Father, indeed, it is a joy to be here in this, your house, to worship you. But we come with busy and distracted lives. Father, we come with hearts full of trouble, with minds anxious about what has happened and what is about to happen. And Father, so we ask as we come now in this time of worship to your word, that you would soften our hearts that we would hear your word and it would take root, that you would open our ears that we might hear, that you would open our eyes that we might see. Lord, that you would use this time to mold us and to make us in the image of your son. By the power of your spirit, we pray that this word would be living and active in our lives. It would both heal and correct. It would build up and tear down as we have need. We ask that you would do this work to the glory of your Son by the power of your spirit, we pray. Amen. This is Romans 8:8-14, and it is the word of God, O 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 You shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covenant, 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 near 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 daytime, not in orgies or drunkenness, not in sexual immorality or sensuality, not in quarreling or jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desire. The word of the Lord. You may be seated. Let me pray for the preaching of God’s word. Father, as my words are true to your word, may they be taken to heart. But if my word should stray from yours, may they be quickly forgotten. And I pray this in the name and in the power of Jesus Christ.
Amen. Love, love, love. Love, love, love. Apparently, it’s easy. All you need is love. All you need is love. John Lennon and Paul McCartney, some say, wrote this top hit in 1967. It’s a catchy tune with a genre classification of pop psychedelia. And if you know the song, after a few simple nonsensical lines like, There’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sum. There’s no one you can save that can’t be saved. The song moves into a mind-numming yet Musically powerful repetition of love, love, love, all you need is love, and then ends with 23 repeats of love is all you need. Apparently, it’s that easy. Declare it ad nauseam, and the world will be a better place. Now, John and Paul weren’t wrong in their assessment in 1967 and today, that the world needed love. But dare I say they were entirely misguided as to what or who love looked like. When we hear the phrase, all we need is love, what is generally communicated is that what each person needs is to be fully accepted, affirmed, and embraced. In this bubble, there is no room for questions. Threatening, no room for objective standards, and certainly no room for judgment or condemnation.
Love becomes entirely self-focused. I need you to love me. I want you to want me, which means you must only do the things that I like or that I want or that will make me feel better about myself. The recipient, and therefore all of their tastes, dreams, and desires is king. Love becomes make me feel better. And with that definition, with that picture, you cannot get any further away from the love that Paul speaks of in text. It is literally the difference between night and day. And in our text, Paul declares to us a call to love. And then he shares with us a few motivations to that love and enables us and shows us rather how God enables us to love. And as he does so, I hope you’ll see that we get a beautiful and powerful picture of God as the ultimate lover. Now, Paul begins to make these points in a wonderful fashion. He sneaks up on the topic through that introductory phrase, Oh, no one, anything. Paul has used this type of transition before. Remember that in his initial writings, there were no chapter and verse separations. It would be a single letter.
So if you were in the original audience, you would, although I’m going to translate this into the English, you would have heard this read, Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God. Now, was there a change of subject there? Sort of. Yes. But then again, not. You see, under the Roman Empire, there was much in that covenant and many governors that would look at and they would see, they would look like and feel like evil. And yet the call to honor, to respect, and to obey those in authority is real, as elder Micah Tinkham masterfully pointed out last week. Listen to another one of these transitions. Pay to all what is owed to them. Taxes, to whom taxes are owed. Revenue, to whom revenue is owed, respect, to whom respect is owed. Honor, to whom honor is owed. Oh, no one anything except to love one another. A change of subjects? Sort of. But in another sense, verse 8 introduces, or rather, should I say, reintroduces the theme of love, which Paul moved into in chapter 12, verses 9 to 21.
