Transcript
An elderly couple was celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary. The couple had married as childhood sweethearts and had moved back to their old neighborhood after they retired.
Holding hands, they walked back to their old school. It was not locked, so they entered. They even found the old desk where Jerry had carved into it, ‘I love you, Sally’.
On their walk back home, a bag of money fell out of an armored car, practically landing at their feet. Sally quickly picked it up and, not sure what to do with it, they took it home.
There, she counted the money – fifty thousand dollars! Jerry said, “We’ve got to give it back.” Sally said, “Finders keepers.” So she put the money back in the bag and hid it in their attic.
The next day, two police officers, who were canvassing the neighborhood looking for the money, knocked on their door.
Jerry and Sally came to the door, and one of the police officers asked them, “Pardon me, but did either of you find a bag that fell out of an armored car yesterday?”
Sally said, “No.” Jerry said, “She’s lying. She hid it up in the attic.” Sally said, “Don’t believe him, he’s just getting senile.”
The officers turned to Jerry and began to question him. One said: “Tell us the story from the beginning.” Jerry said, “Okay, well, when Sally and I were walking home from school yesterday.”
And the officer stopped him, “Thank you very much sir,” and he turned to his partner and said, “Let’s go to the next house.”
The Apostle Paul teaches us more about our daily walk in Romans 13, telling the Church to “walk honestly,” like this man was trying to do.
Romans 13:11: “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”
The words, “And that,” gather in all the duties that have been urged earlier by the apostle from chapters 12 and 13, from presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice in chapter 12, verse 1, down to the need for the Church to “love one another” in the verses directly preceding this one.
And considering the importance of doing these things, then Paul said, “knowing the time.”
The word “knowing” is about perception, being aware of something. And what we are to be aware of and to perceive is “the time.”
Knowing the time is something that we can all identify with because much of our life and many of the day’s activities are based on time.
Time to wake up, time to go to work, time to eat lunch, time to go to the doctor or dentist appointment, time to go to the ball game, and on and on. Knowing the time is often linked with doing something in life. And that is Paul’s point in these verses.
“Knowing the time,” is first about a spiritual perception and sensitivity to the value and shortness of our time and opportunity in this present life.
As Psalm 90:10,12 reminds us that “The days of our years are threescore years and ten [or 70]; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years [or 80], yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away…So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
But “knowing the time,” is also about understanding the current time in God’s plans and purposes. The word “time” is translated from a Greek word referring to an opportune time, critical period, an era, age, or epoch.
An epoch is defined as an extended period of time usually characterized by a distinctive development or by a memorable series of events; applies to a period begun or set off by some significant or striking quality, change, or series of events.
That is a good way to define this age of grace. And knowing the time today is about understanding the dispensation of grace and the opportune time that this age is.
The dispensation of grace began with a memorable event, the salvation of Saul on the road to Damascus. It has been an extended period of time of nearly 2000 years.
It is a unique, distinctive age in God’s dealings with the striking quality that sets it off that it is all about God’s grace that He is showing both to the world and the Church today.
This is an age in which God is giving all people an opportunity to be saved by His grace, and giving those who believe a heavenly hope.
Under God’s program with the nations, salvation today is a free gift of God’s grace, received through faith alone in Christ’s death and resurrection. Thus, 2 Corinthians 6:2 calls this age, “the accepted time…the day of salvation.”
It is a time in which, following God temporarily setting His program with Israel aside, God’s salvation has been sent to the nations, and God has “opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles” (Acts 14:27).
According to God’s eternal purposes, this is a strategic time of salvation, marked by the formation of a Church with saved Gentiles and saved Jews in the one Body of Christ. And the Church, during this period, is called to live and serve by God’s grace.
We need to know the time in which we live, understand that time is limited in it, and perceive that the opportunity to serve the Lord in this current age is fleeting and passing.
It has been said well that “Time is given us to use in view of eternity.” And that is how God would have us use our time: considering eternity and eternal issues.
