May 27, 2022
What would you say you cling to? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me on the Follower of One podcast. Today, I want to continue reading in Romans 12:9. We started with this verse yesterday and only talked about the first part of it. The verse says, and this is from the New American Standard Version. "Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good." Many translations use cling, or adhere to, or stick to what is good. Hold fast to what is good is what the ESV says.
Abhor means to hate, to hate what is evil. We don't like the word hate anymore in our world, but the Bible here in the author of Romans is challenging us to hate evil and cling to good. Stick to good. Our job is to identify those things which draw people towards Christ that build up the world and build up others. That follow through on our un-hypocritical love that we talked about yesterday. Today, let's hate those things that are evil and cling to those things that are good.
We want to stick to it. We want the good to stick to us. We want the good to be something that comes out of us all the time. Good is something that is designed to be good for others. It's positive. It lifts others up. It raises others up. Selfish things tend to drag things down. I think about good as being something beneficial for a large number of people. The more people it's beneficial for the better it is, and the fewer people it's beneficial for the worse it is.
Years ago, I wrote a blog post about good leadership versus effective leadership. Because there are many bad leaders who are very effective. The results of their leadership don't produce good outcomes. We know deep down inside what's good and what's evil. And if we're uncertain it, isn't hard to figure it out. We can ask God and we can ask others and we can find ways to be attracted to the good, to stick to what's good. And to hate those things that are evil. I think something that's selfish, something that's only for me, something that takes from others at their expense for my benefit, anything with that kind of a scarce model, where I have to take something from you so that I can give me something, those things end up being evil.
It's okay to do a lot of things, but they don't result in good. And that's my challenge for us today. Are we the kind of people who can ask God, what's the ultimate good here? What's the biggest best good thing that I can do today in my job. What's the best thing I can do. Let's cling to what is good.
Let's be people who always lean towards the good and turn to the good. Because it's that way that we show other people the benefit of our faith. We can trust our God that going for what is good will eventually pay off. He will make everything right. These are all based on the promises of who he is. And so our challenge today is to cling to what is good. Let's ask God to show us the evil that we're hanging on to, and let's get rid of it. As he says in Hebrews, we want to lay aside every encumbrance. We want to let go of these things that weighed us down so that we can cling to the things that promote our faith, that point other people to the one that we follow.
Let's do that today. Let's turn to the good every chance that we get today. Hold fast to it, cling to it, let it stick to us because of the good things are what glorify God.. Thanks for being a marketplace minister. And thanks for sharing this podcast with others. If you think of one friend today, share it with them. This is just a simple challenge.
Let's be people who bring good into the world, not who suck it out. So let's bring good to the people around us today. And we will glorify our father. Other people will see him then in our lives. Thanks very much for being a marketplace minister. I'm grateful that you listened to this podcast. Thank you.