Book of Romans XX, The Key to Right Relationships

Romans 12. You'll need your outline. Did everyone get their outline tonight? Thanks very much. I want to thank many of you for making an extra effort, but really, I hope you're here because God put it on your heart, and I pray that He'll be the one that will reward your time. Remember last week's message and the focus of Romans 12? Let's look at it, verse 1, shall we? Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, His good, pleasing, and perfect will. To set the stage for the last verses of this chapter, I want to just go back and mention that spiritual worship is what Romans 12 is all about. Worship is what Romans 12 is really all about. The first 11 chapters describe the amazing plan of God for us, and His grace and mercy and unfathomable love that we have all received in His Son Jesus. Paul says, now look at it, verse 1, therefore, don't just see the therefore as being the last couple verses of chapter 11, but all the first 11 verses, because of all that you've read. How many have been here in the Roman study from the beginning? Wonderful. Therefore, because of everything you've read about God, about His mercy, about His love for you, about His patience with you, about His long-suffering attitude toward your sin, about His sacrifice for your own shortcomings, therefore, that's the motivation, present yourself to Him, a living sacrifice, your whole person, body, soul, and spirit, a living sacrifice. I like to say it this way, make a pact with God. Don't get an image of walking up and laying over some altar. That's not what this is talking about. It's talking about, as one person said to me, every day I get up and say again to God, God, I am totally, completely, unashamedly yours. I'm yours to use, I'm yours to abuse, I'm yours to use up, if that's what you want me to do. I'll go anywhere, do anything, say anything to anybody, because I'm yours. Use me today. Touch me today. Make a pact with God. Give a sacrifice. What happens to a sacrifice? What does a sacrifice have to say about what it's sacrificed for? So be a living sacrifice. And that, the Bible says, is, look at the end of verse 1, which is your spiritual worship. Now, I did a lot of studies. I can tell you with all those words meaning Greek, one of my favorite Greek passages here. But when you think of worship, church, what do you think of? Singing, Pastor Scott said. What else? Praying, praising, lifting your hands. How many say we worship some here tonight? That's the normal thing that clicks off. If you go out to the man on the street tonight down at the mall and say, what do you think about worship? He'd probably say, boring, you know, I did it for five years, I don't ever want to do it again. He'd probably describe something in church, a service, worship service, you know, order of worship. We think, anyhow, of worship as at least having some expression to it and some life to it and some vitality, maybe a song of the Spirit and those kinds of things. You know, this morning, I don't know, it was a beautiful day. The Lord provided, son. I thought I was in the wrong state. And I arrived in my office early enough to be here before the Eden kids. You think you had a bad week last week? Last week, two Eden buses ran into our overhang. Boom! I mean, it's like an earthquake. I thought it was the rapture or something. Boom! But anyhow, I got here today before the Eden kids arrived, so it was kind of quiet. I went back to my little office back here and the sun was streaming in. And I looked at my desk and I knew I had this teaching to finish. And I closed it all up and I said, Lord, I just want to worship. I just want to worship you today. And I just began to do the little things that I do. You know, the Lord puts up with my singing and just kind of like you do. And I just had a time of thanking God. I turned to somehow I got led to Mark chapter 14, you know, where the stories of the woman who broke the alabaster flask of expensive perfume over Jesus. And everyone, you know, you're wasting that. And Jesus said, she did a wonderful thing for me. And I said, Lord, I want to do something special just for you today. And I just, I worshipped. And my little office became a sanctuary. How many of you know that can happen to you anywhere you are? I mean, it can be in your car. You know, I advise you get smoked in windows if you get too carried away. You can worship anywhere. You know, your little private little bathroom somewhere can be a worship altar. You can worship any place you can get along with God. And that's acceptable. And I want you to know, God loves it when we worship. If your only worship time is Sunday morning at 9 or 11, I want you to know you're missing it. And many people who find fault with worship form usually don't have a worship life. I just say that. My highest moments of worship really aren't up here. They're out there. And that's when yours should be, too. And the Lord loves it. The Lord just, he loves that. One great man of faith of the last century said, my secret to victory is I come into God's presence every day and I don't leave it until I feel the warmth of his love. And that's what gets you going. The Lord loves that. And out of that, you see, giving is another way of just worship. I give to the Lord. I give, you know, Lord, if I'm on the altar, if