Romans 12:13

contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

Verse 13 here is essentially an application of verse 10. We're told to love one another with brotherly affection and outdo one another in showing honor by contributing to the needs of the saints and seeking to show hospitality.

So tonight, I'm going to spend most of our time looking at how these four virtues fit together. These four virtues of love and honor, and charity and hospitality, what the relationship looks like between all four of those. And then I'll conclude by offering a framework for us to consider how to apply these to our lives, and then just one specific application for what this could look like for us on a regular basis. So let's start by looking at how these four virtues fit together, these four virtues of love, honor, charity, and hospitality.

True love and true honor

One of the most important lessons that we learn from Scripture is that our actions speak louder than our words. When Jesus tells us that

you will know a tree by its fruit

, or when James tells us that

faith without works is dead

, they're telling us that talk is cheap if we're not living in a manner that's consistent with our words. And when it comes to love and honor, It's really easy to cheapen these essential Christian virtues by only expressing them through our words.

True love and true honor, they're heart postures. They're meant to be rooted in the deepest parts of our soul and to be expressed in the weightiest areas of our lives. I mean, if you think about what these words mean as the Bible defines them, you think about love.

Biblical love is not just a response to someone or something that you deem attractive. No, it doesn't start with the lovely qualities that a person or an object possesses. It starts with the benefactor, the person who is expressing the love, the person who's giving the love. Biblical love is solely dependent on the lover, not the beloved.

It's a commitment that involves sacrifice and the well-being of the beloved, no matter what the condition or the cost. And while God tells us to love like this, he also expresses it. He doesn't just cheapen these words. He shows this love to us in every area and every component of our relationship to his people, or his relationship to us as his people. So from our calling to our salvation to our entire Christian life, we know, we see in scripture that God loves us because he loved us, not because of anything good within ourselves.

This is what makes the gospel such good news, right? This is what makes the cross so scandalous. The entire Christian faith is based on God's love for a people who don't deserve it, people who don't earn it, people who don't even possess anything lovely within themselves. And yet God gave up His truly lovely Son to bear the Father's rejection and the Father's hatred so that we could receive His acceptance and His affection by faith. Our calling, our capacity, to love like this, that the only way we can love like this is because God graciously loved us first, and he granted it to us in Christ.

Similarly, honor in the Bible is also meant to be proactive. Honor in the Bible is not reactive. Honor, as I defined a couple months ago in James 2, it's the value and the worth that we place on someone. Worldly honor, if you think about it, is based on external factors like wealth and power because worldly honor comes with quid pro quos, right?

It's transactional. We extend honor in exchange for access, access to the things that makes someone honorable. We make much of them, they make much of us. Biblical honor turns this basis entirely upside down. Right? Biblical honor is not based on what someone has to offer, but instead it's based on the value that God assigns to them.

The poor man in the assembly is just as honorable as the rich man because of the value that God assigns to the poor man. These two virtues, they relate to each other because Christian love naturally leads to honoring others. So when we set our affections on someone, we commit ourselves to them and resolve to sacrifice for them, we give them significant weight in our lives. When Christ tells us to

love your neighbor as yourself

, he's saying that we're supposed to take all that care all that concern, all that weight that we have for our own lives and place it onto others. Paul articulates this well in Philippians 2 when he says that we are to

count others more significant than yourself

and to

look to the interest of others.

Love and honor in the Bible, they're two sides of the same coin.

Right? They both relate to how we view others, what we give to others, and how much we make of others over ourselves. All right, so that's biblical love, that's biblical honor. Well, what then does this have to do with charity and hospitality? Charity and hospitality are related to the two things that are inherently most valuable to us. our money, and our time.

Contributing to the needs of the saints

Contributing to the needs of the saints.

This also gets translated as

share with the saints in their need. Share with the saints in their needs.

Sharing here is the same idea as fellowship. It's how we actively express our God-given partnership and our unity in Christ with one another. The sharing that's being referred to here is financial sharing. It's sharing our stuff. Financial fellowship, you could say.

Money, by definition, is how we place value on something, right? Valuable things cost more money. Dollars and cents, like if you think about it, dollars and cents have no intrinsic value in themselves, right? Dollars are pieces of paper. They're simply ways that we express how much something is worth.

And our wallets, Jesus tells us that our wallets are a direct reflection of what we truly value in our hearts. We only invest in the things that touch on our deepest desires. Whether it's pleasure, or power, or safety, or security, or acceptance, or intimacy, Every dollar that we spend is ultimately an expression of our deepest longings. So when we contribute to the needs of the saints, it says something significant about what we value and what we desire.

Our wallets serve as a powerful expression of our love. The same goes for time. we don't just spend money, we also spend time. And once we spend time, we have no way of getting it back, right? There's no way to replenish our funds or get a return on investment when it comes to our time. Once it's gone, it's gone. Time truly is our most precious commodity.

Friendship with strangers

Hospitality, It requires us to spend time, time with someone, time on someone, time for someone. Hospitality is never just going to happen passively. It requires you to actively pursue someone who is outside your normal rhythm and patterns of life. Hospitality, by definition, the word means friendship with strangers, which means that hospitality only exists when someone who is on the outside is brought inside.

