Let Love Be Genuine (Rom. 12:9–21)

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Ray Ortlund
Well, I’ve never said this to you. I’ve talked, never talked to you about this, but you and I were speaking once at my home several years ago, and you very kindly asked about a hardship that I went through one point, and I was simply describing it to you, and I saw a tear go down your cheek. Tthat meant a lot to me, especially when I was talking about that. Thank you, Sam.

Sam Allberry
You were kind enough to open up your heart to me, right?

Ray Ortlund
Okay, well, now there you go. You see here I am dumping all this, you know, misery on you, and you thank me for it.

Hi, I’m Ray Ortlund, and I’m with my dear friend Sam Albury. This is you’re not crazy, a podcast for young pastors and all who are interested in the advance of the gospel. Sam, good to be with you.

Sam Allberry
Good to be with you. Ray. And thank you. Those of you who are listening in.

Ray Ortlund
Yeah, we really appreciate your participation. Welcome, Sam. We’re plowing through Romans chapters 12 through 15, and we’re thinking out loud together about the kind of beauty that God puts upon a church when the gospel really gets traction in our hearts and we’re transformed by the renewing of our minds. It’s not just a moral upgrade, it’s relational beauty. That’s what Paul emphasizes here. So let’s think about beauty today. What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever visited in all your life.

Sam Allberry
Well, I’ve mentioned the Isle of Skye before, so I won’t mention that one again, but I think a few months ago, I had the privilege of being in South Africa, and I think the most beautiful city I visited is Cape Town, because geographically, it’s just a beautiful place. You’ve got Table Mountain, you’ve got the coast, you’ve got the cape. It’s just a stunning place for a city. I can imagine when God was creating it, thinking, man, these guys are going to, this is going to they’re going to love this place to build the city. How about you?

Ray Ortlund
I would say the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland. And I remember being there in the 1980s and a friend of mine and I took his dog for a walk out onto the island, away from the village there of Tobermory. I could only hear four sounds. And this, I grew up in LA, so this was a big deal to me. I could hear the wind rustling through the grass. I could hear the occasional bleat of a sheep. I could hear the Chug, chug, chug of a little fishing boat in the straight off in the distance. And I could hear my friend chatting to the dog in Gaelic.

Sam Allberry
It was magic that would make such a nice kind of ambient YouTube channel just to hear that sound in the background. Well, I guess one of the things we’re going to be realizing then is we don’t have to fly to Cape Town or go to the Isle of Mull to discover beauty. We should be able to turn up a church. And there’s a there’s a kind of beauty evidence in our churches that we’re being called into through these passages that that we should all be able to access and enjoy and be part of.

Ray Ortlund
And I really believe as the kind of moral and social prestige of Christian churches has fallen in recent years in our world, the relational beauty that we pastors are called to nurture and cultivate in our Churches becomes all the more urgent. Paul considered it urgent. He spends these four chapters in Romans, one of the most consequential books in the Bible, helping us think through what that beauty looks like. And he starts out by saying, here in chapter 12, verses nine through 21 he starts out by saying, Let love be genuine. Now you’ve helped me understand that with more vivid clarity. What’s going on there with that declaration?

Sam Allberry
Paul is, I think, assuming that there are, there are ways in which we know when love isn’t genuine, and there’s a kind of love that we try to pass off as love that isn’t genuine, and Paul is steering us to be doing the real thing love is, I mean, he goes on to say in the next verse, Love one another with brotherly affection. So Paul won’t let us get away with some expression of love that doesn’t come from the heart. So it’s not just, Well, of course, I love these people on I’m I’m serving them in practical ways. Or, of course, I love these people. I tell them not that I do for love to be genuine, it has to come from deep affection in the heart. We are to have one another on our hearts, and when we do, the love is genuine and people. Can see that we don’t, we don’t like being handled as people.

Ray Ortlund
And we know what it’s like Sam to walk into a church, and immediately you just sense this is different. Something’s happening here that’s unusual. It’s striking. It says here in verse 10, Love one another with brotherly affection. That’s an emotional word, yeah, and we who are theologically serious pastors, cannot be above tender emotion. Great theology and tender emotion not only go well together, the great theology is meant to nurture and arouse and sustain tender emotion. He doesn’t say, just love one another. He says, Love one another with brotherly affection.

Sam Allberry
And we see Paul expressing that throughout his letters. I’m preparing to preach on Second Timothy one this Sunday, and Paul talks about longing to see Timothy. He talks about Timothy being his dear son. Paul is is not embarrassed to express brotherly affection, and it’s a beautiful thing when a pastor is able to do that. He’s Paul’s not just telling them to express brotherly affection to each other. He if we’re if we’re a church leader, if we’re a pastor, we are leading in expressing brotherly affections.

