Love Fulfills the Law (Rom. 13:8–14)

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Ray Ortlund
The heart of Christianity is not ethics. The heart of Christianity is Christ. Yeah, it doesn’t say put on morality, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ. We’re taught by the gospel in this passage to face the future, not with dread, but with eager anticipation.

Welcome to you’re not crazy, a podcast for young pastors and all who care for them and are involved in ministry and our churches. Thank you for everything you’re doing for Christ right where you are. And I’m here with Sam Albury, my dear friend. Hey, Ray. No, actually, you’re Sam. I’m ready. Okay. I

Sam Allberry
get hold up sometimes,

Ray Ortlund
and we are plowing through in this season, if you’re not crazy, Romans chapters 12 through 15, because we believe deeply that gospel doctrine creates gospel culture. And these chapters are all about the gospel culture, the beauty, the beauty of human relationships, the warmth, the radiance, the magnetism that the great truths of Romans one through 11 inevitably create when we allow those truths to have their full authority in Our churches. So now this time, we are in Romans, chapter 13, verses eight through 14, which are about love as the the definite article, key insight for the demonstration of authentic Christianity in this and in every generation. Sam, what stands out to you about this passage in Romans? Chapter 13?

Sam Allberry
Oh, lots of things. I was just thinking. Ray, that the passages that it’s interesting, the passages that most speak about love in the New Testament. This passage first, Corinthians 13, First John four. None of them are speaking about romantic love. They’re always speaking about the one another, love of God’s people. And this is, this is no exception. It’s beautiful. Oh, no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. And it’s just beautiful. But I think that it stood out to me is because Paul is saying love is behind all of the commandments, all of the law. It means even the laws that are framed negatively, the prohibitions that thou shalt nots are there to invite us into a positive so it’s something I try to do now, whenever I find a prohibition in the Bible, I ask myself, what is the good thing this prohibition is protecting for me, what is the positive behind the negative? Because we can look at various commands and think, oh, that’s constraining. That’s restrictive. But Paul is saying all of those commandments are helping us to love each other better. There’s a positive intent behind even negative commandments. So that just that just that just helps me, because I think okay, if the law, if God, is telling me to say no to something, it’s because he’s telling me to say yes to something better. It’s never just stop doing that. It it’s actually, hey, love someone better. By saying no to that,

Ray Ortlund
that is a timely insight, because one line of reasoning that’s being used by some today is that the love ethic behind or underneath the commandments of God can give us freedom to reinterpret those commands in a way that deconstructs them. Yeah, for example, he says in verse nine, for the commandments, You shall not commit adultery and so forth, and any other commandment are summed up in this word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So there is no way, if we’re in our right minds, theologically and hermeneutically, there is no way we can take You shall not commit adultery, work around behind it, find love behind it, so that we end up with a commandment that says, You shall commit adultery. There are books being written and proposals being put out there for us to consider that invert some of God’s commands as if the negative command were simply negative, restrictive, confining, life depleting and not, in fact, life giving.

Sam Allberry
Yeah. Paul is saying these commandments are summed up in love your neighbor. He’s not saying they are, you know, trumped by or made redundant by or revised in the light of love your neighbor, but they actually You shall love your neighbor as yourself is is the executive summary of of the commandments.

Ray Ortlund
Wow. Well said. Now that’s helpful for all of us. It’s helpful for me. Here’s why, if love properly understood, is the key insight that sort of unlocks the commands of the Old Testament. Especially which Paul quotes here that corrects me as much as it corrects anybody else, because there is a crazy inside me that our modern world has beaten into me through the years that says I can’t be myself. I can’t find my identity and fulfill my destiny and actualize my existence, unless I am completely released from all limitations. It is my Unlimited, fully expressed self that is my true self, and this sacred self that must and deserves to be expressed without restraint or limitation. Jesus did not come into the world to teach us that the apostle Paul clearly opposes that understanding, and here he offers not a revision of love, but the fullness of love, which is he says, Love does no wrong to a neighbor. So following Jesus means we accept full responsibility to be life giving. Each of us wants to be a life giving presence in the world, at home, at church, wherever we are, at work, and trusting that being that life giving presence guides us to our own personal fulfillment as well. No one has ever followed Jesus on his path of love and ended up diminished. No, it’s so

