Overcome Evil with Good (Romans 12:14, 17-21)

Big Idea: When faith brings hostility, bless, pursue peace, and leave justice to God.

Imagine someone taking a real dislike to you at work. You try to be a good coworker: friendly, competent, and kind. You don’t preach, but you’ve set some boundaries. You don’t join in when coworkers trash others. You excuse yourself when jokes get crude. When someone asks what you did over the weekend, you casually mention that you went to church. You quietly pray over your lunch sometimes without drawing much attention to yourself.

But one of your coworkers just doesn’t like you. At first it’s subtle. You first noticed this when you saw him smirking as you were saying something in a meeting. But it’s been other things. You heard him calling you a saint to a coworker, and he didn’t mean it in a good way. He takes little digs at you in meetings for being better than everyone else. After a while, you start to notice that others are starting to treat you differently too, including your boss.

It’s hard. You often find yourself going home feeling misunderstood and angry. You want to retaliate. You want to expose him. You want to turn the room against him the way he just turned the room against you. You start composing the speech in your head that will show everyone who he is. Or you consider going quiet and cold, keeping things “professional,” but letting him feel the distance. You can almost taste the satisfaction.

What should you do? Paul tells you in this passage: When faith brings hostility, bless, pursue peace, and leave justice to God.

The Problem You Can Expect to Face

We’re in the practical section of the book of Romans. For 11 chapters, Paul has been explaining the gospel in all of its fullness. Now, Paul is explaining how the gospel changes how we live, and for the first time, Paul talks about our relationship with people outside of the faith.

Here’s the assumption he makes: you will face persecution. Believers must expect animosity and opposition from those who do not believe. Rather than treating opposition as abnormal, Paul treats it as a normal consequence of living differently from the surrounding culture.

Christian: you will endure tribulation. You will be persecuted. People will do evil to you. Some will treat you as an enemy. No matter how hard you try, there are some people with whom it is impossible to make peace.

You probably won’t end up in prison because of your faith in Christ. When people learn you are a Christian, or when you have different views on sexuality, marriage, forgiveness, or truth, you might be called “one of those Christians.” You may become the butt of jokes and stereotypes.

A gospel-shaped life will eventually feel strange to a world running on a very different set of values and beliefs. And when that friction comes, Romans 12 gives us three actions we should take in response.

Three Actions

In verses 14 to 21, Paul gives a set of commands that are fairly loosely structured. Some have to do with our relationship in the world; some have to do with our relationships in the church. This week we’re going to cover what Paul says about relating to people in the world, especially those who are hostile.

Here’s what to do when you face opposition from unbelievers. Three things.

Bless Persecutors (12:14)

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. (Romans 12:14)

When someone mistreats you or bullies you, it’s tempting to respond in kind. That’s what comes naturally to us. We respond to goodness with goodness, love with love, hostility with hostility.

But Paul says something else. He says that we should respond in a completely unnatural way and wish them well with kind words instead. Respond with love to those who hate us and with goodness to those who do evil to us.

The word “bless” means to speak well of. He doesn’t just tell us to avoid negative actions toward those who mistreat us; he tells us to take the positive step of blessing them. Pray for them by name at night. Send a kind email. Speak a word of genuine affirmation about them in a meeting.

This goes completely against the way we normally operate. Paul calls us to react in a completely different way than how the world operates, a completely different way than we normally would. It reminds us of the instructions that Jesus gave:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

Our motive, according to both Paul and Jesus, isn’t to treat others the way that they treat us. Our motive is to seek everyone’s good no matter how they treat us. Think about your worst enemy. What do you want to happen to them? You should want God to bless them so they come to know Jesus too. If this is what you want God to do for them, what should you do to them? You should bless them too. Seek everyone’s good, even the good of your enemies.

