Rutabaga with cheddar cheese soup ** Honor

As we continue looking at the next exhortations we’ll be reading from... 

Romans 12 verse 10. "Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor."

Now please bear in mind that this is addressed to the church.

The “one another” is not everybody, but is fellow believers.

The focus here is on the church... on believers.

The “brotherly affection” in this verse is similar to the affection of a family.

And of course, you can have squabbles and get mad, but let some bully pick on one of your siblings, and the family affection shows a powerful side.

Or let one of the family members get a life-threatening sickness or even die, and there will be tears and sorrow that is far different from others.

You see, this is what we are supposed to have for each other in the church.

And we have absolutely no excuse to think that we are unable to do that with some believers. Because maybe they’re hypocritical or because of their attitudes and/or their behavior.

Keep in mind that the Lord never asks us to something that we cannot do in His strength… (Matthew 19:26).

Now let’s move on to the next part of verse 10 that says, “Outdo one another in showing honor.”

Honor is different from affection. You can honor a person for whom you have no affection.

And the implication in this verse is to do both.

Honoring someone is treating them with your actions and your words as worthy of your service… They may not be worthy of it… But we are to do it anyway.

You see, sometimes honoring means treating people better than they deserve.

Like in 1 Timothy 6:1 where it speaks to Christian slaves, and says: “Let all who are under a yoke as slaves regard their own masters as worthy of all honor” 

Even though some may be hypocritical or even unscrupulous… we can “regard” them as worthy of honor.

Because we can count them worthy in the same way that God counts us as righteous.

Now that doesn’t mean we don’t see their faults. But we act and speak honorably toward them.

Notice that we are not only told to honor them, but we are to: Outdo one another in showing honor.

This is instructing us to prefer to honor others more than we desire to be honored. That we should find joy in elevating others to honor more than we get joy from being the one honored.

We are being told to foster a love of honoring others.

And we must never give honor to only to certain type of people because of their education, their title, or social economic class…

God gets angry when he sees this kind of dishonoring in the church.

Just read: James 2:1-6 which clearly show how failure to honor based on favoritism displeases the Lord.

Always keep in mind that we were undeserving of the Lord’s divine affection and honor. Yet, God gave us both in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Like we’re told in Philippians 2:3 [to] Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.

 And the key is to “count others better than our selves”

 So never forget your undeserving position. It’s the seed of true affection for others.

Perhaps the way we can become this kind of person is to wake up and smell the coffee [so to speak] and realize how precious God’s mercy is to each one of us personally.