Put on Christ (Romans 13:8–14) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

0:00 We're going to continue our study of Romans chapter 13, God willing. We'll finish that chapter this evening so that we can plunge rapidly headlong next week into chapter 14. I'm going to read again, beginning at verse 8 and reading through verse 14, which is the end of the chapter. I'll ask the congregation to stand for the reading of the Word of God. Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet, and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in the saying, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

1:02 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent. The day is at hand. Therefore, let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts. This is the gospel in a nutshell, dear friends, and teaching that is vital for our personal growth and sanctification.

2:20 It is the Word of the Lord for His people. Please be seated. Let us pray. Oh, Lord, how we love Your law, for Your Word is law. It is the light that guides our feet and shines upon our pathway. We thank You that Your law comes to us out of the infinite depth of Your knowledge and wisdom and reflects not only the perfection of Your character, but Your gracious, condescending love for us for which law is given for our blessing and edification.

3:23 Help us to understand the context of this law in Your love as the Apostle sets it forth herein. For we ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. We looked briefly at the beginning of verse 9 last week, O no one anything except to love one another, and I made reference to all of the attempts that have been made to use this as the classic proof text that would prohibit Christians from ever enter into any kind of indebtedness, and I hope we were able to demonstrate last week that that's not the point of this text. But the text does make mention of an obligation, of something that we do owe, and a debt that can never be remitted fully in this world. We can pay our debts to the bank, we can pay our debt to the store, we can pay our debt to the credit card company, But our debt in this world to love our neighbor is never discharged until we cross into heaven.

4:35 This is a perpetual obligation, an indebtedness that is given to us in the great commandment, which calls us to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, strength, and soul, and so on, and our neighbors as we love ourselves. And immediately here, the apostle links this obligation of love to some of the Ten Commandments. For the conclusion he reaches is this, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. Now, I want to come back to that in just a moment. Then he mentions certain of the commandments, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness, you shall not covet, and if there's any other commandment, all are summed up in this saying, namely, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

5:40 Now when Paul lists some of the Ten Commandments, the ones that he mentioned are those that are often described, particularly by our Lutheran friends, as coming from the second table of the law. The Scripture refers to the giving of the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone. And if we look at the beginning of the Ten Commandments, the first few prescribe our duty and behavior with respect to God. We're to have no other gods before Him. We're not to make any graven images of Him. We're to keep ourselves from idolatry. We are to make sure that His name is not taken in vain, that we are to keep the Sabbath, and so on.

6:32 These commandments early on in the Ten Commandments prescribe, as I say, our responsibility to God on a vertical plane. And then the focus of the Ten Commandments moves to our responsibility of how we treat each other as human beings with respect to no adultery, no murder, no stealing, no coveting, no false witness, and the like. And so for that reason some have divided the two tablets into two. The first tablet having to do with our obligations to God. The second tablet or table has to do with our obligations to our human counterparts. That may be the reason for two tablets of stone that God gave to Moses were inscribed or etched on one, were the obligations to God and on the other the obligations to man. Again, a very popular understanding of why the Ten Commandments came in two tablets.

7:35 I don't hold that position, of course, but I don't have to. I'm not a Lutheran. So I think rather the reason for the two tablets was that the law that was given at Sinai was given in the context of the most sacred covenant in which the people of Israel entered that was mediated by Moses, and the stipulations of that covenant relationship were expressed in terms of the Ten Commandments. And as was the custom in antiquity, when formal covenants were entered into, the agreement was always made in duplicate, one for the sovereign, the other for the vassal. That's why one of the copies of the Ten Commandments were to be kept perpetually, in the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. So one table was for God, the other one was for us, so that if there was any dispute as to what the obligations and the terms of the covenant were, God could take out His copy and say, here's what it says, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, and so on. But anyway, neither of us, myself nor our Lutheran friends know for sure why the commandments were given in two tablets. But we notice here that however we come out on that question, the ones that are mentioned are the ones that prescribe behavior on the horizontal plane, that describe our behavior toward each other. And Paul is saying here that whoever loves another has fulfilled the law. This is not any serious departure from what our Lord Himself taught on the matter, or what was found in the great commandment that I've already alluded to that concludes with the statement, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now this brief passage here has created lots of consternation, particularly

9:40 in the second half of the twentieth century, and again particularly in American liberal Christianity, where with the publication and popularization by Joseph Fletcher in his book Situation Ethics, the basic thesis of that borrowed from a more sophisticated treatment of ethics by the Princeton scholar Paul Lehman, Ethics in a Christian Context, Fletcher developed this famous concept of situation ethics, and whereby he reduced the entire law of God to one essential precept, and that is the law of love. And the law of love he expressed in this manner, we must always do what love requires in every given situation, hence the name situational ethics. Now let me just back off for a second and say that any ethical principle, any divine precept that is given to us, in order for it to be obeyed requires a context in which it is obeyed, and that God's law is given to us to be followed in real life situations.

