Romans | No Such Thing as “Agree to Disagree” | Romans 14:1-23 | Ep. 35

Welcome to Preaching from Bryanson Bible Church, located in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is our prayer that this teaching would bless you, deepen your love for God's word, and encourage you as you follow Jesus.

And if you're not a Christian, we pray that this message would encourage you as you explore the Christian faith.

So it's so good to be worshipping with you this morning.

It's so good to be journeying on with you through our sermon series in Paul's letter to the Romans.

Now, for those of you who have ever been in a deep relationship or in a friendship, which I would say is most of us, you have definitely reached for the most sophisticated, most diplomatic get out of jail free card in the English language.

You know what it is?

Let's just agree to disagree.

It sounds so holy, doesn't it?

When we say it, it's like we've reached this higher plane of maturity.

But let's be honest, when we say to others in relationship, let's just agree to disagree, it's often just a polite way of saying, I have exhausted my ability to tolerate your wrongness.

Or I cannot force you to be right.

Agreeing to disagree isn't a resolution, it is a ceasefire.

One of the places where I've often reached for that phrase is in my marriage.

My wife will agree.

In marriage, agreeing to disagree is sort of like waving a white flag when you've become tired or weary of trying to be on the same page or of trying to be one.

But here's the thing in a marriage, you can't actually agree to disagree because you live in the same house.

One spouse, one spouse believes that a fan is meant for cooling the room.

The other spouse believes that a fan is a life support device that must be blowing onto your face at all times at Gale Force 10, even in the month of July.

Chandra.

You can't agree to disagree when one spouse is huddled under three layers of blankets and the other spouse is just enjoying the liberty of a category five hurricane.

Or for the weak sleeper in the relationship, that little red light on the TV is like a laser beam pointed directly at your soul.

It is just so bright.

But for the stronger sleeper, the total darkness sometimes can feel like a little bit of a tomb.

We can't agree to disagree when we're both hungry, but we can't decide what to have for dinner.

One spouse just wants a light salad.

The other spouse doesn't consider it a meal unless something died and was bright over open coals.

What about that classic toilet paper orientation debate?

One spouse is convicted that the toilet paper must hang over.

The other spouse is convicted about the fact that the toilet paper must hang under.

I mean, can we just put this to bed forever?

I know you'll back me in this because the right answer is that the toilet paper must hang under.

And it's not just in a marriage, it's anywhere where we have to live, work, or play in the close proximity of other human beings.

Eventually, one person's freedom to have their socks lying on the floor or leave dishes in the sink overnight or eat fish in the office kitchen clashes directly with someone else's need for a tidy home or an orderly office.

And it can cause a major, it becomes a major stumbling block.

Whenever we live in the proximity of others, our our personal, our personal preference, preferences aren't just private choices.

They are the environment that our spouses, our friends, our housemates, our colleagues must breathe in.

We can't just ignore one another's convictions because we are sharing the same life.

And in the text that Danae read out for us in Romans chapter 14, that's what the apostle Paul was saying to this early church.

Romans 14 · chapter mention

You are a spiritual family.

You share the same spiritual house, you share the same father, the same Lord, the same table, you share the same life.

And so you can't just ignore one another's convictions.

You have to learn to live in them.

See, when Paul wrote this letter to the Roman church, he was writing to a diverse church.

It consisted of Jewish Christians as well as Gentile Christians, in other words, non-Jewish Christians.

Jewish people in Paul's day in that city of Rome were a minority group who often clung to their religious traditions as a survival tactic.

If they felt if they didn't eat a certain way or celebrate certain days, that they were losing their cultural identity.

Enter into that mix the Gentile Christians who might not have shared the same convictions.

And what resulted in this church wasn't a disabate, a debate or a disagreement, but they were judging one another.

They were despising one another.

Paul isn't very specific about what was dividing this community, but he hints at it.

In verses two and three, he speaks about meat.

In verses five, he speaks about certain holy days.

And in verse 21, he speaks about alcohol.

As he writes this chapter, he he really addresses this church in two groups that he calls the weak and the strong.

