Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: It is my birthday weekend, and I want to dispel a rumor I heard about.
I think my son may have started said rumor. I, in fact, am not 250 years old.
That's our country. That is 250 years old this weekend. And what an awesome thing to celebrate. You think about the American experience and this experiment that started 250 years ago and has been an amazing thing. I know that there's plenty of issues and challenges and things that we as a country face, but the reality is, it's kind of like what Winston Churchill said, that our form of government and our thing has its issues and struggles, but it's a whole lot better than all the other options. And so I hope you had a chance to celebrate our country this weekend with friends and family, and you still get to do it today and this afternoon and go from there.
For me personally, many of you know that I spent about 20 years coaching college basketball before going into business and ultimately ending up on staff here at Journey. And one thing you may not know about coaching at the collegiate level is that you literally live in a fishbowl.
Every decision you make has a public eye to it. People know. Know everything that's going on and what's happening.
And thankfully, everyone second guesses those things. They get to criticize those things. They get to do all the things that they wish they could do if they were in your shoes.
And the groups of people that do that are kind of endless. I mean, you have, like, fans and you have boosters. You have, like, print media, social media, bloggers. It's just everybody has epic opinions about everything. And you get to enjoy that when you're in that role.
When I decided to leave coaching, I had an opportunity to go into private business. And when I made that decision, I sat down with the people at the university and we crafted, effectively, a PR statement to just explain to people why I was leaving, what was going on. There's nothing. No skeletons in the closet. It's just an opportunity.
There was one very popular sports blogger who had followings of thousands and thousands of people who decided in that moment it was a great opportunity for him to expose the real reasons why this transition was occurring.
Unfortunately, he didn't talk to me or anyone in our staff. No one in the athletic department.
Everything was just his opinion of what was happening and why it was happening.
And it was really hard because the things he talked about disparaged my character. They challenged relationships that I had. It even spoke poorly and shed a bad light over the entire program and everything that we had accomplished and were doing, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I just sat there and had to take it. I had to just realize someone else was going to tell my story publicly, and I couldn't correct it. I couldn't change the things that he said.
I was misrepresented. I was just frustrated. And ultimately, quite frankly, I was pretty angry about it. It was really, really frustrating to be cast in that light.
I feel like we've all been there, we've all been hurt by somebody else.
In fact, if you took 10 seconds right now and you thought, I'll guarantee you, you could come up with someone who has hurt you recently, you got a name?
Doesn't take very long. It's part of the human experience. We hurt one another constantly. A lot of it's unintentional, Some of it is intentional, whatever, but it happens.
Keep that name and put it in your pocket, and we'll come back to that in a minute here.
One thing I know about when we are hurt by people is that we generally react in one of two directions.
Either we take that hurt and we want to seek some form of revenge. We want some way to get even or be made whole, or we actually seek the best for the other person.
And those two roads aren't the same path. They're very divergent.
And it's really, really challenging. With that blogger, when he wrote that article, I didn't want to really deal with the like, hey, I want your best buddy. What I wanted was a pound of flesh. I wanted to set the record straight.
I wanted to make things right as I saw that. And frankly, ultimately, I just kind of wanted my little piece of revenge.
As we dive into Romans 12 again this morning, what I want to talk about is this challenge. We have our natural presupposition to go toward revenge rather than seeking the good of the other person.
And I want to do that in light of what Scripture teaches us.
So where I want to start is on the revenge side of the equation.
We're in Romans chapter 12, and Paul is talking about this at this moment.
And revenge is not usually where we start.
Revenge is a ladder we kind of climb and get to the first rung of that ladder, if you will, is retaliation.
Paul talks about it in Romans 12:17. He says, do not repay evil for evil.
We all know what retaliation is. It's simple, right? It's just this idea that if you hurt me, going to hurt you back. If you insult me, I'm going to insult you back.
If. If you embarrass me, I'll embarrass you.
Retaliation is basically, we ask ourselves the question, how am I going to get even?
You hurt me. How am I going to get even over that hurt?
One of the things we may not realize when we engage in retaliation is what we are actually doing. Doing is handing control of the situation to the other person.
When they hurt me and I respond and retaliate, I'm just reacting to their behavior. They now have control. My behavior is determined by their hurting me.
And usually we hit that point of retaliation and then we go to step two on that ladder, which is escalation.
We take our retaliation and we raise the level.
Paul in Romans 12 talks about the exact opposite of that. He talks about peace in Romans 12:18.
