Romans 14:1-12 Peace in the Gray

Of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches his series in the Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in.

Welcome, Church Announcements, and the Call to Hear Romans 14

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church, everybody. I'm Don Filsak, I'm the lead pastor here, and we're gonna go ahead and get started, so if you can find your seats, that would be great. And a welcome to the gathering of God's people.

It is a privilege that we have to gather together in the name of Jesus Christ, and I hope that you have come to hear from him and what he desires of us. Just by way of announcement, last week, we did have an announcement clarifying that we are going to bring on a new associate pastor.

He's gonna be starting in February. Actually, February 2nd is gonna be his first Sunday. His name is Spencer Valeri, and he and his wife, Megan, are originally from Michigan. They've spent some time in Ohio recently, and I guess they're kinda ready to come home, so they're coming back to Michigan to serve among us here.

And as I said, he's gonna be starting in February, so please be in prayer for Spencer and Megan and their daughter, Bexley, in this transition. They are in the process of looking for a home in the Matawan area, so be in prayer for that.

But we're praising God also that there is some temporary housing that's been provided. A family in our church has an apartment that's available for them, so they have a temporary place to live while they're looking for a house, so it takes a little bit of the pressure off of them, so very glad for that and praising God for that.

Spencer is gonna be focusing on primarily an administrative role in pastoring. He's gonna be heading up our community groups and really trying to provide more structure and more guidance and more direction to those community group leaders and organizing and structuring those in a way that helps us to grow in community here.

He's also gonna be helping in the area of service, and so helping people to get plugged in, using their gifts into teams and structuring that a little bit better as well. So looking forward to what he's gonna bring to us in 2020 as God has led him to join us here.

And we're gonna have some opportunities for you as a church to get to know Spencer a little bit better too. February 9th, we're gonna be having a potluck immediately following the service. That's gonna be his second weekend here and a chance to get to know him better, so encourage people to follow what instructions there are for that potluck that's coming up and a chance to hang around after a service and get to know him.

After all of that announcement, we're gonna shift gears to the introduction of the text this morning, and I just am curious, how many of you prefer really clear instructions? If somebody gives you a task, you like to have it kind of spelled out in black and white, very clear instructions?

I know I do, and I think many of us like to dwell in the realm of black and white, just tell me what to do, tell me what not to do, and I'll try to do those things. Knowing clearly if what I'm doing is wrong or if clearly what I'm doing is right, well, that just helps us to evaluate, right?

Like we know whether we're on target, whether we're hitting the marks, we have some metrics we can meet if we have those clear instructions. Give me a checklist. How many of you would just say, I'm the kind of person who likes checklists?

I kind of like that. Some of you maybe even add tasks that you've already completed to your checklist thing so you can check them off. My wife would be more like that than me, but yeah, I mean, I don't mind checklists.

Like I don't mind having something that tells me, yes, I've accomplished this. But how many of you knew that life has some gray area in it, right? It's not all checklists. It's not all very clear exactly what we are and are not supposed to do.

There's a lot of gray area between the right and wrongs of everyday life. And I want to suggest to you that that is not an oversight on God's part. It isn't as if he ran out of steam and giving us laws and said, I've already got that many pages already in the Bible, so I just, I don't feel like adding more.

It isn't like he ran out of prophets, kept sending prophets, we kept killing them, so he's like, I just don't have any more prophets. I'm out of, I'm fresh out of prophets. I don't have any more to give laws and rules and regulations to you.

Instead, I think that God is showing us in the way that he has orchestrated our reality that there is all of this gray area. He's showing us that we have significant freedom in the realm of what the Greek culture and early Christians called, this Greek word, a diaphora.

A diaphora is a big word that simply means unclear things, debatable things, things that are up for dispute. Those gray area issues of our everyday life where we know that good people disagree and differ on them.

And in our text this morning, Paul is calling the church to peace and unity in these a diaphora, up for debate kind of things. Within the church and out in our daily lives, we encounter all kinds of opinions and thoughts, don't we?

