| “Love does no harm to a neighbor.” |
| —Romans 13:10a |
Whatever the diminishing percentage of people in the world may be who actually believe in eternity—and possibly care about getting there—they seem to 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. There is no set of rules we can follow that will assure we will pass to eternal life with God when we die. That’s because God has done it all without us. He, and He alone, has made provision for saving us from the penalty for our sins.
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, God has poured His love into us by sending His one and only Son, Jesus, to assume human form, to suffer and die for us, to become raised from the dead to secure our eternal home in heaven, to ascend to heaven where Jesus now sits on the right-hand of God and makes intercession for us. Furthermore, God has placed His Holy Spirit within us to guide us along the pathway that He has laid out before us.
So, you see it’s not up to us. God has done it all. There are no rules we can follow to achieve our salvation!
What’s that you say? What about free will? Oh, we have free will all right. Once God has chosen us, 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 human 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 obediently 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.
Based on a blog originally posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2016
