1 How the Gospel Shaped (Introduction)

The other night, we were out for dinner, and our waiter had one of those international accents, and after a while, we got talking. She started to talk about this city that she had moved to and now called home, and how it easy it was for her to fit in and begin to feel like this place was home, and as she talked about that Joy she casually mentioned how different it was to any other American city she could have moved to becuase of the way people expressed their sense of community, belonging and identity. This city we call home knows what it is to belong and to be excluded, doesn’t it? The streets we live in and walk along are full of the signs of life and belonging. Whether it is the colour of the kerb stones, the murals on the wall, or even the street signs – all around us there are the living signs of belonging.

As much as this city is a place where people can belong easily, if we are being honest, it is also a place where boundaries are as much a part of belonging as belonging itself. We easily know where we are welcome and where our welcome might be lacking. That is not merely a truth of this city; the reality is that you could go to any city in any country and find places where all are welcome and others where only some are – it is a product of our humanity, and the cultures we make. We are people made to belong and to find purpose, security, and identity in it; we just miss where we are meant to find our belonging, so we create tribes, teams, and territories to give us a sense of what we have been searching for.

We create tribes to belong, and we often do so by defining boundaries: one is welcome here because they are from the right place, while others might not be for the same reason. Our sense of belonging begins to be protected by the walls we build, and our sense of welcome becomes limited in the same way. We think of it as safety, yet it often leads us to miss out on some of the very best things that might be ours.   If we are honest, we create boundaries, and those boundaries run right through the human heart. If we were left to ourselves, we would end up in a city full of people in small corners, thinking we were happy as long as everyone else stayed in theirs. We might think it is about belonging, but such is the state of the human heart without God: it becomes about boundaries, and without God’s help, we will always drift back to them and find our safety behind them. Yet, beautifully in Paul’s letter to the Romans, we see how the Grace of God turns our natural human instinct upside down because after spending some eleven chapters explaining the Mercy of God to a young church in the most difficult and divided of cities, he now wants to teach how the life of God should flow from that mercy. Not only has Paul shown how the mercy of God affects our standing before God, but he has also begun to show how it affects our lives apart from one another, as he has pointed out how the Cross tears down the walls between Jew and Gentile, and saint and sinner. In a world that knew a lot more about tribes and boundaries than we do know Paul has been keen to teach how the mercy of God makes the church look nothing like the world in terms of how it views people and what it means to belong: “There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3:22-24).

You are all sinners, and Grace saves us all by faith. Do not think of yourself more or another less when it comes to life in the Kingdom of God and the Body of Christ. On and on this teaching of the mercy of God goes in terms of the life and witness of the church into a divided city and a higherical world, as again Paul says “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”   (Romans 10:12-13)  We are so used to this thinking in our culture and in the life of the church that we forget how radical it is. We live in the age of supposed equality, where everyone has value and access, and hierarchy is despised. We look back and forget how messed up the Roman world was, and what an awful experience it was for most who existed and thus how radical the church as a place where other people belong became.

I wonder, as we sit here in a new city, some 2,000 years ago, how radical our sense of belonging and welcome might have seemed? You see, no matter the century we are in, the city we call home, when the people of God gather, it should always be radical and different to the context we are being called to live, love and serve in. The diversity of Pentecost in terms of calling, and then the unity in worship and mission, should still be our norm today. Thus, we are left to ponder and ask what our belonging looks like today. Does it cut across our cultural boundaries as the Cross did in those days in Rome and Jerusalem, or have we simply built a more religious version of what is already normal in the place where God has called us to make known his hope? Think about it, that after eleven chapters of the majesty of Mercy and the effects it has on the life of the Church, Paul looks in the eye of the believers in Rome and writes, because of the Mercy, what they are to do:

“Therefore, in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” (Rom 12:1)

True Life, Paul insists, begins where mercy is seen and received : in a people gripped by grace, no longer building taller fences; they become a living sacrifice—a community whose very life together proclaims that the old walls have come down, a place where the Spirit is renewing, and by the life of the church brings renewal. God is building his Church and renewing it in each time and place, and one of the ways he renews our lives in the Body is by reminding us not just of the beauty of Mercy but of its effects on our lives, individually and collectively. Mercy known and lived is different from ur being a gathering of people to a community Christ is forming. Thus, more beautifully, in the section of Romans 12 that we are focusing on today, we see what Mercy looks like as God renews and sustains his churhc through their life in the Spirit and life together in every time and place. In verses 9-16, we see exactly what true and proper worship is: not the doing of things a certain way, nor the doing of things in a certain place, nor even that we adorn when we are worshipping. Rather, true and proper worship is our life in God, evidenced by how we love and serve the community God has called us to be a part of.

