The Law is About Love
Title: The law is About Love
Part: 24 of 27 Romans Series
Reading: Romans 13:9-14
Tonight, I want to read you from Romans chapter 13 and verse nine to verse 14. Romans 13:9-14 Paul says,
"Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.
The commandments, “Do not commit adultery’”, “Do not murder”, “Do not steal”, “Do not covet” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.
And do this understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.
The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.
Let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy.
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature."
Well, the primary thrust of that passage is about love, and how the love is the fulfillment of the law. And I want to talk to you about love today, not as a suggestion that Paul makes to us or is made elsewhere in scripture, not simply as a thing that is good to do to be loving, but as Paul describes it here, it's a debt that we owe to each other.
Let no debt remain outstanding. Accept the continuing debt to love one another. Now first, let me just remind you of the context of this statement to get the full meaning and to get the full thrust of what is intended by the writer.
It's always important to seek to understand it in its context. And you'll know if you've been here before that Romans has presented the heart and substance of the gospel. It's about restoring the righteousness of God in the human experience.
And Paul has taken the first 11 chapters to explain this theologically. And then from chapter 12 on to chapter 16, the end of the letter, he explains this ethically.
That is the practical outworking, because true belief when it really connects with our understanding in our hearts becomes behavior.
Doctrine in the New Testament always leads to duty. Understanding our resources in Christ always leads to our responsibilities for Christ in the world. And the goal of the gospel is not simply that we believe the right things. That is a necessary steppingstone.
But the goal of the gospel is that as a result of believing the right things, we behave in the right way. You see the Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to give us something to believe in.
He came to equip us to behave properly and to be restored to the original function intended for every human being, that we display in our behavior the moral character of God.
Now in chapter 12, when he begins the practical expressions of it now working, he says, "Present your body as a living sacrifice." And as you do, you'll discover the will of God to be good and pleasing and perfect. We talked about that.
And then in chapter 12 and chapter 13 talks about this in two primary areas of relationship, in relation to the church, the church is the body of Christ. We talked about this. There are different members of that body, different functions of the body.
In the same way, the church is made up of many people with many functions. That's why it's so important we understand spiritual gifts and how God has gifted us and equipped us and called us. And we talked about that. And then he talks about the Christian and the state.
We talked about this last week. How the authorities are established by God, meaning not that God appoints the individual personalities to leadership, but that the principle of authority, the principle of government, he talks in particular about the state, is God ordained.
But now he comes down to talking about relating to individuals. You see what is the church in its composition, but a collection of individuals? We are a local church here tonight, and there are hundreds of us.
We're all individuals. We're not just a group. There are things we must understand about the group, how we meet together, how that we are mutually dependent although we are different. But we're individuals. When we talk about the state, what is the state?
It's a collection of individuals. When our census is published, it tells us about lots of individual people. And it is on the individual level that we relate to one another. You see, God doesn't relate to us collectively.
It's true. God so loves the world. But the world is not simply a big, massive humanity, and God loves that massive humanity. When we say, “God loves the world”, he loves you. He knows you. He knows your name. He knows how many hairs are on your head.
God didn't just create the world. He created you. We're told in Psalm 139. David in that Psalm 139:15-16 says,
"My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body, and all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."
"I'm not just another in the massive humanity. I'm someone", says David, "Created by God, woven together." The King James says knit together. If you're feeling wooly it's, because you are knitted, the King James says.
You are individually made. Now it's very easy to be sentimental about the big picture. It really is. And yet to only relate very poorly when it comes to real people.
It was that peanuts cartoon, I remember seeing once, when Lucy says, "I love mankind, it's just people I can't stand."
Do you know in a few weeks we're going to have our World Missions Conference and we will hear of events all around the world and we'll hear what God is doing in different parts of the world.
And I trust that we might be moved and God will move us as to what are we in the privileged position that we are in going to do in relation to world mission? But we can be sentimental but actually never get involved in any individual activity towards people in need.
That's the great danger. And so, I want to talk about this as Paul does here, not just about the state we looked at last time, the church we looked at the time before, but people where called upon to love.
Our Debt to the World
And there are two points I have to make. First our debt to the world. None of us like debts. It's wise to pay our debts quickly and fully. And as far as our financial debts are concerned, Paul says that.
He says, "Let no debt remain outstanding." But that's simply the lead into his rear point, "Except the continuing debt to love one another." "There's a debt", says Paul, "you'll never pay off." It's like an eternal mortgage.
An eternal debt. Well, if not eternal, certainly for this life. A never-ending debt is the debt to love. I think it might change many of us if we began to see ourselves as being in debt to the world, in debt to our neighbors.
No longer feeling we have the luxury of responding tit for tat when relationship with our neighbors don't work out very well, or relationships with folks in our families don't work out very well.
The luxury of tit for tat is no longer ours. We have a that we owe them. "They may not deserve it", we may reason, but don't take that too seriously. Neither do you deserve it. Neither do I. That's the marvellous thing about love.
It just has nothing to do with deserving. See, here's something which is unique to the church of Jesus Christ and radical in our world, and it's this, that our greatest obligations as a church are not to ourselves.
It is to others. We carry a debt of love to the world. Paul uses the word five times in Romans 13:8-10. He says, "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another."
He says the commands in verse nine is summed up in this one rule, love your neighbor as yourself. "Love does no harm to its neighbor", he says in Romans 13:10. "Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law", he says in verse 10, which he also said in verse eight actually, "He who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law."
And the main ingredients in our relationship with us is to be love. And I feel that we Christian people have a lot to learn about this. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I will anyway. It's always easy to get forgiveness than to get permission.
I was listening to a preacher on the radio the other day, and I've heard enough preachers like him to know he wasn't unusual.
He was very good at attacking society, But I felt very little evidence that he was any good at loving people. It's very easy to catalog the failings of our society because they're many, it's very easy to become anti this and anti that and seek to present an exposure of this sin and failing.
But as I listened to this guy and there was nothing, he said that was untrue, but I asked myself, where is the compassion? Where is the love? Where are the listeners to this program going to say, "This man loves me" And I'm caught up in these things.
Easiest thing in the world to attack homosexuality, easiest thing in the world to attack divorce. I nearly said marriage then and that's easy too. Easiest thing in the world to attack promiscuity.
There's lots of it. Easiest thing in the world to attack corruption. By the way most of these kinds of attacks tend to be sexual sins that people talk most about.
But where's the love that lets people in their sin know that there's somebody who cares enough to seek to rescue them? You see, look at the way Jesus treated people.
