03-02-2026 With One Another Romans 12:10

0:00Welcome to the Bread of Life, I'm Jovan Hugen, the Director of Church Partnership of Angelism and the Pastoring Bible Teacher at the Bread of Life Fellowship Church in Boise, Idaho. Everywhere the gospel goes, spiritual opposition follows, but God is opening doors and lives are being changed. We ask for you to pray for us as we continue to equip believers around the world to bear witness to Jesus Christ. To learn more about our ministry, go to traincpe.org or breadoflifeboise.org. Today we return to Romans chapter 12, verse 10, where Paul calls upon those in the church to be bound to one another with the tender affections of family. There are many ways in which the members of the church are illustrated in the New Testament. We're identified as a flock of sheep, as a building, or a temple, or as a vineyard as well. But there's only one way in which we're addressed. We are addressed as family. We start there and explain what makes this true.

1:03Colossians 1, verse 2, is very helpful in this area. There Paul addresses the Christians in the church and he calls them faithful brethren in Christ. Faithful brethren in Christ. That's it by the way. We are family, we are brothers and sisters together because we've been adopted and born again of God through our faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus is identified in the New Testament. God speaks two different times during the life of the Lord Jesus. This is my beloved son and whom I'm well pleased. Jesus is called the beloved one on other occasions that are out the writings of Paul as well. Ephesians 1 says that in Christ we've been adopted to God and it also says in Christ, we have been accepted in the beloved. That means Jesus is God's much loved son and because we are in Christ, because our life and our faith is in him, God loves us because God sees us and identifies us and receives us in the Son, Jesus Christ.

2:04He's desired to pour out his praise upon his Son and identify him as one that he loves that he's pleased with. Now not only goes to him but it extends to us as well. We're loved in the Son. I think it would be helpful for you to kind of consider your connection to one another. You look around at one another, see one another's family but ask God to help you see that the tender love that you're to identify that calls us to one another's family and to receive one another's family is because the bond we have is that our life is bundled up and tied together in Jesus Christ. We see ourselves in him and we see him in us. We recognize it sometimes by faith but it's there and it's true and here's what it means. This is humbling to me and wonderful to me. It means that our fellowship and tender affection for one another is not based upon performance. You are not to be received into the body of Christ or loved in the body of Christ because

3:05you behave yourself. You received because you belong because your life has been planted in our Savior Jesus Christ. You received because you're beautiful to us and we're beautiful to one another because we're clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. You're received because we receive him and we bless him and we honor him. You're tenderly loved because we love him and we want the tenderness of our love with our Savior to go out upon one another. It also means that our fellowship to one another and this tender experience we have with one another is not constructed upon the fact that we share common goals. It's not constructed upon the fact that we have the same ministry vision when I first began in ministry, the key goal and leadership I was taught was that I had to be a vision caster without the vision the people perish and so the pastor would go out and they'd set the vision for all the people but ultimately it came down to us this. If you don't buy into this vision you might want to go somewhere else because this is where

4:05we're going and these are our goals and this is what we're accomplish it. This is how we're going to win this city or this is how we're going to fill out our congregation. This is going to be our style and this is going to approach here's the homogeneity of people we want to reach and if you don't see eye to eye maybe I'd go down the road because this is our vision but here we read and here we understand that the one thing that brings us and qualifies us for the tender affection of God's families that we've all been cleansed in the same fountain of blood. We've all been washed and bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ and we've been baptized by the Holy Spirit into him and we love one another as family because we share in his life together that's it that's what makes us family and you might say well what about those individuals who are in a fellowship and attend a fellowship and they're not born again you know they're not really truly saved we don't always know who those are I think

5:06of 1 Corinthians chapter 13 that says love hopes all things and believes all things it means that the quick consideration we make of one another as we assume we assume you've been put in Jesus Christ and we pray that Christ would manifest and express his life through you and be glorified in you and it should be discerned that there are some among us who are not which is almost always the case we go on loving anyway we go on loving and waiting and praying hoping that the day will come when you'll grab hold of his love recognize that love is fully expressed in him dying completely for your sins in your place and order that you might stop grubbing your way through life and achieving your own righteousness but that you would just surrendered him and submit to him and receive the gift of his life by faith and the meantime we go on loving we go on loving here's the third idea we have in this passage and I just kind of state this as a bit of a recognition the idea of family

6:06is taking a hit in our day and age it's been going on for about 50 or 60 years actually there's a concerted effort by those who would gain control over each individual in the battle of for his and her mind to separate the individual person from the morality that defines them we talked about this a few weeks ago and that morality is conveyed to us in more than any other place around the family table it's where we begin to construct our value system and our morals and our understanding of the kinds of people we are but the best way to somehow sweep people into the influence of some other entity and to exert power over them is to isolate them from that morality and that life that they have in their homes and with their family so as a result the primary point of attack over the last 50 to 70 years in order to gain people and bring people away and bring them under certain powers and entities is to somehow bring them and call them out from their own families and develop and devise systems and strategies to do so so a few weeks ago we talked about this Satan's battle for the