He says, if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
In other words, don't retaliate, live at peace with everyone.
But our more natural response is to actually escalate, which is clearly the opposite of peace. I can't have peace with someone when I'm raising the stakes. And escalation is effectively just making the challenge bigger.
It is taking the fire and just pouring a little bit of gasoline on that.
When we retaliate, we're talking about even, insult for insult, hurt for hurt. With escalation, we now don't want just even exchange.
We want a little bit more.
Instead of saying, how is it that I can hurt you back? It's how can I win?
We grab control in the situation and decide that we want to win. Think of it this way, like, you tell an embarrassing story about me.
The way I can escalate, that is to tell an embarrassing story about you that also digs at your character.
I offend you in private. I hurt you in private. The way you escalate, that is you take it to a public forum.
Retaliation is just returning fire.
Escalation is again pouring that gasoline on the fire.
It's not, how do I get even, it's how can I win?
But that's not the top of the ladder. The top of the ladder after we retaliate, after we escalate, is where we actually hit the point of revenge.
Paul talks about this in the next verse, Romans 12:19. He says, do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath.
Retaliation is getting even.
Escalation is winning.
But revenge is a whole nother level of that. It's not just about getting even or just about winning. It's actually, I want my pound of flesh now.
I Want to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner. And I want to take justice into my own hands. It's taking control. Not not only taking control, but it's actually denying God any control in this situation, any control in the ability to incite his justice.
I was talking about this with one of the guys on our staff, Logan, who does all our video work around here. And Logan and I were talking about it, and I said, you know, I'd. I'd really love a really simple analogy that would help people remember what this revenge kind of ladder looks like.
Check out what we came up with.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Let me give you an example of how we get to revenge. I want you to think about two teenage boys, let's call them Brian and Bob.
Let's say that Brian were to punch Bob in the shoulder.
What's Bob going to do?
Bob's going to retaliate, and he's going to punch Brian if his shoulder. It's a reaction to an action without much thought.
But retaliation then leads to escalation.
After Bob crunches Brian back, Brian's response is to escalate, and he's going to hit Bob in the shoulder harder.
To which Bob then is going to escalate and hit Brian in the shoulder harder. What began as a reaction now has a total change of attitude that Brian and Bob want to win, not just get even or retaliate, but after escalation, we end up with revenge.
Now Brian raises the stakes. He grabs a chair and finds a way to win and get his pound of flesh.
And at this point, Brian's not thinking about relationship.
He's focused on revenge.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Now, Logan wanted me to just say to you that no future pastors were hurt in the creation of that little video. But the idea is there. I think a lot of times when we think about revenge, we think of, like, the hatfields and the McCoys, right? Like this revenge is about murder and violence and all this stuff.
But I think the reality, revenge is actually much more subtle.
I think often we don't even realize how we go about revenge. In fact, I. I started to think about, do I even engage in revenge? Like, is this even applicable to me or. Or to you?
And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, oh, I totally do this.
And I think you might as well just a couple of things. Thoughts or examples as revenge plays out. Again, this isn't the hatfields and the McCoys. We go about our revenge in a much more subtle and socially acceptable manner.
Have you ever engaged in the silent treatment?
It's a great form of revenge. Someone makes you mad and it's like you're going to shut them out and raise the stakes and say, you know what? You don't even deserve my love right now. That's how bad you are.
What about gossip?
Gossip's a great way to get back at people and get your revenge, right? Like they. They harm you in some way and you can defame their character or you can challenge them in other ways. My favorite form of gossip in the Christian community is prayer requests. You know, it's like someone hurts you and it's like, oh, I should tell all the people they should be praying for this person and how awful they were to me so that they understand how awful they were to me, so they make me look better and feel good. It's revenge.
All kinds of other ways that we seek revenge in socially acceptable ways. What about withholding affection?
Happens in marriages, happens with parents and kids. We withhold affection.
Sometimes we can seek revenge by holding grudges.
Sometimes we seek revenge by. By secretly just hoping they really fail and fall on their face.
In our current context, revenge on social media is so easy halfway anonymous. You can just fire it off and never have to think about it again.
It's so easy for us to take revenge in socially acceptable ways again. Movies portray revenge like the shootout at the OK Corral. We're going out in the street and, you know, bang, bang. And that's not the way revenge plays out. The way revenge plays out in our lives is very socially acceptable.
