By Audrey Bauman

Romans 13: 8 – 14   (NLT)

 “Owe nothing to anyone—except for your obligation to love one another. If you love your neighbor, you will fulfill the requirements of God’s law. ⁹ For the commandments say, “You must not commit adultery. You must not murder. You must not steal. You must not covet.” These—and other such commandments—are summed up in this one commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰ Love does no wrong to others, so love fulfills the requirements of God’s law.

¹¹ This is all the more urgent, for you know how late it is; time is running out. Wake up, for our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. ¹² The night is almost gone; the day of salvation will soon be here. So remove your dark deeds like dirty clothes, and put on the shining armor of right living. ¹³ Because we belong to the day, we must live decent lives for all to see. Don’t participate in the darkness of wild parties and drunkenness, or in sexual promiscuity and immoral living, or in quarreling and jealousy. ¹⁴ Instead, clothe yourself with the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And don’t let yourself think about ways to indulge your evil desires.”

These verses give us some general principles to figure out how to live a life pleasing to God.   Paul includes some of the Ten Commandments from Exodus 20 as well as an instruction from Leviticus to love your neighbour as yourself as the over-riding guideline.

I don’t think it’s all that hard to understand that we like to put ourselves first.  We don’t like to think of ourselves as selfish, but if we’re honest, that’s exactly what we tend to be like. For example, as parents, we tend to put our children first, but there are certainly times when we really resent that. I’m sure you’ve experienced those moments when your thoughts were not exactly loving and giving as you had to put aside, once again, what you really wanted to do because you had to help your children with something.   Or those times when your baby cried non-stop and you were just so tired of pacing around the house jiggling that little one on your shoulder.  Our first daughter was colicky for the first 4 months of her life.  I can remember putting her in her crib, shutting the door, leaning my head against the door and wondering why I had ever wanted children.   ‘All that fun and creativity in the classroom and the volunteer joy involved in drama and music gone out the window’ – that was the mantra that got repeated in my head as diapers, feeding, laundry, colicky screaming took over my life.

Or Paul directs us to other things that show we are self-centered – adultery, murder, stealing, coveting.  Any of those things are really attempts to get what we want at the expense of someone else.  If you think like me, you might focus on the words adultery and murder – bad things I would never do – or at least I don’t think I’d murder someone, but adultery? Tempting sometimes?  The other day as I was doing my grocery shopping, I tucked a birthday card between the side of the cart and my purse to keep it from getting crushed or damp.  As I walked out of the store, putting my wallet back in my purse, I realized that I hadn’t paid for the card.  It was out of sight as I was putting the groceries on the check-out belt.  My first thought was that it wasn’t that much money, and I spend a lot at that grocery store all the time, so just keep on walking to the car.  Then I thought about how I encourage all of us to live God centered lives with the verses we’ve been looking at in Romans, and I couldn’t believe I would think of 'stealing’ a card'.  So I did a mental slap to the head, and turned into the area where they sell lottery tickets and paid up.  It’s so easy to give into selfish motives.  (Glad writing to you keeps me on the straight and narrow!)

Or coveting.   When I was a young mom, I think I spent my whole day coveting someone or something else.  My neighbour’s baby napped for hours every morning and afternoon, and slept through the night, and hardly ever fussed.  Another friend had new living room furniture and drapes that looked sooo good.  I only had a piano - with furniture to follow sometime.  Another friend’s husband got up every night to change the baby’s diaper and bring the baby to their bed to be nursed; I don’t think Wayne ever heard the baby in the night. You know that comment in the morning?  Honey, did the baby sleep through the night?  Other friends’ husbands were home from work every day by 5:15 sharp; my husband was heading to the federation office after school.

So when I read those words that Paul wrote, I realize it’s not an easy job to “Love your neighbour as yourself”.  It really requires God’s help, and thankfully, He does offer that help through the indwelling Holy Spirit who whispers to us when we are thinking of heading the wrong way.  On a positive note, those verses also give us a measuring stick by which to live our lives.   If we run into a situation that we’re not sure how to react to, we can measure up our possible responses against these verses.  Is ‘whatever’ the loving thing to do. That’s especially helpful when dealing with the inevitable differences in opinion we meet every day.  

In the last four verses, Paul gives us another reason to live in a God pleasing way.  We don’t know when Jesus is coming again.  Every once in a while, we hear about some psychic or preacher forecasting a date for the end of the world.  But I look to what the Bible says about that:  “ But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone”.  Mark 13:32  (NASB)   However the Bible does tell us a lot about the conditions in the world near the end times, and what is happening today certainly fits into those descriptions.  But whether Jesus is coming soon, or whether our lives might end earlier than expected, both of those possibilities encourage us to take our faith seriously.

For me, there is another reason to live the way God wants me to.    Verse 13 says, “ Because we belong to the day, we must live decent lives for all to see”, and verse 14 says, “Instead, clothe yourself with the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ “.  When I get right down to it, I don’t want to be the Christian that inspired others to make fun of Christianity.  I don’t want to be known as a hypocrite.  Jesus Christ did so much for me through His life, death and resurrection, that I want to thank Him by living with and for Him.

Our song for today is All to Jesus I Surrender by Robin Mark.