Romans 12:14-21

Let's go to Romans, Chapter 12, we are continuing our study and we are already approaching the final stretch, verse 14 onwards. I am going to read it first before entering into any comment, if you do not have your Bible, glory to God, thanks for the brothers who put it here.

If you need translation, if you don't have earphones, please raise your hand, I'll be very happy to have someone…, back here there's one, ok…. Brother ushers, there is a young man here who needs translation. If you need translation just let us know please and we'll be happy to provide you with some earphones.

Chapter 12, verse 14: “…. Bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice, cry with those who cry; be of one accord among yourselves, not haughty but associating with the humble. Do not be wise in your own opinion. Repay no one evil for evil. Seek what is good in front of all men. If possible, as far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, because it is written, revenge is mine, I will pay, says the Lord. So if your enemy is hungry, feed him; and if he is thirsty, give him drink, for by doing this you will heap fiery coals on his head. Do not be defeated by evil but overcome evil with good..."

Bless the Lord his word. It hurts me to read those verses because they hit me hard and it is a great challenge for my life, but we cannot escape the call of the word of the Lord, a call that is not accidental, it is not isolated, but rather it is in the very essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And we are called to enter into that posture.

I could title this message and those verses, 'The attitude of mercy', and also in my Bible I have another note that I put here a while ago and it says, 'x-ray of love'. Those verses, especially beginning with verse 9 to the end of verse 21, it is as if we were taking love, the Christian concept of love, agape, and disassembling it into its constituent parts, and presenting it in its possible manifestations in human relationships. , both in the context of the church and in the context of the world in which we walk.

This morning I had to decide whether to start with verse 9 and I realized that verses 9 to 13 are a unit in themselves and it's been a while since I, months and months ago, discussed this text , before starting to study the Epistle to the Romans in a systematic way, as we have been doing, so I don't really think that I have touched verses 14 to 21 in a specific way, so I felt from the Lord to also take this passage in particular, this text, verse 14 onwards and discuss it with you this morning.

Verses 9 to 13 I would say that they refer to the love that is manifested in the context of the church, the brothers for one another. He talks about love being without pretense, that we teach what is good, that we love one another with brotherly love, etc. It is rather the love in their congregational behavior, the relationship with each other. And how important it is, brothers, if I can say before fully entering the other text, that it is so important that love reigns in a Christian congregation, brotherly affection reigns, including the word affection translated brotherly affection, it is the word philos torgos, which refers to family affection, family love. I could say honey, that we love each other with affection. In a church, affection has to prevail because many times we are so spiritual, right? Lord bless you, dear brother, but we're so formal, aren't we? But God wants us to be loving to one another. Amen. That we express love in practical ways, in familiar ways, that we support each other, that we host each other, that we invite each other to eat, that we forgive each other, that we clean up the accounts quickly; If there's something that didn't go well, look, forgive each other. Let us immediately restore congregational harmony.

Brothers, congregational harmony is the bond through which God's grace flows in a church. If there is no harmony, if there is no love, the power of God cannot run. The heart of God breaks when Christians in the same congregation are in conflict with each other and do not speak to each other, do not greet each other, hold grudges and there are things hidden there. I encourage you in the name of Jesus right now to restore any relationship that is broken. Amen. Deal in the name of Jesus, and don't try, do it in the name of Jesus because we impoverish our church to the extent that we do not contribute to maintaining a totally perfect, intact network of love between us.

But guess what? We also have to behave lovingly towards outsiders. And that is very difficult, that is why I told you, this text sticks me in a very deep way because I can immediately tell you that up to now, I have not fully lived and sometimes I have not even come close to those 8 verses, to live them as God wants you to live it. But one thing I can tell you is that I cannot make excuses about the fact that this is the call of the Lord for my life and for yours as well. I am never going to say, no, that is for super spiritual people, it is not so easy to live it, as we say, and with that we excuse ourselves, right? And we go through those verses at a thousand miles an hour because we don't like them. Or we simply put a mental block that prevents that word from penetrating our hearts, we don't deal with it. We went through it like we went through the enumerations of so-and-so begat so-and-so, and so-and-so begat so-and-so in the Old Testament, right? We run through there as fast as possible to go to other things that are a little tastier. But we can't do that. The very essence of the Gospel is embodied in those verses.

