“Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Take the lead in honoring one another.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Hearing that we are to be following Jesus and mimicking His character is one thing. Having an actual set of guidelines to help us know where the lines on that effort are so that we may live comfortably within them is another. We need both if we are going to get it right. Thankfully, in the second half of Romans 12, the apostle Paul gives us just such a list. We started out our walk through this list last week. I had initially planned to tackle the first four verses covering the first eleven of the commands Paul gives, but as I started writing, there was a lot to say about just the first verse, so we stopped with that. My plan as I’m sitting down this morning is to get through verse 12, but as my Wednesday night Bible study group knows, sometimes we don’t get as far as we planned. So, let’s talk specifics on following Jesus, and see how far we get.

Paul’s next command is to “love one another deeply as brothers and sisters.” This is an interesting command at first read because it seems to contradict Proverbs 18:24 where Solomon says, “There is a friend who is closer than a brother.” So, is Paul calling us here to some kind of lesser love? Not at all. These two ideas are not contradictory in the least. The only person who is going to see one there is someone who is actively looking for things that might be contradictory as a post hoc justification for their previously decided upon rejection of the faith.

Paul wrote this into a culture where family connections were incredibly significant. You didn’t cross blood. You may not always like your family, but you were committed to your family no matter what. Blood is thicker than water, as the saying goes. Yes, we are occasionally blessed with friends who are exceptionally close (I have one of these), but at the end of the day, you are committed to family.

Well, as followers of Jesus, and especially as followers of Jesus who are connected to one another as members of the same church, we are brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus and children of God the Father. That is a family connection that will last longer even than our connection to our blood relations. Our brothers and sisters in the Lord will be our brothers and sisters in the Lord for all eternity. And not just in our particular church. The family of God encompasses the whole globe. It includes every single person who follows Jesus throughout the world.

If the church is going to work like God designed it to work, we’ve got to love one another deeply as brothers and sisters. Our commitment to seeing one another moved intentionally in the direction of Jesus should run deep. Mere petty squabbles over differences in opinion shouldn’t get in the way of that. Ever.

One way we can accomplish this is to “take the lead in honoring one another.” This next command was given in the context of an honor-shame culture. Our culture today is a right-wrong culture. The difference is that our decision matrix for knowing whether or not something is okay to do operates on the question of whether it is right or wrong. Yes, there are numerous possible standards for determining the answer to that question, but whether our standard happens to be, we use that as our determining factor. In Paul’s day, the primary question in determining whether or not something was okay to do was if it was going to bring honor or shame to yourself or your family. Whereas we are comfortable doing something when we can justify it as right on the basis of some standard, they knew something was good to do if it was going to bring honor. Shame was to be avoided at all costs.

Telling believers in the context of the church to take the lead in honoring one another is simply another way of framing Jesus’ command to do to others what you would have them do to you. The point in both cases is that our doing good for one another shouldn’t be passive. It shouldn’t be reactive. We shouldn’t sit back and wait for other people to do good to us. We should actively look for ways we can do good to and for them. We are to be constantly thinking about what would be helpful or kind or generous or thoughtful to do for a fellow member of the body, and then following through on that.

This doesn’t mean we completely ignore our own needs and the things that have to be done in order to make our own lives work. If we stop taking care of ourselves to the point that we become a burden or a drain on others, that’s a problem. But the thought process of serving and blessing others should always be operating in the background.

There’s an assumption built in here that we dare not miss. If we are going to be taking the lead in honoring one another, we have to know one another. We have to be sufficiently invested in the lives of the fellow members of the body of Christ that we have some kind of an idea of what would honor them. This means getting out of our own little box and visiting the boxes of other church members. It means taking an active interest in the lives of the people around us rather than being so focused on our own lives that we never look up.

There’s a balance here that we must walk. We have to take care of our lives and not live in dependency on others, but we have to be sufficiently invested in the lives of others that we can be an active blessing to them. When we do this for them and they do this for us, the result is a community of blessing and showing honor where everyone is made to feel valued and loved by everyone else. That sounds like the kind of community I want to be a part of.

It’s a community in which everyone knows they are cherished and needed. Everyone is constantly finding themselves blessed by little surprises along the way because everyone is focused on blessing others. The petty squabbles that so often come when we are all fixated on our own wants and desires, and making sure things are suited to our tastes as our first priority will all but disappear in this kind of a community. These kinds of churches will be incredibly guest friendly, because this blessing spirit will naturally spill over onto everyone who walks in the doors (metaphorically or actually).

If our knowing one another is an assumption baked into the cake here, there is an even more fundamental assumption than that serving as the foundation point for this command. We have to be connected to a church. If you are a follower of Jesus, you need to be part of a church. You can’t one another anyone unless you have other one anothers around you to do it with. Paul’s instructions here are given to believers in the context of the church. You can’t love other followers of Jesus and take the lead in showing honor to them nearly as well apart from the church as you can from within it. You need to be in a church. If you are going to follow Jesus well, an active membership in a local church is essential. Then you can put these two commands into practice all the time.

Well, we didn’t make it. Just one verse again. We’ll take another step forward tomorrow. Until then…