Paul wrote that “knowing the time,” “that now it is high time to awake out of sleep.”
Paul piles up time phrases and expressions of time in this passage to emphasize the time-sensitivity of his message.
The words “high time” means “the hour.” Paul says it is “the hour” to wake up out of sleep. It is the time to wake up and get busy for the Lord.
One commentator put it well that “It’s as though Paul were sounding reveille to rouse soldiers out of their racks onto their feet in the morning. We are to rise and get busy because of the time.”
Those who are asleep here are believers who are spiritually sound asleep. But in this verse, Paul sets off an alarm clock to wake sleeping believers.
And he calls for the Church to awaken from being spiritually unconscious, unresponsive, and inactive, to be alert to the things of God and sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
And in this context of loving one’s neighbor, being asleep also concerns our love and concern for others growing cold.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:6, Paul also wrote to believers, “Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober.”
The Greek word for sleep is hupnos, which is the source of our English words hypnotic or hypnosis. Paul is telling the Roman believers to awaken from their hypnotic states, which are produced by the believer’s enemies of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
These three lull the believer into this sleeping, sluggish, and dulled spiritual state.
Paul’s wake-up is a call to shake off this slumber of complacency and spiritual lethargy, and to be fully awake, fully alive to the purposes of God in our lives.
And why we are to do so, as Paul explains, is “for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”
Of course, Paul, in writing to Roman believers and saints in Christ, is not referring to salvation from the penalty of our sins and from hell. That was accomplished when we trusted Christ as our personal Savior.
Regarding salvation, salvation is in three tenses for the believer: past, present, and future.
The PAST tense is when we trusted the gospel of grace that Christ died for our sins and rose again. At that moment in the past, were saved from the PENALTY of our sins, and we experienced justification, or we were made and declared righteous in Christ.
The PRESENT tense of salvation is about being saved from the POWER of sin in our daily, practical sanctification, through the Spirit.
The FUTURE tense of salvation is about being saved from the very PRESENCE of sin at our glorification, when we are in God’s presence in glory and our bodies are glorified.
When Paul says “for now is our SALVATION nearer than when we believed,” he is referring to the believer’s future and final dimension of salvation, our glorification.
Paul wrote of our glorification earlier in Romans 8: “…even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (8:23).
Paul is looking forward to that wonderful day when we receive our glorified bodies and experience freedom from the presence of sin.
This glorification takes place for the Church, the Body of Christ, at the return of Christ at the Rapture prior to the beginning of the future Tribulation.
This “salvation” and glorious event draws closer with each passing day, and it is nearer for the believer than we believed in Christ as Savior and were redeemed.
Paul expected the Rapture at any moment, even in his time, and therefore challenged the Church to be ready, and to have a sense of urgency as we live in light of the imminent return of Christ.
The time grows ever shorter; every day we are one day nearer the great day of the Rapture. We move forward towards it, we move closer to our glorification. The final phase of our salvation at the Rapture could take place very soon.
The emphasis here is on the brevity of our time on earth, the limited time of the dispensation of grace, and the imminence of Christ’s return to motivate the believer to be awake and sensitive to spiritual realities and the importance of living for the Lord.
He is saying that we can’t afford to be sleeping right now. He is telling us that it is time to get serious about our faith. The time is short.
The Dispensation of Grace will only last so long. Our salvation, the Rapture, which closes this dispensation, is always nearer and could take place at any time. And so we must engage in our Christian life and seize the opportunities to serve the Lord.
Our faith in the nearness of that glorious day is to stir and motivate the Church to live each day with purpose and to walk by faith with an eternal perspective.
Our response to knowing the Rapture could take place at any time is not to be like that of an alarmist with a doomsday mentality; but instead, this makes us realize we only have a limited amount of time to make Christ known to the world and to serve Him, before this age ends and the Church is removed from this world before the Tribulation.
So believers are being charged here to wake up from spiritual sleep and to present their bodies as a living sacrifice and to love their neighbors, because time is limited and running out and opportunity is fleeting. The time to take heed and to live for Christ is now.
