In this week’s message, “Let Love Be Genuine,” explores Romans 12:9–18 and invites us to reflect on what authentic Christian love looks like in our everyday relationships. Whether you’re watching from home or on the go, we’re glad you’re here.
📖 Scripture: Romans 12:9–18
🎙️ Message: “Let Love Be Genuine”
⛪ Series: Fellowship / Koinonia
Romans tells us, “Let love be genuine.” But what happens when loving another person pushes us beyond our comfort zone? In this message, Pastor John Arnold shares how an unexpected friendship challenged his assumptions and helped him discover a deeper kind of love—love rooted in humility, honor, service, and the recognition that every person is a child of God. As you listen, consider where God might be inviting you to let go of pretense, move beyond discomfort, and show up more authentically in your relationships.
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Reflection Questions:
1. Where do you find yourself putting up a mask in relationships?
2. Who is difficult for you to genuinely honor?
3. What assumptions influence how quickly you value another person?
4. How might Jesus be asking you to move beyond your relational comfort zone?
5. What would “outdoing one another in showing honor” look like this week?
Transcript: Let Love Be Genuine
Text: Romans 12:9–18
Conduct in Community
We’ve been looking at fellowship — koinonia — for three weeks now. We looked at belonging, and last week we talked about belonging to one another. This week is about conduct. If you look through the Romans passage we just read, there are a lot of cues for how we’re meant to behave toward one another, for what real fellowship looks like in practice.
I want to lift up conduct because a dear friend and mentor of mine, who is a master at koinonia — someone I’ve spoken with every Monday morning for about six years — was trying to explain something to me, though he never used the word koinonia. He asked if I’d ever gone somewhere expecting it to be great — maybe you saw a flyer and thought, “I’d love to go there, it’ll be full of people who enjoy the same things I do” — and then it just fell flat. You walked away thinking, “That really wasn’t what I expected.” Even if the event itself went fine, he said, that flatness usually comes down to the conduct of the people there — how you were treated, welcomed, received.
That resonated with me immediately, because it reminded me of an experience early in our ministry. It was our second call, and my wife and I were serving together as associate pastors in a small town. We heard about the local Ministerial Alliance and thought it would be a great way to meet our colleagues. We found the church where it met, but once we got there, we had no idea how to get into the building. Most of the doors were locked, and we finally found an odd side door — like walking up to somebody’s back door at home — that didn’t lead anywhere helpful either. We wandered around until we eventually found the group in a basement fellowship hall.
There were maybe six or eight people seated around a table, eating a meal. At first they just looked up at us, and most of them kept doing what they were doing. Eventually someone said hello, and we introduced ourselves as the two new pastors in town. We sat down and ate, but for the most part we felt like a fifth wheel that wasn’t supposed to be there. I remember thinking, “If these are the pastors of the local churches, this is not good.” It should have been a place where we immediately felt at home — these are our people, the ones who understand what we go through. That wasn’t the case, and we did very little with that Ministerial Alliance afterward.
A Word for Myself, Too
It’s easy to tell stories about other people falling short of welcome and love. But God got to work on me before I even reached the church building this morning — I was literally in the parking lot thinking through the stories I wanted to share, and I realized how easy it is to talk about “those people” who don’t welcome well. So I started thinking about my own journey instead.
The very first line of this passage — “let love be genuine” — is really the foundation for everything after it. Honor one another: that’s what it looks like to let love be genuine. Weep with those who weep: that’s what it looks like to let love be genuine. We could go verse by verse, but I think if we simply focus on what it means to let love be genuine, everything else follows.
Meeting Dwayne
I remember painfully becoming aware that I wasn’t as loving a person as I thought I was. In high school, I volunteered at a homeless shelter, did mission trips, and figured I had a pretty loving heart. Then, in my senior year of college — I was an art history major — my seminar professor mentioned one day that a student in her Art 101 class needed a tutor. She used an old, now outdated term for him: he had cerebral palsy.
Another student and I were both kind of on the fence about volunteering, mostly because we were busy. Our professor suggested we could split the responsibility and take turns. I agreed, mostly because I couldn’t think of a good way to say no — if I’m honest, I said yes because I felt like saying no would make me a bad person. That was really the whole reason.
His name was Dwayne, and he came to class a week later in a motorized wheelchair he operated with his chin on a joystick. He had fairly severe cerebral palsy — his movements were jerky and erratic, one arm drawn up, and a speech impediment that meant I couldn’t understand a single word he said. I was scared. I had no idea what I’d agreed to. I said yes to tutoring him, but not because I felt loving and kind about it — I said yes because I didn’t know how to say no.
