Unity in Diversity: Embracing Differences in Faith

Let's start, okay, it's, pardon? You got it going? Okay, Romans chapter 14, and I looked at verses 1 through 4 last time, and I'd like to include 1 through 8 as we look at that passage tonight, where Paul's talking about the essential nature of people following Christ, having unity with each other, and how differences of opinion and differences of believing come between people, and how the Spirit of God causes us to be able to find a common direction even though we have differences of opinion. In this passage, Paul is dealing with an issue that we don't have in our churches today, the same thing that Paul deals with, but it is an issue that was real for them in the church at Rome. Now, you have to get a picture of what these churches, when he's talking about the church at Rome, they don't talk about a building like this or a large congregation. There were numerous small groups that met in homes, and all of them were considered a part of the church. They would meet together in different houses. Sometimes they might change or meet in different places, but they were different. There were Jewish people who were Christians, and there were non-Jewish people who were Christians. Their backgrounds were very, very different. Their ideas were very, very different, and they came together with one common thing. They made a commitment to be followers of Christ. In the process of trying to work this out, now, you know they didn't have the New Testament like we have. All they had was the Old Testament to be able to read and try to follow God's direction for them. So, as they were practicing living in obedience to Christ, using the only scripture that they had, the Jewish Old Testament, there were differences of opinion about what God wanted them to do. And one of the issues that seemed to be pretty big for the Jewish people, you know, if you read the Old Testament, there are a lot of different instructions about what they are to eat and what they're not to eat. There are a lot of different instructions about festivals that they're to have, the Passover festival, the Sabbath day. Many of the festivals are days that they celebrated that were critical. In fact, in the Old Testament, some of the days that were required for every male in the whole nation to come to Jerusalem to celebrate on certain times. Now you have people who have grown up as Jewish people. They practiced these celebrations like the Passover feast. They practiced the tents, tabernacles for generations. And on these special days, they saw these as commandments of God. Now they come to accept Christ as their Lord. And all of these traditions that they have now bear on them. And some of them would be able to celebrate certain days, and they would look around at their other brothers and sisters and say, why aren't you celebrating these special days that the Old Testament tells us we're supposed to do? The issue would come to play more prominently if they were at a meal. You go to sit down at a meal in someone's house, and everybody brings their potluck, and the Roman people thought that pork was a special delicacy. And so you sit down at the meal to eat, and here your brother or sister in Christ has a dish of pork that's placed on the table. And when you look at that because of your background, you see nothing but sin and rebellion against God. How can you have in a church of people with such different kinds of backgrounds a sense of being one? If everyone is a person who lives in obedience to Christ, there should be unity among the body of Christ. And in this situation, there appeared to be great chasms between the people who are part of this congregation. Many of the issues that you see here will not be important to us, and we wouldn't even see them as issues, but they were critical issues for the people who were there. Now when we think about our own congregation, we might think of it in a different way, the same issue. For example, if you grew up in Kansas, around a lot of Catholic people, and it came Friday years ago, and you sat down at the table with them and you had a steak, and they were eating fish, they might look at you and say, What in the world are you doing? Why are you doing that? If you had a family member or part of a family where some of them were very faithful Catholics and others were not, and you went to a meal, and there was fish on this Friday night meal that your family gathered together, and you came in and brought beef or pork, they would find it offensive that you were not obeying what they thought to be a critical issue in your faith. That may be the closest thing that we might have to a circumstance like what they faced here. I think you've heard probably in our country a lot of complaints about the celebration of Christmas and how many people are not wanting to call it Christmas, but a holiday festival. And I think a lot of the Christian radio programs and people are really carried away by their concern that the Christmas event is not being focused on as they think it's appropriate. Now, I don't know if you know how this has worked, but in the history of the church, there were 200 years of the church before there was ever an Easter celebration. Did you think Easter celebration went all the way back to the time when Jesus was raised from the dead? It's 200 years the church didn't ever celebrate Easter