Please turn in the Bible to the book of Romans at chapter 13. You can find Romans 13 on page 948 there in the Pew Bible before you. Romans 13, I'm going to read the entire chapter. And we're going to focus especially on verses 8 to 10. So Romans 13, reading the entire chapter, please give your attention to the word of God. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval. for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger, who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them. Taxes to whom taxes are owed. Revenue to whom revenue is owed. Respect to whom respect is owed. Honor to whom honor is owed. Owe no one anything, except to love each other. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 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. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. 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. The night is far gone. The day is at hand. So then, let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk properly. as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. Again, today we focus especially on verses 8, 9, and 10. Owe no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Now last week, We covered verses 1 to 7. And I said, why don't theologians talk more about civil government? They used to. But today, we're looking at verses 8 to 10. And the question here is, why don't more Christians follow God's moral law? Because there's actually a teaching out there that you will run into. that says that God's moral law has no place in the life of a Christian. And so today, I need to equip you with what this teaching is, and what it gets wrong, and what is true teaching. But I hope not just to do that. I want also for you to glory in what God has given us here, and to do it. So let us follow the text and lead up to this point. He begins in verse 8. He says, oh, no one anything. And that's very strange, because in verse 7, he said, pay to all what is owed them. So what do you mean, pay to all what is owed them, and owe no one anything? What is this supposed to mean? Well, it doesn't say that you don't owe anyone anything. It says, owe no one anything. How is it that you owe no one anything? Well, if you've paid your debt, then you owe no one anything. And so in the context of verse 7, what it is saying is, owe no one anything because you have given them what is their due. And because you've given to all what is their due, you are free. You owe no one anything. And what this does here for us is verses 1 to 7 were about rulers and subjects, and what we owe to the rulers and implicitly what the rulers owe to us. But here it broadens it and says, in fact, we owe something to everyone with whom we come in contact. What that thing is, changes from person to person, relationship to relationship, but we owe something to everyone that we come in contact with, and that is love. Whoever we come in contact with, we owe that person love. It's not directly about borrowing money here, when it says, owe no one anything, but there is a secondary way that money comes in, and that is, if you're not going to be able to pay it back, then don't borrow it. Because if you can't pay it back, you will not be showing love to that person whom you've taken of his money. That is a secondary application then to debt. The main point here, though, is for us not to be stuck or behind or you could say indebted to anyone in any sort of fashion because we have paid our debts, the main debt being to love each other. And let me immediately come up with an application. Suppose you are working on a project with others. And suppose the project hits rocky waters. It's going amiss, it has to be fixed. What is most important in that moment? It is easy to think that it's most important to fix the project. And in fact, if say a bus is coming down on somebody, it is in fact most important to fix the situation. You don't need to worry about your tone of voice. Get out of the way of the bus! If it's life and death, let us fix the problem and then worry about how we set it. But for lesser things, and most everything is lesser, for lesser things, let us remember in the moment of stress that what we owe is to love one another. So let us love one another as we fix the problem. Let us love one another in the middle of fixing the project. We have two questions. How do you know how to love? And secondly, why bother? It's much easier not to love the people around you. Love means put yourself out, it means respect, it means effort, it means caring. It's easier not to love. So how do we know how to love and why should we bother? He tells you. No one anything except to love each other for, because, The one who loves another has fulfilled the law. Why love? Because this fulfills the law. Notice that we're supposed to fulfill the law. This is supposed to motivate us to do it. This is why to love, because it fulfills the law. Now, the word fulfill can be tricky. Do we fulfill the law by loving? Does that mean that love is an alternate path to get to fulfilling the law? You don't actually fulfill the law, you love instead, and that fulfills it. Is that what it means? Or does it mean that when you fulfill the law, when you do it, then you are loving? That's the question. Is love an alternate route to fulfillment, or is it, in fact, two names for the same thing? Well, the next verse helps make that come clear. The commandments, you shall not commit adultery, murder, covet, steal. And then the other commandments are summed up in the word about loving neighbor. Now a summary, if it's well written, is not contrary to the paper that it introduces. A summary reflects the paper. It distills the paper. It's not an alternate to the paper. It instead wraps it up for you so that you can walk away and remember it. So then, it's not an alternate path, it is rather the summary of the main path. If you need more detail, you read the paper. If