Sunday 05 • 13 • 18

Therefore, let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died. So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then, let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Do not for the sake of food destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble. The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me. For whatever was written in the former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. — Romans 14:13–15:7

Father God, we pray and give thanks for your word. We pray as we open your word that you would open our hearts and speak to us. Father, where there's a need for encouragement today, we pray for encouragement. Where there's a need, Lord, for correction or rebuke, we pray for that. Lord, we pray for you to open up your voice to us as we open your word. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

So did you ever hear the one about the plane crash survivor? The only survivor of a plane crash. Ten years later, he was rescued by a team of folks, and they finally get him off the beach. They say, "Well, you know, we noticed you built three buildings. What are those buildings for?" And he says, "The first one, that's the house that I made for myself. And the third one, that's where I go to church." And they said, "Well, what about the second one?" "Oh, that's where I used to go to church."

Now, funny, not funny. Right? I mean, funny, not funny because we are so used to divisions and disunity that the modern American church is sort of a cartoon of itself with regard to the ways that we divide and separate. And we have "that's where I used to go to church" and "this is where I go to church."

The Hard Work of Unity in the Body of Christ

Today, we're picking up again Romans chapter 14, and we're looking at the hard work of unity in the body of Christ. Last week in the first part of Romans 14, we applied this to unity within this group of people. We talked about how there are areas in scripture that are just not revealed, that Christians choose to make party lines around or dividing lines around, and we really need to offer grace to one another. That last week was about these relationships.

Today as we pick this up, I'm going to have to make an application of this to what I'm going to call the big capital B body of Christ—the larger body of Christ. Because we live in a city that's filled with lots of Christians of a lot of different stripes.

Now when Paul wrote this passage, there was only one church in the city of Rome. There was only one little group of Christians that were gathered together in this little house church. But today, in our context, there are hundreds of churches in our city. And people choose every week where they go to church, who they're going to affiliate with. Because of this, you can easily have "this is the church I go to" and "this is the church I used to go to." And there's a need for us to have honest conversations about how to do unity with people who are Christians but are not part of this congregation.

So that's what we're going to look at today. How can the many live as one?

Now, a little context on this. This is not a proof text for veganism. Some of y'all were hoping that was the case this morning.

Finally, I get the vegetarian proof text. This is about meat, but it's really not. This passage is really about differences. Let's look at what's going on here. In this baby church in Rome, there are—at least as it's represented in this passage—two main groups of people.

There were those who were converts out of Judaism, who had grown up with the temple and the law and the sacrificial system. When they came to faith in Christ, it's like someone turns on the lights and all these things that they had learned about the law and the sacrificial system suddenly come into focus in a way they hadn't before. Today, we would call that person a completed Jew, a Jewish convert who discovers Jesus to be the Messiah.

The second group in Rome, this little baby church, are Gentile converts. Those who had grown up in the Roman Empire with its pantheons of gods and goddesses—all the different gods and goddesses you probably learned about in eighth grade mythology class. They were raised in that culture and so these people also come to faith in Christ and recognize: wait, Jesus is really the only god. He is the only one. What's revealed to them is suddenly monotheism coming out of a superstitious culture.

Now these two groups of people are trying to live together in peace in a little tiny house church. The Jewish converts were raised in a culture that had clean laws. If you've read Leviticus—which you will be reading about as we study Leviticus in the fall—there are all these laws prescribed for what things you eat and what things are considered unclean that you're not supposed to eat within Judaism. The reason those laws were laid out is not just because God said so. Those laws were given for two purposes. One, to show the people of Israel there's distinction between you and the rest of the world. You're different. You're called to be different. And second, there's such a thing as holiness. We worship a God who is pure and holy, and we don't just come into His presence. There's a way that we need to be made clean. The exercise of those clean laws was sort of a preview of what was to come in Jesus.

