Let Love Be Genuine

The Summit of Our Salvation

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

May 11, 2025

Let Love Be Genuine

⁹ Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. ¹⁰ Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. ¹¹ Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. ¹² Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. ¹³ Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. Rom. 12:9-13

In Rom. 12 Paul opens with the words Therefore, in view of God’s mercy…The therefore refers to the deep gospel truths Paul has laid out in chaps. 1-11 about all that God has accomplished for us through Christ. We always need to keep the mercy God has given us in Jesus in our view.

Therefore with God’s mercy to us in view, the rest of the chapter tells us things we are to do and not to do. Do be transformed. Don’t be conformed. Do renew your minds. Do use your gifts according to the grace and faith God has given you.

And do love. Verse 9 says let love be genuine. In chapter 5 we are told that God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. God has given us His love not to hoard, but to share. Jesus commands us to love one another. But here Paul adds a needed qualifier: make sure that love is genuine. God doesn’t give fake love.

God is working on our hearts to make us loving. Love is one of the fruits of the Spirit but like all other fruits, it grows or doesn’t grow based on our honest yieldedness to God. Patience is a fruit of the Spirit. Raise your hand if you are perfectly patient. We could go on with all the fruit: kindness, gentleness, forbearance, self-control. These fruits are to be in us and growing. Same with love.

But don’t fake big love if all you got is little love. A little real love is worth more than a lot of phony love. But what does genuine love look like? I believe the things Paul goes on to tell us to do unpack tangible characteristics of love.

And surprisingly, Paul starts with hate. Abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good. I love the simplicity and clarity of that verse. If you want to love, you need to hate. Hate evil, not people. We shouldn’t even hate evil people – we are told to pray for them not hate them. But God never wants us to give in to evil or let go of good.

It’s worth noting that Paul ends this chapter once again contrasting good and evil:

²¹ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Taken together verses 9 and 21 tell us that love draws a line and love has a spine. Moral ambivalence isn’t love. How can we hate evil if we don’t have moral clarity about what is evil and what is good?

To keep it simple, love wants what is good and best for others. Evil, like the devil, only wants to rob, kill, and destroy souls. Love wants people to come to know Jesus and find salvation and grace for their eternal souls. Love wants people to experience life and love and grace and mercy. Love wants to show kindness and gentleness. Love wants to speak truth even when it hurts because painful truth is always better than sweet lies.

Love hates evil. Hates the evil of injustice. Hates cruelty. Hates corruption, deception, murder, racism, abuse, immorality, pedophilia. Love draws a clear line. We don’t hate the people who do these things – we pray for them – but we hate these things. Clear line. The Bible calls woe down on people who allow their moral compass to get messed up and call evil good and good evil.

Love draws a line, and love has a spine. Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good. Don’t be beaten by evil but beat evil with good. It’s not good enough to sit on the sidelines and just sit this one out. When we see evil, if we are able to do something about it, we are to do what we can to step in and stop it. Praying for those committing evil does not mean we don’t work towards them being held fully accountable. The FBI announced this past week that 205 were arrested in a child sex operation and 115 children rescued. We rejoice that evil was stopped and innocent rescued and while we can pray for the 205 people arrested (and they are presumed innocent until proven guilty) and their families, we also want the guilty to be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Why? Because that’s what love wants, because it’s good. It’s just.

Don’t be overcome with evil but overcome evil with good! Don’t fight evil with evil, fight it with good. Love has a spine – stand up for what’s right. Stand up for what’s good – what leads to the best for others lives. Stand up for the defenseless and the victim. Stand up for morals in a world that increasingly calls it bad to draw the lines the Bible has drawn. Jesus says we are to be salt and light in society: preserving and illuminating with the truth of God’s word and the gospel.

Love one another with brotherly affection. Vs. 10

The word translated brotherly affection is only found in this one passage. Paul could have said, love one another and left it there. But he finds a word nowhere else used in the NT to express a sense of family warmth and affection with which we are to love one another. The NKJV tries to convey this meaning in their translation: ¹⁰ Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love.

I think it’s appropriate on Mother’s Day to highlight that word affectionate. 1 Thess. 2 Paul writes,

But we were gentleamong you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own children. ⁸ So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us. 1 Thess. 2:7-8

Paul was like an affectionate father to the churches he founded. He wanted them to feel his affection for them because they were dear to him. And he wants us in the church to do the same and show the same family affection to one another. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. The church should be a place of genuine – not phony, not love-bombing, not agenda-driven, not if you meet my expectations, but genuine, family affections.

Outdo one another in showing honor. Vs. 10

Again Paul could have said honor one another and that would’ve gotten the point across but Paul sets up a competition: outdo one another. Try to out-honor each other!

Now I think it needs to be said that the church can go down unhealthy roads with honor if not careful. I was listening to an old friend from Bible school being interviewed and he had a leadership role at the Brownsville Assembly of God at the time when the Brownsville Revival was happening near Pensacola back in the nineties. As in any revival, there were excesses and he was sharing how those in leadership were treated with awe and deference by the people. He said people held him and the others on a high pedestal and in fact it wasn’t uncommon for a leader to get a standing ovation just for sharing the announcements. He said it made him uncomfortable but at the same time, to be honest, his pride enjoyed it.

It might be said people were just “outdoing each other in giving honor” but honoring others isn’t puffing up people – especially leaders – and putting them on a pedestal. Only Jesus is worthy of that place in the church. Honor is a healthy esteeming of others. Honor is seeing the intrinsic value and worth of a person. If someone serves faithfully, we see the value of their faithful service and thank them for it. I think Paul says outdo each other in giving honor because pride in us tends to seek our own honor. It’s good for us to see the worth of other people and especially to see the value of people we might easily miss.

Some time ago a piece of art by Yves Klein sold for over a million dollars. What made this painting unique is that it was invisible. I have a hard time seeing the worth of an invisible painting except maybe it’s easy to move from room to room.

But we see in the gospels that Jesus saw the value in invisible people – the Zacchaeus’ and the Matthew’s and the Mary’s of the world. The widow who lost her only son, the leper that no one wanted to touch, the blind man the disciples told to be quiet. The people no one else noticed or saw. People the religious leaders had kicked to the corner. Jesus honored them by seeing them and esteeming them.

The honor Paul is talking about isn’t based on talent or achievement or social status, it’s based on everyone of us being created in the image of God. In the church it’s seeing that Jesus died for that brother, that sister. This kind of honor isn’t reserved just for the highly visible people but even more so the ones that are harder to see. Outdo one another in showing honor.