The Time Is Now

This is the morning message given in the United Methodist churches of the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, April 18, 2021.  The Bible verses used are Romans 13:8-14.

            The definition of a Christian is someone who believes Jesus Christ is the Savior, the divine Son of God.  And you think, well, duh.  You really went out on a limb with that one, didn’t you, pastor?

            But here’s the thing.  If we truly believe in Jesus Christ as the Savior, as the divine Son of God, we need to do more than just make that statement.  We need to do what Jesus told us to do.  Jesus says that a couple of times in John, Chapter Fourteen.  “If you love me, keep my commands.”  “Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me.”  

If we truly love Jesus, if we truly believe Jesus is the Savior, we need to do what Jesus told us to do.  And while Jesus told us to do many things, the main things he told us to do have to do with love.  He said the two most important commandments are that we love God and that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  Jesus told us to love even our enemies.  The last time he spoke to the disciples before his arrest, he told them he was giving them a new commandment:  “love one another”.  They were to love others as Jesus loved them.

That’s a pretty high standard.  To love people as much as Jesus loves them.  Because Jesus loves completely and unconditionally.  That’s what we’re supposed to do, too.

We don’t, of course.  I mean, sometimes we do.  But a lot of times we don’t, too.  It’s hard.  And it’s not just a problem we have.  It’s a problem Jesus’ earliest followers had, too.  That’s why so many of Paul’s letters, and the other letters we have in the New Testament, talk about love so much:  because we have a very difficult time loving to the extent we should.

The Apostle Paul, in the part of his letter to the Romans that we read today, writes about love.  He says that all the commandments--“You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” all of them--can be summed up in the statement “love your neighbor as yourself”.  

Paul calls love a debt, a debt that’s always outstanding and can never be fully paid.  In other words, no matter how much love we give, we always owe more.  We never reach a time when we’ve loved enough, when we don’t need to give any more love.  Love is always owed to everyone.

But you know, you’ve heard all this before.  There’s certainly nothing new or profound about it.  Those of you who’ve been going to church for a long time, you’ve heard any number of pastors stand here and talk about how we need to love each other.

And it’s not that it’s wrong.  I mean, we probably all agree with it.  But, because we’ve heard it all before, there’s nothing new or exciting about it.  Nobody’s sitting out there going, “Hey!  Did you hear that!  Paul says we should love each other.  He says we should always give more love to everyone!  That’s amazing!”  The reaction, when we hear stuff like this, is more likely to be “yeah, yeah, yeah.  We get it.  We should love each other.  We know.”  It’s something we’ve heard over and over and over again. 

And that was true back in Paul’s time, too.  No one reading or hearing Paul’s letter to the Romans was thinking “What?  We should love each other?  What a concept!”  People knew that one of the main things about the followers of Jesus was that they were supposed to love each other.  There was nothing new about it then, either.

But what there was in Paul’s time is something there is in our time:  there’s a kind of complacency about it.  In theory, we might agree that we always owe more love than we can give, and so we should always try to love more and more.  In practice, though, I suspect most of us feel we love just about enough.  Now, that may not apply to everyone.  Maybe you are constantly trying to love more and more.  Maybe you are always trying to increase the love you give.  I hope so.  That’s an awesome thing to do.

But a lot of us are not really doing that.  And again, that was true in Paul’s time, too.  And so Paul tries to fight that sense of complacency.  He tries to create a sense of urgency about our need to give love.  He says we need to do this now.  Immediately.  Don’t wait.  Don’t think we’ve already done enough.  He says, “The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”

Think about that.  “Our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”

It seems to me there are a couple of ways we can think about that statement.  One of them is to believe that the time is near at which Jesus will come again.  And while I’m not making a prediction, Jesus said several times that we need to live with an awareness of that possibility.  He told us that we don’t know when the day will come, and so we need to be ready all the time.  And so, we need to increase the love we give now.  We need to love others more and better and more fully and more consistently now.  We should not be complacent about it.  We should not put it off until some later time.  We don’t know that a later time will come.  The time to keep working to pay that debt of love is now.

But you know, most of us are complacent about Jesus coming again, too.  Again, in theory, we agree that Jesus could come again at any time.  And some of us even think it could be soon.  But very few of have changed our lives in anticipation of that.  Very few of us have thought, “I’ve got to show more love to people.  I’ve got to love more fully and more consistently, because Jesus might come back at any time.”

So, that leads us to the other way to think about Paul’s statement.  We may believe that Jesus won’t come for hundreds of years, but none of us is going to live that long.  If Jesus does not come in our lifetime, all that means is that the day will come when we go to meet him.  And we need to be ready for that day, too.

None of us knows when that day will come.  And sometimes we try to be complacent about that, too.  Especially when we’re young.  We think, well, yes, of course, I’m going to die someday.  But it’s not going to happen any time soon.  I’ve got plenty of time.

But we don’t know that.  Every day there are young people who die, sometimes without warning.  My first boss, when I worked in Pierre, died suddenly at age thirty.  It happens.  Every day someone, somewhere goes to bed with all kinds of plans for the next day and simply does not wake up again, at least not on earth.  

I’m not saying that anyone should be obsessed with the idea of death.  But we do need to live our lives with an awareness of it.  We need to recognize that we are going to die, and that we need to have our life in order before we do.  And the most important thing about getting our life in order is to get our relationship with Jesus Christ in order.  So if, as Jesus said, the way to our faith in him is to keep his commands, and if his main command is that we love each other as he loves us, then we’d better get to work on loving others now.

And I say get to work on it because it’s not an easy thing to do.  Loving fully and consistently is not something that comes naturally to us.  Love is a part of human nature, no question about it.  But so are things like selfishness and arrogance and pride.  We have it in us to love as Jesus loved.  But it’s not always easy to bring it out.

How do we do it?  By staying as close to Jesus as possible.  Or, as Paul put it, “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Spend some time every day thinking about Jesus.  Whether that’s through prayer, or through reading the Bible, or through taking some quiet time to focus on Jesus, or however we do it, we need to do it.  There are lots of ways to do it, and any way that works for you is a good way.  But we need to do it.  

And we need to do it consistently, every day.  If we’re going to love fully and consistently, we need to stay close to Jesus fully and consistently.  We cannot do this by ourselves.  But if we stay close to Jesus, if we feel God’s Holy Spirit in our hearts, we can.  Not perfectly, because humans never do anything perfectly.  But we can do it.  Jesus would not have told us to do something that was impossible.  With Jesus’ help, we can do this.

But the time to do it is now.  As Paul says, the hour has come for us to wake up from our slumber.  The time to love fully and completely and consistently is now.

Let’s show our love for Jesus by keeping his command to love one another.  And you know what?  If enough of us do that, we just might make the world a lot better place.