I'm sacrificing, that means my resources are yours. If you prompt me to give some money to someone, if you prompt me to give some time to someone, it's yours. Now, last week, Pastor Scott alluded to the issue of using our gifts. And I want to just mention to you tonight that I believe that another way that we worship God is through the use and service of our gifts. I believe that it's actually an act of worship when we learn how to discover our gifts and find out where they plug in to the body of Christ. Let's just flip the page here and look at these verses. I'm not going to read them all because we don't have time tonight. But you see, it says in verse 4, just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, verse 5, so in Christ, we who are many form one body and each member belongs to all the others. Grab someone's arm right now and say, you belong to me. All right, don't get cuddly on me now, all right? I mean, we're talking spiritual analogies here and you think we're back in the marriage series. All right, not. But you see, God has placed you in this body. And how many of you know if you're in this body, this is your body? All right. This is your church. This is the body that the Lord has affixed you to. You're a member of this body. You're part of this church for as long as you're here. If you should move to another town, then you'll be part of another body. And I have the conviction that you are uniquely gifted by the Lord with a gift that we need to be a whole body. And we've had a lot of little pot marks, a lot of little shortages in our body right now because some of you don't know where you fit. Do you know we have a whole ministry to help you find that? It's called the Stepping Stones Ministry, the Network Ministry. And you can get into that and find out in about a month or so what gifts the Lord's given you and where you can use them. And I want everyone in this church to learn to do that because, listen now, it's worship. It's not, you know, good service. It's not your duty because you're a good Christian. It's worship to the Lord. How many of you believe God loves to see Christ represented to the world? You see, I think that Christ is most represented when the body is functioning according to its gifts. It's sort of a natural flow of things. And it's worship. It's a sweet savor. It's a fragrance to God. You lift up a sweet fragrance to God when you usher someone to their chair, and that's your gift. You offer a sweet fragrance to God when you teach a child back in the fourth grade, and that's your gift. The Lord says, I like that. That blesses me because He's put that in you, and now you're giving it back to Him. I want to commend you. You know, Jesus said in Matthew 6, don't worry about the Lord missing you. You know, I may not see it, and the other elders may not see it. You know, Jesus never misses an act of service. Didn't He say that? He said, what you do in secret, I'm going to see. And what you do in secret, I'm going to reward even more than the stuff that everyone sees. That's why, you know, being up here, I probably have most of my reward. It's the stuff in secret that God honors. And so whatever your gift is, find it and use it and worship God with it. But tonight, for the remaining moments, I want to talk about a third way that we worship. We worship by praise and adoration and intimacy with God. We worship by using our gifts, which I can't go back and really redo. But we worship tonight, I want to talk about it, through right relationships. Now, I've promised our staff that sometime in the course of this year, I want to do a series on why I'm a charismatic, whatever that means. But let me say this. Let's believe that maybe worship means a little bit more than praise songs. Worship means a little bit more than just the things that we have in our mind. Let's believe that somehow worship to God, love expressed to God, can also happen when you and I learn how to rightly relate to each other. Because I personally believe that that's the exact thing that God has spelled out here in Romans chapter 12. Every time you positively relate to another person, the Lord says, I accept that. That's worship to me. I like that. That blesses me. You know, that little note that you sent off to someone encouraging them, that's an act of worship to the Lord when it's done in the right spirit. That conversation where you stopped in the middle of your busy day just to encourage that person, that was worship. You see the difference in just doing good deeds because you want to accumulate brownie points and worshiping the Lord? That visit that you took the time to take on your way home from church that lifted a person's spirit, that was worship. The Lord says, I'll take that. Now, here in the Roman church, the church at Rome was very, very diverse. How many of you know that Rome was the place, didn't say all roads lead to Rome, something like that? I believe all roads lead to Wexford sometimes. We have people from everywhere. One thing I love about our church is we are diverse. We're not all young people, are we? We're not all old people. We've got some wonderful mature people and some wonderful young people. We've got some fairly wealthy people, a lot of fairly average income people. We've got some highly educated people. We have some poor people, some not so educated. We