Ray Ortlund
A pastor is a tone setter, yeah, in the culture of that church that he serves. So let love be genuine. Paul says in verse nine, let let love prove to be true. Tested love, if I may say, battle hardened love, proven love. Sam, how’s this for a life goal for the rest of our days, that we will stop losing friends, that we will remain friends with those whom God has given us, yeah, that our love will thereby be proved genuine, not a cost benefit calculation, but a whatever it takes abandon to one Another.

Sam Allberry
That’s so important, because the way our world works is you love those you think will be of use to you, and we wonder if anyone will love us, because we’re not sure we’re going to be of use to them, but it’s a very calculating kind of world we live in. So loving one another with brotherly affection means I’m loving you because, not because you’re going to be useful to me or I can get something out of you, but because we’re brothers with the same Heavenly Father. We’re part of the same family, and therefore we’re both relieved of of that whole way of thinking. We just we’re to love each other because we’re family in Christ.

Ray Ortlund
I’m reading, Christopher Watkins amazing book, biblical critical theory, and he makes the point in his chapter on the Triune God and the creation that the universe we live in, ultimate reality in this universe is not the laws of physics, the mechanics of things, but Ultimate Reality is relational solidarity and beauty. So that what we’re talking about here Sam, what the Apostle Paul is talking about in Romans chapter 12, is not an ideal to reach for that’s basically unattainable. When we’re not loving one another with genuine brotherly affection, We’re departing from reality into fantasy. God does not love us within a guarded, selfish manner. He hurled himself without restraint, at whatever cost it would take into covenant with us. Yeah, we see that in the cross, in in the Incarnation itself. So okay, now we know what love looks like. Now we know reality is there is a reason why this kind of church feels real. Yeah, it is real.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, absolutely. And for the rest of the chapter, Paul kind of goes into almost a sanctified Twitter mode, because he gives us these quick fire. You know, a poor word is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Outdo one another and showing honor. We’ve we’ve talked about that before. Do not be slothful in zeal. Be fervent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope. Be patient and affliction, be constant in prayer, contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. And I’m struck those feel like, you know, Paul is just rapid fire. Here’s lots of different things. The Christian life is an ecosystem. These things hold together, don’t they? How interesting. So I can’t expect. To be fervent in spirit, for example, or to be rejoicing in hope and patient in tribulation if I’m not contributing to the needs of the saints or seeking to show hospitality, because that the Christian life is is integrated, and I can’t remove one part of it and expect the other parts to be unaffected.

Ray Ortlund
I have never thought of it that way. So these staccato commands he gives are not a menu of options to choose from. They are different angles of vision on the same coherent reality,

Sam Allberry
But which means my not being slothful in zeal is also part of how I love others. If I’m not being fervent in spirit, actually, I’m not going to be loving you well,

Ray Ortlund

The captivating beauty of a truly gospel centered church has many facets which I don’t know. I can’t remember the way you said it a moment ago, but it was excellent that there’s this sort of totality that emerges when the gospel, when we allow the gospel to exert its full authority upon us, I mean the doctrines of the gospel, when we actually allow that orthodoxy to have its full impact upon us, many things start changing and becoming more beautiful.

Sam Allberry
If “Let love be genuine” is the tide coming in, all these other things are the boats, then all the boats rise, don’t they?

Ray Ortlund
For example, outdo one another in showing honor. Now that’s actually become one of the most important verses in the New Testament to me, yeah, and I, as far as I know Sam, that’s the only competitive command in the Bible. Maybe there. Maybe there’s another one somewhere. But it doesn’t say honor one another. It says outdo one another in showing honor. Yeah. So it’s like, in this friendship that you and I have, you are not going to defeat me. You are not going to out honor me. There is no way I’m going to let you in and you feel the same way. And and what happens is this magic of honest, brotherly, non flattering, forthright joy in honoring one another without holding back.

Sam Allberry
Which means genuine love is never finished. Because if we’re out doing one another in showing honor, we can’t say, Well, I’ve shown honor, so now I’ve I’ve done my Let love be genuine for the day, because I’m constantly trying to outdo everybody else. The same happens with the hospitality. Paul doesn’t say show hospitality. He says, Seek to show hospitality. So with both the honoring and the hospitality, it’s not just please do this, but actually the love that is genuine is constantly looking for more opportunities to do this. We’re never finished yet. So we’re constantly looking for, I can’t, you know, let’s, let’s assume I was amazingly hospitable yesterday. I can’t wake up today and think, Okay, I’ve done that one now. I’ve, my love has been genuine. I’m, I’m still to seek, to show hospitality. We’re always wanting to find ways to love people. That’s, that’s part of the mark of genuine love. We’re never we never feel like we’ve finished doing it.

