Deeper S4, E4: Activated

The way we live and the things we say are directly impacted by the things we believe.  Here we allow a 2,000 year old letter from a man called Paul to help us think about how we learn to love by changing our beliefs about who humanity is and what our place in the world is.  

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Hi there, welcome to season four, episode four of our Deeper Podcast. In this episode, we're going to ask the question: what does it actually look like to live out a life of genuine love? What do communities of people who love each other look like and feel like? What does it look like to practically do that with the way I live and the way I speak? And what central beliefs are going to steer all of that in the right direction? If we can manage that in the next few minutes, then that'll be a minor miracle. So let's give it a go. So brace, brace, this is activated. Father God, you really clearly showed your love for the world in the way that you created the space for us to live in and the way that you came and showed a life of ethical, spiritual, active love. Love with a belief that activated things to happen and that the way that you sacrifice yourself for us. Would you show us parts of our lives now that maybe don't match up to the way that you want us to live? Show us why that is. Help us have the courage to put some things down, challenge ourselves and live differently, inspired by the truth that you want to show us. And we ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen. Okay, let's start by reading a passage from the Bible. It's uh it's been given the subtitle Love in Action by one translation, uh, and it's near the end of one of Paul's longest letters, uh, called the Lesser to the Romans. So here we go. If you want to read along, it's Romans chapter 12, verses 9 to 21. Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil and cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another, honor one another above yourselves, never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer, share with the Lord's people who are in need, practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Don't be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited, don't repay anyone, evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it's possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. So don't take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written, it is mine to revenge. I will repay, says the Lord. On the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed them. If they are thirsty, give them something to drink. By doing this, you heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Every summer for the last 30 years of my life, I have been involved in helping to run the Port St. Mary Beach Mission. It is a kids and youth holiday club run in the south of the Isle of Man, set up for fun, for sharing faith, and for building into the team who run it. I I absolutely love it. It is consistently one of the highlights of my year. There's a game that some of us play there called the Psychiatrist Game, probably not the most PC game in the world, but it's a really funny game where one volunteer child or young person pops out of the room and we all decide something that's wrong with all of the rest of us. So it's the same thing wrong with everybody. And when the doctor comes back into the room, they ask the whole group set questions like what did you do yesterday? How are you feeling? What would you like to tell me about? And gradually, as they listen to the answers from multiple people, they can guess what we think is wrong with us all. So a couple examples in one round this year, we all thought we were toddlers, we had to answer a doctor's questions as if we were about three years old. Um, in another round of the game, we were hugely afraid of our own names being mentioned, and every time uh your name was mentioned, you had to shriek. Um in another round, we all thought we were on the Titanic, and every question made us lean slightly more to the left until we were all like hanging on the floor or or holding on to things. At one time we all thought the doctor was totally naked, so when they came back into the room, we we were like all avoiding eye contact with any body parts we might know what to look at, and answering with veiled references to appropriateness and embarrassment. It it was absolutely hilarious. The point of the game is to get us to see that things we believe really do affect the way we talk, the way we act, they our beliefs affect our attitudes and our fears and the way that we interact with other people. I mean that's not really news, is it? Um, but that's why is it I ask um that certain things I believe about God and humanity so often don't make their way into my behaviour? Why have I got this gap between the things I say I believe in my head, which I think I really do believe, and then the way that I live, which seems to contradict those things? So here's an example from me. Um I do believe that every person has been made in the image of God. We're equally of value and worth. We're all so incredibly precious that the king of the universe sacrificed his life for us. I mean, it's the same as Jesus running into a burning building to carry me out, knowing that it would cost him his life to save me. That's the love and the value that God places on every human being. But do I consistently treat every human being the same? Do I speak to everyone as if they're the most precious, valued thing on earth? Do my emails reflect that when I'm angry that my tumble dryer wasn't fixed on time? No. So so either uh I I've also got another belief running parallel, which says that I'm entitled to think less of other people when it suits me or if I'm annoyed, or there's just a reality gap. Or dare I say it, I'm not sure how much I actually believe what I think I believe. This is why people of faith are rightly accused as being hypocrites. This is why when I look at my life, there are areas of hypocrisy that I do need to address. This is why Jesus consistently spoke directly to religious leaders and told them that they needed to sort it out. You know, why why Jesus spoke to the crowds and told them again and again, respect and listen to your religious leaders, but don't copy the hypocrisy. Church leaders out there like myself, we need to carry on listening to that message from Jesus. We need to be humble enough to carry on being willing for anybody to address the gaps between what we say and what we do. The moment that we think we are the finished article is the moment that we become blinded. So, if we're thinking about our beliefs shaping our life, there is a great example in the person of Paul the