People are becoming more and more free with their opinions and thoughts, aren't they? Especially with the advent of social media, that seems to be the primary place where you can turn to see everyone's opinion and thought about anything that you would be curious about.

But within any body of believers, including recast, there's gonna be people who recognize freedom in Christ and apply it easily. They recognize how free they are and how Christ has set us free in these gray area issues and then they go out and they live according to the clear lines that God has drawn for them.

There are those who are strong in their faith in that regard. But then there are also people who are weak in their faith and they struggle to apply the freedoms that are given to us through the cross of Christ.

Identifying where God draws lines and then drawing their own lines further away from those lines. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where God says, don't do this, and they say, well then I won't do this, this, or this because that, that, and that might lead to this, right?

And so there are those who, according to this text, are actually identified as weak in their faith and put more structures and boundaries in place around their lives. And if we're not careful, a church can turn into a division on these two fronts.

A division of people who are arrogant about their freedom versus those who judge those who apply the freedom they feel. Now it'd be good to identify yourself in this text as we're about to read it because everyone in this room really gravitates towards one of these poles.

Either you are a person who is, has a bent towards fear of freedom or you are a person who is bent more towards applying freedom in your life. And some of that's just straight up a byproduct of the way that you were raised.

But identify yourself and God has a word for all of us. So identify where you're at for sure and try to figure that out. But then this is the word that he wants us to think about. The phrase that he wants us to think about as we come to this text and read it together and it is simply this.

Get along. Get along. Refuse to judge one another on the gray area issues as a church. This passage is close to my heart by the way because we have really sought to apply this passage from the very beginning of Recast Church.

It's been part of my heartbeat in starting a church here in Matawan. We set out to avoid overowning each other's sanctification. So many discipleship programs and so many churches will define all of the gray area issues for us.

We wanna take those issues where people are free to disagree and make rules and to have a published list of acceptable authors or a published list of acceptable titles or a published list of and go on and on.

You can't watch this show. You can watch this show. Do you get what I'm talking about? Some of you remember the age old. You're old enough like me to remember don't dance, don't play cards, don't drink.

You remember those things. Those were I think some of the more funny ones for those of us that are older. But here at Recast, we trust God to work in you through the Holy Spirit to guide you into conviction, to guide you into conviction.

You see, I think the church sits under the teaching of the word, all of us sitting under, myself included. My goal as a pastor when I get up here is not to stand over you with the word. It is all of us together standing under the word and I have intensely tried to place myself this week under this word so that then I can in turn communicate it to you.

So we can all be under the word together. And then by hearing from God's word and by submitting to God's word, we let the spirit help us as individuals figure out how to apply it to our personal circumstances day by day.

And so if you're not already there, let's open up to Romans chapter 14 verses one through 12. Again, the passage is Romans 14 one through 12. Navigate in your device or grab your Bible and follow along.

Recast, this is a privilege, a real true privilege that we have this morning to hear from God through the reading of his word. Romans 14 one through 12. As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him.

But not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats for God has welcomed him.

Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls and he will be upheld for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day is better than another while another esteems all days alike.

Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord since he gives thanks to God. While the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.

For none of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's for to this end, Christ died and lived again that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we all stand before the judgment seat of God. For it is written, as I live says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall confess to God.

So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word that clearly speaks into our contemporary situation, into our hearts, into where we live. Father, I thank you for a reality that you have crafted this life with certainly do's and don'ts.

We know areas, things that we ought to do. We know things that we ought not to do and that we shouldn't do if we wanna honor you. And then you have created within that whole spectrum a massive area of gray that we live and walk in and that we have an opportunity in thankfulness and in gratitude to worship you in it, each following their own convictions in that.

And Father, you have brought us together as a unity of people who have diverse backgrounds, diverse preferences. You've united us in the cross of Jesus Christ, in his sacrifice and redemption in him. So Father, we have this one thing in common we can rejoice right now if we're in you.

We've received the salvation that is available through Jesus Christ then. And this one thing we can certainly do together in unity and that is praise you, bring glory to you, honor you. And so Father, we seek to do so now in singing, but I just pray that the singing is only a reflection of what's going on in our lives and in our hearts all week long.

