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Follower of One : Missions For The Rest Of Us


A show for marketplace Christians to energize and encourage you to live out your faith every day, right where you are. Begin your day with Christ-centered ideas to share your joy with those around you. Add in weekly interviews with other like-minded Christians so you can share in their joy and learn how they make Jesus visible in their workplace every day.

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May 26, 2022

How sincerely do you love other people? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. Today, I'd like to read Romans 12:9, and I'm reading from the ESV at first. "Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good." And I want to focus on the first part of this passage in the new American standard. It actually says, "let love be without hypocrisy," but you also notice in the New American Standard that the words let and be are in italics, which means they're inserted for readability. The text actually says love without hypocrisy.

That's our title of our post today. Our challenge begins at the very beginning of today's message. Love without hypocrisy. What does that mean? Deep down inside, I tend to judge other people. And as we've talked about before, sometimes you learn more about me than you may be wanting to know, but I think we all do this a little bit. I think we tend to criticize other people in our brains or judge them or measure them or compare ourselves to them. None of those things are love. When we are called to love others, that love is an active willingness to put them ahead of ourselves. And Paul here, or the author of Romans here, is challenging us to love without hypocrisy.

"Let our love be genuine" the ESV says. Other translations talk about loving without hypocrisy or with sincerity. Be sincere in our love. We want to be genuine and pure. We want our love not to just have the appearance of love and be something else on the inside. Our love needs to be genuinely focused on creating what's best for the other person.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't come naturally to me. And I will have to work on it. In fact, I have to remember who I am and what Christ did for me in order for me to be effective at coming up with ways to work, to actively do what's best for others.

Today, our calling is to love without hypocrisy. What does that look like in our workplaces? First of all, I would also like to point out that there's some idea that this is talking about brotherly love, that this passage is to brothers, to people who follow Jesus, but we're challenged to love in other places in the scripture. And so our command here, I think, applies to everyone.

We need to find ways to think about what's best for other people. Philippians two says that we should consider others more important than ourselves. I believe this verse is calling us to act as if others are more important than ourselves. So we have to not only just force ourselves to think they're more important, or to force ourselves to consider them as more important, but we need to take some action that demonstrates that we consider other people more important than ourselves.

What will that be for you today? Why not give a huge tip today or why not do something for someone else, even though they can never repay it. Let's look for ways today to love without hypocrisy. I believe everything we do along this line matters forever. And I want to talk a little bit more about the rest of this first in our next post, but this is a great action item for us today.

Let's find a way to love sincerely. Would you please ask God to show you who and how you can love someone else sincerely today. That puts you on mission with Jesus Christ, that makes us a marketplace minister, and I'm grateful that you are a marketplace minister. Thank you for considering how your faith can transform your everyday.

That's what we try and do in our online community, too. You're welcome to join us at https://community.Followerofone.org and see what's involved in trying to live this Christian life on a daily basis. Can we let our faith invade what we do every day? Join us in the challenge. Thanks very much for being a marketplace minister.

And thanks for listening to this podcast and sharing it with someone I'm grateful for you.