- Helping each other grab hold of the abundance God has for us is not a bad description of the Christian life.
When life gets confusing – as if often does – and you are not quite sure what to do next, love is not a bad next option.
For one of my discipleship groups this week, we found ourselves in the last half of Romans 13. That latter part starts off with a verse that has been hanging in my house for 42 years. When my wife and I were married, a family friend asked her what verse we would like to have rendered in calligraphy and framed for our home. We chose Romans 13:8 – “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.” It’s been hanging on our bedroom wall ever since.
This morning as we pondered that precept, one group member remarked, “We ought to write a book that argues against “debt-free living” – taking on a Dave Ramsey precept. Oh, debt-free is great for your finances, perhaps, but we ought to view ourselves as continually in debt when love is the challenge. “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another…”
Indebtedness forevermore.
The word love crops up five times in the surrounding verses. Love one another, love your neighbor twice, love does no wrong, love is the fulfillment of the law. Apparently Paul, writing to the Roman Christians, wanted them to know that biblical love could see them through any situation they encountered…even when surrounded by extremely unloving and unbiblical ways of living. Love was to be the clarifying thought and action of their lives.
This love shouldn’t be confused with our Western society’s conception of the same. We are immersed in a culture that prefers to feel its way through every concept. One of our discipleship group participants, who is working on a doctorate in philosophy right now, brought up the intellectual giant Thomas Aquinas. “Aquinas,” he explained, “defined love as ‘to will the good of the other.’…intellectually, you understood what love required and then you did it.” You willed it. Notice that feelings weren’t particularly necessary to that equation.
One guy in our group runs a Christian coffee house. Noticing its success, people have approached him, wanting to investigate the business model. My friend says, “Love.” That’s not the answer most people are after, but my buddy insists it is true. “We really love the people who come in here, we want to listen, we want to love them. It works.”
Another one of the guys chimed in. He works with a Christian advocacy group that tries to impact his particular state legislature with Judeo-Christian values. “We view our job as going to the State Capitol and turning the lights on. When we do that, the roaches flee.” Read Romans 13 to the end and you discover that light means putting on Jesus Christ. And that light is love.
We always end our group by praying for one another over the discoveries we’ve made from Scripture during that hour together. This time, we prayed that we would be men who recognize love as a debt, men of loving willpower, men with listening and compassionate ears—men who would turn on the light of love in every room we enter this week.
George Eliot once asked, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” But “less difficult” is not really a Christian goal in light of Jesus’ exhortation to “deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Him.”
“More abundant” better expresses the objective. And helping each other grab hold of the abundance God has for us is not a bad description of the Christian life—or of the kind of men we were praying to become.
Matt Friedeman
