pastorjohnb

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Stepping Beyond Easy Love

Reading: Romans 12:9-16

Romans 12:13 – “Contribute to the needs of God’s people, and welcome the strangers into your home.”

In Romans 12:9-16 Paul calls us to love. He emphasizes loving without pretending. Other translations say “love without hypocrisy.” Paul is calling for genuine, sincere love, not fake or false love. Some of the time we can be tempted to love in ways that are superficial. We might, for example, say that we’ll pray for someone but be unwilling to take the obvious step that would be the answer to the prayer.

Paul connects this “pretend” love to cursing those who harass us and to thinking we’re better than or smarter than others. Genuine love would work against us being two-faced and against being arrogant. We are called to “hate” these evils and to “hold on to what is good.” Paul also lays out what it looks like to hold onto the good.

We are to love and honor one another. We are to be enthusiastic as we serve one another. We are to meet each other’s needs. We are to welcome in the strangers. (What a call to be the church both inside and outside the walls of the building!) We are to rejoice with the joyful, and we are to cry with those in sorrow. We are to bless others. We are to consider everyone as equals. We are to associate with those “who have no status.”

Much of what Paul writes in today’s passage parallels Jesus’ challenging words from yesterday in Luke 6. In essence both tell us to love those who are hard to love. There is also the same counter-cultural element to Paul’s words today. Love the stranger, love those without status or voice. There is risk in this call. Genuine love often involves risk.

Prayer: Lord God, as we’ve been reminded, sometimes it is easy to love. It is good and right to genuinely love our family, our friends, our church. Yet you call us to so much more. Encourage us to step beyond these familiar and safe circles of love. Guide us out into the unknown waters of the stranger. Lead us to stand on the uneven and rocky ground of the marginalized. Remind us, Lord, that in these places, we stand with you. Amen.


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Led Back

Isaiah opens with some tough words.  The prophet’s job, after all, is to call Israel back to God.  In verse ten Isaiah calls the Israelites Sodom and Gomorrah.  These two cities were famous for their wild and sinful lifestyle, typified by sexual immorality and idol worship.  No good Israelite would ever go to these places!  So Isaiah opens by telling the people of Israel that they are now just as bad as two of the most evil-filled places ever.  It is definitely a way to get their attention.

Isaiah then goes on to reveal how they clothe who they really are on going through the religious motions.  The people of Israel are still offering sacrifices at the temple and are still reciting their daily prayers.  The people do offer sacrifices but return at once to their sins.  So God rejects their hollow prayers too because their “hands are covered in blood”.  The people’s insides are still full of sin and evil.  Their empty religion is trying to mask this.

Today, are we still living this way?  Do we sometimes act like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah?  Do we sometimes practice a fake or hollow religion?  Do we sometimes fall into sin?  I am afraid the answer to all of these questions is at times ‘yes’.

Sin is and always has been one of the realities of human life.  We are imperfect therefore we sin.  At times we go to church or a Bible study and our mind is consumed by something from work or from home.  We practice fake religion in these times.  We are there but we are not there.  Isaiah offers us a better option.

Isaiah calls us to seek justice, to encourage the oppressed, to defend the first fatherless, to plead the case of the widow.  He advises us to be a servant to others.  By doing the things God calls us to do we will be led back to God and to God’s ways.  This day may we seek to be in service to God, through loving the least and the lost, the poor and the oppressed.