Look at the way he treated the Samaritan woman married five times and now with a live-in lover. He gave this woman a dignity nobody had ever given her. Look at the way he treated the cheating tax collectors, men like Zacchaeus, men like Matthew.
Tax collectors were notorious in the New Testament days. They were Jews who worked for the Romans, and so they were already written all off by most of the Jewish community because they were traders and they had to produce a certain amount of taxation for the Romans.
And what you made above that is your cut, is your business, and they usually made a lot more than they should have done. It's interesting Paul talks about tax collectors. It talks about sinners and tax collectors.
There are sinners. These are people who kill their mothers-in-law and that kind of thing. Those are sinners. And then there are tax collectors in a special category, all of their own.
They didn't fit the general category of sinner. And when Jesus went to the home of Zacchaeus, it was a scandal. The people said, "He does not know who this man is."
But of course, it's precisely that Jesus knew who that man was, that he went to his home, because he was known as the friend of sinners. What about demon possessed people like Mary Magdalene, who was delivered from seven demons and became one of his friends?
The sinful woman who brought that expensive jar of alabaster ointment and broke it at his feet. You see, she'd never met anybody, you can be sure, who cared for her like Jesus did. And when that is written, I think it's Matthew's record, he simply describes her as a sinful woman.
No detail. What about the woman caught an adultery, dragged to Jesus. Of course the man was allowed to go free because everything was weighted in favor of the man and against the woman.
Look at the kindness of which he treated her. Does adultery matter?
Of course it matters. Does cheating matter? Of course it does. Does demon possession matter? Of course, it does.
Does it matter that a boy like the prodigal son wasted his life, wasted his character, not just his money, but he destroyed his own character down in the far country?
Of course, it does. Does sin matter to God? Of course, it matters to God. We're told in the book of Genesis, it fills his heart with pain. You can be sure sin matters to God. But as Jesus said in John 12, "I did not come to judge the world, but to save it."
Jesus did not condemn people for their sin. He rescued them from their sin. You see, it's one thing to criticize sexual promiscuity, it's another thing to help the single mother. That is our task. It's one thing to criticize AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease, it's another thing to help the victims of the virus.
It's one thing to criticize the moral degradation of our society and our culture, it's another thing to take seriously our role as salt and light in the world that seeks to bring aid to people in need.
We don't have to be smart to see what is wrong with the world, but we do have to be Godly to do something about it, and to be Godly is to be loving. Was Jesus ever angry at sin?
Yes, he was. Interestingly, most of his anger at sin was reserved for the self-righteous who were smug and satisfied with themselves like the pharisee who stood up in the synagogue and said, "God, I thank you I'm not like this man." A poor sinner on the other side of the synagogue.
I talked of somebody one day who said to me, "I don't know what's wrong with that prayer because I generally thank God I'm not like other people. I thank God I'm not up to my neck in the kind of sins those other people are.
I thank God I've not made a moral wreck of my life", this person said to me. "I thank God for that." I said, "You don't know your own heart. That's why you're a Pharisee." That was wrong with the Pharisee.
By the grace of God, we thank God that we have been rescued from what could be, did we not know God? That is true. When we start to say, "God, I thank you that I'm better than anybody else."
Jesus said, "Which of those two men went home justified because the sinner in the corner simply cried, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner.'"?
Now, how do we love our neighbor? How do we love? Paul says a very interesting thing here, and of course, Jesus had said it before him. But he says it here in verse eight, "The one who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.
The commandments do not commit adultery, do not murder, not steal, do not covet and whatever else, whatever other commandments there may be are summed up in this one rule.
Love your neighbor as yourself." So an answer to the question how do we love our neighbor? The answer of Paul here is very interesting. He says, "Keep the commandments."
Because these commandments are about relationships of mutual love and affirmation of one another. See some have been troubled by the fact that the commandments by and large are negative statements, and I have read and heard and thought about what may seem to be a problem.
They are, you shall not do this. You shall not do the other. You shall not do the next thing. My wife, who is a great mother to our children has often said, "Only give positive instructions."
Not, "Don't keep kicking the table." But, "Put your feet on the floor." When they were younger, you know, swinging their feet. Well, that's probably good psychology. Yet the 10 commandments are by and large negative statements.
Thus says Paul, "Although they come as negative statements, they're really one big positive statement. You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
You see it's when you do love your neighbor, you will not steal. You will not bear false witness. You will not covet. You will not murder. You will not take the Lord's name in vain. You will not create an idol for yourself. You will not commit adultery.
When the positive you shall love your neighbor, and of course, Paul doesn't mention this here, but the whole commands include, love the Lord your God, that's why you'll have no other gods before him. That's why you'll not make any graven image.
You'll love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself. And the whole command says, Jesus summed up in this one thing, love. And Paul says the same thing here.
By the way, never, never kid yourself that anybody commits adultery for love. To love is to not commit adultery. And you look in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter five, where he talks about the adulterous taking coals and putting them onto their lap.
And eventually they destroy you and the adulterer himself becomes destroyed. But as we're living according to the commandments, we love God, we will love, we will honor, we respect our neighbor.
Now of course we can be poetic and sentimental about loving God and about loving people. But how does it flesh out in real life?
You probably heard the story about the boy who wrote to his girlfriend a letter, beautiful letter. It said, "I love you more than anything in all the world. I would climb the highest mountain just to be with you. I would swim the widest sea to get to you.
I'd walk through the densest jungle to reach you. I'd scramble through the thickest rubble just to be with you. I love you more than anything in all the world. P.S: I'll see you on Saturday if it's not raining."
How do we translate this sense of obligation, this debt into reality? What do we actually mean by love? I think that sometimes the word love itself is a word which gives us a lot of confusion. It's used primarily as an emotion, as a feeling.
I remember hearing a friend of mine, Stuart Brisco. I wish I'd thought of this, but he said this. I remember him saying one day, "I love my wife and I love my dog." Now, he said very obviously, "When I say I love my wife and I love my dog, I'm using the same word, but clearly I mean something totally different."
And he said, "And I do. For instance he said, "if it's raining, I send my wife out to bring the dog in." Well, we use this word love, don't we? I love my wife. I love ice cream. I love sunny weather.
I think the best definition of love is in Philippians chapter two. And I began to say, we tend to think of it as being an emotion. And of course, it says an aspect of love which is emotional, but primarily love is volitional, that is it's natural to the will rather than the feeling of the heart. In Philippians chapter two and verse two, Paul says there, "Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose." What does he mean, having the same love?
Listen to this. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves. I think that's a marvellous description. In humility consider others better than yourselves. I actually prefer the New American Standard there, the NIV.
Consider others better than yourselves seems to imply a value judgment. He/she's better than I am. That may not be helpful.
