Be Clingy
13 Imperatives for the Church • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Does anyone here suffer from acrophobia?
Now, I’m not trying to run afoul of HIPPA regulations, so if you’re not comfortable raising your hand, don’t worry about it. Maybe if I admit to you that I have long suffered from this syndrome, you’ll feel more comfortable.
Perhaps it would make you even more comfortable to know that acrophobia is a fear of heights. Now, let me ask again. Does anyone else here suffer from acrophobia?
I’ve done a little research on this fear, and it turns out that about 1 in 20 people are acrophobic. I really would have expected the number to be higher.
I’ve known for a long time that I’ve had this fear, and I’ve tried to soldier on through it. Since I love adrenaline-pumping amusement park rides, I’ve forced myself over the years to do the some of the tallest, scariest rides I could find, all in hopes of conquering my fear.
In Orlando, I rode the Skycoaster with my grandson, Stephen. It’s a 300-foot tall swing. You’re strapped into a harness, lying face down, winched backward and to the top and then released, making a 65-mph arc as you whoosh past the people waiting for their turn in line. And, if you’re like me, you’re screaming like a little girl the whole way down.
In Las Vegas, with my mother, we took an elevator to the top of the Stratosphere hotel. At the top of that hotel, there used to be a roller coaster, 1,070 feet high, that wound around the observation decks, giving the impression at every turn that you were going to fly off the side and plunge to a grisly end. When I did it with Mom, people watched us and laughed from the observation deck as I screamed like a little girl for the entire ride. “Tell them to stop,” I cried, and the people laughed and laughed.
But there was one time when I was 13 that sticks out in my memory more than all the other encounters with heights, and it scarred me for life.
My father and I were cutting down a tree in our backyard, and I had climbed past the top of the ladder to cut off a branch so we could cut down the trunk without the branch breaking a window.
After I’d cut the branch, I handed the saw down to my father. He said for me to come on down, and I looked down the 20 feet or so to the ground, realized I couldn’t touch the top of the ladder and absolutely froze.
“Come on down, Res,” Dad said. And I couldn’t budge. I had my arms wrapped around the tree, and I was clinging to it for all I was worth.
“Come on down, Res,” he said again. And then I began to cry. "I can’t,” I said between sobs. And held onto the tree even tighter. I was convinced that clinging to the trunk of that big tree was the only thing between me and a whole lot of pain.
Finally, my father had to climb the ladder and come up and help my feet find the top of the ladder, and I was eventually able to climb down.
I remember feeling sorry that we were cutting down this tree that had literally saved my life. And I remember hating it for putting me in a position to have been so terrified.
But I will never forget what it felt like to cling to that tree so tightly that I could feel every crinkly piece of its bark, so tightly that I had red marks on the exposed skin of my face and arms. If I’d clung any tighter to it, me and the tree would have become one.
That’s the image I want you to have as we look at the next of the 13 imperatives for the church in Romans, chapter 12.
You may recall that in verses 9 through 13 of this chapter, the Apostle Paul gives 13 imperatives or commands to individual Christians who were part of the church in Rome.
He spent the first 11 chapters of this letter outlining the sound doctrine of God’s righteousness, describing our desperate need for it, and reminding us that we have access to it only by God’s grace and through faith in Jesus.
And, since sound doctrine should result in changed character, Paul begins in chapter 12 to describe the righteous behavior that should characterize the church and those who constitute it.
These 13 imperatives provide a sort of template for the appropriate Christian response to the various interactions we will have with one another and with those who have not yet followed Jesus in faith.
And the first two imperatives — “let love be without hypocrisy” and “abhor what is evil” — serve as umbrella commands. These are the foundation upon which all the other 11 are built, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors.
Let’s read the passage together, and then we’ll take a look at the third of these imperatives.
9 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good.
10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor;
11 not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord;
12 rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer,
13 contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality.
You might recall that when we discussed the second imperative last week, “abhor what is evil,” I said that it’s appropriate for Jesus-followers, who are being conformed to His image to hate what God hates. And, since God hates evil, it’s appropriate for Christians to hate evil.
We are to detest evil, wherever we see it. But we should especially hate and detest the evil — the sin — we see in ourselves, because it is completely opposed to God’s design for us as followers of Jesus.
Today, as we take a look at this third imperative — “cling to what is good” — I want to introduce you to an important concept, the replacement principle.
Now, the idea behind the replacement principle is pretty simple: When you remove something negative from your life, don’t just leave a vacuum. Otherwise the old, negative habit is likely to return, or there might be others that come in to take its place.
