Living Fervently (Romans 12:11–13)
Transcript
You want to get your Bibles out, turn with me to Romans chapter 12. Romans chapter 12 is where we're going to be studying this morning. It is Mother's Day. Sometimes I have Mother's Day sermon, sometimes I don't, but we do appreciate the mothers in the audience and all the work that you do and the fervency that you live with, which is our topic today. Hopefully we We all can emulate that and live lives that are pleasing to God. We've been studying about our relationships. That's been kind of the focus of the services, the last three sermons that I've done have been about relationships and looking at Romans 12 and understanding how God desires for us to develop relationships with one another that are deeper than surface level.
we're gonna continue that study today. But before we do I just want you to take a second and imagine yourself standing in a battlefield. The battlefield was a long time ago and everybody died and nobody lived. So over time all those bodies have turned into skeletons and they are completely dried up and dead. Now, if you know your Bible, you know what I'm referring to, but just imagine yourself there in that graveyard and you're seeing all of these bones and they're dead and they're dry and they're they're very dry and maybe it's nighttime and the moon is reflected off of the whiteness of the bones. And as you look out across that battlefield, you see so many bodies you can't even walk through it and you hear God say, can these bones live? You might think, well that's about the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. If I was standing in a battlefield full of skeletons everywhere, there's no way that any of this can live. It's dead. It's dead as can be. But Ezekiel was asked that question and Ezekiel said, oh Lord, you know. It's a great answer. It's a recognition that it's physically impossible. I couldn't make that happen.
I don't know of any natural occurrence that would bring any of these things to life, but you know God. And God in that moment could have just zapped all those bones and made them stand up and filled them with flesh and brought them to life, but he doesn't. He tells Ezekiel, prophesy to the bones. Imagine Ezekiel says, bones the Lord commands you to come alive. And the bones start rattling, joining together, bone to bone, tendons start forming, muscles start forming skin overlays everything and they're standing up and how creepy would that be to watch all of that happen? And then you've got this huge army of bodies, but there's something missing. There's no breath in the bodies. They look alive, but they aren't breathing. I want you to have that image in your mind and think about that image as we're studying our text this morning. We're not studying about Ezekiel and the Valley of Dry Bones this morning, but this image gives us the picture of spiritual death and spiritual life. And the idea and the picture here is that there's bodies that can be formed, but there also needs to be a breath inside of them.
There needs to be something, a spark of life within them in order for them to truly be alive. And I think as we're studying Romans 12, the passage that we're looking at today is Paul trying to speak into the Romans and tell them, breathe, come alive, wake up. And he's hoping that they will listen. And I hope that we will hear these words as well. And I hope that these words will encourage us to wake up, to listen, to come alive, to breathe, to be fervent, to be zealous in service to the Lord. We're not just here to serve ourselves. We started in Romans 12 with this picture of by the mercies of God, we're supposed to present our bodies as a living sacrifice for the Lord.
This idea that because of what God has done for us, we see His mercy and we understand how much He has provided for us in the Gospel, in the salvation of Jesus, that now we are totally different in the way that we think and in the way that we act. We are not conformed to the world, we're transformed by the renewal of our minds to think differently about ourselves and the way that we interact with one another. gifts that we have. We don't see them as our own. We see them as being used in service of the people around us. We see them as gifts from God given to us for the purpose of using to serve other people in the body of Christ. And we love one another with a genuine and sincere love. We're not just putting on a show. We're not just acting like we love you and everything's good and we're not really caring that much at all about you. We're not playing church, but we love one another genuinely. This is our goal. Our goal is to use our gifts sacrificially.
Our goal is to love one another sincerely, and those are very difficult goals, but we're gonna do them not because someone tells us we have to, not because somebody guilt trips us or pressures us, but because we see the mercies of God and it motivates us to do what God desires for us to do. This is what God wants, an internal transformation of our hearts. And today we're gonna see in the third goal that God wants us to love or to live a fervent life. We're gonna understand what does that mean to live a fervent life. How are we going to do that? And then we're going to see at the end what that looks like.
