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Love Must Be Sincere

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Pastor Steve Perez | March 17, 2024

The Fountain Apostolic Church

Build Your Church (2024)

Learn more at tfachurch.com/plus

Sermon Notes:

  • Romans 12:9-21
    • Love in Relation to Other Believers (Romans 12:9-16)
    • Love in Relation to Our Enemies (Romans 12:17-21)
    • Love Participation with Other Believers (Romans 12:9-16)
      • Verses 1-8 tells us about our gifting while verses 9-16 tells us of our attitude toward others.
      • Love must be amid our gifts. Love is a circulatory system in the spiritual body which enable all the members to function in a healthy, harmonious way. This love must be sincere.
      • Philippians 2:1-4
      • Paul tells us in v. 13-16 we need to consider those around us, in particular the feelings of others.
      • Our love will be tested. You can’t say you love the Lord if you can’t love people next to you.
      • 1 John 4:20
      • Sincere: The "without wax" usage from sculptures:
        • But that old “without wax” myth has lived on—and on and on. We’ve found versions of it dating back to the early 1600s. One of the more recent incarnations comes from Dan Brown’s thriller Digital Fortress (2008):
          • “During the Renaissance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched their flaws with cera— ‘wax.’ A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a ‘sculpture sin cera’ or a ‘sculpture without wax.’ The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word ‘sincere’ evolved from the Spanish sin cera—‘without wax.’
          • Though all the stories claim in the end that “sincere” comes from “without wax,” the details vary widely. Sometimes the people trying to disguise flaws in stone were ancient Greek quarrymen, sometimes Roman sculptors, construction workers, or architects.
          • The "without wax" usage from pottery: 
            • In at least one version, the flawed goods were pieces of pottery that wouldn’t hold water unless they were secretly repaired with wax. In another, we’re told that a biblical injunction (“Be thou sincere!”) literally means “Be without wax.”
            • The "without wax" usage from furniture: 
              • Yet another version, from the early 1900s, claims that “in the days when they began to make furniture,” dishonest cabinet makers used wax to hide the knots and cracks in inferior wood.
              • The "without wax" usage from writing:
                • A gullible writer in 1870 passed this one along: “In old times, people used to write notes to each other, and tie a string around them, and seal the ends of the string with wax. When friends were intimate, and open-hearted toward each other, they folded the letter, and, leaving off the string and wax simply wrote the word ‘sincere.’” Hence, he wrote, the Latin for “without wax” became the English word “sincere.”
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