And if you want to make sure of that you can go to Luke, Chapter 6 where the Lord Jesus Christ himself, the founder of our faith, speaks to his followers about love towards enemies, love towards people who don't love us very well and we don't love very well either, and how we should treat those people. And I believe that the distinctive aspect of the Christian faith is there in that love that refuses to give an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, that refuses to live by the law of retaliation and retribution, of revenge, of legalism; you did this to me, you have to pay me; You killed a brother of mine, because I can take revenge by killing you or another brother of yours.

Unfortunately that's what we see in a good part of the world. Look at the Middle East where there is so much war, where there is so much discord, where there are members of the same nation, not only of the same nation, but of the same religion, killing each other in inconceivable ways, because they simply belong to a sect or another sect, and because they feel that well, he killed my brother, or they killed ten from my neighborhood, but we are going to kill a hundred from their neighborhood. That is what has the world, and has had the world throughout history in wars and wars and wars.

Unfortunately, brothers, not only Muslims or Buddhists and Hindus, even Buddhists are sometimes more peaceful than the Christians themselves, but we Christians have fallen for it and there have been religious wars like the ones there were in Europe in the seventeenth century, the so-called religious wars.

I had the opportunity to go to the Czech Republic several years ago and go to a museum where there were the instruments of war that Christians used to kill each other and there were weapons that were designed to cause death. more pain and more damage to the body, calculatedly, to kill other Christians.

And I say that being a Christian is not enough, loving God is not enough, giving God our money is not enough, being willing to die for God is not enough, but to unless the essence of the Gospel penetrates our hearts, which is the refusal to ask for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, unless the tenderness of Christ, unless that love that does not avenge itself, that refuses to hurt, that refuses to getting into the diabolical game of 'you did it to me, well I'm going to do it to you', unless that ultra-human, divine, angelic sensitivity does not become part of our hearts, our emotions, our minds Unless we continually program ourselves, brothers, that I am not going to be another instrument of violence and revenge and retribution and resentment in the world, I am going to take away from the world at least one weapon that is going to to be mine, I am going to take it away, I am going to keep it, the world is not going to have healing, brothers. And the heart of Jesus is not going to be able to manifest itself properly and that is why the church has to insist on passages like these, even though many times none of us can reach that level, but we have to do everything possible to try. We have to embrace that sensibility.

Luke, Chapter 6, verse 27, the Prince of Peace speaks to his followers and says: “But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hear you. hate them, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. To the one who hits you on one cheek, also present the other and to the one who takes your cloak, do not even deny him the tunic. Give to anyone who asks you, and to the one who takes what is yours do not ask to be returned to you, and as you want men to do with you, so do you also with them, because if you love those who love you, what merit do you have? Because sinners also love those who love them...”

You see, the essence of the Gospel lies in this that it is very easy to love someone who loves you, and if someone opens the door for you , you will feel a feeling of gratitude and affection for that person; the one who behaves well with you, look, why not love him, why not treat him well? You have to be a pervert to hate that person, right? In other words, even the unbelievers do that, those who do not know the Gospel, the savage in the Amazon does it, stuck there in the jungle, or the warrior who is in a war does it, he does not kill those who are of his conviction or his party, or whatever. That is what the unredeemed man does, the untouched man, the biological man, because of the Gospel he does those things, that is normal. What's going on? Christianity calls us to rise to the level of the divine, yes or no? He calls us to imitate our Heavenly Father, he calls us to imitate the agape love of God.

How does God treat us? Listen to me if God treated you and me as we deserve, where would we be? We would be in a hole in hell. But the word says that when we were mired in sin, Christ came into the world and died for us.

Someone has said that grace is not giving someone what they deserve and giving them what they don't deserve. God gave us something we did not deserve: forgiveness of our sins and reconciliation with him, and he did not give us what we deserved, which was hellfire and eternal death.

So, based on that, God says, 'You know what? You have to do the same with your neighbor', that is the consequence of that act of God. So we have to fight with that call and it manifests itself in so many ways. In other words, the Christian ethics par excellence, brothers, is that of going further, going the second mile, going beyond the minimum. Most of us human beings settle for the minimum of Christianity, but God calls you to go to the maximum. That's why Christ always said, you heard that such a thing was said because Judaism in its legalism had reduced everything to a minimum, but Jesus said, you know what? I have come to do something much greater and to give you higher standards to live by, more powerful principles.