Ray Ortlund
There is a striking energy in this vision of being a church together, because it’s, it’s open ended and sort of surging forward. Here’s another one that sort of fits that description, rejoice in hope, I think, in the year 2024 this year of Grace, I’m thinking now as an American, rejoicing in hope is most timely and relevant and current in its prophetic impact. There is I asked a friend recently who is I really respect him as a thinker and an observer of present trends. I said, What is the most important gift I can give to the rising generation? And he said, hope, as a Christian man, rejoicing in hope that is looking forward to the future, not bracing ourselves against the future, but looking forward to the future, facing into it with expectancy, sitting on the edge of our seats for what the Lord is about to do. That is a Christian posture that is itself prophetic and always applies. I don’t know, maybe the political sky is going to fall in our I love my country. I. But maybe we are going to suffer as a nation in the next few years. We Christians in our churches. What can happen is people can get in their cars on a Sunday morning, drive down to one of our churches, go into the service, and they experience something different that they will never see on whatever cable news channel they watch, they can see people who are actually happy, not freaking out, not even angry, but rejoicing in hope, because we belong to someone who looked us straight in the eye and he said, All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to me. Everything is going my way.

Sam Allberry
Ray, one of the things that has happened since we recorded our last series of this, which you’ve just made me think about, is Dear Tim Keller’s passing. And when you talk about rejoicing in hope, and how a great gift to give to this new generation is hope. There are so many things I don’t understand about why the Lord took Tim from us. I feel like we still need him so much. But I do wonder if maybe one of the things the Lord was doing was I hadn’t realized how much I needed to see someone finish well, to see someone finishing with his eyes so obviously fixed on Jesus and the way, the way Tim ended his life was rejoicing in hope, and he made hope more real to me in doing so.

Ray Ortlund
I am so struck by that I had not I felt the same way. I felt like we, we need Tim Keller now more than ever. But you’re right, we watched a man of God yield his life up to Christ with a magnificence that compels us to admire him. Yeah, and I needed to see that too. You know. It reminds me of what John Wesley said about the early Methodists. He said our people die. Well, yeah, he said people might disagree with our opinions about things. They can’t argue with the the obvious beauty with which we die.

Sam Allberry
We can’t rejoice in hope if, if our horizon is is on this light, on this life, and not the life to come. We rejoice and hope, because whatever’s going on in this world, our ultimate reality is the age to come, not what I can get out of this life now. And it seems to me that there’s a there’s a correlation between, you know, if our hope is in this life, we become more anxious, more angry, more desperate, more unhappy. But if we’re settled in Christ, if, if he is our life, if he is, if he is our hope, then actually we can. We still suffer, we still grieve in this life, but we don’t, we don’t lose the plot. We can. We can rejoice even in the in the painful things, because our hope is not here.

Ray Ortlund
And even in this life, when we see adverse providences and life is hard to bear, and we see a city we love, a nation, we love, a civilization that we love and respect, spiraling down into self destruction, even then, we can always be on the lookout for what the Lord is doing in and through that destruction and upheaval and loss. I remember, oh, Sam, do remember that wonderful book England before and after Wesley that you and I read with TJ several years ago, and it it was a history of the first Great Awakening of the 1740s and the book was in three thirds. First third, what England was like before the first Great Awakening. Second third, what happened during the first Great Awakening. Third third, what England was like after that first Great Awakening. The outcome of it was not just improved church attendance, but the humanizing of English culture. The the gospel came in with power and began to push over historical and cultural dominoes. Child labor laws started to change. How prostitutes were treated by the police started to change. That’s when public libraries were invented, as I understand it. So there were, there were cultural upgrades that happened as an outflow. And it was not the goal of the of the first Great Awakening to to rescue Britain, but it was an outcome that flowed downstream from the gospel. So we might be entering into a time of tremendous loss and anguish and upheaval and a lot of human suffering, but in it all, and indeed through it all, the risen Christ. Will be moving, and we, who are pastors, have the privilege of keeping our eyes peeled to see how the Lord is bringing redemption into our train wreck world.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, we may be in the before section of the story God is writing right now. Ray, there may be a pastor listening to this who, as he’s hearing, he’s thinking, it’s not my city or my country that’s in meltdown, it’s my church, and maybe his tribulation is his, is his church and what he might be going through. How can we help that pastor to rejoice in hope and be patient in tribulation?