Sam Allberry
life giving. I’m struck as well ray that Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is full is the fulfilling of the law. This passage in other parts of the New Testament like it, assume, without God’s help, we don’t know how to love each other properly. We may know enough to know that love matters. And I think that’s part of common grace. People know that a life without love is is missing the point, but we’re not very good at knowing how to love each other in the way that we should. We sometimes hear God is love, and think, if God is love, that means everything I interpret is love, God must approve of. But God is Love means he’s an expert on love, and we need to look to him to learn how to love each other in the right way. And you see this, this is so timely for our world today, because, you know, we have hashtags like love is love, where we’re assuming we know what love is and what it looks like and how it’s to be expressed and offered and received, whereas this verse is actually saying Love does no wrong to a neighbor, but we only understand what wrong is in the light of God’s law. What I might feel as being loving to someone if it contradicts God’s word is actually not love. Yes.

Ray Ortlund
What would you say to someone who says, But Jesus came not to sort of drag us back to Mount Sinai and those old laws of Moses and all that darkness and limitation. Jesus came to set us free and so forth. What would you say? Say to someone? I

Sam Allberry
would say he does set us free, but not by crossing out the law, but by helping us fulfill the law by being people of love, but it’s love as God defines love, not love as we define love. Jesus is changing us from the inside out. He’s changing our hearts so that actually we are disposed to love each other, and therefore we want to read God’s word to know how best to love each other, whereas the problem the limitation in the Old Testament was, was that the law can’t change someone from the outside in and people could. You know, Paul was an example of someone who attained a measure of formal, external, sort of obedience, but without it actually being driven by the love that was meant to be animating and integrating all of God’s law, whereas now, because Jesus is changing our hearts, we’ve talked about our minds being renewed so that we can now test and approve God’s God’s good will, we’re actually having the love of Christ being poured into us, and so we can begin to as Paul’s already told us, our love can be genuine, but the genuine love we show each other won’t be in contradiction to what God has told us here. It will be in fulfillment of it. Can I just give one, one little example, please. There was a there was a guy at a church I was serving at who came to faith from a gay background, and so I was, I was thinking, at some point I’ll need to have a conversation with him about, you know, has I didn’t want to throw everything at him the moment he came to faith, but I remember thinking as he’s now stepping into life following Jesus, at some point, we’ll need to have a conversation about his love life he’d been living. With this other guy. And he came up to me once and said, I’ve been meaning to tell you a while ago I broke up with my boyfriend and moved out. And I was thinking, Oh, okay, so you know I was planning to raise up with him. He’d already got there. And I said, Well, what made you do that? And he said, It just didn’t seem right anymore. And I just thought, okay, the spirit has already been changing his moral taste buds and the spirits better at doing this and than any of us are, but he was already feeling something of this, of this truth that actually living in a way that is disobedient is unloving to his neighbor, and he was because he hadn’t heard the law yet, but his heart was already beginning to line up with God’s understanding of love, that he was sensing at an intuitive level, that this particular behavior was not actually loving. The

Ray Ortlund
brilliant insight that the apostle leads us into here is that authentic obedience to God’s law makes a beeline for the principle of love, the sacrifices of love, the discernment of love, the gentleness of the honesty of love, such as your friend demonstrated there. Yeah, we’re

Sam Allberry
because what we’re beginning to see as Christians is we’re seeing the beauty of the love of Christ, and we’re seeing that being what is behind all that God calls us to do. Well,

Ray Ortlund
let me think out loud with you for about about one You shall not steal. Yeah, so if, if my brain wraps around that commandment, You shall not steal, with the insight that Paul provides us here, gives us in Romans 13, and I see You shall not steal as a door opening to generosity. Does it mean do not steal? Yes, it does mean that, but it opens a door to so much more that I will I will not read that commandment only with a jealousy that my property will not be stolen. Yeah, don’t you dare steal my things, because the Bible says this. But I will read that commandment as an open sesame to a whole world of interest, in concern, for advocacy, for protection of everyone around me, everyone who has their slice of God’s pie that he has given them, I will want to care for them, respect them, and be sure that I never even inadvertently diminish their possessions.

Sam Allberry
Ray who wrote the book The expulsive power of a new affection, Thomas Chalmers. Thomas Chalmers, yes,

Ray Ortlund
the Scottish pastor, yeah, that’s

Sam Allberry
what Paul’s talking about here.