Apostle. Apostle just means one who is sent out. So Paul started off his life as a religious leader from the first century. He was really, really antagonistic to the church. He was utterly convinced that Jesus was not who he claimed to be, and so his zeal for the faith that he represented meant him persecuting Christians. He was approving of them, being martyred right in front of his eyes. On one occasion, he holds all the coats for the people doing the killing, and then he systematically goes from town to town, he's hunting Christians down, finding out where they are, sending them to prison. He's got letters so that when he gets to this town called Damascus, he can do exactly that. But as he's on the way to this town, on this dusty, isolated road, uh, suddenly he has this vivid, genuine, powerful encounter with Jesus himself, who appears to him in the form of a blazing light and says, Paul, why are you persecuting me like this? From that hinge moment in his life, everything changes for him. Very quickly, he starts to preach about his own change of attitude. He starts talking about who Jesus is, and he moves from church hater to church planter. Paul's message is that our behavior flows out of our beliefs, just like his does. Our beliefs are like a source of a river, like a spring that comes up out of the out of the ground, and the water that comes out of that source is our words and our actions. People are gonna drink from this river, and we want to make sure that it's pure water. This is all the way through all the letters that we've got as part of the New Testament that come from Paul. Often, when we're trying to change our behaviour, we try to change our habits without changing our belief system. My wife Amanda, who is like a cooling balm in my life, and I still count myself more than a little bit lucky that she had a momentary lapse of judgment and said yes to me, she's trying to get me to change some of my eating habits, and she's not doing it by just telling me different things to eat. She's educating me about what is in the food that I'm eating and what it's doing to me, both good and bad, and and it's working. And as my beliefs about what food does to me change, my eating is changing. I found myself in the sweet style at the local supermarket the other day. Um I was looking at all the sweets, like a whole row of them, uh, and all I saw was a whole load of chemicals and plastic. So keep going, Amanda, if you're listening to this, we are getting there, but that is how it works. Change comes because we view things differently, we believe things differently. And that circles me back to this passage I read you right at the start. Paul's writing to the church in Rome, even though it's not one of the ones that he helped to establish, and he's telling them what love looks like. It's on the back of him, carefully shaping their beliefs in the first 11 chapters. Romans is massive. It's like he's poured all of the thinking that he's got in other letters into one massive letter. And he's talked about who humans are, that we were pre-planned before creation, so that God puts us in the right place at the right time for what he wants to do. He tells us that that God has stretched out this massive boundary for the course of our lives, these limits and foundations that we won't be able to go past. He says that humans are called, meaning that God himself speaks to us individually, calls us out by name, invites us to walk with him alongside him for the rest of our lives. Um he says that we're pronounced no longer guilty because of what Jesus did. And we literally manifest the presence and the light of God simply as we live. And that's if that's not enough, Paul's audience would also already have lived in this very different relationship to nature than we do in our sanitized modern West. They saw their lives as integrally linked to the planet they're placed on. They would have seen themselves first and foremost as caretakers of planet Earth and shepherds of people. But they had also fallen into the same prideful trap that most long-established groups fall into, where their beliefs and their ways of doing things, because they see them as right, it means others are wrong and therefore others are bad. It's not just a religious thing, any idealism or any community group can fall into that way of doing things. So, how do we love? How do we think about other people? What does it look like when beliefs make their way into words and actions, and particularly what does that mean about the way that we love. If we truly believe that we need to live like Jesus, that he's our model in everything, then for Paul it looks like the things that he's outlined before us. If we truly believe that God sees every human on planet Earth, including ourselves, but not at the expense of other people, as precious and holy and wanted and worth dying for, then for Paul, it will look like sincerity and goodness. It will look like devoted love, passion to serve, generosity and grace. It will look like hospitality, genuine care when people mourn. It will look like humility, peace, patience, forgiveness, even to those who stand against us. It will look like goodness. So here we go. I say choose to love, you ask me how. Choose to move beyond surface world's smiles. Choose to refocus your hatred on only what is ill, never a who. Bring on tight to what's good as if your life depended on it. Choose to be devoted to one another. Lift each other up with respect, your speech and your actions. Lift others way above yourselves. Choose to develop a fire birth. Keep your furnace stoke while actively serving. Choose to let hope to keep you with joy. Choose to let hardship grow your character. Let push you to put on muscle. When life needs you to do the heavy lifting. Choose to laugh by being faithful in the world. Or when you see someone needs to write a move after acting, choose to be the one to do something about it, rather than the one to roll on the next thing. Yet faith for being people of afterwards. Or when people wish you to move you apart with their words, choose not to be a bit of a. Choose the humble task of the order of people. Make the choice now. You will not repay any of the evil people. Instead, choose to do the next right thing. Or when you have the end of yourself, choose the next right thing. Just one more time. If it's possible for the power to depend on you, choose a peace. Choose to allow God to bring about his justice. While you wait, if your enemy's hungry, choose to feed them. Your enemy's thirsty, give them a journey. This is the choice to love. Choose it ahead of time. Choose it moment by moment. Do not be overcome by evil, but choose to overcome evil with good. Choose to overcome evil, choose with good.