11:03 So, in that sense, all ethics are situational, but that's not what Fletcher was getting at. What he was saying was more than that ethics have to be enacted in a real-life situation. He was saying that what God requires is determined by the situation, and that there's only one absolute law, and that is the law of love, which translated again is to do what love requires in every given situation. And he would quote, for example, from St. Augustine, where Augustine was famous for saying, love God and do as you please. even worse application of that from the lips of my friend Martin Luther, who declared to his friends, sin boldly. Now when Luther, in his customary boldness, made that statement, he was not really enticing people to sin. What he was getting at was this, that if you are going to sin, remember that you have a Savior who has paid for your sins, and so that we don't have to spend the rest of our lives in total misery if we have sinned because we have a Savior who has delivered us from the consequences.

12:36 But that's certainly not the most prudential way to communicate that idea, simply abbreviate it by saying, sin boldly. However, most of us don't need a lot of encouragement to do that anyway. But getting back to Augustine's statement, love God and do as you please, what Fletcher was getting at was this. If we look at concrete life situations and we see the laws that are written in the Bible, We can envision certain ethical situations where it is acceptable to God to break some of the commandments. One of His most famous illustrations, the one that I would use for my students in seminary in the ethics class, was the case of a husband and wife who were interred in a concentration camp in World War II, and the guards wanted to have a sexual relationship with the woman who was isolated from her husband, and they said to her that unless she submitted to their advances, they would kill her husband.

13:59 And so knowing that her husband's life was at stake, she acquiesced to the desires of the guard. And when the camp was liberated, she told her husband what she had done, and her husband was horrified that his wife had committed adultery and therefore sued her for divorce. Now that was a for instance that Joseph Fletcher incorporated in his book, and I in turn passed it on to my seminary students, and I say, well, what do you think? And in the first blush, they all agreed that the woman had in fact committed adultery. Then I asked the next question. If it happened in a different way, if the woman were attacked by the guards and a gun was put to her head, she was wrestled to the ground and raped, would the husband then have the right to sue her for divorce on the grounds of adultery?

15:07 And all of my students said, oh, no, no, no, no, that's different. You can't accuse somebody of adultery if they're a victim of rape. And I said, well, what is rape except submission sexually by coercion, by force? What greater force could there be exhibited against a woman of virtue than to require that she submit or her husband would be killed? that is a worse form of coercion than if the gun were pointed at her own head. Well, therefore, on second glance, when the students considered it, from that perspective, they backed up and they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, well, maybe we change our mind, maybe we don't support this man's suit for adultery. And they said, I hope not.

16:01 But what Fletcher would say was that in that situation, love not only permitted adultery, it required it. No, no, no, no, no. Love never requires adultery. Again, this was not adultery. This was rape, and there is a difference, a huge difference ethically. But he used that almost bizarre illustration to argue his point that love can set aside the law of God in unique human situations. You think of two young people that are in love and are struggling with physical temptations.

17:05 The oldest and most effective, seductive line of young men is, if you love me, you will. according to Joseph Fletcher, that is a legitimate seductive device. No. What the law of love is this, and what Augustine was getting at was simple. When Augustine said, love God and do as you please, and as he expressed that in its more profound fullness, he was saying that if your decisions on how you treat your fellow person are always motivated by a love for God, a singular love for God, you really don't even have to worry about the law. Because what the law reflects is what is pleasing to God. And if you love God, you can do as you please because you will be doing what pleases God. Is that simple? Love God and do as you please mean that if you really love Him, what will please you is what pleases Him, and what pleases Him is revealed to us in His law.

18:24 Now, the rule of love of situation is this. Love God and do what the love of God requires in every human situation. The Apostle Paul, in speaking of the love of God on one occasion, and said, let not fornication be once named among you as befitting saints. In other words, the apostle was saying, I can't envision any earthly situation that would justify disobedience to God's law of purity. I hope I'm being clear on this and not just confusing you by explaining to you all these variant options that appear in our culture. But when Paul talks about love here, he's talking about love fulfilling something.