Thus,  in the verses that follow, Paul paints the concrete shape of that living sacrifice: genuine love, holy hatred of evil, zealous service, persevering prayer, radical hospitality, blessing for enemies, shared tears and shared joy, humility that stoops lower than the lowly – all because Christ has loved us. The challenge for us, and for all Christians and churches, is that our life in the Spirit together should look like this, whether we are a church of 10, 100, or 1000! Thus, as we seek to be a church that grows in mission and is renewed in our life together, we are to grasp that in our context: renewal simply means the mercy we have received becoming incarnation and real in our life and service together – mercy becomes the means of life in this ordinary church, and Paul helps us to see so beautifully what life as true and proper worship in this kingdom ethic looks like.

2 A Living Sacrifice Loves Genuinely  (Romans 12:9–10)

Paul has been teaching in a similar vein to the the truths that he was teaching in his letter to Corinth that we look at last week about life in the Kingdom as one body in where each member belongs to the other and use our different gifts according to the Grace that God has given to each of us (12:6), so important that theese gifts are that in love Paul calls the church to use the gifts that: If service then service, if encouragement then encouragement, and if leadership then lead like Jesus, because then “God’s presence will be evident in everything through Jesus.”  Thus, Paul encourages the church in Rome the same way he encouraged the church in Corinth – to not just know their faith, but to grow in their faith as they live it, to be renewed. Now the call to renew witness and faithful living becomes more real, more ordinary as Paul, in a way, gives some real-life examples and cautions about our life in the Spirit and our witness to Christ. The first of which is a challenge to consider their love.

2.1 Love Without Hypocrisy

Specifically, the church is being challenged to consider its Agape love, which is the love we show that mirrors the love God has shown each of us by faith in Christ. When we speak of love, we can be talking about anything from food to travel to people; the same word is used so much that it can lose so much of its meaning. The love Paul is talking about here is something far more profound, far deeper; it is the love that took Christ to the Cross. Thus, Paul challenges the church to ensure their cross-centric love is genuine, their selfless love is real in every way, and that it models Jesus. The Church might have gifts that God has given by Grace to be used for his glory and our good, yet none of it will matter if the love we live out does not model the love we have received, then it may be that we do not yet know the love of God. Think about it, as Paul teaches about the use of the gifts in the life of the church as he moves onto love, he is not talking about something additional, or a new gift that only some might have; rather, he is talking about the heart that might motivate our usage of the gifts and things God has given us. And in our heart we must make sure our love is genuine, sincere, without hypocrisy, sincere and active, not pretend. The love we know shapes everything; that is why Jesus taught the disciples that the world will know their love of him by how they love one another, because in difficult times, they will remember the example of the Cross. We can act in a loving way, but if it cloaks a different heart, then the right thing can be done with the wrong heart. Not only must we be sure of the love we are living by the mercy of God; in love, we must reject the things God rejects while holding that which is beautiful.

2.2 Hate Evil, Cling to Good

Paul moves from the depths of the heart to the choices our hearts might influence us to make as he points to two sides of the same coin. As by the Spirit we seek to be intentional in our Kingdom call and role in the Body by using our gifts to build up the church and live out our Kingdom call to witness to the life of Christ, as we choose to intentional reject the heart of the world – pretend love – and in so move forward in love that models the Cross by the Spirit’s work in us – real – love Paul now lifts the lesson from the heart to the mind. Because of the Mercy of God in our lives and our call to sacrificial living, that which is true worship, we are shaped to see the world in a different way; we begin to reveal that which ever comes in front of us that is not from God. Quite literally, hate evil here means “a strong feeling of revulsion.” What is evil? That which is not from God opposes the work of God in the world, affects the life of Christ in the world, or brings dishonour to the name of God – sin. Thus, like the wise man of Psalm one who avoids mockers, sinners, and fools and then delights in the good things, while we abhor evil, we cling to that which is good. Literally, we hold tightly to the good things God has given us in life to know him and make him known. What are these good things? His Word, His Church, His presence, and all the common graces in the world around us.

