Loving Like Jesus Loves

Romans – A Gospel Shaped Life Loving Like Jesus Loves Romans 13:8-14 Pastor Pat Damiani October 13, 2019 NOTE: This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript. On September 29, 94 year old Paul Grimme traded in his walker for a parachute and went skydiving with his granddaughter, who along with his 5 living children had purchased the jump as a gift for his birthday. Although I’ve always thought that skydiving would be a blast, I’ve always deferred to the idea that jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is probably not a wise thing to do. But as Mary and I watched Grimme’s story on the news last week, I commented that if I live to 94, I just might give it a try then. Of course I only committed to doing that if she would do it with me. Since I know this is the very same woman that won’t even go on a roller coaster since she hates that dropping feeling, I really wasn’t going out on much of a limb. My thoughts reminded me of how when we’re faced with the news that we have only a few months to live or we know we’re nearing the end of our lives here on earth, we often try to cram a lot into those last days. We might travel to places we’ve always wanted to go or to engage in some dangerous activity, like skydiving, that we’d been reluctant to do in the past. And it’s not hard to understand why we would want to indulge ourselves with that kind of “bucket list”. But as we’re going to see this morning, every one of us, and especially those of us who are disciples of Jesus do have a similar kind of deadline facing us. It is a deadline that all of us will encounter whether we are 4, or 64, or 94. And that deadline should motivate us not to indulge our own desires, but rather to live a life in which we love others by serving them sacrificially. Before we read our passage for today in Romans 13, let me put it in perspective. Once again, if we fail to do that, we may very well miss the important connections to what Paul has written prior to this. I’ve come to see that the structure of Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome is actually very consistent with the answer Jesus gave when He was asked which was the greatest commandment in the law. Anyone here remember how Jesus replied? (Matthew 22:37–39): • You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. • And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. To a large degree, chapters 1-11 of Paul’s letter focus on the greatest commandment – to love God. They remind us that we are to love God because He first loved us with the kind of self-sacrificial love that sent His Son, Jesus, to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. The beginning words of chapter 12 serve as a transition from that commandment to the second – to love our neighbors. We’ve referred to those verses every week, but we haven’t actually read them for a few weeks, so would you read them out loud with me? I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1–2 ESV) I would suggest to you that Paul is describing here what it means to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. We do that not by just telling God that we love Him, even though that is important. But we show that we love Him by offering our bodies as living sacrifices, asking God to help us do that by keeping us from conforming to the world and by constantly allowing the Holy Spirit to renew, or renovate our minds. And then in verse 3, Paul begins to focus on how we love our neighbors. We are to do that by using our spiritual gifts to build up the body of Christ, by letting our love be genuine and returning a blessing for a curse and doing good even to our enemies, and by submitting to the human authority that God has placed over us. None of us can do any of those things in our own strength and power, but it must be possible to do them or God would not have commanded us, through Paul, to do those things. That’s why Romans 12:1-2 is so key here. It is only when we submit our lives to God in that way that we are empowered by the grace of God operating in our lives to obey those commands. With that background in mind, please follow along as I read today’s passage. [Read Romans 13:8-14] Here is the big idea that we want to develop from this passage this morning: I am to love others like God loves me – by being a “giver” and not a “taker” We often talk about the idea that when it comes to studying and applying the Bible, it is important to understand the “why” before we try to tackle the “what”. Or to put it another way, God is far more concerned about our heart attitude than our outward actions. To a large extent that is because when our heart is right, our actions will naturally follow. In this passage, we have both the “why” and the “what”, as well as the “how”. Because it is so important, we’ll look first at the “why” which we find in the second part of the passage beginning in verse 11. WHY? • There is no time to waste Have you ever forgotten to set your alarm clock? You go to bed at night and fall asleep while it is dark. And then the next morning you slowly become aware that it is getting light. You look at your clock and realize that you’ve overslept, so you jump out of bed, take off your night clothes, grab a quick shower and put on your day clothes so that you can get to your duties for the day. That is the picture that Paul is painting here when it comes to reaching other people with the gospel. He is reminding his readers, and us, that we live in the time between the two comings of Jesus. And Paul is looking at time from two perspectives. And in order for us to accurately understand those two perspectives, we need to briefly review what the Bible consistently teaches about three different aspects of our salvation: ◦ Past – I was saved and made righteous positionally before God when I put my faith in Jesus. We also call this justification. I was saved from the penalty of sin. ◦ Present – I am being saved as I work out my salvation with fear and trembling and am becoming more like Jesus. We call this sanctification. I am being saved from the power of sin. ◦ Future – I will be saved at the return of Jesus. My soul will be united with my new resurrection body and I will live forever in the presence of Jesus. We call this glorification. I will be saved from the presence of sin. Paul first looks back at the time period between our past salvation and our present salvation. It is a time that should have produced spiritual growth and fruit in our lives. It is a time in which we should have been loving others with the same kind of self-sacrificial love with which Jesus has loved us. But, at least to some degree we have been sleeping and we