And if you're there with me in Romans chapter 12, we'll read through the whole text and then we'll kind of break it down phrase by phrase. Romans chapter 12 starting in verse 11. Paul says, do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord, rejoice in hope, Be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer, contribute to the needs of the saints, and seek to show hospitality." Now you're reading that, you're like, well that's an odd sentence to read and study. There's not a lot of dialogue here. This is like command, command, command, command, command, command, command. But all of these are relating to this goal of living fervently. As he gives off this list of things, I want us to see how he's trying to impress upon the Romans the desire that should be within them to live a life that is fervently serving the Lord. And what does that look like? How do we do that? And all of these things are contained in the passage. Let's study this together, starting with understanding what does it mean to live fervently. Notice the first phrase. He says, do not be slothful in zeal. Do not be slothful in zeal. What is slothfulness?
I think of a sloth. Hopefully nobody here has some irrational fear of sloths or anything like that, but think about a sloth for a moment. How does a sloth move and interact what do they do I mean it's painful to watch it's like move already the Zootopia movie the kids love that movie there's flash the sloth and it drives everybody crazy to watch him move and and yet he's driving a fast car it's hilarious slothfulness is this resistance to moving to doing the things that should that we should do or the reluctance to do those things it's like a child that doesn't want to do something so you have to kind of drag them into it or make them do something it's not pleasant or fun for them it's not something they desire to do it's something they feel obligated to do and so they don't really try to do it they don't do it without being told they don't care about doing it. He says, do not be slothful in zeal. This is a picture of refusing to give God a lazy soul. I'm not gonna be lazy for God. I'm not going to look at all the mercies that God's given me and decide that my life should just be vanilla.
Just be bleh. I just do the bare minimum of whatever it is that I need to do to please God and then I go about my life doing what it is that really excites me and makes me happy. You see God is not looking for people who will be robots who will just do a few things to make him happy and then go about their lives and live for themselves. He wants men and women who have seen the mercy that he's given them and have Decided that I'm now going to give my life in service as a as a living sacrifice Sometimes I forget to breathe. I'm sorry as a living sacrifice That's the picture of what he's telling us here not slothful in zeal is saying do not say I Don't really feel like serving God today Should never come out of our mouths or into our thoughts Service to God should be something that we're constantly focused on. You know, I get it. There's lots of reasons to put off what we could do tomorrow today. Just, I don't really feel like it today. I'm tired. I'm real busy. I got a lot of things going on.
I just, I don't want to do that wrong and I want to wait until the right moment to do this or that and I'll get around to it eventually and those kind of thoughts creep into our minds and our secular world and it wreaks havoc. It hurts our relationships with one another when we're not willing to act and do things and we put things off. Have you ever done that? Have you ever just thought somebody else will do it? I'll just wait and see and if somebody else does it then good I didn't have to do anything. Those kind of Ideas and thoughts are are slothful. They're lazy and that's not what we're supposed to do I heard somebody say the hardest thing to do is to start You know, we have all these great plans and all these ideas about things that will do one day but Actually moving and doing the thing means I'm committed to it and now there's an expectation for me to do that in the future And I don't like doing that or I might not like doing that. I don't know yet You know, we have to overcome these kinds of things.
We have to not let anything hinder us from being zealous for the Lord. I love this proverb. We just did the proverbs last year. It's a proverb about laziness, and the fool who's lazy, he comes up with all these kinds of excuses to not do things, and one of them is, there's a lion in the road. There's no lion in the road. at home and he's like I can't go out there's gonna be a lion somewhere in the road something bad's gonna happen and so I can't do this or that I think a lot of times we we think this way we think about the negative things that could possibly happen and it prevents us from doing anything we cannot think this way if we're going to live a fervent life a life that is alive to God we have to get over this notion that bad things are going to happen, therefore I'll do nothing. Bad things are going to happen. Things are not going to work out perfectly, but it's better to do something and have the bad things happen than to sit around and do nothing. I think of Revelation 3, 15 through 16, where Jesus is speaking to the church of Laodicea.