2.3 Family Affection (The example of Love and Honour)

If we are our love is genuine, and are chose wise in avoidance of wrong and clinging to God then as we walk with the Spirit of God, then as we walk we are mindful of how we are walking with those God has called us to walk with – the Body of Christ in which we serve; then we do what the NLT phrases for verse 9  we “really love them” and we do this with what verse 10 calls “genuine affection.” Interestingly, what Paul employs here in terms of language for love is not Agape but philostorgos, which we could simply call brotherly love or the love a happy family would show to each other. The CSB puts it beautifully as “Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honouring one another.” Gospel love is selfless, so selfless that we care deeply for those around us and delight when they receive honour and praise. JB Philips calls it “real warm affection for one another as between brothers, and a willingness to let the other man have the credit.” It is simply the outwork of Christ’s imperative to love others as God has loved us and to show the world that we are his disciples by how we love the people he has called us to serve in the church. The greatest witness to Christ in the world is our example of love; if our heart rejoices at the success of others in the church, or in their difference of approach then our hearts shows the love of God; and if when other’s are using the gifts God has given them for his Kingdom and being praised and we think of ourselves, then perhaps we need to again examine our hearts and the love we are showing by the love we know at the cross.

3 A Living Sacrifice Serves Faithfully (Romans 12:11–13)

The danger with our approach to the Christian faith in today’s world is that we think about it as something simple to be believed that might affect how we live if we give time to it – that is far too limited. The gospel is good news because it is true and because it affects everything; it is truth that not only shapes how we think, but also changes our moral compass – it is truth that draws us into something beautiful and beyond us, and as it draws us in, it transforms us and the world around us through us. The gospel is different to any other truth in the world because it draws us into something eternal, something beyond this world – the life of the triune God at work in this world as the Cross is made real in us and through us by the reality of pentcsot each day where God has called us to serve in the ordinary. In our new reality of participation because of the Cross, we live out the way of the Cross as living sacrifices and as proper worship and witness. We live out the heart of love that God has for us, and we love one another in the body of Christ by how we use our gifts and honour those God has called us to serve as part of our witness. Participation in the life of God and the witness of God in the world mean loving well, but they also mean protecting the heart God has given us and the gifts we use.

3.1 Don’t Let Your Zeal Flag

It is mercy that brings us into this life with God; it is grace by the Spirit that sustains this life in the ordinary as we seek to live for God and make him known. That is what part of what Paul means as he challenges the Church in Rome to fuel their zeal. To never be lacking in zeal, as the NIV puts it, simply means to keep on going in the things of faith, being mindful of the effect it might have on us. Eugene Peterson says, “Don’t burn out; keep yourself alert and aflame for God. This is about self care for the sake of the Gospel in the work of God, as we use our gifts we make sure that we don’t loose sight of the one we are using them for and our relationship with him; that is why I love how the NLT puts it here as it challenges practically that we “never grow lazy but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically. If we are living well and right in relationship with God, then using our gifts, serving, loving and walking with him won’t drain us – rather it will fuel the fire of our faith. If we find ourselves tired and weary, then perhaps we need to come back to the one whose yoke is easy and burden is light.

3.2 Serve the Lord, Not the Institution

It is painfully easy to let ministry shrink to the size of the system that pays the bills, or the rota that needs filling, or the role we end up fulfilling in church. Yet Paul’s reminder here is simple that we can pass over us – priority:  our labour is first and last an act of worship. As he put it bluntly – “serve the Lord” (v.11). Life gets busy, as we are constantly bombarded with requests and demands: emails, meetings, forms and the wider life of the church and our own pressures. Yet, even amid the mess of busyness we must lift our eyes and remember who sustains us in this life of faith by the Holy Spirit: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Col 3:23). Paul is reminding us where we find both our motive and measurement alike: Christ: our worth is not denied by the institution we serve in or the job we might have; In our audience of one; faithfulness, not visibility, is the metric. So we give our best not by doing better but by submitting more to the will of God and the power of the Spirit, and by rejecting the idolatry of outcome that the world so often promotes: as we trust in the One who sees in secret, will one day say, “Well done.”

