The message given at the Sunday night service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church July 24, 2022. 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.”
The fact that Jesus is the
Savior, that He allowed himself to be tortured and killed, that He took the
punishment we should get for our sins, is an incredible thing. The fact
that we can have salvation and eternal life through faith in Jesus is an
incredible thing. If we truly believe that Jesus is the Savior, we should
love Him for all that He did for us. And the way that love for Jesus is
shown is, again by doing what Jesus told us to do.
Jesus told us to do many
things, of course, but 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 gone to church for a long time, or even just
watched services on TV or online, have heard any number of pastors talk about
how we need to love each other.
Now,
obviously, it’s right. We probably all agree that we should love each
other. 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. The day after tomorrow I’m going to be doing a funeral for a good
friend about my age who suddenly died. It happens. In fact, it
seems to be happening more now. They’ve even given it a name:
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. 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.
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