Upside Down

 “Upside Down” // Romans 12:9

Sunday, January 6, 2013 @ Jericho Ridge Community Church

Series: Upside Down: Living the Transformed Life”

Good morning everyone!  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and it’s so good to have you with us today as we begin a brand new year and a new teaching series. Now, how many of you made New Year’s resolutions?  Not many.  I see you are a smart bunch.  The challenge with resolutions is that we set out to marginally improve an area of our lives.  We tweak this routine or make some minor or even some major adjustments.  Which are not inappropriate.  But here’s the problem – not with resolutions, but with that strategy as a whole.  I don’t know about you, but if I only get around to changing one thing maybe two in my life per year and only by a little bit, I’m never going to experience genuine and deep transformation. I am never going to live the life that God wants for me.  A life that if full and rich and meaningful.  A life that brings God, those around me and myself a deep sense of satisfaction and purpose because it is modeled after Jesus.  So today we’re going to begin a teaching series in Romans 12 where we'll discuss what it might take to see not just one or two parts of your life, but your whole character and your whole world turned upside down in 2013.     

Now, the book of Romans is bit of a complex beast.  The first 11 chapters deal mainly with doctrine.  What Christians believe, why they believe it, why it’s important.  But, I want to suggest to you that people seldom come to faith by intellectual persuasion alone.  In my experience, people not only need to hear about what followers of Jesus believe, they need to see followers of Jesus in action.  They need to observe they ways in which we live out our lives NOT just hear propositional truths, as foundational as those are.  And this isn’t strictly a 21^st century phenomenon.  It has always been so.  The earliest Christians in the first century were noted for the ways in which they helped the lepers, widows and orphans.  Here at Jericho Ridge, I want us to be known not as people who have all our theological ducks in a row, but as our mission statement reflects, we aspire to be a loving and listening people, extending God’s hope and reconciliation to our community in all of life, all of the time.  We want to be known for our work with the 18% of the population in Guatemala who are disabled and whose lives can be totally changed by $115 wheelchair.  We want to be known as those who jump in when the Kettle Campaign needs volunteers so that they hungry and homeless community here in Langley receives the dignity they deserve.  This is why we are sending H&K this spring to a minority and oppressed people group in a remote region in Asia for long term work and service.  This is why our family and others from Jericho are going to Tanzania this summer to work with orphans and who suffer extreme discrimination in their society.  All of these things are a part of our mission because we witness with our lives.  Lives that look visibly different.  Lives that are upside down in many ways from the culturally prevalent system of organizing your comfy suburban existence.  Ninetieth century preacher Matthew Henry says it this way “we mistake our religion if we look on it only as a system of notions… No, it is a practical religion… designed not only to inform our judgment, but to reform our hearts and lives.” 

That is what this teaching series in Romans 12 will be all about.  Helping each of us work out very practical and measurable ways in which our faith is transforming and reforming and turning our lives upside down.  We’ll be walking verse by verse through Romans 12:9-21 because it’s here that we see very specific and radical examples of what living the transformed life looks like.  As we enter 2013, the challenge I want to put out to you is that if you say you are genuinely committed to following God in the way of Jesus, PROVE IT by your actions not just your words or the box you check on the census form.  Let’s pray together as we open up God’s Word today.

I’m going to read the entirety of our series text, Romans 12:9-22, to set the tone for our times together.  [3 slides].  I’ll be reading from the New Living  

One of the things you might notice in this text is that it seems a bit scatter-shot.  It’s almost like it’s a random series of instructions.  Which isn’t too far off the mark.  As we are going to do each week, I want to focus our attention and discussion today on a smaller section.  Today we’ll look at that first verse of this section which functions almost like a header.  Romans 12:9 seems, at first glance, deceptively simplistic: “Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good”.

The challenge that I find, however, is that LOVE can be a very vague idea to define.  And so in this series, we are going to attempt to spell it out for each of us – this is how you know if you are loving someone, which would be a strong indicator of your faith in action.  Just this past week, I was finishing off our Bible Reading Plan for 2012, and I was reading in I John 3:18 where is says so clearly “let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions. 19 Our actions will show that we belong to the truth”.  The proof really is in the pudding, friends.  You can’t just say that you love someone or something but not demonstrate it.  You can’t love hockey but not own any Canucks merchandise or never watch a game.  You can’t say you love photography but never take any pictures!

This is what Romans 12:9 begins with.  A very simple statement: there’s two types of Christian love.  Imitation love, which is all talk with no actions to back it up, or sincere and deep and genuine love.  And in our world today, imitation won’t cut it.  “Love must be sincere.” The verse says…  Without hypocrisy.  Without dissimilation.  No faking or imitations or cheap knock offs allowed.  A few years ago, I was in need of a winter jacket and a good friend was heading to China.  So he asked me if I needed anything and I said yes, please pick me up a North Face coat while you’re there.  I’ve heard you can get them pretty cheap.  So back he came with my North Face jacket and I was all excited.  Until after about a month, the zipper stopped working.  Then I began to notice that it wasn’t really as wind repellant or water resistant as I had known North Face to be.  I asked if he got it at the North face factory and he said “oh no, I didn’t have time to get there so I just picked it up in one of the sprawling street markets in Beijing.”  You know what that means… My “North Face” coat was a cheap knock off.  It wasn’t the real deal – and though I could fool people from a distance, if you get up close and have a look at this, you’ll see right away that it’s a poor substitute for the real thing. 