3.3 Hope, Suffering, Prayer

Paul sticks three imperatives together:rejoice, be patient, persevere (v.12) because Christian endurance is like a string being twined together – each strand strengthening the others. Hope is that bright thread, the settled assurance that tomorrow is already secured by resurrection promise and in God, there is nothing the world can do to us to take from us that which Christ has won. Yet,  hope grows best in the soil of trouble; as tested life proves the value of what it hopes in – we learn patience in affliction, discovering with the saints that “suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Rom 5:3-4). Prayer, then, is the running stitch that keeps the fabric from fraying, the string bound that holds everything together; not prayer said and shot off in bullet points; the sense of bullet-point petitions fired off quickly, but as the slow and steady abiding of our life in God that drips trust into weary hearts. Disciples and a church that prays its pain and praises because its future is secure will not be broken by the enemy as we walk with God. Rather, we will be sustained in our prophetic witness to a watching city that there is a joy deeper than circumstance because pain may come in the night, but we know that joy comes with the morning.

3.4 Hospitality as Mission

If the gospel has dismantled our old boundary walls that we naturally want to put it; then hospitality is the means of Grace by which we keep the walls down and live the new reality now; in a world fearful of the other we: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb 13:2). In Paul’s day that meant opening one’s home and perhaps even one’s kitchen to those who where travelling or found themselves lacking: in ours it still looks suspiciously like spare chairs round an ordinary table, warm food, unhurried attention, and the willingness to be inconvenienced for those God might bring to with us. It means opening up our lives and the lives of the church, no matter who the person is. Why? Because God has been kind to us, the overflow is to show others what we have received. nThus,  notice the verb: we are to “pursue” or “seek out” hospitality (v.13); chasing it with the same energy the world chases status, because every meal shared and every welcome offered, even lift lift given across town preaches a sermon: the Father’s house has space, the Son’s cross has purchased the welcome, and the Spirit is still setting extra places at our table for the sinner God is calling home.

4  A Living Sacrifice Walks Humbly (Romans 12:14–16)

Paul now moves from how we relate to those we love in the church to how we respond to those who oppose us, perhaps the hardest section of this passage to process and think through. Our default is towards selfishness, where the Kingdom calls for Selflessness.   It is one thing to show honour to those who honour us, to care for those who care for us, and to love those who love us. It is quite another thing to bless those who make life difficult, to pray for those who revile us, and to love those who seem to choose hate at every turn.

4.1 Bless, Don’t Retaliate

Yet that is the example of the Cross: in love, Jesus died for the enemies of God, and that is why Paul is uncompromising here: “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.”  Paul is simply calling the church back to the Cross again and again because he knows that our most natural response is retaliation, to react no matter what. We want to defend ourselves, justify ourselves, and if we are honest, to make others feel what we have felt in pain because of what they have done. Yet the gospel always calls us to something better; because the gospel reminds us what Christ has done for us on the cross. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us, or to put it another way, while we were enemies, God reconciled us to himself through the cross. That is our example, and so it becomes our means of living in the Spirit. What is a good example? Well, think about the scene of Jesus at the Cross as it unfolded: as he hung there, being mocked and rejected, what was it he prayed? “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Thus, this call to lie a “living sacrifice” living is a heart so captivated by the mercy of God that they are able to show mercy even when it costs them because in the Spirit we know Christ has already paid the Ultimate cost. No matter where we are, be it living misisonally in a divided city, trying to witness in difficult families, or struggling to know how to love within a strained church. Never mind the added complexity of the ordinary conflicts of life. When we live well in the Spirit, it is one of the clearest marks that Christ is at work in us as we show the Grace we have received when the world might choose a different path.