So, if someone wants to hurt you, bless them. If someone offended you at work, don't be there scheming how to hurt him or her. If a brother in the church offended you or did not treat you as you think he should have treated you, do not hold grudges in your heart but look for a way to restore that relationship. Pray for him or her. How many can say amen even if it is by faith?

However, we can say that this is not always the case, even among us here. I know that there are situations that are not resolved and we always have to be examining ourselves, I always have to be checking the temperature and the state of my soul. And wherever I see a stain of rancor, of resentment against someone, something that I have not resolved. I have to immediately try to heal that, brothers, and my attitude has to be an attitude of grace, militant grace, abundant grace, generous grace.

Do you brothers know that this attitude of grace and mercy is the source of the greatest emotional healing there is? If we could practice that attitude of grace we would not need to go to the psychiatrist, I believe, in most cases, we would not have to take sleeping pills, because many times what happens is that our inner universe is contaminated with untreated things, not healed, with negative attitudes, our marriages are often contaminated by that attitude of "you did it to me, you pay me back"; 'I'm not going to give you because you didn't give me'. All that is rather man's practices not touched by God, then all that damages the marriage, damages the relationship between parents and children, children and parents as well. Children also need to have that attitude of mercy towards their parents, of love, of forgiveness.

I see many children, and by the way this is a 'pet peeve' as they say in English, it's a little issue of mine that I have that I think many young people in our generations, not just 17-year-olds , 18 years but those generations of 25, 30 years, are doing a lot of damage because they have an attitude of judgment against their parents. They refuse to forgive their parents for the offenses the parents committed. What dad doesn't make mistakes with his kids? They will commit them later, when they have children they will commit them too.

And they know what has redeemed the generations through the centuries, is that the children have had that attitude of mercy towards their parents and of reverence that prevents them from seeing their parents with that attitude of judgment fluorescent, phosphorescent with which many boys sometimes see nowadays. The psychoanalytic culture of counseling and all this and legalistic, I think, of modern man and questioning of authority has created a generation that views their parents in a negative and judgmental way and expects perfection from the parents and so they refuse to give parents that generous acceptance, that love, that honoring of parents. And you know what? Those generations are hurting themselves, and they are preparing to reap the consequences of that when they are parents.

If your father offended you, if your mother wasn't all she was meant to be, that's okay, own up to it, but don't hold grudges in your heart. Heal that immediately. Close that gap because you hurt yourself. You don't do as much damage to them, though if it does damage to them like you do damage to yourself. Forgive everything you have to forgive and make sure there is a clear love, a generous heart. Give, bless and that's what it says here in this passage.

In verse 14 it says 'bless those who persecute you, bless and do not curse'. It would have been a lot if you had simply said, do not persecute those who persecute you, do not kill those who persecute you, do not seek evil from those who persecute you, but no, he went further and said 'bless them'.

You have to understand the context in which the Apostle Paul writes, a context where Christians were persecuted or denigrated. In the neighborhoods where they lived they were seen with resentment, with strangeness, with resentment, they were not treated well, some were martyred, they were mistreated because they went against the current of the culture in which they lived. And then the Apostle Paul says, do not enter into the little game of persecuting or holding a grudge against those who persecute you. No, pray for them, bless them in the name of the Lord, instead of cursing them, do the opposite, bless them.

We cannot, brothers, curse. When we curse people with our hearts, the curse first has to pass from our hearts, through our minds and through our mouths, and it contaminates. It contaminates us first before leaving, that is the damage. So we have to refuse to curse people and sometimes you know what? I would go further, sometimes we curse people in our hearts, we don't curse them with our mouth but in our hearts we curse them. Not with words, but our emotions.

Paul says, no, utter words of blessing, ask the Lord to bless that person. You will know that sand blessing when you pronounce it, but you know what? The second time will be easier, the third time will be easier, and then the glory and blessing of the Lord will flow over your life, your mind will be clear, your heart will be clear.

