Luke #29: What Will They Think? (12:1-12)
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Luke 12:1-12
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Good morning again, and thanks for being here today, whether you’re in the room of online, to worship the Lord Jesus together, and to spend time in fellowship and in the study of His Word with the family of Eastern Hills.
If you’re a guest in the room today, I would like to encourage you to fill out the communication card that you’ll find in the back of the pew in front of you. We would just like to be able to know that you were here this morning, be able to pray for you, and to send you a note thanking you for your visit. When you’ve filled that out, you can get it back to us by dropping it in the offering boxes that are by the doors as you leave later on, or better yet, if you could bring the card down to me here at the front once service has ended, I’d like to meet you personally and give you a small gift to thank you for your visit today. If you’re online and visiting with us today, you can fill out a short communication card on our website: ehbc.org, under the “I’m New” tab.
Thanks to the praise band, Worship 4:24.
Announcements
Announcements
WHDR ($7,827.20), goal smashed! Final total at September business meeting.
Opening
Opening
This morning, we are continuing along with Jesus through Luke’s “travel narrative” section, which will take us from the end of chapter 9 all the way into chapter 19, as Jesus continues His itinerant ministry on Earth, but keeps His eyes and eventually His feet on Jerusalem. Last Sunday, we looked at Kingdom Divisions, Signs, and Woes as we considered nearly all of Luke 11. I walked away last week feeling like I had sprayed everyone with a Scriptural firehose. But to be completely honest, this morning’s passage really goes well with what we saw last week. In fact, this is one of those places where our chapter break hurts us instead of helps us, because we lose a little bit of continuity with the thread of the narrative.
I say this today because much of what Jesus says in our focal passage this morning reflects back to or is commentary on what happened in chapter 11, which we looked at last week. And whereas last week, we read a LOT of Scripture, today we will be reading a relatively small amount. So please stand as you are able to in honor of the reading of God’s Holy Word, and turn in your Bibles or Bible apps to Luke 12, where I will be reading from verses 1 through 12:
1 Meanwhile, a crowd of many thousands came together, so that they were trampling on one another. He began to say to his disciples first, “Be on your guard against the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. 2 There is nothing covered that won’t be uncovered, nothing hidden that won’t be made known. 3 Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in an ear in private rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops. 4 “I say to you, my friends, don’t fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. 5 But I will show you the one to fear: Fear him who has authority to throw people into hell after death. Yes, I say to you, this is the one to fear! 6 Aren’t five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. 7 Indeed, the hairs of your head are all counted. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. 8 “And I say to you, anyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God, 9 but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. 10 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. 11 Whenever they bring you before synagogues and rulers and authorities, don’t worry about how you should defend yourselves or what you should say. 12 For the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what must be said.”
PRAYER (persecuted and killed Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Pursuit Church Seattle)
I started as the Youth Pastor here at Eastern Hills officially in 2001 (I was a part-time director of the Student Ministry for about a year and a half before that). And while I had been a youth worker for several years even before the church called me part time, it was my first ever pastoral position. I was really excited to serve, really thrilled to be called to serve, and really completely terrified at the same time. I was a much different leader at that time than I am today, because I’ve grown up a lot in the last 24 years.
It’s funny, if you would have asked me in probably those first 3 or 4 years of full-time ministry, I would have told you that I had the spiritual gift of mercy because I hated conflict. I avoided it whenever I could. But that wasn’t how God had gifted me. My primary spiritual giftedness is teaching, and it always has been. What I claimed was the gift of mercy was actually the very unspiritual gift called “the fear of man.” I didn’t want anyone to be upset with me, and so I worked hard to be a people-pleaser. As long as no one was mad, I was succeeding in ministry (I thought).
But this is impossible to do long-term, and it can be very dishonest, or at least, ingenuine. Not only that, but leading this way isn’t really leading: it’s putting people who weren’t called to lead into a position of leading simply because you worry they’ll be angry or upset if you lead. This isn’t what I was called to: I was called to shepherd students and their families to the cross of Christ, being obedient to God and His Word as I did so.
However, the reality is that sometimes—perhaps often—I was a hypocrite: I taught students not to put on a false face, but I did it. I taught the students to not be afraid of man, but to fear God instead, but I was often more afraid of men than God. I taught them to trust the leadership of the Spirit when they had the opportunity to speak about Jesus, but I often didn’t do that. The truth is that I’m a recovering hypocrite. And I fail all the time still—I don’t have it all together, I don’t have all the answers, and I have to admit that some days I’m a mess, even though most of those messy days I still try to put a smile on my face and give the impression that I’m not a mess. See? Still a recovering hypocrite.
