Pay Up, Wake Up, Suit Up (Romans 13:8-14)

Sermon Preached November 6, 2022, Glynwood Baptist Church, Prattville Alabama.

Good morning! Please open your Bibles to Romans 13.

This week, I was in Stacey’s office, and she was helping me try to come up with a title for the message. I had these three points, of pay up, wake up, and suit up, but I couldn’t find anything to kind of tie them together. And as you can see, I kind of took the lazy way out and just made those three points the title. But while we were trying to come up with something, Stacey just typed those three phrases into the Google search bar. And what came up over and over again was this quote from a woman neither one of us had ever heard of named Regina Brett:

“No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up, and never, ever give up” –Regina Brett

I loved the quote, but I wanted to find out more about Regina Brett before I put her out there as an example or a role model for you guys. I wanted to make sure she wasn’t some Wiccan high priestess or whatever.

It turns out, she’s a really cool lady with a great testimony. She was raised Catholic with an abusive father and a distant mother, became an alcoholic with an unplanned pregnancy in high school, survived one marriage falling apart, got her life together through a series of spiritual retreats and devotional reading, became a newspaper columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer; remarried, and survived breast cancer. In 2006 she wrote a column called “Fifty Lessons From Life’s Little Detours,”  which made her a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for newspaper commentary, became a bestselling book, and launched a podcast. This quote is Life Lesson #46. But here are some of the other ones:

• Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
• When in doubt, just take the next small step.
• Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
• Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
• Pay off your credit cards every month.
• You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
• Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.
• It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
• Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.
• If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.
• All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

I bring all this up because I have a strong suspicion that Regina Brett must have been reading Romans 12-13. Because a lot of her life lessons sound a whole lot like what Paul has been saying all through this section.

We are going to finish up our conversation about Romans 13 this week by talking about verses 8-14. And since we are going to go through this passage verse by verse, I won’t ask you to stand to read it all at once. Let’s pray, and then we will get into the Scripture.

[pray]

The first thing Paul talks about is the obligation to love one another. On your listening guide, we’re going to call this The Debt You’ll Never Get Out Of.

Paul says,

⁸ Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 

Now, I want to be clear about what verse 8 is NOT saying. Verse 8 is not a prohibition against borrowing, so don’t make it a Dave Ramsey prooftext. It may be make good financial sense to avoid borrowing, but you can’t really argue that from Scripture. Verse 8 is just a clever transition from verse 7. Paul has just said pay to all what is owed them— taxes to whom taxes, revenue to whom revenue, respect to whom respect, honor to whom honor.

So now in verse 8, Paul is saying that the one debt you are never going to be able to pay off is the continuing debt to love one another.

Couple of things about the Greek that Dr. Mark helped me understand better this week. Your translation might say, “Owe no one anything except the continual debt to love each other.” That’s a better translation than the English Standard Version, because “to love” is an infinitive verb. That means it is independent of time, or person, or condition. I had never seen the connection between “infinitive” and “infinity” before Mark explained it this way to me. So we are to love like Buzz Lightyear. To infinitive and beyond.  

So who are we to love? Each other? Now is that inside the church or outside the church? Because remember in Chapter 12 we talked about how In verses 9-10, Paul was talking about loving one another inside the church, and verses 14-21 were about loving people outside the church. So when Paul says, ⁸ Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law, which is it?

Here’s what’s genius: It’s both!  There are two one another’s in verse 8. The first one is the Greek allelon, which means another of the same kind. That would be loving the people who are like you—other believers, people in the church. But in the very next sentence, when Paul says “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” he switches to heteron, which is another of a different kind.

So it’s a debt that we can never stop paying, and it isn’t limited to the people who are like us. The debt of love is continual, and its universal.

You might be saying to yourself, OK, I can understand having a debt of love to people in our church. We are a family of faith, we support each other, and maybe today I have a need someone else can meet, but on another day I’ll be able to meet a need you have. I get that.