I think the NASB, which says in humility consider others more important than yourself probably hits the nail there right on their head. What does it mean to love somebody? It means to consider them as being important. How do you know when somebody loves you?
You feel important to them. When you begin to question whether they love you? When you begin to wonder if you are important to them. Because love is that attitude towards other people that says this person is more important to me than I am.
You don't have to know somebody's name, to treat them as important. It might be the lady at the checkout, when you're simply buying a tin of beans or something. And on the way out, you give her dignity, and you look her in the eye and you speak to her as though she's important.
You may never know her name and never see her again, but she may go home that day and say, "Somebody came through my checkout line today who was different." I remember once sharing a conference in Boston. It was the New England Association of Evangelicals.
It was a conference for pastors and about 3000 of them came together from the six New England states. And I was invited to give the morning Bible teaching to start off each day of this three or four days, whatever it was.
And then there were of speakers through the day, Tony Campolo was there, and a man called Juan Carlos Ortiz was there. And I don't know if you know Juan Carlos Ortiz. He was a pastor in Buenos Aires in Argentina. He's Argentinian.
He's a brother-in-law of Luis Palau who may be known to some of you. He married Luis Palau's sister And Juan Carlos Ortiz was the pastor of a large and fast-growing church in Buenos Aires. He's now actually based in California.
And I remember him telling us that he was very pleased with the way his church had grown. It had begun when he went there with 300. It had grown to 1,000 within a fairly short time. One day he prepared to preach on the subject of love at the Sunday morning service.
And he prepared his message well, he told us. He looked at the different Greek words for love. He was going to define them, illustrate them.
He said, "I went to the church that morning, feeling fairly confident about my message." And during the time of worship before he got up to preach, he felt a very strong sense that he shouldn't preach his message.
When the worship leader said, "Now Brother Juan Carlos will bring us his message." He said, "I got up and I came to the pulpit.” And I said, “Brothers and sisters my text this morning is love one another."
And then he closed his Bible, went back to his seat and there was silence for about two minutes. That's a long time when you don't know what else is happening. He said the worship leader leaned across and said, "Are we supposed to have another song?"
He said, "I sat there quietly got up after two minutes and said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is love one another.'" Went back to a seat. He said his wife was in the balcony. She thought to herself, "He's flipped. I knew it would happen one day."
He got up a third time. He said, "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is love one another." And I think it was after the fourth time when he got up and said the same thing, he went back to his seat and somebody sitting over here turned to somebody next to him and said, "Excuse me, is there any way I can love you?
Is there something I could do for you?" Somebody else sitting over here turned to somebody else and said, "Is there somewhere I could love you?" He said within a few minutes the church was alive with everybody in the congregation talking, people moving across the auditorium to find somebody.
He said, "We had 28 unemployed people in the church that Sunday morning. Every single one of them went home with a job." He began to talk about other details, some single mothers in desperate need.
And I was writing so fast, I didn't get all the details down well, as I listened to Juan Carlos Ortiz tell us this. But he said, "If I had preached my message on love that morning, they would've shaken my hand at the end and said, 'Thank you, pastor. That was a great message. We enjoyed that. Thank you very much.'
But 28 people would've gone home unemployed", and Juan Carlos Ortiz said this, "and most people couldn't have cared less." He said, "Although we were growing from 300 to 1,000, and I thought that was really good, I was driving by the local cemetery one day and I noticed that was growing too. So, I asked myself, 'What do we mean we're growing?'" And he realized, he said, "We weren't growing at all. We were just getting fat."
He said, "We used to be 300 unloving Christians, now we were a thousand unloving Christians. That isn't growth. That's just getting fat", he said. He said, "That Sunday changed our church."
The next Sunday morning when he came to the time for the message, he got up and said, "Brothers and sisters, the Lord has given me the same message as last week. Love one another."
Closed his Bible. Same text as last week, closed his Bible, went back to the seat, and people said, "Well, who can I help this week?" He said, "For three months, I had no freedom to preach." When the time came for the message, I said, 'Brothers and sisters love one another. Go to it.'"
He said 300 people left the church. They came and said, "We didn't employ you to stand up and say, 'love one another.' Anybody can do that. We employed you to teach us the word of God." He said, "But I'm teaching you the word of God. Love one another."
They didn't like it. So, he said 300 left. But it revolutionized those who stayed. He said, after three months, I got up one Sunday morning and said, "Brothers and sisters, the Lord has given me a new message this morning."
And they broke out an applause. A new text this morning, they broke out an applause. He said, "My text this morning is love your neighbor as yourself." He said, "There was silence. I went back to my seat."
He said, "Then somebody got up here, went up to that door. Somebody else got up here, went up to that door. Within 10 minutes, the church was empty, the parking lot was empty, people drove home, parked their cars, went next door, knocked on the door and said, 'I'm your neighbor.
I'm a Christian. Is there something I can do for you?'" He says the worst time for it to happen, it happened just before Christmas. He said he and his wife, and two daughters had presents for each other. They found two people on their street, in their neighbourhood in incredible need.
He said, "We gave away our unopened Christmas presents. It was the Christmas we had the least presents, but it was the best Christmas we ever had." He said, "We had tried evangelism. Most of our growth",
he said, "was Christians floating across, because we'd become the flavor of the month." He said, "We'd tried to reach new people. We weren't sure how to do it."
He said, "Now for the first time, within a couple of weeks, people started calling our church and saying, 'Is that the church that cares because...' And we'd say, 'Yes, we're the church that cares, how can we help you?' And we began to see new people come into our church and getting converted."
He said, "The biggest change in our church is when we decided to stop preaching and start doing." Now, he went back to preaching.
That is essential. But preaching that doesn't become doing is hot air, however much you might enjoy it. "And you see, we have this debt", says Paul, it's a debt to love. It's a debt we've got to take seriously.
We need to ask ourselves, "How is it in my place of work, especially with people who I don't like? How do I consider them more important than myself? What about in my home, where there are tensions in my home.
How about stop fighting my corner? And instead saying, 'This person is more important than I am.' It might revolutionize your home.
Our Deeds in the World
If that's our debt to the world, Paul goes on to say, and I'm calling this my second point, our deeds in the world, because he says, "And do this." Verse 11, that is loving your neighbor. "And do this understanding the present time.
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." So let's put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently as in the daytime, et cetera.
Now he talks about our deeds there and the world, but there's a sense of urgency at this point. He says, "Do this loving your neighbor, understanding the present time." Listen to this language.
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber. Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, the day is almost here, so put off the deeds of darkness.
