Why Do You Pass Judgment?

So this morning we're in Romans 14 and we're looking at uh this reality of conscience.

We're gonna look at this reality of what the Bible calls indifferences.

Uh and as we set the scene, I want to share a story about uh the late Charles Spurgeon.

He was the prince of preachers, uh he was a pastor in London uh in the late 1800s, and he has uh this phenomenal ability to just so eloquently preach the gospel.

Uh but one other thing that Spurgeon was well known for was his enjoyment of cigars.

Uh so not only was he one of the best preachers to ever live, uh, but he liked a good cigar.

And one uh day he was preaching, and as he was uh uh really working through the text, he got uh most of the way through, and he had a friend there with him that day, Mr.

Pentecost.

That was really his name.

What an awesome name to have, Mr.

Pentecost.

Uh and uh he invited him to come up and kind of close out the sermon.

And uh Mr.

Pentecost started preaching on uh the fall and and the temptations, the fallenness of tobacco, and how it was a vice to him, and he brought it before the Lord, and he had to get rid of it out of his life, or else he could not be close to God, and he communicated in such a way as that if tobacco itself was an evil, was something that no Christian should participate in or be able to participate in.

And so Spurgeon, being as uh as he is, he stood stood up to the pulpit after Mr.

Pentecost was done and he simply said this statement.

He said, Well, dear friends, you know that some men can do to the glory of God what other men would be sin.

And notwithstanding that Brother Pentecost has said, I intend to smoke a good cigar to the glory of God before I go to bed tonight.

He said, If anybody can show me in the Bible the command thou shalt not smoke, I am ready to keep it.

But I haven't found it yet.

I find ten commandments, and it's as much as I can do to keep them.

I have no desire to make them into eleven or twelve.

What Spirit was talking about was conscience and indifferences.

And we tend to navigate these two things very differently, depending on who we are.

Paul introduces us in this text in Romans 14 to two different types of brother.

And his way to encourage us to love one another, to model and exemplify for us what brotherly love should look like within the church, he presents before us two brothers, right?

There's the stronger brother, he talks about.

He's the one who is able to eat meat.

That's that first passage that brings us into 14.1 uh through.

Then there's the weaker brother uh who eats only vegetables.

Now, I didn't write that.

The Bible wrote that, and it's true.

The Bible's true for all generations uh for all time.

But here's what he does is he brings these two brothers forward.

One is the weaker, one is the stronger.

The one who is weak, his conscience binds him from experience the fullness of Christian liberty.

That's what Paul's trying to help us understand.

The weaker brother in his faith, who sees a stumbling block or a can has a conviction against eating meat, Paul's saying that he's the weaker brother in his faith.

He doesn't have the understanding that the older brother has.

And in that reality, he's not able to experience the fullness of Christian liberty.

But the one who is strong, his conscience frees him to experience a greater sense of Christian liberty.

He is able to enjoy the meat at the table.

He's able to enjoy a broader range of the goodness of God in just what they consume because his understanding gets him to a place where his faith is stronger and he's able to partake in liberty at a greater sense than the weaker brother.

So we have these two brothers that Paul puts forward, but the emphasis is their relationship with one another.

The emphasis is not necessarily on what one believes versus what the other believes.

The emphasis that Paul's trying to help us understand is the relationship that they have with one another in light of those differences.

And so when we look at the verses one through four, what we see is this that they are brought together by grace.

They are brought together by grace.

Both of these people are positioned as they are, one the weaker, one the stronger, due to their faith.

The weak one's faith is not as strong in understanding, and so he allows things that are indifferent to bind him.

The strong one's faith has a more robust understanding of liberty on indifferences, and so he lives unbound by them.

So again, the younger brother, he looks at meat, or the weaker brother in this sentence, he looks at meat, and he maybe brings with him, from either a Jewish perspective or a Gentile perspective, a conviction of inability to eat meat.

He just he cannot honor God in eating meat.

And so therefore he refrains from it.