The theme of our focal passage today comes down to this one word: hypocrisy. So this morning, we are going to look at what Jesus had to say about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, and how He used the example of their hypocrisy to warn His disciples about what to avoid and what was to come in their lives as they would pick up the baton of ministry from Him in the future. To put it simply, He warned them about lying TO God, about shying away FROM God, and told them that they would testify ABOUT God. And we should learn the same lessons from Him today. Let’s look at our first point:
1: Lying TO God.
1: Lying TO God.
At this point in His ministry, Jesus was still super popular. Now, this passage follows right on the heels of Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees and experts in the law that we ended with last week. What He said to them was harsh, and remember that chapter 11 ended with the statement that afterwards, the scribe and Pharisees “fiercely” opposed Him and were trying to trap Him in something He said. So we can see that as Jesus’s popularity grows, so does His conflict with the Pharisees and experts in the law. But this didn’t keep the people from coming to Him. Look at verse 1:
1 Meanwhile, a crowd of many thousands came together, so that they were trampling on one another. He began to say to his disciples first, “Be on your guard against the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.
Thousands of people came to Jesus. Thousands. So many that they were stepping on each others’ toes. But Jesus doesn’t look at them first: He turns to His disciples to teach them, and His teaching points right back to His criticisms of the Pharisees and scribes in verses 37-52 of chapter 11:
Jesus said that the Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish (referring to their ceremonial washings), but inside were filled with greed and evil.
He told them that they tithe from what they grow in their gardens, but don’t give any justice to others or love to God.
He accused them of always wanting to be honored and noticed—both at church and in public—a show of their pride.
For the scribes, He condemned the fact that they tell others all of the rules they must live by, but don’t live by those rules themselves.
He accused them of being just like their forebears, who had killed the prophets of the Lord, as they were planning to kill Him.
And He said that the teachings of the scribes wasn’t truly knowledge, and that such teaching hindered people’s faith.
Each of these connects to hypocrisy in some way. Hypocrisy means:
Simulation; a feigning to be what one is not; or dissimulation, a concealment of one's real character or motives. More generally, hypocrisy is simulation, or the assuming of a false appearance of virtue or religion; a deceitful show of a good character, in morals or religion; a counterfeiting of religion. (Webster’s 1828 Dictionary)
The definition hasn’t really changed in the last 200 years… and it actually uses Luke 12:1 as its example sentence. So hypocrisy is holding yourself out as something that you aren’t—either through pretend and pretense or through concealing and misleading.
When I was going through what Jesus said to the Pharisees a moment ago, I skipped one of His “woes” to them. Look at 11:44:
44 “Woe to you! You are like unmarked graves; the people who walk over them don’t know it.”
I explained what Jesus meant by this last week, so I won’t go over that again. But this is the exactly the kind of thing that Jesus is referring to in His warning to the disciples about their “leaven.” There’s a couple of things about this illustration that we need to know if we’re going to have a good understanding of what Jesus is saying:
First of all, leaven, yeast in particular since this is the kind of leaven Jesus is referring to, is a teeny-tiny bacterial organism that eats sugars, and it multiplies at an exponential rate if the conditions are right and if there’s enough food for it, such as a nice warm lump of moist bread dough. As yeast eats the sugars in the dough and multiplies, it creates carbon dioxide bubbles that are trapped by the gluten in the dough, which is what makes bread all airy and light. A little yeast can work a whole lump of dough because of how fast they multiply.
Second, in the Jewish mind leaven, represented corruption, defilement, or sin. This thinking goes all the way back to the Exodus from Egypt:
15 You must eat unleavened bread for seven days. On the first day you must remove yeast from your houses. Whoever eats what is leavened from the first day through the seventh day must be cut off from Israel.
19 Yeast must not be found in your houses for seven days. If anyone eats something leavened, that person, whether a resident alien or native of the land, must be cut off from the community of Israel.
The Jews of today still think this way. The night before Passover every year, they have what is called the “bedikat chametz,” the “search for the leaven,” in order to make sure that there is nothing with yeast or other leaven—not even a small crust of bagel or a Cherrio—that remains in their houses for Passover. For them, it symbolizes ridding their hearts of all sin in preparation for the Passover celebration.