But what happens in the New Testament, what we read—both Jesus and then Paul tell us—those clean laws because of the coming of Christ are no more. We read this in verse 14:

There is no food that is unclean in itself now.

And yet in this baby church, there's still some Jewish converts for whom this is a really hard thing to change. You say, come on over, we're having crab cakes, and they're like, I don't know. Because in their conscience, they have a sensitive conscience to eating those things. For them, Paul says here, that food is unclean. It still feels unclean. It means they have a sensitive conscience. For that Jewish convert, you're asking them to do something that feels like it's going to pollute them.

The Weak and the Strong

So Paul sets up a dynamic in this passage between what he calls the weak and then the strong. Let me make sure we're on the same page on this. The weak are the Jewish converts in Rome who believe they're still stuck on following these patterns. In verse one, Paul had called them the weak in faith. Though they believe the gospel, they're still following these unnecessary rules now made done in Jesus, but they're still following it because they make them feel spiritual. To do these things makes them feel like I'm actually trying to obey God. To violate that, to have the shrimp scampi, they're like, no, that makes me feel dirty. That makes me feel unspiritual. So: weak faith, strong scruples. You got it? I got to do these things to make me feel right.

There's another group. Those who are strong in faith have weak scruples. These are the pagans—those who came up out of a Gentile background who come to faith and they're like, Jesus is the only God. We can eat whatever we want. Pass the bacon, right?

And these two groups are trying to have a little church together. They're on a collision course because what do Christians love to do? Eat. We love to eat, right? We eat together. And these groups are on a collision course.

The thing is, at first, this looks like a theological problem when really it's a cultural one. There's a lot of cultural stuff in here. If you compare—I'm going to go nerd on you, okay? Just hang with me for the nerd section—if you compare what's happening in this passage with another passage over in First Corinthians chapter eight, one book later, you're going to find what sounds like a similar situation, but very different. In Corinth, a heavily pagan city, you couldn't even go to the grocery store, to the market, and find meat that had not been sacrificed to a pagan idol.

So you go in and the meat counter has the pork, which is sacrificed to Aphrodite, then you got the chicken, which was sacrificed to Athena, and then you get to your fish, which is Apollo. Everything here has been blessed by some pagan priest. And so within that church, there's another food controversy. Again, not about being vegan. But the pagans in that church had grown up, converted to Jesus. They look at this and they're like, we can't eat this meat. This was sacrificed to Athena. I'm no longer part of that. Jesus is my only god. I'm going to follow him.

And the Jews are like, what are you talking about? There's only one god. These idols are superstitious. These idols aren't even real. They're fake. You can eat anything, pass the meat.

Now, if you're paying attention, what I'm telling you is that you have these two churches where both of them are having meat problems but on the opposite sides. So in Rome, you got the Jews who are under conviction, the Jewish converts who are in a conviction like, we can't eat that meat. It's not clean. And the pagans are like, pass the meat.

In Corinth, you got the pagans who are like, we can't eat that meat. It's sacrificed to idols. And the Jews are like, what's wrong with you? Pass the meat.

Which shows us something. It shows us that everybody thinks they're the strong.

In 2011, Allstate Insurance did a nationwide survey and asked this question: how would you rate yourself as a driver? They found that 64% of Americans think they're an excellent driver. And 22% think that 20% of their friends are actually good drivers. Which means that everybody thinks they're great and everybody else is a terrible driver. Statistically, that can't be the case. I got rear ended this week. I know this is not the case.

And yet, don't we do this with faith? Don't we all assume statistically we're always in the strong camp and everybody else is the weak camp? We've figured it out. We've worked out the gospel implications. We know. But the reality is statistically that can't be the case, just like with driving.

Culture and the Gospel

See, in one particular setting, the ethnicity of the one group, the Jews, made them really wise about the gospel, and the other setting made them kind of blind. In one setting, the pagans understood something about the gospel, and the Jews didn't, and they were the strong. And the other makes them really blind.