you need detail for how do I love, then you have to go farther into it, and you have to know the commandments. It is not an alternate way that we leave the law aside because we just love instead, and that fulfills it. No, no, no. The way to love is to fulfill the law. When you fulfill the law, then that is your love. But the question for the Christian is, why, if Jesus fulfilled the law for us, then why do I have to? Do I make Jesus redundant? Do I duplicate his work? If Jesus fulfilled it for us, then why am I supposed to fulfill it? Well, we have to think clearly right here. Jesus fulfilled the law perfectly in our place as our representative and as our savior. We will never duplicate that. We will never make that unnecessary. He kept it perfectly, and we won't. Yet, we are called to fulfill the law as far as we can. Not perfectly. Not in such a way as to earn something, to place God on our debt, as if we can say, God, now you owe me something, I have done this so well. No, not like that. We're called to fulfill the law because when we believe in Jesus, we become one with Jesus. We have a spiritual union with our Savior. This is shown to us when we are baptized in His name. It is shown to us when we eat the bread of which He said, this is my body. The sacraments show us our union with Jesus. And as Jesus fulfilled the law perfectly, and we're in Jesus, we therefore are to fulfill the law. If we turn our backs onto the opposite, you could say, give the lie, we falsify, we make our union with Jesus absurd. If we turn our backs on that which He fulfills. Secondly, we're to fulfill the law because this glorifies God. God is not glorified when His people sin. So we are to let our light shine before men. We're the salt of the earth, we must not be like others, we are to fulfill God's law. We're to do good in Jesus' name. And thirdly, we're to fulfill the law, because we're made in the image of God, and God's perfect character is reflected in His law, His moral law. And so, when we, as a people, as a community, fulfill God's law, this is what works well in human relationships. You want a good relationship? Well, this is how. This will make it work well for you, insofar as you can control it. And so this is why we seek to fulfill the law. Not perfectly, not meritoriously, not replacing Jesus' work at any point, but because we're in Jesus. And we seek to glorify God, and we seek his blessing on that, which we do. But how? How do we love somebody else? The law tells us how. Because we can get pretty far into denial. We can get pretty far into cluelessness. We can get pretty far into rationalizations. Maybe we could rationalize, you know, committing adultery is how I love my neighbor. And so the commandment comes to us and says, no, this is not how you love your neighbor. No, you do not best love the unborn child when you kill the unborn child. No, don't go there. This is a wrong rationalization of things. No, you don't show love because you need it more than the other person who owned it. No. We need because we can either be clueless, or in denial, or in rationalization. The law comes to us to specify. Let's get it clear. This is loving, and this is loving, and this is not loving. I often call this the second table of the law. If you look at those, I hope you can quickly mentally identify which commandment it is. You shall not commit an altery. The seventh. You shall not kill. The sixth. You shall not steal. The eighth. You shall not covet. The tenth. And he names four, not to exclude the other six, but simply to say, I've named enough now. You know the others. You should know the others. And so you know I mean all of them. It's a part for the whole. I don't need to say all ten. If I say four of them, I've gone far enough to let you know, and I mean the whole ten. And of course, since real love goes beyond avoiding negatives, you shall not steal, to go into actual positives, he goes on then to give the great positive, which is all summed up in, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There are some that get all bollocked up about the words, as yourself. They say, yes, but I am filled with self-loathing. So therefore, I can't love my neighbor as myself until I first love myself. And this is, OK, you're getting too American and psychological here. You take care of yourself. You're to take care of your neighbor. You take care of your body. So you take care of your neighbor's body. This is what it means. It's not about the self-esteem and so on. It's about, you know you take care of yourself, and you try to speak well of yourself, and you generally, you know, you try to protect yourself, protect your neighbor as well. So when it begins by saying, oh, no one, anything, he does not mean that we ought to be isolated islands, that we ought to be perfect Western men, rugged individualists. No, he doesn't mean that we ought to refuse help. He means, instead, we should not owe anyone anything because we are continually paying what we owe. That is, we are continually loving others as we are called to love them. And in this, we also pay our debt to God. We obey his commandments and fulfill his law. And so the application for us is going to be that if we're going to do this, we have to know his law. We need to connect it to love, understand how this is loving. And of course, understanding it, then we are to do it. But first, let's deal with the question of why some of our brothers and sisters urge the opposite, that they urge that we are not under law but under grace. That's in this very book, Romans 6.14, that therefore the moral law has no place in the Christian life. I need to acquaint you with this teaching so that when you run into it, you can recognize it. you can reject it, and hopefully you can respond winsomely and effectively to it. All right, what is the name for this teaching that God's moral law has no place in the life of the Christian or no