19:21 He's talking about the purpose of the law, the goal of the law, where the law takes us ultimately, and where it takes us is to the love of our neighbor. Further on, he says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Augustine commented on that as well. There's this question associated with this text. We know that as part of our fallen nature, in fact a strong part of our fallen nature, is a kind of distorted self-love, which is rooted and grounded in selfishness. And so some interpret the great commandment to love your neighbor as you love yourself to mean you are to love your neighbor as much as you sinfully love yourself.

20:22 Others look at this text and say, no, there is a legitimate, virtuous kind of self-love that is not a sin, that is not a violation of the law of God, and that it is perfectly natural for human beings, even unfallen human beings, to have a simple affection for themselves. We are called to deny ourselves in certain situations, but we are not called to hold ourselves in absolute contempt because we are made in the image of God, and there is a certain dignity that God assigns to us, we can easily inflate that importance and self-worth as Paul has addressed already here in his letter to the Romans. But at the same time, there's not the idea implicit in the great commandment that the love of the self is inherently evil. Now which way is intended by the law, we don't know. So either view of that could possibly be right, but in any case, we do know that we have a kind of self-love, and that we are to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves. The other question is, what does it mean to love your neighbor, and who is your neighbor? Remember, Jesus was given that question, who is my neighbor? In terms of an attempt to get Him to exegete the Old Testament great commandment that calls us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, and Jesus could have answered that question very simply and directly as a rabbi by saying, look, When the Bible says, love your neighbor, the Bible is saying by that, love everybody,

22:27 because everybody is your neighbor. Your neighbor is not just somebody that lives next door, or down the street, or in your neighborhood. Again, parenthetically, we hear this terribly distortive idea that the basic essence of Christianity is the the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. And I have to keep repeating that the Bible nowhere teaches the universal brotherhood of man. The brotherhood is something special in Scripture. It is that situation that is enjoyed by all who share the same elder brother, namely Jesus Christ, who is the only begotten of the Father. And when we become redeemed, we are by adoption brought into the family of God, and this idea that we're all brothers, and God is the Father of us all.

23:24 dilutes the whole dimension of the special character of redemption that Christ works to bring us into the family of God. Now, by nature, Jesus told us, we are children of Satan, and we belong to His family. Now, I am laboring the point that we're not all brothers. The unbeliever out there in that community is not my brother. but He is my neighbor. And what the Bible does teach is the universal neighborhood of man, and that the law of the neighborhood in which God is the supreme mayor is the law of love that is to be given to everybody. Again, who is my neighbor? Jesus doesn't say, everybody's your neighbor. All people are neighbors. He answered that question differently.

24:26 You know how he answered the question, who is my neighbor? He said, who's your neighbor? a man went down from Jericho and fell among thieves. And the thief beat him and robbed him and left him in the road for dead. And then he tells the story of the priest and the Pharisee who come and cross the street to the other side and ignore the bleeding fellow. But a Samaritan who had no business dealings with the Jews saw this man in the street, took compassion, went out of his way, bound up his wounds, took him to the inn, paid the innkeeper for his continual treatment there, and then went on his way.

25:17 And Jesus answered the question, who is my neighbor, with the parable of the good Samaritan. And so, we see the biblical responsibility extends to all people. And just a quick recapitulation of this horizontal aspect of the law to remind you that the love that we are to have for our neighbor that is revealed in the law includes these things. If we love our neighbor, if we love our fellow human being, we won't commit adultery, because adultery is the hatred of our neighbor. It is the destruction of our friends, of our family. Remember counseling a case of adultery working in the church over 30 years ago, where this woman entered into an ungodly relationship with another married man, and I confronted them. And she protested, saying to me, this is none of your business, this is nobody's business but the two of us. I counseled 17 different people for the trauma that was brought into their lives by this adulterous relationship.

26:45 mothers and fathers, children, best friends. Adultery does not express love to one's neighbor. you shall not murder or steal. You don't love your neighbor and then help yourself to their possessions. If you love people, you don't slander them. You don't poison everybody to them. You don't stab them in the back, behind their back. That kind of behavior violates the specific law of God and most of all violates the law of love. I can't love you and slander you at the same time. I once read a book on…

27:42 slander, and it said, if you were walking down the streets of New York, as some of us have this past week, and it's a dark part of the night, and you decide to take a shortcut, and so you enter into an alley, and all of a sudden you see somebody come out of the shadows with a knife raised. What's your reaction? What do you do? If you have any sense, you turn around and you run out of the alley and get back into the light, right? And then this man goes on to say about how people will come up to you and say, let me tell you something in love.

