How do we live?
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8 Don’t be in debt to anyone, except for the obligation to love each other. Whoever loves another person has fulfilled the Law.
9 The commandments, Don’t commit adultery, don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t desire what others have, and any other commandments, are all summed up in one word: You must love your neighbor as yourself.
10 Love doesn’t do anything wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is what fulfills the Law.
How do we live?
How do we live?
I ask that question very carefully because everyone has an opinion about how to answer that question.
I googled that question and got over 23 Billion hits. I scanned through about 10 pages of answers. A very popular answer was a Japanese book which seems to be geared to younger readers.
I was pleasantly surprised by the number of Christian websites that were within the first 10 pages of hits.
There was a Buddhist website with lots of answers on how to live for yourself.
I came across a page that seems to be the core problem within the western Church today. The website had nothing to do with Christianity, but it reflects a problem as to why the Church seems to have become irrelevant in society. The theme of the website was “How to live in your truth.”
One thing that I’ve learned in life is that my truth is often a bold face lie. There have been many years of my life that I wanted things to be my way. My truth was far different from the real truth that is found in the words of this book.
When Adam and Eve bought into the lie that Satan presented to them, all of humanity has bought into the lie that we know best.
God created us in His image. Sin broke that image, however, God has been on a rescue mission ever sense to redeem his creation. The rescue mission culminated with Jesus came as the Messiah.
The Ten Commandments that God spoke provide for us the foundational ethic by which we are to live. God said:
1 Then God spoke all these words:
2 I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3 You must have no other gods before me.
4 Do not make an idol for yourself—no form whatsoever—of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.
5 Do not bow down to them or worship them, because I, the Lord your God, am a passionate God. I punish children for their parents’ sins even to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.
6 But I am loyal and gracious to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
7 Do not use the Lord your God’s name as if it were of no significance; the Lord won’t forgive anyone who uses his name that way.
8 Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy.
9 Six days you may work and do all your tasks,
10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it—not you, your sons or daughters, your male or female servants, your animals, or the immigrant who is living with you.
11 Because the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
12 Honor your father and your mother so that your life will be long on the fertile land that the Lord your God is giving you.
13 Do not kill.
14 Do not commit adultery.
15 Do not steal.
16 Do not testify falsely against your neighbor.
17 Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s house. Do not desire and try to take your neighbor’s wife, male or female servant, ox, donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.
Those first four commands reflect on our relationship with God. The other six reflect on our relationship with each other. They are not intended as an end all of things we are to do or not do.
You’ll remember that Jesus was asked what he thought was the greatest of all the commandments of God.
Matthew 22:36-40 “36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.””
All the commandments Jesus summed up in two, Love God with everything you go and love your neighbor as yourself.
So easy to say, but so very hard to do.
In my research I came across one website that had 101 ways to live life to the fullest. Some of the ideas presented were good ideas, but not one of them mentioned God. The vast majority of them focused on self which I guess was to be expected considering the list was about living life to the fullest.
Living for self, selfishness, idolatry has been the headlining sins since the Garden of Eden.
God has called us to an entirely new way of living where self dies so that we can live for Christ. Last week I read from Peter’s first letter with that reminder
15 you must be holy in every aspect of your lives, just as the one who called you is holy.
This being holy is not something that we do. It is what God the Holy Spirit does in us. Yes, there are things that we quit doing because God has identified them as sinful. But this transformation is a work of the Holy Spirit.
Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing that comes from heaven.” One of those spiritual blessings is the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. He goes on later in that letter to write in chapter 4
22 You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts,
23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
24 and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
That old self is put away. He said that the old self is corrupt and deluded by its lusts. Let me just give you one example of how corrupt and deluded many who claim the name of Christ have gotten today. I stumbled across a talk given by a priest in the Anglican Church of Australia. The talk, I cannot bring myself to call it a sermon, it was entitled “Queer holiness and human longing for transformation.”
I would rewrite the title to that talk “Sin and the human longing to fulfill the lust of the flesh.”
That is an example of the corruptness of natural humanity, a way from God we are corrupt and deluded as Paul says.
We are dead to that old person. Paul says that we are to “clothe ourselves with the new self.” In Colossians Paul wrote about clothing ourselves in Christ. Holiness is an entirely different way of living. There is no room for sin in our lives.
The Apostle John delved into this topic. He wrote in his first letter about forgiveness of sin and the results of that forgiveness is love because God has loved us.
Our end goal is to be like Christ. He is holy, pure and righteous. The goal is not to just follow a list of dos and don’ts.
John wrote
3 And all who have this hope in him purify themselves even as he is pure.
The hope that John is writing about is the hope in the return of Jesus. This hope encourages to live a holy life, a life that is modeled after the life of Jesus.
So getting back to that question of “How do we live?”
