that devotion will look a lot like giving one another greater honor than we do for ourselves.

We will be persistent and careful about doing the work we have been called to do as Christians, and we will have a fire within our spirits for this work, because we do it as service to our new master, Jesus, who purchased our salvation on a cross at Calvary.

We will be people of constant prayer who rejoice even in the midst of trials, because we have real hope.

We have the confident assurance that God is good, that He keeps His promises, and that He has promised followers of Jesus they will be raised from the dead into glorified bodies to spend eternity in the very presence of God.

Today, we’re going to look at the next of the commands, in verse 13.

Paul says here that we are to be people who are “contributing to the needs of the saints.”

The first thing to understand about this phrase is that the Greek word translated as “saints” here literally means “holy ones.”

Now, this word has been misused throughout many centuries in a couple of different ways.

It was never meant as a title for some small group of believers.

And it also isn’t meant to elevate some believers over others.

It doesn’t suggest that some people are more righteous than others.

Indeed, what Paul says elsewhere in this letter to the Roman church is that we’re all sinners — we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God.

In great ways and in small ways, every one of us has failed to represent the perfect character of the God who made us in His own image — to be like Him.

Any one of even the “smallest” of our sins was enough to create a chasm between us and God that we could never bridge.

He is perfectly holy and righteous, and beside His perfection, even our best good deeds were, as the prophet Isaiah put it, like filthy rags.

We were created for fellowship with the creator of the universe, but our sins have broken that fellowship.

In our sin, we are destined for physical AND spiritual death — in other words, eternal separation from the God who made us to share in fellowship with Him.

When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, God could have put an end to everything right then and there.

He knew that every person in every generation to follow would be just like our first parents.

We would be disobedient; we would sin against Him.

But He chose to show us His love, His mercy, and His grace.

And so, a little more than 2,000 years ago, He sent His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin and laid in a manger in Bethlehem.

Jesus would live a sinless life, showing us what perfect obedience to and fellowship with God looks like.

And then He would give Himself as a sacrifice for us on a cross at Calvary.

There, He bore the sins of all mankind — yours and mine — taking upon Himself the just punishment for OUR sins.

And He did this so that we who place our faith in Him and His sacrifice could be saved from the punishment we deserve for our rebellion against God.

So that we who place our faith in Him can rejoice in the confident assurance that death is not the end — that we will live in resurrected bodies, just as Jesus does.

We will be able to stand before God, not because of any righteousness of our own, but because we will be clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

Just as He took upon Himself OUR unrighteousness, we who have followed Him in faith have been given HIs righteousness to wear as a cloak.

So, instead of looking at us and seeing us for the sinners we WERE, God will look at us and see us as His holy ones, His saints, the ones who have been conformed to the image of His perfect Son by virtue of HIS righteousness.

So, the saints in verse 13 are all who have followed Jesus in faith.

We are the holy ones Paul refers to here.

We are all sinners saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone — and for the glory of God alone.

And Paul’s command to us in the first part of verse 13 is to be people who contribute to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

It’s a call for us to be generous.

Now, there is certainly a scriptural call for Christians to be generous to the lost, as well.

And we’ll talk about that a bit next week and then a couple more times in January.

But the specific command here is for Christians to be generous in helping to meet the needs of other Christians.

This command was especially important for the recipients of this letter.

Rome at the time that Paul wrote this letter was a place where people were coming to faith from all walks of life.

There were still some Jews there who had professed Jesus as savior and Lord.

And there were also some Roman citizens — even, perhaps, some high-ranking officials — who had done so, as well.

And all of these people were now adopted sons and daughters in the family of God.

They were learning to love one another genuinely.

They were learning to be devoted to one another as family.

They were learning to honor one another above themselves.

And they needed to learn to help one another to survive.

They needed to learn to contribute to one another’s needs.

Now, this word that’s translated as “contribute” here is koinoneo.

It means “to share in” something.

And it comes from the same root as a word you may have heard before — koinonia.

And the first place we see that word in the New Testament is in a description of the Acts 2 church.

The newly saved people of this church that was constituted by the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost were devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship — to koinonia.

And koinonia or fellowship or oneness is the main characteristic of this church that we see in the rest of that Acts 2 passage.