Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

All You Need is Love?

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 13:7-10

July 30, 2000

In his book, A Second Touch, Keith Miller tells of an event which occurred in his own mind one sunny afternoon:

"I was seated on our front porch, and our youngest daughter was riding her tricycle down the driveway toward the street. I noticed that from up the block a huge moving van was coming very fast. The driver's brake had slipped and he was coming faster and faster down the hill in front of our house. In a horrified moment I realized that my little girl was heading out into the street right in front of that truck and that, because of a hedge, she could not see the truck coming! Without even thinking, I jumped across the porch rail and ran for the street, realizing at the last second that I could dive and push the tricycle beyond the wheels, but that I could never make it out of the way myself. Then I was diving. Just as I pushed the tricycle beyond the truck, I felt and

heard a horrible crunch as a huge wheel ran right across my back.

"Even though this scene took place only in my imagination, I was weak just thinking about it. Here was a real act of love, ‘laying down one's life.’ I hoped I would do that if the situation ever actually came up."

I am certain that all of us can enter in to the emotions that Miller relates. Each of us can give examples from books or from our own experience of sacrificial love -- from stories of mothers who starve themselves to feed their children, to soldiers who give their lives to save their buddies. The capacity for sacrifice is one of the finest characteristics of our species.

The issue become more complex, however, as Miller continues: "As I sat thinking about this, a nasty little kid from down the street came riding by in front of our house. He's the one who picks his nose all the time and who laughed and made nasty gestures at me when I had tried to catch him to talk to him about throwing rocks at my little girl the day before. Although I like most

kids, I do not like this one. But as I watched him ride by, the same scene I had been through a few moments before started replaying itself in my imagination. Only this time the nasty little boy was the one riding down our driveway toward the path of the hurtling truck. I hesitated. This wasn't my child. But then, although I did not even like the boy, I found myself jumping the rail and running for the street. Again I dove and pushed the tricycle beyond the truck's wheels. And again I was crushed."

The first imaginary rescue Miller describes is the response of a great but still normal human love -- loving the people who love us -- even in an extremely self-giving way. The second situation is an example of another kind of love altogether -- doing good to those who do not love us even at the cost of our own selves. This love is not a human kind of love. In Greek it is called agape love -- the love of God.

This is the love God calls us to demonstrate in many places in Scripture. One of them is Romans 13:7-10. Listen to God’s word:

Romans 13:7-10

In the late 1960s the Beatles came out with their hit song: "All You Need is Love." One critic reviewed the song with three words: "No it isn't!" But here God says "Yes it is -- but only if you understand what love really is and see how it is connected to my law." The interplay between love and law is the focus of our text this morning.

First, let’s talk about love. That’s where Paul starts. Paul says in verse 8, "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another."

Some people wrongly takes this as a command to never borrow. That’s not what Paul is saying here. Jesus permitted borrowing in Matthew 5:42. The point of Romans 13:8 is not that Christians should never borrow, but that they should never leave their debts unpaid. The verb here is a present imperative which gives it a continuous force: "Don't continue owing. Pay your debts."

Paul’s point here is that most debts have natural limits. If you borrow $20 until payday, you just pay it back and tear up your IOU. Even the taxes Paul talks about in this chapter have limits. But we can never say, "I have done all the loving I need to do." Love is a permanent obligation -- a debt that is impossible to retire.

Early in the second century, a Christian named Origen wrote of Paul’s words here: "Paul desires that our debt of love should remain and never cease to be owed, for it is expedient that we should both pay this debt and always owe it."

If you have ever had a personal debt, even a small one, you know that the first thing that enters your mind when you see that person is that you "owe" them. We need to see ourselves as spiritual debtors. When we go to church, town, work, shopping, school -- wherever we rub shoulders, whoever we meet, we owe love.

It’s not just theoretical. Love that is not expressed in action does not really exist -- just as talent that does not result in creative work does not really exist.

Paul says that no matter how much love we give, we Christians are always love-debtors because we have received so much from God. Love is what we owe to others because it is what God has given us.

C. S. Lewis, at the beginning of his sermon, The Weight of Glory makes the statement that if you asked ten good people today what is the greatest virtue, nine of them would say "unselfishness". I suspect today that "justice" would come high on the list -- making sure that everyone gets their fair share. But both unselfishness and justice are largely negative. The first has the potential of developing an unbiblical "I'm not okay, you're okay" attitude while justice is more concerned with carving up the pie than it is with helping those in distress.

The greatest of the virtues, as Paul so eloquently declares in 1 Corinthians 13 is not unselfishness or justice. It is agape love -- the kind of love that not only avoids wrongs but which seeks to do positive good.

Paul is obviously not talking here in Romans 13 about the kind of love portrayed in our popular music -- love as a soft emotion centered around sexual attraction or natural friendship. That is a human dimension of love, It’s a good love. But we are called in this passage to love with a super-human love -- the self-giving, agape love of God -- the love which has the power to break down barriers between people. And that kind of barrier smashing love has a profound impact on society.

One of the most eloquent and personally moving quotations I have come across is from a great nineteenth-century preacher named Alexander Maclaren. It is a description of what happened when Jesus' followers lived out His new commandment in the Uper Room to love one another as He loved them.

Maclaren writes: "When the words were first spoken, the then-known civilized Western world was cleft by great, deep gulfs of separation, like the crevasses in a glacier, by the size of which our racial animosities and class differences are merely superficial cracks on the surface. Language, religion, national animosities, differences of sex, split the world up into alien fragments. A "stranger" and an "enemy" were expressed in one language, by the same word. The learned and the unlearned, the slave and his master, the barbarian and the Greek, the man and the woman, stood on opposite sides of the gulf, flinging hostility across."