So in verse 44 of chapter 11, Jesus had said that the Pharisees were like “unmarked graves:” They brought defilement without the people knowing it. When Jesus called their teaching “leaven,” he was saying the same thing. Their teaching spread like yeast, and since they were hypocrites, their teaching trained a new generation of hypocrites.
Paul had to deal with some of this with the churches of Galatia. After he had come and preached salvation by grace through faith in Christ, others came in with false teachings about circumcision and Jewish rituals, and the church was confused by them, and some even started to believe them. Paul had this to say:
7 You were running well. Who prevented you from obeying the truth? 8 This persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. 9 A little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough.
In verse 1 of our focal passage this morning, Jesus was calling on His disciples to watch out, to be on their guard against, that kind of teaching—because it is hypocrisy. It claims to be something that it isn’t, just as the Pharisees claimed to be holy and devoted to God and they weren’t. Their teaching fooled some of the people, but it could never fool God. This is why Jesus said what He did in verses 2 and 3:
2 There is nothing covered that won’t be uncovered, nothing hidden that won’t be made known. 3 Therefore, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in an ear in private rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops.
We can’t lie to God, even if we want to, even if we try to. God knows what is going on in our hearts, our minds, our guts… everything! No matter how good of a face we put on, no matter how skilled of an actor or actress we may be, no matter how sincere we might seem, God knows the truth of what’s going on on the inside. He can see our motives, our secret desires, our manipulations, and our fears that drive us. He knows whether or not we really believe the Gospel. We saw Jesus say something similar back in chapter 8 when I preached on Mother’s Day:
17 For nothing is concealed that won’t be revealed, and nothing hidden that won’t be made known and brought to light.
The Scriptures tell us that there’s going to come a day when everything we have ever said, and everything we have ever done, and everything we have ever thought, will be laid bare before us to see as the Lord looks on. Think about what the teacher in Ecclesiastes wrote:
14 For God will bring every act to judgment, including every hidden thing, whether good or evil.
So then what we are called to in Christ is genuineness—we’re to be honest about our need for Jesus, to be willing to have a struggles be seen so that we can listen to the Spirit and godly counsel and apply biblical solutions, to be willing walk with others in their pain and hardship because of how God has healed us. We’re to surrender ourselves to Jesus, not to an idea or a denomination or a tradition… to a Person, and to follow Him by walking in newness and life.
6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little leaven leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new unleavened batch, as indeed you are. For Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore, let us observe the feast, not with old leaven or with the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Sincerity and truth before the Lord. This is how we are to live as His church. And in order to do that, we cannot shy away from Him, which is our next point:
2: Shying away FROM God.
2: Shying away FROM God.
As I said in my opening, a big part of hypocrisy is people-pleasing. And it’s not that people-pleasers are so excited to make people happy (as the name implies); it’s that people-pleasers are so fearful of upsetting others. And when our people-pleasing makes us stop following Jesus, it shows practically that we are more afraid of the person we are trying not to offend than we are the Lord God Almighty. And that is just not a good balance. Look at verses 4-5:
4 “I say to you, my friends, don’t fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. 5 But I will show you the one to fear: Fear him who has authority to throw people into hell after death. Yes, I say to you, this is the one to fear!
Jesus paints a contrast here, saying that we should not fear other people in an ultimate sense if we’re in Christ. If we belong to Jesus, the WORST another human can do to us is end our physical life. Not that this is a good thing, or that we should be foolhardy just because we don’t fear man. But our physical death is not the ultimate thing for the Christian, because for those who believe in Jesus, our forever is secured by His blood, and we have eternity to look forward to as our ultimate destiny. This is why Paul could say:
21 For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.
However, Jesus does say something in verse 5 that might make us a little uncomfortable. He says that we should fear God—He is the only One who has authority to throw people into hell after death. The word here for “fear” certainly can mean to be afraid of, or to be alarmed by. But it can also mean respect, reverence, or even worship. I think that in this case, can mean both depending on who is reading.
The unbeliever, who is in rebellion against God, should be absolutely terrified to fall into the hands of the Creator of the universe upon their death, as the author of Hebrews states:
31 It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
There is literally no scarier being who has ever existed, will ever exist, or even could ever exist than the Lord God. We’ve already said that He knows literally everything you have ever done, said, or thought… even the secret motives you thought you had kept so carefully guarded. Not only that, but He has all power at His disposal. He SPOKE the universe into being. There is nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, that He chooses to do that He cannot do. Nothing can stop Him. He is perfectly just, completely righteous, and will not tolerate even one bagel-crumb of sin. His judgment is complete and final, and there is no authority above Him to appeal to if you object when your life is over and you are bound for hell because of your sin. It’s what we deserve, and no excuse will change God’s mind.
