This morning we get into the first practical application of the principle that Paul gave us last week from Rom. 13:8 – “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” So, how do we love our neighbor? Over the next three sermons, we are going to flesh out what it looks like, especially in terms of our relationships with other believers. To start, this morning we see that we can love our neighbor by sacrificing our own preferences and refusing to judge others by those preferences. Let’s read Rom. 14:1-12 together. From this passage, we are going to see two points: The judgment of purity and the judgment of practices.
Before we can get into those two points, we need to do a little background work. Baptists, especially, come to a passage like this with a bit of a handicap. That handicap comes from two practices we have. First, we tend to read and understand the Old Testament in a shorthanded fashion. What I mean is that we tend to read all of the Old Testament as one single genre, namely the Law. But, actually, the commands of the Old Testament fall into more than one category. Certainly, in the first five books of the Bible, we find the Law of Moses, where God speaks directly to the people of Israel to lay down his moral, ceremonial, and governmental law. But, we also find commands of a different kind in the OT: Wisdom. We see this genre in the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. What we often fail to understand is that the Jews and early Christians made a distinction between Law and Wisdom. Law pertains to those things that are morally forbidden. To disobey the Law is to act in rebellion against God’s character. Wisdom, on the other hand, pertains to those practices that tend lead to a healthy, prosperous, good life. If you break the Law of God, then you have sinned. If you fail to follow or understand the Wisdom of God, you may suffer and eventually fall into sin, but to act unwisely is not sin in and of itself. Let me give you a couple of examples. First, consider Prov. 22:7, which says, “the rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is a slave of the lender.” The principle of wisdom here is that we should avoid borrowing money, because we could end up enslaved to that person. Now, does the OT Law forbid borrowing money? No, it doesn’t. It forbids loaning money with interest, but it doesn’t forbid loaning or borrowing. Further, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of us in this room have borrowed money. Either we have all been living in sin, or we recognize that there is a distinction between law and wisdom.
Here is a second example. Proverbs 7 and 31 paint two pictures of the deceitful woman and the Godly woman. The deceitful woman is shown by the immodesty of her dress and behavior. The godly woman is shown by her modesty in both. Again, there is nothing in the OT law about modesty in dress or behavior beyond the actual sins of adultery and lewdness. Further, most clothing that women wear today (and I mean everything from capris to two-pieces) would be considered immodest just 100 years ago. Does that mean that most Christian women today are living in sin? No. It does mean that there should be a standard of modesty. That wisdom keeps us from walking down the path to sin, which is the point of Proverbs 7.
Baptists are also handicapped in the way we conflate tradition with Biblical truth. We have been greatly impacted by the Temperance movement of the late 1800s. That movement led to a number of assumptions about hygiene, dress, family planning, and the use of alcohol and tobacco. I’ll say more about tradition in a minute, but I want you to recognize before we get into our text that much of what you believe to be wrong may simply be a mixture of wisdom and tradition.
So, with all that said, let’s consider our first point, the judgment of purity, from verses 1-4. Here, Paul says that one way that we can love our neighbor is by welcoming those who are “weak in faith.” We do that by avoiding “quarrels over opinions.” So, let’s define what Paul means by these two terms. First, when he says that we should welcome the one who is weak in faith, he is referring to those who are new believers who have come out of other religions with all of their practices and baggage. Christianity was and is a multi-cultural faith. Every day, people of every background are brought into the faith. Often, when they come, they believe or practice erroneous things. Paul’s point here is that we shouldn’t keep them segregated until they deal with all that baggage and false belief. We should welcome them. Understand, there is nothing preventing you this very day from coming to faith in Christ and joining us in fellowship here outside of repentance, faith, and obedience in baptism.
The other term we need to understand is the statement, “quarrel over opinions.” The word, “opinions”, means “unsettled debate or discussion.” It’s the idea of a belief or opinion that has no biblical foundation. It could be a tradition. It could be a personal preference. Whatever it is, it’s not based in a biblical command.
Then, Paul turns to an example of what he means in verse 2. He says, look, there are some weaker brothers who are going to come into the fellowship from a strict religious background. They are going to have problems with people eating meat that is sacrificed to idols, and they are going to be so strict in their practice that they refuse to eat any meat. On the other hand, you are going to have people who have absolutely no problem eating meat. In fact, they may eat only meat! So, what are the vegetarian and the carnivore to do as brothers in Christ? Paul says that neither is to pass judgment on the other. Rather, as verse 4 says, they are to worry about their own master, who is Jesus Christ. In other words, if the vegetarian is avoiding meat because he just can’t, in good conscience, eat meat out of concern for falling away from God, then he should avoid it. He shouldn’t do it because someone else has told him to, but because he wants to serve his master, Jesus. In the same way, the meat-eater shouldn’t give up meat because his pastor is a vegetarian or because someone in the congregation could be offended. His conscience is obligated to Christ and isn’t bound by the opinions of men.
Now, I want to temper what I’m about to say. I want to be clear that there is room for judgment when it comes to biblical morality. If the Law of God forbids it, it is sin, and the church has authority to judge those things. But, there are traditions and opinions that we have about personal purity that affect the way we view other people and may affect our fellowship with them. If you have misgivings about the way people dress, how they cut their hair, whether they have tattoos, what they eat, whether they smoke, dance, or have a drink, then you are worried about the wrong things. It is not your authority or position to judge others in their own pursuit of obedience to Christ.
The second point we need to see is the judgment of practices, from verses 5-12. Paul moves on to another example of the preferences we might have, and they relate to the religious practices and traditions we may have grown up with. He says that one man may view one day as important, while another views them all the same. Paul is likely referring to the Jewish sabbath and feast days here. Remember that Jews were coming to faith in Christ, and they were being joined in fellowship with Gentiles who didn’t observe the OT feast days. I don’t think this pertains so much to the weekly Sabbath worship as it does to the special sabbaths and feast days that the Jews observed. More broadly, this example applies to any religious practice that we hold dear that is not expressly commanded for us in the New Testament. Understand, I’m an outspoken critic of the church-growth movement and contemporary worship, but if you think there is anything uniquely sacred about the hymns we sing or the way we sing them, then you are holding on to tradition for the sake of tradition. If you resist any and every change to “the way we’ve always done it” because it’s not “the way we’ve always done it", then you may be judging your brother or sister over a religious opinion, not an actual biblical command.
So, how should we respond to that tendency we have to react against those changes or differences in opinion over practice? Paul gives us the answer in verse 8: “if we live, we live to the Lord…” Everything we do, whether we eat meat or don’t, whether we wear shorts or long pants to church, whether we sing hymns or contemporary praise songs – it should all be done for the glory of God, not out of spite or legalism.
Brothers and sisters, this church should be a welcoming church. We should be patient with new believers who don’t understand our practices. We should come alongside of them and help them understand, and maybe we can even be informed by the ways our practices are clumsy and misunderstood. We should praise God when we have new faces, when there are squealing babies in the pew next to us. And we should actively pursue those things as we welcome the new in faith.
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