I'm never going to be hospitable to my wife. Not because I don't love her, not because I don't want to be friends with her. I love her dearly. But because she's already on the inside. She's not a guest in my life. She requires no invitation to enter into my home or sit at my table and eat my food or sleep in my bed. No, and when we do have guests over to our homes, that's time that we do not get to spend together. Our attention and our energy is focused on the guests who we've invited over. It'd be really weird and uncomfortable if we had you over to our house and then we spent the entire time planning out our week or like working through a conflict or just playing board games with each other, right? No. And time in the home is precious. Right? Time at work is precious. Me time is precious. Time doing anything, it's precious.

That's why our culture is so obsessed with efficiency. We recognize that we only have so much time and we'll do anything that we can to make the most of it and spend it as shrewdly as possible. So when we strive to be hospitable, we say something significant about the person that we're welcoming into our lives. That our time is best spent on them, with them, and for their well-being.

Love, honor, charity, and hospitality. Four Christian virtues that are deeply connected, and when they're working together, They make for a faithful and beautiful display of God's gracious calling on our lives. So Paul is telling all of us here, don't just tell someone you love them. Don't just tell someone you honor them. Show it to them by giving them what matters most to you.

Use your giftings

This is the universal call for all Christians. We're all called, every single one of us, called to display these robust Christian virtues. I mean, this is the Christian social life, right? A life marked by relationships, a life marked by putting others above yourself.

And yet, we can't expect that we're going to look uniform across the church when it comes to these. You know, not everyone holds the same schedule. Not everyone works the same job. So as we think about what this might look like for us, I would first just encourage you to resist the temptation to compare yourself to others. You might not be in the same situation as the person next to you. And in the church, you do not have to keep up with the Joneses. The Christian life, it's not a competition. and we are not being ranked against our fellow members.

Instead, I'd encourage you to just strive to use your giftings for the sake of others. Your treasure, your time, and use your talents. This is the framework that I mentioned earlier. Use your giftings for the sake of charity and hospitality. How has God designed me? What has God given me? How can I use that?

If you look up at the few verses before our passage, Paul gives these universal commands in our verse after he speaks about spiritual gifts in verses six to eight. Paul recognizes that not everyone is designed by God to be the same. And yes, you could make the argument that these spiritual gifts are universal qualities that all Christians should possess, but Paul also says that these gifts differ according to the grace given to us. So verses six to eight, it's not an excuse to neglect sanctification where we're lacking, but it is an encouragement to lean in where God has already been graciously at work in your life. Whatever gifts or talents that God has blessed us with, use that to build up the body.

This is how we come together as many members. Each part functions differently, but in unity. Some of us are comfortable with the spotlight being on us. Others prefer to be in the background. Some of us enjoy crowds. Others prefer personal connections.

We're all called to give money, but some of us have particular skills that can help the church save money. Some of us are people-oriented, some of us are task-oriented, some of us are thinkers, some of us are doers. And you see, Christians are not all cut from the same cloth, and that's a good, God-given thing. But however God has designed you, He has called you to use that design for the sake of sharing it with others, both in charitable service and in hospitable relationships. So to close, I want to offer one simple application that I think captures everything that we just talked about. It's this. It's not super profound, I promise.

Invite someone over into your life

Invite someone over into your life. Send an invitation out. and just invite them into the stuff that you're already doing. And by stuff, I mean even like the mundane, ordinary stuff that you're gonna do regardless of who's gonna do it with you. Eating a meal, grocery shopping, exercising, yard work, your kids' activities. Just have them even stop by your office just to say hi. Don't worry about planning anything special. Don't worry about having some sort of particular formal conversation. Just invite them over and see what God does with it.

In campus outreach, we use a lot of simple, catchy phrases to think about ministry and discipleship. And one of them is that

discipleship is not just taught, but it's caught. Discipleship is not just taught, but it's also caught.

If you think about Jesus and his disciples, they were constantly with him. They learned not just by hearing from Jesus, but by observing him as he prayed and traveled and taught and healed and ate and slept. And when they were with Jesus in all of this, they learned from him. He even used the simplest moments to teach about the kingdom of God.

Paul and Timothy had a similar relationship. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul commends Timothy for not only following his teaching, but also his conduct, his aim in life, his faith, his patience, his love, his steadfastness, his persecutions, and his sufferings. Timothy was there for all of it, and he learned from Paul. Paul passed the torch on to Timothy through a life-on-life relationship.

And that's the spiritual potential that comes with hospitality. You invite someone into your life and you set the precedent for how you can do all things for the glory of God and the good of his people. And when you do that, you never know what kind of spiritual need you'll be meeting for them. So love and honor others. by showing charity and hospitality. Show it with your treasure, show it with your time, and show it with your talents. And trust that God is going to use it for good and glorious purposes according to the grace that he has given you.

Let's pray. Father God, you have contributed everything to our greatest need in our salvation. Father, you have brought us in from the outside and reconciled us to yourself in Christ Jesus. Father God, we praise you and thank you for the great work that you have done in the gospel for us.

And Lord, we pray that we would be a display of the gospel in all of our relationships as a church. Lord, pray that we would share in the needs that others have. Lord, pray that we would be open about our own needs. Lord, pray that we would welcome others into our lives. And Lord, we pray that you would glorify yourself in us and through us as a church. We pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.