191124 The Power of Love

Romans 13:8-14 Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Paul concludes his list of debts began in verse seven. There he said if you owe taxes pay them. Our debts are not just counted in money. We are to pay respect and grant honor where it is owed. We are to stay out of a very real bondage that is triggered when we don’t meet our obligations. We need to keep in mind always that debt does not just involve money.

It used to be, though I haven’t heard it lately, that when a person finished their prison sentence they had paid their debt to society. I don’t know when the concept was changed.

For a child of God, the greatest unpaid debt is love for one another! Love for one another fulfills the law — all of it!

Jesus was challenged by a lawyer who asked, “which is the great commandment in the law?” Jesus’ answer was more than the lawyer expected. Jesus responded with “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Enough said! Every Jewish schoolboy would have known that answer. Jesus knew they were trying to trap him and he was willing to enter into debate with them. However, he was not willing to leave it at one Great Commandment. He added “a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:36-40) It is easy to say that we love God because it is a concept very hard to prove. However, love for a neighbor is clearly provable by actions. These two commandments are the anchor points of the entire law. Everything that we owe and love is summed up by them.

In fact, Jesus had said that the evidence that we are his disciples is our love for one another. And this is not just some sweet wishy-washy love this is robust adult level love! The kind of love Jesus referred to is the kind that lays down one’s life for another (John 15:13). What does the love Jesus described look like? Is it possible for us to see the kind of love God wants us to have?

Yes, for sure, that description is found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a. There Paul wrote, “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. ⁸ Love never ends”. This kind of love reflects the love of God in Christ Jesus. This love is patient, kind, considerate, not self-serving, not haughty or resentful. This love is always supporting truth. This love tolerates anything in order to prove its existence. Infatuation may end but God’s kind of love never will! Friends, God’s kind of love requires activity on our part. The writer of Hebrews tells us that we are to think about ways to encourage love for one another. (Hebrews 12:24-25).

This is not necessarily all sweetness and light. We are to give serious consideration to how we are to love one another. We are to stir one another in a way that will sharpen our response. We are to stimulate each other and urge one another. The original language implies we are to stimulate even to irritate each other so that love will dominate our lives. We definitely want unbelievers to recognize that we are disciples of Jesus. He said that we would be so recognized when we love one another with his kind of love.

Did the world that Jesus was born into understand the radical kind of love Jesus called for? I would like to quote the words of Alexander McLaren. (Born‎: ‎11 February 1826; Glasgow Died‎: ‎5 May 1910).

When these words  (John 13:34-35) were spoken, the then-known civilized Western world was cleft by great, deep gulfs of separation, like the crevasses in a glacier, by the side of which our racial animosities and class differences are merely superficial cracks on the surface. Language, religion, national animosities, differences of sex, split the world up into alien fragments. A “stranger” and an “enemy” were expressed in one language, by the same word. The learned and the unlearned, the slave and his master, the barbarian and the Greek, the man and the woman, stood on opposite sides of the gulf, flinging hostility across. This is what the world that Jesus was born into was like. As time went by and the truth of Christianity spread around the Roman world there were changes beyond our imagination.

Let me return to pastor McLaren: Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant, clasped hands and sat at one table, and felt themselves “all one in Christ Jesus.” They were ready to break all other bonds, and to yield to the uniting forces that streamed out from His cross. There never had been anything like it. No wonder that the world began to babble about sorcery, and conspiracies, and complicity in unnameable vices. It was only that the disciples were obeying the “new commandment,” and a new thing had come into the world—a community held together by love and not by geographical accidents or linguistic affinities, or the iron fetters of the conqueror.

Christ’s radical command created a profound commitment to love support and encourage one another.

Let’s return to Romans 13:9 For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When we see the phrase “for the commandments” we might expect to see the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments has two divisions called the two tablets. The first division is vertical from top to bottom. The horizontal commands pertaining to human relationships. These commandments are specifically reflective of human relationships. Adultery — a sin that has widespread effects. The adulterer, or adulterees, damages his or her relationship to their spouse, to their family, and to the family of the other party.

Throughout the Bible, God uses the word adultery to represent idolatry! When you love your neighbor you will not commit adultery. When you love your neighbor you will remember that he was made in the image of God just as you were! You will not murder him! When you love your neighbor you respect his ownership of property. We might convince our neighbors, and even ourselves, that we love God because it’s so hard to measure love for God. However, we cannot pretend love for neighbor unless we act it out on a day-to-day basis. Our neighbors know when we love them -- or not. No wonder the world, by and large, does not recognize that we are disciples of Jesus. I believe the only example given by our Lord is love for one another.

Having given us four specific examples Paul then sums everything up with “love your neighbor as yourself”.

I don’t believe Paul is telling us that these human relationship commandments are the most important. In fact, the vertical commands illustrate our relationship to God. No other gods; no idols; no misuse of the name of God and set aside one day out of seven to honor God.

If we recognize on a daily basis that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves then, and only then, will they recognize that we have been with Jesus!

¹⁰ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love does what is right to the neighbor and so doing it fulfills the law. Jesus assured his disciples, in the Sermon on the Mount, that he had not come into the world to abolish the law but instead to fulfill them. The words of the law, which include all the Old Testament, will never pass away, not a dot or a dash will be lost. (Matthew 5:17-18).

Beginning in verse 11 Paul seems to change directions. He does not! He has called us to radical love and now he points out that time is passing quickly. There are two Greek words Paul could have used here. Chronos represents calendar time. Kairos represents quality time. “You know the time”. What kind of time? Throughout the New Testament it is called the last days. In those last days — continuing now — should give us a sense of urgency. The last days began with the birth of Christ and will end on the day of his return.

¹¹ Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. ¹² The night is far gone; the day is at hand.

Salvation has come to us and we have dozed off. Just as the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane slept while Jesus prayed we too sleep spiritually while the world around us goes to hell in a handbasket!

Every day that passes is a day closer to the return of Jesus Christ. Every day is 24 hours nearer to complete salvation. The world around us is darkness — spiritual night! Peter, in his second letter, pointed out the attitude that surrounds us today concerning the second coming. 2 Peter 3:3-4a  tells us, knowing this first of all, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires. ⁴ They will say, “Where is the promise of his coming? Peter quickly points out “do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Peter 3:8). Then Peter challenges us, “Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, ¹² waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! ¹³ But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 11-13).

Paul gives us an answer to Peter’s question in Romans 13:12-14.

So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. ¹³ Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy”

Looking back at Romans 12:2 we see “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

Later, John would add to this discussion. 1 John 1:6 “if we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” A little further on John adds “it is a new commandment that I am writing to you, which is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining.” (1 John 2:8).

Then Paul wraps up the message in verse 14 of Romans chapter 13. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. We are not to struggle to live right. We are to submissively let the peace of Christ rule in our hearts and then, “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16).

All scriptures quotes are from: The Holy Bible: English standard version. 2001. Wheaton, Ill, Standard Bible Society.