There's a sense of urgency coming through here. The hour has come, the night is nearly over, the day is almost here. What is Paul talking about?
Well, we know of course that the world was changing rapidly at the time of this letter when Paul wrote it. Within a short while the Roman persecution of Christians, which began in 64 AD would commence. Many Christians would lose their lives during that period of time. Many in Rome would be thrown to the lions, some tied to poles covered in tar and ignited to blaze, to provide light for Nero's garden parties.
Many would find refuge in the Catacombs, the series of caves under the city of Rome. And no doubt Paul with his acute mind and his acute awareness of what is going on was anticipating this day is coming.
But his thoughts extend beyond that. He says in Romans 13:11, "Now salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." And he must be referring to the Lord's coming. His thoughts are that maybe this great persecution that will come will mark the return of Christ.
Now of course Paul didn't know, because not even the Lord Jesus knew the day or the hour of his return. He said that in Matthew 24:36, "No one knows the day or the air, not even the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father."
So, if angels don't know the time of Christ's return and Christ himself did not know the time of his return, Paul certainly didn't know, and he of course knew that. But he also knew it may be soon.
And what I love about Paul, we may say, "Well, he was wrong." But I'll tell you where he was right. He was living with expectancy. That was where he was right.
You see, the return of Christ is one of the greatest incentives to holy living. John tells us in his epistle, 1st John 3:3, "We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him, purifies himself just as he is pure."
The day is going to come when the Lord Jesus steps out of heaven. Every eye will see him. That was a mystery. I'm not saying it's by television, but we know we can things happening. We have watched sometimes too graphically from the inside the war in Iraq.
And we have seen, we've been on the spot. We've seen live images coming back, something that was unheard of until this generation, impossible until recent years.
The day will come every eye will see him and every ear will hear that trumpet blast. We only have a limited time to do the work that God has called us to do, a limited time.
Stephen Olford, a man many of you know, great pastor and preacher. And he tells of the time when in his 20s, although a Christian, he was not living for God. He was away from God, he came across this little ditty,
which said, "Only one life, it will soon be passed. Only what's done for Jesus will last." And that became a catalyst in Stephen Olford's life, to realize he was wasting his time. There is an urgency of time, you see. Time when it's gone, it's gone.
You can't save it up. You can't store it. You can't keep it for another occasion. This urgency of time that Paul brings up here. He says, because of this urgency of time, put aside the deeds of darkness there in Romans 13:12.
As I read this I said, "What are the deeds of darkness?" We probably think about it as being evil, wicked, sinister activity. Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. And sure, those are deeds of darkness.
That's for sure. He talks in Romans 13:14 about orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality debauchery, dissensions, jealousy. But he's talking to Christians here and it's true the Christians sometimes get caught up in the most amazing sins.
But I think there's another idea here as well. You see, he's using the metaphor of night and day, of light and dark. The hour has come to wake up from your slumber and the deeds of darkness may simply mean ding nothing. "Wake up", he says.
You see, my primary deeds of darkness, I'm speaking personally now, is sleeping. I sleep eight hours a night. At least I try to. Doesn't always work out that way. My wife was saying to me earlier this week, "I don't seem to have seen much of you lately."
Or, "We haven't spent much time together lately", I think she said. And I said, "What do you mean? I spend a third of a day six inches from you. Eight hours every day at least." She said, "But you're asleep. That's no use."
And Paul says wake up because you see the deeds of darkness may not be going out and doing all these wicked things. It may simply be being asleep, or we need to be awake To the needs of our world and our responsibility in the world.
The night is nearly over. He says the day is almost here, speaks to the passing of time. Time passes so quickly. Billy Graham was asked by Larry King when he interviewed him on his show one night, "What has surprised you most about your life?" Intriguing question?
"What has surprised you most about your life?" And Billy Graham as quick as a flash said, "It's brevity. I didn't realize it was going to be so short." But it is short.
"What is your life", says the book of James, "you're like a vapor that appears, a mist that appears in the morning and then disappears."
You get up in the morning, there's a mist, there's a fog. You notice as you drive in by mid-morning, it's gone. You didn't notice it go. Life is like that. Time goes so very fast.
I often say to my wife I cannot believe I'm as old as I am. I don't feel it, and she says I don't act it. And this sense of urgency that Paul brings in has to do with the fact, yes, our salvation is nearer the more we first believe Christ is coming back.
But also the brevity of time. I have never been in my life as old as I am right now, and I'll never again be as young as I am right now, Tomorrow will be another gray hair. There'll be another less capacity. I read a letter from somebody yesterday who was an evangelist in Britain.
He's now 78. He's suffering Parkinson's disease. He's in a wheelchair. He says, it's very hard for me because now getting in and out of a car is a huge ordeal for me." He said, "I used to fly around the world and I would leave London and fly to New York, and I'd preach that night in New York.
And it didn't bother me at all. Now getting into a car is a huge ordeal for me." He said, "I'm finding it difficult to adjust."
But that's going to come to all of us. The book Ecclesiastes tells the time comes when everything begins to fade. In the meantime says Paul, "Wake up." It's not a message to those who are young, that's a message to all of us, because God has a purpose for all of us.
"Let us behave decently", he says in Romans 13:13, as in the daytime. And Romans 13:14, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Here of course is the key.
Cloth yourself with Christ, a beautiful picture, that you are now united with Christ in such a way that you're clothed with him. I just had a look the other night as I was preparing this, of the different things that's about clothing in scripture, and I finish with this.
Romans 13 says, "Put on the armor of light." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Ephesians 4:24 says, "Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." That's clothing yourself with Christ.
Ephesians 6:11 says, "Put on the full armor of God that you may take your stand against the devil schemes." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Colossians 3:10 says “Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge and the image of its creator.”
That's clothing yourself with Christ. And Colossians 3:14 says, "Above all these virtues, put on love which binds them all together in perfect unity." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Because to be clothing ourselves with Christ is to be putting on love because love is his character.
Love is A Christians Privilege, Responsibility and Debt
And that goes back to the whole thrust of this passage. Love is our privilege to love is our responsibility, and to love is a debt. Do people know that you're disciple of Jesus?
Not because you have a testimony that I'm glad you do. Not because you've been baptized. I'm glad you have. Not because you are a member of this or any church.
Not because you hold a position in the church. Do people know you're a Christian the way Jesus said they would? "By this shall all men know that you're my disciples that you love one another."
When they meet you, when they have dealings with you, whatever else they may sense, they know they're important to you. Have this love, in humility consider others more important than yourself. This is our debt.
Title: The law is About Love
Part: 24 of 27 Romans Series
Reading: Romans 13:9-14
Tonight, I want to read you from Romans chapter 13 and verse nine to verse 14. Romans 13:9-14 Paul says,
"Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.