Which should give us some kind of a warning to say that your background, your family of origin, your preferences, your church experience—you always bring that to the gospel. Everybody is wearing a set of glasses that they don't even feel because they're really light and really nice glasses. But it's called culture. And you come to the gospel, and you always look at the gospel through those lenses. And there should be a warning to us that maybe that affects the way we see things.

Let's consider this. Let's say you work in an office park in RTP, Research Triangle Park. You work in an office building there, and you know there are other people there who are Christians because you've seen the stickers or the magnets, and they're different from you. They say things that are kind of different from what you might emphasize coming from our church.

So let's say you have a reformed Presbyterian who likes church to run on time like the German railway system, like things in order. You know how long my sermon should be, and you know when we should be done. And then you have working at the next cubicle over, you have the charismatic Christian who's like, I like it all free flow, just let go. Hashtag blessed.

Now, are those two people having fellowship with each other? Is it really a theological difference? Maybe. I think more often than not, it's a cultural one.

And here's what happens in America. In the Church of America, we don't have the church in Raleigh. We have hundreds of churches in Raleigh. So people are self-selecting what kind of body of Christ they want to be a part of. And it's usually around things that are some theological but some cultural stuff too. And so you end up at church with PLUs, people like us. People who watch the same shows, like the same kind of coffee, think the same things are funny.

Why do we do that? It's easier. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to—it's just less complicated. So we end up in churches where we don't even, because of the homogeneity principle, have to learn to practice the weak and the strong. We don't even have to do this.

You can go to an American church every day of the week and never have to apply this passage except we're out there. And that's what we need to learn how to do. When we go to churches where we're just around PLUs, we are much poorer for it. Because when there are areas and ways that other groups—Bible believing, Jesus loving people who understand the gospel and practice it just a little different from you—you have so much to gain from in understanding what it means to live as a follower of Jesus. We're poorer when we don't do this.

But notice, before we let ourselves off the hook here, the main group that Paul takes on in this passage is not the weak. Remember, we all think we're the best drivers. If we're all the strong, we have all put ourselves right into the crosshairs of Paul's passage here because he addresses everything wrong in this passage to the strong—to those who have this real sense of freedom. We're the strong. So Reformed Presbyterians are always in that group. Let's just put ourselves under that.

Now let's talk about where he doesn't go with this. Because this is where you may think I'm going to go with this passage this morning, and where you may think Paul is going, if you just listen through this really briefly. You may think you're getting the gospel of tolerance. The gospel of tolerance—that is what is preached all the time, everywhere right now. We should be tolerant. Tolerance says you never make a negative evaluation of another person, and you say, "You're over there. I'm over here. Leave me out of it." That's what the tolerance police in our country, which is everywhere, says is the way we ought to get along. We just never make a negative evaluation of another person and we should just let people alone.

And here's the thing: the problem with that is the tolerance sword cuts both ways. If you're intolerant toward people you think are intolerant, you're intolerant. It doesn't work. Rather, the gospel shows us a different way.

If tolerance says no negative evaluations—you're over there, I'm over here, leave me alone—what we find in the gospel is not a god who's tolerant. We have a god who makes the worst negative evaluation of you that anybody has ever made. A God who comes to you and says, "You're dead in your trespasses and sins. There's nothing you can do about it. You are lost without my rescue, and no performance or goodness in you makes you right." And yet we don't have a god who leaves us there. We have a god who moves toward the weak, moves toward us in our deadness and loves us and welcomes us to himself. This is what the gospel tells us. Jesus does this for us.

So following him in how we treat those we would judge as the weak is absolutely the opposite of tolerance. Paul is calling us not just to a different approach to tolerance, but the opposite of tolerance. The world says no negative opinions. The gospel says there are ways to be weak and there are ways to be strong. There are ways that you understand the gospel and ways to misunderstand and not apply the gospel. And to call someone weak is to make a negative evaluation. "Hey, you know what? You haven't thought this out. You haven't understood all the implications of what it means to know Jesus. You don't understand monotheism. You're superstitious." That's not how Jesus talks to his kids. All those things are ways we kindly come alongside someone and make an evaluation.

