Westminster Talking the Text
A Lectionary Podcast at Westminster Presbyterian Church
Westminster Talking the Text
Westminster Talking the Text Podcast for Sunday, September 6th, 2026 | Romans 13:8-14 | with Guy D. Griffith, Ashley Higgins, and Stephanie Boaz
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Westminster Talking the Text Podcast for Sunday, September 6th, 2026 | Romans 13:8-14 | with Guy D. Griffith, Ashley Higgins, and Stephanie Boaz
Romans 13:8-14
Live honorably as in the day
13:8Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
13:9The commandments, "You shall not commit adultery; you shall not murder; you shall not steal; you shall not covet," and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
13:10Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
13:11Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;
13:12the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
13:13let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
13:14Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
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Good morning. This is another talking the text. We have Romans 13 in front of us today. I'm Guy.
SPEAKER_03I'm Ashley and I'm Stephanie.
SPEAKER_01And our preacher for this Sunday, Sarah, is not with us. So I think we can say whatever we want about the text. Right. And then the congregation will hear something totally different. I was going to say, so Sarah, what is the title of your sermon? And just leave a pause for oh, Sarah's not with us this morning. She is home with Grace, who unfortunately has a fever, and we are aware of what a challenge it is for working moms. And so we pray that Sarah and Grace would get better soon. All right. Well, let me open with a word of prayer and we'll get right into reading the text. Gracious God, thanks for a chance to wrestle with uh your word this morning. Uh wrestle with Romans, as the old commentary used to say. We ask that uh Donovan and Beth have a good week away of uh vacation and pray for Grace and and Sarah and her family. Let us hear the text now. In Christ we pray. Amen. Who wants to read it? Do you have it ready for us?
SPEAKER_03I do. What word first are we starting at?
SPEAKER_01I think it's eight, isn't it? Eight and thirteen. I can probably tell you in a second.
SPEAKER_03Okay, but it's right here. I'm ready to go. I just Okay. Ready? Yep. Hear the word of God.
SPEAKER_01Are you doors are open?
SPEAKER_03Owe no one anything except to love one another. For the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and any other commandment are summed up in this word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we become believers. The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
SPEAKER_01Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_03Thanks be to God. I was looking going, surely we say that next.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03We don't end on licentiousness.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no. We go all the way to 14.
SPEAKER_03There we go.
SPEAKER_01All right.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think there's a a number of great obviously, because there's so many sermons in every passage. But um, I think there's a number of really great directions to go.
SPEAKER_01Love is the fulfilling of the law.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01What does that mean to you, Stephanie?
SPEAKER_03I to me it means love is the key. And as we come to know God's love for us and take that in and and begin to experience that, then we recognize we have love to share. And that is the key to following God, and therefore the key to all the laws. Everything from how we treat one another, how we're faithful in our marriages, as parents, who we're supposed to be when we go to work, um, who we are at every stage in our life. I mean, love is what is the key to everything.
SPEAKER_01And uh all the commandments, love the neighbor as yourself, uh summed up uh first table love God, second table love neighbor.
SPEAKER_02Um yeah.
SPEAKER_03I remember the first time somebody told me that, and I thought, this should have been like right out of the gate. It should have just been arranged that way for us because it's such a great key. You know, first our relationship with God. How are we faithful there? And then it's so important to God that we're faithful in our relationships with each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The uh gosh, back in right around 2000, I got tapped to write curriculum based on the study catechism and uh the study catechism has three parts the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. And one writing group did the Apostles' Creed, and that book was for uh lay members, it was really almost a confirmation curriculum and um or not confirmation, but uh uh new members' curriculum. And then my team, uh Ruth Santana, Grace, and I wrote uh for leaders of the church and the commandment and the and the Lord's Prayer, and you don't realize until you get into it that both are patterned the same way. The first table of the law and the first part of the prayer deal with the vertical relationship with God. And then it moves both to the horizontal relationship with one another. And um that was a really wonderful exercise to see that. But you know, boil it down. Love God with all your heart, mind, strength, and love your neighbor as yourself, and that's pretty much it all. So why is that hard for you to do, Ashley?