But the stronger brother, who has a deeper understanding of the freedom of God, uh the freedom of Christ that we've been given through by grace, through faith, he has the ability to partake in Christian liberties at a greater rate.

But the reality is that both of these brothers, whether they one holds a conviction that they cannot, they must abstain, and one holds a conviction that they can, where there's liberty, the root issue is how they receive one another, that they are brought together by grace.

What we need to set the stage with this morning is that Paul's referring to things that are biblically indifferent, not things that are biblical, universal, absolutes.

Let me help us unpack that a little bit.

Biblically indifferent.

These are things that the Bible is not explicit in.

We may independently utilize biblical principles and spirit-informed convictions to establish our conscience.

Here's some examples.

The media that we ingest, alcohol and tobacco use, the clothes that we wear, the holidays we do or don't celebrate, uh, your use of essential oils.

Right?

All of these, all of these the Bible says is indifferent.

They're not universal absolutes.

Well, what are universal absolutes?

These are things that we have an obligation to submit ourselves to and obey because the Bible has been explicit.

Biblical universal absolutes, these are things that the Bible is explicit in.

We have an obligation to submit ourselves in obedience to these commands and precepts.

There is no freedom to not obey for all of God's people.

If we look at an example of this, we can look at the Shema, right?

Hero Israel, the Lord your God is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

This is an explicit command of the Lord that we have no freedom to not follow.

The Ten Commandments are another one.

We have no freedom to not follow them because they've been explicitly communicated as commands and precepts of the Lord for his people.

But what you and I tend to do is we tend to make things that are in different commands.

And we can even get to that place by using biblical principles and spirit-informed convictions.

And what we have to realize is that for some of us, it is sin to us, but that doesn't mean that it's sin to our brother.

We'll get into that.

In light of this reality of biblical indifferences that Paul's putting forward, what are we being called to do?

We're being called to welcome, to receive one another in spite of our differences around indifferences.

This receiving of our brother has become for us a gospel issue because it's affecting gospel people.

How do we demonstrate love for one another?

Well, we should be demonstrating love for one another by the reception of our brothers in spite of those differences that we hold around indifferences.

Because we have been brought in by grace into the family of Christ, then we should bring in one another closely into relationship and friendship with one another by that very same grace.

Christ is a unifier.

In unity, he brings his body together despite our differences around indifferences.

But then we as the church, we do more work to divide over those things than we do to celebrate the unity of Christ in himself.

We demonstrate a love for our brother by receiving him because ultimately we have been received by Jesus.

Here's the qualifier to that reception, though.

Paul lays it out in the very opening line.

He says, As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions.

It's a reception absent of an ulterior motive.

Right?

Sometimes we want to bring our brother in and act like we're welcoming him, and we do the old bait and switch or what they call the DC dip and twirl, when we're like, hey, come on over, let's talk.

I want to receive you, I want to welcome you.

And then you're trying to you're laboring and trying to convince them to think like you.

And the problem is that we're not called to do that.

It's a reception of wholehearted hospitality, not ulterior motive.

Paul brings us into the natural disposition of these two brothers, the strong one and the weak one.

For the weak brother, the one whose faith binds his conscience and restricts his liberties, his natural disposition is disposition is to try and bind the stronger brother also through judgment.

The weak brother will always try to bind the liberty of the rest of his brothers by working to make that which is indifferent and absolute.

So think about the church world.

There's so many instances of this where we try to bind our brother by making indifferent things absolutes.

Whether it's Bible translation, the style of music that we use for worship, whether we use instruments or not, uh the clothes that we wear, uh the movies that we watch or take in, uh the things that we do in our recreation, right?

You you can make a laundry list of different things where Christians try to make things that which are indifferent absolutes.

And this is the position of the weaker brother, because the weaker brother tries to bind the rest of us by his weakness.

Where to him it is sin, to where him he has conviction, to where him he cannot be of fully an honor to the Lord if he partakes in these things, he tries to bind everyone else as well, restricting their liberty and trying to bring them down to his weak state.