have a diverse body of believers. It's kind of like Galatians 3 says that, you know, in Christ there is no male, female, Greek or Jew, slave or free. That's kind of North way. We're just all a hodgepodge. And I like that, don't you? I don't know that I'd want to be part of a church that was one little narrow band, you know. I know that I, I just think that that's not what the New Testament is describing as the church. But it doesn't make it easy to love. Because guess what I've discovered? There are a lot of people that are really different in this church. Are you sitting next to someone who's really different? I mean, careful husbands, I mean really different – extremely different. And yet the Lord doesn't let us off the hook because as we begin to read now in Romans 12, 9, the commandment of the Lord is to build right relationships. Let's look now at our overheads, okay? Roman numeral 1, this is your outline. Right relationships, number 1, bring worship to God when they are sincere or authentic. Right relationships bring worship to God when they are sincere or, another word would be, authentic. Look at it, verse 9. Love must be – let's all say it – sincere. Love without hypocrisy, without deceit. Hate what is evil, the Bible says. Verse 10. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. You see, you cannot worship God in your relationships if they're not real, if they're filled with pretense, if they're nice little fake praise smiles, you know. How are you? Fine, how are you? Back of your gums get dry, you know. It's fake. Paul is saying here, get rid of all this pseudo-spirituality, this pseudo-concern and take your masks off and learn to love. And I want you to know, it's not easy. Listen, it's not easy to do it over the long haul. You know what? I find I can love most people for a short period of time, you know, at least 10 minutes or so. But how many of you find in your home group that you loved them at first? I mean, you know, it's easy to love them at first. This is a great group, honey. We're really going to get along well here, you know. Six months later, honey, this is terrible. Oh, if he comes again tonight, I'm leaving here. And we, if we're honest, over time, did you know that most pastors leave their church, this is according to National Survey, every 3.4 years? I want to submit to you it's because either that's the time that they have to get real in order to stay or that's the time when the people have to get real or they'll drive them out. You see? He either has to get real or they have to get real. And if they don't want to get real, they just say, hey, get out. You know, we don't want you anymore. That's why pastors leave every 3.4 years. You know, recently I was meeting with a group of people who were concerned for their pastor or so they said. There were some things going on and so forth. And they said, well, you know, we really care about him. But when it got down to putting that into action, that didn't jive. There was some dichotomy between their words and their actions. I get really blown away, for example, I don't know if you saw USA Today, it was probably about a year ago now, where one of the great denominations of which some of you were a part at one time, had a big political battle going on for the headship of that denomination. And I want you to know, I've been in some of those where behind closed doors, you know, people are at each other's throats for who's going to control the power behind, you know, the pulpit, so to speak. And, you know, people connive and they manipulate and they think of ways to get control. And then they walk out on the platform and say, we are bound to each other in love. Well, that's not for real. That is not the kind of love that Paul is talking about here. God won't honor it. He won't receive it as worship. That which is full of deceit and dishonesty and disguised bitterness does not bless God. Truthfulness, dear ones, is absolutely crucial when it comes to our relationships. And I want you to know, we are capable of taking truthfulness and twisting it to fit our own needs. Look at the word here, devotion. Would you look at that? Verse 10, be devoted to one another in brotherly love. That word devoted, looked it up in the Greek, it's the only time the word appears in the entire New Testament. It means to be tenderly affectionate. Now, once again, if that person is someone you're attracted to or someone that you like, that's easy. I don't know to be tenderly affectionate to someone you think is a loud mouth or a nerd or whatever. I mean, that's not easy. But Paul doesn't describe it any other way than to say, honor them, be devoted to loving them. And I don't think this could ever happen without good old-fashioned hard work. And listen now, church, hard work in relationships for us is very difficult because most of us have come to this whole operation by cutting bait somewhere else where relationships got tough. Listen very carefully, please. One of the scourges of spirit-filled churches has been, get in it until it gets tough and then get out. And I pray that whosoever is here tonight and hearing my voice would say, I'm staying. Because I want to work things through no matter what the cost. I want to be real no matter what the cost. I want to last. I want to abide because it's worth it. You see, a lot of