This is the principle that’s in play for many people who give up smoking. They’ll choose something like a lollipop to take the place of cigarettes to trick their minds into going along with their hearts’ desire to stop smoking.
The Apostle Paul seems to have been a big fan of the replacement principle. He wrote many times about putting off the old self and putting on the new. About laying aside falsehood and speaking truth. Setting aside the old clothes of sin and self-righteousness and clothing ourselves in the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
And here in this passage, we see the replacement principle once again: “Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good.”
The truth of the matter is that Christians who hate evil without clinging to what is good are some of the worst people to be around.
They’re a terrible witness for the life-changing message of the gospel. They are one of the reasons that the church has become known more for what it is opposed to than what it stands for.
They’re the ones we see walking around with picket signs that condemn the world to hell.
Remember that we’re not in the business of condemnation. The lost world already is condemned by virtue of its rejection of Jesus. He alone will judge them for that sin. And He alone will punish them for their evil deeds.
Our calling as Christians is to examine ourselves and find any evil, any sinfulness that remains within us; to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in removing those things from us; to replace those sinful deeds and thoughts with what is good; and then to cling to what is good.
Now, I told you the story about my being stuck in the tree as a 13-year-old, because I wanted you to have the image of a terrified young teenager who was holding onto something for dear life.
And that’s exactly the image you should have as you read Paul’s command here: Cling to what is good.
The Greek word that’s translated as “cling” here is a construction term. It meant to glue or join substances together and can be translated as “to be cemented.”
Paul uses this term as a figure of speech here to describe just how tightly we should hold onto what is good.
It should be like you’ve been glued to the good thing. It should be as if you’ve been cemented together.
Interestingly, this is a form of the same word that Jesus used when the Pharisees asked Him about divorce. We see this interaction in Matthew, chapter 19.
3 Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?”
4 And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female,
5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?
6 “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”
Now, in verse 5, Jesus was quoting from Genesis, chapter 2, where Adam had just met Eve, whom God had created from a rib taken from Adam’s own body.
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
Of course, this passage was written in Hebrew. But in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that most Jews were familiar with during Jesus’ time, the word is the same one that Jesus used and the same one that Paul used in Romans, chapter 12.
A husband is to be joined to his wife, to cling to her, to be glued to her so closely that they become one flesh.
We might think of this imagery as being brought to its fullness in the sexual act, But the Bible tells us the marriage of a man and a woman should demonstrate this kind of closeness as a matter of course, not just in the marriage bed.
And as it bears on the third imperative of the 13 Paul gives us in Romans, chapter 12, we can learn something from what Jesus said about a husband and wife and what Moses wrote about them in the Book of Genesis.
For a follower of Jesus, who is the image of the invisible God who IS good and who creates only good things, goodness should be our constant companion.
Without goodness, we should feel incomplete. Separated from goodness, our hearts should feel troubled, and we should long to be reunited with it.
The hardest part about being in Haiti for me was being separated from Annette. We had talked about it at great length before I left for that six-month separation, but I still was unprepared for the long period I would spend without her.
I really don’t know how the folks in our military deal with such long separations.
There were nights when I went to bed in tears because I missed her so much.
There were times when I had to ask Gary to start the generator, just so I could power the wi-fi and bring up Facebook Messenger on my laptop and have a video chat with her.
To tell her how my day had gone, to ask her to pray for me, just to see her face and hear her voice.
For the Christian, our relationship with what is good should be just as deep, just as meaningful, just as necessary, just as life-giving.
That’s because we serve Him whose goodness is personified in His Son, Jesus Christ. We serve the Savior who described Himself as the GOOD Shepherd.
If we are, as Paul puts it elsewhere in the Book of Romans, being conformed to the image of Jesus, then we should reflect His goodness.
Yes, we should hate evil, but that can’t be the end of the story for us. We must also love goodness. We must also pursue goodness.
We must also CLING to goodness, just like I clung to that tree, as if to be separated from it would mean the end of life itself.
Now, it’s all good and fine for us to say we who follow Jesus in faith should be good people. It’s easy to say we should be clingy people when it comes to goodness. It’s easy to say we should be people who are characterized by goodness.
But just as we defined evil last week as that which is opposed to the God who IS goodness, we must also define what we mean — or what the Bible means — by good.
It’s a pretty straightforward word, and we all probably have some general definition in mind for it. But like the word “love” in the Bible, "good” has some specific connotations that we might not normally associate with it.
The Greek word here, agathos, means “pertaining to meeting a relatively high standard of quality.” It can refer to things that are useful or beneficial.
