Romans 13
8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,”[a] and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[b] 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
I cannot overemphasize that the law is good. Christians need to follow the laws of God but there must be one crucial element in fulfilling the law – and that is love. Not romantic love or the brotherly love that we know but the AGAPE kind of love.
Most of the time we have mistaken the meaning of love in Scripture. We tend to make it mushy and romantic. I even know people who would equate the “love” they hear in love songs as the same kind of love that Jesus gives us. As much as it sounds spiritual to equate Jesus to a song of Bruno Mars’ “Just the Way You Are”, the love of Christ is in a different plateau than the love that the world knows.
The love of the Father is not a romantic kind of love but a God kind of love. It declares that He loves those whom he have redeemed from sin. That means He loves the unlovable. Romantic love cannot do that. A supernatural kind of love does.
Agape love involves the will. It means when God commands us to love He expects us to love others as the way He loved us – while we were still sinners Christ died for us. That is tough love to follow but we are able to do this because the love of Christ has transformed us. We are in debt with the agape love of God and this is the love He commands us to give thus it would require the Holy Spirit and the dying to ourselves to be able to AGAPE the people around us.
When Paul said the love fulfills the law – He was pointing to the love of Christ that chose to die for man’s sin and became the sacrifice and payment so that God’s wrath won’t fall upon us. It is a never changing, forever and never ending kind of love. It is a love that you can’t resist once you have been awakened by the gospel message.