Impact of Grace #3 - Relational Benefit
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund walks through Romans 12:9–21 to show that real love isn't another thing to "max out," but the natural overflow of a life shaped by grace. He unpacks twelve simple, unglamorous qualities—like honesty, patience, and hospitality—that quietly transform our closest relationships when we stop trading love for love and start giving it away.
Summary and Application
There's a trend right now that writer Richard Beck calls "maxing" — the drive to optimize everything, to become the best version of yourself in every category of life. Nutrition max. Fitness max. Career max. And, increasingly, faith max: imagining yourself praying the hours in a monastery, reading the Church Fathers by candlelight, escaping what Beck calls the "thinness and superficiality of modern life". It's a compelling fantasy. But as Kurt pointed out this week, that fantasy tends to collapse the moment it meets the actual, ordinary work of becoming like Christ alongside a room full of broken people.
That's the tension Kurt explored in this week's message from Romans 12:9–21, the latest stop in Orchard Hill's Impact of Grace series. It would be easy to read this passage as one more list to max out. Instead, Kurt framed it as something almost the opposite: a set of deeply mundane, unglamorous qualities that quietly determine whether our relationships flourish or fall apart.
A List Rooted in "Therefore"
Romans 12 opens with the word "therefore" — everything Paul says here is a response to the previous eleven chapters, which describe how God brings people into relationship with himself, not through effort or religious performance, but through grace. Because of that, Paul writes, "Love must be sincere" (Romans 12:9). Kurt landed on twelve qualities in this passage that bring what he called "relational benefit" to the people around us.
Authenticity and Moral Clarity
The list starts with authenticity — love without "play-acting" (v. 9a). Kurt noted this word is related to our word "hypocrite," meaning literally an actor. Real love shows up in actions, not just words. Right alongside it comes moral clarity: "Hate what is evil; cling to what is good" (v. 9b). Kurt pushed back gently on the modern instinct to equate love with unconditional support for whatever someone wants, quoting Nietzsche's line that "whatever is done for love occurs beyond good and evil" as an example of that instinct taken to its logical extreme. Real love has a moral center.
Affection, Honor, and Enthusiasm
From there the list moves into warmth: devotion, honor, zeal, hope, patience (vv. 10–12). Drawing on C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves, Kurt noted that three of the four Greek words for love show up in this short passage — agape, philos, and storge. Lewis's counsel was simple: "when you behave as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him". Affection, in other words, can be a choice before it's a feeling.
Generosity, Hospitality, and Goodwill
Generosity and hospitality (v. 13) round out the practical side of the list. Kurt pushed back on what he called "the myth of perfection" — the idea that hospitality requires a spotless house and a perfect meal before anyone can be invited in. Most people, he said, would rather share pizza in a messy home than wait forever for an invitation that never comes. He illustrated goodwill (v. 14) with a story from a summer construction job, where a crew leader defused a tense standoff between two work crews simply by bringing everyone pizza — a small, almost silly act that dissolved real hostility.
Presence, Harmony, and Humility
The list closes with presence — "rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn" (v. 15) — and harmony and humility (v. 16). Kurt cited research on couples navigating a cancer diagnosis, noting that they tended to talk more about logistics than about what they were actually feeling. Presence, he suggested, means resisting that pull toward logistics and staying in the harder, more honest conversation.
Grace, Not a Checklist
Kurt was careful to say this list isn't meant to produce either self-satisfaction ("I'm eleven for twelve") or sheer effort ("I just need to try harder"). Paul's point, rooted in Romans 5 — "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" — is that love like this flows from grace already received, not from willpower. The more we understand how we've been loved, Kurt said, the more capacity we have to love others without needing something back in return.
Something to Sit With
Where in your life right now are you quietly keeping score — giving just enough love, patience, or generosity to get some back in return?
If you really believed you were loved by God without having to earn it, what's one relationship where that truth could change how you show up this week?
This post was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on the sermon "Relational Benefit" by Dr. Kurt Bjorklund (Romans 12:9–21, July 26, 2026). While every effort has been made to faithfully represent the content and intent of the original message, readers are encouraged to engage the full sermon audio or transcript for the complete teaching.
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C.S. Lewis
"When you behave as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. But if you do him a good turn, you will find you dislike him less."
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Good morning. It's great to be together. I want to say thank you to so many of you who served and volunteered and participated in Kids Fest over the last three weeks. It has been an amazing three weeks. Over 2,000 kids came through here, along with all of the high school leaders, middle school serve team, and adult volunteers. So we are just thankful for so many of you who participated.