The weak and the strong.

Crucial to understanding this text is understanding what Paul means when he says weak and when he says strong.

And so I love the way that the Bible scholar Douglas Mu says it.

Here's what he says.

We must recognize that the phrase whose faith is weak has a special nuance in this context.

Faith refers not directly to one's belief generally, but to one's convictions about what that faith allows him or her to do.

The weak in faith are not necessarily lesser Christians than the strong.

They are simply those who don't think their faith allows them to do certain things that the strong feel free to do.

In other words, being weak in the story is not having a weaker character.

It is not having a weaker faith, but it's having a more restricted conscience.

It's not about how much we love Jesus, it's about how much we think Jesus allows us to do.

It's so important to keep that in mind as we journey through this text.

Now, to be sure in the Bible, as we read it, as we study it, there are certainly some things that are closed-handed issues.

Things like the gospel, things like sexual immorality, things like the fact that the Bible is the inspired word of God, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, things that we are that we draw a hard line over.

In fact, things that the Apostle Paul even teaches in some of his other letters that we would be right to divide over.

But Romans 14 is about open-handed issues.

Those gray areas where the Bible might be silent, but our opinions are loud.

Things that we should not break fellowship over, things that we should not allow to divide ourselves or cause division in our church.

And so those are the category of things we'll explore in Romans 14 today, essentially answering two questions.

Is there a way to handle things in this local church?

Is there a way to handle things that aren't sin but still feel wrong to some of us?

In other words, things where our minds might know, yes, the Bible doesn't speak about them, but our hearts feel them so deeply and so strongly.

Our hearts feel so strongly that they are wrong.

Or on the other hand, our hearts feel so strongly that they are right.

Because the second question we'll look at is how do we get along with someone here in our church who is passionate about something that we find completely unnecessary?

Paul's answer to these questions and his main idea in this text is simply this In Christ, we don't agree to disagree.

We sacrifice our rights and our rigidity to protect unity.

As those who've been transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, we don't agree to disagree.

We sacrifice our rights and our rigidity to protect unity.

As we journey through this text, we'll see how Paul encourages the strong in the community in light of certain of their rights to certain freedoms, how he encourages them to do just this.

We'll see how he exhorts or challenges the weak to do this in light of their apparent rigidity.

And what's interesting is that the challenge he has for both the strong and the weak is essentially the same thing as he challenges them to protect unity in the in the in their church family.

And the exhortation is simply this do not judge your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Do not cause your brothers and sisters in Christ to stumble.

And so that's how we'll journey through the text this morning.

We'll see how Paul speaks or challenges or exhorts the strong in their right to certain freedoms.

He says to them, Do not judge, do not cause others to stumble.

And then we'll look how he speaks to the weak and says to them, Do not judge, do not cause others to stumble.

What's interesting for me is that as I was studying this text and processing it this week, I realized in my life, sometimes I find myself being the weaker brother.

Sometimes in my life, I find myself being the stronger brother.

It really depends on the issue being discussed or the particular situation.

And so, just in case we were tempted to switch off, look at this and think it's not relevant to me, Paul lets none of us off the hook in this text.

And so let's look firstly at how he speaks into the rights of the strong, saying to them, Do not judge.

Now, when the strong say, Let's agree to disagree, what they often mean in that moment is that I'm going to continue exercising my rights to those freedoms.

And if it bothers you, well then that's your problem.

Here's the issue with that though.

In a Christian community, in a church family, in God's kingdom, we can't just sign a ceasefire and then go in our opposite directions because we are sharing the same spiritual family.

We're in the same spiritual house.

And so, in Paul's view, an agree-to-disagree ceasefire that leaves some of our brothers and sisters in Christ here wounded is not Christian unity, but rather it is thoughtlessness.

It is us choosing to be selfish, us choosing our preferences over people.

In this first century church in Rome, it would seem that the stronger brothers and sisters had become so focused on enjoying the things that they were free to enjoy that they became indifferent to how them doing that was hurting their brothers and sisters in Christ.

