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"Fulfilling the Law" PRAY Several years ago pop singer Tina Turner belted out a best selling hit single entitled “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Remember that song? “What’s love got to do with it?” she asked. “What’s love but a second hand emotion?” That was back in 1984, if you can believe it. Well, according to our texts for today, both John and Paul say love has a lot to do with it. As Christians, love has everything to do with the way we live our lives. Jesus said the entire law can be summed up in the dual commands to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves. Paul reminded the Romans (and us) that the commandments that deal with how we relate to people, commandments concerning adultery, murder, stealing, coveting, and the like, are summed up in the admonition to, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Paul echoes the teaching of Jesus when he writes, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” This statement is so important that Paul says it twice. In verse 8 Paul says, “The one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Then in verse 10 he says, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love is a continuous theme of the Bible. Throughout our history, Jews and Christians have relied on the steadfast love of God to sustain us in good times and in bad. The passage Brenda read was from the letter we call First John. Perhaps no other disciple better understood the significance and magnitude of God’s love for us expressed through Jesus Christ than did John. It is a dominant theme of his Gospel. John was so amazed, so over-whelmed by Jesus’ great love for him that he often referred to himself as the “beloved disciple.” In the fourth chapter of First John, the beloved disciple called on the Church to love one another in response to God’s great love for us. We talk about it. We sing about it. Perhaps no word is more popular among Christians than this one word, love. We proclaim without hesitation that God is love! We believe that as we allow Christ to come into our lives, to live in our hearts, that God’s love will fill us and flow through us. We believe it is the love of Christ alive in us that enables us to love and forgive others – even to love our enemies. Oh, we may be able to say all the right words. We can pray all the right prayers. We can even join our voices in sweet melodies. Yet in the day to day reality of living with people, loving can be difficult and sometimes it may seem impossible. One of the problems is with the word itself. In our language the word “love” has a wide range of meanings. I love my wife and I love our dogs. I love my job, and my children, and my car. I love pizza and blackberry cobbler and corn on the cob. (Not all at the same time, mind you.) I love all kinds of things, and I love all sorts of people, but I love them in dramatically different ways. But we have only one word to express this complicated emotion that is so multifaceted. And that brings me to the second problem we have understanding love. We tend to automatically connect love with emotion – with a feeling. Certainly any genuine expression of love involves the emotions. If that were not true the book shelves wouldn’t be filled with romance novels and Hollywood wouldn’t produce so many romantic movies. Romantic love is the subject of more books, poems, and expressions of art than probably any other human experience. But there is more to love than romantic love. Our culture seems to promote the idea that love is something that we either have or don’t have. Love is something you can fall into and fall out of. According to Tina Turner it’s “a second-hand emotion” that often leads to heartbreak. Every year countless marriages end in divorce because people fall out of love. The spark is no longer there, the flame has gone out, and couples seem to think that nothing can be done to rekindle it. The popular idea of love creates dramatic expectations about how it will be for people in love. But the testimony of the Bible is that love is not something outside our control. We are not subject to the whims of some mythical Cupid, wildly shooting arrows at us. According to the Bible, love is both practical and doable. The Biblical understands love to be more of an attitude, more of a mind-set, than it is an emotion. The decision to love is a choice. It is a choice we make every day. As Christians, it is even more than a choice. It is a requirement. Jesus commanded us to love. In John 13:34, Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. When Jesus commanded us to love, he wasn’t talking about a feeling, he was talking about our behavior. Inherent in the command for us to love, is the fact that it is possible for us to obey. That means loving involves a choice we can make. It is a matter of the will. It involves behavior, choosing to do specific things that are the actions of love. This is not sentimental romantic love. As N. T. Wright says, this kind of “love will grit its teeth and act as if the emotions were in place, trusting they will follow in good time.” That is what Paul is getting at when he says love is the fulfilling of the law. He doesn’t mean we don’t have to keep the commandments any longer. The commandments that God handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai will always be valid and binding. What Paul is saying is that if we truly put God first in our life, if we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and if we love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves, then the keeping of the law will be a natural result. If we want to know how to love our neighbor, we look to the commandments for guidance. We won’t do anything to cause our neighbor harm. We don’t steal, commit murder, covet, or commit adultery. We treat our neighbor, we treat all people, in the way we want to be treated. In so doing we honor God and we love all people. To be sure, I don’t think it is possible to love in the way the Bible asks us to love without the enabling grace of God. Love is not something that can ever be entirely the product of the human will. But our wills are involved. The job of the Spirit is to foster love within us. Our job is to cooperate with the Spirit – to work toward developing an attitude, a mind-set, of love toward others, and to translate that attitude into action – into deeds of love. Fred Craddock, one of the great preachers of the twentieth century, once said that throughout history Christianity had civilized millions, moralized thousands, and converted a few. Oh that we might all experience conversion, the conversion that comes when we surrender our hearts to Jesus and seek to follow him in the way of love. Within twenty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity had spread from an upper room in Jerusalem to the streets of Rome. Paul wrote a letter to those Christians living in Rome in which he urged them to love one another. It is interesting to note that among the ancient documents that have survived since the days of the Roman Empire, there is one letter from a Roman citizen, a pagan, a non-believer, who commented about this new sect of Christians living in Rome. “See how these Christians love one another,” he wrote. We have designated September as Open House month. We are inviting our neighbors to visit us to experience our open hearts, our open minds, and our open doors. Oh, that they might come for a visit and return home to tell their friends, “See how these Christians love one another.” AMEN!
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First United Methodist Church - Garden City, KS