Ray Ortlund
Oh my goodness, yes, we

Sam Allberry
are, we now want to obey God’s commands, because we’re captured by the beauty of a Christ, like heart of love, because the love of Christ has come into our hearts. We Our hearts have been ravished by it, and so we start to love things that are expressions of that very heart, which means we now want to not covid, we want to not murder, because we’re seeing the beauty of Jesus’ ways behind those commandments, he is the fulfillment of them.

Ray Ortlund
The expulsive power of a new affection is a brilliant title, and really does describe the dynamics of the new covenant, which Paul is summarizing here and bringing to a focal point in love. Let’s take the You shall not commit adultery. Okay, select double click. Here’s what comes up on the screen. Let me think out loud and you tell me which Yeah, You shall not commit adultery means not simply that Ray Orlan may not have an affair. Okay? It does mean that, but it also means I want to carefully respect the boundaries of everyone’s very personal sexual integrity. Yes, this is so personal, so delicate, and I want to walk through all my relationships with everyone I know with an implicit sensitivity to respect for awareness of the God given loving boundaries that he has set up so that anyone around you, anyone around me, has literally nothing to fear. That’s

Sam Allberry
true, because it’s what we’re looking at is not merely non adultery, but love. If Jesus says, I’ve not come to abolish the Lord, but to fulfill it, and if Paul is saying love. As the fulfilling of the law. We’re saying that Jesus is the love that fulfills the law. So

Ray Ortlund
if Okay, what I’m beginning to see more clearly now is that, is that each of the 10 commandments is like a pebble dropped into our mental pool, and the ripples just start going out in all directions with a new awareness, new thoughts, new possibilities for Christ, like love spreading out into the world, even through me. Yeah, wow,

Sam Allberry
there’s a wonderful story. Edward Donnelly wrote a book many years ago, I think, called the biblical doctrine of Heaven and Hell. And in that book, he talks about this guy in Japan who comes to faith, and this guy has been a thief his whole life. So stealing is all he’s ever done. It’s all he’s ever known. He becomes a Christian. He’s he goes to starts attending church, and the particular church he attends has the 10 Commandments up on the wall at the back of church, and he reads the commandment, You shall not steal. Now he’s been in a bit of a crisis, thinking I’m now a Christian. How am I? How am I ever going to stop stealing when it’s all I’ve ever done and all I’ve ever known? And he reads the words, You shall not steal, and reads them as a promise, and takes heart and thinks, oh, great, I’m going to stop I shall not steal. I’m going to stop stealing. He’s reading the Old Testament command correctly, yes, because it becomes in in Christ, it becomes a promise, because our hearts now are changing so that we actually love God’s ways, and therefore we don’t want to sin.

Ray Ortlund
That leads us right into the second part of this passage, verses 11 through 13, where Paul says, besides this, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep for salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. Now he stands back and looks at history as a whole, and he sees the darkness of this present age. We sees the son of Christ’s kingdom rising on the horizon, and we don’t have long to wait. It won’t be it’s not far away when the New Covenant of that the explosive power of a new affection implanted deep within us will explode into fullness and forever and ever and ever. There will be a glorious completeness in us. It will be love flowing out of us and we will never again throughout eternity as we’re together, ever offend each other, disappoint each other, take from each other, we will live as life giving presences Among other. LIFE GIVING presences, Jesus being glorified in it all. That’s not far away. That’s where we’re going, and, and, and so there is nothing petty and small about the law of God. No, it is a prophetic sign toward everything we most deeply long for. And

