The Central Importance of Christian Love: 13:8-14

Recap and Background

Welcome to Episode 5 of Series 4 of our study of the book of Romans. Series 4 has been focusing on how Christian communities function well together. Paul has spent a lot of time in the earlier parts of the book of Romans outlining his gospel, outlining the resources to live the Christian life, explaining the place of the Jews in God’s purposes and in the rest of the letter, from the beginning of chapter 12 until the end, he is focusing on the welfare and health of the Christian community in Rome.

There have been some challenging topics that he has been teaching about, especially in the last two episodes, when he spoke about how to deal with personal hostility to you because of your faith and how we should relate to the government and the civic authorities in our country. Undoubtedly that topic is a difficult one and many of you will have had much to think about, if you have listened to that episode and thought through some of the things that Paul has been teaching, in the light of your own experience dealing with the problems of relating to the government in your own country.

Paul reminded us of a few of our responsibilities towards the authorities. First of all, he reminded us that we should be paying our taxes, not avoiding them. Many people avoid their taxes in many countries. It is a common practice and Christians are advised strongly by Paul against doing that. It compromises our integrity and our Christian witness. He then went on to say that whatever the government is, we should have an attitude of honour and respect towards them. I ended the last episode by adding in one other thing that Paul said in a different context, in 1 Timothy 2, which concerns praying for the government and those who rule over us in our local areas as well as in our national government; praying for peace in our country, and trusting God that he will deal with unjust rulers in his own time and in his own way.

Paul now returns to the immediate Christian community. The focus of this passage comes back again to how we should relate to each other as local church communities. I want to pause at the beginning of this episode, and ask myself the question, ‘Why does Paul keep coming back to this issue?’ He is passionately concerned for local churches to be well-functioning communities. He has learnt from his many years as an apostle planting churches in different places, that you can establish the gospel in a community but still have many difficulties creating viable, strong and healthy church communities. If that becomes difficult, then the Christian witness in that area will be affected and there will be less people coming to faith in Christ. Paul is deeply concerned about this for the Romans. As I have mentioned in earlier episodes, he had heard rumours of divisions and tensions in the church in Rome. He hadn’t visited the church at this point but he was very concerned that it didn’t split apart and fragment.

Paul had experienced such a fragmentation in another context, particularly in Corinth. If you study Paul’s letters to the Corinthians you will notice he was deeply concerned that the whole church that he had planted could fragment and fall apart and disappear altogether. That was the fear in his mind. He described it in writing to the Corinthians as ‘a present crisis’. It was such a great crisis that he wrote a long and detailed letter with many instructions as to how to resolve conflicts tensions, divisions, moral problems and bad behaviour in the church in Corinth. Paul’s heart is to prevent this. He has that same heart, for example for the churches in Galatia, where he also saw that there was likely to be a genuine split over the question of whether the Gentile believers should have to be circumcised to become Jewish in order to become Christian. He was totally against that practice which some people had come and advocated in the churches. He wrote a passionate letter to the Galatians. What he could see in his mind’s eye was the risk of a split and he was very much against that.

He wanted churches to remain harmonious. This is why Paul keeps coming back to the foundational things - about our attitudes. He is not talking about doctrine here; he is talking about heart attitudes. He really wanted the church in Rome to be strong, to be a vibrant witness for Christ and to be very influential across the whole Roman world. There was a Christian community right at the centre of the most powerful empire of the Ancient World and Paul desperately wanted this community to be strong and healthy and win many converts. This is why he spends such a long time trying to help the church function well. That is also why he added in the long section about the Jewish question, in chapters 9 to 11 which we studied in Series 3. There were fundamentally different understandings about where the Jews fitted into God’s purposes; it could have led to a total split in the church in Rome.

Love Your Neighbour as Yourself

Having resolved that issue, having talked about it, he now comes back to some fundamental issues of our behaviour towards each other. He comes back to the centrality of Christian love, especially in these opening verses.

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, ‘You shall not murder’, ‘You shall not steal’, ‘You shall not covet’, and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. Love does no harm to a neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law.”

Romans 13:8-10, NIV

Paul considers that we have a debt that we owe to other people because of God’s mercy towards us; we owe it to other people to extend the same love and mercy towards them. Remember, Paul is linking this with his theme at the beginning of chapter 12, about giving our lives to God as a living sacrifice in response to his mercy. What God has done for us is the motivation for us to be gracious, kind and loving to other people. It is a debt that we owe them, to love one another. And he quotes the commandment, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, from Leviticus 19: 18.