4.2 Rejoice and Weep

One of the great dangers of modern life is that we can become increasingly disconnected from one another while remaining constantly connected. We know what is happening in people’s lives through social media, messages, and photographs, yet we often never truly enter into their joys or sorrows. Paul presents such a  radically different vision of life together when he writes: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” It is not about being polite; it is about participating in one another’s lives. It means that when God blesses a brother or sister, our first response is not envy but gratitude. We celebrate their success, growth, answered prayers, and joy because we recognise that we are one body. Equally, when suffering comes, we do not stand at a distance offering clichés and platitudes. We draw near. We sit with people in their grief. We carry burdens that are not our own. We enter their pain because Christ first entered ours. Paul told the Corinthians that “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it” (1 Cor 12:26), and that is exactly what he is describing here, the truth that a church becomes more than a crowd when people genuinely know one another well enough to share tears and celebrations together – to do life. It is in these moments that the love of Christ becomes visible and tangible, not merely preached from a pulpit but experienced through the life of his people.

4.3 Harmony, Humility, and the Lowly

Paul concludes this section by turning to the attitude that makes all of this possible. “Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.” Pride is one of the great destroyers of Christian community because pride always seeks to elevate the self and diminish others. :Pride asks what I can gain, what recognition I deserve, how my preferences can be protected, and why my opinion should carry greater weight. Yet the gospel consistently moves in the opposite direction. The Lord Jesus Christ, though equal with the Father, “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil 2:7). He moved towards the outsider, the sinner, the leper, the widow, the tax collector, and the forgotten. He did not merely tolerate the lowly; he gladly associated with them. That is why Paul challenges the church to cultivate the same mind. The measure of spiritual maturity is not how important people think we are, but how willing we are to serve those from whom we have nothing to gain. In every generation, the church faces the temptation to value status, influence, education, wealth, and position. Yet the Kingdom of God has always operated differently; This is the reality of the Gospel, that before the Cross, the ground is level for all who approach. It is the same mercy that saves us all! Therefore, unity or harmony or whatever way you want to put it grows where humility is present, and humility grows where people remember that every good thing they possess has first been received by grace through what Christ has done and is sustained by the Spirit at work in us.

5 The Gospel Lived  (Conclusion)

Romans 12 is one of my favourite passages of scripture, and this section is one of my favourites within the whole of scripture because of what it teaches about life in the Kingdom, because of the King. As we come to the end of this section, there is one key thing to remember: Paul is teaching about life here, life not in our own strength but because the Spirit came at Pentecost: this is not about moral improvement, doing better on our own strength as we try to keep a list of commands we have been given. Behind every command stands Jesus Christ himself, and the life that flows from our life with him. Think about it: His love was genuine; His service was faithful; His humility was an example of humility; He was the good one who hated evil and clung to what was good so that we could know good; He turned the other cheek to bless those who cursed him; He welcomed the outsider and associated with the sinful, downcast, and lowly. Indeed, was he not the true living sacrifice who offered himself completely to the Father for our salvation? Thus, in every sense and every word and every virtue, Romans 12 is first seen perfectly in Christ.

That is why Paul begins this whole section with those crucial words, “in view of God’s mercy.” The Christian life is never about earning grace and mercy – we cannot – it is life that flows from, and responds because of Grace. We do not live well so that God will accept us; we live because he has already loved us and shown us that love in Christ. Our living sacrificially is because he became the sacrifice by which we know life. Thus, our life flows from what he has done for us at the Cross: We do not serve to secure our place in his family; we are already in it! The mercy we have received becomes the mercy we extend in the ordinary and normal places the spirit moves us through. Ordinarily, we make known the grace shown to us through simple deeds of faith and obedience. Our life in God is never about improving; it is about delighting: the more deeply we delight in the gospel, the more naturally the life of the gospel begins to take shape within us as the Spirit works in us to make us like Christ and, through us, to make Christ known.

Thus, we have found ourselves back at the beginning, perhaps wondering what renewal actually looks like at the individual and community levels. Individually, it means more of Christ in us and through us by His Spirit and in His Grace. Communally, it can be harder to define, and our default is to think in terms of metrics we can measure; renewal may mean fuller pews, new ministries, and people coming to faith (all things we should continue to pray for). Yet Romans 12 reminds us that renewal begins much more simply: it begins when the mercy of God becomes visible in the life of his people. It begins when genuine love replaces pretence; faithful service replaces self-interest; and hospitality replaces suspicion – it begins when the life of the Spirit is made known in us and through how we love and serve one another. Let that be where everything lands: Long before renewal is seen in numbers, programmes, or buildings, it is seen in ordinary Christians whose life together proclaims that Jesus Christ is alive, his mercy is real, and his kingdom is breaking into the world around us.