For the strong brother, though, the one whose faith allows for a more free conscience and greater sense of liberty, his natural disposition is to despise the weaker brother.

The strong brother will treat the younger brother with disrespectful disregard.

What they'll do is they'll say, Oh, you you believe that?

That's ridiculous.

I I that that's so childish, that's so weak, that's so shallow in your thinking, right?

You you'll you'll start to treat with disrespectful disregard your brothers and sisters who think differently than you, who believe differently than you, that have different convictions that you do on matters of indifference.

And so we start to set up camps because it's easy to disrespectfully disregard our brothers and sisters.

And so you see where these two these two people, the weaker brother and the stronger brother, what's the natural implication of that?

We establish camps.

You're in my circle, you're in my camp because of these positions that you hold, you're in this circle or this camp because of these positions that you hold.

And so the weaker brother, in his effort to try and bind the stronger, he sets up these camps full of weaker brothers.

And then the strong brother, he's gonna try and set up a camp because he's gonna disrespectfully disregard the weaker ones, and so we splinter, we fraction, and we divide.

But we're called to change the postures that we engage with one another.

It's because of the reality of the gospel in our own lives.

If Jesus has welcomed us in spite of our particulars, so we should be joyfully eager to welcome one another.

Our reception into the family of God is by grace, and our reception of one another should be by grace also.

Because when we are reconciled to Jesus, we are not just reconciled to him alone, but we are reconciled to his people and to his mission also.

Therefore, if we've been brought to Jesus by the power of grace, then we also are brought together by that same grace.

If we look at Serm uh verses five through nine, what we'll see here is that we are to honor God with your conscience.

Verses five through nine tells us that we should honor God with our conscience.

So he talks, he starts breaking it down.

He's not talking about just people who uh the strong ones who eat meat and then all the weak ones who eat vegetables.

He he then talks about observation of days.

There's some of you who observe days, there are some of you who don't observe days.

And what he tries to lay out in five through nine is that the issue isn't the issue.

Whether you eat meat or you don't eat meat, whether you observe days or you don't observe days.

Don't you love Paul on this?

He's like, I'm not trying to come in and answer this question.

I'm not trying to come in and make one thing right and the other thing wrong, but that's what we always want to do.

We always want to say, no, the way that I think is right, therefore I'm gonna try and convince you to think like me because I'm so confident I am right.

Paul allows for the tension.

He just said, Great.

Are you honoring God in your conscience?

That's what he's concerned about.

He's concerned about the heart.

Are you honoring God in your conscience?

Because guess what?

Both the one who doesn't eat meat and the one who does eat meat says grace and give thanks to God before they consume.

So Paul says it's not about what you do or don't do.

Paul's asking, can you do it in honor to God through your conscience on matters of indifference?

We're looking at the aim of the individual conscience.

Is it to honor God in all we do?

No matter what position you land on, matters of indifference, your aiming endeavor is to honor God through it.

We have to reiterate the critical nature of these liberties being rooted in indifferences and not in moral absolutes.

Right?

There's a lot of times in the church, especially in today's culture, we want to take moral absolutes and make them indifferences.

But then those exact same people want to use indifferences and turn them into moral absolutes.

And so things where God has been explicitly clear about what is sin and what is not, about the ways that we should honor Him and love Him and worship Him, and the ways that we should honor and love and respect one another, where God has been explicit, the church now wants to turn that into indifferences.

No, we don't have that freedom.

We can't call what God has called good wicked.

We cannot call what God has called wicked good.

We don't have those freedoms on moral absolutes.

But we also, on the same side of the coin, we try to turn preference into commandments.

You see, these are issues of indifference.

They have not been explicitly communicated by God, and they have no effect on the gospel.

Next week we're gonna dive into uh a deeper understanding of this through a case study.

But for today, let's try to look at the overarching narrative that's happening here.

Paul refers to brothers who either eat meat or abstain from it, and brothers who observe certain days or those who don't.

Paul would not be so gracious.

Hear this out.

Paul would not be so gracious to these brothers if they were coming from a position that these issues affect or determine one's salvation.

