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Romans
13:8-10 January
28, 2001 Fourth
Sunday after the Epiphany And do you know
what really gets conservatives upset?
When they hear liberals accuse them of being unloving.
We conservatives just hate people who accuse us of being
unloving. Rarely do we take
this accusation to heart. Instead
we issue a counter-charge against liberals who accuse us of this.
We accuse them of rejecting the Bible, God’s word, of
conforming to man’s will rather than God’s, of making up their own
rules as they go along. There,
take that, you liberals. Accuse
me of being unloving? I’ll
accuse you of something far worse! But there is
nothing worse. Conservative,
Bible-believing Christians need to hear these words. There
is nothing worse than being unloving.
And if the shoe fits, wear it.
It will not do simply to attack the critic, especially when his
criticism is true. Or do we
think that the Apostle Paul, whose words are inspired by the Holy
Spirit, is simply tossing a bone to muddle-headed liberals when he
writes, “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who
loves another has fulfilled the law.”?
No, he is saying that our strong convictions – our devotion to
the word of God – must have as its fruit love for our neighbor.
As we just sang, ’Tis
all in vain that you confess the doctrines of the Church unless Some people
think that being a conservative Christian means adhering to a long list
of rules and then slavishly following those rules.
That’s not true at all. In
fact, inventing rules with which to replace God’s law is the very
opposite of conserving God’s word.
If we are to be real conservatives in the best sense of the word,
we must hold on firmly to the very words of God.
God’s words direct us – not to a long list of rules – but
to a single rule that says, “You shall love your neighbor as
yourself.” Those who
substitute their own rules for God’s law aren’t conservatives at
all. They aren’t
conserving God’s word. They
are avoiding it. If our
convictions are really based on the word of God, we will spend less time
making up rules and more time considering what we should do to help our
neighbor and to do him no harm. That’s
what love requires. What,
specifically does this mean? That
is, what should we do to help our neighbor and what should we do to
avoid harm to our neighbor? Just
how are we to love our neighbor as God’s law requires?
Our text gives us the answer.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not murder. You
shall not steal. You shall
not bear false witness. You
shall not covet. This is how
we are to love our neighbor. The
Ten Commandments teach us what love requires of us.
Since God is
love, God defines love. How
can those who have not loved define it for themselves?
And yet folks presume to do just that.
They call adultery and fornication “making love” as if it is
love when men and women sin against God’s commandment.
In the name of compassion, even nominal Christians lobby for laws
to permit women to kill their unborn children in direct defiance of the
Fifth Commandment. Love says
not to steal, but folks steal in the name of love.
We are slandered, or so we think, so we slander the one who
slandered us. But love
doesn’t do this. Love does
no harm to the neighbor. Adultery,
murder, theft, false witness are harmful.
They are always harmful because God says so.
God defines love for us and he knows because he is God.
Love is what hurts our neighbor.
And then commandments that God gave to Moses still define for us
what hurts our neighbor. It is common to
confuse human rules with divine law.
If you drink too much alcohol you will get drunk and that is a
sin. So folks make up rules
against drinking alcohol and think that they are doing God a favor.
If you obey the rules, you will be obeying God, they think.
And since smoking is bad for you, they make a rule against that
too. Then, since playing
cards might lead to gambling, and that involves coveting, they make a
rule against that too. This
is called putting a hedge around God’s law.
The idea is that we reduce God’s law to a list of rules.
Then, when we obey the rules, we will be obeying God’s law.
But, you see, this is exactly wrong.
This puts us over God’s law, when it is God’s law that is
over us. It is one thing to
have rules for the security, peace, and the maintenance of well-ordered
liberty. It is quite another
to claim that God has established these rules and that they must be
obeyed on that account. The
proliferation of rules rarely helps Christians to live a more pious and
decent life. Go to church on
Sunday. That’s a good
rule. However, the
Commandment requires more than that, does it not?
It requires that we love God’s word and God’s wisdom more
than whatever else might be occupying our attention on a Sunday morning.
And when it comes to loving our neighbor, how can a list of rules
help me love those who do me wrong?