The commandments, “Do not commit adultery’”, “Do not murder”, “Do not steal”, “Do not covet” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.
And do this understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.
The night is nearly over; the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.
Let us behave decently as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy.
Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature."
Well, the primary thrust of that passage is about love, and how the love is the fulfillment of the law. And I want to talk to you about love today, not as a suggestion that Paul makes to us or is made elsewhere in scripture, not simply as a thing that is good to do to be loving, but as Paul describes it here, it's a debt that we owe to each other.
Let no debt remain outstanding. Accept the continuing debt to love one another. Now first, let me just remind you of the context of this statement to get the full meaning and to get the full thrust of what is intended by the writer.
It's always important to seek to understand it in its context. And you'll know if you've been here before that Romans has presented the heart and substance of the gospel. It's about restoring the righteousness of God in the human experience.
And Paul has taken the first 11 chapters to explain this theologically. And then from chapter 12 on to chapter 16, the end of the letter, he explains this ethically.
That is the practical outworking, because true belief when it really connects with our understanding in our hearts becomes behavior.
Doctrine in the New Testament always leads to duty. Understanding our resources in Christ always leads to our responsibilities for Christ in the world. And the goal of the gospel is not simply that we believe the right things. That is a necessary steppingstone.
But the goal of the gospel is that as a result of believing the right things, we behave in the right way. You see the Lord Jesus Christ did not come into the world to give us something to believe in.
He came to equip us to behave properly and to be restored to the original function intended for every human being, that we display in our behavior the moral character of God.
Now in chapter 12, when he begins the practical expressions of it now working, he says, "Present your body as a living sacrifice." And as you do, you'll discover the will of God to be good and pleasing and perfect. We talked about that.
And then in chapter 12 and chapter 13 talks about this in two primary areas of relationship, in relation to the church, the church is the body of Christ. We talked about this. There are different members of that body, different functions of the body.
In the same way, the church is made up of many people with many functions. That's why it's so important we understand spiritual gifts and how God has gifted us and equipped us and called us. And we talked about that. And then he talks about the Christian and the state.
We talked about this last week. How the authorities are established by God, meaning not that God appoints the individual personalities to leadership, but that the principle of authority, the principle of government, he talks in particular about the state, is God ordained.
But now he comes down to talking about relating to individuals. You see what is the church in its composition, but a collection of individuals? We are a local church here tonight, and there are hundreds of us.
We're all individuals. We're not just a group. There are things we must understand about the group, how we meet together, how that we are mutually dependent although we are different. But we're individuals. When we talk about the state, what is the state?
It's a collection of individuals. When our census is published, it tells us about lots of individual people. And it is on the individual level that we relate to one another. You see, God doesn't relate to us collectively.
It's true. God so loves the world. But the world is not simply a big, massive humanity, and God loves that massive humanity. When we say, “God loves the world”, he loves you. He knows you. He knows your name. He knows how many hairs are on your head.
God didn't just create the world. He created you. We're told in Psalm 139. David in that Psalm 139:15-16 says,
"My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body, and all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."
"I'm not just another in the massive humanity. I'm someone", says David, "Created by God, woven together." The King James says knit together. If you're feeling wooly it's, because you are knitted, the King James says.
You are individually made. Now it's very easy to be sentimental about the big picture. It really is. And yet to only relate very poorly when it comes to real people.
It was that peanuts cartoon, I remember seeing once, when Lucy says, "I love mankind, it's just people I can't stand."
Do you know in a few weeks we're going to have our World Missions Conference and we will hear of events all around the world and we'll hear what God is doing in different parts of the world.
And I trust that we might be moved and God will move us as to what are we in the privileged position that we are in going to do in relation to world mission? But we can be sentimental but actually never get involved in any individual activity towards people in need.
That's the great danger. And so, I want to talk about this as Paul does here, not just about the state we looked at last time, the church we looked at the time before, but people where called upon to love.
Our Debt to the World
And there are two points I have to make. First our debt to the world. None of us like debts. It's wise to pay our debts quickly and fully. And as far as our financial debts are concerned, Paul says that.
He says, "Let no debt remain outstanding." But that's simply the lead into his rear point, "Except the continuing debt to love one another." "There's a debt", says Paul, "you'll never pay off." It's like an eternal mortgage.
An eternal debt. Well, if not eternal, certainly for this life. A never-ending debt is the debt to love. I think it might change many of us if we began to see ourselves as being in debt to the world, in debt to our neighbors.
No longer feeling we have the luxury of responding tit for tat when relationship with our neighbors don't work out very well, or relationships with folks in our families don't work out very well.
The luxury of tit for tat is no longer ours. We have a that we owe them. "They may not deserve it", we may reason, but don't take that too seriously. Neither do you deserve it. Neither do I. That's the marvellous thing about love.
It just has nothing to do with deserving. See, here's something which is unique to the church of Jesus Christ and radical in our world, and it's this, that our greatest obligations as a church are not to ourselves.
It is to others. We carry a debt of love to the world. Paul uses the word five times in Romans 13:8-10. He says, "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another."
He says the commands in verse nine is summed up in this one rule, love your neighbor as yourself. "Love does no harm to its neighbor", he says in Romans 13:10. "Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law", he says in verse 10, which he also said in verse eight actually, "He who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law."
And the main ingredients in our relationship with us is to be love. And I feel that we Christian people have a lot to learn about this. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I will anyway. It's always easy to get forgiveness than to get permission.
I was listening to a preacher on the radio the other day, and I've heard enough preachers like him to know he wasn't unusual.
He was very good at attacking society, But I felt very little evidence that he was any good at loving people. It's very easy to catalog the failings of our society because they're many, it's very easy to become anti this and anti that and seek to present an exposure of this sin and failing.
But as I listened to this guy and there was nothing, he said that was untrue, but I asked myself, where is the compassion? Where is the love? Where are the listeners to this program going to say, "This man loves me" And I'm caught up in these things.
Easiest thing in the world to attack homosexuality, easiest thing in the world to attack divorce. I nearly said marriage then and that's easy too. Easiest thing in the world to attack promiscuity.
There's lots of it. Easiest thing in the world to attack corruption. By the way most of these kinds of attacks tend to be sexual sins that people talk most about.
But where's the love that lets people in their sin know that there's somebody who cares enough to seek to rescue them? You see, look at the way Jesus treated people.
Look at the way he treated the Samaritan woman married five times and now with a live-in lover. He gave this woman a dignity nobody had ever given her. Look at the way he treated the cheating tax collectors, men like Zacchaeus, men like Matthew.