He says, I know your works, you're neither cold nor hot. I wish that or it would that you were either cold or hot. So because you're lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth." The idea of slothfulness and not doing anything is very much what we're seeing here. It's like the people who go through the religious acts, they just check the boxes of attending the services and they don't really care anything about God. It's not something they're interested in. They got hobbies, they got other things they're really interested in, but this is something that I could go either way on. I just I just show up to fulfill my duties to get the get out of hell free card and and to avoid the eternal judgment. And this is not what God wants from us. He's not satisfied with that. He doesn't want lukewarm. He wants us on fire. He doesn't want us cold, but He'd rather have us cold than lukewarm. He really wants us on fire. And this is a picture of the excuses that we might come up with. If you have excuses that prevent you from serving God and pushing yourself and doing hard things to help your brethren and to build up and strengthen the body of Christ, just admit it.
You don't crave God. You don't appreciate His mercy that He showered upon you, enough to change your activities on a daily basis. If you are slothful, you are callous and you are indifferent. You do not care. And maybe something has happened that you blame that causes you to think that I'm this way because of that, but it doesn't matter why you're this way. You can't be this way anymore. God's mercy does not, it demands for us to move and to make a difference in the body of Christ and to be a working part of that body in some way. I say all that, maybe some of you are beating yourselves up and you are working in certain ways, but you're one of those who just always knows you can do more.
Please understand I'm not talking to you, but I'm making sure that everybody understands there should be action, there should be activity. This is not a 20% of the people do 80% of the work. This is 100% of the people do 100% of the work. That's the idea in the body of Christ. next phrase. And don't worry, all the phrases are not the same length. I know it's Mother's Day, we got lunch plans. I'm not going to foil those. I don't plan to. Look at the next phrase, and this is the key phrase in all of this text. He says, do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit. What does it mean to be fervent? The word fervent is a word that is pointing to like boiling water, heat or movement. That's what the idea of fervency is. So being fervent in spirit is the idea of having this energy within you that's just coming out. It's like what Jesus said in John chapter 7 about the spirit. It's going to go inside and and then we're going to become a wellspring of life. The spirit is going to overflow and bubble out of us and spread to everyone else.
And this is the picture that Paul wants to be within us, that living sacrifices are just bubbling with the truth of God and with the will of God and the desires of God and and the work of God and the love of God. All those things are just moving out of us and in whatever way that we can find to make them move. As we see the desire for Paul, the desire for God to have us be fervent in spirit. I want you to think about what's bubbling up in your life. What are you overflowing with? Joy, excitement, what gets you going? What makes you excited? What makes you happy?
Is it spiritual? Are you excited about this text you just read? Are you excited about a study you've got going on with a friend or a neighbor? Are you excited about working together with somebody on learning how to do this in the church or be a part of the body of Christ in some way? Is there anything that really gets you excited and emotional that's the idea here the fervent in spirit and I'm not talking about emotionalism I know that we have kind of an aversion to emotionalism we probably should emotionalism can do a lot of damage as people play on people's emotions and get them all spurred up and everybody's on fire for a service and then they go off and they forget about it and the coals kind of flame out. I'm not talking about that, but I am talking about emotion. You should have emotion. You should have an excitement about what God's done for you.
You should have an excitement about what God's done for people around you and how you can be used in the kingdom in the body of Christ to bring souls to Christ or to strengthen the body of Christ there should be something in you that's alive we shouldn't be suspicious of emotions and we shouldn't try to restrict people or suppress people who are emotional or who have emotions that are stirred up and aroused and they have affections toward other people that's something that God wants within us. Paul said in second Corinthians 6, we have spoken freely to you Corinthians, our heart is wide open. You are not restricted by us, but you're restricted by your own affections. The Corinthians had affections for things, but it wasn't for Paul, and it wasn't for the work of the church. And Paul is saying, I am wide open. I have given myself to you. I'm emotional about this. This is a big deal to me, and it should be a big deal to you. And that's the picture here. I know I'm getting loud, but this is not saying you have to be loud.
Your excitement can be bubbling up in you, your work can be something that you're you're always thinking about, something that you're always working on, and you're interacting with people, and nobody really pays that much attention to anything you're doing. I'm not saying that you need to be fervent in spirit means you need to be talking to everybody. I know that you introverts are like oh please no I'm not saying that but I'm saying you should be excited about something you're doing for the Lord something you're doing for the church and it should be something that keeps you going that keeps you pushing to serve more and more. I'd like you to think just a second about what's going on inside your mind inside your heart as you're living your life how are you feeling about God? How are you thinking about Him? What are the things that you think about about God in the past, maybe you thought about them, that have made you cold and and you don't really care about the church or you don't really care about the people of God? What are the events that have happened? Maybe it's an interaction that you've had with a brother or sister that has greatly discouraged you.