But this isn’t the end of the story. Look at how Jesus goes on:
6 Aren’t five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. 7 Indeed, the hairs of your head are all counted. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.
Yes, God is scary. But we don’t have to shy away from Him. We can have a kind of fear that respects, reveres, even worships Him. This comes because we not only understand that His terrifying power is real, but that His trustworthy love is real as well… and both at the same time. And it’s just awesome to be loved by Someone so powerful!
Jesus argues from the lesser to the greater here. If God knows about all the sparrows (the cheapest meat poor people at the time could purchase), certainly He knows all about our lives. Not only that, but He values our lives. He even knows exactly how many hairs are on our heads! His love goes with His power.
This is why Jesus had to die. The Bible tells us that we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23). And as a result, we all deserve death (Rom 6:23). But Jesus lived a perfect life in our place so He could die in our place, so that we can be justified before God by His grace (Rom 3:24), because Jesus also overcame death in our place so that we can have eternal life in Him (Rom 6:23 again). If we surrender to Jesus in faith, believing in what He has done to save us, and trusting in Him as Lord of our forevers, then the Bible tells us that we will not come under that terrifying judgment, but have passed from death to life:
24 “Truly I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not come under judgment but has passed from death to life.
What an incredible promise! We don’t need to be terrified of the judgment to come, because we know that Jesus has paid for our sin. This also means that we don’t have to hide behind a mask of perfection, because the judgment for our sin has already been rendered.
So if we’ve never surrendered to Jesus, the only thing we can do is not shy away from God now, so that we won’t have to shy away from Him later. Come to Jesus by believing in His death to save you. And if we are in Christ, we have no reason to shy away from God, but we do have a mission that we are called to fulfill, and one that we are not to be hypocritical about: testifying about Him, which is our last point this morning:
3: Testifying ABOUT God.
3: Testifying ABOUT God.
The final section of our focal passage today contains two fairly difficult sayings of Jesus. One of them might cause us to fear if we can lose our salvation, and the other that we could never have been saved in the first place. However, both of these fears are unfounded. Let’s look at verses 8-10:
8 “And I say to you, anyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge him before the angels of God, 9 but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God. 10 Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.
Verses 8 and 9 are pretty clear: If we acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior to others, He will acknowledge us before the “angels of God,” which really just means “in heaven.” However, the converse is also true: if we deny Him, He will deny us. Does this mean that we can lose our salvation? No. But it does mean that if we are able to completely reject Jesus once we have “been saved,” then we have no reason to believe that we ever actually were saved in the first place. This should take us back to the fear of God from verse 5.
Remember what Jesus said the life of the Christian is to be marked by: a denial of ourselves, and the acceptance of the cross, for the glory of Jesus Christ:
23 Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it. 25 For what does it benefit someone if he gains the whole world, and yet loses or forfeits himself? 26 For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and that of the Father and the holy angels.
You see, acknowledging Jesus is more than a one-time tipping of the hat to Jesus’s existence. Acknowledging Jesus is confessing that Jesus is in fact, Lord:
9 If you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
A confession is something that you base your life and your future on. And if He is truly Lord, you cannot live in denial of Him. If you can, then perhaps He wasn’t ever Lord of your life to begin with, and you’ve been living out the testimony of a hypocrite: You claimed to be something that you actually weren’t. If this statement has caused you to examine your heart and realize that you have never believed, never surrendered to Christ, there is one solution: Repent, believe the Gospel, and be saved.
This is also a call to evangelism for the Christian. We are called to acknowledge Jesus “before others.” We are to be a living testimonial to the grace of God found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We should be looking for and praying for opportunities to share our faith with those around us.
Verse 10 is another tough verse, and one that, fairly early in my faith, scared me horribly. I used to be an atheist. I actually got a kick out of trying to make unprepared Christians look foolish for their beliefs. And one of the things that I am sure that I did was speak poorly of the Holy Spirit. And one day after I came to faith, I was listening to a sermon on the radio (I think it was Greg Laurie), and it was on this very passage, and I was shaken to the core. What if I could never actually be saved? What if I had ruined any chance of eternal life before I even understood it because I ran my mouth off? Let’s evaluate this verse and see where we land:
Jesus said in verse 10 that anyone who speaks against the Son of Man will be forgiven. Basically, if we speak against Jesus in ignorance, ambivalence, or enmity, and later come to faith in Him, we will be forgiven. However, the one who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. What does this mean?