Tax collectors were notorious in the New Testament days. They were Jews who worked for the Romans, and so they were already written all off by most of the Jewish community because they were traders and they had to produce a certain amount of taxation for the Romans.
And what you made above that is your cut, is your business, and they usually made a lot more than they should have done. It's interesting Paul talks about tax collectors. It talks about sinners and tax collectors.
There are sinners. These are people who kill their mothers-in-law and that kind of thing. Those are sinners. And then there are tax collectors in a special category, all of their own.
They didn't fit the general category of sinner. And when Jesus went to the home of Zacchaeus, it was a scandal. The people said, "He does not know who this man is."
But of course, it's precisely that Jesus knew who that man was, that he went to his home, because he was known as the friend of sinners. What about demon possessed people like Mary Magdalene, who was delivered from seven demons and became one of his friends?
The sinful woman who brought that expensive jar of alabaster ointment and broke it at his feet. You see, she'd never met anybody, you can be sure, who cared for her like Jesus did. And when that is written, I think it's Matthew's record, he simply describes her as a sinful woman.
No detail. What about the woman caught an adultery, dragged to Jesus. Of course the man was allowed to go free because everything was weighted in favor of the man and against the woman.
Look at the kindness of which he treated her. Does adultery matter?
Of course it matters. Does cheating matter? Of course it does. Does demon possession matter? Of course, it does.
Does it matter that a boy like the prodigal son wasted his life, wasted his character, not just his money, but he destroyed his own character down in the far country?
Of course, it does. Does sin matter to God? Of course, it matters to God. We're told in the book of Genesis, it fills his heart with pain. You can be sure sin matters to God. But as Jesus said in John 12, "I did not come to judge the world, but to save it."
Jesus did not condemn people for their sin. He rescued them from their sin. You see, it's one thing to criticize sexual promiscuity, it's another thing to help the single mother. That is our task. It's one thing to criticize AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease, it's another thing to help the victims of the virus.
It's one thing to criticize the moral degradation of our society and our culture, it's another thing to take seriously our role as salt and light in the world that seeks to bring aid to people in need.
We don't have to be smart to see what is wrong with the world, but we do have to be Godly to do something about it, and to be Godly is to be loving. Was Jesus ever angry at sin?
Yes, he was. Interestingly, most of his anger at sin was reserved for the self-righteous who were smug and satisfied with themselves like the pharisee who stood up in the synagogue and said, "God, I thank you I'm not like this man." A poor sinner on the other side of the synagogue.
I talked of somebody one day who said to me, "I don't know what's wrong with that prayer because I generally thank God I'm not like other people. I thank God I'm not up to my neck in the kind of sins those other people are.
I thank God I've not made a moral wreck of my life", this person said to me. "I thank God for that." I said, "You don't know your own heart. That's why you're a Pharisee." That was wrong with the Pharisee.
By the grace of God, we thank God that we have been rescued from what could be, did we not know God? That is true. When we start to say, "God, I thank you that I'm better than anybody else."
Jesus said, "Which of those two men went home justified because the sinner in the corner simply cried, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner.'"?
Now, how do we love our neighbor? How do we love? Paul says a very interesting thing here, and of course, Jesus had said it before him. But he says it here in verse eight, "The one who loves his fellow man has fulfilled the law.
The commandments do not commit adultery, do not murder, not steal, do not covet and whatever else, whatever other commandments there may be are summed up in this one rule.
Love your neighbor as yourself." So an answer to the question how do we love our neighbor? The answer of Paul here is very interesting. He says, "Keep the commandments."
Because these commandments are about relationships of mutual love and affirmation of one another. See some have been troubled by the fact that the commandments by and large are negative statements, and I have read and heard and thought about what may seem to be a problem.
They are, you shall not do this. You shall not do the other. You shall not do the next thing. My wife, who is a great mother to our children has often said, "Only give positive instructions."
Not, "Don't keep kicking the table." But, "Put your feet on the floor." When they were younger, you know, swinging their feet. Well, that's probably good psychology. Yet the 10 commandments are by and large negative statements.
Thus says Paul, "Although they come as negative statements, they're really one big positive statement. You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
You see it's when you do love your neighbor, you will not steal. You will not bear false witness. You will not covet. You will not murder. You will not take the Lord's name in vain. You will not create an idol for yourself. You will not commit adultery.
When the positive you shall love your neighbor, and of course, Paul doesn't mention this here, but the whole commands include, love the Lord your God, that's why you'll have no other gods before him. That's why you'll not make any graven image.
You'll love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and you'll love your neighbor as yourself. And the whole command says, Jesus summed up in this one thing, love. And Paul says the same thing here.
By the way, never, never kid yourself that anybody commits adultery for love. To love is to not commit adultery. And you look in the book of Proverbs, Proverbs chapter five, where he talks about the adulterous taking coals and putting them onto their lap.
And eventually they destroy you and the adulterer himself becomes destroyed. But as we're living according to the commandments, we love God, we will love, we will honor, we respect our neighbor.
Now of course we can be poetic and sentimental about loving God and about loving people. But how does it flesh out in real life?
You probably heard the story about the boy who wrote to his girlfriend a letter, beautiful letter. It said, "I love you more than anything in all the world. I would climb the highest mountain just to be with you. I would swim the widest sea to get to you.
I'd walk through the densest jungle to reach you. I'd scramble through the thickest rubble just to be with you. I love you more than anything in all the world. P.S: I'll see you on Saturday if it's not raining."
How do we translate this sense of obligation, this debt into reality? What do we actually mean by love? I think that sometimes the word love itself is a word which gives us a lot of confusion. It's used primarily as an emotion, as a feeling.
I remember hearing a friend of mine, Stuart Brisco. I wish I'd thought of this, but he said this. I remember him saying one day, "I love my wife and I love my dog." Now, he said very obviously, "When I say I love my wife and I love my dog, I'm using the same word, but clearly I mean something totally different."
And he said, "And I do. For instance he said, "if it's raining, I send my wife out to bring the dog in." Well, we use this word love, don't we? I love my wife. I love ice cream. I love sunny weather.
I think the best definition of love is in Philippians chapter two. And I began to say, we tend to think of it as being an emotion. And of course, it says an aspect of love which is emotional, but primarily love is volitional, that is it's natural to the will rather than the feeling of the heart. In Philippians chapter two and verse two, Paul says there, "Make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose." What does he mean, having the same love?
Listen to this. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility, consider others better than yourselves. I think that's a marvellous description. In humility consider others better than yourselves. I actually prefer the New American Standard there, the NIV.
