The Love Debt

In the latter half of Romans 13 Paul moves from discussing how believers should interact with earthly authority, into how we ought to interact with all people. He goes as far to make the claim that we owe love to other people (v. 8). This opens up two potential lines of thought for rejection:

1. There are lots of people who’ve never done anything for me, so it doesn’t make sense for me to owe them anything. 
2. Some people have done things that have hurt me, and it makes even less sense that I’d owe them a debt of good when I have received bad things from them. 

Those rejections miss the reason why we’d owe love to one another. The Bible says we owe this love to each other because we have been forgiven a great debt of our own. John Piper puts it simply when he says, “this debt of love that we owe to everyone did not come about because they gave us anything. It came about because Christ has given us everything when we were no more deserving of his love than anyone is deserving of our love.” This shows how the love debt described in Romans 13 is reflective of the debt Christ paid on our behalf on the cross. Even though we are not deserving, He loved us still. 

It can feel abstract to talk about love as a debt, but this is something I’d say we’ve all seen play out relationally in our own lives. I’ve lived this reality countless times through the grace my believing friends have extended to me. We tend to be well acquainted with our own sin, and one thing I see in myself is a propensity towards defensiveness, especially as a protection mechanism against shame. When I am constantly doing this dance of pulling away and hiding in friendships, it sows distance between myself and the people nearest to me. There are more times than I can count where friends have pushed through my withdrawal to extend love and draw me near in our friendship again, even though they were bearing the burden of the distance I imposed. Both in friendship and far more significantly in relationship with God, love is not extended from a place of naivety about my character (or yours). With a clear and deep understanding of our lack of merit, with full knowledge that we deserve neither nearness nor relationship with Him, God looks upon us unflinchingly with love. It is through that profound love, not merely begrudging tolerance, that we are called and enabled to extend real love to others.

Paul continues to describe how this love we owe to one another is a fulfillment of the law (v. 8 & 10).  In Matthew 5 Jesus speaks on the same idea, saying that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. This fulfillment is seen in Christ’s perfect obedience to every command - the absence of sin in his life. Paul is getting at our call as believers to imitate Christ in obedience. Love “does no wrong to a neighbor” and therefore would lead to an absence of the actions we are commanded to not partake in (v.10). 

Once we see the love debt we owe other people and understand how that love fulfills the law, the next question we ask is how do we do this? Everything described above can only be achieved through “put[ting] on the Lord Jesus Christ'' as Paul states in verse 14. All ability to resist the temptations from versus 9 and 13 - covetousness, sexual immorality, quarreling, etc. - comes to us through our union with Christ as believers. In Christ we “have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Romans 6:18). 

It’s important to emphasize how obeying some moral code doesn’t earn us higher favor with God. We are already delighted in, wholly and completely loved before we act. The love of God is not a reward for our obedience; it is instead a free gift, worthy of rejoicing over, that enables us to “through love serve one another” (Galatians 5:13). It is a beautiful reality that obedience in love comes through union with Christ. The same God who calls us to obey is the one who enables us to do so. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes the exchange as a father giving their child money to buy the father a birthday present. Of course the father is delighted to receive the gift, but he wasn’t really receiving anything “that was not in a sense his own already”. God responds similarly to us, genuinely delighting in our obedience while knowing fully that our desire and ability to obey comes from Him. 

When we look back at Romans 8 we remember the truth that nothing can separate us from the love of God. It is from that reality that we are able to endure in love when doing so is costly. It would be dishonest to say that I feel like loving people who my flesh would say don’t deserve it. More often than not those who are closest to us, whose sin we experience most directly, are the people we find ourselves resenting rather than loving. Miraculously, through our union with Christ, we are no longer chained by a need to “gratify the desires of the flesh” but rather are being changed to look and live differently (v. 14) - for our lives to reflect ever more clearly the richness and transformational nature of God’s love. Let’s be encouraged by this truth today: that all God asks from us He equips us to do, by the nearness and power of His love.