https://app.dropwave.io/episode/2c1a452d-d1c4-4797-a68e-7948216b7f34/second-sunday-after-the-epiphany-epiphany-2-ad-2026.mp3

Today’s sermon is on the Epistle. More precisely, it’s on verse 9 – the beginning of the second paragraph which reads: “Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good” (Romans 12:9). There are three parts to this: what love is not; hating what is evil; holding fast to what is good. They all belong together and give us a full picture of love. Because they all belong together, each one helps us understand the other. So I’m going to focus on the middle part: Abhor what is evil.

But first, a brief comment on the first part. Paul begins by describing love according to what it is not. Love is not an actor. An actor plays parts. He pretends to be something or someone he’s not. He wears a mask. The real person is there, but he’s hidden behind the mask. But that is not how true love is. True love isn’t an act or a show. True love doesn’t pretend to love. True love doesn’t put on a performance of acting loving. True love is a genuine expression of real kindness. It comes from the heart.

It doesn’t come with hidden motives or a series of terms and conditions. It doesn’t express itself just to get something in return. In Proverbs 27, Solomon writes: “Open rebuke is better than love carefully concealed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (Proverbs 27:5-6). True love speaks clearly. It’s honest and straightforward. Genuine love risks discomfort for the sake of truth. Paul does not command us to act loving. He instructs us to be loving. Love genuinely, from the heart. That’s why some translations will say something like, “Let love be genuine.” That’s one way you can tell if your love is true. How do you respond when you don’t get something in return for your love?

Yet this is a reminder that left to ourselves, our love will not be genuine. On our own, our love is hypocritical, pretend, and selfish. True love only comes from God in Christ. God has given us His favor. The Father has loved us in His Son and fills our hearts with His love. We do not love because we need to earn God’s love, but because we already have it. Because God is pleased with us by the mercy of His Son, so we seek to love as He first loved us.

Paul continues by describing another kind of false love. This second kind is worse than the first. It’s worse because even though it’s false, it can be “without hypocrisy.” It can be sincere, but sincerity alone doesn’t make love right. It depends on what is loved. That’s why Paul says, “Abhor what is evil.” This is where we’ll focus today.

Let’s consider what Paul is doing here. “Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil. Cling to what is good.” Grammatically, it might sound like a list. But this isn’t so much a list as it is a continuation of the same sentence.

You’ll have to permit me a bit of a grammar digression. Greek has a grammatical element called a participle. It’s like a verb and an adjective mashed together. So it can function like both. It shows action, but in such a way that it also describes a noun. In this case, ‘abhor’ is the action. It’s in the imperative mood. That’s why our translation makes it sound like a command. But it also functions as an adjective, describing genuine love.

This is how genuine love behaves. This is what true love does. We might say it this way: “Let love be genuine, abhorring what is evil.” This is also the same structure that the next part of the verse has: “clinging to what is good.” That’s a further description of love. But right now, we’re considering this first attribute of genuine love: abhorring. To say it another way: genuine love hates. That’s what we’re considering today.

Now before we consider what that statement means, we need to define what is meant by ‘hate’ or ‘abhor.’ It’s the only time this word is used in the Bible, but we know its meaning from other sources outside the Bible. It’s based on a word that means “to abhor, “to detest,” or “to be disgusted.” It conveys the idea of what happens when you open that mysterious container in the back of the fridge and catch a whiff of something that turns your stomach. It’s that sense of whole-body revulsion. But the form of the word used here is an intensification of that term. So it’s the strongest way to express complete and utter disgust with something. But more than a response to a bad odor or rotten food, this is a response to evil.

This is what love is. Love hates. Hate is built into the nature of love. Even from the beginning of creation, when Adam and his wife lived in paradise, they were to hate anything that would bring harm to the other. God had given them two trees in the midst of the garden — the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the day they ate of the second tree, they would die. If Adam truly loves his wife, then he will hate anything that could cause her death. He will hate the idea of eating that fruit. He will hate the false doctrine that says, “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4). But Adam’s love failed because Adam failed to hate, and it brought sin and death into the world.

This is especially important for us to hear today, because we are constantly told that love is something else. Love, we are told, always lets someone be what they want to be. That every attitude and behavior is ok. Love, we are told, is radically tolerant: no judging, no correcting, no discipline, no correction. That causing any kind of discomfort is wrong. Love, as they say, is love. It welcomes every kind of behavior and considers any kind of relationship or self-expression to be good and holy.

But God says no. That isn’t what love is. Love, for it to truly be love, must hate. To love something, you must hate whatever would destroy it or oppose it. Do you want to have rightly ordered love? Then look to the Scriptures and love what God loves. Find out what God hates, and then hate those things.

If you love God, you love the Sixth Commandment — “You shall not commit adultery.” God loves marriage and children. He loves the love between husband and wife within marriage. He invented it. God loves children. Children are the greatest blessing of marriage. So you love marriage. You love that God has established the lifelong union of one man and one woman. Even if you’re not married, you love what God says about marriage. If you love marriage, you hate adultery. You hate divorce. You hate sodomy and fornication. You hate that the government authorizes some unions as marriage even though they aren’t marriage.

If you love God, you love the Fifth Commandment — “You shall not murder.” You love life. You love that your neighbor has life. So you hate the ways people take life unjustly. You love unborn babies, so you hate abortion.

But we are told that it’s not loving to “impose” our views on others. That one can ‘personally’ be against abortion, but ‘imposing’ those views on someone else is illegal. (I’m not going to address the argument about ‘imposing’ views, except to acknowledge that this is what every law does. Every law is some kind of imposition. So if imposing any view is wrong, then every law is wrong. Enough about that.)

The question of loving life is a moral one. We are pro-life, so we hate the slaughter of the innocent. Because we are pro-life, we hate all the other methods and practices that cause the death of little babies. It’s not just that we disagree with murdering the unborn or we don’t like it. It’s that it’s a most vile and nauseating thing. We cannot be indifferent about these sins. So we can also state clearly that the proposed amendments in Virginia to make abortion a constitutional right and to redefine marriage are evil. True love doesn’t have the “right” to call evil good. We voters will have an opportunity to vote against these supposed ‘rights’ later this year.

Sometimes people say that we don’t want to be extreme. “We want to be neutral. We want to take positions that are inoffensive.” That’s another way of saying, “I don’t want to be involved.” Maybe you’ve heard people talk this way about perversions of human sexuality. They say, “I don’t care what they do in their home. It doesn’t affect me. It’s not my business.”

But as Christians we must care. What people do in their homes matters. Disordered lives cause real hurt. As Christians, we must look at sin with disgust. Indifference toward sin is cruelty toward those who live under its oppression. Consider the loved ones in your family. What if one of your family members had the habit of sticking a fork in a power outlet? Would it be loving to accept this behavior? Would it be loving to be indifferent? Love cannot be indifferent.

If you love good, you must hate evil. Conversely: if you love evil, you must hate good. If you love life, you hate death. If you love God, you hate sin. If you love justice, you hate it when someone is mistreated. If you love a person, you hate what will destroy him.