Well, let's take a moment and pray together. God, as we are gathered here today, we ask that you would speak to each of us wherever we're coming from, wherever we are on our journey. I ask that my words would reflect your word in content, in tone, and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
One of the trends that is somewhat popular right now is what's called "maxing," where people will say, "I'm going to nutrition max, I'm going to health max, fitness max, appearance max, clothes max," whatever it is. They want to say, "I'm going to be the best version of myself in every possible way," in terms of this maxing idea. There's a man who wrote an article, his name is Richard Beck. I don't know anything about him other than this article, but he wrote about how the tendency for people is to say, well, church and Christianity are just another place I'm called or need to max out. So if I want to max out my career, my finances, my health, whatever it is, then shouldn't I also want to max out my faith, my faith journey?
He says that one of the outcomes of this is that people have tried to find increasing ways to help them connect more deeply with Jesus Christ. Here's what he writes, and he says this specifically about what he calls "tradition maxing," which is looking for deeper traditions that would help inform our present faith. He said, instead of simply going to church, you imagine yourself praying the hours in a monastery, reading the Church Fathers by candlelight, making pilgrimages, keeping rigorous fasts, escaping the thinness and superficiality of modern life and low-brow evangelical culture. To be clear, there's nothing wrong with these things. The desire for God is holy. But the danger with this sort of tradition maxing is that the fantasy, a sort of monastic cosplay, becomes more compelling than the reality. The imagined world becomes more captivating than the ordinary church filled with ordinary people.
He goes on a little later and says, after the initial excitement of conversion fades, or when the fantasy meets reality, one discovers that the long obedience in the same direction is stubbornly mundane. No amount of tradition maxing can escape the boring and ordinary nature of Christian faithfulness — the quiet, undramatic work of becoming like Christ alongside a group of broken people, day after day, year after year.
Now, I read this because today we come to a passage in our study of Romans, which is what we've been working through here at Orchard Hill for some time. We're in Romans 12:9–21. It could be tempting to look at this and say, "This is just another place where we're called to max out, to do things better, to try harder." And there's an element of truth to that. But sometimes, even in reading this, what we might see is that rather than this just being something to max out in, these are incredibly mundane things that are actually at the root of being the kind of person God calls every person to be.
In fact, you don't have to be someone who's been long around church or long in the faith. You can be someone who's new to faith, new to your faith journey, new to church, and as we talk today, you will hear and see in this passage some things you'll recognize as true, whether or not somebody claims to be a follower of Jesus. It would be good if people lived this way, because this passage is about how to bring relational benefit to others. But it is rooted in some mundane things.
I remember years ago I was at a wedding, and the father of the groom got up to talk for a while at the reception. As he talked, he made one comment that has stuck with me over the years. He said to his son, who was about to get married, "Son, I want you to know this one thing: good men do boring well." I heard that and chuckled a little — "boring well," that's not very inspiring to tell your son at his wedding. But his point, as he elaborated, is that to have a good marriage, to have a good life, you show up for all of the routine moments. You do the boring things well, and that is what gives you the life you actually want. That is a little bit of what we see in this passage, because this is wisdom that God gives to show us how we can have good relationships.
Now, I mentioned that this is part of Romans — Romans 12 opens with the word "therefore." Here's what that means: he's saying, therefore, because of everything that's come before it in the book of Romans — which is about how God works to bring people into a right relationship with himself, and that it isn't something you or I do through our own religion, our own effort, our own goodness — so when he says "therefore" at the beginning of chapter 12, he's saying, "Because of this, here now is how you can live."
In verses 1 and 2, he says, offer yourself as a living sacrifice. In verses 3 through 8, he talks about using the gifts God has given you to serve inside the community of faith. And then here he begins by saying, "Love must be sincere." These are the qualities he lists that help bring relational benefit — that bring love into our relational world. I'm going to give you twelve of them today. You're going to be here a while — just kidding, we'll move through this quickly. I'm indebted to John Stott for some of the structure of this message today.
Here's what he says at the beginning: love must be sincere. This is the first quality, and it's authenticity. The word "sincere" here is, in the original language, a word like our word "hypocrite" — it's actually where we get the word hypocrite. It meant "an actor," and then it had a negation placed on it, so it says love must be without play-acting. You understand this, because if somebody proclaims their love to you and you know intuitively that they're playing at it, it's actually more of a turnoff than something that draws you in — when somebody uses words and says, "I love you," but their actions, their attitudes, their heart, don't back it up.