This is what the first Christian martyr, Stephen, did. As they killed him, he prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60). It’s not only how Stephen acted; it’s how Jesus acted to us. God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

How should we respond when people mistreat us? Bless them. God’s love empowers us to seek the good of even our worst enemies. When we remember how Jesus loved the very people who crucified him, as well as those whose sins put him on the cross, we’ll seek their good rather than seeking revenge.

Instead of cursing those who persecute you, bless them.

But that’s not all. Here’s the second action Paul gives us when responding to hostile unbelievers:

Live Peaceably (12:17-18)

We’re going to get back to verses 15 and 16 next week, because they deal with our relationships within the church. But look at what Paul says about how we should act in the world in verses 17 and 18:

Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

Paul repeats what he’s already said: repay no one evil for evil. Now he adds another layer: give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. Notice what Paul says: “give thought.” This won’t happen by accident. Paul is asking us to do some proactive planning. Just like you would study for an exam or prepare for a presentation, give some thought about how you can act in a way that unbelievers would consider honorable. Plan words that will heal instead of wound, actions that will bless rather than put people down. Your public behavior should be above criticism, even by people who don’t know Jesus.

Then Paul says to do everything you can to avoid conflict. In other words, one of the marks of a Christian is “a winsome and friendly spirit that delights in peace and harmony, not arguments and division” (Thomas Schreiner). Paul calls us to move towards others, not away from them. Of course, sometimes others will have a problem with you, but we should aim to live in such a way that we’re not picking fights with others. Christians should be easy to get along with.

This takes careful thought in a hostile world. How can you be a student, a coworker, a neighbor who is known to be a good person who’s easy to get along with? Aim to be a dependable, honorable, low-maintenance person in your relationship with unbelievers.

What should you do when you face opposition from unbelievers? Bless them, and live as peaceably as you can. There’s one more step you can take:

Trust God (12:19-21)

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

There’s only one way we can do this, and it’s to stop trying to get justice for ourselves, and we trust God with justice instead.

If we make it our job to avenge ourselves when we’re wronged, we end up in big trouble. We take on a job only God can do. Because we possess limited information and understanding, and because our personal wounds cloud our judgment, we inevitably get it wrong. Not only that, but we become enslaved to bitterness, obsessed with getting what is right. We end up in danger of ungodly anger.

The alternative: surrendering the outcome to God’s perfect justice rather than corrupting it through our own wounded hands. He sees everything. His justice never fails and never errs—unlike fallible humans. God knows all things, sees all things, and has all power. He is a perfectly just God, who will not ultimately allow evil to go unpunished. We can therefore trust him to avenge any evil that people may do to us. We are to “leave room for God’s wrath.” If we try to exact revenge ourselves, we transgress onto territory that God has reserved for himself.

So trust God. He will do a better job of dispensing justice than you will. In the meantime, do good to those who hurt you. The result is that you will heap burning coals on their heads. By this, it seems that Paul is saying that your kind response may produce shame and conviction in the heart of the wrongdoer, potentially leading them to conversion.

Verse 21 wraps it up. The way to respond to evil is not with evil. That never works. The way to respond to evil is with good. How do you conquer evil in the world? By doing what Paul says here: bless persecutors, live peaceably, trust God. It’s the only effective way to respond to evil in the world.

When someone treats us poorly, it’s easy to respond the same way. They go to war; we go to war. That feels natural, but it’s not the way of Jesus.

What did Jesus do? When people rebelled, he didn’t rush to destroy them. When Adam sinned, God promised a Savior. And when we were still sinners, Jesus didn’t come to condemn us; he came to save us.

When he was insulted, he didn’t insult back. When he suffered, he didn’t threaten. He trusted the Father, who judges justly. And through his death and resurrection, he overcame evil with good, defeating sin and death and offering us forgiveness and life.

Now we get to follow his example.

When following Jesus brings hostility, don’t fight back. Bless your persecutors, pursue peace, and trust God, overcoming evil with good. That’s how he calls us to live in a hostile world.