Let's help understand this.

When we're talking about indifferences, these are things that do not have any effect on our salvation.

They don't determine our salvation, nor do they affect our salvation.

These are matters of Christian liberty, where I have the freedom to believe and live my life the best way I have been convicted to through biblical principle and spirit-informed uh uh decisions to honor God.

But there are things that do determine our salvation or affect the gospel.

And here's the kicker: our indifferences can become that all by our motivation.

Let's work through this here for a second.

Let's look at two people from the Bible, Timothy and Titus.

Timothy was a young pastor that Paul had brought in to disciple and raise up a mentor.

And in Acts 16, we read this about Paul and Timothy's relationship.

Paul came also to Durb and to Lystra.

A disciple was there named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek.

He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium.

Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those places.

For they all knew that his father was a Greek.

So what's Paul trying to do?

He's saying, Hey Timothy, guess what?

We're going to reach the Jewish people.

We're going to go and preach the gospel to the Jewish people.

Here's how I understand you will missionally benefit by creating equity with these people in hopes that they hear and receive the gospel.

We got to circumcise you.

Praise God, that's not a myssiological framework for us today, right?

Hey, are you a member?

Uh, well, uh, anyway, we're gonna send you to reach a people group.

Um, what Paul wasn't doing to Timothy was Paul was not saying, Timothy, you must be circumcised to be saved.

Paul was saying to Timothy, if you want to have missional equity with a people group we're trying to reach with the gospel, it's gonna be to your benefit and theirs that you get circumcised.

But let's look at Titus, another apost another disciple of the Apostle Paul.

In Galatians 2, 3 through 5, he says this about him.

But even Titus, who is with me, was not forced to be circumcised, though he was a Greek.

Yet because of false brothers secretly brought in who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery.

To them we did not yield in submission, even for a moment, so that the truth of the gospel might be preserved for you.

What was Paul dealing with in the Church of Galatia?

It was brothers, these enemies, these wolves, who crept into the congregation and who said, If you are not circumcised, you are not saved.

It's the gospel plus circumcision that saves you.

How was Paul's response to that?

It was aggressive.

It was aggressive to shut it down.

In fact, in this letter, he says, if they think that circumcision saves them, then they should go the extra mile and cut the whole thing off.

That's how aggressive he came at them when they tried to determine a matter of indifference, being dependent upon the effect of the gospel in your life.

So we're dealing with matters of indifference, not things that God has explicitly commanded for us or things that affect or determine the gospel's power in us.

He's not speaking of absolutes or a belief that negatively affects the gospel.

He's talking about indifferences.

And again, I want to stress this.

We may use biblical principles and spirit convictions to shape and form our individual conscience.

But two brothers can come out on two different positions and still be honoring God.

And we hate that.

Like some of your skin crawls just hearing that.

Because you love to think that you're right, and people who don't think like you, you think should.

And brothers and sisters can approach the scripture with sincerity.

They can pray earnestly, desiring to hear from the Spirit.

They can feel the conviction of them, and for them, they land on a hill where they cannot partake, where they cannot be a part of, where they cannot uh walk out this way in Christian life, and another brother over here can do can approach the scripture.

And prayer and the listening of the Spirit in the same manner and come out on a different hill on matters of indifferences.

This is the essence of Christian liberty.

The Christian liberty is tethered itself to the obligation of worshiping God with our entire lives.

Everything we do is to be done as unto the Lord.

Whether it's in the strong man in his liberty or the weak man in his limited nature, everything they do is to be unto the Lord.

There is not one aspect of our being that isn't his already.

So, through our conscience, we are being called to honor the Lord no matter where we fall in matters of indifference.

And we're being called to receive our brothers, no matter where he or she lands in his conscience in matters of indifference.

So Paul helps us to wrap this section up in 10 through 12.

He pretty much just says, worry about your own self.

Worry about your own self.

The concluding question becomes for Paul.

Why do we treat one another this way?

These are not matters that should concern us in such ways.

Ways that either seek to bind or seek to disregard our brother.