But what does it mean that I have a debt of love to someone I’ve never even met? How can I owe them anything? And the answer, is that it isn’t them that you owe. It’s God. We are to love—agape, which is self-sacrificing, Christlike love—because God first loved us. (1 John 4:19). And when we love, it is the fulfillment of the law. Verse 9:

⁹ For 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: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁰ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.

You may know this already, but just in case you don’t—the Ten Commandments are basically divided in half. The first five deal with our vertical relationship for God—no gods before Him, don’t make idols, don’t take His name in vain, remember the sabbath. Honor your father and mother.

(By the way, if you live in Prattville, you’ll never have an excuse for not remembering the first five commandments. Just think about Gin Shop Hill Road: Gods, Idols, Name, Sabbath, Honor Parents. Gin Shop. You’re welcome.)

 five, because the last five are all about our horizontal relationships—our relationships with other people. Don’t murder. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal. Don’t covet something that belongs to your neighbor. Don’t lie to or about your neighbor.

So when Jesus was asked what’s the greatest commandment, he said, I can’t just give you one. I have to give you two. First, love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. If you do that, you’ll take care of those first four commandments—the vertical relationships.

Then, if you love others like you love yourself—starting with your mother and father, then the last six commandments will fall into place. And Paul is saying the same thing in Romans. If you love your neighbor, you aren’t going to steal from them. If you love your neighbor, you aren’t going to do any wrong to them.

Love is the fulfilling of the Law, according to verse 10. Now, this statement has another layer of meaning for those who are in Christ, In the sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I’ve not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” Jesus perfectly fulfilled the law by never sinning. And then, he shed His blood on the cross as a demonstration of God’s love for us. Friends, that is a debt we can never repay. And so in a very real sense, every single person we will ever lock eyes with is a person for whom Christ died. And some of them don’t even know it. We owe it to them to share the love of Christ with them. It is a debt we will never get out of. So In the words of those great theologians from the 80’s, REO Speedwagon, we’re going to keep on loving you.

So that is the first point of the sermon this morning. You owe a debt of love to each other, so pay up.

Paul moves from talking about the debt you never get out of totalking about the Sleep we’ve all got to get up from. Look at the next two verses with me.

¹¹ 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. ¹²The night is far gone; the day is at hand.  

The word “time” is another one of those rich Greek words that’s worth camping out on. Greek has two basic words for time: chronos, which is about the chronological sequence of events, and Kairos, which is a divinely appointed moment. Kairos describes a time when God is about to break through and do something.

And that’s the word Paul uses here. He’s saying at any moment a chronos moment can become a Kairos moment. At any moment God can break through our normal everyday existence with a divine appointment—a Kairos moment that changes everything. And you don’t want to miss that. So you have to be awake. You have to be watching for those moments.

When Paul says that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed,” what does he mean? I think there’s three ways to understand this, and I think they are all true.

First, Paul is speaking prophetically. We know that Jesus is returning one day, right? And no one knows the day or the hour. But every day Jesus tarries is one day closer to the day he will come.

Second, Paul is speaking personally: The doctrine of salvation has three components: There is regeneration: that moment when a sinner repents and puts his or her faith in Christ. When people talk about when they “got saved,” they are talking about that moment of regeneration. But the Bible also talks about the ongoing process of sanctification as part of our salvation. Sanctification is our day to day becoming more like Jesus. Finally, there is glorification, which will happen in the future, either when Jesus comes back or when we die and are united with Christ. Regeneration, Sanctification, and Glorification are all part of salvation. As the early theologians put it, we have been saved, we are being saved, we will be saved. And Paul is saying that for every one of us, our ultimate glorification is nearer now than when new first believed.