They were despising one another with the strong looking down on the weak as narrow-minded over things like wine and holy days and meat.

They were looking down on one another in these moments as narrow-minded.

Now, in our day, the issues are not quite the same as they were here in this church in Rome, but oftentimes that contempt remains from the strong towards the weak.

It may be the view that, of course, Christians can enjoy alcohol responsibly.

Or it's okay for us and our kids to enjoy that fantasy novel, that movie, that day, or to be on social media.

It's okay for me to take my Sabbath on a Thursday, on a Friday, on a Saturday, to play a round of golf on a Sunday morning and then come to church on Sunday evening.

If you resonate with the person in this text who might be the stronger brother or sister, in those moments when we are enjoying those freedoms, what we often say to ourselves is, yeah, I'm not causing, I'm not, I'm not hurting anyone, I'm not judging anyone as I do this, I'm just minding my own business.

But look closely at the text.

In verse 3, Paul says, Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains.

In verse 10, he says, Why do you despise your brother?

There is a tendency of the strong to look at their wicked brother and sisters and despise them.

In Paul's vocabulary, despising or showing contempt or looking down on someone is really just another word for judging them.

The judgment of the strong is very rarely a finger pointed in anger, but oftentimes it is that eye roll of contempt in secret.

It is looking at our brothers and sisters with a more restricted conscience, with more rigidity, and thinking to ourselves, they are so narrow-minded, they are so legalistic, they are so out of touch.

When we look down at our brothers and sisters because they haven't caught up to our level of freedom, well, in that moment we put ourselves in the judge's seat, and we are measuring their maturity by our preferences.

And Paul would say, Stop judging your brothers and sisters in Christ because they don't feel free to enjoy some of the things that you do.

Because maturity is not about who has the most knowledge about what is clearly allowable, maturity is about who has the most love.

And so Paul says to the stronger brothers and sisters in this in this church community, and he's very clear, he says, Stop judging your brother and sister who Jesus Christ has accepted.

The problem with despising others is that once we have looked down on them, we very quickly stop looking out for them.

Once we've judged someone as backwards, we very quickly stop caring how our actions or our attitudes hurt them or hinder them.

And so that's why in the text, Paul moves very quickly from our attitudes, do not judge, to our actions, as he says, and this is the second thing we'll look at: do not cause others to stumble.

What's interesting in this text, as you read it, you will see that Paul is not neutral on the subject.

He actually agrees with the strong.

In verse 14, he even says, nothing in and of itself is unclean.

And so naturally, how did the strong respond sometimes when we say, let's just agree to disagree, that's just us in that moment making a claim about us being technically right.

Paul is saying, if you being right destroys your brother or sister in Christ, well then even if you're technically right, friend, you are spiritually wrong.

You may have won the theological debate, but you have lost your brother or sister in Christ.

You have lost joy, you have lost unity.

You may ask, what does Paul mean when he says that we can destroy our brothers and sisters in Christ?

I don't think he means that we somehow ultimately destroy them or that they go to hell because of our actions.

Remember Romans 8, Paul said, There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I think that extends to the actions of the strong towards the weak in community.

There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And so when Paul says we destroy them in verse 15, I think what he really means is that we halt or hinder their Christian discipleship, their maturing, their character formation as they are formed into the image of Jesus Christ.

For weaker brothers and sisters to stumble is not simply to become offended or annoyed, but it's to be tripped up in their walk with God.

If us exercising certain freedoms entices our brothers and sisters in Christ to go against what their consciences are telling them to go and to do something that they truly believe is sin, in that moment we haven't freed them from a rigid conscience, but we've actually pushed them into a ditch.

We've trained them to ignore the voice of their conscience in their lives.

Oftentimes, we reduce the Christian life to what we can do and what we can't do.

But here in this text, and particularly in verse 17, Paul recalibrates the scale.

He says the Christian life isn't about what we eat or what we drink.

He says the kingdom of God is about righteousness and peace and joy.

It's about unity.

If you enjoying certain freedoms destroys the righteousness, peace, and joy of the community, well then you might be technically right, but friend, you would be spiritually wrong.

