ROMANS 12 (Paul)
So, here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it’s important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.
In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So, since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
If you preach, just preach God’s Message, nothing else; if you help, just help, don’t take over; if you teach, stick to your teaching; if you give encouraging guidance, be careful that you don’t get bossy; if you’re put in charge, don’t manipulate; if you’re called to give aid to people in distress, keep your eyes open and be quick to respond; if you work with the disadvantaged, don’t let yourself get irritated with them or depressed by them. Keep a smile on your face.
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.
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.
Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Rejoice and laugh with your friends when they’re happy; weep with those who weep. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.
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.”
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.
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How I love and value each person in our Life Group as gifts directly from God. Where else could we find the actual living out and love in action described by Paul. I woke up this morning with the words in my heart – “Weep with those who weep.” Many of you have wept with me – with us - but on Sunday, sitting by a man who is in a human sense is almost a complete stranger to me, but who, in a heavenly sense, is a friend as close as a brother witnessing my anguish, Donald reached out ever so slightly to connect and comfort and I collapsed into his arms crying, wailing, and I could hear him crying softly with me. His precious dog laid her head between us. No words were needed. Donald hasn’t lived the last 6 years with us and may have thought I was crying because of the story I shared about our dog, Nico, losing her hearing. Who cares! He wept with me and it was like weeping on the shoulder of Christ and there was no sense of “stranger-ness”.
“Love from the center of who you are.” We do that in our North Coast life group and every Sunday, we “open the clinic” and dress each other’s wounds from a week of walking in this broken world. What better epitomizes that than when everyone gathered around my phone and prayed for our precious son in prison. He was so touched and told me he felt immediately a sense of lightness after the heaviness of a long lockdown. How I cherish all my brothers and sisters in Christ and consider them to be Jesus with skin on. C.S. Lewis said, "it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”" Why is that? What are we protecting or hiding. My soul can't contain the aching heart or the river of tears so I don't have the option of hiding it. It just IS - take it or leave it. Living inside out is a better way to live anyway.
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