How can a list of rules make me regard my neighbor as someone who
is just as important as I am? When love has
been replaced by rules, the church of Christ becomes a club of
holier-than-thou religious do-gooders whose piety is measured by how
many rules they have and how strictly their rules are followed.
But this is not the church. We
need fewer rules and more love. “Owe
no one anything, except to love one another.”
That’s the word of God. Reducing the
Christian faith to rules silences the word of God and destroys the
church. It distorts both the
law and the gospel. The law
loses its true focus and the gospel loses its comfort.
Let me explain how this works.
You might think it would be much easier to obey only one rule,
the law of Christian love, than to obey dozens or hundreds of rules of
human invention. But
that’s not so. Obeying
rules simply requires that we learn what we may and may not do.
You don’t have to care why.
You don’t have to consider the consequences.
You have only to do what the rules tell you to do.
When you do, you get credit for being good.
When you don’t, you suffer the consequences of being bad.
It is totally self-serving. The
law of love, however, requires that you serve your neighbor.
And that is infinitely more difficult. Let’s take
the school classroom as an example.
When the student lives according to the rules without regard for
love, he simply follows that course of action that will keep him out of
trouble. The rule says,
don’t talk when the teacher is talking.
The student who lives under rules doesn’t have to care one bit
about the welfare of his teacher or his fellow students.
He need only care about not getting into trouble for breaking the
rule. His obedience to the rule has nothing to do with love for anyone
but himself. Does the rule,
don't talk when the teacher is talking, require him to love his teacher?
No. The rule, without
love, tells him nothing about caring for the welfare of the teacher.
It tells him only to know what’s best for himself.
He then learns that self-interest – not interest in the welfare
of his teacher or fellow students – is motivation for what he does. It is always
easier to obey rules than to love. What
happens is that the rules take the place of love, in fact, they take the
place of God, for it is God who has given us this single command, Love
one another. No man-made
rule can ever permit us to disregard that command.
Love does no harm to the neighbor.
Regardless of whatever the rules might say, love does no harm to
the neighbor. And the Bible
doesn’t say that he who has obeyed the rules has fulfilled the law.
It says that love is the fulfillment of the law. Have you
fulfilled it? One single
command. One simple command.
Have you obeyed it? Have
you fulfilled the law? Let me tell you
about the One whose love has fulfilled the law.
He was sleeping in the boat.
Yet he is the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps.
He became tired and hungry and thirty.
Yet he is the One who owns all there is and need nothing that he
hasn’t always had. He is
our true brother and he is our eternal God.
He felt every pain we feel, and yet he is Master over nature,
stilling the storm by a single word.
He loved. He loved
with an unmatched purity. He
needed no rules; he simply did what was in his very nature to do.
And he loved with such perfection and single-minded devotion that
his love for his neighbor fulfilled the entire law of God for all people
of all time. He loved.
We hear words
here in church whose meaning often escapes us: redemption,
justification, reconciliation, salvation.
Biblical words. Words
about God and words about us. What
do they mean? They mean
God’s love for us. They
mean Christ has fulfilled the law that we failed to fulfill.
They mean Christ Jesus has freed us from the guilt we bring upon
ourselves when we care more about justifying ourselves than in helping
our neighbor. They mean
forgiveness earned by his life of love, purchased by his sacrifice of
love on the cross, forgiveness given to us in love and received by faith
alone. They mean peace, the
peace of sins forgiven by God. They
mean deliverance from the hell which we, by our refusal to love, have
deserved. What these words
say and what they mean cannot be reduced to a list of rules for us to
follow. They are not about
our doings, but God’s. Their
truth is centered in that love of God for us which is so deep and so
persistent that it caused the incarnation of God’s only begotten Son.
It caused him to come into the world in humility and to love
those who hated him, to serve those who denied him, to suffer for those
who caused his suffering. This
love never grows cold. And
it is for you. It is given
to you in your baptism. It
is pronounced upon you in the absolution.
It is literally put inside of you in Holy Communion.
It is God’s love for you revealed in Christ.
And it is the only source, the only strength and the only power
of your love for your neighbor.
Rev. Rolf D. Preus |