I love the way that the late pastor Tim Keller explained the impact of this, of what Paul is saying.

He says, our behavior in community is to be guided by what brings these things about.

In other words, the things in verse 17, righteousness, peace, and joy.

Our behavior is to be guided by what brings these things about for our brothers and sisters in faith as well as for ourselves.

What Paul is saying is our unity as we grow in righteousness and peace and joy, our unity is more important than enjoying our liberty.

And so we must allow our actions to be guided by what brings those things about righteousness, peace, joy.

I believe to the first century Gentile Christians, Paul may have said to them, Stop bringing your toasted bacon and cheese sandwich to Bible study because it's causing your Jewish brothers and sisters to stumble.

And the Gentile Christians might have said, But Paul, Jesus died so I can enjoy bacon.

Paul would have said yes.

But more importantly, he died for your brother and sister.

And so your focus should be the same as his.

If Jesus thought they were worth giving his life for, surely you can think that they're worth more than a ham sandwich or a glass of wine.

Those who are strong, who see themselves as strong and mature, should display their maturity as Christians by doing everything in their power to prevent or to avoid causing their brothers and sisters in Christ to stumble.

If Jesus Christ thought they were worth his life, then surely they are worth us not simply writing them off as narrow-minded, not simply writing him off as backwards.

When we enjoy things that we might think are nothing, in that very moment, we might be hurting our brothers and sisters in Christ.

And so we should love them enough to be prepared to give up our rights to those freedoms.

Here's just one example.

There are many more.

Yes, we are free as Christians to responsibly enjoy a glass of wine.

But next weekend, when you exercise your right to that freedom amongst your Christian brothers and sisters, ask yourself Am I aware of their story around this thing?

Whatever it may be, am I aware of their story?

Do I know how this may be impacting them?

If Jesus thought they were worth giving his life, surely I can think they are worth more than just simply enjoying the freedom to a glass of wine.

And it may be that God is calling the strong in the community to really engage with the weak and understand why they don't feel free to do those things.

Because if Jesus thought they were worth giving, if he that he was if Jesus thought they were worth his life, then surely we can think they are worth more than just writing them off as narrow-minded.

My encouragement to you then is to lean in, not to defend your freedom, not to correct their rigidity, but to truly know them and then be prepared to have your own views shifted.

Why?

Because Jesus thought they were worth giving his life for.

So to the strong, do not cause your brothers and sisters to stumble.

But what about the weak?

Surely they have a responsibility here too.

They may not struggle with holding on to their rights to certain freedoms, but it would seem that they struggle with rigidity.

And so here's the first thing Paul says to the weak.

He says to them, Do not judge.

When the weak say, let's agree to disagree, it's really something like a cold war.

They just grow silent, they stop speaking about the issue, but in their hearts, they are still firing missiles of judgment, silently condemning their brothers and sisters in Christ in their church for enjoying things that they see are clearly wrong in their minds.

Paul is saying that an agree to disagree ceasefire that doesn't lead you to truly loving your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Well, that's not Christian unity either.

And I believe he would call those of us in this church community who tend to look down on others, who enjoy certain things that we may feel very strongly you're not.

Allowed to enjoy, Paul may be asking us to consider what that judgment communicates about us.

It may be communicating that there is pride in our hearts that God would have us search ourselves over.

Because when we judge someone for something that the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn, in that moment we're not just being strict, we're being arrogant.

Paul says in verse 4, who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?

It is before his own master that he stands or falls.

What Paul is saying is that when we exercise judgment in that way, it's essentially identity theft of God.

We put on the robe, we climb onto that bench and sit in a seat that only Jesus Christ is qualified to occupy.

So it may be communicating when we judge in that way a sense of pride.

It might also be communicating a lack of wisdom and ironically a lack of maturity.

Love the way the pastor J.D.

Greer sets out this challenge.

He says this we should always show restraint in equating our wisdom, our application of a principle, with the word of God.

Unless you can give a chapter and verse, don't give your perspective in the application, equal authority with God's word.