SPEAKER_00So hard for me to do. Um, because I'm selfish, right? Uh I I'm reminded of uh Brene Brown, Barbara Brown Taylor. They taught I think this might be more Brene Brown, but they talk about scarcity and how especially in the last 20 years, we've really embraced the idea that maybe there's not enough. And so if there's not enough, well then I gotta take care of me first, and then if there's enough left over, but just this false idea that that there is a scarcity mentality when it comes to material things, but I think that becomes really spiritual really quickly. So can I love with scarcement? Can I even love God with my whole heart? Right, that seems incompatible, but certainly can I love or not love my neighbor? That becomes more than just about material. I think it becomes a spiritual question really quickly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think so too. I mean, we in we did the summer Genesis. Uh, we followed a fair amount of that during the Sunday school hour because Sarah had us doing the Old Testament. Um, and the week that I was up, which was the first week of August, was um Joseph and his uh amazing coat. And I mean, they're God's family at the very beginning. Right. Um, but Jacob somehow set up this scarcity of love by showing that he really favored someone more than he did all of them. And so, yeah.
SPEAKER_01God's dysfunctional family. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03We're still going.
SPEAKER_01I'm teaching for the the uh book group, uh an amazing book called The Barn by uh Wright Thompson, and it's a story of Emmett Till's killing, really figuring out who did that. And and Wright is such a gifted writer, and he grew up um not far from where that happened. In fact, a family farm uh is less than 20 miles, and he did not realize that that incident happened there until during COVID, who moved back.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And uh it is such a focus on on place, but one of the things that amazed me is it got deep into the economy of the cotton uh and how it was prices were set in Manchester, England, and right about the time that Till was killed, um I mean cotton became in the United States almost unprofitable. And how the economics of that pitted people against one another and such pecking orders of people, and that all was based on scarcity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um and so I think you're absolutely right. And uh I'm I found myself as you were talking, Ashley, about you know, you have, you know, all of us. Well, you have one child, you've given all your love to that one child, you've got two children, I had two children. Um but I I grew up in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, and the Donnegans up the street who lived in a house maybe 2200 square feet, if, had five girls and then Joseph, James, Michael, Patrick, and Thomas. They had 10 kids in that little house.
SPEAKER_02Oh five stars.
SPEAKER_01And uh, I mean, literally, they were like, you know, third Irish twins. But Mrs. Donnegan had such love to give not only those kids, but any kid in the neighborhood. She was amazing. And um, it was, you know, uh books are written about how can you afford children, right? How much does it cost to put a grow a child up through college and all of that? And and right away you're thinking, man, I can't afford more than one or two, and you know, I'm gonna be, and and yet this capacity to love. And do we have the capacity to be generous in our love and uh see everyone as a child of God? I remember, you know, John Lewis saying they called me everything except a child of God. And how do we look at one another and say, your fundamental identity is a child of God and you deserve my love? Right. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um I remember back when I was doing um college ministry, and I'm not gonna maybe one of you will be able to pull it out because it'll take me a minute to even look it up on Google, but there's a passage in scripture where it talks about those who love God are children of God. Or those who love Jesus or follow Jesus are children of God.
SPEAKER_01First John.
SPEAKER_03As opposed to we're all children of God. And when I was doing college ministry, there were a fair number of um Baptist students that were involved because we were close there and had a great relationship with the Baptist church there. But, you know, some of them were coming from different churches around the area. And I remember I said something about how everyone's a child of God and deserves to be treated as such. And these couple of young men who are great people, they are wonderful people, but they were like really hung up on no, unless you confess Christ, you're not a child of God. And I thought, I mean, really, when you step back and look at who God is, is that truly the verse that you want to hang your hat on, hang your heart on? Or can you believe that everyone is loved by God, even if they haven't come to believe yet? And um, it was interesting because they were really, I mean, they were young and they were being as faithful as they could. Um, but I re I really hope that they think further than that now, because I knew their hearts too.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. They were restless but not reformed.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Right, yeah. Yes.
