“Let love be without hypocrisy. Detest evil; cling to what is good.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What does it look like to follow Jesus? It looks like living as if He were Lord. Okay, but what does that look like? We want details. We want specifics. We want to know what kinds of things we should be doing on a day-to-day basis. Thankfully, Paul’s letter to the believers in first century Rome, and especially chapter 12, is a thing. Starting here in Romans 12:9, and running through the rest of the chapter, Paul gives us a bullet list of characteristics that should define the lifestyle of a follower of Jesus. All told, there are 25 commands here. Let’s start walking through them, one at a time.

“Let love be without hypocrisy.” Understanding this means understanding what love is in the first place. We’ve talked about that before. Love is an intentional decision to see someone else become more fully who God designed them to be. Hypocrisy, on the other hand, is claiming or proclaiming moral standards that you do not actually believe in or practice in your own life. It is calling or holding others to a standard you have not adopted for yourself.

What Paul is calling us to here right out of the gate, is that our love for one another must be sincere. We must not love without actually loving. If you have professed to love another person, then you had better be working intentionally to see them become more fully who God designed them in Christ to be. If you are pushing them merely in the direction you think they should go, or if you aren’t really encouraging them in any particular direction at all, but are rather just letting them find their own path, you aren’t actually loving them according to a biblical understanding of love. Don’t do that. And, per the command and example of Jesus, we are to be loving everybody.

So, does this mean we should be busybodies, sticking our noses in everyone else’s business to make sure they are being like Jesus in all they do? No, that won’t be particularly well received by anyone. For most of the people around us, moving them in the direction of Jesus is something we will do very informally and mostly by our example of kindness to them. There are some people, though, to whose lives we have sufficient access that we can be active in our calling and leading toward Jesus. It takes wisdom to know who goes into what category, but doing nothing is not an option. Jesus didn’t call us to live and let live. He called us to love. That’s different. If we are going to proclaim ourselves to be loving, then we’ve got to actually do it.

“Detest evil; cling to what is good.” The opposite of love is not hatred, but apathy. As followers of Jesus, we are not to eliminate all hatred from our lives as the culture around us calls us to do. Not being a “hater” is a high cultural value, but it’s not a biblical value. Our culture thinks about hatred only in emotional terms. To not be a “hater” is simply to not have negative emotions toward another person or idea. Throughout the Scriptures, the word hatred is rarely, if ever, used in primarily emotional terms. Rather, hatred is a thoroughgoing rejection of another person or idea. There could be an emotional element in that rejection, but there doesn’t have to be.

The truth for followers of Jesus is that there are some things we should reject entirely. That is, there are some things we should hate. Even, though, borrowing on the cultural definition of hatred for the moment, there are some things toward which we should have negative emotions. Our hatred should not be directed. There will be times when another person has hurt us to a sufficient degree that we about can’t help but to have negative emotions toward them. Our call in Christ, though, is to love and forgive these people.

This doesn’t mean we excuse without consequence their actions, or needlessly put ourselves in the position of being hurt again by the same person doing the same thing. We forgive – that is, we release another person from the debt they owe us because of an offense they’ve dealt us – because that’s what God in Christ has done for us. Jesus paid their debt just as much as He paid our debt, and God will settle all accounts justly in the end. If there are unpaid accounts when judgment comes, God will take care of that. We don’t have to carry that burden. In fact, we are not to carry that burden. Their offense was primarily against God, not us. We can trust Him to resolve things in the right way.

But this forgiveness doesn’t mean we automatically extend trust. It does not mean we don’t put in place wise, sometimes strong boundaries and other measures designed to protect us against future offense. These boundaries may include cutting off all relational ties to the person when there is no acknowledgment of offense or move toward repentance on their end of things. We’ve released them from their debt to us, but without repentance or at least an acknowledgment of fault, reconciliation may remain impossible.