Romans 13:12: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”
Night, of course, is the period between sunset and sunrise, that part of the day that lacks light.
Metaphorically, “the night” here describes the period of moral and spiritual darkness that enshrouds this world during this presentation dispensation of grace.
This dark, sin-dominated world is profoundly opposed to Christ, the Light, the light of the glorious gospel and the Word of God, and the people of light, the Church.
In this passage, Paul uses the metaphor of night to refer to the spiritual darkness, wickedness, and ignorance of this present evil age (Gal 1:4).
The present time, while Christ is at God’s right hand in heaven, Satan is at work as the god of this world, and unbelief pervades the world, is appropriately described as night.
But Paul says that “the night is far spent,” or it is far along and almost gone. The present age is like a long, dark, night of sin that has just about run its course.
The end of the age is certainly much, much nearer now, since two thousand years of human history have taken place since Paul wrote these words.
“The day is at hand,” Paul says, which is the day of Christ, the day of glory, the day of the Rapture. And Paul wrote that it is “at hand” or it is drawing near; it is about to dawn. Dawn could break at any time.
And Christ could suddenly descend to this world in the clouds with the sound of a trump, first calling forth the dead bodies of those in the Church, and then catching up the living members, and then taking us all to heaven.
Paul portrayed the time of Christ’s return, our transfer to glory, and the glorification for believers at that time as the beginning of a new day for us. And it really will be, as we will then be forever with the Lord, with Him in the place of pure, unclouded, and eternal day.
We will then live in that state of glorification forever and ever.
Christ’s return at the Rapture is the next event in God’s plans. Paul knew it could take place at any time and so he sought to prepare the Church for “that blessed hope,” and to challenge believers to live for the Lord in light of that day.
And in light of the nearness of the day of Christ’s return, Paul wrote, “let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”
This is a call to revive our spiritual awareness, to be conscious of our actions before others, and to live in a manner that reflects our light in Christ.
As we draw near to that day of glory and glorification at the Rapture, we are called to lay aside those deeds and habits associated with darkness, unbelief, sin, this world system, and our former life before Christ when we were in spiritual darkness.
The words “cast off” refer to casting off of clothes. Such as when Stephen was being stoned, Acts 7:58 states, “the witnesses LAID DOWN their clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul.”
The words “laid down” are translated from the same Greek word as “cast off.” So like casting off clothes, Paul is teaching the church to cast off the works of darkness, to throw off once and for all the garments of worldliness, sin, and unrighteousness.
This casting off implies a conscious decision to turn away from sin and wickedness, and a reliance on God’s grace to do so.
And then after casting off the works of darkness, then we need to put on battle gear, and to “put on the armour of light.” “Let us put on” means to “let us clothe ourselves with.”
This armor of light is the full armor of God as described piece by piece in Ephesians 6.
There we are told to “take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day…”
Believers are soldiers in a spiritual conflict who need to be alert and equipped for battle. This armor of light refers to righteous, Christ-honoring living.
Being an armor of LIGHT, therefore, the apostle means those graces which stand opposed to the works of DARKNESS.
This armor of light is for the purpose of spiritual, divine protection in our battle against Satan and his powers of darkness with their destructive schemes, as well as against the darkness of sin and worldliness, to which, even as believers, we still are so prone.
But by putting on the armor of light, we are equipping ourselves with the light and strength of God to withstand these attacks that stem from the darkness.
It is an armor of the light of goodness, righteousness, and truth, which reveals Christ’s light within, so that the world and those in darkness may clearly see Christ and His light in us.
Alexander Maclaren put these verses this way, “The language is vividly picturesque. The darkness is thinning, and the blackness turning grey. Light begins to stir and whisper.
“A band of soldiers lies asleep, and, as the twilight begins to dawn, the bugle call summons them to awake, to throw off their night-gear,—namely, the works [of] darkness,—and to [put] on their armour of light.”
Romans 13:13-14: “Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.”