We have to work out our own salvation in fear and trembling.

And so this is the emphatic emphasis is on the last line of this passage.

So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

Worry about your own self.

The fullness of the weight of this charge can be concluded in this singular sentence.

And we would do well to listen to the word of the Lord in matters of indifference.

Because too many times we try to divide, too many times we try to bind, too many times we try to disregard on matters of indifference, or some of us too many times try to persuade our brother into thinking like us because we believe so wholeheartedly we are right.

And if we are right, they must be wrong.

But again, let us point us back to the beauty of what Paul does as he's trying to shepherd these people through these matters.

He never deals with the issue of whether they eat meat or they don't.

He never deals with the issue of whether they observe the days or they don't.

He doesn't come in and try and establish one camp is right and one camp is wrong.

On matters of indifference, he asks, are you honoring God with it?

And are you receiving your brother?

That's what he's that's what he's worried about.

That's what he's concerned about.

Why is that?

Because ultimately it's this God desires unity over uniformity.

God desires unity over uniformity.

As we have been received into the body of Jesus by faith, so we're to receive one another in this same relationship.

This is going to come with challenges because we're bringing in with us different cultures, values, perspectives, traditions, convictions, etc.

The very nature of the diversity of the body puts a strain on its efforts for unity.

The very nature of the diversity of the body puts a strain on its efforts toward unity because we're all so different.

And we come from different backgrounds.

And there's some of us who in our previous life before Jesus, we we imbibed in things, we ingested things, we, we, we, we uh uh lived a life centered around things that now in our Christian life, guess what?

There's liberty, but for you that's sin because you can't go back to that.

Because you understood how it mastered you, you understood how it bound you, you understood in the ways that it prevented you.

But that doesn't mean that's the same way for your brother.

That doesn't mean it's the same way for them, and so we can't seek to bind them.

But then us in the stronger position, we can't seek to disregard those who may be weaker in their faith.

We have to come to a place of understanding that Jesus is our unifier, and he does not seek to make us uniform.

Because in the unity of the body of Christ, we are still known in our diversities.

I love this picture of heaven that we see that it's able to be seen and known and experienced that Jesus saved people from every tribe, nation, and tongue.

We don't come into heaven and all I literally had a family member who believed that when you got to heaven you were a 33-year-old male because you were conformed to the image of Jesus.

Literally.

That's not how heaven works.

I'm just, I don't know much about heaven.

I can make that statement with a lot of confidence.

We as believers spend too much energy on trying to establish uniformity in the body of Christ that we make a wreck of the very unity Jesus desires for us.

Because we each try to make particulars and matters of indifferences absolutes.

You and I, we have a lot of work to do to try and live in the holy tension.

Where Jesus isn't trying, we're not called to try and bring uniformity.

We're called to live in the holy tension of difference.

Where you might have preferences that are different than mine, you may have a liberty of conscience that's different than mine.

You may be able to see uh uh the conviction of the way that you live out your Christian life different than mine, and in matters of indifference, we should be more concerned on if we are honoring God with those differences than trying to bring uniformity around them.

We have to work to live in this holy tension.

We need to work with the Spirit to condition our hearts to love and embrace the diversity of the body so we can uphold and contend for the unity of the body.

But we want to make everything a war, don't we?

In our pursuits of battle, we do more to divide than we do to unify.

A lot of the division within the body of Christ is over in differences, if we're honest.

We love to put absolutes around our preferences.

We wrestle with what we believe to be the ideal way of living out the Christian faith, all of which are biblically informed and spirit convicted, but where liberty still resides.

In that, we either try to bind the liberty of the others through judgment or disregard our brothers through disdain.

So many of us we divide by binding the freedom of others.

We divide by binding the freedom of others.

And this happens a lot throughout the church.

If you probably look at the primary fractures within uh Protestantism, we see a lot where the weaker brother has tried to bind the liberty and freedoms of others.

In this situation, we're the weaker brother.

And ironically enough, what we discover through church history is that the weaker brother often is the most tyrannical.