So he says here's the first, baseline way you love people: you're sincere, you're authentic, you bring your true self to bear. Now, I recognize that in some relationships you may say, "That's hard to do, because I don't actually love him or her that much — so shouldn't I just not act, isn't that better than pretending?" But his point isn't to say, "Choose to be authentically unloving." It's to say, get your heart in line in such a way that you can authentically love.
Then he gives the second quality, and that is moral clarity. He says at the end of verse 9, "Hate what is evil; cling to what is good." When you first read this, you might say, "This feels odd — how is hating evil and clinging to what is good part of love?" Here's what I think is at issue: we often think that loving someone means supporting them in whatever it is they want. But there are actually things in this world that are evil, and things that are good, and to have no moral clarity on that is actually not loving toward somebody in your life.
In Proverbs 17:15, we read this: "Acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent — the Lord detests them both." This is simply the Proverbs' way of saying that if you acquit the guilty, or don't hold to justice, it's offensive to God — and this is especially true when it comes to the people in our lives. Now, this isn't necessarily saying you need to challenge everything. But it is saying there has to be a moral center. Otherwise you're not actually loving someone well if you don't have a standard beyond yourself.
You get this, by the way, even if you're not tracking with it right now. Here's how I know you get it: if somebody you love starts down an addictive path with drugs and you can see the negative impact, what are you going to do? You're not going to say, "Cool, that's good for you." You're going to say, "I hate this substance that's destroying your life." That's moral clarity. But sometimes we get the idea that love isn't about having moral clarity — that it's just supporting somebody in anything they want.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, years ago, "Whatever is done for love occurs beyond good and evil." This is part of where society has gotten the idea that love is something that transcends categories. But what the apostle Paul does here is say that part of loving — having love that's sincere, being of relational benefit to other people — is having moral clarity, that there are some things that are not beyond good and evil.
There's a podcast Miley Cyrus was on a while back — I know, Friedrich Nietzsche and Miley Cyrus in the same message, but bear with me. She was on this podcast with Monica Lewinsky, talking about how, as she was coming up as a pop star, she got sexualized and began to pose in certain ways. She basically said, in this podcast, "I regret it, because it brought damage to my life, and I don't feel like there were people telling me how damaging it was." It was a moment of pretty raw admission, saying there are things in this world that are damaging.
So love, or relational benefit, is being sincere, or authentic. It's having moral clarity. There's also affection, which is what we tend to think of — verse 10: "Be devoted to one another in love." In this section — "love must be sincere," "be devoted to one another in love" — three of the four Greek words for love are actually used. C.S. Lewis wrote a book years ago called The Four Loves, in which he talked about this. There's the word agape, which is the word for God's love, or one-way love, love without conditions. There's the word philos — we get our word "Philadelphia," the city of brotherly love, from it — which is the idea of brotherly affection, kindness, enjoying being with somebody. And then there's the word storge, which in essence means a familiar kind of love, the kind where you say, "This is the person who just knows me, and I can be myself with them."
So in this section, all three of those are called for — affection. C.S. Lewis, at one point in writing about this, says that we spend a lot of time deciding whether we love somebody or not. He says the best thing we can do is act like we love them, and we'll find that we come to love them. Here's how he put it: "When you behave as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. But if you do him a good turn, you will find you dislike him less."
So we have this idea of affection — am I going to be affectionate to the people in my life? Then we see the concept of honor. It says, "Honor one another above yourselves." The ESV says, "Outdo one another in showing honor." This is calling for giving preference to somebody else, speaking well of them, giving them credit. What would happen in your home, in your workplace, with your friends, if you said, "I am going to try to outdo everybody in giving honor"? If you really went home and said, "I'm going to speak well of you, give you credit, give you preference rather than myself" — it would change your home, it would change your relationships. Honoring somebody, outdoing one another in honor, giving preference — this is part of God's call for relationally benefiting those around us.
In verses 11 and 12, we see a fifth quality — I'll just call it enthusiasm. This one might be surprising, but here's what it says: "Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope." Hope, in many ways, is looking at the future and saying there's a way through this. We don't tend to think of enthusiasm or a positive attitude as a relational quality — we just see it as something we either have or don't have. But what he's saying here is that when you choose an attitude, when you're zealous, when you're fervent in serving the Lord, when you're hopeful and joyful in hope, this is something that benefits the people around you.
Then he talks about patience — verse 12, the end: "Be patient in affliction, faithful in prayer." Certainly his words about affliction aren't only about relational affliction, but that's certainly part of what's in view here. What most of us do is want somebody else to give us patience, but we expect them to behave in a way that doesn't require it. What he's saying here is that you'll be patient when you're relationally driven to benefit others.
