Romans 13:8-14 – Him Her

I'll be reading from Romans thirteen, eight through fourteen.

Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

For the commandment, 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.

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

Besides this, you know the time that 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.

The night is far gone, the day is at hand.

So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.

Let us walk properly as it in the daytime, not in orgies or drunkenness, not in sexual or immorality or sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.

This is the word of the Lord.

Amen.

Please take a seat, everybody.

Uh welcome to you.

If you join us while we're singing, my name's uh Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at the church.

This is the second week in a series that we're calling Him and Her.

So we're thinking about uh issues of uh gender, uh sexuality, sex, marriage, singleness, uh, all of those completely uncontroversial uh topics.

It's not our normal practice to do topical series.

We normally pick books of the Bible, uh, though we think that this is uh timely and relevant and necessary uh to have this sort of uh this sort of discussion about these uh about these matters that people hold so personally uh and yet also in which there is a lot of confusion.

Immediately after the service, as we did last week, you can come back in here, go and grab a cup of coffee, come straight back in, and we'll have a bit of a Q ⁇ A uh for for some time as as we kind of wrestle with some of these things together.

These first two weeks, so last week and today, are are basically kind of laying the uh the foundations of uh the series and establishing a little bit of groundwork.

And I think that's important because oftentimes if we just went to kind of some of the uh some of the moral prescriptions about what Christians believe about things like sex and marriage and gender and identity and all of those things, it actually wouldn't make sense because you need to understand them within a Christian framework, why it is that God says certain things uh about these topics.

And so, and also the world that we now live in is so foreign to that mind that that's part of the reason why when you talk to perhaps a non-Christian friend, or if you're here and you're not a follower of Jesus, why do you think that Christians are bonkers when they say certain things uh about gender, sex, sexuality, and marriage?

And so last week we began to think about uh identity because many people uh are uh are experiencing a kind of identity crisis, struggling to know how to figure out and express who we are.

And we considered the historical roots uh of the Western view of identity with some of the figures up on the up on the screen.

I'm sure you remember all uh uh of who they are.

But basically, what these guys did.

So, who have we got here?

We've got we've got this guy here who's Rene Descartes, we've got Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and basically what they did is they said, well, actually, in order to know who you are, the best place that you can look is inside yourself, uh, to your own sense of uh self and your place in the world, that your identity was a psychological thing.

It was something that you uh that you considered yourself to be.

So that's what these two boys did.

And then these guys here.

So we've got uh this is Percy B.

Shelley, um, husband of Mary Shelley, uh of Frankenstein fame.

You've got Lord Byron over here, and you've got William Wordsworth taken together.

These are the romantics, not all of the romantics, but kind of the main players.

And they said, okay, well, if if the real you is the psychological you, the one that's inside you, well, what's the strongest drive that kind of uh kind of puts itself forward when you think about who you are?

Well, it's your it's your sexual drive, it's your sexual identity.

And so if uh if Descartes and Rousseau made who you are psychologized, psychological, what the romantics did is said, well, it's actually sexual.

That's expressing that is who you truly are.

And all of those guys were taking that over and against things like the church and the state.

They've thought that those were repressive institutions that chained people up in moral structures.

And uh the final guy right in the in the middle there is Sigmund Freud.

Because what Freud did, even though he's been largely debunked in psychological circles, he still kind of exists in the in the cultural mind.

What Freud did was he says that all of these things were innate and natural and good.

And so we come, this is where where we find ourselves today.

That the inner you is the real you, that the sexual you is the most truest you, the most authentic you uh that you can be.

And as Freud might have said, baby, you were born this way, right?

And so that's what we saw last week in a nutshell.

You can go back and listen to it.

And that who we are is best demonstrated when we express our inner authentic selves.

What we saw over and against that last week was that God's design or God's intent is that he makes human beings in his image, that our identity is not so much something that needs to be created from within, but received from without and uh and lived into.

That we are all made with the dignity, value, and worth of being an image-bearer of God, that each human being, regardless of their ethnicity or sex or sexuality, that they all reflect something of who God is.

We saw that human beings were both sexed, male and female, and sacred.

That this uh division that uh that Rousseau and Descartes made between body and soul, that actually the Bible joins those two things back together.

That we're not just uh ghosts in the meat machine of our own body, but that they that our body and soul are inextricably linked and both matter and go to tell us something of who we are.

Now, this week we pivot not just to think of who we are, but why we are, why we're here.

Because central to our question of identity is our understanding of purpose.

Why, those why questions.

The question of purpose is not only essential for us, but it's also crucial for our understanding of the world.