I started meeting with Dwayne regularly, and bit by bit, I began to understand him — and the line between us kept moving. First it was tutoring. Then he started inviting me to lunch, and I went. I’ll be honest, I was uncomfortable. I hadn’t been around anyone with a significant disability before. But Dwayne didn’t care about my discomfort — he just kept moving the line.
One day he asked me to help him in the bathroom. That was new. Over time, as we became close friends, I helped Dwayne with nearly every part of his life — getting dressed, bathing, getting ready for the day. We went on retreats together. We traveled together. I got over those early inhibitions completely — I remember one time at lunch on campus looking around for an extra chair before realizing Dwayne was already there, in his own chair. I’d forgotten he was even in a wheelchair. That’s how far the line had moved.
The “Shalow Hal” Moment
Dwayne invited me on a weekend retreat called Handicapped Encounter Christ — HEC — similar to a pilgrimage retreat some of you may know. Half the participants were able-bodied, and half had physical disabilities, and each person was paired with a partner. By that point my comfort zone had grown a lot. My partner for one of those weekends was a man named Dan — nonverbal, bedridden, with very little movement. I did everything for him that weekend, and he turned out to be a spiritual giant. It was a Catholic retreat, and Dan, in his motorized chair, took himself to Mass every single day.
Part of the weekend involved writing a letter, and since Dan couldn’t write his, I wrote it for him. I was humbled writing that letter — by the depth of love and devotion in his relationship with God. This man was in a completely different place spiritually than I was.
Shortly after that retreat, I had what I think of as my “Shallow Hal” moment — some of you may remember that old movie about a superficial guy who’s given the ability to see people’s true inner beauty regardless of how they look on the outside, and then has it taken away and sees them as they physically are. I was sitting at a stoplight near Dwayne’s house — I remember the exact intersection — and I looked over and saw a girl in the car next to me and thought, “Wow, she’s really attractive.” It was a shallow, surface-level moment. And it hit me hard: how much I valued people simply based on how they looked, and by extension, how many people I quietly rejected or downgraded in my heart because they didn’t look a certain way. It was a real gut-punch of a realization.
I’m so grateful for Dwayne, because he just kept moving that line for me. We became such close friends that we could do genuinely mean things to each other — you know you’re really good friends when you can do that. Dwayne eventually got married, and he asked me to help hold him up so he could stand for his vows. I got to do that. He also put me in charge of making sure his suitcase made it into the car — which he probably shouldn’t have done, because another groomsman and I filled it with the most ridiculous, unmentionable things we could find, knowing his new wife (not Dwayne) would be the one to open it after the wedding. That’s how good of friends we were.
Outdo One Another in Honoring
But the moment that really broke me open — the moment Dwayne fully lived out “let love be genuine” and “outdo one another in showing honor” — came near the end of that retreat.
There was a foot-washing service, built around the passage where Jesus gives the new commandment to love one another as he has loved us, washing his disciples’ feet. I went and washed a couple of people’s feet during the service. Then Dwayne — not in his motorized chair, but in a manual one, where he could pull himself forward with his legs — came over to me with a towel and asked if he could wash my feet.
In his jerky, effortful motions, he wet the towel, and I put my foot in his lap. As carefully as he possibly could, he washed my foot and dried it off. And I realized, right then, how far I still had to go to love others as Christ has loved me. It was raw and unguarded — gracious, kind, and honoring in a way I hadn’t experienced before. That’s real koinonia. It lets go of pretense entirely. There wasn’t a haughty bone in Dwayne’s body. He didn’t think himself wiser than he was. He simply loved, humbly.
What Still Needs Redeeming
I want to leave that with you to sit with for a moment. What part of you still needs some redemption? People often say, after going through something hard, “lesson learned.” I’d rather say “lesson given” — because it’s still worth asking whether we actually learned it.
I know I’ve learned some things. But I also know I still carry plenty of under-redeemed pieces of my heart — moments where I quietly run a litmus test on someone I’ve just met, deciding whether they’re worth my time and honor, based on nothing but appearance or first impression rather than the simple fact that they’re another child of God.
That’s when koinonia really happens — when we let go of pretense and humble ourselves, the way Christ humbled himself: willing to be a servant, even to the point of laying down his life for us, even when we were unlovely and unlovable. He humbled himself. He gave himself. He washed his disciples’ feet.
Let us have that kind of heart — letting our love be genuine, letting our love honor others, letting our love enter fully into both rejoicing and weeping. Praise be to God, who lived this out and showed us how, through Jesus Christ.
Amen.