Romans 13:8-14
8 Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
9 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 neighbour as yourself.”
10 Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
11 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.
12 The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.
13 Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarrelling and jealousy.
14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
I know that last week was challenging for us all. Most of us, as we move into the second half of Romans 13, would do so with a sense of relief, but if anything, Paul’s teaching for the rest of the chapter is even harder.
One of the greatest struggles of the Christian in this fallen world is being faithful to the Word of God. Our own lives prove just how hard it can be, because how easily do we slip back into our old way of living? Jesus warns in Luke 9:62, “No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” But we have the assurance of this promise in Philippians 1:6, “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”
This is why, especially when our old lives seem so attractive, that we must remember that because of what God has done for us, and because we now are in Christ, the purpose of His Word is to transform us as we willingly and joyfully submit ourselves to God. God’s will for us as believers in Jesus Christ is clear, and it can be summarised by looking at Romans 12:2 and 8:29. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.”
Don’t be conformed to the world, but instead, know that God is conforming you into the image of Christ. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. Christlikeness is the goal of Christian living. How we respond to the truth of Scripture reveals just where we are in our walk with Christ, and as we’ve seen throughout this series, because of the transforming power of the Gospel, we are called to a whole new way of living.
Psalm 119:66-68 says, “Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe in your commandments. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word. You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” That should be our prayer.
The central theme of the book of Romans is the doctrine of justification, but there is a shift from the beginning of chapter 12 where Paul teaches some of the practical issues of the faith. We are now in the section of Romans which deals with Christian living. He has dealt with how we are to relate to God, our attitudes towards other Christians (or brothers and sisters in Christ), and also non-believers and the civil leaders God has place over us.
And now in the second half of chapter 13, Paul brings it all together by reminding us of what Jesus calls the second great commandment in Matthew 22 and Mark 12: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”
What makes this particularly challenging is the reality that we live in a “me first” world. We are redeemed, and our eternal salvation is secure in Jesus, but we still live in this fallen world with all of its brokenness, and our own sinful nature is at war with the Spirit of God who indwells us. Loving our neighbour as ourselves does not come naturally to fallen man, and Christians are not exempt from this struggle.
However, this doesn’t excuse us from loving one another, for the simple reason that not only are we commanded to do so, but the Spirit Himself empowers us to love our neighbour.
We have an obligation to love, and Paul gives us one of the reasons in Romans 13 - Jesus will return for His bride. Part of our Christian duty is to love one another and to live in submission to one another as living sacrifices, because Jesus will return.
Paul writes in verse 8, “Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” The debt of love is a debt that can never be fully paid, and if you think about it, this actually works two ways.
We are debtors to God’s undeserved mercy and grace. He loved us, even while we were His enemies. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength and then to love our neighbour as ourself. So as we receive a love we can never pay for, one of the ways we display our gratitude is by loving others, understanding that we will never love in full. There should never come a point in the life of a Christian where we can say, “I have loved completely, and now it is me time.”
Of course, as we well know, loving God fully and loving others fully does not come naturally, but don’t forget that we are supernaturally empowered by the Spirit to do the very thing we cannot do in our own strength.
One of the most mangled verses in the Bible is Philippians 4:13. You see it on fridge magnets, t-shirts and Facebook memes everywhere. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”
I say mangled, because so many Christians turn that verse into some kind of magic spell by which they think God will make them into top sportsmen or successful business tycoons. Philippians 4:13 is not about you. It is about Him. You exist for His glory, and He will, by His power, strengthen you in order to bring Him glory, including enabling you to obey the command to love others.
Can you love others perfectly? No you can’t, but He will empower you and strengthen you to love others with His love, because that is what fulfills the law and brings Him glory.
We have at our disposal everything we need to do exactly what God has commanded when it comes to authentic Christian love.
Paul wrote in 1 Thessalonians 4:9, “Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.” In other words, we shouldn’t be reminded to love one another, and secondly, whenever we feel it’s impossible to love, God has already taught us and empowered us. So we must be very careful of ducking the issue by saying we can’t love. If we can’t, the real reason is that we won’t. Remember that the very first quality of the fruit of the Spirit that Paul lists in Galatians 5 is love.
The same Holy Spirit who convicted us of sin, and our need for salvation, who led us to repentance and believing faith in Christ, is the same Spirit who leads us to obedience to God.
It is the Spirit who convicts us as God draws us to Himself to salvation, but He continues the work of sanctifying us. And it is He who continues to convict us when we resist - when we grieve the Holy Spirit by our disobedience, and probably the greatest struggle we have is in the area of self-love, because when we love ourselves first and foremost, we cannot love God and others as we should.
So again, we have at our disposal everything we need to do exactly what God has commanded to do with respect to love.
As we are truly transformed by grace, so the capacity to love God and others even more grows - it is a debt that cannot be paid in full. Romans 5:5 says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
All of this serves to remind us that as we submit to the Holy Spirit in our daily lives, we have at our disposal all we need and more to love others. One of the biggest warnings to us that there is something wrong within us, is a lack of love. We’re not talking about emotional or romantic love here but Godly love.
