Romans 13:8-14
Our Debt and Our Dress
The outline:
1) Our debt:
a) cannot be fully repaid.
b) is loving one another.
c) brings God’s law to action.
2) Our dress:
a) is seasonal.
b) involves taking off darkness.
c) requires putting on Christ.
Some (brief) comments:
Firstly,
We are to discharge a debt that can never be repaid. Infinite love has been shown to us, offering our bodies as living sacrifices means loving one another.
Christians and non-Christians each in turn.
Obedience of God’s commands is obedience to God, but expresses itself in relational terms. Loving one another is fulfilling God’s law.
We recall from Luke 10 that loving our neighbor is not an act that can be confined by preference but is defined by need. We there is need, there is our neighbor.
Love is not a benign or sentimental expression. It has rational bounds.
Secondly,
We are in the last days.
For the Christian darkness is dispelled and union with Christ is the day.
The time until His return is fixed and unknown. However long it is until Jesus comes back, the fact we don’t know when places an imperative upon the urgency with which we should consider our priorities.
The self-indulgent and self-centered have no place in the lives of those who have offered themselves up as living sacrifices.
In the words of John Piper we live in a war-time footing.
Darkness, sin and disobedience to God, need to be conciously set aside.
The sins mentioned are self-centered, the fruit of lax discipline and self-indulgence. The are also destructive of the community, the opposite of the actions exhorted in chapter 12.
Instead we put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Obviously this is instruction given to Christians. Putting on Christ is a concious act with concrete outcomes. Galatians 3:27.
It involves the process of being conformed to the renewing of our minds, of learning the Scriptures and showing our love for the Lord Jesus by keeping His commandments.
We clothe ourselves with Jesus, who is Christ and Lord. We live Christian.
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