Let us pursue what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding — Romans 14:19

Welcome one another — Romans 14:7 (end)

This is not a "you're over here, I'm over there" situation. But let me move toward you. Let me move toward the weak. Let me welcome you. Let me build a bridge. Let's have a relationship. This is not "this is the church I go to, that's the church I used to go to."

Let me give three applications of how we apply Romans 14. I want you to write them down on your phone, on your bulletin. Last week I gave you four for how you apply this within the body of Christ. These three are how you apply this with regard to Christians who are out there who are different from you.

Here's the first principle: Don't violate the conscience.

Now, if you grew up on Bugs Bunny—anybody else grow up on Bugs Bunny? You may think you know what the conscience is. Remember the Bugs Bunny cartoons where you'd have the little devil on one shoulder and the little angel on the other, and the little angel is telling you to do good things, right?

Obey your mom, go to school, turn in your homework. The devil is telling you, skip school, disobey your mom, you don't care. Run away. So that picture is great for cartoons, but it's terrible theology. Let's just name it and push it away.

Here's what the conscience is: it's more like an early warning radar system. John MacArthur describes it this way. He says it's a built-in warning system that signals us when something we have done is wrong. The conscience is to our souls what pain sensors are to our bodies. It inflicts distress in the form of guilt whenever we violate what our heart is telling us is right.

Paul shows us that a weaker brother or sister with regard to these kinds of activities that make you feel more spiritual or less, that person has a sensitive conscience to things that really the Bible gives areas of Christian freedom within. So things that are not wrong biblically, but that person feels are wrong because of their background or their faith journey or their upbringing.

Look, their sense of conscience—this is what verse 14 says: the food's not unclean, but the weaker brother, the weaker sister feels like it's unclean. So to him, eating bacon, shrimp scampi, bacon wrapped chestnuts, that feels wrong. And you don't make them do that. You don't put them in a position where because of peer pressure, they need to violate their conscience. This is what he describes it as: it would cause them to grieve (verse 15), to stumble (verse 20), maybe even be destroyed. Putting that person in a place to sin against their conscience hurts them. It's destructive.

Whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats because the eating is not from faith. Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. — Romans 14:23

The doing of an action goes against their conscience and makes them feel that way. There are some people when they become a Christian, when the gospel clicks in their life, they look back on practices, things they were involved in in the past. Going back and being part of those things or doing those things feels like reliving something where you were far away from Jesus.

You may know people for whom like, "Man, I used to watch those kind of movies. I really can't watch anything now that's PG. I can only watch PG and G because that reminds me of who I was." I know people for whom drinking alcohol in excess over and over for a long period of time was such a part of their pre-Jesus life that just being at a party and someone opens up a beer, it just makes them feel weird because that's part of who they were before. They've experienced so much joy and freedom in Christ now that being in that context is painful.

I have a friend named Dave White, a good friend who came to faith out of a heavy drug past. And for him, listening to the Grateful Dead just takes him to another place. It's dark. That's a really dark time in his life. I love the Grateful Dead. I do. I've never smoked or taken anything—I've smoked cigars and I hate them. It just doesn't do anything to me. And yet, I'm not going to have Dave over to my house and play the Dead while we're having dinner. Why? Because I love him. I value him. I don't want to violate his conscience.

So you don't encourage another person to do something that they feel is a sin. You don't have a tea towel roll over your house and open up a bunch of beers. That doesn't mean we never offend anybody or we never have conversations. We'll give that to you in a second. But you don't drag a weaker Christian into a place of sin.