Then he talks about generosity — verse 13: "Share with the Lord's people who are in need." Certainly the Bible also says that somebody who isn't willing to work shouldn't necessarily eat, meaning that if somebody won't take steps to help themselves, it isn't your responsibility to help them. But for as many times as that comes up, people will walk past genuine need even when they have a surplus of things in their own possession that could help others. Generosity simply means using what you have to bless people in ways they can't bless themselves — sometimes with time, sometimes with money or other resources — saying, "If I can help somebody along the way, that's part of God's call."
Then he talks about hospitality — the end of verse 13: "Practice hospitality." The way we hear "hospitality" today is generally the idea of having somebody in our home, and certainly that's in view here, in that culture — having somebody in their home was a way of extending the hospitality of God, even to people. But I heard somebody define this once by saying that hospitality in our day and age is really using our resources to refresh somebody in the way we usually use those resources to refresh ourselves. Sometimes hospitality is going out to dinner with somebody and, instead of just going by ourselves, taking somebody with us. Or it's saying, "I'm going to use something I normally use for myself in order to help somebody else feel a sense of refreshment."
You know what happens, especially around having people in our homes in our day and age? There's this myth of perfection that keeps us from ever doing anything. Do you know what I'm talking about? Here's the myth: "I would love to have somebody over, but in order to have somebody over, I should clean my house, prepare the perfect meal, have everything just right — and I'm not going to have anybody over until I do." But most people in your life would rather come and eat store-bought pizza in a dirty house than never be invited to the perfect meal you never get around to serving. My point is, hospitality is refreshing people with what you usually use to refresh yourself. Sometimes it's pizza, it's burgers on the grill, it's easy stuff — but we make it such a big thing that sometimes we rarely act on it. And you may say, "Well, I don't even have a home right now to invite anybody to." Well, where do you get refreshed? What is it that you do? He says, "Practice hospitality." So hospitality is part of being of relational benefit.
Then there's this idea of goodwill — we see this in verse 14 and verse 20. Verse 14: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse." Verse 20: "On the contrary: 'If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.'" Here's the idea — bless those who curse you. This is extending goodwill to those who have not extended goodwill to you.
I remember years ago I worked for a construction company during a couple of summers in college. I was on a crew, and — especially at that age — I was in the low-skilled part of the crew, meaning I was mostly running errands and doing the things nobody else wanted to do. I wasn't really part of the conversations about how the jobs got done. One day we were working on a house, and another crew from a different subcontractor came in and got in the way of everything we were doing. The two people in charge of the two different crews got into it, and then the crews started getting in each other's way, and nobody was letting the other group get their part done. This went on for a day and a half. I remember thinking, "Wow, that's really something" — I was back there just doing my own thing.
Then the guy leading one of the teams went and came back to the job site with a couple boxes of pizza, and he served the people he thought had offended him, simply saying, "Here's some pizza." All of a sudden the two teams that were butting heads melted into one — they had pizza, and went back to work, and everything was fine. I still remember watching that as a young man in one of my first jobs, thinking, "Really? Pizza did all that?" I don't know if that guy understood the concept of "bless those who persecute you," but what he was doing was choosing to do something good and kind where he could have drawn a hard line instead — and it became a way to bring relational harmony. The point is, there is a place to extend goodwill.
Then there's presence, spoken of in verse 15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn." Sometimes just being present with somebody who's hurting, or celebrating with somebody who's celebrating, is a way to be relationally present. There was a study done a few years ago — it was called the EAR study, using some kind of electronic device that people carried on their phones, giving permission for it to record everything they said. You may say that might be happening anyway, but that's beside the point. The people who gave permission had their conversations recorded, and researchers tried to identify patterns. Here's one thing they found: when a spouse was diagnosed with cancer, the couples spent far more time talking about logistics than about their actual experience. Think about that — who's the one person you would hope you could talk with most about what you're walking through in a moment like that? And instead, the conversations became about logistics: "Who's going to the doctor? Who's getting the kids? How do we take care of this?" Being of relational benefit to people means saying, "I'll rejoice with those who rejoice, and I will mourn, or weep, with those who weep."
Then he talks about harmony — this is the eleventh quality. Verse 16, and then verses 17 through 19, say this: "Live in harmony with one another." Verse 17: "Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone." So often we allow petty things to get in the way of genuine harmony. But if you read through the book of Proverbs, one of the things you'll see is that arguments are never wise — not just sometimes unwise, but never wise. "You can't win an argument," as Dale Carnegie put it years ago. Living in harmony is actually part of God's design for us.