Consider others better than yourselves seems to imply a value judgment. He/she's better than I am. That may not be helpful.
I think the NASB, which says in humility consider others more important than yourself probably hits the nail there right on their head. What does it mean to love somebody? It means to consider them as being important. How do you know when somebody loves you?
You feel important to them. When you begin to question whether they love you? When you begin to wonder if you are important to them. Because love is that attitude towards other people that says this person is more important to me than I am.
You don't have to know somebody's name, to treat them as important. It might be the lady at the checkout, when you're simply buying a tin of beans or something. And on the way out, you give her dignity, and you look her in the eye and you speak to her as though she's important.
You may never know her name and never see her again, but she may go home that day and say, "Somebody came through my checkout line today who was different." I remember once sharing a conference in Boston. It was the New England Association of Evangelicals.
It was a conference for pastors and about 3000 of them came together from the six New England states. And I was invited to give the morning Bible teaching to start off each day of this three or four days, whatever it was.
And then there were of speakers through the day, Tony Campolo was there, and a man called Juan Carlos Ortiz was there. And I don't know if you know Juan Carlos Ortiz. He was a pastor in Buenos Aires in Argentina. He's Argentinian.
He's a brother-in-law of Luis Palau who may be known to some of you. He married Luis Palau's sister And Juan Carlos Ortiz was the pastor of a large and fast-growing church in Buenos Aires. He's now actually based in California.
And I remember him telling us that he was very pleased with the way his church had grown. It had begun when he went there with 300. It had grown to 1,000 within a fairly short time. One day he prepared to preach on the subject of love at the Sunday morning service.
And he prepared his message well, he told us. He looked at the different Greek words for love. He was going to define them, illustrate them.
He said, "I went to the church that morning, feeling fairly confident about my message." And during the time of worship before he got up to preach, he felt a very strong sense that he shouldn't preach his message.
When the worship leader said, "Now Brother Juan Carlos will bring us his message." He said, "I got up and I came to the pulpit.” And I said, “Brothers and sisters my text this morning is love one another."
And then he closed his Bible, went back to his seat and there was silence for about two minutes. That's a long time when you don't know what else is happening. He said the worship leader leaned across and said, "Are we supposed to have another song?"
He said, "I sat there quietly got up after two minutes and said, 'Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is love one another.'" Went back to a seat. He said his wife was in the balcony. She thought to herself, "He's flipped. I knew it would happen one day."
He got up a third time. He said, "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is love one another." And I think it was after the fourth time when he got up and said the same thing, he went back to his seat and somebody sitting over here turned to somebody next to him and said, "Excuse me, is there any way I can love you?
Is there something I could do for you?" Somebody else sitting over here turned to somebody else and said, "Is there somewhere I could love you?" He said within a few minutes the church was alive with everybody in the congregation talking, people moving across the auditorium to find somebody.
He said, "We had 28 unemployed people in the church that Sunday morning. Every single one of them went home with a job." He began to talk about other details, some single mothers in desperate need.
And I was writing so fast, I didn't get all the details down well, as I listened to Juan Carlos Ortiz tell us this. But he said, "If I had preached my message on love that morning, they would've shaken my hand at the end and said, 'Thank you, pastor. That was a great message. We enjoyed that. Thank you very much.'
But 28 people would've gone home unemployed", and Juan Carlos Ortiz said this, "and most people couldn't have cared less." He said, "Although we were growing from 300 to 1,000, and I thought that was really good, I was driving by the local cemetery one day and I noticed that was growing too. So, I asked myself, 'What do we mean we're growing?'" And he realized, he said, "We weren't growing at all. We were just getting fat."
He said, "We used to be 300 unloving Christians, now we were a thousand unloving Christians. That isn't growth. That's just getting fat", he said. He said, "That Sunday changed our church."
The next Sunday morning when he came to the time for the message, he got up and said, "Brothers and sisters, the Lord has given me the same message as last week. Love one another."
Closed his Bible. Same text as last week, closed his Bible, went back to the seat, and people said, "Well, who can I help this week?" He said, "For three months, I had no freedom to preach." When the time came for the message, I said, 'Brothers and sisters love one another. Go to it.'"
He said 300 people left the church. They came and said, "We didn't employ you to stand up and say, 'love one another.' Anybody can do that. We employed you to teach us the word of God." He said, "But I'm teaching you the word of God. Love one another."
They didn't like it. So, he said 300 left. But it revolutionized those who stayed. He said, after three months, I got up one Sunday morning and said, "Brothers and sisters, the Lord has given me a new message this morning."
And they broke out an applause. A new text this morning, they broke out an applause. He said, "My text this morning is love your neighbor as yourself." He said, "There was silence. I went back to my seat."
He said, "Then somebody got up here, went up to that door. Somebody else got up here, went up to that door. Within 10 minutes, the church was empty, the parking lot was empty, people drove home, parked their cars, went next door, knocked on the door and said, 'I'm your neighbor.
I'm a Christian. Is there something I can do for you?'" He says the worst time for it to happen, it happened just before Christmas. He said he and his wife, and two daughters had presents for each other. They found two people on their street, in their neighbourhood in incredible need.
He said, "We gave away our unopened Christmas presents. It was the Christmas we had the least presents, but it was the best Christmas we ever had." He said, "We had tried evangelism. Most of our growth",
he said, "was Christians floating across, because we'd become the flavor of the month." He said, "We'd tried to reach new people. We weren't sure how to do it."
He said, "Now for the first time, within a couple of weeks, people started calling our church and saying, 'Is that the church that cares because...' And we'd say, 'Yes, we're the church that cares, how can we help you?' And we began to see new people come into our church and getting converted."
He said, "The biggest change in our church is when we decided to stop preaching and start doing." Now, he went back to preaching.
That is essential. But preaching that doesn't become doing is hot air, however much you might enjoy it. "And you see, we have this debt", says Paul, it's a debt to love. It's a debt we've got to take seriously.
We need to ask ourselves, "How is it in my place of work, especially with people who I don't like? How do I consider them more important than myself? What about in my home, where there are tensions in my home.
How about stop fighting my corner? And instead saying, 'This person is more important than I am.' It might revolutionize your home.
Our Deeds in the World
If that's our debt to the world, Paul goes on to say, and I'm calling this my second point, our deeds in the world, because he says, "And do this." Verse 11, that is loving your neighbor. "And do this understanding the present time.
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." So let's put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us behave decently as in the daytime, et cetera.
Now he talks about our deeds there and the world, but there's a sense of urgency at this point. He says, "Do this loving your neighbor, understanding the present time." Listen to this language.
The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber. Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, the day is almost here, so put off the deeds of darkness.