So if. If Paul says, don't retaliate, don't escalate, and don't seek revenge, why is it that we do it?
Why is it a challenge for us to not do that?
I think there's probably a lot of reasons why.
I think one of them is our pride. We just want to justify our anger, and so our pride kicks in.
I think sometimes it could be pain. Sometimes we just feel pain, and we want others to feel pain back.
Just a reaction, like we're just mad.
But as I've been studying this for the last couple weeks, and I've been looking not just at what it says in Romans 12, but even expanding that throughout the New Testament, the thing that has been really clear to me is that those actually probably aren't the core reasons that we actually seek revenge in the ways that we do.
I think the way or the reason that we seek that revenge is because we want control.
It's actually just a control issue in our lives. We all want to be in control.
We want to determine our own destiny and lead the way. And when we get hurt, we want control.
We want to be the ones that determine when that vengeance takes place, when justice happens for that hurt. We want to be the ones that determine what that justice looks like and how it's going to play out.
We want to be in control, and we don't want to allow God to be God and be the one in control.
It's really hard when we want to take that revenge, but it's not new to the story.
Go back to Eden.
The snake asked Eve. Is that really what God meant? Is he really trustworthy? Can you really trust his word?
And when Eve said no, she took a bite of the apple.
But when we say no in our current environment, when we say no, God, you're not trustworthy to enact justice on my hurt because my hurt needs my influence. On the result, we do the same thing. We just repeat the cycle of Eden and original sin.
But what if.
What if we actually took the stance and said, you know what, God, I actually want you to be in control of my life.
I don't want to take control when somebody hurts me. I actually want you to be the one in control for you to be the one to impact the justice.
What would our response to the people that hurt us look like in that kind of an environment?
Well, good news. Paul finishes chapter 12. He walks us right into it. He says in verse 20, on the contrary. Why does he say on the contrary? Because he just told us, don't seek retaliation. Don't escalate situations and don't seek revenge. On the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil. Evil with good.
We are not to seek revenge as Jesus followers, we are to seek the good of the other.
A hungry person, we feed him. A thirsty person, we give him something to drink.
And notice he's talking about our enemies.
Our enemies, the ones that have hurt us.
Those are the ones that we are to seek the good for.
And this isn't just like a Paul idea here in Romans. This is literally a heartbeat of the New Testament scriptures.
Take Jesus for example. Matthew, chapter 5.
Jesus says, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
Love agape.
Agape. Love says that I will seek the best for the person I'm engaging with.
That's what I'm supposed to do for my enemy. Pray for those who persecute you.
Do you realize in context, in the first century, persecution didn't mean someone was slandering you or saying bad stuff about you.
Persecution means they're trying to kill you.
And Jesus says to his followers, agape, love your enemy and pray for those that are trying to kill you.
What about in Matthew 7? Jesus gives us the golden rule. The way I memorized it. Memory.
Many did is do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Right, do unto others.
Do you want people to give you the silent treatment or gossip about you or withhold affection or all these ways that we go about seeking subtle revenge for those slights that we expose we are exposed to?
No, that's not what we want.
We want people to engage us to have our best in mind, to be seeking our best. And that's what Jesus has called us to.
What about in Matthew 22, when he sums up the law and the prophets and he says, love your neighbor as yourself.
Got a love.
Seek the best for your neighbor.
Seek what you would want it sought in your life as well.
And this is just the consistent flow and movement of the New Testament.
Revenge needs to be put away by the believer in all of its subtle forms. And we need to seek the best for those that are hurting us.
And this is the point where I tell you how much I hate this teaching.
Really, this is hard stuff.
Like where my mind goes to immediately is, what about the exceptions?
Where are the exceptions?
There are so many situations where I want exceptions.
Think about abuse, adultery, humiliation in public in horrible ways, murder. I want exceptions that in those situations, I want to be able to seek my revenge. And then in the lighter things, how about that's when we seek the best of the other, that feels better to the Gospel according to Brian.
That's not what the Gospel teaches us, though.
This is hard stuff.
Like, when we engage scripture, we got to deal with the hard, too.
We don't get to just deal with the easy stuff. This is. This is hard to grapple with and think about.
If you are someone who's a victim of those greater sins, abuse and different things.
What I want you to hear is that Scripture never gives evil a pass.
Scripture never, ever condones or justifies sin, ever.
And so when we say seek the best of the one that hurt us, not saying that as a victim of abuse, you need to pretend that everything's okay, or you need to step into that and stay in that environment.
