Romans 12.9-21 All Age Talk

Romans 12.9-21 (All Age)

Introduction

• Just a list of right and wrong ways to behave?
• A powerful and vital lesson in how to live in relationship to other people – especially those we may regard as enemies. The key word is love and it all flows from God’s abundant and merciful love for all people (11.36-12.1).
• In this short talk I want to concentrate on the first and last verses of the passage;

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. (12.9)
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (12.21)

Sincere Love

Who can explain what “sincere” means? (Hint: use your spanish to work it out. Sin cera = without wax.) What’s that got to do with love? Here’s a vase of ours which has been accidentally knocked over and broken a few times. It looks pretty good and it is fine to use because Billie has repaired it with superglue. But dishonest Roman merchants used to repair their cracked vases with coloured wax and then sell them as new. Why was that wrong? (…) How could it be detected? (Hint: what happens to wax when it gets hot?)

So when our Bible tells us that love should be sincere, it means it should be without wax, without pretence, without a mask. Let me give a few examples and I want you to use your “wax detectors” (kids have rattles and bells) to spot whether the love is sincere or not …

• We tell someone we will pray for them but we don’t actually do it.
• We smile when someone is speaking to us, but without really listening.
• We visit a sick friend in hospital instead of going to watch our favourite football team.
• We give some food and clothing to a needy family without saying who they are from.
• We say nice things about someone when we are with them, but when they have gone we say bad things about them.
• We tell someone to call us any time, but when their number comes up on our phone, we don’t answer.

All these examples, and the others we heard in our Bible reading show that love is not just about what we say, but what we do.

Who is Lovable?

There are lots of reasons why we don’t always find it easy to love sincerely. We are so busy, self-centred and insecure for example. We also come across the problem that people are not always lovable. In fact people can be nasty and act so badly towards us that they deserve to be hated instead of loved. But notice what the Bible says: Hate what is evil (not WHO is evil); cling to what is good (12.9).

So we are to hate the evil and bad things people do but we are not to reject or hate people, who are all made by God in God’s image. In fact we are to cling to people, as God does. Because God’s mission is to rid the world of evil, not of “evil people”. The way God destroys his enemies is by turning them into friends, as we will see.

Vengeance and burning coals

This leads us into the most difficult and misunderstood part of the reading. We are challenged to bless the people who persecute us, to hold back from taking revenge on bad people but to leave them for God to sort out in his wrath. God is (ominously) quoted as saying: It is mine to avenge; I will repay (Deut. 32.35). Some people think this is like when someone trips you up and steals your bag, and you don’t chase after them because you know your big brother or your Dad is going to find them and beat them up later.

The problem with this is that it makes God somebody who is inconsistent; who does not treat people the way he tells us to treat people. It is very hard to respect and obey a parent who is like this (examples … "don’t laze around in front of TV eating chocolate" … "don’t push in front of people in queues"). God’s love for “bad” people would be fake rather than sincere.

Our love for certain people would also be fake, just giving them a false sense of security. We would be meeting our enemy’s hunger and thirst temporarily, knowing that they were going to have burning coals poured onto their heads later.

But God in fact loves all his creatures with a genuine, sincere love. The burning coals of kindness are to shame our enemy into changing. They are like a furnace which burns away the impurities from metal – hating what is bad and clinging to what is good (b.t.w. John Wesley interpreted this verse like this).

Perhaps you can remember a time when you said something hurtful to someone and they responded with kind words which made you blush, your face burning with shame! Maybe that experience changed you, “burning away” something bad from your character.

When the Heat is on

For a perfect example of God’s love in action we can look at Jesus, who put it into action sincerely, consistently and without any pretence or hidden agenda. It is not easy to love people as they express their hatred of you, spit at you, nail you to a cross. But Jesus kept loving them to the end, hating the evil but loving the people, all of them.

And what kept him going was not the thought of the revenge he would take on them later, it was the knowledge that they would all be transformed in the end by God’s perfect love.

There is a Greek myth in which Icarus flies too near the sun and the wax holding his wings together melts. In a similar way, the nearer we get to Jesus, the more the wax in our lives – all the pretence and fear and selfishness – will be melted away, leaving only a pure love for God and for all people.

What can you do this week to show sincere love to others?