If a husband you divorced or divorced you from did not treat you well, forgive him, let him go, let him go from jail. Do you know that the word forgive has the resonance of letting a person go, freeing him because many times we keep people in jail. The law did not put him in jail but we did, inside. We have a special cell, indeed, many of us have a whole dungeon, a complete jail, with a number of cells there and we have a number of beings there that we do not give them bread, water, light, or even air and From time to time we take the little grill and open it like this to look at them suffering inside and we come back and close it and continue with our work.

The Lord says, open the door to all those prisoners you have, bless them, feed them and send them on their way. We have to try to do it, brothers, in the name of Jesus. Right now I encourage you, make a count in your mind of any person that you have in a cell inside of you and promise yourself that you are going to release them and that you are going to bless them and that you are going to give them money to buy the ticket , perhaps so that he goes far away from you, but at least give it to him. But free, bless those who persecute you, do not curse. Cursing contaminates you and does no good.

He says “... rejoice with those who rejoice, cry with those who cry...”

You know what? That passage also cuts me because sometimes I would say that it is easy to cry with those who cry. I think it takes a very bad person not to be moved when a person is crying, for example, because of a tragedy or a loss. It is easy sometimes to cry and grieve with people who are crying and mourning.

But for me, I confess, the part that hurts me the most is that of rejoicing with those who rejoice, because sometimes brothers, it is difficult to celebrate someone's triumph, yes or no? It's like an itch enters us inside, 'and why not me?' I confess something, I don't like to think much about those people who spend a hundred million dollars, they sometimes win in the lottery, I don't like. Do you know why? Because I say, geez, so, so hard that one works to earn money and these people 150 million dollars and I already see them going to the bank and taking money to buy a sports car and a house in Mensa and all that and I I prefer not to even think much about those kinds of fortunes, let's say. And that's my problem because I should celebrate and say, glory to God, how good it was for them. Amen. I hope that.... Lord bless them and that they enjoy and that they can make the most of it. But there is one, more like saying, 'why them and not me?'.

The word of the Lord says, he calls us to be generous and to rejoice with those who rejoice. If someone had a triumph in your work, if they were given a higher position, look, bless them and rejoice with them. Glory to God. That generous attitude, brothers, has great, great merit and blesses and cleanses the internal panorama of the human being.

It also says "... with one accord among you..."

There is the idea, again, among believers there must be one accord, not in the sense that we all think exactly the same. That will never be. Each head is a world, someone has said. But I believe that the unity of the Christian is the unity of an orchestra that has different instruments but all produce a harmony together. One may be playing in one rhythm, another in another rhythm, but there is a unity, a tremendous fluidity. If you listen to some of the music by Johann Sebastian Bach that Eric was playing here, some of his piano pieces, you see how the left hand is doing something completely different at times, and the right hand is somewhere else. And it seems like there could be a conflict between those two parts of the music, but it flows in an incredible way and makes sense musically.

And so is the harmony between believers. Sometimes some come from one culture, others from another culture, some are better off financially, others are more humble in their financial condition; some are highly educated, others less; some have slightly more modern ideas, others are more conservative, but you know what? God rejoices in that diversity of his people. Amen. The important thing is that this does not lead to conflict, to contempt for one another, that we all know that we are playing on the same key, the key of Christ, the key of the Kingdom of God, that we all work to advance the Kingdom of God, that we all we are members of a family, that we all have to love each other and that at the end of the day, even if we think differently, we have to kiss each other for peace and recognize ourselves as brothers, members of the family of faith in Christ Jesus. We all have to work in harmony, go in the same direction, unanimous with each other.

Oh, my, if the church of Christ were united in New England, what terrible, incredible things would happen. If Hispanics and African Americans and whites learned to work together. If even among the whites the evangelicals of a certain group and those of another group would learn to work together, brothers, I believe that New England would be for Christ in one day.

Christ always prays in his priestly prayer, in John Chapter 17 that they be one, as you and I, Father are one. And at least here in this church, we have to try, brothers, to work for that unity, for that unanimity, that harmony among us. We have to be unanimous, united among us, let's avoid anything that harms that harmony, that unity. Unanimous means, of a soul, anything that removes that unity of the collective soul of our church, do not be you or I agents of discord in our congregation. Remove again one element of discord from this church in your life, at least and try to maintain and work towards the collective peace of your congregation.