before it started. It was 400 years before the church ever celebrated Christmas. There's a time, you see, in the history of the church in which these events were not even important. Now, so when you come to our culture, if you had someone who is reading the Bible and saying, I don't know that it's proper for us to have a Christmas celebration. We don't even know when Jesus was actually born. So we in our family, we don't observe that. It might be difficult in a church if you had families that felt that it was not proper to observe Christmas, or if they felt that it was not proper to observe Easter, so that the church would find itself in a position where part of its members wanted to celebrate an event and others did not want to celebrate the same event. Now, what normally happens when this occurs is that the church separates, divides. The people that want to celebrate Christmas go off and form the Christmas church. Those that don't want to celebrate Christmas go off and form the non-Christian, non-Christmas church. Or you have one that goes off and says, okay, we're going to eat pork and you can go your way, and others that say they're never going to eat any pork at all and go their own way. So you find that our human way of dealing with these issues is to separate or to divide. Now, we're used to this. You're used to driving around and seeing all different kinds of churches that do all different kinds of things. And whenever we see this, we get used to the fact that there is separation and division among believers. Paul saw this as a tragic expression of the failure to find unity and oneness in Christ. He felt like that if you had a group of people who all said, I give my life to Christ and I'm living in obedience to him, that there should be some way by which the group would be able to find unity regardless of the differences of opinion. This is his way of addressing the issue of how you settle doctrinal differences. That's what he's talking about. Doctrinal differences and doctrinal practices. So, beginning with verse 1, Except those whose faith is weak without passing judgment on disputable matters. One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man's whose faith is weak eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not. And the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does. For God has accepted him. Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls, and he will stand for the Lord as able to make him stand. One man considers one day more sacred than another. Another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind, he who regards one day as special does so to the Lord. He who eats meat and eats to the Lord. For he gives thanks to God. And he who abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord. If we die, we die to the Lord. So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. He ends with this conclusion. I'd like to start maybe with that one. The idea behind all of this is whenever you give yourself to Christ, you say to him, you own my life. That's a commitment and promise that you make all of your life and every part of your life belongs to him. Everything about you from your money to your time, to your eating, to the schedules of your life belong to Christ. He is the Lord, the supreme ruler of all. And because he's the supreme ruler of everyone, if you're a follower of Christ, he rules your life. Now, if you're trying to make decisions about how to be able to live, then if each of us decides the same thing, then that's wonderful. If we sit down and pray and say, God, what do you want us to do about eating pork? And we all talk to God about it and he says, it's okay to eat it. Then we all come back and there's no problem. But what happens if the congregation begins to pray and someone says, I think we should still observe the Old Testament practices. And others in the church say, I think those are really past now. What happens to that group? How do they live together in a way that allows them to show obedience to God and still find acceptance to one another? Paul indicates here that there is a difference between the two. Not that it makes one not a believer. Never in any of this does he say eating the food that you eat makes you an unbeliever or celebrating certain days makes you a believer or a non-believer. He accepts the idea that both sides in this doctrinal issue are acceptable as followers of Christ. He does that by saying in the beginning that we're not to pass judgment with regard to disputable issues. That is, issues that have not to do with the divinity of Christ, for example, or about salvation. But they're issues that would be in the Bible that would allow us to have differences of opinion, honest differences of opinion about them. He talks about the people who are weak in faith as the people who need this help. I place my faith and trust in Christ, but I still think that it makes me closer to God if I eat the food that is said we should eat in the Old Testament. I really believe, you know, when the time for the festivals of the Jewish faith come, that it's important for me to keep those. So I feel like this helps me. He calls them weak because he's saying their faith in Christ is not strong enough by itself. It needs the support of some action or some work to get the approval of God. He doesn't suggest that they don't have faith in God, but that they're