They are the ones who stumble over things that are liberties within the Christian faith.

They might not participate in certain holidays.

Maybe they can't play video games or go to a casino because their conscience doesn't permit them to.

But then aro rather than allowing that to just settle and be true for themselves, they feel the need to impose it on others.

And so their own convictions, their own preferences, they feel the need to try and impose on everyone else and force it to become theirs also.

Oh, you can't dress that way, you can't read from that translation, you can't listen to that music, you can't go watch that movie, you can't go to that event, you can't go to Halloween or Santo or any of these other things, right?

All these things.

And look, the reality is, all of that, they're gonna be able to point to Scripture.

They're gonna be able to point to biblical principles of why they've come to that conclusion.

But biblical principles don't always create absolutes unless they're tethered with it a command of the Lord.

And so we have to realize that a lot of times we're making absolutes out of indifferences.

We're convinced that we are right.

And we work to make places of liberty obligatory.

And that in their judgment, they are working to bind the freedoms of others because their own sense of liberty is restricted.

Again, we're convinced that we're right.

And then if it is sin to us, then it must be also sin to others.

Right?

And that's the kind of natural thinking that we have in our Christian life.

Well, obviously, if it's sin to us, it must also be sin to others.

And we abuse this.

We abuse this in so many different ways.

Even in our modern culture, we're seeing this where they are trying to bind the liberties on matters of indifference by imposing their own convictions on other people.

And so we're saying if you don't do X, you must not really love your neighbor.

If you don't do Y, you must really not love your neighbor.

The Bible's not explicit on these things that you're trying to impose on me.

There's liberty that still resides, and you can honestly, with sincerity and with all seriousness, approach the scriptures, approach your prayer closet, and be listening to the Holy Spirit.

And one brother can land here and say, I'm loving my neighbor this way.

And another brother can land here and say, I'm loving my neighbor this way.

And our efforts should not be to try and convince this brother to think like us or that brother to think like this one.

It should be, are you honoring God in that?

Yeah.

All right, let's move forward.

Let's move forward in unity, in relationship, because I'll receive you no matter your indifferences, because you're a brother in Christ.

Too often this position breeds legalism.

If we want to remind ourselves, legalism is anything where we try to separate the Christian's due from Christ's done.

If you don't do this, then you must not really be a Christian.

I don't know if you grew up in the church at all.

I got saved when I was a junior, and I could put a hundred different sentences to if you do X, you must not really be a Christian.

I can't tell you how many of my CDs I threw into a youth group fire, or or uh one uh literally, I uh one of my old pastors looked at me one day and said, Take your earrings out and put on a suit or you'll never be in ministry.

So you know what I did?

I took my earrings out.

They're still got holes there.

I think I can get something through them.

Uh, and I went out to Tri-Candy Mall and I bought three suits.

We try to make these things where we say, You must not be a Christian if.

And so many times these are on matters of indifference, where we can honor God no matter what side of that we land on.

And so we breed legalism.

Because we try in our efforts to separate the Christians due from Christ's done.

The issue is not the issue, it's the reason we feel that way and are living that out.

A Christian who cannot go to a casino because his conscience refrains him, to him it is sin.

He's still able to refrain in honor of God and love of his neighbor.

A Christian who says you cannot go to the casino because it's fundamentally sin and delegitimizes your salvation is a legalist and should be rebuked.

The weaker brother is not in sin with his convictions on indifferences, he is in sin when he tries to bind his brother with them.

Does that make sense?

But some of us we divide by ridiculing the conscience of others.

We divide by ridiculing the conscience of others.

We are the stronger brother in this situation, but our strength does not make us greater.

That way of thinking is the beginning of our folly.

We may be able to live in light of Christian liberty and greater capacities than the weaker brother, but that isn't a license for pride.

In humble love, we're actually called to prefer our brothers over ourselves.

Because the same liberty, the same Christian liberty that allows you to say yes to things, obligates you to say no also.

Let me say this for us who love Christian liberty.