SPEAKER_00Well, Lee Camp, you know, was here on Sunday and between his conversation and I started his book yesterday last night. Um, he something that really struck me, he talks about how we we lose the whole narrative of scripture, we lose the whole story because we pick and choose little pieces, little slices. And I've been thinking about that. Um but he also, I mean, along that line, you know, loving your neighbor as yourself. He he has some pretty strong words, excuse me, uh, about this that as and this might feel touchy, but his the way he he's he's a the way he talked about it was just so compelling, you know, the exceptionalism of America and how that has seeped into Christianity and how we've allowed that then to wrap back around and to how we understand Christianity in America uh feels really compelling. And I think that if one believes that they're exceptional, particularly when it comes to relation their relationship with God or their community or their country's relationship with God, that does not bode well, I don't think, for loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself because it will if I'm better than my neighbor, they do they they they don't necessarily deserve the the relationship that I or they don't have the relationship that I have with God or I've really been wrestling with that, but I think it there's a really strong word to to be had about kind of a a a period, this this period in time, which he also names is not unique, right? He's his language is that this is just another chapter in a sorry story, he says.
SPEAKER_01Um it was such a gift to have him. And you know, as the former pastor for adult faith formation, my dream always was we would have a big speaker kind of end of August to bring us all together before we went to our individual classes uh after Labor Day. And uh it was so encouraging to see so many there. And I hope that Sarah will help those who got the book to respond and wrestle with it. One of the real gifts and surprising gifts for me in this last season of my ministry was since 2008, I've been connected with the Outreach Foundation that has put me in touch with global Christianity again in a way that for many of my middle years of ministry I had not been. And uh the end of the month we'll have a board meeting up in Indianapolis, and the speaker I just read this morning is going to be a guy who's the head of the Christian community in the Gulf states, and we're being asked to think about doing ministry in you know the Gulf states. Um and what's interesting is many of the Christians there have been imported to do building from um poorer parts of the world, uh Egyptian Christians and Indian Christians and all of that. And uh being in touch with worldwide Christianity reminds us um that we need to really interrogate the exceptionalism uh that comes along with uh being an American Christian.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. I think it's also once we get down to verse 11, I love how he says, besides this, you know what time it is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. How it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've got a marginal note in here, don't put it off. Yeah. Exclamation. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Well, and it's interest interesting because of course this this sort of begins to pick up on some apocalyptic language. But and we we hear apocalypse and we think certain things, but I um I was looking, I was like, Apocalypse isn't just about the end. So I went back to the just looking it up, and AI came up with this, and it's just so stark, and I love it. Because I mean, usually I don't look at the AR part because when I get an email, it usually says, you have been informed of an event somewhere. And I'm like, I don't want to hear what you have to say, AI. I want to see the message. But this popped up and it was funny because it says in the Bible, apocalypse means an unveiling, disclosure or revealing of something hidden. Or it says, or it could be a global catastrophe. And I'm like, either or you know, like that's the thing. I think a lot of us think of apocalypse as the end where all of the things that we don't like are going to come crashing down. When really an apocalypse is something that can happen to us at any point. Um, at any time when we can be made to understand something new. And that this is also happening for us as a people. You know, it's not just individual. There are moments when we we are sort of awakened to God is doing something here and we've been going in the wrong direction.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And I feel like that may be what time it is for us, especially in the United States, yeah, to be waking up to what is it that we believe and how does that look? Um I I noticed earlier today too on Facebook that it's James Baldwin's birthday. Oh, awesome. And watched a clip. It's kind of long, but I watched a clip where there was he was with a group of people um being interviewed. So there's like someone behind the desk and three people, and there's a person who is who looks like he's of European descent. I it was black and white, so I couldn't tell for sure, but I would assume he was a white person. And he asked Baldwin, why do we have to talk about color so much? Why do we have to talk about this all the time? I mean, color and sex and all these things. Why do we have to talk about? Aren't there other things we can connect on? And Baldwin launches into saying, hmm, let me tell you something. I moved to Paris with my with my family. And essentially he said, while I was there, I realized that I was released from this fear that I felt the whole time I was here in this country. Right. And he said, I can't fully explain that to you. I'm not gonna expect you to understand it. And I can't say that any, and this is huge paraphrasing on his part, by the way. He is very he's so eloquent when he's speaking. But he was essentially saying, I can't look at any individual person and say what they think about me. But I can look at a country and I can see its policies and see something in there, right? And that says something about its people. And um, it was it was very interesting to me.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01All right. Well, I wonder what what Sarah is gonna do with this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03She's probably gonna focus on the drunkenness and licentiousness, likely. Quarreling and jealousy.