It says “...not haughty but associating with the humble....”

It is a call there, to what? To humility. Again in a church as diverse as ours, as Christianity was in the first century, where there were Christians with a lot of money and slaves, sometimes sitting in the same space. There was required to be an ethic of equality. Christianity dealt a death blow, I believe, to the system of slavery. He did not do it through violent revolution, he did not do it through the armed forces, but he did it through the ethics of love. It is said that there were occasions when in the same church there was a slave sitting next to his master, his owner. Or sometimes a bishop or a person of high position who was a slave exercising spiritual authority over a person who was a slave owner. That kind of contradiction sooner or later was going to deal a fatal blow to the institution of slavery, as it has been wherever Christianity has been applied because unfortunately there have been many Christians who have not applied Christianity.

Meche and I just watched the movie Amazing Grace, which I highly recommend. The story of Wilberforce, the great English reformer, who spent a good part of his life fighting against the institution of slavery in England. And to the shame of Christianity in America, in England, and in other parts of the world, slavery persisted despite the Christian faith. Because? Not because Christianity failed, but because many people, rich people, government people, political people benefited from the slave market and took the ethical call of the Gospel to heart, because no one who took the call of the Gospel to heart, I believe that it could enslave a man or a woman and further denigrate and torture them as was done in slavery.

That is why, brothers, it is so important that we understand, it is not enough to be a Christian. Many Christian cultures through the centuries have committed atrocities against their neighbor because they compartmentalized the Gospel and refused to ingest the terrible call to love your neighbor, to not look at anyone as inferior, but on the contrary, the further away they are from your condition. love him more, treat him better. When you identify someone in this church or out there in the community who is not on your level, be sure to treat that person with extra preference. Amen. Do a spiritual exercise and serve that person, extend your hand to that person, extend honor to that person, and treat him with deference and respect, because human nature rebels against that act and that human nature must be trampled on and it is necessary to bring the nature of Christ within us.

When here in this church you see someone who doesn't dress like you, who doesn't have the eyes like you or who doesn't have the manners that you have or who doesn't drive the car that you drive, make sure that that person receives greetings from you, good treatment, consideration, respect. Amen. That is necessary, brothers, as followers of Jesus Christ we have to do it. It is not merely enough not to despise it. Some would say, well, I don't despise him, I don't treat him badly, but are you doing anything to bridge the gap? We have an incredible diversity of people in this place, from all different categories and God's desire is that every day we blend more, we divide the barriers.

If there is someone you don't know, look, go and say hello. Instead of greeting each other, what do we do at the end of the service? We immediately go to the person we know the most, the ones we know, the ones from our country, the ones from our cell, the ones who dress like us, the ones from our category, we unconsciously identify them and stay within that little group, from that circle, yes or no? Many times that happens, you don't have to say amen to give yourself away, don't worry. But at the end of being each one of us, who is a minister of God, what we have to do is go to someone we don't know, go to someone who doesn't look like us, go to someone who may not be able to help us. invite to your home, go to someone who perhaps will not give me joy to be able to shake their hand because I see myself reflected in him, my values, my standards, my money, my social status, or nationality. That is the spirit of Jesus: to go against human nature or beyond human nature and enter the zone of the divine. Amen. Give glory to the Lord. That is important.

Don't be haughty. Haughtiness is more than pride, it is your looking at the person from your height, right? who are you? It is that putting yourself higher than you are. It says “...not haughty but associating with you...”

The implication in the original Greek is walking with, walking along with, beside. It is up to you to penetrate your life and have co-ordination, have intimacy, associating with the humble. And that part there that follows ".... do not be wise in your own opinion...." would seem like a non sequitur, like it does not follow, one thing is not attached to the other, but yes, because haughtiness, the implicit or explicit sense of superiority is associated with this idea as 'you overestimate yourself', and your belief that you know more, you have more, you are more than the other.