The very Christian liberty that allows you to say yes to things obligates that you say no at times.

To prefer your brother over yourself.

True strength is found in meekness, having a power but unwilling to use it to harm another.

If we are the stronger brother, we have to consider the weaker brother and prefer him over ourselves.

Too often we want to disregard our brother or our sister who has different convictions than we do, instead of bring him near in friendship and relationship.

Maybe we want to bring him near, but it's just to debate him or try to persuade him in our way of thinking.

Hear this the violation of conscience, even if it's a misinformed one, is never a matter to take lightly.

Because here's where we can get a stronger brothers in this room.

We can get to a place where our brother is in sin because we've made it so difficult to belong that he violates his own conscience for the sake of community.

And we can do that to the weaker brother.

We can do that to our own brothers and sisters in Christ, where we make it so hard for them to belong because they don't do the things that we do, because they don't partake in the things that we do, because they don't see the world the way that we do through our worldview, that we actually cause them to violate their own conscience just so they can come hang out with us.

That's a terrible place for us to be.

That is a terrible place for us to be the stumbling block of our own brother and sister.

This posture, though, of the stronger brother can breed a hyper-grace culture.

Christian liberty, misunderstood and misapplied, give ways to lawlessness.

While there is an abundance of Christian liberty, there is also an abundance of universal absolutes in the scriptures as well.

The stronger brother is not in sin with his understanding of Christian liberty.

He is in sin when it causes him to disregard his brother over not sharing that same understanding.

Church, we have to learn to live in the tension of unified diversity.

We have to learn to live in the tension of a unified diversity.

We are going to land in different places on different issues of indifference.

For some of us, one thing will be sin or something we have to refrain from.

While to the others of us, it will be an employment of the freedom and liberty that we have in Jesus.

We have to stop working so hard to divide the body over matters of indifference and start focusing our energy into the unity that Jesus died to accomplish for us.

Because the beauty of the gospel for us is that Jesus brings unity to diverse people.

Jesus brings unity to diverse people.

If we look at the high priestly prayer of John 17, which we're going to go into after Romans, Jesus would pray that they would be his, all that the Father had given him, and that we would be one as him and the Father is one.

He died to make a scattered people unified.

No matter their differences on indifferences, no matter what kind of cultures they would bring into the body of Christ, no matter what kind of values and so forth.

There's not, it's not saying that some of those things didn't have to change.

We understand where God spoke explicitly, there was a call to conformity.

But where God was silent, there was freedom of difference and diversity.

And what we want to do is we want to put more energy into dividing the body of Christ that he bled and died to make one.

And it's over the goofiest of stuff, if we're honest.

It's over what kind of style of music you have, or whether you use instruments or not.

It's how you dress or what you uh watch on TV, or it's a matter of whether you uh drink alcohol or you don't, or smoke cigars or don't, or whatever it is.

Because what happens?

We want to be, as the stronger brothers who love cigars, we want to look at the weaker brothers and be like, oh, you must all, you must all be half Christians.

You don't understand the way that we understand.

You don't have the liberties that you do.

So what do we do?

We separate them because we have disrespectful disregard to our brother who can't imbibe in those things because he doesn't have the understanding that we do.

But then the younger brother or the weaker brother, what does he want to do?

He wants to bind the liberties of us.

Because a sin for him does not mean it's sin for all of God's people.

One of my daughters this week at or last week at school was told she wasn't a Christian because they do trick-or-treating by a little girl at our school.

What that should be rebuked in so many different ways.

Trying to bind us over things of indifference.

One, they don't know the historical reality of trick-or-treating, that it's actually rooted in the Protestant Church post-Reformation.

Uh so thank Martin Luther for trick-or-treating.

But she was told that, and what happened to her?

She her conscience, there was labor in trying to bind her conscience to doubt her own faith on a matter of indifference.

Why do we trick-or-treat?

We trick-or-treat to be missional.

We trick-or-treat to try and build relationships with our neighbors and introduce ourselves to them.