I don't mean that you need to not have healthy boundaries, and I definitely don't mean you need to move toward trust prematurely.
But I still don't See the exceptions that I don't have to at some level, in some way, seek the best for the other person.
And that's hard.
I just struggle with that. And I don't have a prescriptive way to say to you, if you are in those shoes, this is how you have to handle that, or think about that. I think about even praying for someone who has hurt you in that kind of a way.
I mean, that seems like such a simple thing. That seems like such a difficult thing if you are in that situation.
So the only thing I can say is that we have to go before God and hold that up and say, God, how do I seek the best in someone without compromising my safety or my health or any of those things? How do I do that and seek his and wise counsel in and around that?
But if I don't get an exception to. For the hard things, then I really don't get an exception for the other stuff.
For my neighbor who's slighted me, or that person at work that said something bad about me, or the relative who's painted me in a bad light, like, I don't get a pass.
I don't get to seek my revenge in all my little subtle, socially acceptable ways. I actually have to figure out what is it going to look like that I might seek that person's good.
And I'm uncomfortable with that. And I'm not afraid to tell you that because I think you should be uncomfortable with it too.
But how do we know that this is like the way that God would want us to move forward in that?
I think the way we know that is because one, Jesus said it. We've talked about that.
But Jesus wasn't our Savior who came and just like said stuff.
He did stuff. He lived it out.
If you think about the time that he is literally hanging on the cross and he's looking at the guards and the people and the religious leaders that put him there, the people that tortured him, the people that accused him falsely, that mocked him, that tormented him, that put him through unimaginable suffering.
What did he do in that moment?
He didn't seek revenge. He prayed for those folks.
He said, God forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
That's what Jesus did.
And Paul talks about this. The Gospels talk about this. Peter. Peter is Paul's, or, sorry, Jesus's best friend, the closest one to him of all the disciples. He's the one that is there at every turn along the way.
And what did Peter write when he was reflecting on how Jesus dealt with these kinds of situations.
He wrote it down first. Peter 2, 23.
When they hurled their insults at Jesus, he did not retaliate.
When he, Jesus, suffered, he made no threats.
Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
What did Jesus do in that moment? He looked at God and said, you're good and you're in control.
And I'm going to release to you my desire for revenge and have you be the one that acts injustice. And I'm going to pray for those that have beaten me and persecuted me and crucified me.
So what do we do with this? Where do we go with this? What do we act upon in this way?
How do we become Christians who don't seek the natural reaction to hurt of revenge? How do we be followers of Jesus who actually seek the good in others?
I think the first step in that is going to demand that we really understand grace.
If you look at how the book of Romans is set up, we've spent a couple years on and off going through the first 11 chapters of Romans and Paul explaining to us how it is through grace that we are saved through faith, that it is nothing we did, but it is God's mercy on our lives. That is how we have come to relationship with him.
And so then he gets to chapter 12 and he wants to transition, to talk about how do I practically live this out. And the first thing he says in Romans 12:1 is this.
Therefore, in view of God's mercy, you know why I have to have mercy and seek another's best is because that's exactly what God did for me.
And if I do not understand the grace that I have received for my sin by Jesus dying on the cross, then there is no way I will tangibly be able to seek the best of one who has hurt me, because my natural tendency is to go toward revenge and getting even.
So Paul knows that. And so as he moves to practical application, he's like, you have to understand God's mercy to be able to step forward in this.
And then he transitions in verse two and he says, do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
What's the pattern of this world? As we think about the idea of revenge, it's exactly what we talked about. It's all the digs, it's attacking people, it's making myself feel better, it's supplementing my pain with their pain. Like that is my natural reaction. That was the natural reaction in ancient times, that's the natural reaction today.
That is what we do.
We automatically want to hurt when we are hurting.
And yet what does it look like if we were people that ultimately had this renewed mind, that understood God's mercy so intently that we could seek the good of others, I think we would see exactly what we saw from Jesus on the cross. We would see someone who says, you know what, God, I'm really hurting right now, and I need you to own it.
I need you to be the one that seeks the justice.
I have to give up every ounce of my desire to seek revenge for the hurt I have felt.
And I need you to be that provider, that comforter in that moment.
So if we can understand his mercy upon us, then what do we practically do? Like, what do we actually do? What would be. If you were to go back to the name of the person who hurt you that you came up with when we started this, what would be the next step that you could take to seek that person's good?