In order to understand what something like marriage is for, you've got to ask, well, what is its purpose, or sex, or family, or or work even.

You gotta figure out, well, what is its intent, what is its purpose.

Today, the common idea is that purpose, like identity, is something that is subjective, something that you create yourself.

You bestow purpose and intent on something or on your own life.

You create your own purpose.

This means that purpose is now uh something that is uh less clear, uh more open to subjective interpretation.

And so it's worth just briefly, the history lesson last week was much longer, and I loved it.

Uh uh because that's that's my kind of that's my jam.

Uh this history lesson will be much, much shorter, but it is just worth uh uh introducing one other character.

In addition to people like Rousseau and the Romantics and Descartes and Freud, there is a uh there is another figure.

Our next figure is Charles Darwin.

Now, I don't want to get lost in the weeds of uh of evolution and uh and natural selection.

I simply want to make one brief point.

In Darwin's work, and the thing that has come down to us, his conclusion was this, and this is important.

His conclusion was that the world simply had the appearance of intent and design, but there was no actual designer behind it.

There was only evolutionary forces at work.

In the same way, for us, we might look as though we have design and intent and purpose at an objective level, but actually, we ourselves, human beings, are here as a result of uh of blind, indiscriminate evolutionary forces.

And so you cannot then say that human beings ought to do something because there is no designer who stands behind it, who stands behind our world.

That's the implication of what Darwin is saying.

The world looks designed, but it's not.

And so if you are asking this question of purposeful or purposeless, you actually uh end up being here, or so the world only has the appearance of design, no designer, no purpose.

But we need to understand design and intent in order to understand the purpose of human beings.

You think of uh what is the purpose of a car?

Well, it's to drive.

When we design a car, we design it with that purpose in mind.

We don't put square wheels on it, usually.

We make cars to drive, clothes to wear, houses to live in, design and purpose go hand in hand.

But if there is no designer, how do we know what our purpose is?

What's more, if there is no designer behind nature, then nature itself cannot tell us how we ought to live.

It cannot tell us what we're journeying towards.

It cannot tell us what the goal or end of our life is, what is it that human beings should be striving for, and how is it should we use that we should use the the tools of our world, things like marriage and sex and family and career and work.

On one hand, I guess on the one hand, that seems immensely freeing.

You can do whatever you want with any of these things that you perceive.

Indeed, we see freedom these days as the absence of constraint.

That freedom wrongly is defined as the absence of constraint.

Design and intent is something that would limit freedom.

And Darwin has helped us to explain that away.

However, very few of us live as though there is no purpose or meaning to existence.

It would be quite disorientating, it would be hopeless.

That's nihilism, right?

Very few of us live as pure nihilists.

We all try to figure out, okay, well, what is what is the goal?

What is the purpose?

Where is my life going?

Where is the cosmos going?

Why am I here?

So, what do human beings do?

Well, human beings, we construct stories and we tell them to one another.

Stories of how our world is and what's important in our world and where our world is going and what your place in it is.

I want to briefly note three stories that uh are in the air that we are breathing, in the water that we're all swimming in.

These stories are the scientific progress story, the sexual freedom story, and the instant satisfaction story, or the Amazon Prime story.

The first story, the scientific progress story.

This is uh, I mean you all know this figure down here, is Richard Dawkins.

And the scientific progress story says this that for hundreds of years, human beings were kept in the dark, kept in the dark by society and by church.

It kept them ignorant.

But with the dawning of the enlightenment, the lights went on, and human beings began to understand the world in scientific terms.

And so there was no longer any need for religion.

This is Richard Dawkins' God of the Gaps uh theory or hypothesis.

So what he says of religion is, well, when we didn't know how how lightning worked or how thunder worked, uh, we attributed a uh a god to it.

We said that it was something that was divine, was making uh the thunder and lightning happen.

So you've got Thor uh doing his doing his thing.

But as you began to understand things like how the how the weather works, it became uh unnecessary to explain thunder and lightning in terms of uh Thor uh having a bit of a tiff with uh with Loki up in the heavens, right?

And so and so God got kind of slightly smaller and smaller.

And as we understand more things, God will get smaller and smaller and smaller.

And so if you have read the kind of Philip Pullman um kind of Wheel of Time series, uh that's actually what happens at the end of that series of books, is that God becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, that he just kind of fizzles up and not even so much dies, but just becomes a kind of nothing.

He fades into nothingness.

And that's what science is going to do.

Science is not just a good tool to understand the world, it is the tool with which to understand the world.

It is the only way that we can understand a purely materialistic existence.

And so, what's our purpose within that?