7:13mind we said was that he basically plays with language and what he wants to do is he wants to go away the words and the language you use that has a moral substance to it and withdraw that from our lives and he wants to insert words and other words to replace it with that don't have the same moral substance to them and so we talked about a number of words that nowadays if you say them sound kind of antique like chastity because it's just been pulled out of our vernacular and there's been no attempt to replace it with any equivalent because the interest and ideas to just draw away from the impulse and the power and the tethering in our lives that moral language would give us but it's important because we're moral people and if we lose that sense of moral language we lose a sense of ourselves we don't understand who we are we lose a sense of our own identity and as a result of losing this language over the last number of decades we're seeing massive identity crisis within people they don't have the tethering in their lives of this moral language I gave you a number of examples but the fact is if you went back and saw how people described the life of the family if you read books that are being written now compared to books

8:16that were written 70 and 100 years ago on the family you'd see that the primary thing and the prime thing that's changed is the words that are used and the language that's used we used to speak of raising children and rearing them but now we're invited into a parenting experience words with and I know what raising and rearing looks like I remember being reared a few times over a chair when I was a young kid it wasn't a parenting experience for me by the way might have been for my parents words with strong emotional and moral connotations like together loyalty honor obey submit purity discipline forgiveness faithfulness are being replaced with words like safe space boundaries toxic relationships gender identity openness actualization self fulfillment privilege and these are in the

9:17books on the family and the shifting these terms for family life empties the family that's moral power the moral power that's found in a home so what's the application for ourselves we're a family our connection as families were bonded together in the life of Jesus Christ this battle is still raging for us the application is that we need to ever and increasingly identify our lives together as family we need to love each other as brothers and sisters through Christ in Jesus Christ our church needs to also restore and find and exercise itself in the language of family language that God the Father has given to us we're to speak to others and we're to speak to one another as much as we can out of the language and the lessons that we find in this word that means all you need to be in this word so you know the the language of family of this family God's language God's terms what our Father says to us what the Spirit says to us how he's

10:18communicating his life to us enriching us in this word and we need to been expressing that more more in our life and we also need to judge our lives together as much as possible and justify the programs and the expressions of the life of our church as much as possible with the language of family the decisions we make how we meet together and how we minister together we need to say is this consistent with the language of family now listen I'm not going to go into this but when I was first in ministry and there were all these ministry strategies family was not the template that we're using for building a church usually you'd have somebody get up and talk about how successful Coca-Cola and McDonald's were around the world and begin giving you corporate strategies for building the church if we just had somehow an ability to put these technical things in terms one of the chapters in one of the book I read was something like unifying around the meta-glow that was the name of the chapter and you're supposed to figure out because an expert then will unfold all of his expertise and it'll show you all of his wisdom in order that you can learn how to do church together

11:22and so he's kind of taking it all apart and disassembling it so he can put it back together and this kind of technocratic language and he becomes the expert and it's actually what the world is doing as it tries to rip apart the family and it's certain to own influence and power over it but here we are learn the language of family live in the language of family identify our lives with one another together in the language of family with just one caveat don't use this as a promotional device don't speak about family as an advertisement to somehow express how sincere we are together remember there's always a danger of feigned love pretentious love be careful that you not throw around the term love even unless you're backing it up with a true deep surrendered and commitment to the Lord Jesus and the desire through the Lord Jesus to express that to other this is not the terms of family the terms of relationship the terms of life together it's not been given to

12:25us so that we can promote ourselves and send out gained favor from other individuals let's go to the fourth again it's not only is it this love have this affection of family but it's also a love that is an honor giving love it says here in honor giving preference to one another the Greek there literally means go before one another in giving honor there's a debate as to exactly how you translate this some say what it means is that you're to outdo each other in giving honor you're supposed to get ahead of the other person and you're going to be the person who's to outdo one other in giving honor I think that's not necessarily bad advice when I talk to young couples that are getting married I say that the the best principle is that you bow to serve one another and you don't look out of the corner of your eye to see who's bowing lower it's that if you're going to compete with one another because this is what happens when you first get married my family's better than your family this and whatever it is you know we get these arguments that take place instead of competing with one another make the competition be which one of you can be the kindest

13:26the most encouraging most important but that be your competition that's kind of the idea here the other idea would be that you read this and say what it really means is it's the consider others better than yourself I actually think it's probably the first of those options but regardless what it's teaching us is that we're to be people who are quick to give encouragement to one another thanks for listening into the bread of life today to learn more about our ministry to take the gospel around the world and how you can help us go to traincpe.org until the next time may god bless you