I am going to consider this teaching by going back to the book of Leviticus and reading the verses there where this command is first given by God to the Jewish people, as part of the Law of Moses, for the conduct of the Jewish communities of the Old Testament. What did this command mean in the first instance? Then we will see how Paul uses it here.

“Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbour’s life. I am the Lord. Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbour frankly so you will not share in their guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbour as yourself. I am the Lord.”

Leviticus 19:16-18, NIV

This command is speaking about Jewish communities in villages primarily, or maybe in small towns. Almost all Jewish people in the Old Testament lived in village communities, or small holdings. They all had land attributed to their family and they all had agricultural interests. These verses are describing how those communities should live. It is very easy in a neighbourhood to have quarrels with your neighbours - their chickens are coming all over your yard, their children are misbehaving in the street, their teenage son has stolen something from the back of your house, people have been drinking too much in the street late at night waking you up when they come home. These and many other reasons cause tensions in local communities everywhere. It is that sort of tension that is in the mind of God when he gives these commands to the Jewish people of the Old Testament. They are talking about community life. How are they going to function in community life in a healthy way? The Jewish people in the Old Testament were designed to be a model of God’s love and grace to the Gentile communities around.

This command, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, goes right back to those ancient days, with the Law of Moses. It appears that community relationships is the main issue. That is exactly the issue that Paul has got in mind here. It is the community of the church. We already know that Jesus, before Paul, had identified this command as the most important command concerning human relationships. Jesus was asked, ‘What are the greatest commands?’ by different people at different times in his ministry. In Matthew 22: 37, Jesus replied,

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment and the second is like it, love your neighbour as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commands.”

So when Paul is mentioning ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ here, he is following the already existing teaching of Jesus.

Who is my Neighbour?

This is the most important command concerning human relationships. But the question arises, ‘Who is my neighbour?’ In the Old Testament, in Leviticus, everybody knew what they were talking about in terms of neighbours. It literally meant the people on your street, or in your village. But people asked Jesus the question, ‘Who is who is my neighbour?’ and once, when Jesus was asked that question, he told the parable of the Good Samaritan to teach us that the neighbour is the person in need who we have opportunity to help.

Paul then applies this law, this rule, particularly to the Christian community. He is focused on the people who meet regularly for worship in Rome - in one big gathering, or lots of different gatherings in people’s homes; the people who are affiliated to the church. He is focusing on their relationships with each other. This attitude of love, thinking about the welfare of other people in the church community, becomes tremendously important in terms of the health of that community. When you gather together for worship, in a church community, it is very interesting to think, about what your first motivation is. What do people want when they gather together? Hopefully, it should be first of all to glorify God, to worship him and to lift up his name. But the second thing, according to Paul here, is to use it as an opportunity to look out for the welfare of other people as you gather, and as you relate at other times. Paul knows that that attitude will build community, will lift up the weak people and will make conflicts much more difficult to break out and to become problems. There will be an attitude of grace and kindness expressed between people.

The Ten Commandments and the Church

There is another point in these verses of great interest. Paul talks about other commands. He quotes here four commands from the Old Testament, and all of them come from the Ten Commandments. But he says that all these commands are summarised in the command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. This raises a very interesting question about the Old Testament commands, the ones that appear in the Law of Moses. We have discussed this issue on several occasions as we have gone through the book of Romans. Paul taught very clearly that when the gospel came, it was separate from the Old Testament law, and to obedience to the Old Testament law. In Romans 3: 21 he says, “But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been made known through the gospel.”

‘Apart from the law’- so we constantly have to remember that Christians are not commanded to obey the laws that exist in the Law of Moses; those were given to Israel on Mount Sinai through the leadership of Moses. The only exception to that is if an Old Testament command reappears in the New Testament. It so happens that here we have the best example in the New Testament of where Old Testament commands are reaffirmed. There are four of them in a couple of verses - four out of the Ten Commandments are restated. They become important for us because they are restated in the New Testament.

The Second Coming

“And do this, understanding the present time: the hour has already 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 armour of light. Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing 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 flesh.”