uncertain about it. I believe I've given my life to Christ, but I also think there's something else I need to do to make sure God approves of me. So he calls this a weak faith. Now, he calls the other group people who have strong faith because they say, I think if I give my life to Christ and place my life in his hands and live the way he wants me to live, that it doesn't matter whether I eat by the old-fashioned rules in the Old Testament. And I don't think that it's necessary for me to keep the days that are given for festivals in the Old Testament because after all, placing my faith and trust in Christ, giving him my life and living in obedience to him is all that is required. I don't need anything else. Paul calls this strong faith. Now, you may have a weak faith and someone else has a strong faith, but the tendency is if someone has a weak faith and they're placing their life in God's hands and then they feel like they need to eat according to the Old Testament meat laws of eating or they need to keep these festivals, those who are trusting Christ and don't need those have a tendency to look on and say, oh, Brother John over there, he just can't feel confident in his trust in Christ and look at him over there eating that food and keeping those celebrate days. We don't have to do that because we just trusted Christ and that's all really that needs to happen. So there comes a time between the two in which those with the strong faith can look at those who have the weak faith and think they're less of a believer than me because of my strong faith. So you're eating in a room. The people who are eating the kosher food look over at the brothers and sisters who are eating the pork and they say, I just don't know about Brother Doyle. I don't know how he can sit there and eat this stuff and think that God is going to approve of him. After all, this is what the Bible says you should do. So there's condemnation, ridicule from the stronger people to the weaker ones and then a sense of condemnation from the weaker ones to the stronger ones. So you have people in the congregation who are divided because they see one group as inadequate because they don't have the faith they need to have and the other group that sees the others who say they have the faith as failing to keep the details of the law that God has given. This is what he found in the church. Now, his remedy for it is a very complex, a very difficult thing for people to do who are convicted about these things, who really believe they're true. He said, the first thing you're to be aware of is, verse 3, the man who eats anything must not look down on the one who does not. Looking down on someone who doesn't causes you to feel superior to them. That's why you must not do it. So when you start thinking of yourself as better than a person who is in weak faith because you have strong faith, you should immediately stop and realize that you have stepped over God's line in your life. You're not to look at another brother and sister regardless of their status in your eyes as if they are less spiritually holy than you are. So, that's a beginning point for the people who are eating everything. The reason he says this is, here's a person who's accepted Christ and has begun to live his life in obedience to Christ and because of his faith God has accepted him. So if God accepts your brother as they are or your sister as they are, we have no right to criticize someone who belongs to God. They are accountable to God for their life and not to us. Now remember, he's not talking about someone who says, I don't believe that Jesus was really the Son of God. He's talking about the things that have debate about them. Some people think it's right and some people think it's necessary and others don't think that. So it's disputable items that he's talking about. So, you begin by saying, I can't condemn someone because God has accepted him. If God approves of this person's life and how do we know he approves? Well, I was talking about this this morning. It's evident because the Holy Spirit of God is placed in that person's life and you can see the Spirit in them. You can see that the Spirit of Christ lives in them. You see the power of God in them. You see the leadership of God in them and you can see that good things are happening in their lives and they are followers of Christ and the fruit of the Spirit is evident in their life. Both the fruit and the work of the Spirit are evident in them. So you can tell that God's Spirit is in them and that means he has approved of them. In Acts chapter 15, whenever they're called this great conference and Paul goes to the conference and they're saying, Is it possible for a Jewish person, for a Gentile person to become a follower of Christ and still remain uncircumcised? They're asking, Is faith enough? Peter at that meeting stops the debate when he says, I went to the house of this Gentile man and I told them about Christ and they believed and the Spirit of God came on each one of those exactly as it did on us at Pentecost. If God approves of Gentiles by giving them his Spirit, then we can't do anything except accept that. This was the principle that he was using. God's affirmation of a person's life, that affirmation provides evidence to us that God has accepted them. Now, so he's talking about that here. You can see in the life of someone whether God's accepted them. What