“Besides this, since you know the time, it is already the hour for you to wake up from sleep, because now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, and the day is near; so let us discard the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I don’t like to put things off. My preference is generally to work ahead of whatever the schedule happens to be. That way I can sit and relax until it’s time to get started. Some people, on the other hand, work best under pressure. Admittedly, though, when I have a quick approaching due date, I can be remarkably productive. There’s something about an impending deadline that spurs us into action. No one wants to be caught unprepared when the moment of testing arrives. A sense of urgency can result in a whole lot of positive action. Here, near the end of Romans 13, Paul puts a bit of a sense of urgency on our faith. Let’s talk about why the return of Christ matters and what it means.

Paul starts out here with the transition phrase, “besides this.” Besides what? Well, the most obvious reference is his immediately prior call for us to lean into love in all of our dealings with one another so that we join Christ in fulfilling the law and are by that able to stand with confidence and boldness before the throne of God. Beyond that, he’s referring back to everything he’s said since the beginning of chapter 12 and his call for us to live our lives as living sacrifices to God in light of all He has done for us in Christ. Besides all of that, here’s one more thing.

And what is this one more thing? We’re not there quite yet. He’s going to get to that one more thing in a second, but first he drops a whole series of phrases and expressions on them to further build up to the command he’s going to give in a second. Look at this whole series again: “Since you know the time, it is already the hour for you to wake up from sleep, because now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed. The night is nearly over, and the day is near.”

That’s a lot of build up, but what exactly does it all mean. It means that Paul is rooting this next command firmly in the fact that Christ’s return is imminent. Let’s talk through these right quick.
“Since you know the time.” How is somebody supposed to know the time when it comes to Jesus’ return? Didn’t Jesus Himself say on more than one occasion that nobody knows when His return is going to happen? Yes, but in almost the same breath, He also told us to watch for the signs, and then went on the list out several things that we could lean into as precursors for His soon-coming return.

The trouble with His list, though, is that those kinds of things have been happening almost continuously since His departure in about AD 33. How are we supposed to watch for signs that point to His imminent return when we are about 2,000 years removed from His telling us to watch and He still isn’t here? The apostle Peter helpfully addressed that for us late in his second letter when he reminded us that the Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise to return as some might count slowness. Rather, He is patient, waiting until just the right time so as to give as many a chance to repent, turn from their sins to Him, and enter His salvation as will do that before He comes. He wants for everyone to be saved.

Still, here we are 2,000 years later. Do we really know the time? Is it really “already the hour for you to wake up from sleep” as Paul declares? Is our salvation really “nearer than when we first believed”? Well, on that last question, the answer is yes because that’s how time works. If Jesus’ coming is a fixed date in the future, then we are closer to that date today than we were yesterday. We are closer to that date than we were a week ago. We are much, much closer to that date than Paul was when he was dictating this letter to Tertius.

The answer to all of these questions is yes. We don’t know the time and date that Jesus will return in power and glory to claim His kingdom, to raise those saints who have already passed to new life, and to rule over the earth for a millennium (and whether that’s a literal thousand years, or simply a really long, perfectly complete period of time doesn’t matter for our purposes at the moment). But that just means that it could happen at any time. It could be tomorrow. It could be later today. I may not finish writing this blog. The apparently long delay between Christ’s promise and the fulfillment of that promise–a longer delay than just about any of God’s other promises in the Scriptures had between their delivery and their fulfillment–is not a reason for us to slack off and give up our hope, but a reason for us to double down on righteousness and to be all the more sure that we are ready for when that moment finally arrives.

“The night is nearly over,” Paul says. “The day is near.” We are almost there. What does that mean? I don’t know. But if Paul had a sense of urgency to his thinking on this matter, we have to share it. But it has been so long. Yes, but that just means the imminence of the thing is even more pressing. Will it indeed be in our lifetime as so many have said over the centuries since Paul expressed his hopeful confidence that it was a temporally soon event? Perhaps. But it may be that there are still others God is waiting to have the chance to receive Him so no one gets left out. We can be an active part of His efforts to make sure no one is left out of the party. In fact we should be. But either way, we need to be living ready. We don’t want to be caught unaware, thus demonstrating that we were never really preparing for His arrival in the first place. That would be the most egregious of tragedies imaginable.

Finally, then, we get to Paul’s command. Here’s what we must do in light of the soon-coming return of Christ. “So let us discard the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.” This is, of course, rooted in what Paul just said about the night’s being nearly over. Evil things happen in the dark. No horror movie ever is set in a bright, sunshiny field. Sure, there may be a few scenes in a place like that, but when the bad stuff starts happening it is dark. And stormy. When the light comes on, things go back like they are supposed to be. When you are doing something you are not supposed to be doing, you try to hide that thing so that you don’t get found out.

Paul is saying we need to quit doing those things. If you are doing something you don’t want anyone else to know about, you probably don’t need to be doing that thing. And, yes, maybe you are doing some great work of charity that you want to be anonymous. You can keep doing that. That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. You know the kinds of things I am talking about. I suspect one or two…or maybe a whole lot more…came to mind fairly quickly. Discard those deeds, Paul says. Don’t do them anymore. Get rid of them entirely.

Instead, “put on the armor of light.” Dress in the righteousness of Christ so that when the deeds of the dark come calling, they won’t be able to get to you. How do you do this? Well, it’s not terribly convenient if you’ve got deeds of the dark hanging around. You’ve got to get rid of those first. But even that you aren’t going to be able to do on your own. The armor of light will help you drive them away. Okay, so then how do we actually put it on.

By immersing ourselves in the things of the light. We need to stay rooted in the Scriptures. More than that, we need to be reading and studying them every day. We make knowing the Scriptures and what they say, understanding them carefully with the active help of God’s Spirit, who leads us into all truth, and in the context of a solid community of faith to help check our understanding, and putting what we understand into practice.

Speaking of the active help of God’s Spirit and the community of faith, we must root ourselves in prayer and the church as well. We need to have an ongoing and open dialogue with God going on in our heart and mind all the time. If you know you are talking with God, you are a whole lot less likely to do something you know He doesn’t want you to do. But even this when you are on your own isn’t enough. You–we–need the church. We need a community of other followers of Jesus who are committed to us and us to them, together working to encourage one another on toward love and good deeds, giving each other the active opportunity to pursue those things, lovingly holding one another accountable to persevere in those even when it’s hard, and restoring one another with gentleness and kindness when we fail.

All of that is the armor of light, and if we wear it well, we will indeed walk in the light as He is in the light. We do all of this, again, because Christ’s return is imminent. It really could be tomorrow, and we need to be ready. We don’t want to be caught unaware. We don’t want to be like those wedding guests who forgot to bring extra oil and wound up getting caught outside and missing the party when the bridegroom finally arrived. That’s just not a risk worth taking. As for what this looks like in more detail and for a bit more on how we actually do it, we’ll get into that next Tuesday. Tomorrow, Lord willing, I want to tell you about a horror movie that is very much worth your watching. Until then.