SPEAKER_01Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh.
SPEAKER_03Yep. All right, there's a lot of ways to go, Sarah. There's a lot of ways to go. Anything else for the good of the whole? Oh, I just want to say one last thing. Um, up here in verse nine, I think it's at no, it's yeah, it's the end of verse nine. It reminds us you shall love your neighbor as yourself. And I think a lot of times we only say the love your neighbor part. Loving your neighbor and loving yourself in God's language are intended to be part of the same thing. Um loving God, loving neighbor, loving ourselves. Those three cannot be torn apart in God's world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and what happens when you don't have a good self-love? I mean, uh I think one of the great poets of our generation, of course, is Bruce Springsteen and has that marvelous lyric, it's a sad man, my friend, living in his own skin who can't stand the company. And um, you know, how do we come to grips with who we are and love that person and forgive that person for all of our flaws and faults and all of those kinds of things. And if we're not capable of doing that with self, how are we able to do that with the no way.
SPEAKER_00Right. Correct.
SPEAKER_03But you're a child of God, loved by God. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00We have a family friends, Josh and Abby Rodriguez. They're in Ohio now. Uh they say every every blessing, you know, before dinner or before every meal, they'll say the blessing. I say amen, and immediately they all ent launch into uh guy, you're a child of God, seven-year child of God, that everybody says it to each other. And it's just this like cacophony of like mom, your dad, your, you know, and their kids every time. And I I'm always remind when we're together with them and they launch into that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really important. And our girls kind of get into it too, but that's just their ritual. And uh that feels like a good one. That's a good reminder.
SPEAKER_01A professor at Columbia Seminary, I think he retired a year or two ago, uh, who was a PhD student at Princeton when I was there, and uh big tall guy, and he would say when when things were busy, he would stop and he would put his hand on his head and say, Remember, you have been baptized. Um, you know, whose you are is the foundational reality of of life, not what you do, not what your job is, but whose you are. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And so whatever mess we find ourselves in, we belong to God and God has purpose for us. And even the big messes we see around us on the news and our families, we can move through those with love and make a difference.
SPEAKER_00And we have to believe those things about ourselves to be able to believe them about others. Yeah. What you're saying.
SPEAKER_01Who wants to close us with prayer today? I will do that. Thanks.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_03The Lord be with you.
SPEAKER_01And also with you.
SPEAKER_03Lord God, we thank you for this beautiful morning. And we thank you for your word. Lord, we thank you that we are reminded again today of your amazing love for us, and that your love is the key to this life, the key that leads us to live in your love and according to your love. Lord, we ask that this week, as people are listening to this podcast and preparing for worship this coming week, that you will open our hearts to the love that you are pouring out on us and showing all around us. Lord, help us to be aware that you may be showing us something new, revealing something to us this week. So open our eyes and our hearts so that we can take in what you are showing us and be ready to pour it back out on all those around us because we all matter to you. Lord, I especially lift up Sarah as she begins preparation for this sermon on Sunday. We trust, Lord, that your word will come through her. And we ask God that even as she is at home being a mom, that you are also nurturing in her her preacher self and making her ready for Sunday. We pray all this in your powerful name. Amen.
SPEAKER_02Amen.