That love, when applied, when lived out, looks a particular way. It shows itself as love. For instance, in our last section last week, it looks like love as we respect and honor and obey those in authority over us. New Testament scholar Douglas Mu pointed out that our section this morning, verses 8 to 14, looks both backwards to the main line of Paul’s thought on the outworking of the sincere love. But also looks forward. It sets a groundwork by which Paul will rebuke and challenge in chapters 14 and 15. I can’t wait. Those who let debates about the law, disrupt the weak and the strong and the love and the unity they should be displayed. So then this biblical love is foundational to Christian living. And in a world in which we are nearly regularly surrounded by, and at times even under the influences and authority that seeks to disrupt the peace and the purity of our lives, and especially as lives together in the church, we are called by Paul to understand and then apply this biblical love as a divine weapon in response to those outside destructive forces and our own inside destructive and selfish forces.
Again, Paul begins ‘ owe no one anything. ‘ Some commentators have latched on to this phrase and have suggested that Paul is arguing against the accrual of debt. And while it’s certainly true to say that Paul calls us to pay to all what we owe in verse 7, taxes, tributes, and one can reasonably add debts, accumulated loans, acquired. I believe he’s really using this call as a springboard to remind us that what we really and truly owe people is the hard work of loving them. Origen, writing in the early 200s, states this. He says, Let your only debt that is unpaid be that of love. That is, a debt which you should always be attempting to discharge, but one that you will never fully succeed. Charles Hodge writes in similar fashion, Equit yourself of all obligations, tribute, custom, fear, honor, whatever else you owe. But remember that the debt of love is still unpaid and will always remain so, for our love includes all duty since he that loves another fulfills the law. Certainly, we can never be finished loving one another. As Paul gives us this command, he also immediately gives with us one of the two motivating forces or ideas to spur us on to this type of love.
He says, The one who loves another has fulfilled the law. And as Paul begins to explain how it is that love fulfills the law, he takes us back to the Ten Commandments, and he quotes specifically four of the second tablet of the six commands directed to our conduct with one another. Paul uses the same negative or prohibitions that were originally given. You shall not commit adultery, murder, steal, covit. And then he catches the other two the catch-all phrase, and any other command. And then Paul tells us that these are all summed up in this word, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That’s a direct quote from Leviticus 19:18, which is on the front of your bulletin. If you were to turn to Leviticus 19, you would notice that it speaks to and explains a variety of various laws. For instance, verses 9 and 10 instruct the farmers to leave the edges of their field for the poor and the sojourner to glean from, ending with the phrase, For I am the Lord your God. Verses 11 and 12 prohibit taking advantage of another, ending with, I am the Lord. Verses 13 and 14, Command fair wages for I am the Lord.
Verses 15 and 16, speak of justice in the courts for I am the Lord. And reading from verses 17 and 18, we hear, You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. What Paul is doing here is pointing to the law, that the law does not simply prohibit bad behavior, but rather instructs with specific positive behaviors that ought to flow from one’s heart. Without a positive response from the heart, we cannot truly obey these laws. John Murray puts it even more succinct. No law is fulfilled apart. From love. We need to be emotionally connected to these laws. I’ve shared, likely with some of you, the story on a deployment once, an airman came into my office to see me. He had had a big fight with his wife over the phone. He told me he sent her some flowers, but she wasn’t there to receive them. Apparently, she had to buy diapers for the kids.
So he cussed her out. That’s why they were fighting. Why did you send flowers to her in the first place? I wondered out loud. And he stopped and he said, Because you’re supposed to if you love someone. So in a moment, maybe of not as gracious response as I should have, but perhaps it was just fine. I said, So let me get this straight. To show your love, you clicked a few buttons over here and then called and cussed out your wife because you think she messed up your plan to show her you love her. What love is that? What do you think the wife heard? I mentioned this story because none of us are that bad. Because we all have patterns and habits and routines and ways of understanding our own actions and efforts that when something or someone disrupts that, then everyone else around us gets to see the real condition of our heart. For instance, if you can’t find your keys or your phone where you thought you had put them, if the first thing that you think or the first thing that you say is, Who moved my stuff? That’s self-focused.
