Daily Devotion – August 31, 2020 – Dr. Pat Taylor Ellison
Romans 13:8-14
13:8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
13:9 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, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
13:10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
13:11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;
13:12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
13:13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
13:14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
I want to dwell in the first 3 verses of this passage from Romans 13: verses 8, 9, and 10.
The only thing we should owe to one another is love, since acting in love to each other fulfills the law. This is true because all the commandments related to other human beings are about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and this kind of loving of the neighbor will do no wrong to the neighbor.
So what does this love of our fellow humans look like?
It puts their needs before our own.
It does no harm (either by outright misdeed or by neglect).
It makes us put ourselves in their shoes in order to love them as we love ourselves.
You know what I think? It would be easier for me to accomplish such love of the neighbor with my actual next door neighbors than it would with some members of my own family. It might be easier to accomplish this kind of love with comparative strangers than with fellow church members. Why is this?
I believe we may have trouble loving those closer to us because they have hurt us in the past, knowingly or not knowingly, and we hold those hurts like little scars, or like a stack of IOUs they need to pay before we’ll do business with them again.
But that is precisely what declaring that love fulfills the law is trying to overthrow. Paul is saying, “Guess what? Nobody can pay those back to you sufficiently. You can reconcile in spite of them, though, because love fulfills the law better than justice does.” Be reconciled, he often says. He doesn’t say to add the debts all up and pay them off in order to feel trusting again. He just repeats Jesus: Love one another.
Dang it.
Gracious God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for encouraging us to tear up the IOUs and just love one another. Give us the courage to take the leap and do that. And do it often enough to get practice enough to make it easier. Amen.