stability you see in mainline churches is really just stability of pretense. It's there because some people have just decided they were going to build a wall and no one was going to get through it and they just stayed. But here, you know, it takes some real giving. It takes some talking. It takes some working things out to get there. It takes some learning to appreciate the differences. Do you appreciate the differences in the people that are in your groups? I mean, do you appreciate them? It's one thing to put up with them. Do you appreciate them that maybe they're a little more clever than you? Maybe they're a little more discerning. Maybe they're a little more, well, you know, sharp in some ways. Do you appreciate their differences? Have you learned to be real with them? Have you learned to let them know who you really are? On our Tuesday night elders meetings, we come in here and every Tuesday night that we have an elders meeting, I walk by one of the rooms down here at the end and there's usually 25 or 30 or more people in a couple of circles or in a big, have their chairs all lined up. And they are there for one reason. They are there because they have serious addiction problems. And they come to that meeting only to tell one another, hi, I'm here and I've got a serious problem. I'm here and I need some help. I'm here and I just want you to know that I need you to help me through. That kind of honesty, dear ones, you know, these aren't necessarily the coolest, sharpest people in the whole wide world. But I want you to know something, they're some of the bravest people. Because it takes some guts to say, I need help. And to stick with it. We have a counseling ministry and every once in a while, you know, people will come and say, hey, Pastor Jay, I'm embarrassed about this. Or Pastor John says, John, I don't want anyone to know this, but I'm having a real serious problem. Would you help me with this? One of the fears that I have, folks, is in our home groups. You know, it's easy. Some of our groups will meet for two, three, four, six months and it's plastic card city. Let's sing some choruses. Let's have a Bible teaching. Let's be all healthy, well and wise and let's go home. And that's not the way it needs to be. A group needs to get to the place where real honest things happen. Real genuine care and love is expressed. Where we're open about our fears and frustrations and questions. Where we get real with the conflicts and the circumstances that are really involved in our lives. Someone said, I don't know if I want that. It gets messy. I have to get involved in people's lives. And I have to say to you, you're right. And it does require some things. And a lot of people don't want it. We're too busy. I want you to know that's not New Testament Christianity. It's not being real. When we started North Way, I see a lot of the guys, the original group of the elders are here now, what we call the Servants Council. One of the things that we said way back when was, folks, let's not play games at church. Let's not see if we can be a game playing church. Let's just be who we are in Jesus and keep growing together. Let's not play games as members. Let's not play games as pastors. Let's not play games as elders. Let's not play games, period. And I believe God has honored us in that as we start to do it. You can't build a marriage on pretense. You can't raise kids with it. And you certainly can't build a church. And how many of the world is full of pretense? You spend most of your time wondering if someone's real or not. It doesn't need to be that way in God's church. Now, if you need some help in specifics about how to be real, a year ago, December of 88, I did some messages. I think the tape ministry has these. It's called To Tell the Truth. And I did a series on just how you can communicate very clearly. One more thing. If you're a leader of a home group, how many home group leaders are here tonight? Thank you so much for coming. You be real in your home groups. If you're frustrated, if you're struggling, if you're seeing new things and gaining victory, be real. How many of you are teachers of some level? You teach somewhere. Kids or discovering later. Be real with your classes. You don't have anything to prove. Just be real with it. Some of you are involved in other groups. How many of you are in some kind of a serving ministry? You're serving somewhere. Be real. You know, if you're serving in the food bank, if you're serving in the tape ministry, if you're serving in any way, be real. If you're serving in the food bank, if you're serving in the tape ministry, if you're serving in any way, be real. The only people in this church who don't have to be real are in the drama team. And you can be whatever you need to be for that ten minutes, okay? Number two, write relationships, express love tangibly. Look at this now in verse 13. Share with God's people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Relationships flourish when love is expressed and not just felt. Did you hear that? How many of you know that marriages have crumbled because love was felt but never expressed? Churches have crumbled for the same reason. A while back, someone left our church and the word came back to me that they left because they got discouraged and they went through a personal setback and here's what they