Spiritual maturity is not just developing strong convictions, it is learning to show restraint in the weight you give those convictions.

Did we all hear that?

Because this is hard-hitting.

Don't give your perspective equal authority with God's word.

And so where may it be in your life right now, if you think about your life, where you might have played the God card to get someone else to see it your way.

Where your opinion on something might be so strong that you don't allow your brothers and sisters to feel any other way about it.

And if if they do, you simply write them off, or you cancel them, even if only in your own heart.

Judgment in this way may be communicating a lack of wisdom and a lack of maturity.

But also it may be communicating an inconsistency or hypocrisy.

We tend to exercise a far more stricter judgment on others for the things we see in their lives, how they spend their time, how they eat, what they do.

But then we are very slow to pass judgment in our lives about the things we can hide: the greed, the gossip, the anger, the sexual sins.

It is the height of hypocrisy to judge our brothers and sisters for their visible freedoms while we excuse our own hidden filth.

So, where might it be in your life right now that you are hiding something?

You're quick to let that go.

But you see your brothers and sisters in Christ and you're judging them.

A caveat here before we move on.

In this text, Paul is crystal clear that if your conscience says to you and tells you not to do something, then if you go ahead and do that thing, for you it is sin.

Verse 23 Whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith.

For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

He's clear.

If your conscience tells you not to do something, and if you go ahead and do that thing, for you it is sin, even if the Bible doesn't speak directly to it.

I won't have time to go into this today, but our consciences are essentially this internal moral compass where you just know something is wrong before you can even explain it.

And it's in it's it's informed by a growing knowledge of God, a growing knowledge of God's word.

It's that thing that before your head can explain it, your heart can feel it.

And it's a very important concept in the New Testament.

Paul is saying, when your conscience says don't do something, and you go ahead and do it, for you it is sin.

And we must be very careful of going against what our consciences are telling us.

Because if we do that again and again and again, eventually our consciences will become numb and that thing won't feel wrong to us anymore.

And so, to the weak, weaker brothers and sisters in the community, those who don't feel the freedom to do certain things, Paul is saying, by all means you continue abstaining from those things.

But don't judge your brothers and sisters in Christ who feel the freedom to do them.

If they are wrong, God will correct them.

If they are wrong, God will correct them.

That's his first challenge to the weak.

Do not judge.

Secondly, do not cause others to stumble.

Now, we often think that it's it's only the strong who cause other people to stumble.

How then is it that the weak can cause people to stumble?

I would say by creating a culture of hiding.

When your rigidity is so loud, and not vocally loud, but just how strongly you hold on to certain things, that the people around you feel they must hide, what they eat, how they live, how they spend their time just to stay in your good books.

Well, then you've placed a stumbling block of hypocrisy in front of them.

Because you haven't helped them to be holy.

You've more likely just trained them to be fake.

And so I believe Paul would have us hold our convictions more loosely because he says something radical in this text in verse 6.

He says it is possible for two Christians to be doing the exact opposite things.

One eats, in verse six, he says one abstains, or one eats, one doesn't eat.

It's possible for Christians to be doing the exact opposite thing, and at the same time, for them both to be doing it with a clear conscience and to the glory of God the Father.

And so when the Bible isn't clear about things, we mustn't expect everyone to do the things that we do.

We must not devalue the allowable too quickly.

Now, if you resonate with the weaker brother or sisters in this text, we must embrace that our stronger brothers and sisters, as they're enjoying their liberties, that's not necessarily rebellion for them in that moment.

It may even be an act of worship.

Unity is what happens when we realize that the person sitting next to us, the person sitting right here across the aisle, might be just as sincere in their freedom as you are in your faithfulness.

And so are we willing to accept that God might be just as pleased with their yes as he is with our no.

And so, to the weak in the community, choose unity over uniformity.

Do not cause your brothers and sisters in Christ to stumble.

So interesting as we study this text because, in essence, the things that both the weak and the strong struggle with are the same.

We tend to feel things so deeply.

We want everyone to see it our way or to be on the same page as us.

And so on the screen, you'll see here a summary of Paul's challenge to us today.

