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What does it mean to love someone else? Often we think about love in terms of a feeling, a desire. We talk a lot about people being in love and recapturing love.
When the Bible calls us to love one another, he’s not talking about this at all– but by a continued choice to act in the best interests of another person, in honor, preferring one another.
When Jesus died on the cross, He called us to follow him. He showed the ultimate form of love– the sinless dying for the sinner, for the enemy. As we are in this time of the church, awaiting Christ’s return, Paul reminds us to keep track of the time in which we live.
“You know the time,” he says. He means that we know the context we have been called to live in. It’s a context in which Christ has ascended but not yet returned. His Commission has been given but not yet been rescinded or completed. Hence it is a context in which we have sacred duties to fulfill. There is a certain kind of life God calls us to live here and now. The alarm bell rings to wake us, to stir us, to provoke us to consider whether we are living in the way God has commanded us.
To convey this sense of urgency, Paul offers a little illustration. “The night is far gone; the day is at hand.” We are meant to imagine that we have endured a long night, but finally daytime is almost here. And when the day comes, so will the end, for when the sun breaks across the sky, Christ will return. And already the sky is beginning to brighten and the first birds are beginning to stir. This means that the time is short. There is a sense of urgency—a sense of “now or never.”
So what is this urgent task? What is it that God means for us to do? By looking at the immediate context we can see that the task is love—to love others in the way Christ has loved us. “Love one another with brotherly affection … Outdo one another in showing honor … Owe no one anything, except to love each other … Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” In other words, we are to believe and internalize all the glorious doctrine that has been taught in the book of Romans, and to apply it to loving other people. The gospel calls us to love with all the fervency with which Christ loved us. We are to make it the goal of our lives to bring glory to God by doing good to the people he has made in his image. A life committed to the doctrine of Romans is a life marked by love.
The Night is Far Gone
You do not have control of yesterday, and life is a vapor. Forgetting what went before and pressing forward, how will your life look from her on out? How will you show love, first to those closest to you, and then to your neighbor, and then to the ends of the earth?
