Paul has just told the Roman church what they owe their government, taxes to whom taxes are owed, honor to whom honor is owed. He picks up the same word in the next sentence. 8"Owe no one anything, except to love each other." Every other debt can be paid off and closed, and this one never fully clears. Love someone today, and tomorrow you owe it again.
Paul names four of the commandments, adultery, murder, theft, and coveting, and says all of them collapse into one sentence. 9"You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Love does no wrong to a neighbor, and a person who loves the neighbor in front of him will not, in that moment, be stealing from him, lying about him, or coveting what belongs to him. Love reaches the place the law was always pointing toward and gets there from the inside.
Then Paul turns to the hour. 11"you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep." An urgency enters the passage that was not quite there a sentence ago. Salvation is nearer now than when they first believed, and every day that passes is a day closer. 12"The night is far gone; the day is at hand." Paul is describing a direction. The world these Christians woke up in was still, in a sense, nighttime, and the day they were made for was visible at its edge.
12"let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light." The two images differ. What gets cast off are works, deeds done in the dark. What gets put on is armor, built for a fight. Paul is describing a battlefield, and telling the congregation which side they already belong to.
13"Let us walk properly as in the daytime." Then he lists what does not belong there, drunkenness and sexual immorality, and also 13"quarreling and jealousy." The list moves from the obviously scandalous, drunkenness and sexual excess any Roman citizen would have called disreputable, to something quieter and easier to miss, quarreling and jealousy. A church that has cleaned up its loud sins can still be full of the same self-centered flesh in a more respectable coat. Paul names both, because darkness does not only arrive loud.
Then the verse that, by his own account, changed Augustine's life. 14"But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires." Augustine, worn out from years of trying and failing to break free of his own desires, sat weeping in a garden in Milan and heard a child's voice repeating, take up and read. He opened this letter at the first place his eyes fell, and it was this verse. He read no further.
Clothing changes what people see when they look at you. To put on Christ is to let his life become what the world meets in place of yours, and it happens as clothing goes on, deliberately, each day. "Make no provision for the flesh" is the practical half of the command. Augustine could not out-argue his own desires. What worked was refusing to give them room to grow, and letting Christ be worn in their place.
Paul began with love as a debt that never clears. He ends with the only clothing that can pay it down, day after day.
Prayer
Father, love is a debt we will never finish paying, and we are grateful you have never asked us to pay it alone. Wake us from whatever sleep we have settled into. Where we have made room for the flesh to gratify its desires, close that room off, and clothe us instead in your Son. Let salvation, nearer today than yesterday, find us dressed and ready. In Jesus' name, amen.