That’s not love. Or if you’re headed out to volunteer at the local food bank because you know you love this community and you miss a light or get cut off and you rage internally or externally at the forces aligned against you or the people that are messing up your great charitable plan to love the community, that’s self-focused and not love. Are we loving our children? Are we loving our spouse? Are we loving our neighbor? Are we loving the Lord? Do we even have time to love one another? That’s the question before us in the busyness of our days. Or are we simply acting in ways that we can control, in ways in which we think we’re checking the boxes and deepening our delusion of self-righteousness? I think of the man who approached Jesus in Luke 18, and he says, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? That is a great question, and I’ll tell you that any pastor or teacher would love to answer that. Jesus sees the heart more clearly. And after listing five of the Ten Commandments, the man declares, All of these I have kept from my youth. And Jesus responds, One thing you still lack.
Sell all you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. And come and follow me. Jesus’s one thing was the perfect heart check for this man. And if you know the story, you know that he went away very sad had, for he was extremely rich. And so here we get a glimpse into this man’s heart. He did not have love for God. He had love for his riches, not his poor neighbors. He may have kept the technical prohibitions of do not steal, but his heart was not involved in looking to better the wealth and the standing of his neighbors around him. And he certainly wasn’t interested in living any sacrifices for the good of his neighbor. When we act out of love, our actions and our responses must be and are very different from that deployed airman or that rich young ruler. John Murray refers to love in three ways. He says love is emotive, motive, and expulsive. What does he mean by these three words? He says it’s emotive, and here he says that it means, quote, that we create an affinity with and an affection for the object of our love, end quote.
In other words, you actually care for and about that person. Emotive. By motive, Murray means it compels us to action. So for instance, telling your loved ones about all the things you planned but didn’t do isn’t showing them you love them. This I learned from experience, and I am grateful for a wise wife who graciously helped me see that this is more hurtful than helpful. She was demonstrating the third aspect that Murray speaks of, that love is expulsive. That is, in Murray’s word, it, quote, expels what is alien to the interest which love seeks to promote, end quote. In other words, it gets rid of all of the stuff, empty words and promises that hinder and detract from real love. We’ll see in a couple of verses that this expulsive love is at work in other areas. There are other distractions that we are called to get rid of as well. Love. From the heart, it’s a motive. Through our hands and lives, it’s motive. And it also seeks to clear the decks of anything that gets in the way of it being lived out. Now, as a quick bonus, when Paul uses these commands, these four, he’s doing a few things.
One is he ought to be settling the debate on whether Paul was really against the law or not. We’ve seen that question come up multiple times in our study of Romans, Paul is not against the law. In fact, his inclusion here shows a permanent and abiding relevance to the law. Furthermore, he’s tying the law in with love. And he’s showing us very clearly that those binding obligations of the law do not interfere with the exercise of love in fulfilling all those obligations. It’s more than simply doing no wrong to a neighbor. It is the active doing of what is right and best for them. Indeed, we are called to love, and we ought to love for it fulfills the law. Paul gives us the second motivation, to real love. Verse 11, Besides this, you know the time, that the hour is coming for you to wake from your sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Here, Paul desires that we are motivated into loving action because the time is short. And he uses a series of contrasts in the next couple of verses, Sleep and awake, Day and Night, Light and Dark.
Paul wants us to know that the time is now. Douglas Mou, a New Testament scholar on this passage, he notes that, he says, quote, While earlier text encourages us to look at the present in light of the past, for example, by virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, the old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. But Mou says this text shifts the perspective even further. We are to look at the present in light of the future. While we are transferred, he says, by God’s grace into this new realm, we away to full and final consummation. End quote. In verse 11, Paul is simply stating that Christ’s return is the next big event, and it is always imminent. With respect to Christ’s return, New Testament scholar Alfred writes this, on the certainty of the event, our faith is grounded. By the uncertainty of the timing, our hope is stimulated and our watchfulness aroused. So not only is our watchfulness a call to call us to love, but in verses 12 and 13, they also speak to that expulsive nature of love. To increase our love for the Lord and for one another, we are to cast off and put on.