28:30 He said, almost every time somebody comes to you and says, I would like to tell you something in love, what they then tell you has no love in it. It's just a license for vicious personal attacks. When somebody says to you, let me tell you something in love, you ought to run for your life like you just met somebody with a knife in the alley. don't bear false witness. You shall not covet. I've mentioned this before that if you were given the responsibility to write a charter, a constitution for a new nation, and you had only ten bedrock laws in which to frame this nation, what laws would you include? Maybe you would include a law that would protect the sanctity of life, prohibit murder. Maybe you would conclude a law to protect private property and prohibit theft. But would you think to include in your top ten laws a law against covetousness?

29:36 God did, because God knows what happens to people when one is jealous of another. How destructive envy can be. How do you explain somebody walking in a parking lot, taking out their keys, and willfully scratching somebody else's car? that's worse than stealing it. You can understand when somebody steals somebody else's property because you're saying, I just want that so bad, I just got to have it. And it's something else to say, well, if I can't have it, you can't either. Vandalism is the worst form of envy and covetousness. God understood that. God understood what destroys human relationships. God understood and understands what destroys and fractures love.

30:40 Paul sums this up by saying, love does no harm to a neighbor. Isn't that a simple way of putting it? If you love your neighbor, friends, you don't harm your neighbor by stealing him from him or slandering him, being jealous of him, envious, bearing false witness, backstabbing. No, if you love somebody, you don't want to harm him.

31:16 And that's the way we're supposed to live as Christians, that we're supposed to be known by the love that we have for one another. Therefore, Paul concludes, love is the fulfillment of the law. Now, granted, this is just a really quick, short, and terse treatment of that theme here in Romans. Paul wrote a whole chapter to the Corinthians when he explained to them what it means to love. 1 Corinthians 13 is not a treatise on romance. It's a treatise of loving one's neighbor and what that means. All right, the tone changes now in verse 11, and I'm going to plunge on.

32:08 And do this, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep. For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, and the day is at hand. Therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Now, as Paul enjoys a certain kind of behavior and prohibits another in this section, he prefaces it by reminding the people what time it was.

32:49 And I say this to you, knowing the time, knowing that it's high time, that it is high time to wake up. It's not a time to take a nap. This is a time that requires vigilance, alertness, and diligence. Why? For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Well, let's unpack that. Is this again another one of those examples where the apostle believed the return of Jesus was going to come fully and finally within his lifetime, and then later had to change his whole theology of the future, as many critics assume? What is Paul talking about when he says, their salvation is nearer than it ever was. Some refer that to the closeness of the advent of Christ that Paul anticipated in the first century, and he may have been thinking in terms of the destruction of Jerusalem here, saying, wake up, wake up, it's closer than you think any day now.

34:00 The judgment of God is going to come upon you, maybe. But most commentators, I think, and rightly so, think that what Paul is talking about is the consummation of our salvation when we pass into glory. How old are you? Let me ask another question. How old were you ten years ago? Well, I can answer that for you. You were ten years younger than you are now.

34:37 How old will you be ten years from now? Again, you can do the simple math, given your age at the moment. But the deeper question is, where will you be ten years from now? Where will you be 20 years from now? Do you ever sit around and think about, you wonder how long you're going to live? I've never done that so much in my whole life as I have been doing it now, I have to tell you that. Okay, Lord, please, you know, I can't wait to get home, but give me 10 to 20 more years in this pulpit. Get that church built. Hurry up. And I say to Vestas, oh, I wish I were 45.

35:26 Do you ever do that? I don't know, twenty years from now I may still be standing right here in this pulpit and we still may not be done with Romans. That's a real possibility. But let me cut the Gordian knot here and say, where will I be in fifty years? There's no doubt about that. I'm not going to be in this pulpit fifty years from now. Where will you be? Some of you, young people, God willing, will still be here. will you be in a hundred years? But you know, in the fullness of time, a hundred years is not that long, and fifty years is only half of that. Ten years is only a tenth of it. I don't care how old you are. It's time to wake up because the day is approaching. The end of our lives is approaching. That's what I think Paul is talking about here. Our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

36:34 What? Salvation is nearer now than when we first believed? I thought that when we first believed, we were saved. Isn't that the way we talk as Christians? When were you saved? Well, I was saved February 13, 1957, 11 o'clock. I was saved. And then the preacher comes and says, well, boy, you're a lot closer to salvation now than you were when you were first saved. First saved? How many times do I have to be saved? First time, second time, third time, fourth time? Now, here what Paul is dealing with are the tenses of the verbs of the Greek word sozo, sozomai, which means to save. And that word appears in the biblical text in every one of the tenses of the Greek verbs, which are far more than what we find in English. There was a sense in which you were saved from the foundation of the world.