But third, Paul is speaking evangelistically. This circles back to what he has been saying about the debt of love we owe everyone we meet. Understand that every single person we encounter is potentially on the verse of a Kairos moment. They are either one step closer to following Jesus, or they are one step closer to rejecting him for the last time. And it is crucial for us to wake up, to preach and teach and proclaim and exhort and urge and beg and plead with urgency.

Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed, but beloved, so is condemnation for those who won’t believe. Listen to the verse again, but this time, put the emphasis on the word “we”: Salvation is nearer to us now than when WE first believed. For those who have not put their faith in Christ, the night is far gone, the day is at hand. O, God, let there be a Kairos moment for someone today! If you are listening to this and are not a Christian, wake up, and come to Christ. If you are listening to this and you are a Christian, wake up, and tell someone about Jesus.

We need you in the game. We need you off the bench. So that brings us to the third exhortation from Romans: It’s time to suit up. Put on the clothes you’ll never grow out of! Let’s close out the chapter by reading verses 12-14:

So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.¹³ Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. ¹⁴ But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Notice that Paul says put on the armor of light. Armor is a very specific and intentional word. Not the bathrobe of light. Not the pajamas of light. Not the tuxedo or cocktail dress or cocktail dress of light. This is a reminder to the Christian that we are in a battle. Armor is what you wear when you are going to war. And the Christian is at war every minute of every day. Not against other people. Not primarily against a pagan culture, although there are elements of that. The emphasis in verse 13 is that we are at war against our own sinful nature.

So when Paul says out on the armor of light. In Ephesians 6, he will explain piece by piece what the armor is. We are to put on the belt of truth. The breastplate of righteousness, our feet shod with the gospel of peace. the shield of faith, with which we can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. We put on the helmet of salvation. That’s what protects our mind. Then, the one offensive weapon is the sword of the spirit.

And when we are suited up in the armor of light, we can do battle against all these besetting sins Paul lists in Romans 13.  

How do we make provision for the flesh? We make provision for the flesh when we don’t take sin seriously. Paul lists a lot of besetting sins that were an issue for the people of Rome— orgies, drunkenness, sexual immorality, sensuality (which doesn’t have to be sexual. It could just be living for your senses), quarreling, jealousy. So to make no provision for the flesh means you are aware of those besetting sins, and you avoid situations where they might have an open door back into your life.

• If drinking too much is a besetting sin for you, then you don’t have alcohol in your home. One of the men in our men’s bible study talked about how he had been so used to downing a six pack every Saturday while watching college football that he had to take a break from college football.
• If quarreling and rage are besetting sins for you, stop watching the news. Stop listening to talk radio.
• Maybe jealousy is a besetting sin. Get off Instagram. Get off pinterest.
• If sexual immorality is the besetting sin, and you are constantly giving in to the temptation of clicking on porn after everyone else has gone to bed, then don’t charge your phone by your bedside.
• If procrastination is your besetting sin, and you find yourself wasting hours playing games on your phone, then have someone else set a screen time password on your phone. You can set limits for every app on your phone. And if you don’t know your own password, then once your allotted time is up for the day, you’re done.

The point of all of this is that this is how we as Christians put on the armor of light. This is how we do battle with our own sin nature. Forget the culture wars. The biggest battle you face is not against culture. It’s against your carnal, sinful nature. So suit up! Get in the game. Fight.

Part of the armor of light is directing your mind to a greater affection direct your mind to the glory of Jesus. Direct your mind to Scripture. This is going to be a major focus of 2023 as we are encouraging every glynwood member to read the Bible through next year.

But maybe some of you need to put on the Lord Jesus Christ for the first time. The call in verse 14 is for you to repent and turn to Christ and trust him to save you.

Listen, when you put on Christ, you will never grow out of Him. He will never go out of style. He will always fit you perfectly.

This morning, as the musicians come back up and we enter into our time of response, can I remind you that salvation is nearer than when we first believed. Today could be your Kairos moment—your moment of spiritual breakthrough. So suit up.  Put on Christ.

Invitation.