Grace Pharisees and Law Pharisees

Number two: write this one down. There are Pharisees and there are Pharisees, and both are Pharisees. We tend to think that Pharisees come in one flavor—people who are moralistic or legalistic, who are like, "You need to do this, this, and this in order to be a good Christian." That's a law Pharisee, a legalist Pharisee, and that's true. But there are also grace Pharisees.

A grace Pharisee is anyone who becomes unloving to a law Pharisee, who's so concerned to make sure that we're all living in all the freedoms we can have in Christ that we end up hurting other people. I was part of a church in Suburban Philly, a great church, but a lot of those people had come out of law Phariseeism and became grace Pharisees. You couldn't tell anybody what to do any time ever.

We all had to make sure we were free as we could be in the gospel. And what happened is some people got hurt in that. Some people were stepped on in that. See, here's the problem with grace Pharisees and law Pharisees. They're Pharisees. That's a problem.

Listen, it is a wicked thing to become a specialist in the weaknesses of your brothers and sisters. It is a wicked thing to think that you need the gospel less than other people just because they're Pharisees. See, the Pharisee in all of us—the smug law Pharisee and the dismissive grace Pharisee—have both taken on the position that they think it's their job to say who is in and who's out. Who are the good Christians? Who are the bad people? Who are the people who really get the gospel? Who are the people who don't?

And you know what? Jesus doesn't do that. Jesus doesn't divide the world the way we do. Thank him. He doesn't divide it between the good and the bad, those who get it and those who don't. He divides it between the humble and the arrogant. Those who are like, "I need him every day" and those who are like, "I got it." Be careful. Are we prepared to welcome the way Jesus does?

The Priority of Others Over Self

You greater than me. We greater than me. You're more important than me. We are more important than we.

You get this if you grew up in a home where either of these scenarios happened. You're at a family gathering—let's just say a Mother's Day gathering—and you're fighting with your cousin or sister or friend, and your mom pulls you aside and says, "What is wrong with you? You better pull this together because this isn't about you today. We're trying to have a great day for grandma. Don't you make this about you."

What is she saying? She is saying, "Who's greater right now? The family is greater than you are. We are greater than you. You need to lay aside being a child for a moment. Stop being so childish so that the family can have peace."

Or maybe you had this scenario: you're driving in the car, you've got a toy that you're fighting over with your little brother, and dad turns around with Hulk strength, grabs you, and says, "Give him the toy. He's your little brother. Little brothers always win." And what is he saying? He's saying, "In this moment, maturity looks like you prefer your brother in love."

You want a great study in this? Look at Philippians chapter two.

In humility, considering others better than yourself. — Philippians 2

This is what the body of Christ looks like. If we had to draw some traffic patterns for what it looks like to be a Christian in this day and age, this is what it would look like. It's not a stop sign. It's a yield sign.

A stop sign—when there's an accident at a stop sign, the officer shows up and there's a rule for who is right and who's wrong. There's a clear right and wrong. There's an order to who gets to go. But a yield sign—see, a stop sign is cold. A yield sign is so warm because a yield sign says, "You let the other person go. You prefer the other person to yourself."

If I could get a big sign to put out in our lobby to govern how we approach one another, especially in the larger body of Christ, it would be a giant yield sign. Because it says, "I prefer you. You come before me. You come before what I want to do."

This is what it means to love the weaker brother. To say, "I'm going to yield my freedoms in this moment. I'm going to yield my right to do what I want to do, to exercise all my Christian freedoms, in order that you and I might be able to have fellowship with one another."

Three Wrong Applications of Romans 14

Let me give three wrong applications of Romans 14 before I get emails this week.

First, Romans 14 doesn't say all opinions in matters of conscience are equally valid. There are ways to apply the gospel that aren't moralism or superstition, but it is kind to pull aside a weaker brother or sister and say, "Let me help you work this out." In kindness—not forcing the issue, but in kindness—helping them understand the gospel more fully. That's kind.