Maybe it's somebody has not been on fire for the Lord and so you were on fire and they kind of quenched your fire and made you think this isn't worth it anymore. I don't I don't want to do this anymore. What is it? Something bad happened to you in your life? Or is it just you got tired of trying and you got distracted, other things are more important. What is it? Why aren't you alive? Why aren't you breathing? Why aren't you moving? Why aren't you sacrificing? What makes you on fire? What causes you to stir emotionally? To have a strong desire to serve the Lord in every facet of your life. You need to think about that. We all do. We need to make sure that we're focusing our minds and our hearts on what we can do to serve the Lord. What's going to get us excited about it? What's going to make us say, Lord, here's my hands. Use them. Here's my wallet. Use it.
Here's my time, my schedule. Use it. I'm going to cut into my hobbies. I'm going to cut into these other things so that I can serve you. What is it that's gonna get you excited and moving again so that you say, my life is yours, God. It's not mine. I'm giving it back to you. I took it for myself for a while, but it's not mine anymore. I want you to have it and I want you to use it for your glory. He says, do not be slothful in zeal. Be fervent in spirit and serve the Lord. You're not here. I'm not here to serve ourselves. We're here to serve the Lord.
So whatever sets me on fire for God has to become the primary focus of my life so that I'm honoring Him in every way. I'd like for us to think for just a second about how do we how do we stay fervent? You know the truth is if we live long enough we're going to experience peaks and valleys. I know that I've experienced those. How do we stay in the peaks? And how do we quickly get out of the valleys whenever they come? Satan's constantly trying to pull us down to him. We don't want to stay in the valleys. We want to get out of the valleys. We don't want to get in ruts that we can't get out of. How are we going to do that? Well notice Paul tells us how to do that, but first think about it. How are we going to to keep the fire burning when things happen. Things are gonna happen. I'm gonna experience a great loss. I'm gonna make a huge mistake and humiliate myself.
People around me aren't gonna act the way they're supposed to act and and I'm gonna be tempted to be focused in again on all these hobbies and on all these things that have nothing to do with God. I'm gonna get pulled back in. Maybe this sermon is gonna light you on fire and then next week my sermon is not gonna do much for you and you're gonna be like well I'll just go back to the other things that make me excited you know those temptations are gonna come you're gonna feel that how are you gonna avoid going back down how are you gonna avoid being wearied by the constant dredge of dealing with sinful people and having relationships that don't live up to your expectations. Well Paul tells us a few things. Verse 12, he says, rejoice in hope. Rejoice in hope.
Then he says, be patient in tribulation. And then he says, be constant in prayer. I think these three things are an eternal fuel source source I felt like that was a good way of describing this since I got a lantern on the screen This is a fuel source that doesn't run out It doesn't burn up if you can learn how to put this in your mind and in your heart Then whenever you're down, you're gonna be right back up again First one, rejoicing in hope this is telling us about the promises of God. What do we have hope in? We have hope in the promises of God. Do those hopes, do those promises ever fade?
Are they ever gone away? In the bad times did we lose the hope so they no longer available to us? No, they're always there. God's promises are something that are given to us and that we can hold on to forever and that we can trust in that God is going to be faithful to provide them to those who love Him. So we can look to His promises and have hope and rejoice in the hope and then He says we need to be patient in tribulation. You know the times of trials are going to come and that is probably the hardest time to be patient. I struggle to be patient when things are going good because I want them to go better. I'm one of those. But when things are going bad, when you're experiencing pain and suffering, and when there doesn't seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel, a way of things getting better, patience is not something that is easy. He says we need to be patient. Remember the patience of God towards you. Remember the patience that they've displayed in the past. All those men of faith in Hebrews 11, they've now experienced.