Verses 12, we are to cast off the works of darkness, all of those distractions that could easily entangle us. And instead of this darkness, we are to put on the armor of light. Now, Paul goes into a bit of detail in verse 13, and he specifically mentions actions that our culture associates with love as sexual expression. Orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality, and sensuality. These are what our culture often sees as love. And these are but cheap copies of how beautiful, intimate, intoxicating, and exhilarating genuine love can be. Note, especially Paul’s inclusion of the last two items in verse 13, quarreling and jealousy. Here’s where he may connect with most of us. Their more socially accepted sins, especially in the church. We don’t like to talk about those other ones. But I hope that you can see that the spirit of selfishness and self-indulgence is the same spirit. It sometimes works itself in physical sexual ways, and sometimes it works itself out in a spirit of jealousy or quarreling. Where the spirit of jealousy, where that divisiveness flows from some selfish desire to be right or to win an argument or to tear somebody down and hope that somehow that lifts me up.
You see how these are opposed to love. And against all of this, Paul concludes with the call to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. F. F. Bruce noted that Paul regularly uses this expression, put on. And he declares that it seems to him to be a simple way to taught the early church converts. They were urge to put on Christian values as one might put on new clothes. You can see this in the command in Colossians 3:12, where Paul does there, in instruct new converts to put on then as God’s chosen one, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Now, Paul, to the Ephesians, calls them to put on the new man, to those in Colossi, put on the new self, to the Galatians, as many of you as were baptized into Christ, you have put on Christ. We are to put Christ on and recognize the newness in Christ. You also see that Paul wisely charges us to make no provision for the flesh. That’s that expulse of love, knowing how weak and how fickle we regularly are. Don’t give yourself your self-focused ways, even an itch. Strive to take all of that off and put on Christ.
This is actually the first mention of Jesus in our text this morning. It comes in verse 14, although I hope you see we’ve been talking about him throughout. It is in Christ that we see love perfected or perfect love. And perhaps you need that love this morning. Look deeply at Jesus. If you want to know how to put on Christ, I invite you to look deeply at Jesus, and you will see a love that considered the other as more important than himself. You will see a love that was willing to serve. You will see a love that healed, the love that wept A love that spoke words of comfort when failures were exposed, and words of needed correction when we spoke out of religious hypocrisy. We need that love today. When you look at Jesus, you see a love that’s sacrificed, a love that paid the price that we, the beloved of God, could not pay. We see a love that is willing to atone for our sin, a love that gave us his righteousness, which we are invited to wear as a robe, a love that now even advocates before the Father on our behalf, and a love that one day, one final day, and that day is drawing near, when he will receive us into his loving presence in a full and final consummation.
To put on Christ is to be refreshed and reminded of Christ’s love. Let his love change your emotions. Let his love fuel your motion. Let his love expel all the nonsense that hinders you from loving your neighbor. In Jesus, all you need is his love. But around us, you know that we see that all the world needs is for you to love like Jesus. So put on Christ and let him love through you. Let us pray. Father, we do need that love, and in our own strength, we are unable to love like you loved. But Father, I pray that you might be pleased to remind us again of your great love, even as we in our service of worship, begin the transition from the word preached to the word the gospel visibly demonstrated here at the Lord’s Supper. Father, in it, we see your love for you, the spotless lamb, you, the sinless one, you, the bridegroom, you freely offered yourself in love, and your body was broken, and you were given for us. Father, on the cross, your son, Christ Jesus, bled and died that we might be washed clean. Lord, only you can love like that.
And you have given us that love. And by your spirit, you enable us to love one another as well. Oh, Father, we thank you and we praise you for your love. In Jesus’.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.