Now, I'm not going to be prescriptive. There are thousands of different possibilities of what that could be. But I do want to just offer up to you maybe a couple things to think about that might help you start down that journey.
The first thing I'd offer up to you is to pray for them, to genuinely and sincerely pray for the person who has hurt you. That God would meet them in their hurt, their pain, wherever they are, that he would draw them to Himself, that He would bless them and care for them.
It's very difficult to seek revenge on someone that you are genuinely praying for.
So that would be one potential option.
Another potential option of a next step in dealing with this would be to forgive.
You have to forgive the person that has hurt you. It's not about forgiving for their sake. It's not that you gotta stand before them and say, I forgive you, and some great things gonna happen that may or may not happen. But that's not the point of forgiveness.
Forgiveness is the moment that we turn over control to God.
When we truly forgive someone, it means that there's not that ache in us to get revenge.
It's that moment where we see that God is just and he is the one who will deal with the hurt in his timing.
And I have to move past that. Forgiveness is a me and God thing way more than it has anything to do with me and the person that hurt me.
A third potential option. You go back to what Paul said at the very end of verse 21 and Romans 12. He said, Feed those that are hungry and give water to Those that are thirsty. It's like this call to a tangible act of seeking another's best.
Now, again, when you're in the extremes of abuse or whatever like what that looks like, you need to be really wise and cautious about that.
But for the vast majority of our hurts, the day to day stuff that gets to us, we can do a tangible act that shows and seeks the best for the person who has hurt us.
Sometimes that could be something as simple as a conversation. It could be something like just a tangible act of kindness.
Again, I don't want to be prescriptive because I think these are things where we need to go before the Lord and we need to seek the Spirit's nudge and guidance as we move through these hard deals.
I think every situation is going to have a different possible next step and how it plays out.
But the call is the exact same regardless of the situation.
We are called to put off the idea of revenge and we are called toward love and relationship and seeking the best for the other.
And that's the place where as believers, we have to go. It is countercultural. It doesn't make any sense. It's part of this upside down kingdom that Jesus has for us and we don't want to do it. I don't like it, you don't like it. But I can't find Scripture to justify another route.
And so we are called to overcome evil with good.
Don't seek evil for evil and revenge. Overcome evil with good.
Now, this morning we're going to celebrate communion. As you can see up front here, communion really is about two things. And I really couldn't think of much of a better day for us to do that than today.
But communion is about two things. Number one, communion is about remembering.
Communion is about remembering what Jesus did on the cross. For my sins and for your sins.
It's taking the bread of the cracker that represents his body that was broken.
It's taking the juice of the wine that is his blood spilt. For my sin and your sin, it's going back to Romans 12:1 and understanding God's act of mercy on our lives. And we remember that and we should pause and think of that and ponder that.
But there's a second element to communion that we're called to. Scripture is really clear that we ought not take communion lightly, that we should have some level of reflection as we engage communion, that we would be reflecting on our own lives. Where are we at today?
And this is where I feel like this fits into what we're talking about as you think even of the one example of your hurt in your life.
Are you in a place where you're seeking revenge, or are you seeking the best for the other, whatever that looks like.
And are you in a place of reflection before the Lord before you take communion? To say, this is where I'm at.
That's a great use of time as you get ready to celebrate communion and engage in that.
Now, just a couple logistics.
There's a million different ways that churches do communion, but journey our tradition. Just the way we choose to do it is we just ask you to come forward on the right side, take a cracker and dip it into the juice of the wine, and ultimately you go back to your seat up the right side.
There'll be plenty of time. The beautiful thing about church on the 5th of July is that there's some room here to take your time.
So if you need to take a moment and remember and reflect as to where you're at with this, do that and we'll have time for you to come forward and take the elements.
So before we enter into this time of communion, would you just pray with me, Father God, I am thankful for your word. I get frustrated by your word.
It challenges me in ways I don't want to be challenged.
Ultimately, I know your way is best and right, and I want to submit my life to your word. I want to follow your guidance, but I also just have to acknowledge that's not easy.
It doesn't feel simple to me.
And so in this time, Lord, I know there are so many that have been hurt traumatically and dramatically by other people.
And I just pray for your mercy and your kindness on them.
Pray that you would help us to be followers of Jesus, that would not seek revenge, no matter how subtle or how small it seems, but that we would be people that would show the love that you showed us, that we would be people that show the mercy and the grace that you showed us. I pray you would help us to love people well. In Jesus name, amen.