I’m sure you know that the Bible uses three different Greek words for love. Firstly eros, from which we derive the word erotic. This speaks of romantic love. Then there is phileo, which is brotherly love and affection, but Paul, in Romans 13 specifically uses the Greek word agape which is the same word Jesus used in John 3:16 when He spoke of the love of God.
We are to love with a Godly love. Just as an aside, when Paul says husbands are to love their wives in Ephesians 5:25 and Colossians 3:19, he also uses the word agape, and not eros. Now of course, we cannot love with the same purity and holiness as God loves. That is impossible, nevertheless, there is to be an intensity and a depth to our love for others which should way surpass merely liking or tolerating one another.
A lack of Christian love is an indicator that we are not walking in the Spirit as we should, but in the flesh instead. Paul prayed for the Church in Ephesians 3:14-19, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
When we are rooted in love, we will know the love of Christ. It is no coincidence that in the very next verse, halfway through his letter to the Ephesian Church of all places, Paul cannot contain himself as he bursts into a doxology of praise. “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.” (Ephesians 3:20-21)
When we are filled with the same kind of joy, our call to love our brothers and sisters in Christ is no longer an obligation, nor is it onerous. Instead, as we overflow with the love and joy of Christ, we find joy in loving. We looked at Romans 12:10 a couple of weeks ago. “Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honour. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.” These things will become second nature to us as we submit to the power of the Spirit within us.
We mustn’t miss the significance of what Paul writes at the end of verse 10. “Love is the fulfilling of the law.”
God’s perfect, holy law reflects His perfect, holy character. Because of our justification, we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and at the same time we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. So as we walk according to the Spirit, God Himself fulfills the requirements of His law in and through us. As we live lives that honour Him by loving others, we are fulfilling the law, and we bring glory to God.
Jesus is the one who obeyed the law on our behalf. This means we no longer treat the law as some kind of checklist. Rather, as the redeemed we glorify God by our joyful obedience to Him. Do you want to fulfill the law and be obedient to God? Then love one another. That is how we fulfill the law, and the best news is that God Himself empowers us for true Christian living.
The first 4 commandments tell us how we are to relate to God, and the next 6 deal with interpersonal relationships. “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.” (Exodus 20:12-17)
That is a daunting list, as anyone who has ever tried to do these things will testify. But when we understand what Paul is teaching in Romans 13, and when we connect that to all he has taught in the previous chapters, everything changes.
As Jesus bled and died on the cross for our sin, as He clothed us in His righteousness and gave us His Holy Spirit to empower us for Christian living, He teaches us how to love, and that is how we fulfill the law!
In the rest of Romans 13 Paul encourages us to live a life of spiritual alertness and moral purity. Some commentators have suggested that Paul expected the return of Jesus during his own lifetime. Here we are, nearly 2000 years later, but that doesn’t change the fact that He is going to return. Time is short, and the older we get with each passing year, the more that reality sinks in, so bearing this in mind, how should we be living?
Quite simply, with one eye on eternity, because this is not our home. We need to be living in anticipation of the glory that awaits us. When Paul writes in verse 11 that the hour has come for us to wake from sleep, he is talking here specifically about spiritual apathy. Now I’m not saying we should be so heavenly minded that we’re of no earthly use, but there is a healthy balance between the two. Spiritual apathy and lethargy is an unresponsiveness to the things of God, particularly the apathy that so many Christians have toward sin. When sin doesn’t bother us as much as it should, huge alarm bells should be ringing in our ears.
When you woke up this morning, you were one day closer to home than you were yesterday. Your salvation is nearer now than it has ever been. The Saviour is coming to take us to the Father’s home in eternity.
In Colossians 3:1-10 Paul writes, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”
He says much the same thing in Romans 13:12-13. “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armour 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 flesh, to gratify its desires.”
Why would we want to live our old lives? Why would we want to go back to the bondage of sin and the condemnation it brings? It just makes no sense. I’m sure every generation for the past 2000 years has felt that the end must be near. As we look around us we ask how much worse can it get? A lot worse is the scary answer to that question, but had God wanted us to know when Jesus would return, He would have told us.
The important thing is to be ready, and we do so by clinging to the Cross of Jesus Christ. The Gospel’s power has freed you from the condemnation you deserve, and as Paul writes in verse 11, “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.”
And having been set free from sin, we no longer have any excuse for spiritual slumber - for sleeping on the job. God has given us all we need to carry out His purposes for us. The night is nearly over. The day of eternity is about to break, so love one another.
Homegroup Study Notes
Read Romans 13:8-14
Throughout Romans, Paul has made it clear that Jesus has fulfilled the law on our behalf, but in verse 8 he says that not only do we fulfill the law by loving one another, but we can never reach completion.
Is there a conflict here?
How does loving one another fulfill the commandments of God?
In which ways do we fall into “spiritual slumber,” and how do we guard against this kind of lethargy in our walk with Christ?
Most Biblical commentators agree that Paul believed Jesus would return during his lifetime, yet we are still waiting some 2000 years later.
How do we answer the critics? (see 2 Peter 3:1-9)
Discuss both the hope and warning we find in verse 12.
How do we avoid the temptation to “gratify the desires of the flesh?”