Well, our purpose is to be to become more advanced, to become more rational, to throw off all of the silliness that uh that I'm gonna talk about from the front, and to to consign it to uh the annals of history where it belongs, to wipe out any notion of the spiritual or metaphysical or the miraculous.

There's one main problem with all of that, and that's this.

Despite Dawkins and Sam Harris and the layers of religions, despite their their best efforts and their greatest desires, religion isn't going away.

In fact, as human beings become more advanced, more technologically advanced, it's increasing.

Religion isn't just going away, it's increasing.

People are becoming more aware of the spiritual and the metaphysical.

So for example, in uh uh in 1970, so in East Asia, so uh uh China and Japan and uh South Korea, the percentage of Christians in East Asia was 1.2% of the population.

Now, in 2020, the population of Christians in East Asia is 10%.

171 million people as the world has gotten more technologically advanced.

Just by way of a sidebar, the other problem that viewing the world in purely materialistic and rational terms is that actually what that ends up doing to human be human beings is that they they tend then to operate uh with uh with powers the governing dynamic.

We take uh we take Darwin's uh survival of the fittest in lots of ways to its natural conclusion.

We just need to look at the wars of the uh the early 20th century to understand uh or the or the gulags of the uh of the Soviet Union.

To understand that actually the scientific progress story has some major flaws.

The sexual freedom story, we talked a little bit about this last week, uh, and we'll talk probably more when we talk about uh about sex and sexuality, but just in brief, uh we've got Sam Smith there.

He's not here to make friends, uh, though, though he probably should make some friends uh with us.

Uh the sexual revolution story is that the real you, the true you is the sexual you.

The realizing and expressing how you feel internally is the best way to live.

That the goal of human existence, the goal of the sexual revolution, is to increase our inner authenticity, to be free, is to be unrestrained.

But as we saw last week, uh this actually isn't helping people.

This is leaving people feeling increasingly depressed and anxious.

26% of uh 18 to 25 year olds in Ireland report experiencing extreme symptoms of anxiety and depression, despite Ireland becoming more uh open and free in these sorts of terms.

Even non-Christian writers, particularly feminists, are beginning to realize that the sexual revolution has massively overpromised and underdelivered.

More on that in three weeks' time.

And then the third story is the Amazon Prime story, or the instant satisfaction story.

This story sees human beings primarily in terms of your desires.

You are a you're a consumer, in terms of your appetites, rather, I should say.

You're consumers of entertainment, Netflix and chill, of media, scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, of brands, of experiences, of technology, and of stuff.

Your purpose in life is to feed, to strive for the most, the best, and to have it instantly.

Those who are trapped in the Amazon Prime story are always hungry and never satisfied.

Now, of course, uh I've kind of tried to neatly uh parcel out each of those three stories, but that's not how we work.

We we tend to kind of mash them all up into one big worldview milkshake and consume it all.

We don't normally think about these things in neat categories.

People are complicated.

But what's important to see here is that all of these stories are attempting to answer the question of why we're here, to give us a vision of the future, where human beings and human society is going, and to help us to give us a sense of place in the world.

Christianity gives a different story, and I want to argue, a better story for how to look at the world and to look at ourselves and to understand who we are and why we exist.

Christianity looks at who you are and what your purpose is through two primary lenses: the lens of creation, how God made the world, and the lens of new creation, how God is remaking the world.

So, what's the Bible's view on purpose?

Well, let's take both of these in turn.

Creation, first of all.

In Genesis, which we read last week, we read that God made creation and that he made it purposeful.

Everything in creation has a purpose.

Fish are designed to swim, birds designed to fly, pollinators to pollinate, and human beings are made to image God.

We read last week that he blessed the man and the woman and he gave them a command, and so there's purpose entail in that.

He says, fill the earth and subdue it, be fruitful and multiply.

Now that entails within it the idea of uh of reproduction and of creating more humans, but it's also the idea of uh of making of making culture.

You think of this uh of this wild, uh, untamed landscape, and God is saying, go into that and bring order and beauty out of it.

This command is what theologians call the culture.

Cultural mandate that human beings are made by God to go out into the world and to cultivate it, to steward it, to make uh art and music and uh and justice systems and uh and and charity and things that bring peace and uh and uh and goodness to others.

And so in the Christian mind, it'd be no shock to say that we think that Darwin was wrong, that there is an order and an intent behind the world.

Morality, therefore, isn't just us being good boys and good little girls.

Morality is about connecting and acting in accordance with God's intent and design and purpose.

Well, what's right for me to do?

Well, what did God intend you to do?

It would be in a way, it's just it would be immoral if a fish decided, well, I don't want to be a fish anymore.