And the quintessential Christian attitude is one of the complete opposite. Not only are you not wise in your own opinion but you know that you are not so wise after all, period. That if it were not for the wisdom of God in you, you would make a fool of your life, what you would do in your life would be a disaster, that you always need the wisdom of God, that in order to solve your problems every day you have to say, 'Father, today I need my dose of wisdom to deal with my job, my marriage, my children, my finances, my health.' To drive you need the wisdom of God. None of us can depend on our own understanding, there has to be that humility, 'Father, I need you to enlighten me.' There has to be an awareness of our own fragility, of how prone we are to make inappropriate decisions that are harmful to us.

If you are like me, I cannot trust my own wisdom, my own prudence. I have to ask the Lord every day, 'Lord, replace your mind with my mind, that I have the mind of Christ.'

The Apostle James says, 'if someone lacks wisdom, ask God'. We do not move in human wisdom. What human wisdom leads to is what we have in the world: disaster, frustration, dysfunction, violence, mistakes, crooked mind, that is the human mind. That mind cannot do anything good for humanity. You need God's illumination, no one, none of us can say I am wise, I can deal with life, I can solve my problems by myself.

Oh how God loves that humility. As David says, 'Like a weaned child, so has my soul been before you, Lord.' Like a fragile child before its mother. When a man or a woman walks like this with that simplicity, with that humility, knowing that they cannot make any decisions for themselves, but rather that they need divine illumination, listen to me, there is a blessing there.

There are many haughty people even in Christian churches who cannot enjoy God's blessing because in their mind they have made a decision that they can fend for themselves and they are always making mistakes. While when a man or woman has that humility, that simple heart of a child, of an infant who needs his father, listen to me, God provides him with wisdom, frees him from so many errors, from so many difficulties.

“... Do not be wise in your own opinion, do not repay anyone evil for evil...”

Again, that same call, right? Don't just pay back what they did to you, that's what I'm going to do. He didn't look at me this morning when I got to church, well, I'm not going to look at him when I leave here from church. He didn't give me a present for Christmas, forget it next year, it's not going anywhere. He didn't invite me to his wedding, well, wait, don't worry, I'm not going to invite him to my Christmas party or my daughter's wedding or whatever. We hold grudges, we are always watching. The Bible says, no, do not repay anyone evil for evil, bless him, be generous, give more than anything, and in that there is a great blessing.

“... seek what is good in the sight of all men...”

The Christian touched by God is characterized, I believe, by an attitude of essential goodness. It is an attitude that you are an agent of good for others, you are not a weapon that hurts anyone, quite the contrary, your life is oriented towards helping others, blessing others and making others progress and advance to others.

The child of God is an instrument of grace in the hands of the Lord, your mentality, your heart must be how can I help someone this day? How can I help a youngster to find his destiny who is disoriented? That child of a single mother who does not have a role model, how can I serve as a role model and tutor and mentor to that child? How can I advise a woman who is in depression? How can I give a call to someone who has not surely called him? How can I attend to that person in the church that nobody greets him because he dresses badly, smells bad and it seems that he does not have all the screws in his head well tightened, but people avoid him? Because their conversation doesn't entertain, it doesn't even make sense... How can I add a spiritual vitamin to your life this morning or on this day, improve your life a little bit?

That's what it means, 'seek what is good in the sight of all men.' And he says "...if possible, as far as it depends on you be at peace with all men...."

This is one of the few times in this entire passage, or the only time perhaps in that there is a qualification, there is like a note of caution and a small exit, an exit clause here. He says, if possible, as long as it depends on you, two small conditions. The Christian must do everything possible to be well with people, but there will be times when it will not be possible, right? and then Christianity there are moments in which you are going to have to stop and say, no, I do not agree with this and the church of Jesus Christ is in a time in which there are things in which you have to say we do not agree, what We are going to resist, this is not from God and stand up clearly. They are going to insult us, they are going to protest, they are going to say that we are not people of mercy and love, but in that we say, 'no, in this it is not possible, we are very sorry'. We have to resist evil too.

Then there will be times in life when for different reasons a person, you will not be able to be one hundred percent well with him. As someone says, I'm not a gold coin to please everyone, or something like that. There are times when there will be conflict, but those times should be the exception and not the rule, yes. We must do everything possible to be okay with a neighbor, with a brother in the church, with a collaborator at work, whatever, but if it is not possible, then we have to use Christian means to draw the border and the difference and keep distance. We cannot use forms that are anti-Christian or non-Christian.