Romans 13:11-14, NIV

Paul moves on in his thinking to something more prophetic as he is approaching the church in Rome. Paul introduces a sense of urgency into his teaching. He is speaking here about the Second Coming. ‘The night is nearly over, the day is almost here’. He is causing people to think prophetically about their Christian life. Christ will come. We are getting closer to the Second Coming. Paul had a very strong doctrine of Jesus’ Second Coming. He was absolutely clear that Christ comes twice to this earth. First of all he comes as the Saviour, as recorded in the Gospels and he dies on the cross and he is raised again from the dead and the gospel spreads to the world. But he will come again in glory, power and honour, to overthrow all the worldly systems, to finally defeat all the spiritual powers of darkness, and to redeem the Christian church, to bring physical resurrection to Christian believers, so their bodies are restored into perfect and wonderful condition, and then bring in the eternal world and bring us into a new heaven and a new earth. This was Paul’s vision of the future. He held it very strongly and he taught it very clearly on occasion in his writings, most notably in 1 Corinthians 15.

Paul has all that in mind here and what he is saying to the Roman church, which he could say to our churches too because the same thing applies to us, is that we need a sense of urgency about our Christian life. Things won’t go on forever as they are now. Suddenly this world will be interrupted by the Second Coming of Jesus. Paul didn’t know what time the Second Coming was going to take place. He didn’t know whether it was going to take place in the lifetime of the Roman church or not, but he injected a sense of urgency so that we are not just carrying along quietly and fairly passively in our Christian life. He always wanted people to be extremely active as they prepare for the Second Coming of Jesus, even if it doesn’t take place in their lifetime; to be prepared is important.

If you have an exam that you need to study for - maybe at school, or training in your job - you know that there is a certain time period for revision and preparation. You know that if you don’t take that time, then suddenly it will come upon you, and then it is too late and you can’t go back and do your revision. If you score badly in your exam, ultimately it is your responsibility. We all know that people take different approaches to this. Some wait till the very last minute to revise and others will prepare thoroughly. Paul is advocating an approach of preparing thoroughly. Christ may come at any time and will want to know what we have done with our lives.

The Parable of the Talents/Bags of Gold

There is a parable that Jesus told which is something very similar to what Paul has in mind here - the parable of the talents, or the parable of the bags of gold. Three men are given money in the form of gold to use while the landowner is away somewhere else or the businessman is doing other work. One man has five bags of gold, one has two, and one has just one. They don’t exactly know when the businessman or landowner is going to return but they opportunity to do something with the money. The man with five bags of gold and the man with two bags of gold invest them in business. They get involved in market trading, in buying and selling, maybe buying land, maybe creating agricultural produce. Over a period of time they make money and double the amounts that they had at the beginning. But the man with one bag of gold, or one talent, decides to do nothing but to sit quietly, to bury it in the safest place - in the ground because there was nowhere else to keep it safely in the Ancient World - and wait and hope that the master, the businessman, the landowner doesn’t come back. Then he could dig it up again and use it for his own purposes. This story is very challenging. Of course, when the man comes back there is a distinction between those who have used the opportunity and those who haven’t.

Paul has a similar idea here. He is saying, you have got time; you don’t know how much time you have got. Don’t assume that time is endless - use it well for the Kingdom of God. Invest your lives in his Kingdom; don’t slip back into the way of life that you came from when you became a Christian. With the passage of time, some people who profess faith go back to the behaviour patterns they had before. Paul says we should never do that: don’t go back into carousing and drunkenness, sexual immorality, debauchery, dissension and jealousy but rather put on the armour of light.

Reflections

As we draw to the end of this episode, let me make a few comments by way of reflections for us to think about in terms of applying this teaching.

First of all, the centrality of the commandment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is taught frequently in the New Testament.

In your church community, which is the focus of Paul’s teaching here, who is it in your church community that you can extend love and kindness to and do things for, during the next month - from the time that you listened to this video? Ask God to show you and take action.

Secondly, and finally, do remember that the Second Coming of Jesus is a reality; he is coming back to this earth. The delay of 2000 years does not mean that his Second Coming is any less certain in our minds than it was, as we can see from this passage, in the mind of Paul. When Jesus comes, if we are still alive then we will be asked, ‘What did you do with the opportunities you had as a Christian?’ We need to give a good answer to that question. Let’s use our opportunities well.

Thanks for listening and join us again for our next episode as we go to Romans 14.