place in the Christian pulpit? The word is antinomianism. I'm sorry, that's the word. You'll remember it better if you say it. Let's break it in three. Anti-nomian-ism. Anti-nomian-ism. All right, now what does that mouthful mean? Well, nomos is law in Greek. So it's anti-law-ism. Only they gave it a more dressed-up name. Anti-nomian-ism. And anti-nomian-ism has its verses. The law was a tutor to bring us to Christ. You are not under law, but under grace. The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. And the antinomians get one very important thing correct. We are saved by God's grace alone. We lay hold of God's grace by faith alone. Jesus is the Savior. And I don't get what Jesus has done by working, but by believing in Jesus. And Jesus doesn't bring me to believe in Him because of anything that I did or that He saw that I would do. It is by His grace alone. So it is absolutely correct that our keeping of the moral law has no place in our forgiveness, no place in our justification. But why did Jesus save us? He saved us so that we would be His own people, that we would reflect His character, that He would renew us in the image of God. He saved us so that we would love our neighbor as ourselves. You can get this in Ephesians 2, 8, 9 and 10. Ephesians 2, 8 and 9 say, for by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that's not of yourselves, it's the gift of God. not as a result of work, so that no one would boast. For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, that God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." You'll notice, good works are a part of the Christian life. They're not the cause, they're the effect. And so the moral law of God, it's not how you start, You must come to God asking Him for forgiveness for your sins that you have and that you will not work off. And then when He renews you after His image, He then tells you how to live the rest of the life that you have, however long that is. If you're the thief on the cross, it's not long. If you're a child of this congregation, it's probably long. But we are called in Him to do good work. So our law-keeping is no part of our justification. It is part of our Christian life. It's what we're saved to do. So let's go through the various arguments for antinomianism. And I hope you can quickly see why they are wrong. The first one I hope you never hear, because this one is not even Christian. The teaching that says the soul matters and the body doesn't. So therefore, what you do in your body doesn't matter. This one is false both in the premise and in the conclusion, because your body does matter. Look back at Romans 12, verses 1. I appeal to you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Which is your spiritual worship? The body matters. So, never mind the conclusion, the premise is wrong. This is a Gnostic heresy. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. That is why the body will be raised, and this way we will be restored to the very good state in which we were created, body and soul. So, that one isn't even Christian. Certainly the body matters. Now a second more seemingly Christian argument. God doesn't see my sin. When he looks at me, he sees Jesus. Therefore, what I do doesn't matter. Has anyone here ever heard something along these lines? Yeah, some people here have heard something along these lines. Now, this one begins with something. There is a sense in which God sees Jesus and not our sin. Let's not go too far with that, though, because God is omniscient, and he does know everything that is happening. But to refute this, let's just listen to Jesus. Jesus often said, blessed are those who hear the word of God and do it. Yes, Jesus calls us to do it. And so we have this exhortation in verses 8 to 10. We have the following exhortation in verses 11 to 14. The hour has come for you to wake from sleep. Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Clearly there, what we do matters. Argument three. We don't need the moral law because we have the Holy Spirit. And it says in 2 Corinthians 3, the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Well, it does say that in 2 Corinthians 3. It is saying that the new covenant in Jesus is superior to the old covenant in Moses. But that doesn't answer the question about the place of the moral law in our lives. Here, it's repeated for us. Us, the Church, it is repeated right here in Romans 13, given to us, told, this is what you've got to do. This is how we live this life. And it says in 1 Corinthians 14, the spiritual person will acknowledge that what I write, what I write is the Lord's commandments. It says in 1 Corinthians 4, you must learn not to go beyond what is written. And so, despite the power of that little verse, the letter kills, we still have plenty of letters we are to read and to follow. How do we live this life? The Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures, and the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. And if we want to know what the Holy Spirit is saying to us, we find it out in the Scriptures that the Spirit inspired. Argument number four. The Ten Commandments are from another dispensation. That was the dispensation of law. We are under the dispensation of grace. Anybody heard one of those before? Yes, various hands go up. All right, look back at Romans 3. Romans 3 is what I read earlier about how no one will be justified by the works of the law. And yet, look where it goes. Romans 3.31 says, do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means. On the contrary, we uphold the law. Or in 1 Corinthians 6, he says, do not be deceived, neither thieves, nor swindlers, nor fornicators. And he goes on with a long list of sins. And he says, we'll inherit the kingdom of God. He has grace there. He says, such were some of you, but you were washed. You were forgiven. You were justified. But if we would be washed, we must forsake