That it's not just a Sunday morning behavior, it's not just a song behavior, it's not a music thing, but at the end of the day it is a worship thing that carries throughout the week in the way that we live, in the way that we interact with one another, the way that we interact with the world around us.

I ask that you would receive these songs as worship to you this morning in Jesus' name, amen. Well, yep, go ahead and take your seats and then remember if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts or use the restrooms, they're out the barn doors down the hallway on the left-hand side if you need those.

And then I just ask that you please reopen your device or your Bible to Romans chapter 14 verses one through 12. So you've got that in front of you so you can see it. I'm gonna be referencing it throughout the message.

The Gospel Before the Commands of Romans 14

We're gonna be walking through that passage and hopefully our focus is able to be on God's word and what he has for us for the remainder of our time together. The gospel, let me start off by saying something that the gospel is not.

It's very important that we keep rehearsing the gospel at the start of these messages at the latter half of Romans because the first 11 chapters of the book of Romans has been there to express to us the gospel and now he goes into how we should live in light of the gospel.

So if you just grab a passage out of anything after Romans chapter 12, it's gonna sound like law. It's gonna sound like rules. It's not gonna sound like a relationship of love because you're missing everything that came before it.

And the fact of the matter is we do not, God doesn't love us because of what we do. He loves us because he chose to love us and sent his son to die for us. And then if we're in Christ, now from that position, we go out and we follow these instructions that he's given to us based on the love that we have in our hearts through Christ's sacrifice for us.

And so the gospel is not fix yourself and live a certain way so that God will love you. The gospel is God loves you and showed that love by paying the gruesome price for your sins on the cross of Christ so that in love, you can now live for him.

That our obedience flows out of a loving relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. And our text this morning is written to those who love him. It is written to those who have faith in Jesus Christ and faith in his death on the cross to cover our sins and to wash them away.

So as we talk about the two categories of people in this text, the weak in their faith and the strong in their faith, we need to understand that both categories of people that we're talking about are in the kingdom of God.

Both are saved. Both are members of Christ. Both have different understandings and are moving in the same direction towards a stronger faith, toward a stronger understanding, but they're at different stages of their lives in their understanding of their freedoms in Christ.

And so it's interesting to note from the very beginning that not everyone within the faith, not every believer, not everyone in the church is expected to see things exactly the same. And that's fundamental to this text.

That's a fundamental teaching from what we're looking at here in these first 12 verses of Romans chapter 14. These first 12 verses are there to express to us that it is okay for us to differ on things.

Now it's important for us to understand at the start here, there is only one gospel that saves us and all must come through that one door of salvation through Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. That's the thing that brings us together.

That's the thing that makes us a church. But aside from what God has clearly revealed in his word as his will for us, we have a lot of freedom in our daily lives, don't we? There's a lot of things that when push comes to shove, and how many of you have had a decision you had to make this last week?

Some of you had major decisions in 2019 that you had to make. And sometimes the words of our decisions aren't found in scripture. In other words, I might be out looking for a new car and I'm going Hummer or Prius, and how many of you knew that neither one of those words occur in the Bible?

You can look it up, you can jump into your concordance or look it up online, and how many times does the word Hummer appear in scripture? How many times does Prius appear? And it's not there for you, so you have to make a judgment call based on your own convictions, based upon your own understanding.

And so, I mean, one way we're looking at a passage is telling us, don't look awkwardly at the person who drives the Prius. Don't look awkwardly at the person driving the Hummer. There's a freedom within the body of Christ to differ and to disagree on what car to drive.

We need to make sure that we do understand that there is indeed a standard. Scripture is our standard. And where it doesn't speak to an issue, then there is freedom, that's a gray area. That freedom, of course, within the church has produced a lot of disagreement over the years, hasn't it?

People with strong opinions, people trying to get people to their side and win them over and quarreling, as the text says, over opinions, over things that are in the gray area. So the flow of our text this morning is four points.

