Love at the Centre (Romans 13:8-14)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

Thank you for tuning in to Newsong Church's Sermon Podcast.

At Newsong Church, we want to see Jesus lifted high in Port Perry, Ontario, as we worship, grow, and serve.

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Second lesson this morning is found in Romans chapter 13, beginning at the eighth verse.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

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

For the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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

Besides this, you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep.

For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.

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 in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrelling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the shelf for the flesh to gratify its desires.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

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

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, you have died, you have risen, you will come again.

This for us is the mystery of faith.

Give us grace to stay awake, to open the eyes of our hearts, to see the dawn of your glorious kingdom breaking over the horizon.

Set our hearts upon hope.

We pray in your precious name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Thanks for turning up the house lights.

I want to give you as little excuse to fall asleep as possible.

Friends, what's at the center of the Christian life?

What's at the bullseye?

What's at the very middle where everything else seems to orbit?

What's at the center of the Christian life?

I wonder if there's many ways we could frame that question.

There's probably a number of great suggestions.

Jesus and holiness, righteousness.

I wonder if what Paul is getting at in his passage this morning in Romans 13 is what's at the very center of the Christian life, and Paul identifies it as love.

The center of the Christian life is nothing short of love.

Love is at the center of the Christian life.

I think Paul wants us to understand a number of things about love.

He wants us to understand what love does.

And I think in Romans 13, love does at least three things.

This love that's at the center of the Christian life does at least three things.

It pays a perpetual debt, it fulfills God's law, and it wills our neighbors good.

This is the love that animates everything it means to be a Christian, to follow Jesus.

This is what we're about in the already not yet of the moment we live in.

The already, the inauguration of Christ's kingdom and the not yet of his coming in glory.

This is the love that glues everything together.

It pays a perpetual debt, it fulfills God's law, and it wills our neighbors good.

So if you have your order of service, if you have your Bible, I'd encourage you to pull out Romans chapter 13, and we're going to track from verses 8 to 14 this morning.

Romans 13 · chapter mention

Love pays a perpetual debt.

Owe no one anything, Paul writes, except to love one another.

For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

So sometimes when I'm doing sermon prep, I get a song caught in my head and it just plays endlessly on repeat up there.

And this particular week triggered a catchy little tune by Feist, if you know Feist.

She's got a great little song called There's a Limit to Your Love.

And it's just so dang catchy, I can't get it out of my head.

I won't try and sing it for you because it won't come across as catchy.

But the lyrics go something like this: There's a limit to your love, she says, obviously to her lover.

There's a limit to your love.

Like a map with no ocean, like a waterfall in slow motion.

It's a little cryptic lyrics.

Here's my best interpretation.

Something like, in a way, we expect love to be limitless.

We expect love to be without boundaries.

It comes to an abrupt stop where we'd least expect it.

Where we'd expect love to be an overabundant outpouring that's just ceaseless.

Instead, it's so uh reserved and it's so so slow to come forward.

There's a limit to your love.

And I wonder if Paul heard that song, if he'd, one, find it as catchy as I do.

But two, I wonder if he'd say, I wonder if what we're really talking about here is love.

Can love have a limit?

Can love say, I'm gonna go this far, but no further?

Is it contractual?

Is it transactional?

Can love have a limit?

Owe no one anything, Paul writes, except to love each other.

Owe no one anything, he says.

This is um jumping off of what Paul's been talking about in the first seven verses of this chapter.

Paul's been writing about a Christian's relationship to their civil government.

And this calls for a much bigger conversation, a whole nother sermon.

But the bottom line is this: a Christian is called to submit to her governing authorities not blindly, but because they are instituted by God.

We are heavenly pilgrims, and we are also citizens of our earthly government.

And so we rightly render unto Caesar what's owed to Caesar.

Civil authorities are owed at least three things, Paul understands: respect and honor, and yes, taxes.

Christians should be those who pay their taxes.

But Paul understands that the church is supposed to be a different sort of community than our civil government.

It's not meant to deal in the earthly realm of law and order and crime and punishment, not in the same way.

We don't owe taxes and submission to one another as fellow Christians in the same sense that we owe them to our government as citizens, but we'd be wrong to say that we owe each other nothing.

Owe no one anything, he says, except to love each other.

Love is an outstanding debt we owe to one another as Christians.

My taxes are paid by the end of April.

My debt to you as a fellow brother and sister in Christ is never paid.

Not fully.

One commentator writes this When we love one another, we give of ourselves so thoroughly that we come under debt to each other.

As long as love governs the relationship, the so-called debt continues.

In other words, we say, I owe you my very life to the one we love.

So if it's true, if it's true, then the debt we owe isn't paid off.

It's a perpetual debt.

It's a debt without limit, and therefore it calls for a love without limit.

Paul's already written about love in the previous chapter.

Let love be genuine.

Love one another with brotherly affection.

Outdo one another in showing honor.

Don't be haughty, but associate with the lowly.

If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

So, new song.

Paul wants us to understand that we are indebted to one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.

We owe each other a limitless debt.

