22 Sep Three Ways to Love

Hi everyone. It’s been another gut-wrenching week in the news this week, hasn’t it? So here’s what I’d like to ask you to do. I’d like to ask you to first, think about all the things you’ve read and seen in the news or online—go ahead, call all that to mind—I’ll wait.

Now, please read this slowly. It’s beautiful, and it’s brilliant—it’s Romans 12 from The Message Bible:

9-10 “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.

11-13 Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.

14-16 Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.

17-19 Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”

20-21 Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness.

Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.“

 

It’s hard not to let evil get the best of us, isn’t it? Either through some unrighteous action we take or some righteous action we don’t take.

Let’s not do either, as we look at the world. Instead, let’s look at and then move out from Romans 12, which calls us to do 3 things for one another as we look at the evil in the world.

1. Love doggedly.

Verse 10, in Greek, directs us to love each other like family—in other words, we must love one another in the Christian community as if we were related.

When you know your literal brother or sister is going through something, what would you do? At minimum, you’d pick up the phone and call, if not go visit. Really, for family, you would drop your other plans and just go be with them. You’d sit and talk. Maybe you’d figure a way to solve their problem, maybe not. But just your presence would change something in them, and give them hope.

Let’s do this for one another—let’s pick up the phone (again) or go to lunch (again) to re-weave our hearts and community when we see (yet another) shooting or bombing or act of violence we know affects those we love.

2. Love patiently (verse 11)

Patient love is not passive love.

When I think of patient love, I think of the love I have for my children. Loving them patiently means, at its core, not giving up the fight against sin or hard-heartedness in their lives. Patience does not mean saying nothing, it means what Paul says here—“Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame.”

How can we do that? The next few words direct us: “Pray all the harder.”

I want you to know that every Friday there is a group of people who pray for change in our country and in our city and in our church. I know many of you cannot come for the best of reasons—you have to be at work early, you have small children to care for (please don’t abandon them to come to pray!); I know many of you cannot, and should not come—but I know many more of you could.

Prayer is not loving passively; prayer is loving patiently.

The moment I quit praying about something, it means I have quit on that issue—either it has changed, or I have given up.

Please come pray, if you are able! And if you can’t join us at 7 am this Friday, please consider getting up and setting aside an hour that morning to cry out for God’s hand of mercy and justice in our world.

3. Love actively.

Verse 13 says “Help needy Christians.” The NIV translates it as “share with God’s people who are in need.”

Sometimes this means sharing our money with someone, sometimes this means lending our voice to something.

Essentially, Paul is saying here: Put your money where your mouth is. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn.

He is commanding us to slow down and come into the inner world of those who are feeling something deeply.

For me, this is hard. I like to move fast, am not particularly emotional by temperament, and tend to disregard something that slows me down from a goal. But…

Feelings are complicated.

Feelings are sticky.

Feelings are “slow”.

To love actively, therefore, means to lend our own “slowness” in order to listen to people’s cries around us, and then to share something we have to meet their need, if possible.

As a multicultural church, one of the greatest things we can lend each other right now is our personal “slowness” and our personal voice.

Go slowly into the inner life of someone who you think may be affected by a tragedy somewhere. Then lend your voice by asking, what can I do?

Recently, I became aware of the story of some missionary friends of mine in an Eastern European nation. They were church planters there from the US but who considered that foreign nation home and spoke the language fluently. They befriended a young lady and then saw her come to Christ—only to find out and experience a kind of horror they didn’t think possible.

The young lady was being exploited sexually—in this nation, there is a dark and unbelievably lucrative underground film industry built upon filming live scenes of shocking and illegal and murderous violence and sexual activity. This young woman who came to Christ was someone being blackmailed into participating in these films. When she gave her life to Jesus and threatened to walk away from the people blackmailing here and making the films, they found out who her pastors were and threatened to kill them within 24 hours.

My friends had to call their mission agency to extract them and the young lady from the country that very day. In less than 24 hours, they had to leave behind everything they had spent decades building.

It was tragic. And a reminder of the darkness that exists all around the world.

To walk with them, I had to slow down and enter into their inner life—how did this affect them? How are they doing? What hope do they have for their future? What can I do? After all, they, more than most, would have good reason for giving up on God, faith and the world—decades of work lost, relationships gone for good, a dream ended. And yet…

Do you know what they say when you ask them what you can do?

They say something that challenges me in my own context and nation:

They say, “You can pray. Pray for our nation. We must pray!”

And do you know what they are doing now? Preparing to move back to Eastern Europe to a nearby nation to support another church plant, and where they can also resource the church they were forced to leave behind. They have kept their own hearts fueled and aflame to supernaturally battle the forces of darkness. They are loving doggedly, patiently and actively.

They won’t be stopped.

They won’t be deterred.

And neither will we—from praying hard, from lending our voice and our presence when it is needed—no matter how many times it is needed.

Let’s overcome evil with good, wherever we find it, no matter how many times we find it.

Don’t let the weight of evil prevent you from doing nothing, when you are able to do at least something.

With hope,

Morgan