Those who wait on the Lord will find that He is good and that He delivers, that He provides for those who love Him. You must be patient in every situation believing that God can provide a solution that you've never thought of in your life before. Don't let the trials and tribulation take out your fire. You know, some of the most, the brightest lights I've ever seen are those who are in the midst of an extreme trial or tribulation and they're still on fire for the Lord. They still love Him. They're still trying to serve others and to glorify Him in everything that they're doing. So patience is a must if you're gonna remain fervent, but also prayer. Be constant in prayer. You know, prayer is where we go when our hearts need rekindling. The fire is not just dependent on you and you lighting your own fire. If that's the way we think, we're gonna spend a lot of time with our fire put out. We can turn to God and God is there with us and He'll breathe new life in us. He'll rekindle us. He'll get us excited. And this is the way that fervency will survive. We have to remember the promises of God. We have to wait for God to deliver.
We have to constantly be thinking about God and desiring his help in everything that we're doing and the fervency will remain alive. And if it goes out some, it'll come back. Just keep trusting in the Lord. Next, I want us to see what fervency looks like. That's what Paul says in verse 13. He says, contribute to the needs of the saints. Contribute to the needs of the saints. You see, whenever we're fervent, whenever we're on fire for the Lord, and whenever we're striving to serve Him and thinking about what we can do for Him all the time, we're gonna be helping one another. We're gonna be devoting ourselves to building up the body. We're going to be sharing and participating in each other's lives.
Whenever there's a burden that somebody else has, we're going to jump on it and we're going to make sure that other people are taken care of. Because the mercies of God have ignited us and made us excited to help other people. And that's what God wants from us. That's what fervency looks like. And then he says, seek to show hospitality. These two things are connected in some ways, right? the needs of people are for us to open up ourselves to one another and to share life with one another. That's what you need from me. That's what I need from you. We all need this from each other. I'll tell you, I grew up in a family that didn't really open their home to anybody. Maybe you did too, I don't know. My mom and dad, we kind of lived a very isolated kind of life. We were next door neighbors with my cousins and my aunt and uncle, had them over a little bit but not much. Didn't really have people over much. Jenna had her family's a little different. They had people over from church. They'd have lunches and and maybe sometimes have get-togethers and stuff, but that was about it. And so we didn't have a lot of experience going into marriage being overly hospitable.
And then we had preachers come and stay in our house last week and we had that happened last year and tell you what we don't know what we're doing we like told them flat out like we don't know how to do this we weren't trained in how to do this so if y'all need something there we're doing something wrong tell us so we can fix it. That hospitality that opening up your home to these guys or to other people it does more good for you than it does for them in some cases it it helps us to develop deeper relationships until somebody is in your home with you, you don't really come to know who they are. Until somebody is sharing your life, and you're sharing your life with them, and they're sharing their life with you, you don't really connect with them, and you can't really help them. The very end here, what we see in verse 13, is that there needs to be the fervency that we have for God, the fire, the zeal that we have, and appreciation for His mercy, it needs to spill out and affect the body. We need to be reaching out and opening ourselves up to one another. In our country, it's very common to play church.
It's very common to just attend services and go home and do your thing. That is not the way God designed the body of Christ. That is not the way we're supposed to be. We're supposed to do life together and to build one another up and encourage one another in a way that is unlike anything the world knows. This is supposed to be something different, something better. Think about Jesus. Was Jesus slothful in zeal? Was he cold? Was he callous? Was he uncaring? Or did he live a life that is totally devoted to the Lord? That's it. And his love for God spilled out for everybody else. So that's what we must do.
We're not here just to exist in a cold and lonely and dead existence. That's what you're doing. If that's what your life is like in the body of Christ, something is wrong. And I'm speaking very passionately because I want you to see it. If that's how you are, something is wrong. And just like Ezekiel was told, prophesy to the breath, the Apostle Paul here is saying, live, wake up, come alive, move, act, serve, be passionate, be zealous, be fervent, and do the will of the Lord. I hope that this has helped you, as it's helped me. I need this too, to serve the Lord faithfully and do His will. At this time we're gonna sing a song. It's an invitation song. We call it an invitation song, but really it's a song of encouragement to everybody here. That we will wake the dawn with praises. That we will sing out in joy over the love of our great God who has shown His mercy to us and who we desire to please and exalt. If you need anything please come as we stand.