There's a sense of urgency coming through here. The hour has come, the night is nearly over, the day is almost here. What is Paul talking about?
Well, we know of course that the world was changing rapidly at the time of this letter when Paul wrote it. Within a short while the Roman persecution of Christians, which began in 64 AD would commence. Many Christians would lose their lives during that period of time. Many in Rome would be thrown to the lions, some tied to poles covered in tar and ignited to blaze, to provide light for Nero's garden parties.
Many would find refuge in the Catacombs, the series of caves under the city of Rome. And no doubt Paul with his acute mind and his acute awareness of what is going on was anticipating this day is coming.
But his thoughts extend beyond that. He says in Romans 13:11, "Now salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." And he must be referring to the Lord's coming. His thoughts are that maybe this great persecution that will come will mark the return of Christ.
Now of course Paul didn't know, because not even the Lord Jesus knew the day or the hour of his return. He said that in Matthew 24:36, "No one knows the day or the air, not even the angels in heaven, nor the son, but only the father."
So, if angels don't know the time of Christ's return and Christ himself did not know the time of his return, Paul certainly didn't know, and he of course knew that. But he also knew it may be soon.
And what I love about Paul, we may say, "Well, he was wrong." But I'll tell you where he was right. He was living with expectancy. That was where he was right.
You see, the return of Christ is one of the greatest incentives to holy living. John tells us in his epistle, 1st John 3:3, "We know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him, purifies himself just as he is pure."
The day is going to come when the Lord Jesus steps out of heaven. Every eye will see him. That was a mystery. I'm not saying it's by television, but we know we can things happening. We have watched sometimes too graphically from the inside the war in Iraq.
And we have seen, we've been on the spot. We've seen live images coming back, something that was unheard of until this generation, impossible until recent years.
The day will come every eye will see him and every ear will hear that trumpet blast. We only have a limited time to do the work that God has called us to do, a limited time.
Stephen Olford, a man many of you know, great pastor and preacher. And he tells of the time when in his 20s, although a Christian, he was not living for God. He was away from God, he came across this little ditty,
which said, "Only one life, it will soon be passed. Only what's done for Jesus will last." And that became a catalyst in Stephen Olford's life, to realize he was wasting his time. There is an urgency of time, you see. Time when it's gone, it's gone.
You can't save it up. You can't store it. You can't keep it for another occasion. This urgency of time that Paul brings up here. He says, because of this urgency of time, put aside the deeds of darkness there in Romans 13:12.
As I read this I said, "What are the deeds of darkness?" We probably think about it as being evil, wicked, sinister activity. Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. And sure, those are deeds of darkness.
That's for sure. He talks in Romans 13:14 about orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality debauchery, dissensions, jealousy. But he's talking to Christians here and it's true the Christians sometimes get caught up in the most amazing sins.
But I think there's another idea here as well. You see, he's using the metaphor of night and day, of light and dark. The hour has come to wake up from your slumber and the deeds of darkness may simply mean ding nothing. "Wake up", he says.
You see, my primary deeds of darkness, I'm speaking personally now, is sleeping. I sleep eight hours a night. At least I try to. Doesn't always work out that way. My wife was saying to me earlier this week, "I don't seem to have seen much of you lately."
Or, "We haven't spent much time together lately", I think she said. And I said, "What do you mean? I spend a third of a day six inches from you. Eight hours every day at least." She said, "But you're asleep. That's no use."
And Paul says wake up because you see the deeds of darkness may not be going out and doing all these wicked things. It may simply be being asleep, or we need to be awake To the needs of our world and our responsibility in the world.
The night is nearly over. He says the day is almost here, speaks to the passing of time. Time passes so quickly. Billy Graham was asked by Larry King when he interviewed him on his show one night, "What has surprised you most about your life?" Intriguing question?
"What has surprised you most about your life?" And Billy Graham as quick as a flash said, "It's brevity. I didn't realize it was going to be so short." But it is short.
"What is your life", says the book of James, "you're like a vapor that appears, a mist that appears in the morning and then disappears."
You get up in the morning, there's a mist, there's a fog. You notice as you drive in by mid-morning, it's gone. You didn't notice it go. Life is like that. Time goes so very fast.
I often say to my wife I cannot believe I'm as old as I am. I don't feel it, and she says I don't act it. And this sense of urgency that Paul brings in has to do with the fact, yes, our salvation is nearer the more we first believe Christ is coming back.
But also the brevity of time. I have never been in my life as old as I am right now, and I'll never again be as young as I am right now, Tomorrow will be another gray hair. There'll be another less capacity. I read a letter from somebody yesterday who was an evangelist in Britain.
He's now 78. He's suffering Parkinson's disease. He's in a wheelchair. He says, it's very hard for me because now getting in and out of a car is a huge ordeal for me." He said, "I used to fly around the world and I would leave London and fly to New York, and I'd preach that night in New York.
And it didn't bother me at all. Now getting into a car is a huge ordeal for me." He said, "I'm finding it difficult to adjust."
But that's going to come to all of us. The book Ecclesiastes tells the time comes when everything begins to fade. In the meantime says Paul, "Wake up." It's not a message to those who are young, that's a message to all of us, because God has a purpose for all of us.
"Let us behave decently", he says in Romans 13:13, as in the daytime. And Romans 13:14, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ. Here of course is the key.
Cloth yourself with Christ, a beautiful picture, that you are now united with Christ in such a way that you're clothed with him. I just had a look the other night as I was preparing this, of the different things that's about clothing in scripture, and I finish with this.
Romans 13 says, "Put on the armor of light." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Ephesians 4:24 says, "Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness." That's clothing yourself with Christ.
Ephesians 6:11 says, "Put on the full armor of God that you may take your stand against the devil schemes." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Colossians 3:10 says “Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge and the image of its creator.”
That's clothing yourself with Christ. And Colossians 3:14 says, "Above all these virtues, put on love which binds them all together in perfect unity." That's clothing yourself with Christ. Because to be clothing ourselves with Christ is to be putting on love because love is his character.
Love is A Christians Privilege, Responsibility and Debt
And that goes back to the whole thrust of this passage. Love is our privilege to love is our responsibility, and to love is a debt. Do people know that you're disciple of Jesus?
Not because you have a testimony that I'm glad you do. Not because you've been baptized. I'm glad you have. Not because you are a member of this or any church.
Not because you hold a position in the church. Do people know you're a Christian the way Jesus said they would? "By this shall all men know that you're my disciples that you love one another."
When they meet you, when they have dealings with you, whatever else they may sense, they know they're important to you. Have this love, in humility consider others more important than yourself. This is our debt.