37:28 There's a sense in which you were saved. There's a sense in which you were being saved. There's the sense in which you have been saved. There's the simple heiress, you are saved. There's the present act of you are being saved. There's the future, you shall be saved. There's the future perfect, you shall have been saved. And salvation is unfolded biblically in all of those different increments. And in the ultimate sense of salvation is not something that you experienced when you were born again. That was one aspect of salvation, but the fullness of your salvation does not take place until your glorification, till you enter into heaven. And Paul's addressing believers. He says, the fullness of your salvation is much closer today than it was when you first believed. You know, friends, that is not bad news.

38:33 That's good news, that the fullness of our salvation comes closer to us with every passing hour, but that has implications. He uses a figure from the normal daily movement of the sun, the difference between night and day. He says the night is far spent, and he's describing that time that has passed already as the nighttime. We're now in the last watch of the night. the dawn of the fullness of our salvation is about to break through. The day or the time of darkness is passing, and the time of the fullness of living in the light is at hand. Again, this metaphor is used over and over and over again in the Scriptures that by nature we are children of darkness. And the Bible uses that metaphor to describe sin, and that we love by nature, we love darkness rather than the light because our deeds are evil.

40:03 Orlando is the city beautiful until the lights go out. Downtown Orlando in the wee hours of the night has been one of the worst crime centers in the United States of America. when things happen in the darkness that don't happen in the light of day. People love darkness because it conceals us from exposure. But when we are brought into the fullness of the day, then we are known for what we are. The night, Paul says, is far spent.

40:56 The day is at hand. Therefore, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let's walk properly as in the day. not in rioting and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts. Earlier in this book, we looked in the very first chapter of the letter to the Romans, and we saw the thematic introduction to the doctrine of justification. I mentioned on that occasion that when Luther understood that through the interpretive eyes of his patron saint Augustine and understood the gospel of justification by faith for the first time, I remember I told you that Luther wrote, he says, when I saw the gospel, the gates of paradise opened and I walked through. And so we know that one of the impacts of the book of Romans in church history was that God used this epistle of Paul to awaken Luther and to bring about the Protestant Reformation. But now we come to another one of those passages where there was a young man who in defiance of his mother's Christian commitment and defiance of God lived a life of unbridled licentiousness. He had fathered a child out of wetlock. He had involved himself in the gross practices of the pagans of his day. And he was a brilliant student of philosophy, but he was as corrupt in the flesh as he was brilliant in his intellectual a human. And one day he was standing in a garden where children were playing, and they had a

43:05 refrain as they were playing a little children's game, and the refrain was simply this, tolelega, tolelega, tolelega, which means pick up and read, pick up and read. And when Aurelius Augustine heard those children's words, his eyes fell upon a large Bible that was chained, and he let the Bible just open up anywhere, and his eyes fell upon the printed page.

43:38 And here's what he read, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust, and like a lightning bolt, the Word of God pierced his heart, and this was the text used by Almighty God to convert the soul of Aurelius Augustine, whose ministry continues to this place even tonight. Not in rioting, Thank you. and drunkenness. The reference there in the text is to the practice of the pagan religion under the aegis of the goddess or the god Bacchus, who was the god of the grape, the god of the vine.

44:41 And he was the sponsor of the ancient Bacchanalia, which was an orgiistic feast involving gluttony and unbridled sexual behavior, and an intentional work to get drunk so that in the drunken stupor the pangs of conscience could be silenced and people could then engage in unbridled sin.

45:17 The Bacchanalia. That's what's in view here. And Augustine's eyes fall upon the text and it says, not in this debauchery, Aurelius, not in this kind of lifestyle, not in this kind of hedonism, not of this kind of unrestrained licentiousness, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh. An odd use of the term from which the word providence comes. Don't provide opportunities for sin. The old country preacher said, if you're trying to get over drunkenness, don't tie your horse to the post in front of the saloon.

46:19 Don't make provisions. If you struggle with sexual temptation, don't subscribe to Playboy or other such things. make provisions for human sin and weakness. Luther put it this way. He said, I can't stop the birds from flying around in the air near me, but I don't have to let them nest in my hair. That's what it means by not making extra provisions to accommodate our base desires. Instead, provide for your soul.

47:10 Put on Christ and walk as people who walk in daylight. Let's pray. Father, we thank You for this Word, for this application of really what Your love requires. And give us such a desire to please You that we would find Your law not as an abstract lists of prohibitions, but that we may see these as things that express what Your love requires and what is pleasing to You and helpful to our neighbors. Before we ask it in Jesus' name, who loved Your law more than any of us could even comprehend. Amen.