do you see? The person has changed. I come to Christ and I say, Okay, I give you my life. He changes your mind, the way you think, and he changes your behavior. And you can see it. You no longer find in that person that they're living the way they were before. If no evidence of change comes, the Spirit's not in them. You see them also making choices that are difficult for them to make and costly, taking up their cross. You see them making those choices. They're required to, and Ros was talking about this, I want to go to this meeting and so I'm saying to the ball team, I'm not going to come to practice because I know that God wants me to do this. Now, I know the parent did that, but when an adult said, I'm not going to take a job that requires me to not be able to serve God in the church or do the work that I think He wants me to do, and make choices in obedience to God that are costly to them, you know that the Spirit is there because that motivates people to do what God wants. You see the nature of that person. They begin to learn the Scriptures. They're now following Jesus, learning what He has to say, beginning to put into practice those things. That gives us evidence that they are accepted by God. So he says, you look at the person's life and you see that their life has evidence of God's acceptance, then keep your hands off of them. They belong to God, not you. That's a very difficult thing to do, especially if you have strong convictions about what you think is the right thing to do. Now, that gives us a clear way of beginning to look at this situation. Who are you to judge someone else's servant? It might be hard sometimes, you know, when you have, this sometimes happens to us, you have kids come to your house. They're not your kids. They're not your grandkids. They're just people who come to your house. And you see them doing things that you don't want your own kids to do in your house. And your temptation is to try to correct them and make sure that you make them do the things that are right. But then you remember, these are really not my children. There's a difference between having authority over persons and not having authority over them. So when you look at someone else in your congregation and you say, I can't believe that that person could do those things, and there's not really a spiritual or biblical reason why they can't do it or not do it, you must stop and say, that person works for God. That person belongs to God. It's not my business to correct them or to straighten them out. It's God's business to do that. Now he says, verse 5, One man considers one day more sacred than another. Another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. Now he turns around and says, here's the other side of this. How do you live in a circumstance like this? You start out by saying, each person who's committed their lives to Christ has a responsibility. You make sure that the things you do, whether it's eating pork or not eating pork, is the result of you saying to God, what do you want me to do? If you've asked God about this, then you have permission from Him. What about celebrating the Passover? If you feel like that this is a great tradition in God's history, and God wants you to celebrate the Passover, you ask Him, and if you're fully convinced in your own mind that He wants you to do it, you go ahead and celebrate that. If you ask God and you're fully convinced that He doesn't want you to do it, you go ahead and not do it. Each one of us, he's saying, is responsible for making these decisions between ourselves and God. What happens sometimes to us in the church is that we are convinced that certain things are right, and we encourage people to do those things, and they do them because we tell them they should, instead of because they're convinced that God wants them to. You see, what Paul is teaching us is that we are responsible to God for what we do and believe. I could hear from God this message. He says to me, you know, Doyle, you need to get up every day, and you need to start reading the New Testament and read the book of Matthew through and through and through. Read a few verses every day, and when you finish Matthew, go back and read it again. Finish, go back and read it again. And I do exactly what God tells me to. I've read it through 30 times. I could come to church and say, you know what God did? He told me to read the book of Matthew through day by day for 30 times, and I can't tell you how that's blessed me. Every one of you ought to do the same thing. Now, why did I read the book of Matthew through 30 times? God told me to. Now, why are you going to read the book of Matthew through 30 times? Because you want to imitate what I have just experienced. I have obeyed God, but you are simply exercising your own will. You see, when God tells each of us to do something, it doesn't mean everybody's supposed to do it. For each one of us has our own direction from God as to what we're to do. And sometimes when we read books about people who've done something wonderful and great, and God's really blessed them in it, our first inclination is to say, I'm going to try that myself. You shouldn't do that. You should stop and say to God, I read in this book what this person did, and it was very impressive what happened. Do you want me to try that too? You know why that's important? Because if you do it because someone