Ray Ortlund
Well, here’s just one thought. Let me toss it out, Sam, then you can add something far more. Didn’t our Lord say to Ezekiel on several occasions, they will know that a prophet has been among them, and may it may be the destiny and privilege and hardship of a pastor listening to us right now, despite his prayers and efforts, his church does go into meltdown. It might even die, but they will know a prophet has been in their midst. He will not gloat over that. He will weep over that. But that too is prophetic. Every tear is prophetic. And inevitably, I think Sam, there are pastors whose destiny and calling is lovingly, gently with tears, to preside over the funeral of a church that did not know the day of its visitation.

Sam Allberry
Many, many years ago, Ray the beginning of my kind of Christian ministry. I worked for mmf International, the wonderful missionary organization that Hudson Taylor founded back in the 1860s and I haven’t checked recently, but when I was working there, the sort of mission statement for the organization was to glorify God by the urgent evangelization, urgent evangelization of East Asia’s millions. And the wording was very intentional. It wasn’t to glorify God by seeing lots of fruit and lots of conversions. It was to glorify God by the urgent evangelization. In other words, you might be in a very difficult mission field where you’re seeing very little fruit, but if you are bringing the Gospel to people, you are bringing glory to God. You are glorifying God by the ministry you are exercising, irrespective of what impact it may seem to be having or not. And I remember talking to missionaries in places like Japan, where things were very, very hard soil, just saying, how encouraged, how that kept them going, because they could be glorifying God if they were speaking Christ to people, even if they were seeing very, very little fruit. Maybe one convert a year would be, would be things going well? And I feel for a pastor in a in a hard situation, if he is proclaiming Christ, he is bringing glory to God, you can be glorifying God even whilst the church is is melting down around you,

Ray Ortlund
I’m reminded of what Jonathan Edwards said one time that a faithful minister who presents and proclaims Christ faithfully is a sweet savor to God, whether he is successful or not. So I think we have in Christ, we pastors every right to trust that if, if the ministry is extremely difficult and I seem to fail, nevertheless, my my offering to the Lord is a sweet savor to him. Yeah, and there I may even with a, I hope, a biblical imagination. See angels above you, know cheering and high fiving and because Jesus is being lifted up. Ray.

Sam Allberry
Just a couple of other verses before we leave for this for this episode, verse 15, rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep, part of our our genuine love, part of our brotherly affection, is that we, we’re not emotionally aloof from each other. Yes, sometimes when I see someone rejoice, my My heart wants to be jealous, but actually brotherly affection, genuine love, means actually their win is my win or whatever. I see someone weeping. Part of me might be thinking, I’m glad it’s Emma, not me, that’s going through that trial. But one of the signs of that we really do have brotherly affection is I can’t be unaffected by what my brothers and sisters are going through in my church, in my church family.

Ray Ortlund
That is so perceptive. I’ve never thought of it that way.

Sam Allberry
We’re bound up with each other. Yeah, if you’re having a bad day, doesn’t matter what’s happening to me, I’m having a bad day too.

Ray Ortlund
This is emotional vulnerability, Sam, I will never forget I’ve never said this to you. I’ve talked, never talked to you about this, but you and I were speaking once at my home several years ago, and you very kindly asked about a hardship that I went through one point, and I was simply describing it to you, and I saw a tear go down your cheek.

That meant a lot to me, especially when I was talking about that. Thank you, Sam.

Sam Allberry
You were kind enough to open up your heart to me, right.

Ray Ortlund
Okay. Well, now there you go. You see, here I am dumping all this, you know, misery on you, and you thank me for it.

Sam Allberry
Well, it’s the great privilege. We’re as brothers and sisters together. We’re, we’re bound up with one another. Now, yeah, we can’t, we can’t undo that. Well, you know, when Paul first meets Jesus, he’s saying, why do you persecute me? Because what you do to the people of God, you do to Christ. And we feel that solidarity even among ourselves. What when one of us hurts, all of us hurt.

Ray Ortlund
Usn’t that just those are the great moments of life. They are.

Sam Allberry
It makes the wins are sweeter and the losses there’s more comfort in the loss when we feel those losses together. If

Ray Ortlund
I could put it this way away with all pastoral grandiosity as contemptible and unworthy and Hooray for personal vulnerability and openness and sensitivity,

Sam Allberry
Which in verse 16 looks like, do not be haughty, but associate with a lowly never be wise in your own sight. So we’re not aloof, we’re not above at all. We don’t look down on others. We actually climb into other people’s emotional reality, and because that’s what Jesus has done with us, he’s drawn near to us in our pain.

Ray Ortlund
If there’s a tear on his cheek, how can my eyes be dry?

Sam Allberry
Well said. Well Ray, thank you for this conversation. For those of you listening, thank you for your time with us. We don’t take it for granted. Thank you for letting us spend this time with you, and we’ll see you next time.