We put payments towards that debt in our love towards one another.

And this is an unending debt, but it is a wonderful debt.

It's a debt to care for one another, to show compassion towards one another, to outdo one another in respecting and honoring each other.

See, I think in a huge way our practice of friendship, this compassion, this care, this reaching out to those we haven't heard from in a while, or welcoming someone new, or even inviting someone to join us, this is the kind of love that we owe to one another.

It is our duty to pay it as Christians.

Loving a brother and sister in Christ can be a difficult thing.

It's our responsibility if we're following God's will.

So I wonder what it would be like if we owed someone the question, How are you today, every Sunday?

I wonder if we owed someone a how can I pray for you?

What can I do to help?

Love pays a perpetual debt.

Love also fulfills God's law, Paul wants us to understand.

The one who loves has fulfilled the law.

So last uh or yesterday afternoon, Rachel and I were driving back from Ottawa.

Rachel is checking in with the clinic where she works, and I had a few meetings to take, so up we were in Ottawa, and we're driving back, and we're driving back uh somewhere around three and four o'clock.

We're on Highway 7, and I'll tell you at three or four o'clock, that sun is blazing.

It is unbelievable.

And all I can see is the road pretty well immediately in front of me, and I've got my flap down, and yeah, my mistake was not bringing my sunglasses.

But uh I had very limited visibility on the road, and you know Highway 7 has some twists and turns to it on the way to Port Perry.

And so, in a real way, I started to get thankful in a way I haven't been thankful before for those guardrails that go along some of those twists and turns.

Thankfully, I didn't have to avail myself of any of those guardrails, but I was thankful that they were there.

Guardrails are there for a purpose, right?

They're to keep us on the right side of the road, but they serve a higher purpose.

They're part of getting us where we need to go.

If we go off course, they're going to make sure that we stay oriented towards that ultimate destination of ours, so to speak.

And I wonder if, in a way, this is how we're meant to understand God's law.

God's law can be a complex, sometimes confusing thing, but God's law is purposeful.

There are specific and hard and fast boundary lines that serve a higher purpose of the Christian life.

God's law is like the guardrails along the road of life that keep us going towards a greater destination, keep us oriented in the right direction, and that direction is the love of God and neighbor.

The one who loves has fulfilled the law, Paul writes.

Why?

Because the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word.

And I wonder if we had paused what we expect that word to be.

Here's what Paul says.

He quotes Leviticus 19.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

We've read the Ten Commandments this morning at the beginning of our service, and in we read them in place of Jesus' own summary of law that we often read.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like it.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

And then Jesus says this on these two commandments, love of God, love of neighbor, hang, pardon me, depend, or we could say we could say hang, we could say these, it's fastened to all the law and the prophets.

All of God's requirements hang on these two things culminating in love.

Love is the ultimate destination, and the law are the guardrails keeping us on the right way.

So God's commandments aren't arbitrary or random.

They're not capricious, they're purposeful.

One of our greatest Anglican theologians is named Richard Hooker.

He is to Anglicans in some ways what Martin Luther is to like Lutherans, but we can be really glad with a last name like Hooker, we didn't, you know, get named after our patron.

Richard Hooker says this.

He says, uh, in his very Elizabethan English, law directeth them, law directeth creatures, in the means whereby they tend to their own perfection.

Okay, what's he saying there?

He says, God's law governs God's creation towards God's best intention for his creatures.

God's law is meant for our very best.

The Ten Commandments, the summary of the law, all of these things pointed to the very heart of God for us and what's called to be our heart for one another, and that is love.

Here's how Paul understands God's moral law, represented by the Ten Commandments.

It's meant to order our often disordered lives towards the most noble and godly purpose for which we are intended, and that is love.

I cannot love my neighbor and steal from her.

And I cannot steal from my neighbor and love her at the same time.

If I want to be loved in this way, I have to show my neighbor this kind of love as I would want it for myself.

Writes one commentator, in love, Christian, the Christian sums up the purpose of the law and brings it to completion, completes it.

It's its goal.

No wonder he says the obligation is never ending.

We can never love perfectly, but only continue to grow in it.

So I wonder if law and love can seem mutually exclusive to us.

Love is something free and unfettered, isn't it?

And love, doesn't love have its own kind of moral compass, its own intuitive sense of right and wrong?

And doesn't law seem too rigid or too tasking to achieve a goal like love?

God's word invites us to see these things not as two mutually exclusive or contradictory things, but to recognize something we might otherwise miss, and that's the partnership between God's law and God's heart of love.

Pastor John Stott submits this: love cannot manage on its own without an objective moral standard.

Love needs law for its direction, while law needs love for its inspiration.

Law, or pardon me, love without God's law, I think, is aimless.

But God's law without love is merciless.

Law and love go together.

So if we desire to love one another in our neighbors, new song, we need to diligently submit ourselves to God's law.

We need to be those who are so saturated in God's word that we know exactly the direction to which these guardrails are pointing us.

It's no Christian life, it's no way to drive to ride yourself against the guardrails the whole time, is it?

That's exhausting and it's expensive.