When Paul says, “Let us walk,” he refers the believer’s daily life in every step we take, every place we go, and everything that we do and say.
Knowing the time, and anticipating the return of Christ, God would have the Church committed to a right and proper walk in life. It’s not a time for the Church to sleepwalk, but instead to “walk honestly, as in the day.”
As a result of putting on the armor of light, to “walk honestly” means to live properly, decently, honorably. It is to live honestly before the Lord and before others. Thus, this is a call to integrity, to consistency in our faith and to live out what we believe.
To walk honestly and decently is about avoiding the works of darkness, but it is not only about that. It also concerns actively seeking to do good and to extend grace.
It is about following Paul’s instruction in this context “to love one another” and to “love thy neighbour as thyself.” And it goes back to the context of all that Paul instructed from chapter 12, verse 1 down to this section. Things like,
“Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality. Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate…” (12:13-16).
Paul adds that we should “walk honestly, as in the day,” or as people walk and act during the day when everyone can see and know their actions.
The apostle exhorts the Church to live honorably and properly as if their conduct were always seen, and they had nothing which they had to hide or conceal.
Paul’s point is that although believers are still living in the “night” of this present evil age, they should not walk as “night walkers,” but as “day walkers,” those who walk as if their actions were in full light and subject to full disclosure.
And we are to walk honestly “as in the day,” because we are of the day. 1 Thessalonians 5:5 states, “Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.” Walking honestly then is about walking properly and consistently with who we are in Christ as light and children of the day.
1 Thessalonians 4:12 teaches us, “That ye may walk HONESTLY toward them that are without…” This honest and proper walk is for the purpose of being a testimony to those who “are without” meaning without Christ, without hope or life in Him.
We walk with integrity and dignity, living out what we believe, for the purpose that we might be a light and reach others for Christ.
The second half of verse 13 contrasts with the first half. Walking honestly or decently is contrasted with what is indecent or improper and what is not love.
Paul presents three “negative” couplets, “not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying.”
The Amplified Bible explains this verse as “not in reveling and drunkenness, not in immorality and debauchery, not in quarreling and jealousy.”
These are some of the works of darkness we are to cast off as Paul mentioned in the previous verse. Verse 10 states that “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor,” but all these are things that are not real love and which do harm to others. They stem from a determined selfishness and pride that seeks only one’s own pleasure.
Then in verse 14, Paul states, “But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ.” “Put on” again means to put on clothing. To put on the armor of light, as Paul instructed in verse 12, is done by putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.
To put on Christ is as it pertains to our walk and warfare. And seeing that our walk and our warfare are things that are part of our daily experience, we are to put Christ on and keep putting Him on every single day, because we need Him and His grace all the time.
To put on Christ is not to hide what’s inside the believer, but to boldly display our true identity in Christ and that we belong to Him.
To be able “to walk honestly,” or properly, decently, “as in the day” living openly as if all our actions were in full light, we must “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
One author put it, “When I get up in the morning I put on my clothes, intending them to be part of me all day, to go where I go and do what I do. They cover me and make me presentable to others. That is the purpose of clothes.
“In the same way, the apostle is saying to us, ‘Put on Jesus Christ when you get up in the morning. Make Him a part of your life that day. Intend that He go with you everywhere you go, and that He act through you in everything you do. Call upon His resources. Live your life in Christ.’”
Paul does not say, “Put on purity, meekness, humility, kindness, grace,” and so on, but he does say all this and so much more at once, by simply saying, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Putting on Christ is about a life of surrender to His will, it is a deliberate, conscious, willing acceptance of His Lordship over us and our actions. It is about our need and desire to be more like Him.
And by putting Him on, by His strength we will be able to obey the second half of verse 14: “and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.” The act of faith of putting Him on is about making Christ the power of our practical sanctification.
By putting on Christ, we are putting our trust and confidence in Him, not ourselves. William Barclay has said: “The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ.”
And this passage reminds us of both, by telling us to put on Christ, and challenging us to carry out the instruction of these verses in light of Christ’s return,
“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day…”