else did it and it was good, then you're following them. If you do it because God has directed you to do it, you're following Him. And the follower of Christ does not follow other people around. He follows only Christ. What Paul is saying is, each of you, when you make decisions about these special days, if you want to say, I just don't see any reason why in our family we should celebrate Christmas. We love God and every day we get up and pray and every day we thank God for what He's done. We ask Him to give us direction for our lives and our lives are full and complete. And Christmas seems to take away, all that activity seems to take away from the celebration and the reality of Christ and His presence. So we're just not going to do that anymore. We don't think God wants us to. There's no reason for us to say to someone who's found that direction from God, there's something wrong with you if you don't want to celebrate Christmas. Because there's nowhere in the Bible does it say you should celebrate Christmas. You see, those are hard things for us to get hold of because it's become so much a part of us that we think if someone felt the leadership from God not to celebrate Christmas or Easter, that there would be something quite wrong with them. Paul asks us, each one, to say to God, how do you want me to live? What do you want me to do? And to make those choices based on what God says instead of the calendar. Okay, December we got to start celebrating Christmas. I think a lot of Christians go through the celebration of Christmas without very much real spiritual impact in their own lives. And what God is interested in is having us understand what it means to make choices day by day, saying, God, what do you want me to do? Not being influenced by our culture, not being influenced by the people around us, for the culture we live in is deadly to us and the people around us will give us false signals about what's right and wrong. What God wants us to do is each one consider the other person. Each person should be fully convinced in his own mind exactly what God wants him to do. He who regards one day as special does so to the Lord. I consider this a special day because you have told me it's a special day. He who eats meat eats it to the Lord. If I fix beef or pork, I say, Lord, this is what you've told me is acceptable to me. And I'm doing it in obedience to the ruler. That's what the word Lord means. I'm doing it in obedience to the ruler. It's like I walk into the house and say to the owner of the house, I'm hungry, what would you like me to eat? If he's the owner of the house and owns everything there and he gives me food, then I eat what he gives me. Since the Lord is the ruler of my life, I simply say, Lord, what do you want me to eat? And I eat it and I give thanks to God for the provision for me. Because it's God now who's exercising control over me. He who abstains at first and says, I don't want to eat pork. He can't do it because he says, my family has not eaten pork in five generations. That's not enough. It's not enough for us to look back at tradition and say that drives us today. So the person who doesn't, who abstains, should do so to the Lord. The Lord has told me that this is something that I'm not to do. And so I do this giving thanks to God as I don't eat this meat, but I eat something else. See, both groups are recognizing the authority of God and giving thanks to God for his guidance and provision. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. What he means is, if you're a follower of Christ and you've given him your life, he owns you. You can't separate yourself from God. You are connected to him. And you're not alone in this world. And you don't have the right to make your mind up yourself about what you want to do. You have said to God, you are my Lord. And he is the one who gives us the direction. None of us lives our lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. From the day we receive Christ, we are living under his authority. And we do this to the very day we die. If we live, we live to the Lord. He means by that we live according to his purpose or under his direction. So every day we live, we live in direction and obedience to him. Paul said that everything we do that is not in faith is a sin. Now think about that for a minute. Everything we do that is not in faith is sin. So if you do something without asking God and getting his approval and doing it in obedience to him, it's a sinful act. Now when you think of everything, eating, buying a car, buying a house, every act in your life should be the result of you saying to God, what do you want me to do? And God saying, here is what I want for you. So if we live our lives, we live to the Lord. If we die, we die to the Lord. So whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. The key ingredient in settling the issues that come up between us is to recognize that each of us is responsible not only to ourselves and to each other, but primarily to God. What does God want me to do? And every issue in my life must be the result of me asking God for direction, finding his direction, and making that decision. It may result in us doing things differently from one another. But he asks us to recognize that it is God who is in charge of the people who are his followers. And if I pray and ask God for direction about what I should do, and God says to