So, we love people, but people aren’t neutral actors. They don’t just do what they do randomly and without cause. We are motivated, each of us, by the ideas we embrace. What we believe determines what we do. And not all beliefs are equally good. Not all ideas are equally worth embracing. Some ideas are bad. All ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. Those victims are both the ones who are impacted by the actions of the ones who have been poisoned by bad ideas, but also the ones holding those bad ideas and being poisoned by them. To put things even more starkly here, there are some ideas and accompanying behaviors that are evil. They are disconnected entirely from God and His character and are thus devoid of goodness. We should absolutely feel strong emotions – strongly negative emotions – for these ideas. We should detest evil.

If we don’t detest what is evil, we will allow for its flourishing if nowhere else than in our own hearts. If very many people decline to detest what is evil, we will collectively allow it to flourish in our culture. Our culture will quickly be consumed by it. That won’t be good for anyone. Evil unleashed only begets more evil.

But how do we detest and oppose evil without succumbing to evil ourselves? When we have an enemy who is willing to go low; who will lie and cheat and steal and undermine our efforts to hate without letting go of love at every opportunity, how do we keep from finally giving in and using the methods of evil to stop its advance (at which point evil wins anyway)? The next part of this command gives us the key. We are to detest evil while clinging to what is good.

As followers of Jesus, we must never let go of what is good. And what is good? Loving one another after the pattern of Jesus’ love for us. Showing kindness to everyone around us. Being gracious and generous with our friends and foes alike. Having compassion for and showing mercy to those who are in the grip of evil both in its impact on their lives and in how it is causing them to impact the lives of the people around them. What is good is inviting everyone into God’s kingdom through a relationship with Jesus which will unleash the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives who will work in, with, and through them to bring their character more in line with the character of the God in whose kingdom they now reside. He will help them embrace better ideas which will lead to better outcomes both for them and for the people around them.

In our efforts to oppose and detest and utterly reject evil, the only path that will lead us to successful outcomes will be the path of clinging to what is good; of absolutely refusing to be anything other than generous and kind and patient and compassionate and humble and self-controlled and loving in our interactions with other people. They may still respond from out of the evil that has a grip on their own hearts, but we must always recognize this for what it is. It is a broken response prompted by broken ideas. If we respond in kind rather than with kindness, we will only acknowledge that what is good is powerless before what is evil. We will demonstrate the weakness of good in the face of evil. When we do that, evil wins.

We must cling to what is good. And we can do that because of what the various authors of the Scriptures including Jesus Himself promised us would be the ultimate outcome of our efforts. When we cling to what is good, stubbornly insisting that we will live and move only from within the boundaries of the kingdom of God, then when the end finally arrives – for there is an end that is coming – we will indeed find ourselves living and moving in God’s kingdom. And here’s the thing about God’s kingdom: it alone is eternal. Everything else in this world, all the other ideas and their outcomes, will be wiped away. All those who have chosen to plant themselves in the kingdom of this world will be wiped away then as well. It will only be those who are standing in God’s kingdom who will remain. They will go on to enjoy the eternal life of His eternal kingdom.

When we cling to what is good, it may be that we will face a cost for our decision in this life. That cost may be fairly small, or it may be quite large, but it is a cost that will be worth paying because the God in whose kingdom we stand will more than compensate us for our troubles in this life. As Paul himself wrote back in Romans 8:18: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.”

What is coming is better than what is. There’s not even a comparison. And when we cling to what is good, rooting our lives in what is coming rather than in what is, we can be sure we will receive it when the time for its coming arrives. Even if doing that means giving up our lives here and now, in Christ, we are promised new bodies in that eternal kingdom when it comes. As Paul also wrote back in Romans 8:10-11: “Now if Christ is in you, the boy is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.”

Because of that, we can cling to what is good. We can detest what is evil. What is evil is actively keeping people from what is good. We should hate it all the while loving the people who are being victimized by it. And we can love truly and deeply without any hypocrisy since our God is committed to our good even when we aren’t committed to His. When we do this, we will indeed be dwelling in the kingdom of God where we will enjoy the benefits that come by no other means as well as inviting others by our good example to dwell in it with us. We will be enjoying the redemptive work of Christ and sharing it with others. That’s the whole purpose of our lives in Christ. That’s a good place to be.

Well, I had planned to get a lot further than this, but that’ll have to be enough for today. Next week we’ll keep rolling down this path.