haven’t always done those things. Second, he is looking forward to the time period from the present to the future aspect of salvation when our salvation will be complete. Like Paul, as we live in that period, we do not know when Jesus will return, but what we do know is that day is one day closer than it was yesterday. We’re going to discuss this more in a few minutes, but knowing that we have a limited and rapidly diminishing time in which we will be able to bring the kingdom near to others by loving them like Jesus loves us ought to cause us to have a tremendous sense of urgency. Now that we’ve identified the “why”, let’s go back to verse 8 and talk about the… WHAT? • Love others with a self-sacrificial love The verb “owe” in verse 8 is a present tense imperative. Hopefully by now, you know that means that this is a command and not merely a suggestion. And secondly it means that we must do this continually. It could literally be translated “keep on owing”. Unfortunately, some have taken this verse out of context and tried to apply it to our finances. While the Bible does have much to say about borrowing money elsewhere, Paul is not addressing that issue at all here. What he is doing, however, is to counter our culture’s approach to love that says it is merely an emotion or feeling that is spontaneous and effortless. That idea that is wrapped up in the often-used phrase “falling in love”. The problem with that is if we can fall in love, we can also fall out of love. But the fact that we are commanded to love others implies it is something that does require some thought and effort on our part. As we said a couple weeks ago, it is a decision to put the needs of another ahead of my own desires. That is not natural for us because we have a natural mindset that says I am owed something. I deserve to have my desires fulfilled. That’s why I’ve described our natural, fleshly kind of love as being a “taker”. That means we all have a natural tendency to love others because of what they can offer me or because of what I can get out of the relationship or even because of how it makes me feel. Paul quotes Leviticus 19:18 to remind his readers of their obligation to love others: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Unfortunately, a lot of people, many of them well-meaning I believe, have used this verse to teach that you can’t love others until you first learn to love yourself. But one of the consistent themes we’ve seen in Paul’s letter and one which is emphasized here again in this passage, is that no one really has a problem loving themselves. In our flesh, we are naturally self-centered and seek to satisfy our own desires. Paul demonstrates that here by referring back to the Ten Commandments. Those commandments are really just a recap of what it means to love God and to love my neighbor. The first four all deal with my relationship with God and then the last six deal with my relationship with others. Paul mentions four of those six commandments here as an example to show how self-centered we are naturally. The point that Paul is making by citing those commandments is that if we are focused on the good of the other person, we’re not going to violate these commandments and therefore we will end up keeping the law. If I love others with a self-sacrificial love that puts the interests of others ahead of my own, I won’t murder, I won’t commit adultery, I won’t steal and I won’t covet because those actions would serve only to fulfill my selfish desires and they would do harm to the other person. So I have an ongoing debt to others to love them like Jesus loves me. But unlike a mortgage or a car loan or my credit card debt, that is an obligation that I will never pay off. I can never say, “Well I just loved that person, so I don’t ever have to do that again.” But the good news is that I don’t have to pay this debt of love that I owe to others out of my own meager store of love. Instead, I pay it out of the inexhaustible riches of God’s self-sacrificial love for me. That brings us to the… HOW? • Have a sense of urgency I know we’ve already touched on this when we considered the “why”, but it’s so important we need to revisit it briefly again. Like many of you, when I look back on my life, I can see that at times I have been spiritually asleep. I haven’t always taken advantage of the opportunities that God has given me to love others with the kind of self-sacrificial love that we’ve been talking about this morning. And so, as Paul writes here, I do need to wake up. But there is no sense dwelling on those lost opportunities because I can’t go back and change anything in the past. But what I can do is to be awake so that I can take advantage of all the opportunities that I’ll have in the future. I want to finish well. None of us know exactly how long we’ll have to love people like this. That time will come to an end either when we die or when Jesus returns to this earth. That fact alone ought to instill a sense of urgency in us. But even more importantly, for those who are not yet disciples of Jesus, when either of those events occur, their eternal fate will be sealed once and for all. As the author of Hebrews writes: And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, (Hebrews 9:27 ESV) That means that our family members, friends, co-workers and neighbors who have not yet placed their faith in Jesus are going to face the wrath of God the moment they die or when Jesus returns. And the most effective thing we can do to love them into the kingdom of God is to offer them the same kind of self-sacrificial love that God has offered to us through His Son, Jesus. And because the time is short, we can’t waste even one moment. • Choose love over lust Because in our culture, we don’t usually define love the way God defines it, we often confuse love and lust. So we say that we love another person when in reality what we really want out of the relationship is for my own human lusts and desires to be fulfilled in some way. But as Paul makes very clear here, satisfying our lusts is actually the opposite of genuine biblical love. Paul approaches this idea from both a positive and negative perspective here in this passage and he addresses both ideas multiple times. We’ll begin with the negative – what we need to stop doing: ◦ Stop being a “taker” Paul addresses this idea three different ways that are all making the same point. First, in verse 12, he commands us to “cast off the works of darkness”. Then in verse 13, he exhorts us not to engage in “orgies and drunkenness…sexual immorality and sensuality…in quarreling and jealousy”. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of the works of darkness. Paul, in typical Hebrew fashion, uses these couplets as examples of what happens when we try to satisfy our own lustful desires. Before we yielded our lives to Jesus that is the way all of us lived because we were incapable of doing otherwise. We were, by nature, “takers” who lived our lives for the purpose of satisfying our desires. Even if we wanted to cast off these things, we just couldn’t do it in our own power. But as we said earlier, the current aspect of our salvation has freed us from the power of sin. But that doesn’t just happen automatically. The very fact that Paul commands us to cast off the works of darkness means that we have a role to play in that process. Paul describes our part in verse 14, where he commands us to “make no provision for the flesh.” The word translated “provision” there implies foresight, planning or premeditation. While it is only used twice in the New Testament, in other Greek literature it is used to describe a premeditated crime. Paul reminds us here that sin seldom just happens. It is usually the culmination of a series of thoughts and actions in which we do things that make provision for that sin. Most people don’t set out to engage in sexual immorality. They don’t plan to enter into an adulterous relationship. But they make provision by thinking lustful thoughts about someone else, or by flirting, or by putting themselves in a place where they will be with someone of the opposite sex alone, or even by sharing about the problems in their marriage with someone other than their spouse. Most people don’t consciously decide to be envious or jealous. But they make provision for that when they see their neighbor’s new car or they see their co-worker get the promotion that they wanted and they begin to dwell on the idea that they deserve to have those things. And then they make further provision for that sin when they go to the car dealership “just to look around” or they begin to look for some way to undermine their co-worker. So we begin by refusing to live according to our old nature in which we were “takers”. But it’s not enough to just quit doing that. We also have to take some positive action and… ◦ Start being a “giver” Again, Paul conveys this idea three different ways. First, in verse 12, he commands us to “put on the armor of light”. We live in a culture that often tries to assert that if you believe in moral absolutes that you are actually in the dark and that every enlightened person knows that those standards vary from culture to culture and person to person. But the truth is that true light originates only with God. This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5 ESV) So to put on the armor of light means to cloth ourselves with a mindset and a way of loving that is consistent with that of God Himself. Next in verse 13, Paul reinforces that idea when he writes, “Let us walk properly as in the daytime…” Since daytime is the time of light, Paul is essentially saying the same thing again here. Like we’ve seen with most of the principles in this section of Paul’s letters, this is easy to understand, but hard to actually do consistently. That is why at the end of this passage, in verse 14, Paul gives us the key to being able to put these principles into practice when he writes “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”. To me that is almost exactly the same as what we read earlier at the beginning of chapter 12 when we were commanded to offer our bodies as living sacrifices. When we looked at that passage several weeks ago we said that in God’s kingdom I must die in order to truly live. When we put on the Lord Jesus Christ we admit that we are unable to do any of this on our own. We acknowledge that we are 100% dependent on Jesus to love others like this through us. And then we surrender our lives to Jesus and ask Him to both reveal how He wants us to love others and then empower us to do that. One of the practical ways that we start being “givers” rather than “takers” is by making an intentional effort to look for the needs of others that God has placed into our lives and then taking concrete steps to do what we can to meet those needs. So in just a moment as we close, I’m going to ask everyone to make a commitment to apply this message by doing that this week. I am to love others like God loves me – by being a “giver” and not a “taker” Indulging our own desires occasionally like Paul Grimme did by going skydiving at the age of 94 isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as we don’t live that way all the time. But as we’ve seen this morning, in order to bring the kingdom of God near to others, we need to love others with the same kind of self-sacrificial love that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. That is not natural or easy, but if we completely yield our lives to Jesus, He can love others like that through us. I want to make this message extremely practical for us this morning. So on the back of your sermon outline, I’ve given you a list of some possible ways that you might love someone else by being a “giver” rather than a “taker”. Obviously that list is not exhaustive. You’ll likely come up with some other ideas. But what I do want to ask is that during our response time you will prayerfully consider that list and ask God to reveal how He wants you to apply what you’ve learned today. And then I want to ask everyone to either circle of these suggested actions or to write down some other action that you’re going to take this week. 1. Take the first step to reconcile a broken relationship. 2. Forgive someone who has hurt you. If possible, tell that person that you have forgiven him or her. 3. Pray for an “enemy”. Even better, do something to meet his or her needs. 4. Help someone with a financial need – if possible do it anonymously. 5. Take someone you don’t know very well out for a meal, or even better, invite them to your home for a meal. 6. Praise your co-worker in front of his or her boss. 7. Take someone who is unable to drive to his or her doctor or out shopping. 8. ______________________________________________________________ Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable 1. God obviously wants us to be able to enjoy life. So how do I know when I’ve crossed the line and become overly self-indulgent? 2. How would you respond to someone who claims that before I can love my neighbor as myself, I first need to learn to love myself? 3. Why is it not enough to just “cast off the works of darkness”? Why do I also need to “put on the armor of light”? 4. What are some practical things I can do so that I do not “make provision for the flesh”? 5. How do I “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”?