said. They said, and no one reached out to them. I did a little investigating and I know that the people who knew them loved them. I know that they were even friends. But they didn't express it in some tangible way. Love isn't love. It's a relationship. Love until you give it away, someone once said. It's not love until it's given away to somebody. Expressing actions, expressing those good feelings is the only way that people know that you really do love them. You know, our food bank is a tangible way of saying to people, we care about you. We love you. Some of you in your home group ministries have done marvelous things to tell people we love you and here's how we're expressing it. Here's how we're doing it. This is what we're trying to do. Saturday night, I see the Slavkovskys are here, at least Peter's here tonight. We had a marvelous reception for the family and at the end of the reception, there was this little monument in the middle of the floor and it was this really intriguing looking thing covered over with a white tablecloth. At the very end of this hour or so reception, and Peter shared some things in his heart and they sang some songs and so on. We pulled the covering off and it was a beautiful and very kind of elaborate looking professional quality commercial sewing machine that some company here in the area donated to Peter because he's a tailor to get him into business. I was so encouraged by that. I think it's worth thousands of dollars. I mean, it's really, really fancy, you know. And I said, now there is tangible love. Somebody in our church kind of pursued someone else to help make the donation and the whole thing and they made love work. This Christmas, one family in our church had a successful year and their business wrote out several large checks to some other families. And I happened to be sort of in between in some of these things and that one family didn't know who the other family was at all. And I want you to know, when those checks went out and those people received them, God was worshipped. 2 Corinthians says, it's a fragrance to me when you tangibly express your love. I've seen it. I know it's true. It's a wonderful thing to see. And Paul says here, look at it. He says, verse 16, live in harmony with one another. Don't be proud but be willing to associate with people of low position. I'm glad that's in there, aren't you? And though we know that we kind of get along better with people, you know, if we have four kids, we get along better with people that have kids and those kinds of things because we have more common experiences. I pray that you never feel like you can only relate to someone in your own little category, okay? Relate to a teenager if you happen to be in your 50s every once in a while. It'll do you a lot of good. Relate to people with different backgrounds and different interests. It will help you. Number three, right relationships. Hold on now. It gets hairier. And by the way, obviously, I'm not going through every single one of these but I've kind of distilled these down. Number three, right relationships should be reconciled. If possible, Paul says in verse 18, be at peace with all men. Now, why would he say if possible? Huh? Because it's not easy. It is not easy to be at peace with all men. Anyone here ever take physics? No. Good. Thank you. What happens when two objects rub together, physics students? Friction. Now, what objects am I talking about? Right now, I'm talking about my hands but how about you and you or you and you? And you see, how about when two people objects rub together? I mean maybe physically but more I mean in terms of personality. What do you get? Friction. You get problems. You get heat. The issue is, folks, not are we going to have struggles or are we going to have differences. The issue is, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do with the problems and the struggles and the real life kind of things that we have to deal with? You see, in our church, I want you to know we have some friction. Anytime you have a group of people the size of this one, there are going to be people who rub together the wrong way. And unfortunately, too many people resort to some rumoring and sniping and talking and backbiting rather than reconciling and peace-building. Dear ones, listen carefully. Whether we like it or not, we are a family. Turn to someone right now and say, I'm part of your family. Go ahead. I am part of your family. Now, the revelation, all right? Here's the revelation. You are in that family for eternity. It's forever. And I know what some of you are thinking. I'll avoid them until I die and I'll never see them again in heaven. Now, I am developing a theory and I am working on scriptural proof texting, but I believe that God will intentionally assign your mansion right next to that person you hate, right there. So when you walk down the street, you're going to walk down there and you're going to look at the sign in that door and it's going to say that name, the name that right now you can't stand. I know God's going to do that. And that's where you're going to be for eternity. And it'll be someone in this church and I'm going to love it. I'm working on finding that in Revelation, but it's... Listen, there's going to be hurts, bumps and bruises, disappointments. But when someone comes along with some