And we've had success in being able to have some people come over to our house and trick-or-treat with us who are neighbors and be able to have other opportunities where that trickles into a dinner together or a hangout together, and we're sharing the gospel, and we're talking about Jesus.

That's why we do it.

So why do we trick-or-treat?

To honor God.

We do it to honor God and to hopefully create missional equity, right?

It's like Timothy getting circumcised.

I'm putting on a costume and I got a bucket.

Definitely not the same pain, but it hurts me to dress up.

But what we have to see in the beauty of the gospel is that what Jesus does is he brings unity to diversity.

And our sinful disposition, whether you're the weaker brother or the stronger brother, is to try and develop homogeny.

We want people who look like us, act like us, think like us, value the same things we value.

And if we're really honest, so much of that is around matters of indifference.

And so what should we do in light of this?

Number one, we should contend for unity.

As a church, we should contend for unity.

I pray that we don't experience fractures and divisions within this body over matters of indifference.

I pray that we're able to, as a people, contend for the unity of the gospel, the unity that Christ gives us through the shedding of his blood, that he purchased us with a price, so that we might be brought into his body and that we would receive one another in that same unity, in that same grace, in that same truth of the gospel.

There is going to be issue after issue that's going to lend itself to division because we have wrestled and we have come to a place where for us this thing is sin, or for us, this is a preference that we have landed on.

And what we're going to be always tempted to do is make that the conviction and preference of our brother and sister.

And so there's going to be more energy in you and I to create division than the unity.

Where God spoke, let us be committed, you know, wholeheartedly with everything that we have.

Let's be committed to where God has spoken, that we don't budge on these things.

And there is an obligation to these absolutes.

But where God is silent, let's not be so prideful that we think we can speak for Him.

Church, we have to contend for unity.

Secondly, we have to be content in diversity.

We have to be content in diversity.

If you look around this room, we want to see more diversity than what we see here.

Culturally, we want to see more diversity.

Age, we want to see more diversity.

Ethnicity, we want to see more diversity, socioeconomic status, we want to see more diversity.

We want to see more diversity.

And what we're going to have to do, you and I, is we're going to have to wrestle to be content in that diversity.

Because that diversity is a portrait of the body of Christ, of which he died and purchased with his blood.

So many times we're not content in diversity because we want things that are similar to us.

You wouldn't believe how many times I've been asked, well, do you have a group or a ministry or something for like this particular group of people?

Right?

It's like if you're uh 18 through 25 white and do computer programming, we've got a group for you.

Uh no, we're never gonna do that.

Uh, two, that shows the heart of homogen that we so desire.

We love to be around people who are just like us and who think just like us.

And and we've got to fight against that.

We have to fight to be content in diversity.

I don't want people coming here and feeling like they can't belong because they don't think like we do on matters of indifference.

If people start leaving this church or people start not feeling like they can belong and connect with us here because they don't think exactly like we do, believe exactly what we do, or practice exactly like we do on matters of indifference, we're gonna have major issues, church.

All of that stuff can be pushed to the side.

I don't really care.

Are we honoring God?

And are we standing on the absolutes of the explicit places He has spoken?

Lastly, we have to convey the unifying gospel of grace.

Convey the unifying gospel of grace.

Do our lives, do the way that we conduct ourselves, do the way that we speak of our other brothers and sisters in the body of Christ convey a unifying gospel of grace, or does it convey a man-made reality of division and separation?

There's a lot of the church that's splintered over nothing more than preference and matters of indifference into the world that's watching, they don't see unity, they don't see the oneness of which Christ begged his father for in John 17.

They see the man-made fractures and splinters of our sin because we want to make indifferences absolutes, we want to make our convictions the convictions of others, and we don't realize and settle in the holy tension of liberty.

My prayer for us is that we would work to see the unifying gospel of grace not only proclaimed but lived out in this Christian community.

That when the world looks at us, when the world engages us, they engage a church who contends for unity, who's content in diversity, and who models and reflects the oneness of the body of Christ, of which we have in him, even if it's not fully realized in our everyday life.

Let's pray.