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| “Love does no harm to a neighbor.” |
| —Romans 13:10a |
Whatever diminishing percentage of people in the world who actually believe in eternity—and possibly care about getting there—spend most of their time trying to follow a set of rules set forth by their religion. That’s the one thing that totally sets Christianity apart from all other religions: there really are no rules.
If you believe you’re a Christian and are shocked by that statement, well, I’m not at all surprised. But, it’s true. There is absolutely, positively nothing we can do to earn our way into heaven. That’s because God has done it all without us.
If God has chosen us to belong to Him—and we wouldn’t have any interest in Him whatsoever if He hadn’t chosen us—then He has poured His love into us, sent His one and only Son, Jesus, to die for us, raised Jesus from the dead to secure our eternal home in heaven, and placed His Holy Spirit within us to guide us along the pathway He has laid out before us.
So, you see it’s not up to us. God has done it all. There are no rules!
What’s that you say? What about free will?
Oh, we have free will all right. We can choose to follow the pathway God has laid out for us, or we can choose not to follow it. But, we will be much happier, more fulfilled, and more at peace if we decide to bend our free will to God’s perfect will for us.
With these truths out on the table, we can finally understand what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote the words found in Romans 13:9-10:
The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
Love fulfills the Law. If we allow God-breathed love to flow through us and out into a needy world, we will become startlingly good and amazingly “well-behaved” people. Not because we’re trying to win God’s favor. But, because the only logical, reasonable, intelligent response to God’s love is to become instruments of His love in a very needy world.
If we’re trying to win God’s favor by being “good people” we need to stop. By ourselves we can never become good enough.
But we can become tuned in vessels of God-breathed love. And, if we allow that to happen, we can help change the world.
