Please turn with me to Romans chapter 12.
Over the past two weeks and into next week, we are studying four passages that shape the core of our ministry at Stonebrook. In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus commands his church to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that He commanded. How do we work that out at Stonebrook?
Week 1, we looked at2 Timothy 3:15-4:4, and saw that Christ-centered, Expository (or “Word-shaped”) Worship and The Spiritual Disciplines deepen our faith, as God’s Word does its life-creating and sustaining work. This is why the hub of our ministry is to gather each week to hear God’s voice through His Word in the Scripture.
Last week, we looked at Acts 2, and how Biblical Community and Discipleship sustain our spiritual health. Sunday morning worship is the hub and starting point of our week of walking with the Lord. If you have to pick only one, we’d urge you to be here on Sunday morning as a priority, but it will be incomplete on its own. We are meant to grow in Christ together as we share our lives and bear one another’s burdens and speak the Truth of God’s Word in love to one another. That kind of closeness requires smaller groups.
This week, we’re going to see how being rooted in God’s Word: changed by His gospel message, overflows into generosity and service. As we understand God’s mercy toward us, we offer ourselves completely back to him. And as we offer ourselves to Him, He points us outward toward others, to serve them, just like He does. The third aspect of our ministry at Stonebrook is that “Generosity and Service Expand Our Reach.”
The church understood this from the beginning. One story from the early church highlights this.
An illustration from the Cyprian Plague
In the middle of the third century, a plague swept through the Roman Empire—high fever, vomiting, paralysis, bleeding from the eyes and the mouth. Catching the plague was a death sentence. In many cities, the dead lay unburied in the streets. Those who could afford to leave did, and many even abandoned family members who became sick.
In Alexandria, Egypt, the Christian community responded differently. An Egyptian pastor, Dionysius, who witnessed the plague and the response of the church, wrote:
“Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy… drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.”
He contrasted this with others in the city:
“The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead, and treated unburied corpses as dirt.”
This witness of sacrificial service, even at the cost of their own lives, became widely known even among the pagans in North Africa and contributed to the spread of the Christian faith.
Their generous, self-sacrificial service was the vehicle God used to spread His message throughout the world, and so has it always been throughout history.There are countless stories in other countries of the self-sacrifice of God’s people in the service of others. The ancient saying goes: The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. As Christians give their lives in the service of the world and to spread Jesus’s message, the church grows.
This is what it looks like when God’s people, because of His mercy, offer their bodies as a living sacrifice — service that costs us much, because Christ has already given us everything.
Romans 12 may be one of the best chapters on what the life of a Christian should look like. And it starts with remembering God’s mercy to us in Christ.
We serve in light of the Gospel
Romans 12:1 (CSB)
1 Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.
“This is your true worship” - that word “true” is translated into english in different ways depending on your version: “true, spiritual, reasonable” - the word is literally “logical” - The logical outcome of realizing the mercies of God is to offer yourself, your whole life, to God.
What are “the mercies of God”?
Our passage starts with a “therefore” and whenever you come up against a “therefore” in the Bible, you need to ask what the “therefore” is there… for…
“The mercies of God”, this is what Paul just got done explaining in the first eleven chapters of Romans! Romans chapters one through eleven is the clearest explanation of the gospel message in the Bible.
I’d like to speed run the first eleven chapters here quickly.
The Gospel
Chapters one, two, and three tell us that the whole world, every individual human in it, has rejected God’s truth, and has traded it for a lie, and so falls under His judgment. “No one is righteous, not even one.” (3:10) “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” (3:23).
Chapter three also lets us know the good news that anyone can be “justified freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.” (3:24). Chapter 4 lets us know that no work we can do can make us right with God. It is only faith in Christ that makes us righteous!
Chapter 5 promises us that if we are righteous by faith, then we have peace with God! God proves his love for us that while we were his enemies, Jesus died for us to save us. Chapter 6 and 7 explain the reason we still sin, that even though our sin is completely paid for, and we are forgiven, in this life, we still struggle, but Jesus will be faithful to rescue us in the end.
Chapter 8 promises that in spite of that struggle, if we are in Christ, His spirit is in us, and nothing will ever seperate us from God’s love, not suffering, plauge, war, or even death!
Chapter 9 reiterates that God’s mercy on us doesn’t depend on anything we do. It is not our ethnicity or personal good deeds that save us, but he saves us because he chooses to!
Chapters 10 and 11 clarify for the Jewish audience of the book that it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, God plans to show his mercy to both, only through Jesus Christ. There is only one way to salvation for everyone: Jesus.
In light of that mercy, that none of us deserved it, in fact, we deserved the opposite, while we were God’s enemies, He had mercy on us, and gave his life to save us.
And Romans 12:1 says that the logical, reasonable, true, spiritual response to that is to offer ourselves back to him.
