Justified to Love

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. We are in our 12th week. I know this is a long series for Thrive. We usually do four to six weeks in length, you know, move on to a topic. But this fall, with COVID-19, with us coming back into in-person worship with masks on, with all these limitations, we thought this was a good year to just get back to the basics. And so we are doing a series on, of all books, the Book of Romans, 13 weeks. So next Sunday is the last week in our series. And how God justifies us, and that's called justified, and how God then mends us, mends our lives, our hearts, our world. And I'm excited about today's message as we are in Romans 13. So after this series, what are we going to do next? We're calling it Ugly Christmas. Okay, and you might say, this is going to be an ugly Christmas. And it could well be, in the sense of what we're used to having. But think about the first Christmas. You know, a manger. It wasn't pine-scented, you know, Christmas candles, cinnamon, all that, and spices. No, it was kind of manure-scented, probably. And it was kind of an ugly time. And actually, all the prophecies, starting in the Old Testament, about the coming Messiah were spoken during very ugly times. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, all these wonderful prophecies we think of. Unto us a child is born, all those types of things. Were not spoken in an easy time, not in a wonderful time, not in the peak time, but in a really bad time. And so I think it's going to be a good contrast this year with what we're going through to start this series on, I think it's November 29th, if I'm right, two weeks from today, okay? Going to be fun, okay? So, Justified version 12. We're actually, when we started this series 12 weeks ago, we started at the end of the letter of Romans to find out where was Paul headed with all of this stuff. And what we found out back then is that Roman society was dealing with two huge issues, two huge issues that I think we do too. And they were the issues of power and privilege and how that caused such divisions in those days between men and women, between slave and free, between Gentile and Jew, and between all sorts of ethnicities as well. And how the gospel of justification, this wonderful word that we are justified by God's grace through Jesus Christ, mends our hearts, mends our relationships, and will mend our world and how God has brought that about. So today what we're discovering is in Romans chapter 13, how Paul's telling those Christians in Rome, in these small five to eight house churches, how do they live in the real world? And the real world of their day was a world under Nero, the emperor. A powerful, pervasive, and unscrupulous regime that was ruining or dominating all sorts of lives. And so we're going to look at Romans chapter 13. We could read the whole chapter. It starts out about the government in those days. But I think the last verses, 11 through 14 of chapter 13, will give us a good summary of all that Paul is saying. So we're reading in Romans 13, 11 through 14. Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake up from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone, the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. I think you might realize this. The Roman Empire was never wonderfully benevolent or tolerant for Christians or for Jews or for any religious or ethnic minority. In fact, for instance, in 49 AD, Claudius, the reigning emperor, banished and expelled the Jews from Rome itself. And we know about this as well in the Book of Acts because Priscilla and Aquila left Rome at that time. They met Paul in Corinth. That's where they met. But it got worse. It got worse than just having Jews banished from Rome. In 64 AD, it was Nero who fiddled while Rome burned. Have you heard that line before? He blamed the Christians for the burning of Rome. This little minority. Most historians believe that he set the fire himself because he wanted to renovate the city. But he blamed the Christians. He rounded them up. He had them killed. Some were torn apart by dogs. Some were burned alive as human torches on poles. Isn't that wonderful? Dip them in wax, light it on fire, let them go. And over the next hundred years or so, Christians were sporadically persecuted in Rome. There was no great dominant government that was persecuting all people until the 3rd century. That's when the emperors initiated intensive persecutions. But Paul is dealing with this. Nero is on the throne when he is writing the Book of Romans. He knows the history. He...