I I want to live in a tree like a bird, it because it would not be living according to its design.

Let's briefly take sex as an example.

What is the purpose and intent of sex?

Well, the answer that the world tends to give us is pleasure, fulfillment.

But even our world realizes that using pleasure as an ethic as an ethic opens up sex to being abused.

And so we bolt on to the pleasure ethic the idea of consent.

Say, well, as long as we're not harming another person and there's there's consent involved.

You see how actually, in doing that, you're defining uh you're defining the purpose of sex in terms of a negative, as long as they're okay with it, uh, as long as it's not doing any harm, then we can fill our boots.

But there's no positive vision for sex.

And indeed, the uh the bolting on of consent uh leaves us on very shaking ground.

And non-Christian writers, non-Christian feminine writers are realizing this.

So there's an article uh, I think about a year and a half ago by a lady called Christine Emba, writing in the Washington Post, so not a not a newspaper of the uh of the kind of of the ideological right, so more left leaning.

And she wrote an article saying consent is not enough.

Let me give you a brief quote of what she says.

She says, even when it goes well, sex is complicated.

It involves our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our connections to each other and to our deepest selves.

Despite the many and popular arguments that it is only a physical act, it is clear to almost anyone who has had sex that it has vast consequences, some of which can last longer, sorry, long after the encounter ends.

Christians have a different understanding of the morality of sex.

We'll unpack this more in a few weeks' time.

And we have a different understanding of the morality of sex because we have a different understanding of the purpose of sex.

Put simply, not all sex is of equal moral value because not all sex happens in line with God's intent and purpose for it, which is, in the Bible's mind, the joining together of two people, a man and a woman, who have committed themselves to be united at every other level of unity, and who desire to form a new family in the community.

And so when we look at the world and when we look at ourselves, in order to discern our place in it, to order to discern how we should use something, the key question is to ask, well, what is its purpose?

What if you sitting here and you say, well, I want to, I just want to, I want to blow off my purpose.

I don't, I don't want uh God to say, well, uh, this is my intent, this is my purpose for your existence.

Well, let's go back to the fish.

The fish who decides not to live in the water, but to live in a tree, is not flourishing.

It's dying.

It's not in the environment for which it was made, and that is destructive for it.

There is something else in Genesis that we read last week that is worth bringing to our attention.

Genesis 1, in fact, it's actually the very start of Genesis 2 speaks to the goal of all creation.

Let me read a couple of verses from Genesis 2.

The very first uh three verses.

It says, Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the hosts of them.

And on the seventh day, God finished his work that he had done, and rested on the seventh day from all that he had done.

So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all of his work that he had done in creation.

This is the end of the creation story, and as the end of the creation story, it gives us our pattern for understanding what the goal and end of all of humanity is.

Did you catch it?

It's rest.

What is the goal of human life?

It's rest.

Not just a day off, though that is nice, but a holistic pace with ourselves and who we are, with one another, and with the God who made us.

That is the goal.

The fall, Genesis 3, where sin enters the world, has shattered that rest and left us wandering, restless, disintegrated internally, seeking out those those other stories, trying to trying to have them make sense of who we are, trying to have them fit over our lives.

But they're they're like they're like a fitted sheet that's just, yeah, it's the worst thing about making a bed.

Isn't it?

It's the worst thing about making a bed is is trying to get that last corner on, right?

Uh and you're you're you're pulling and it just doesn't quite go on.

And you kind of you kind of you just get it over the corner, and then and then you jump into bed and ping.

Because it doesn't quite fit.

That's what we're doing with all of the these other stories that we're creating.

We're trying to get them to fit over our lives, and yet from time to time they end up just pinging off.

And we think, actually, there must be a better story about why I exist.

You were made to find rest.

Find rest internally with one another and with the God who made us.

And that is why we need the second lens.

The lens of God's new creation work.

We cannot understand how we ought to live in the world, what our purpose is, if we don't know where the world is headed.

This is why we have the competing narratives of rationalism, individualism, and consumerism.

Because they give us a view of the future.

Christianity offers us a vision of the future that is radically different than those other stories, and it is based on the physical, bodily resurrection and return of Jesus.

You know, every single command in the in the New Testament, every command to live differently is set within the context of Jesus' return and the renewal of all things.

Why do we live the way we live?

Because Jesus is coming back and he's going to make all things new.

Why do we live the way we live?

Because his resurrection has utterly changed where history is going and how the world works.

And so, Paul, you might think, well, what's any of this got to do with Romans 13?

Normally we kind of are digging really deeply into a passage.