Looking at the parallel in Mark really helps us here:
28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for all sins and whatever blasphemies they utter. 29 But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—30 because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”
Notice the “because” in verse 30. Jesus said this because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.” This is exactly what the Pharisees were saying about Jesus back at the beginning of chapter 11:
15 But some of them said, “He drives out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons.”
The Jews were rejecting the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ by attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to Satan. They were resistant to the work of the Spirit because they honestly thought they were good enough to deserve God’s favor. Why do they need a Savior? Why do they need the Spirit?
The Bible tells us that it is through the work of the Holy Spirit that we are saved. He makes us clean as we believe:
4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, 5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit. 6 He poured out his Spirit on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior 7 so that, having been justified by his grace, we may become heirs with the hope of eternal life.
If the Holy Spirit didn’t do this work, we would still be lost. Robert Stein said it this way in his commentary on this passage:
Rejection of the Spirit’s work renders faith impossible and salvation unattainable.
—Robert H. Stein, New American Commentary Series, Volume 24: Luke
This is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit—the complete rejection of His work of regeneration and renewal in our lives. This is why I said earlier that salvation comes through surrender. It’s giving up our rebellion, waving the white flag, and laying ourselves down at the mercy of God, who will work what He wants to work in us through the power of His Holy Spirit.
Now, if this is still freaking you out like it did me so long ago, Robert Stein has one more really good thing to say to us in his commentary:
One thing is clear. Anyone concerned about this sin has nothing to fear, for such a concern witnesses to a sensitivity and openness to the Spirit’s work, which those who have sinned in this way do not possess.
—Robert H. Stein, New American Commentary Series, Volume 24: Luke
Jesus closes this argument with a promise about the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of His followers, who would be picking up the mantle of ministry from Jesus after His coming crucifixion, burial, resurrection, and ascension. Jesus tells them that they will be persecuted, but that the Spirit would be there with them:
11 Whenever they bring you before synagogues and rulers and authorities, don’t worry about how you should defend yourselves or what you should say. 12 For the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what must be said.”
This was a wonderful promise for the disciples, who would eventually face the kind of things that this passage wars about. And true to His Word, the Holy Spirit did work through the lives of men like Peter when they faced the ruling Jewish council in Acts 4:
8 Then Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit and said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders: 9 If we are being examined today about a good deed done to a disabled man, by what means he was healed, 10 let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified and whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing here before you healthy. 11 This Jesus is the stone rejected by you builders, which has become the cornerstone. 12 There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.”
These were the words of the Holy Spirit, as He fulfilled the promise that Jesus made. There are other examples, but I’m just using this one.
We have the same promise. We don’t have to be afraid about what to say: we can trust that the Holy Spirit is within us if we belong to Jesus, and He will teach us what to say, like He did with Peter. This isn’t to say that there is no benefit in reading, studying, and memorizing Scripture. There certainly is. It’s not to say that we shouldn’t know how to share our testimony, or how to explain the Gospel. We should do both.
It’s saying that it’s entirely possible, even probable, that we will face situations where we need a special word from God’s Spirit, where God Himself shows up and does the speaking through us. This might be in front of a crowd of 300, a group of 30, a small gathering of 3, or even just speaking to 1 about the truth of the Gospel. We can trust that God wants to speak. He wants to save. He wants to move. He wants to be glorified through such testimony. So walk faithfully with Jesus, and He’ll make sure you’re ready when the time comes to speak.
Closing
Closing
So here’s the reality: I’m a recovering hypocrite. Are you?
Invitation to trust Christ
Baptism
Church membership
Repentance
Prayer
Giving
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
VALUES
Authentic Family
We have fun and encourage each other through life’s ups and downs.
Real Truth
We dig into Scripture for clarity in a confusing world.
Transformational Growth
We thrive as we learn to become more like Jesus together.
Practical Impact
We seek to meet the needs of our neighbors wherever we find them.
Bible reading (Catch up day 1 before Acts, Psalm 22)
No evening activities tonight, but a homeschool theatre group is performing here in the sanctuary at 6 pm if you want to come check it out.
Prayer Meeting this week, Joe leading
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Detest evil; cling to what is good. 10 Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honoring one another. 11 Do not lack diligence in zeal; be fervent in the Spirit; serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer. 13 Share with the saints in their needs; pursue hospitality. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.