me, this is what I want you to do, and I criticize you, then I'm actually criticizing God. If God is giving you that direction and I'm criticizing you for following it, then I'm becoming a critic of God. Every one of us are responsible for living as God directs us. And when you live the way God directs you, I have no interest or business in criticizing the result of God's direction in your life. He suggests that the church at Rome could have people who are sitting here eating meat, saying this is what God wants me to do, pork, and this table over here who says I would never put a piece of pork in my mouth, and not being at odds with each other, not being critical of each other, but accepting your brother who lives in that circumstance as obedient to God and actually being proud of him because he's following God's direction even though it's not the same direction that you've gotten. Now, remember, this is not about whether or not Jesus is the Son of God, but it's about disputable issues, things that are not clear in the scripture. The idea is that we can live together, have different direction from God, and still find one another as brothers and sisters in Christ because we recognize that Christ guides each of us. Paul felt that a church filled with spirit-filled people could live with differences among them and still find a unity and oneness. One time, I remember years ago, well, it was actually Denise's parents, O.C. McCrary and Onza. They started coming to church, and I went over to visit O.C., and he had a huge Bible, and it was King James Bible. And a lot of people have King James Bible. If you don't have the King James, you don't have the right thing. That time, we were using the Good News Bible instead of the NIV. So I sat down and talked to him. He said, I just believe that King James is the Bible that I want to use, and I read it, and I love it, and I think that it's what God wants me to do. And I said, well, as you notice, we use the Good News Bible at our church. They're both translations from the same Hebrew and Greek text, but just translated 300 years apart. So the language of the Good News Bible will be more modern like we speak today, and the King James will be like they spoke in 1600s. And I said to him, I accept the idea that you use the King James and you think that's what God wants you to use. What I ask of you is, you allow us to use the translation that we think God wants us to use because it helps communicate to the people that don't know the Bible. And we can get along great if you will say, Doyle uses a Bible I don't like to use, but I believe he's a follower of Christ and I can trust him. And I will say, O.C. is a man who believes in God, has given his life to God, and he uses a version of the Bible that I don't particularly find useful to me, but I believe he's a faithful, loyal follower of Christ as I am. And if we can both respect each other as godly people, even though we've chosen different translations to use, then we have done what God says is the right thing. And I was trying to follow this kind of pattern. If you think that's what God wants you to do, don't let me stop you. I don't want to stop you. If I stop you, then I keep you from obeying God. If I do what I think God wants me to do, and I stop because it will make you upset or make you not come to church, then I've failed God too. If we both do exactly what God wants, then we can have oneness and unity. All the years O.C. was in this church, I never found a man more faithful and loyal. And we became good Christian brothers. Even though to the day he left, he used his version, I used mine. The Bible tells us that we can find ways to overcome those. Some churches won't let you in if you have any other Bible than the one they use. And I think that's a failure of putting this into practice. What the Bible believes is, our unity and oneness in this world of division is one of the most powerful witnesses we have in this world where people cannot get along. It shows the power of God to overcome differences. That's why Paul writes this. And he's really talking about how do you love someone who is practicing different things than you do? Not immoral or bad things, but just practicing different things than you. And this is how you put love into practice. Chapter 12, first two verses, he talks about the fact that we're not put away the way the world thinks. And we're to learn how to live the way God tells us to live. And this is how you do it with differences of opinion. Let's pray. I'd like to ask when you see somebody doing something that you know is a follower of Christ, not immoral or wicked, but just different than you, and your first thought is to think bad things about them one way or the other, that you remember this. Find a way to love people who are different and think differently and practice things differently. Because you know, because of what you see in them, that they belong to Christ. This is a world where people can't get along. Families can't get along. Even couples can't get along. It's a world in which fighting and quarreling is the norm. You've placed us here in this world to live together as different kinds of people in the oneness that comes because we have one Lord. Teach us how to do it. Amen. Well, we have a budget. Trustees have a budget so we can use it. I didn't know that. I didn't either. Did the church need to decide that?