But the passage that the grace read for us from Romans 13 uh uses this idea.

What Paul is saying there is that when Jesus rose from the dead, it is as though the lights went on in our cosmos.

Have you noticed that actually the story of rationalism also has this light image that there's there's a moment that that switches things, and for uh and for Dawkins et al.

it's the it's the kind of the enlightenment revolution, you kind of uh Copernicus and things like that and Galileo.

Um but there's a there's an enlightenment that happens in Christianity, and it happens when Jesus rises bodily from the dead.

It's as though the lights went on and we could see finally how the world truly is and where the world was going.

But unlike the rationalist, we see that the world is not just a closed system, that there is a God who is there, and he's made himself known in history in the person of Jesus Christ.

That unlike the sexual expressionist, we understand that not all of our inner thoughts and feelings and desires are good, that sometimes our appetites are uh are not what they should be.

We think and we say and we do things that are harmful both to ourselves and to others, that are against God's good order and destructive for ourselves, and that is why Jesus needed to come to human history in order to die and rise to remake us.

Or unlike the consumeress Amazon Prime sort of story, what Christianity tells us is you can never be satisfied by stuff.

That there are longings in your heart that cannot be met by anything in this world.

So Jesus steps onto the pages of human history and at the start of Mark's gospel says this.

He says, The kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe the good news.

What is he what's he saying there?

He's saying there's a future reality coming, the kingdom of God, I'm bringing it in, and that affects how you ought to live.

You should repent and believe.

What does repent mean?

Repent means stop going one way, stop going with purpose in one direction, and realize actually, with Jesus' arrival onto human history, with the lights going on, that actually we should be traveling towards Him.

Repent and believe the good news.

Or Paul in our passage, where he says, the night is gone, it is time to wake up, the day is at hand, and so live as people who are awake.

How does Christianity answer the question of purpose of your life?

Well, God looks at you and says that you're not an accident of birth.

You're not simply the product of evolutionary forces.

No, you were made with intent and precision, with design and with love.

You were made to reflect God in the world.

Your souls were made to find rest in him.

Sin has left the image of God distorted and cracked and broken in your life, and has left you feeling restless.

But God says, not only have I made you with love, but I now come to remake you, to restore my image in your life, and to give you a new purpose.

And so the encouragement that Paul says is don't be like people who are pretending like it's still dark.

It's as though there are people in Paul's image going around with their eyes fastened shut.

And it's midday, and yet they're pretending like, oh man, I can't believe it's the middle of the night.

I can't see anything.

Paul's saying, no, you can open your eyes and see what God is doing in the world.

Join him in it and journey with him in his purpose and intent for history.

Stop trying to stumble around, trying to make meaning and purpose like that fit as she fit over your life.

There's something bespoke, made just for you, that fits each one of us, that's made by God.

And that's why we should live differently.

It's in that context that he said he makes the moral prescriptions, you know, to cast off the works of darkness and to put on the armor of light, to walk properly as in the daytime.

So walk properly, why?

As in the daytime.

Days come.

Jesus died to save you from that destructive existence.

And in his resurrection from the dead, he establishes a new creation, no longer distorted.

And so Paul would say in 2 Corinthians 5 that we who believe in Jesus, that we are new creations, who are becoming more like him as we journey towards him, and will finally be like him on that last day.

That now he gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that spirits work within us to remake us, that we'll be brought to completion on that final day, that day towards which all history is headed.

In the meantime, what is the purpose of the Christian life?

Well, again, Paul tells us in the passage that we read.

Love does no wrong to his neighbor.

Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

What is the purpose of the Christian life?

It is to love God and to love others.

To join God in the renewal of all things, as we pray in the Lord's Prayer.

When we ask for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

To join God in the renewal of all things is to image him in the world, in how we act, in how we conduct our relationships, in to be people of peace, offering rest to weary hearts, loving people and lovingly calling them to turn from these false stories, to turn from what the Bible calls sin, and to find hope and rest and forgiveness and life in Him.

In this new creation, we see the things of this world differently.

We view marriage and work and sex and family and money and position and power not as ends in themselves to give us purpose, but as tools, as gifts to be used for the glory of God and for the good of others.

And why do we live this way?

Because we know where the future is headed.

History doesn't end with the sun burning out and expanding and engulfing us all, nor with human beings reaching the very pinnacle and zenith of freedom and equity.

But with the return of the glorious Son of God, with the return of the Lord Jesus, and the renewal of all things.

And so we turn right to the final pages of the Bible, where God speaks from that heavenly throne and says, Behold, I am making all things new.

What is your purpose?

Your purpose is to look to that day and to live in light of it.