What does it mean to offer yourself as a living sacrifice? The rest of chapter 12 explains. And it starts by living unique, counter-cultural lives. Lives that distinguish themselves from the surrounding world first by their different motives.
We do not serve from selfish motives
Romans 12:2-3 (CSB)
2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God. 3 For by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think. Instead, think sensibly, as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one.
We are surrounded by a culture that tells us that the most important thing is personal achievement or personal gain. We have a hard time seeing past this. This is why Paul tells us we need to be transformed in our thinking. The service God wants from us might not earn us any recognition or award. Jesus said its better this way:
Matthew 6:1–4 (CSB)
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. Otherwise, you have no reward with your Father in heaven. So whenever you give to the poor, don’t sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be applauded by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. But when you give to the poor, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Do you want a reward from people, or from God?
Paul says not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought; we should soberly consider the reality: Everything we have, our abilities, even our faith, anything we can have to offer in worship and service, was “distributed to us” by God. It was a gift! We have nothing to brag about. Nothing to compare ourselves to others.
God gave us all these things for a reason: to serve each other and the world.That superhero-like faith of the Alexandrian Christians in the Cyprian plague? It was a gift from God for that moment.
We may not be called to dive into a deadly situation to serve; that was their time, and their purpose, and their situation. God has given us our own situation, our own work to do, and our own tools with which to do it.
We serve with everything we have
Romans 12:4–8 (CSB)
4 Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, 5 in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. 6 According to the grace given to us, we have different gifts: If prophecy, use it according to the proportion of one’s faith; 7 if service, use it in service; if teaching, in teaching; 8 if exhorting, in exhortation; giving, with generosity; leading, with diligence; showing mercy, with cheerfulness.
We all have different shapes, sizes, and flavors of gifts from God. I won’t go into the details of this list., It’s not an exhaustive list anyway. Just notice that it includes all different kinds of ways you could contribute to the work of spreading Christ’s message as you serve your neighbor, the church, and the city.
Paul often uses the metaphor of a “body” for the church, and each individual in it is a part of that body. It requires the group working together to get the complete picture! When Jesus said, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people!” (Matthew 4:19), he had a net-fishing boat with a crew in mind, not an individual with a pole on a dock.
The classic categories of how you can offer yourself in service, in response to God’s mercy, are “time, talent, and treasure” (notice that’s an “and” not an “or”). We are to use our time, talent, and treasure to serve God.
The word talent comes from a unit of money Jesus spoke of in a parable about investing money to yield a good return. The meaning of the parable was to use your God-given gifts for His service. “Talent” came to mean “skill or ability” precisely because of this. We are to steward our God-given-talents by using them to serve the world and spread his message!
We are to serve God by serving his people and all his creation, with everything he has given us, which is everything!
We give generously, serve faithfully, cheerfully show mercy, because he was generous to us, he served us, and he showed us mercy!
We serve because Christ served
In the plague, those believers could give their lives because they knew their lives were already secure for eternity in Christ. The same mercy that moved them is the mercy that moves us — we serve because Christ first served us, and nothing can separate us from His love.
Most of our churches and our names won’t be remembered in history books like the Alexandrian Christians in the Cyprian plague. But we are all called to serve. And God promises that He remembers and will reward our service that is done in anonymity.Jesus promised that not one cup of cold water given in faith will go unrewarded.
Every single one of Jesus’s people has been given gifts by him to use for the good of others. What has God given you to work with? There are many ways to serve inside and outside the church.
In your neighborhood, classroom, workplace, and city, there are many needs that we can work together to meet in Christ’s name. That can be done unofficially as you see opportunity, or more officially, together in coordinated ways.
A couple of ways that can happen: a portion of our offering goes toward many good organizations in town that are doing important work to help those who are at risk or in need.
There are also ways to serve them directly with our time and talent that come up occasionally through our new City Serve ministry. Those opportunities are in our email announcements and website, and you sign up for information there.
Within Stonebrook, there are many ministry areas to plug into. All of them always need more hands. Everything from helping our parking ministry welcome people, door greeters, ushers, Sunday School helpers and teachers, music ministry, AV team, and more on Sunday morning, to helping with men’s or women’s ministry, youth ministry, and international ministry throughout the week—just a few of many examples. You can find out about them by talking to longer-time members, by looking at the website, or by going to the Connect Desk. Stay tuned over the next several weeks as we launch our new ministry year.
Take a sober look at what God has given you. It may not be the flashy thing you wish it were that brings you a lot of respect and recognition from people. But every role is crucial in the group project of this mission that Jesus has given us.
If God has brought you here, He has a mission for you and a spot for you.
Jesus said the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. He said to love because he first loved us. Serve because He first served us. This morning, I hope you find yourself refreshed in Jesus’s amazing love and mercy toward us, and encouraged to take that same love and mercy, out to each other, and the world that so desperately needs him. How will you use your time, talent, and treasure in Jesus’s name?
Let’s pray.
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