This was the state of the world when Christ gave His new commandment to love. But as years went by and the flame of Christianity spread around the Mediterranean, the world witnessed something unheard of before this time.

Maclaren continues: "Barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, learned and ignorant, clasped hands and sat at one table, and felt themselves "all one in Christ Jesus." They were ready to break all other bonds, and to yield to the uniting forces that streamed out from His cross. There never had been anything like it. No wonder that the world began to babble about sorcery, and conspiracies, and complicity in unnameable vices. It was only that the disciples were obeying the "new commandment," and a new thing had come into the world -- a community held together by love and not by geographical accidents or linguistic affinities, or the iron fetters of the conqueror."

Maclaren writes: "Christ's radical command worked a profound commitment to love among his followers, and the world could not believe it! The truly radical nature of this love was that the Master's commandment called them to love as Christ loved them. It was a sacrificial love, the kind of love that even reaches out to those who wish us harm (as Jesus had done to Judas just moments before He gave the command).

The reason Jesus' words, along with Maclaren's quotation, mean so much to me is, first, because they are so challenging. Who, even among those in the Early Church, fully lived up to this commandment? Probably not that many. But even partial obedience works miracles. Second, the command is so promising, if the Church would just put it to work. The promise is, "All people will know that you are my disciples..." -- will know that we are truly His -- if we obey the command to love one another. The implication is that many will turn to Christ as a result.

Now, let’s talk about law. That’s the second part of the text.

In verse 9 Paul refers to several of the Ten Commandments and says that all of these commandments are summed up in the phrase: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." He didn’t make that up himself. He learned it from Jesus.

Paul says that love is the fulfillment of the law.

We need to understand exactly what that means — for there are those who would love for us to join them in their misunderstanding..

The advocates of what is sometimes called the 'new morality' or 'situation ethics' distort the teaching here. They say that love doesn’t fulfill the law. It erases it. Love is the end of law' because law is no longer needed.

These people usually come out in force to every meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly including the one I recently attended in Long Beach. The point of their arguments before committees and in the general sessions is that now 'nothing is forbidden except love' — no matter what the Bible might have to say about particular practices. They claim that love has its own "built-in moral compass" which discerns intuitively what a true respect for persons demands in each situation.

But this whole approach expresses a naive confidence in love's infallibility. The truth is that love cannot manage on its own without an objective moral standard.

History shows us that we still need the commandments. We need the commandments because we can rationalize our behavior very readily. We need practical guidance as to what love looks like in concrete human situations.

I, for one, am capable of all sorts of things in the name if love. I could steal your car and call it love — because I am liberating you from your dependance on material things. If I could do that, I could certainly find a way to call something like promiscuity love. I could even kill you and call it love — because I would be setting you free from your own, obviously miserable, existence.

People who are not obedient to the commandments can do the most heinous things in the name of love. For example, it was in the name of love that Charles Manson sent his people out to murder. Remember that several young women with Xs on their foreheads seriously told us that "Charlie is love." We need the commandments because we need guidance as to what love really looks like.

That is why Paul doesn’t write that "love is the end of law." He writes that "love is the fulfilment of the law." For love and law need each other. Love needs law for its direction while law needs love for its inspiration.

Don’t ignore the commandments. They provide the minimum definition we sometimes need. They tell us that when you love your neighbor you will refrain from adultery. When you love your neighbor you will regard his life as precious. When you love your neighbor you will respect her ownership of property. If we really love our neighbor we will not kill him or lie about him or covet what he has or steal his possessions.

And yet, as Paul so clearly says, the key is love -- not law.

For the trouble with the law -- both civil and biblical -- is that it states only the minimal requirements. The law can require you not to lie about your neighbor but cannot require you to build him up. That is a decision of love. The law can require you not to steal from your neighbor but it cannot require you to gladly share what you have. That, once again, is a decision of love. Using an example from the teaching of Jesus, the law could require a person to carry the armor of a Roman soldier for a mile. But it was a decision of love to go the second mile.

The law deals only with the minimal requirements of a relationship. But when Paul says that the one who loves has "fulfilled" the law the word literally means "overfilled" or overflowed the law. Love takes the law, fills the law, and then goes beyond what is required. Paul is teaching that agape love fills the law to overflowing -- it takes the basic requirements of life in human society — does them — and then makes something. creative out of them.

Paul says that the one who loves has fulfilled the law. Note that Paul is not just talking about the Jewish law of the Old Testament. He is talking here in the context of the civil law of human governments -- that we are to give everyone that which we owe them and the one thing we are to owe is love. That is our one inexhaustible debt. And when we attempt to pay it, it makes a profound impact.

There is a true story from the time of the Korean War about a misfit soldier who became the butt of all the jokes of his training platoon. The Sargent soon became disgusted with this useless excuse for a soldier and made his life hell. One day the men in his platoon decided to play a joke on this scapegoat. A dummy grenade was obtained and given to the Sargent who announced to the platoon that it was a live grenade. He handed it one of the inductees to throw. The inductee pulled the pin and then fumbled the grenade -- letting it drop at the feet of the misfit. The misfit immediately fell on the grenade, burying it in his stomach. The seconds ticked by and he realized that it was a joke. He had made a fool of himself again. Humiliated, he looked up. But no one was laughing. The Sargent carefully helped the soldier to his feet and carefully dusted him off. The soldier was willing to die for those who ridiculed him -- and they knew it..

This kind of self-giving reminds me of another man who was ridiculed, perceived as a misfit, and who was put to death for the sake of love. That is agape. Agape is the love that thinks not of itself but gives totally. This is what we owe to others because it is what God has given us. If we love in this way, Paul writes, we fulfill the law.