Finally, the twelfth characteristic, verse 16 again: humility. It says, "Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position; do not be conceited." Humility isn't just thinking less of myself — as some have put it, it's thinking of myself less. It's saying, "I want to be somebody who is not all about me."
So here are twelve characteristics, qualities, of somebody who is of relational benefit. And here's what we see at the end: "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." There could be a tendency, hearing this, to simply say, "Okay, so what I need to do — even if I have evil people in my life — is practice these twelve things, and that will help good overcome evil." But one of the things we need to do to make sure we're reading the Bible well is to read it in its entire context. Not that we ever negate what something says, but we take what something says alongside what the Bible says elsewhere, so that we don't misunderstand or misapply it.
In the book of Proverbs, there are three basic categories of people — there's more nuance than this, but this is a quick summary from Henry Cloud's book Necessary Endings; you don't need to read it after this. Here's what he says, in essence: in the book of Proverbs there's the wise person, who receives light — in other words, gets instruction and applies it to their life. There's the foolish person, who resists light and says, "I don't want light." And then there's the evil person — in Proverbs, if you read through your copy of Scripture, it's probably rendered as "the wicked," a word that's used over and over.
Here's his point: there is actually a category of people who are wicked, evil. And if you try to say, "I'm just going to do loving things toward somebody who is truly evil," that is not wise — it's not even loving; it's actually counterproductive. His solution, when you're dealing with somebody who's truly evil, is — half-jokingly — "what you need are lawyers, guns, and money."
My point is this: you might be in a marriage right now where you hear this and think, "All I need to do is be more patient, all I need to do is..." — and you might actually need a lawyer. You might be in a business deal right now thinking, "All I need to do is show a little more goodwill" — and you might need some money for a buyout. This is not saying that's always the case. But I say this so we understand: when this passage says "overcome evil with good," it is talking about the category of evil, not necessarily the person. When the person is truly wicked, in the Proverbs sense, you may need to find a way to extricate yourself. But "overcome evil with good," more often, is a way of saying that when you choose to bring love to a situation where love hasn't been extended, you are overcoming evil with good.
Now, my guess is you hear this and respond one of a few ways. Some of us hear this and say, "I'm pretty good — I'm eleven for twelve." And you might be. But that breeds a little self-sufficiency and pride, and chances are you're not as loving as you think you are. Some of us hear this and say, "Okay, I'm not eleven out of twelve, but I've done okay with some of these, so I need to step up my game in this area — it's been a long time since I've had somebody over, so I'm going to be hospitable this week. I'm going to do it." You may say you're going to try harder.
But I think the best way to see this list is in the context of the whole book of Romans, and to say, "I have not done these things perfectly toward anybody in my life." That's not an indictment, except that it points us back to our need for a Savior. In Romans chapter 5, we're told this: God demonstrates his own love for us in this, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
The reason love usually breaks down in reality — and I'm not talking now about situations that need lawyers, guns, and money — is that in a normal friendship or relationship, people go into it saying, "I'll be affectionate if you're affectionate. I'll be hospitable if you're hospitable. I'll be full of goodwill if you have goodwill." We extend just enough that if you extend some, I'll extend some, and we end up with this careful little exchange — I give a little, you give a little, and if everyone gives just enough, you have a decent relationship. But that is not what Christian love is called to be.
Therefore — Romans 12:1 — he says, offer yourself as a living sacrifice, and then he moves into this list. Why? Because of everything that came before it in Romans: you can express love because of how much God has loved you. You express love out of the overflow of what God has done in your life. When that becomes true, instead of saying, "I'll love you if you love me," you love out of the overflow of God's love for you.
The more you live in the experience of grace, the more grace you have to offer. The more you understand the love of God for you, the more loving you will be — as a mom, as a dad, as a spouse, as a brother, a sister, a friend, a neighbor. And the more you try to simply trade love for love, the less you will be able to live out what this passage describes.
Christians ultimately should be the best friends, the best family members, the best citizens — not because there's a bar they're supposed to get over (every belief system has some kind of bar), but because the resource isn't "I'm going to redouble my effort." It's "I have been loved even when I didn't deserve it — so why wouldn't I reenact that with the people closest to me in my own life, out of that overflow?"
I ask today that you would help those of us who are here to love out of the overflow, not to get something back — and that it would change our families, our friendships, our neighborhoods, our places of work, because we would be filled with your goodness and love. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thanks for being here. Have a great day.
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This transcript was cleaned up and formatted with the assistance of AI (Claude, by Anthropic) from an original audio/video transcription. While care was taken to preserve the speaker's words and meaning as closely as possible, minor edits were made for grammar, clarity, and readability. Please refer to the original message recording for the authoritative source.