Second, Romans 14 doesn't say that all moral strictness is legalism or weak, or that all an unburdened conscience is strong. I want to say this because many people think a carefree lifestyle is what he's talking about here, but there's a way to be carefree that's actually careless. Paul does say:

Whatever is not from faith is sin. — Romans 14:23

He doesn't say everything done with an unburdened conscience is not sin. See, there are people who are like, hey, I don't care. I don't feel no moral compulsion about things that are clearly outlined in scripture. Live with my girlfriend is fine. See, no, that's revealed. That's something we don't condone what is condemned. We don't say just because you don't feel a conviction about it, that you're right.

And then finally, Romans 14 doesn't say the convictions of the weakest brother or sister should always govern how we as a church do everything. See, if we did that, we'd always have to be doing a poll to find out who is the weakest brother in our congregation and what are their convictions and let's all match that. And you end up binding the conscience of the whole and always creating a bunch of man made rules. We're not going to do that.

So here's my conclusion for today. Again, remember, we've gone through this end part of Romans, no general applications, only specific applications because these are all about love and unity, and there's stuff for us to do. So here's our application for today. Seek unity with brothers and sisters who are Christians, who are not from your tribe or your church.

So here's my push to you. Would you start a lunchtime gathering? Would you start maybe weekly, maybe monthly, maybe it's a breakfast, but would you initiate with people who aren't like you, who aren't from the same tribe, aren't from the same church? Don't look at the world, the Christian world all the same way that you do. Would you find people who you've seen their bumper stickers, you've seen their Christian magnets, you know they're blessed? Would you invite them to a regular time of fellowship? Not to argue, just to build some bridges, just to welcome, just to build relationships.

Maybe you get together and you pray for your boss, you pray for your company. Maybe you get together and you pursue what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding. See, that's all you're doing.

Now let's say you don't work in an office space. You look for the people in your neighborhood. There are people in your kid's school that you could get together and start praying with just for the teachers, once a month. We have fellowship that meets here for a local school of people from all kinds of different churches come together and they pray for the teachers. Maybe you find other people in your dorm, other people on your campus. You can find people who are Christians who don't go to your church. The city is filled with them. But you begin exercising: let's get together. You're Baptist, Catholic, charismatic, Methodist, Seventh day Adventist, we're gonna get together and we're gonna try to pray together. We're just gonna try this.

You know, and if this doesn't work for you, let me give you a softball pitch. If this doesn't work, come on a Sunday when we have this early prayer meeting that meets at 08:30. And on the third Sunday and fourth Sunday of the month, we meet with a sister church, Mount Pleasant, very different from us. Man, it is awesome to come and I learn how to pray from this congregation. Very different from the way our congregation prays, but man, so needed.

The Dysfunctional Family of Christ

Here's my closer for today. You know, one of my favorite Christmas movies is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I heavily identify with Clark Griswold who is played by Chevy Chase in that movie. And Clark, all he wants in this movie is for his family to have this awesome Christmas celebration for everybody to be happy. And so he gathers his family. He's got all these plans and cousin Eddie shows up. You remember cousin Eddie? Cousin Eddie shows up uninvited, parks his RV in Clark's driveway, and empties the sewer from his RV into the storm drain. And cousin Eddie is just a train wreck. Everything he touches is sort of wrong.

And at one point in the film, Chevy Chase's character, Clark, sort of just he's had enough. And he says to Eddie, he says, Eddie, can I refill your eggnog for you? Get you something to eat, drive you out in the middle of nowhere, and leave you for dead?

I am thoroughly convinced that the funky body of Christ is one big dysfunctional family with lots of cousin Eddies. And see if the statistics are right, I'm probably a Cousin Eddie and so are you. And the thing is, in the movie, Cousin Eddie is the one who actually ends up sort of saving the day. He bumbles and sort of makes things work out right.

Maybe Jesus has a cousin Eddie or two for you to connect with in the body of Christ. And maybe, just maybe, you'll be so much the better for it.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.