The obligations of the previous passage — taxes, customs, respect, honor — lead Paul to the one debt that never gets paid off. "Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another; for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law" (Romans 13:8).

Every civic debt can be discharged. Pay the tax and the obligation is complete. Pay the fine and the matter is closed. But love is the debt that remains always outstanding — not because love fails, but because the obligation of love does not have a point of completion after which a person has done enough. The neighbor who was helped yesterday needs love again today. The brother who was encouraged last week needs encouragement again. Love is not a transaction to be settled but a posture to be maintained.

And that ongoing posture fulfills what the law demanded. Paul quotes four of the ten commandments — against adultery, murder, theft, false witness, coveting — and says they are all summed up in "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Romans 13:9; Leviticus 19:18). This is not Paul dismissing the individual commands. It is Paul showing their common source: what each commandment protects is the neighbor. Love does not merely avoid the prohibited acts; it removes the interior motivations from which those acts spring. The person who genuinely loves his neighbor will not steal from him, because love does not take. He will not murder him, because love does not destroy. He will not covet what belongs to him, because love delights in the other's good. "Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law" (Romans 13:10).

Then Paul presses the urgency of the hour. "Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light" (Romans 13:11–12).

The metaphor is of a night that is ending. Whatever darkness remains, less of it remains than there was before — the day is coming, and the wise person does not sleep through the last hours of the night when morning is already breaking on the horizon. The Christian is not a person who has entered a long, comfortable holding pattern until some distant event. He is a person standing in the final stretch of the night, awake to the approach of the day.

The conduct that fits the night is the conduct of darkness: "carousing and drunkenness, sexual promiscuity and sensuality, strife and jealousy" (Romans 13:13). The Christian who lives as though it is still midnight — indulging what darkness covers, living as though the day will never come — has lost the sense of where he is in the story.

The alternative is pointed and personal: "But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts" (Romans 13:14). Put on — the same word used for putting on clothing. The image is not metaphorical in the vague sense. It means adopting, taking on, making the character and conduct of Christ the covering of your life. And the negative corollary is equally direct: make no provision for the flesh. Do not plan for it, do not arrange circumstances to accommodate it, do not position yourself where you know temptation will find you. The renewed mind does not flirt with what it has been freed from.

Love as the perpetual debt. The day as the orienting horizon. Christ as the clothing of the new life. These three images together describe what the living sacrifice of chapter twelve looks like as Tuesday arrives and an ordinary person has to decide what to do with his body and his time.