That’s what this first of three phrases is driving at: If you say that you are a follower of Jesus, if you tell me that you are fully devoted to Him, then your love for other people had better not be a cheap knock off.  It had better be the real thing.  Don’t pretend.  Don’t play at this…  Either your life is being turned upside down so that you possess increasing measures of genuine love for others or it isn’t.  Let me tell you, I have lots of room for growth in this area of my life.  There are people who I find challenging to love, and I’m going to guess you might have some of those people in your life as well…  You may just have spent Christmas holidays with them!  But I am encouraged and challenged by the language of one of our core value’s here at Jericho around Authentic Community: We desire relationships with one another that are transparent, supportive, encouraging and rooted in a desire to love as we have been loved by God.  More on this next week as we get into Romans 12:10…

The second phrase for us to pay attention to as we consider what it means to live a transformed life is “Hate what is Evil.”  A violent dismissal of that which is shadowy, dark and pulls us down.  Now, let me suggest to you the problem with your New Year’s resolution (if you made one).  Usually, resolutions are built upon this “hate what is wrong” foundation.  People say “I’m NOT going to do x or y…”  But this strategy in isolation almost never works.  Why?  Well, I’m going to suggest that you can’t experience the transformed life simply by telling yourself over and over and over again that porn is bad and that you shouldn’t spend more money than you make, you shouldn’t get emotionally and physical involved with that person who isn’t your spouse. That you shouldn’t overeat; and won’t lose my temper with my kids…  And the list goes on and on.  Simply hating what is wrong in 2013 won’t get you there. 

Gary Thomas in his excellent book “Pure Pleasure” says it this way.  “For years, the church has tried to scare us out of our sin.  For example, you could fortify yourself against an affair by meditating on all the evil that could result: the consequences of bringing home an STD; the shame of getting caught and exposed, perhaps risking your job or at least your reputation; the pain of seeing your spouse’s hurt reaction; the horror of watching your kids lose their respect for you; or the threat of a revenge-minded spouse.  I suppose there’s a place for this approach.  If you lived not to sin, you might even be able to make a case that such an exercise would bring spiritual benefit.  OR… you could focus on building a marriage in which thoughts of straying get pushed out by a real and satisfying intimacy in which no room exists for another lover.  You could spend your time actively raising your children, becoming engaged in their lives in such a way that your heart overflows with love for your family, making any thoughts of teaching apart your family repugnant.  You could faithfully pursue the work to which God has called you so that you have neither the time not the inclination for something as sordid as an affair.  See the difference?  We can build lives of truly lasting pleasure and so fortify ourselves against evil because evil has lost much of its allure – or we can try, with an iron will, to ‘scare’ ourselves away from evil while still, deep in our hearts, truly longing for it.  Which life do you want to live?  Which life do you believe will ultimately succeed?” (Ch. 2)

Nineteenth century preacher Thomas Chalmers also believed that simply focusing on “avoiding evil” as a way of living the transformed life was (quote) “altogether incompetent and ineffectual.” He believed that the “constitution of our nature demands that we instead focus on the rescue and recovery of our heart from wrong affections by embracing the “expulsive power of a new affection”.  Chalmers argues that an old affection is almost never overcome by sheer force of mental determination.  Mental reasoning is cannot possibly compete with the force of our passions.  But what cannot be thus destroyed may be dispossessed – and one taste may be made to give way to another and to lose its power entirely as the reigning affection of the mind.  It is thus that the boy ceases to be the slave of his appetite” (quoted in Thomas, Pure Pleasure)

So its incomplete or insufficient to simply say ‘hate what is evil’, there’s more to living the transformed life.  Which brings us to our third and final phrase: “Hold Tightly to what is Good.”.  Cling or cleave or hold fast to that which is good.  I love the way the Message translation puts Philippians 4:8 - “Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse.”

In Romans 12:9, the word hold tightly or “cling” is the same word that is used in I Cor. 6:16,17 of a sexual relationship.  In other words, when you are so satisfied with good sex, nothing else is appealing to you.  When you are satisfied with healthy food, gluttony loses its hold on your life.  That’s why, friends, our theme for 2013 is “renewing your mind” through Prayer and Scripture intake.  I want my life, I want your life to be full of things that are true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, and gracious.  The expulsive power of new affections that comes from clinging to what is good as opposed to simply avoiding what is evil.  I don’t want to combat greed by trying hard not to think about money, I want to combat it by filling my heart with generosity and thus the actions and affections of my heart begin to change as I see the benefits of using God’s resources wisely!

What will win the day in the battle for a transformed life isn’t simply pushing through by sheer willpower to steer clear of that which is sinful.  We have to give ourselves a higher and grander vision than that!  You need to stop focusing on what you aren’t going to do in 2013 and instead be so filled with real devotion and love and peace and joy that these things can’t help flow out of you. That is what it means to live a life that is genuinely transformed, turned upside down, by the work of God the Holy Spirit in you and in me.  I want to live a life of satisfaction and fruitfulness in God so that others around me experience not pious sounding words, but genuine love.  I want to be transformed upside down from inside out.

But I know that this is only going to happen by a movement of God’s Spirit in my heart and my life.  I’m not going to get there on my own.  If I just try really hard, I’ll end up producing a cheap knock off version.  Empty pious religiosity as opposed to a genuinely transformed life.  So as we begin this New Year, I’m going to be at the front here praying and asking God to transform and change me.  We have a prayer team, Dave, Bailey and Meg this morning and they would love to stand with you and join you in asking God to do amazing things in your life in 2013.  Whether you need a fresh start or you want to invite God to transform you for the first time.  Whether you want someone to join you in your celebration or your struggles, I invite you to stand and pray with me as we respond in worship in song together.  Let’s pray.