“......if it's possible and as long as it's up to us...” There are people who are just going to have it against you and they're going to persecute you and they're going to do whatever they can to hurt you , and they will be against you continuously, because they hate you or because they have evil in their hearts, or whatever. You can't fight with their hearts, but with you you can fight and in what depends on you, you can make sure that everything is fine. If you have done everything possible to be well, you have loved, you have prayed, you have blessed, then I believe that you are free, in a sense, to try to be well with that person.

I think there is a tension here what he is saying in this passage, but I have to make sure of that, as long as it depends on me. I think that this is a great law, in marriage for example, you may not be able to change your spouse and make him a paragon of virtues, but perhaps you can change some things. Deal with yourself, do everything you can to improve yourself and then that will put you in a stronger position to try to see that there are changes in your spouse's life as well.

Now, the end is the last call says, “...do not avenge yourselves, my beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God....”

It is like a summary of everything said in another way. Revenge, rancor, resentment, retribution for damage received is something that is always threatening to possess us. Someone did something to me and I have this desire to get back at them. There is a call from God, not us to seek revenge, but what do we have to do? Leave room for the wrath of God. In other words, open space so that it is God who executes justice and that is what justifies us, you know what, brothers? Many people say, I am not going to forgive him because if I forgive him then he goes unpunished and there is no justice.

Brothers, God's justice is implacable and impeccable. I believe that there are spiritual laws that govern. When a person does something harmful, something bad, there is a consequence and God takes it upon himself to bring justice in some way. Many times however, we do not have the privilege and joy of seeing God's justice done, but we have to believe. Your word says Lord, that you are just and you do justice. So we entrust justice to the Lord, we entrust retribution to the Lord, let him take care of it and let him do it the way he wants and prefers. And you know what, brothers? I believe that God's justice is often so deep, so systemic that it is more just than ours. We may be able to take someone's arm off, or put them in jail for three years, but that may not touch the person. Sometimes God's justice reaches deep, deep and is more powerful and more just than ours.

Now, that takes faith, it takes faith to take your hands off the matter and say, 'Lord, I'll leave it up to you. You take care of that.'

There are three reasons, you say, right? for which we have to leave justice and revenge to God. He says, number one, because the Lord says 'vengeance is mine, I will pay, says the Lord'. The Lord says, that is my department, not yours, the department of revenge, the retribution is from God, that does not correspond to us. So the Lord says, I will pay, revenge is mine. No, that's my area, don't get involved in it, it belongs to the Lord.

Number two, there's something here that says, “... so if your enemy is hungry, feed him, if he is thirsty, give him drink, for by doing this you will heap fiery coals on his head ”.

That's an expression that means, it's like you pick up hot coals and put them on the person's head. What happens if you put a number of coals on people's heads? After a while they don't know what to do, their heads are burning, their heads are burning and they have to run away. And the idea is, I think, that when we do good for people, you know what? We shame them, we heap so much pressure on them that they can't take that and also, I think, in a sense it's like we're saying, hey, we're heaping even more wrath on them from God. It could be interpreted that way too. It's like saying, we're heaping more judgment on them, do him good and then let the Lord take care of it.

And finally he says, "...do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good..."

It's the summary of everything, isn't it? Because there is the thing, when you act in the flesh and in the animal aspect, treating people as they treat you, you have allowed yourself to be defeated by them, you have become one more, like them, you have also been .

I finish with this illustration. Meche and I were in Providence last weekend, I think it was, it seems like forever, hear me. We were resting over there, I was sitting in a star box reading and I overheard a conversation. Meche tells me that I am one of the most quarrelsome people in the world, and I was reading and I overheard a conversation and I stopped reading because I was captivated by what these two people were saying. I couldn't see them, one of them, later I found out because I had a very interesting conversation with him, he was the hotel parking manager, a very polite man I later found out, and with the young women who attended the star box at the counter. And it seems that he knew them because they are part of the same commercial system there, so he was talking to them about an incident that he just had that day, there was a big Mary Kay convention, there were thousands of women there in that area.