I want you to just spend a few moments reading through that and then asking yourself in a few moments of reflection what is it that God may be pressing you over in your life right now.

We share the same table, we share the same father, we share the same future.

And so because we live in the same spiritual house, our private convictions, our personal convictions are never just personal.

They are the air that our brothers and sisters in Christ must breathe in.

And so, as those who are transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, let's not agree to disagree.

But let's sacrifice our rights and our rigidity to protect unity in this spiritual family.

As I close, I want to jump slightly ahead to the text that Mark will preach for us next week.

Just the first few verses, because I believe in those verses, Paul gives the motivation or the example and the example for us living this way, pursuing unity this way.

Chapter 15, verse 1, he says this we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.

Let each of us, in other words, the strong and the weak, 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, the judgment, the contempt, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.

We've all heard of that golden rule: do unto others as you want them to do unto you.

Treat others the way you want to be treated.

Even better.

What if we treat others the way that God treats them?

We see Paul says here that Jesus is the ultimate example of someone who gave up something for others.

He did it not to please himself, he did it to build us up, to save us, to bring us into the presence of God the Father.

That was God's attitude towards us, how he treated us in Christ Jesus.

And so when we are tempted to look down on our brothers and sisters in Christ because they feel free to enjoy something, remember this.

We have no warrant to climb onto the judge's seat and put our brothers and sisters in the dock.

Jesus died for those freedoms.

We cannot equate our convictions with God's word.

And when we have the tendency to look down on our brothers and sisters because they don't feel free to enjoy something that we feel free to enjoy, remember that Jesus died for that person.

He didn't agree to disagree, he gave his life up for them.

If Jesus, the only truly strong one in the universe, sacrificed his life, surely we can sacrifice our rights to preserve the peace of our brothers and sisters.

You may hear those things and you may say, yes and amen.

But perhaps you need to do more.

From what we've learned here in Romans 14, it may be that some of us need to go home and consider changing our social media posts.

Because even though we have the freedom to express that thing online, it might not be building peace and joy and righteousness in this house.

Some of us might have to go away and rethink the way we enjoy our freedoms at that bride next weekend because we might be harming our brothers and sisters in Christ.

And for those of us in this local church who are divided from our brothers and sisters because of something the Bible doesn't explicitly condemn, we may need to go home and consider repenting of our rigidity.

BBC, would we be a people that are more passionate about Jesus, more passionate about one another than we are about our own opinions?

So whether we are the strong, whether we are the weak, if we truly think we are more mature, we should be the first to step out in love.

And here's the most countercultural thing I can say the whole morning.

Are we humble enough to learn from someone else, even when we think that they may be wrong?

Are we humble enough to have our rigidity softened by someone else's story?

Are we humble enough to lay down our rights for someone else's peace?

Imagine the kind of church that we would keep growing into here if we are secure enough in our identity in Christ to listen to one another, to really listen to one another, and ask, tell me, why do you find that so offensive?

And then not just write that person off as narrow-minded immediately.

Or to ask, tell me, why do you find the freedom to enjoy that thing and then not judge them in our hearts?

Think about how many times in our spiritual lives we have been wrong, and yet God has never stopped accepting us.

We when we refuse to judge our brothers and sisters, when we refuse to cause them to stumble, I believe we are demonstrating the righteousness, the peace, and the joy of the Holy Spirit that Romans 14 speaks about.

We follow the one who gave up his life to bring us to his table.

And so as we go out from this place today, let's not agree to disagree.

Let's agree to love one another at this table.

Would you pray with me?

Father, this morning we come before you, Lord, and we ask you to search our hearts and show us the ways where we have judged people that you gave your life for, where we have caused others to stumble, people that are precious in your sight.

Keep revealing those things to us as we go through this week, Father God, and help us to remember Jesus Christ, who gave up his life, who gave up his rights so that we would be brought into your presence.

Father, would that cause us to worship and that would that cause us to soften and love our brothers and sisters in Christ?

We pray all of these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thanks for listening to this sermon from BBC.

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God bless you.