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word, tob, could mean a range of things — from pleasant or desirable to usable or in order.
So, at the end of each day of creation in Genesis, chapter 1, when God looked at what He had created and declared it “good,” He was saying that what He had created was not just pleasant and useful, but that it was in order.
He had brought order out of the chaos of the “formless and void” waste and emptiness that previously existed.
So, if we’re going to be people who cling to what is good, then we must be people who cling to things that are beneficial, not hurtful. Things that are useful, not useless. Things that are in order, not in chaos. Things that are desirable, not things that are objectionable.
None of this should surprise us. Made in the image of God, we all have within us a sense for what is good, because He is good, and He made us to be people who reflect His good character.
But that’s not something that just happens to us because we have followed Jesus in faith. Goodness — at least, this side of heaven — is something we have to work at.
And Paul had some advice for the people of Philippi in this regard. Essentially, he said, ponder and contemplate and deliberate and consider what is good.
Others have put it this way: What you think about, grows.
So, Paul says in the fourth chapter of his letter to the Philippians:
8 Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.
If you want to BE good, then DO good, and if you want to DO good, then THINK good.
Notice how closely these things Paul says to think about are aligned with our earlier definitions of the word “good.” Honorable things are worthwhile. Right things are ordered. Pure things and lovely things are desirable. Things that are excellent and worthy of praise are hardly objectionable.
Here is the way to cling to what is good: THINK about what is good. Capture your thoughts and force them to get in line.
When your mind wanders in prayer — and the devil is able to make some of the most loathsome thoughts we think arise during prayer — stop yourself and think on the goodness of God, on the excellence of Jesus, on the loveliness of grace.
When you find yourself confronted with temptation, stop and think about how worthy Jesus is of your praise, and then thank Him — out loud, even — for giving you the Holy Spirit, who empowers you to turn away from temptation.
A mind that is filled with thoughts of the goodness of God and the beauty of His Son cannot long be distracted by evil, no matter how much it’s tarted up to fascinate us.
We were made to be fascinated by good, not evil. We were made to be people who reflect the goodness of God, people so wedded to goodness that being separated from it causes us pain and longing.
Of course, we often aren’t like that. And when we fail be like that — when we allow ourselves to be fascinated and enraptured by evil, rather than good, it’s called sin.
When we fail to do the good things that we are able to do — or when we DO the evil things that our sinful nature prompts us to do — then we reveal ourselves to be just like Adam and Eve, rebelling against God in a desire to define for ourselves what is good and what is evil.
Ever since THEY ate the fruit from that one forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, mankind has chosen to identify with Adam, its first father, rather than with God, our heavenly father.
And in that choice, we set ourselves against God as His enemies, as enemies of GOOD.
That would be bad enough if this world were the end of the matter for us. But we were made for eternity. Each one of us has an eternal soul that will one day be reunited with our bodies, and we will be immortal.
And in our rebellion against God, we have put our immortal souls in jeopardy, because God is holy and righteous, and He will not allow sinners to enter His eternal Kingdom.
For sinners, He has justly declared that they face an eternity of suffering for their rebellion AGAINST and rejection OF Him.
God is perfectly righteous and perfectly just, and He punishes sin. But He is also perfectly loving, and He loves YOU.
And so, He sent Jesus, his unique and eternal and beloved Son, to live here as a man, to experience all of the temptations that we face but to live a sinless life of perfect obedience to God so that we could see the beauty and peace to be found in such a life.
And when Jesus had completed His ministry here on earth, He gave Himself as a sacrifice for our sins.
He took upon Himself the sins of all mankind and the just punishment for them, so that all who put their faith in Him might have eternal life — life the way it was meant to be in the presence of and in fellowship with Him and with His Father. So that we might live forever in His goodness and light.
He who knew no sin BECAME sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
For those who follow Jesus, the Bible has a new name — saints — not because we are no longer sinners, but because we have now been clothed in the righteousness of Jesus.
If you have made the decision to follow Jesus in faith that He alone is your means of being reconciled to God, then I encourage you today to start thinking about what you should BE.
Dwell on these things: whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, things of excellence and worthy of praise.
Dwell on these things, and you will find yourself clinging to what is good as if you’ve been glued to it, as if you are cemented together with goodness. Cling to these things as if life depended on it, because the abundant life that Jesus promised His followers does, indeed, depend on it.
And if you have never made that decision to follow Jesus, then listen for His voice calling you to Him today. Do you hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in your heart today? Turn to Him now. His goodness and mercy await.