the sins. We're not to continue in them. He says, such were some of you, not such are some of you. Yes, the law tells us what it is that must be forsaken. In argument five, all we need... Another bad argument. All we need is for love to be our motive. If love is your motive, then you can't go wrong. Answer, sure you can. Of course you can. Because of our cluelessness, or because of our denial, or because of our ignorance in various ways, Sure, we can say we're acting in love, and perhaps in some muddled way we are, but if what we're doing is not actually something beneficial to the neighbor, as God defines beneficial, then it's not good enough. Right motive is necessary, but not sufficient. You have to be moved by love, but you need something else beyond that. You actually have to be doing what is good for them. So to sum this up, the idea that I have been attacking for the last eight minutes is called antinomianism, the idea that the law, the nomos, has no place in the Christian life. It is wrong because the same one who said, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, is also the one who said, if you love me, keep my commandments. That's Jesus. Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. And so we have the Ten Commandments. Four of them repeated here to indicate that they are all still valid for us. And I thought it's necessary, since the teaching is out there, to equate you with it, particularly the college students who are going to be hopefully rubbing shoulders with many other Christians. And that is a very good and beneficial thing. But when you come across this one, I want you to be able to have some helpful way of answering that one. Now beyond that, let us glory in what is true and do it. He's telling us here that to love rightly, we need to follow God's moral law. How wonderful of God to spend time telling us what real love looks like. We have so many bad examples. We can certainly be in so much denial about what our real motives are. How good of God to come and to speak to us. The wonderful love of God here is shown as he repeatedly tells us what is good. And the fact that there are summary statements, very brief summaries of what is good, doesn't erase the detail. He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? But to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. That's another summary. It doesn't erase the detail. It just helps you to get the whole big picture in mind. Because as you go through life with many decisions that don't exactly fit into the commandments, how are you going to know what to do? Well, the summaries help give you guidance for that. So our part is, if we're going to love rightly by doing the moral law, we need to know what it is. This is a big part of why we read the Ten Commandments so often, that we ought to all know them. I encourage you to know them all by heart. I encourage you, from time to time, to read through the Shorter Catechism and the Larger Catechism as they talk about each commandment. Shorter Catechism is around 40 to 80. Larger Catechism, it's around 80 to 150. They've got a whole bunch of different questions and answers. What does it mean to keep the first commandment? What does it mean to break the first commandment? What does it mean to keep the second commandment? What is required in the second commandment? What is forbidden in the second commandment? It goes into that further detail so that we can know it better. Secondly, of course, we need to connect it to love. Because if we don't perceive how these commandments show love, then we haven't really gotten them rightly yet. And as we meditate, we also have to keep in mind what is waking and what is light. Jesus said, you need to remember. He said, it is not good when you're keeping the small and you're breaking the big. Let's start with the big. Let us love mercy and do justice. Let us do these main things that are there. And finally, beloved, let us go out and do it. It is not good to have knowledge without. ensuing action. Let us, in fact, love our neighbor and go and do likewise. And as we do this, let's remember the antinomian's concern. However well you do this, you will not be justified by your law-keeping. You will be justified by Jesus' law-keeping. You are saved by grace alone through faith. But the faith that justifies is never alone in our life with no evidence that it's there. If the faith that justifies is in us, it spills out of us as our faith works through love. And so it says, God has prepared these good works beforehand for us to walk in them. Notice this also. At the beginning of chapter 12, he started this new section in the book, where he turns from telling us how God has saved us, he starts telling us how then we are to live. And at the beginning of chapter 12, he said, devote yourself to God's service. Present your bodies to God as living sacrifices. That is, love God with all your heart and soul. And here, towards the end of this part of the book, he says, and, the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Notice how the apostle follows his master, follows the Lord Jesus Christ, in showing us what is the sum of the commandments. Let us pray together. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you are gracious and loving. Help us, Lord, never to take this for granted, but ever to thank you that you are full of mercy and love. And help us, Lord, to reflect that same love in the way that we live our lives, not in blindness, not in cluelessness, not in self-justification as we pursue our own ends. But help us, Lord, to walk as Jesus walked, to be moved by His Spirit. We pray, Lord, for our relationships, beginning with those closest to us. Help us, Lord, with husband and wife with parent and child, with brother and sister, to show your love day by day. And help us, Lord, also to love whomever you bring into our path. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.