damaging information, some misunderstanding, whatever, listen, church, we can either choose to snoop in it, dig into it, slander some, backbite and struggle and create some division, or we can be the mature one and choose to begin to reconcile. You see, not only is a person who is a backbiter and a sniper, not only is he not offering something positive to God, what he's offering, what comes out of him is a foul stench in the nostrils of God. Jesus said, if you're at odds with your brother, don't even bother coming to the worship altar. He said, I've got plugs in my nose. And North Way, let's get mature about this. This isn't just some place where we praise the Lord and have, you know, great services and all these things and let's just go do our thing. This is a place where I want worship to be the relational integrity of our love for each other. I don't know if you've ever thought of worship that way, but I believe God does. I believe he sees it that way. I believe that's what he's calling us to. We're going to fail. We're going to be at each other from time to time. How many of you never have a failure in your home? I mean, who here has never had an argument in your house since 6.30 tonight, okay? Well, if it happens in your house, guess what? It's going to happen in this family too. But I want to see a group of people begin to say, I don't care. I'm here. I'm going to be the one that stops it. I'm going to be the one that shuts the door on the flow of junk that can come out of someone's mouth. Jesus said, if somebody does wrong, Matthew 18, 15 and following, go to that person. Do not get a group of people together and say, here's what they did. Do you think I should go to them or not? He just says, go to him, be mature enough to say, brother, you know, you hurt my feelings when you said, or sister could, I don't understand what happened there. Could you explain to me why that took place? Or, or I heard some troubling news about you and I, I just wanted to come to you and I want you to know, take the mind that you won't even believe it unless it's proven to be true. And because I don't talk about this enough, I want you to know there are things that fly around in our church. Not too long ago, there were some rumors going around here, different things, not big things, you know, it wasn't big scandal, nothing like that, praise God. But there were some things going around that, for example, that someone in our church got hurt because I didn't give them the kind of care that they needed. And the corollary of that is I'm not a very caring person. I tell you, those kinds of things really hurt a pastor, especially when you thought you did everything you could or at least everything you're capable of doing with the limitations that you know you have. And those kinds of things have got to stop. We need people who will protect somebody else and not look for a way to say, well, you know, you're right. I mean, he really would be a whole lot better pastor if he was more this way or whatever the case may be. A whole lot better home group member, a whole lot better youth leader. I've been in recent situations where one person spent six months proving false charges against them because someone didn't stop the flow of crud along the way. I've been in places recently where whole churches are getting ripped up because no one knew how to stop the flow of the false rumors. If you love God and you want to worship him, then protect the unity of the body. Preserve the purity of the work. Go right to the source. If you hear something, go right to the person. You say, well, they'll just put me down. They're stronger than I am. Dear ones, listen. Look what it says now. Here's Paul. This isn't Jay. This is Paul. Verse 18. As far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. If anyone here tonight, if you know you've been talking or you've been just kind of carrying on things, I want to ask you tonight, do you feel the Holy Spirit saying to you, it's time to stop? Just get a little instant maturity right now and say, I'm not going to do that anymore. And you'll begin to be a sweet fragrance to the nostrils of God. I want to say one more thing about our elders. You know, our elders are learning what it means to preserve unity. We had a heck of a struggle last part of last year with some difficult relational things in our church. Many times I saw elders weeping because they didn't know how to resolve some of these problems we were having. We lost a few people over some of these things, to be frank. But I have a lot of appreciation for men who try to work things out. They did everything they could to reconcile, but they would not allow the backbiting and the sniping and the bickering to keep going because God loves this bride and He's entrusted this bride to the elders of this church. And their call, their duty is to present it to the best of their ability, whole and spotless before Him. I just want to appeal to you. Do your part. Every one of us can make an enormous difference if we say, I'm going to be mature. I'm going to speak the best and believe the best. And very quickly, finally, steer clear, number four, of revenge. All right? The word says here, look at it, vengeance is mine. Verse 19, I will repay. How many of you know that it's not easy to do that? I was driving up here in wonderful Wexford j