Sam Allberry
it’s, it’s the time, it’s the time for it. I’m struck by Paul, and he does this in other places. He says, you know the time that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. And every day, we rehearse that in our physical bodies, a time comes when we know it’s time to wake from sleep. For most of us, we have an alarm that signals, okay, hey, time for sleeping is done. Time for waking is beginning. And we have things that we do to transition from the night to the day. For you, I think it involves a hot cup of coffee. It sure does. Every morning. I don’t like coffee. I wish I did. So my morning coffee is a shower. It is a shower that wakes me up. So the first thing I do in the morning, typically, is get a shower, because the shower helps me get into I’m in daytime mode. Now. I’m washing the night off me. I’m washing the sleepiness off me, but the time I get out of the shower, I’m feeling readier for the day. There’ll be breakfast, there’ll be a bite to eat, there’ll be morning devotions. There are things that we do to get into the day, just as at the end of the day, when it’s time for bed, we do things to transition from the day to the night. But Paul is saying, we do there’s a Christian version of that as well. Spiritually, we do the same thing. And spiritually, Paul is saying, The hour has come for you to awake from sleep. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed the night is far gone, the day is at hand. So let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. So we don’t in our day to day life. We don’t go in to the day wearing our bed clothes. Neither us right now are wearing pajamas because it’s the daytime. So we took off our pajamas, we put on our day clothes, and Paul is saying, behaviorally, we are now casting off the ways of the night. We’re putting on the ways of the spiritual day. Salvation is at hand. The hour has come, and so we are put. Putting on the fulfilling of the law. We are putting on the armor of light, as he calls it here, verse 14, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Yeah, as we’re seeking to live in obedience to all of these commandments we’re putting on Jesus, yes, which, again, is why we want to be obedient. I want to to live in obedience to God, because I want to be more like Jesus. I might imperfectly, but truly, my heart has been captured by his beauty.

Ray Ortlund
The heart of Christianity is not ethics. The heart of Christianity is Christ. Yeah, it doesn’t say put on morality. No, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, this was the verse that converted Augustine yes from his crazy life, yes. And we’re taught by the gospel in this passage to face the future, not with dread, but with eager anticipation. Verse

Sam Allberry
13, let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in all Jesus and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But the answer to that is the positive, isn’t it? Yes, put on the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m not going to say no to sin unless I love something else more than the sin. I’m saying no to you.

Ray Ortlund
And then it says, And make no provision for the flesh. In other words, don’t think, Oh yeah, I’m gonna follow Christ now, but I’m gonna hold on to these vestiges of my old life, just in case Jesus doesn’t work out. If he proves to be a disappointment, then I really haven’t lost everything I’m gonna budget for just in case I need some sin along the way. Gosh, yeah, yeah. So he’s just know, hurl yourself at Christ, let go of everything, move all your chips over onto his square. He will not let you down. And it

Sam Allberry
means that the more we go on on the Christian life, commands that we initially may have started to obey begrudgingly, we start to cherish. There are certain commands I remember early in my Christian life as I began to sort of see what the Christian life was going to look like, there were certain commands where I thought, Oh, well, if you say so, then okay, I think about the, you know, some of the sexual ethics in the Bible. I now love those commands. I don’t, I don’t, secretly think it would be nicer if God changed what the Bible says. I actually, I’ve come to see the beauty of what God is calling His people into so that if I could change it, I wouldn’t want to.

Ray Ortlund
Sam, let me ask you this. We’re there’s a young pastor listening to us and really engaged with with what Paul is saying here in Romans 13. What? What would you offer that young pastor about guiding and vision casting and shepherding his congregation toward this sort of gladness and gratitude and expectancy, such as Paul describes here.

Sam Allberry
Oh, right, that’s so important. We, we’ve talked about this, and I know we, we talked about it in our you’re not crazy book, but it’s, it’s how we, how we do the application part of the sermon really matters, because it’s easy for us to do the application in the form of, come on, guys, you’ve got to do this. Get on with it. But what I’m trying to do now as I, as I’m coming to that part of preaching is to see how we are being invited into something that we now get to do. As I’m coming to that part of sermon preparation each time I’m now thinking, rather than Come on, guys, you’ve got to do this, is to think, how is the gospel awakening in us desires to want to do this. Because, again, it’s a way of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ exactly they want to be like him. So

Ray Ortlund
what if that category? But put on the Lord Jesus Christ in His beauty, in His grace, in His glory, everything he is to us, everything desirable to the human heart. What if the application part of the sermon is really we’re riffing on that theme, yes, not how we should improve, but how we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, which is a privilege,

Sam Allberry
then we are being excited into obedience, yeah, rather than being slapped into obedience,

Ray Ortlund
the explosive power and simultaneously the uplifting power, yeah, of a new affection.

Sam Allberry
Well, Ray, may the Lord help us with that. For those of you who are listening, we so appreciate your your time. We love this opportunity to to share with you. We pray the Lord will be with you as you think about these things. Let all of us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, because now we can. Can you imagine this? We can put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Gosh,

Ray Ortlund
Sam. How did we get here? Yeah, we totally don’t deserve this.

Sam Allberry
God bless you.