So he was saying that they had all been very good, and that he had a good time working with the women who came to the parking lot, and that they had been very courteous except for one, who says that when He went to open the door of his car, he stormed out and insulted him, that she could open it herself, and this and that, and to leave her alone. And the girls told her, 'ah, if it had been me, I would have insulted her and why didn't you tell her something, I don't know what, I don't know how much. And he told them, and this is what made me pay attention, he said; 'No, never, that cannot be done.' He said the following: 'If I react with the same attitude as her, then I am giving her control. I'm letting her control me. I am letting her define my way of acting and she then owns me and controls me. I couldn't do that, so what I did was I greeted her and said 'Have a nice day. Have a nice day'.

And I was like, wow. A secular person talking that way and I felt challenged myself, you know. Because I don't know if I would have that control, that self-control to have that ethical lucidity at that moment to say, no, I'm not going to let this person define my way of acting and turn me into a clone, into a reproduction of her, of her attitude. I am going to take a higher attitude and I am going to dominate the situation with the weapons of light.

The Bible says that our weapons are not carnal but what? Powerful in God for the destruction of strongholds. That is to say, we do not leave because of the external symptom. No, we go to the fortress, below, where the root is and we destroy the root so that the root of evil dries up. Because you can cut the grass as much as you want on the top, but if the root is inside, the grass comes out again. So Christianity says, No, we are not going to fight with weapons, weapon against weapon, hate against hate, resentment against resentment, negative action against negative action, we are going to remove the very root of it by refusing to play the devil's little game. We are going to be different.

I want to ask the Lord today this morning to help me first to embrace that ethic of Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are going to ask the Lord to make us agents of blessing. I want to ask the musicians to please stop by immediately if you would be so kind.

I want each one of us brothers to fight. I know that the call of God this morning is heavy, but it is an inescapable, inescapable call. If we want to be true children of our Heavenly Father, true imitators of Jesus, true followers of our God who makes his sun rise on the just and the unjust, we have to ask the Lord, 'Father, I want to be better than the world. I want to live at a greater height or I want to live at a greater depth. I want to uproot the roots of revenge and retribution and I want to be like Jesus who on the cross blessed his persecutors and said, Father, forgive them because they don't know what they are doing. And also Stephen, when he was stoned by the Jews, raised his eyes to heaven and said the same thing, 'Lord, do not take into account this great evil that they are doing'. There in that scene was Saul grabbing the clothes of those who were stoning Esteban. Saul later became the Apostle Paul and he remembered that scene. It cannot be denied that we possibly have the Apostle Paul here today writing those passages because Stephen's prayer came and this man was blessed and this horrible Pharisee was converted. So brethren, that is breaking down strongholds through a positive action of militant grace. Let us be agents of grace not of legalism.

Let's stand up for a moment and ask the Lord to please touch us, touch our lives and make us instruments of peace, instruments of good. Meditate 30 seconds, one minute on what you just heard right now and take that time there to settle that word in your spirit. Let her go in there deep. To what extent does this word touch you, to what extent does it confront you and what are you going to do with it, how are you going to incorporate it into your life and your life program? How can you change? How can I change on this day? How can we adjust our walk a little more to that of the teacher par excellence that we have?

Lord, we choose to forgive those who offend us, bless those who curse us. We choose not to seek retribution or revenge. We choose to set free those we have put in our inner prisons. We choose to use grace to forgive our parents, our relatives, the members of our church who have offended us and we will also try to ask for forgiveness, we will make retribution or rather restoration towards those we have offended or harmed as much as possible. Today, Lord, we choose to be agents of light, of peace, of good in this world, not agents of evil, not continuation of the same dynamic of war and conflict that has this world so wounded, so damaged.

In this church, Father, in this place we receive your word and we know that it is true, we recognize it as the word of God that can bring blessing to our lives and we abide by it, and we obey it. Give us the strength, Lord, this is too serious and too heavy for us to execute them by our own human strength. We need the gift of God, the energy of the Holy Spirit, the grace of God in us. Holy Spirit strengthen us in our desire to honor the modeling and teaching of Jesus Christ. Bless this people, Father, may this word continue to speak to us today and may it be a blessing for this church, for our families, for our community, for the places where we work, Lord, our schools where we attend as well. Thanks, Dad. We entrust ourselves to you, Lord, and to your mercy, in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. Glory to God.