But instead, we see those guardrails and we're thankful for them because they keep us pointed to God's ultimate purpose, and that's love.

Love pays a perpetual debt, and love fulfills God's law.

Finally, I think Paul wants us to see that love wills our neighbors good.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor, Paul writes.

Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

And perhaps we can state that positively by saying love wills the good of one's neighbor.

It desires our neighbors best.

It's willing to give of ourselves for our neighbor's sake.

I've described love as willing the good of a neighbor before.

When we love this way, we're saying this.

Love makes a deliberate choice.

Love in this sense is more than a feeling, although feelings are very nice.

And feelings come and go.

But love in this sense is committed and it's constant, it's continuous, it's even covenanted.

Even when it's the most difficult thing to do, love makes the choice to do it.

The truth is sometimes doing wrong to our neighbor is the easier thing to do.

Love calls us to a higher law, to the more difficult thing, to loving one another.

This is the kind of love I think that's beautifully illustrated in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

I think I quoted this parable recently, but it's just so good I'm going to use it twice.

We remember that a priest and a Levite, a religious expert, pass by a man left for dead on the side of the road.

And of all people, it's a Samaritan who's the one who tends to this wounded man at his own outrageous expense.

And Jesus' question to the crowd he's talking to is this Who was the neighbor to the wounded man in this situation?

Perhaps we could rephrase this question as follows Who showed love by doing right and not wrong to their neighbor?

See, we can wrong our neighbor through action, sure.

These bandits who mugged this man did wrong to their neighbor, but we can also do wrong to our neighbor through inaction, by passing them by in their time of need, like the priest and like the Levite.

It's when we make the choice to love our neighbor that we ourselves fulfill God's requirement of us.

We will our neighbor's goods, even at our own expense.

So love is at the center of the Christian life, writes Paul.

What does love do?

Love pays forward a perpetual debt.

Love fulfills the purpose of God's law, and love wills our neighbor's greatest goods.

But before we close, I want us to consider this.

God doesn't require this sort of love from us without first showing this love to us.

God doesn't require this sort of love from us without first showing it to us in Christ.

See, in Christ, perpetual love pays our debt.

In John chapter 13, Jesus knows that his hour has come to depart out of this world.

John 13 · chapter mention

He's getting ready for the cross.

And Jesus, John writes, having loved his own who are in the world, he loved them to the end.

Or we might translate that, he loved them to the uttermost.

Jesus owed no debt of love to his disciples or to us.

In fact, we're the transgressors of God's law.

We're the ones rightly under the penalty of sin who have chosen to transgress the boundaries, the guardrails of God's moral law.

But nevertheless, God in Christ loved us with a perpetual, uttermost, limitless kind of love that paid our debt on the cross.

And thus he keeps on loving us and calling us to himself.

Christ's perpetual love prepays our debt.

Christ in love fulfills God's law.

In Matthew chapter 5, Jesus wants to clarify the nature of his ministry.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets, everything, all of God's moral commandments.

I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

Through his life and death and resurrection and ascension and prophets.

Promise to come again, Jesus fulfills on our behalf the divine law which we ourselves have failed to keep.

His love for us reconciles us to our Heavenly Father and promises us to spend eternity in his kingdom with him.

Christ in love fulfills God's law on our behalf.

And finally, Christ's love for us wills our greatest good.

See, in Christ it's been said that God took on flesh and moved into our neighborhood, and that makes us his neighbors.

As Jesus prepares for the cross, he tells his disciples that greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

This is Jesus' love for you and for me.

Jesus' love makes the choice to will our greatest good at his greatest cost.

Jesus wills our greatest good.

God doesn't require love from us without first showing it to us in Christ.

And now, friends, as Paul concludes, I want us to land here.

Paul has two more exhortations to us.

To those of us for whom love is at the very center of life, Paul has two more things to say.

He says, Mind the time.

Besides this, you know the time, Paul writes, that the hour is come for you to wake from sleep.

For salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.

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

Another commentator writes this the end of the age is fast approaching when good will triumph over evil once and for all.

God's people must wake up and begin to live accordingly.

Don't delay.

Don't put off making the love of God in Christ the very center of your life.

Don't say I'll get around to it.

The hour is come for you to wake up from sleep.

Salvation is nearer now than ever before.

And as Jesus reminds us, you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Mind the time.

Then Paul says, conduct yourself accordingly.

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

Let us walk properly as in daytime, not as not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual 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.

In other words, cast off the deeds of darkness, indulgence and addiction, sexual impropriety and hostility and envy, these things that break down our fellowship with one another and with God.

God's law guards us against such things.

And love demands that we regard one another with a greater dignity and respect and holy value.

And instead put on God's armor.

Put on Christ.

Paul writes this in Galatians: all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.

Wrap yourself up in the splendor, in the beauty, in the holiness and love of God in Christ.

If you've been baptized, you've been soaked in it.

By grace, let people see Christ all over you.

Let this world glimmering with the first light of the dawn of the kingdom, see the love of God in Christ at the center of your life.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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May God bless you and keep you today and every day.