We are to live a life of holiness and love. Paul wrote in verse 10 of our text
10 Love doesn’t do anything wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is what fulfills the Law.
Corrie Ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place tells an encounter she had long after her release from the Nazi Concentration Camp. She spent her life telling the story of God’s forgiveness and love. She had just spoken at a a church and a man came up to her and she recognized him as on off the S.S. Guards. She wrote:
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile. I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.
And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.
As I took his hand a most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love, our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself (ten Boom, p.215).
David Seecombe in his commentary on this passage wrote:
Romans: Dust to Destiny The Debt of Love
as disciples we know that however faithful we may be in keeping the requirements of the law, we are not called to reach some pass mark, but to fulfil the law, to overflow it, to swallow up its ‘thou shalt nots’ with friendship and positive love, just as Jesus did. ‘Love is the fulfilment of the law.’
Love is the fulfilment of the law. I hope we grasp that.
In the Covenant of Christian Conduct that I have been referencing the past two weeks, there is a sentence that says:
The Church of the Nazarene believes this new and holy way of life involves practices to be avoided and redemptive acts of love to be accomplished for the souls, minds, and bodies of our neighbors.
I read a story of a pastor of what was once a very large and wealthy church who had found itself in a changing community. One day he was headed into the church “when he met a very respectable woman in the congregation – a wealthy woman, “a pillar in the church” -- having been a member all her life with parents and grandparents who had been a part of that congregation. She could hardly walk through the hallway because of all the poor people who had come to get a meal.
With a degree of anxiety and some judgment in her voice she said, “Dr. Bales, what on earth are you doing in the midst of all of this?”
His response was, “I am trying to save people from hell..”
She responded, “Well then, that is all right – we do need to save people like this.”
He said, “That’s not the way it is. I am not trying to save them. I am trying to save us.”” (Dunham)
That pastor got it, he was trying to help his congregation respond to the needs of their neighbors. Notice that the people he was trying to save was the people in the church.
Stuart Briscoe wrote:
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 29: Romans (The Reality of Practical Obligation)
The two main questions related to loving our neighbor have to do with defining what is love and discovering who is our neighbor. The first is answered by the complete biblical statement—we are to love as we love ourselves.
This means that minimally we are to have the same concern for the preservation, protection, and respect of our neighbors as we have for ourselves. A normal, healthy person loves himself enough to be concerned about his own safety, security, and station in life. Normal love for the neighbor has at least the same concerns.
The second question was answered once and for all by the Lord in the parable of the Good Samaritan: my neighbor is any man in the sphere of my influence whose needs I am in a position to meet or whose sufferings I am in a position to alleviate. To love him is to take action and do something on the understanding that God in Christ loved me first and did something about me.
Who are our neighbors? It’s those who live around the church, down Main St and Green Bridge Road, over there in Boswell Heights, down town, the ones who live next to you or you work with.
There are some important questions about this loving our neighbors that we need to be asking.
1.) Do we really want to know these people who are all around us?
2.) Do we want them in our church?
3.) Are we willing for our church to become their church?
4.) Are we willing to go where they go and engage them on their turf?
5.) Are we willing to spend time with them – are we willing to identify with them and show genuine compassion?
Quoting from the book, The Devil’s Advocate, we read these words:
“The root of …[the problem], I think, is this: [as priests] we …have a rhetoric of our own, which, like the rhetoric of the politician says much and conveys little. But we are not politicians. We are teachers – teachers of truth which we claim to be essential to man’s salvation.
Yet how do we preach it? We talk roundly of faith and hope as if we were making a fetishist’s incantation. What is faith? A blind leap into the hands of God. An inspired act of will which is our only answer to the terrible mystery of where we came from and where we are going.
What is hope? A child’s trust in the hand that will lead it out of the terrors that reach from the dark. We preach love and fidelity, as if these were teacup tales – and not bodies writhing on a bed and hot words in dark places, and souls tormented by loneliness and driven to the momentary communion of a kiss.
We preach charity and compassion but rarely say what they mean – hands dabbling in sick room messes, wiping infection from syphilitic sores. We talk to the people every Sunday, but our words do not reach them, because we have forgotten our mother tongue.” (Dunham)
Maxie Dunham pointed out that last sentence:
Our words do not reach them, because we have forgotten our mother tongue.
He went on to write about our mother tongue and said:
So the mother tongue, our “first language”, is a language of confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit, and a language of certainty about the power of the gospel to transform.
Do we still have confidence in the presence of the Holy Spirit? Do we still believe in the certainty of the power of the gospel to transform lives?
Dunham, M. (n.d.). The work of an evangelist. Sermons.Com. Retrieved January 21, 2023, from https://sermons.com/sermon/the-work-of-an-evangelist/1352137