The debt we owe

Our culture is toxically individualistic, it craves rights without responsibilities, profit without production, treasure without the toil. It looks for success in life without the strain of labour. The rights people have, the profits they gain, the treasure they find, and the success they enjoy are not then used to bless, help, and encourage others but rather to do the bare minimum required - if that! People’s word is not their bond. They say one thing and do another. They do not seek the advantage of their brother or sister, they are more likely to take advantage of them. People are as and more likely to be characterised by Sadism, the love of inflicting pain on others, than they are sacrifice, the enduring of pain for others. Other people’s generosity - of money, time, or some other precious resource - is abused with impunity and millennials in particular clamour for more and more without ever contemplating where the more is going to come from and to what ultimate effect other than the temporary placating of their own insatiable demands.

Individualism has brought with it sentimentalism, that you cannot love unless you feel something that the world calls love. That you cannot love against your inhibitions, your scruples, your preferences. This is because the love that the world primarily envisions is the Eros love of sexual attraction and romance. The Bible gives us a deeper love, an agape love that in Christ creates community where there would otherwise be chaos. Christian love is not born out of sentiment but out of salvation. It is not a feeling that you can check in and out of like a hotel but it must be a fact that you settle down into and make your home.

One of my observations is that there is probably no generation that is crying out for this kind of familial, deep love in the church more than the millennial generation. They have accurately enough made a diagnosis that something is lacking in the chapel-going culture of yesteryear. And yet their prognosis leaves much to be desired. It as though recognition of the problem is enough for some, but we also need a remedy for the problem - and such a remedy will not just mystically materialise out of everyone’s loveless misery.

I fear that far too many, especially those of the millennial generation, want the blessings and benefits of "love” and “community" without putting in the hard work to make it happen. They want to be served, not to serve and need reminding that church isn’t about them, it is about Christ and his people. They don't feel stirred in any way by church life perhaps because they aren’t really stirring other people up to love and good works in church life (Hebrews 10:24-25). Beyond that, the vision they have of Christian community is skewed anyway - for a lot, it's like they expect everyone to be likeable, low-maintenance, have fun personalities, and to be spiritual social butterflies, always hanging out with similarly spiritual people that they like, get along with, and actually want to be with. They mislabel uniformity (which is easy enough to find in cults) as "community" and give up when what they get is not what they want or expect, when they find that the love needed of them might actually cost something.

Of course such mindsets are fuelled by unbiblical approaches to church that invite people to either a show or a social instead of equipping them to serve. Concert Christianity won’t help, nor will some sort of holy hipster Coffee-shop Christianity - appealing to sub-cultural cliques instead of exalting the Saviour Christ will ultimately create loveless consumers not loving Christians. Spiritual leadership, not showmanship, is required, that prayerfully and pastorally works toward a more responsive membership bound by intentional relationship.

Intentional, countercultural, sacrificial, familial, intentional love in the church can only be founded on God’s love for us in Christ. Intentional, because “God proves his love for us.” Countercultural, in that Christ reveals another way to God than flawed ultimately failing sinful human attempts at law-keeping, a way made “while we were still sinners”. Sacrificial, because the cost of revealing God’s love was “Christ died”, satisfying the righteous demands of eternal justice. Familial, because though we were sinners and while we were still sinners, Christ died “for us” (Romans 5:8).

In the New Testament letter of Paul to the Romans, the first eleven chapters expound the mercies of the righteous God, but with chapter 12 Paul begins to show how one should rightly respond to those mercies. At the heart of this portion of the letter is the command to love.

“Owe no one anything, except to love each other”, Paul says (Romans 13:8). Love is a perpetual debt. For recipients of God’s love in Christ there can be no appropriate time at which to stop loving. There will never be a point in time at which you can rightly say you have loved enough.

You’ve got to keep on loving, “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.” Love is a prescribed duty. In the same way that in the most reductionist sense of verse 8, you must pay back what is owed, you are obligated, indeed commanded to love.

But this love is also a powerful desire. Paul’s urges his readers to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” The more you think about, imitate, and give to Jesus, the less inclined you will be to serve yourself. Making “no provision” is refusing to keep that little slice for yourself but saying, “No, Jesus takes the whole cake.” And when you give that whole cake to Jesus, you might find he cuts you a big fat slice. But once you start slicing away you find that there’s not much cake left, certainly not one that’s pretty enough to give.

Christian love is compelled by a greater desire than “the desires of the flesh.” Would you rather sleep or be saved? Would you rather walk forever in darkness, or live in the light? Do you want your life to be one long, unsatisfying pointless orgiastic experience of unbridled sexuality or do you want to pursue a higher satisfaction? Would you rather forever be quarrelling and eaten up by jealousy or discover kindness and contentment? Jesus brings what the Puritan author described as “the expulsive power of a new affection.” There’s no room for the other stuff now.

Ours is a culture all too used to getting, and despite its patronising colonialist pretensions, knows very little of what it means to really and truly give. Even when it comes to giving back, it is at best stingy and at worst completely negligent. But when Paul says “Owe no one anything” he is saying “leave no tax, no revenue, no debt unpaid, no authority disrespected, no dignitary dishonoured, no labourer unrewarded, no kindness unanswered, no service disregarded.” When he says “Owe no one anything, except to love” he is not saying “get to a point where you can live without owing anyone anything” but rather “live with a mindset that says ‘I owe everything’!”

The above is from a sermon I preached on Sunday, 04 March 2018, at Grace Baptist Church Wood Green (www.gracebaptistchurch.org.uk)