Four points that look like this, the text breaks down like this. The first is verses one and two, accept the weak. The second movement is don't judge each other on the gray areas, verses three through six.

The third section is we belong to the Lord, and that's one of the rationales why we ought not to judge one another, is each and every one, you can look around you right now and look at the people around you, they belong to Jesus, not to you.

Like, you're not their master, Jesus is their master, is the point. And then the fourth thing that ties in very closely with that is, since Jesus is their Lord, he alone is their judge. He alone is our judge, that's verses 10 through 12.

So let's jump into this first section, accept the weak, accept them. The first two verses introduce a dichotomy within the church I've already kind of explained, and it was obviously a dichotomy within the church at Rome to whom the letter was written.

Paul is addressing a real life situation. There are those who are weak in their faith, and there are those who are strong in their faith in that body of believers. And at this point of identifying these differences, I kind of expect Paul to go a different direction than he does.

What do you expect an apostle of Jesus Christ, one who's standing for him, what do you expect him to say when he identifies that there are weak people in the church and there are strong people in the church?

What would be your logical thought that he's gonna do in the remainder of this text? Encourage the weak to get it together. That's my expectation, right? If you're weak in your faith, does that sound like a good thing?

Is that a good thing to be weak in your faith? Of course not. And so what I would expect him to do next is to encourage the weak to become strong, to give them five steps to becoming a stronger person in their faith.

But instead, he starts off with a simple command to the strong. Welcome the weak with open arms. The word welcome here is to associate with, to befriend, to stay in fellowship with them. And he is giving instructions and he's speaking to those who are strong in their faith and are understanding the freedoms that they have in Jesus to welcome those in their midst who maybe have more hangups and more rules and more structures that they place around their life in order to make themselves feel more at peace.

I find it interesting that Paul is speaking to the strong in their faith in this text and he wants to be sure that the strong do not merely associate with the weak for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.

Often a person coming from a stronger position, what is their goal from somebody who's coming from a weaker position? To win them over to my side, right? To bring them in and bring them over so that I can convince them and argue them into my position, right?

And he says, don't do that. That's not the purpose of your welcoming is that you would seek to constantly be badgering and badgering and pushing and pushing. Now, verse two helps us to understand the type of situation because so far, verse one is kind of theoretical.

It's just kind of like up in the sky, like it doesn't have any flesh on it. But he says in verse two, he kind of fleshes it out a little bit and gives a specific illustration. Really in verse two and in verse five, we see two specific illustrations of the way that this might play out in a church.

He says, one person feels free to eat whatever they want. This is the strong person in their faith. Nom. But another person only eats vegetables and this is the weak person in their faith. So, now hear me out for a second.

This is not, some of you know a vegetarian or maybe even a vegan and it's not saying that all vegetarians and all vegans are weak. That's not the point. As a matter of fact, they can be quite strong. But this is about the way that a Jew would avoid meat altogether just in case it wasn't prepared in a kosher way.

Now, what you need to understand is going on here is very different than just our modern day understanding of vegetarianism or a choice for health or something like that. This was a religious choice. And this is a very significant religious choice because at the end of the day, God has, in his Old Testament, has declared certain dietary restrictions.

And he drew a line in the Old Testament and he said, don't eat pork. Don't eat lobster. Don't eat shrimp. He had a list of things that he said, do eat, these are okay. These things are not okay. And what the person in this text is doing is saying, God, I see your standard.

I see your line in the sand and I'm gonna do one better, God. I'm gonna improve on your law. I'm gonna improve on what you have said and I'm gonna say, you know what? Just in case the meat here would cause me to sin, I'm gonna not eat meat at all.

I'm gonna draw the line. You've drawn the line here, God. Good for you. I'm sure that's okay for you. But what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna draw the line over here and I'm not gonna eat anything. I'm just gonna eat only vegetables for the sake of being pious, for the sake of being okay with God and being sure that I'm all in with you and that everything is okay between us.

I'm gonna draw the line there. Well, we have a further issue here that comes into play and that is the fact that Peter was standing on the roof of a house and praying in that ancient time in the book of Acts.

He's getting ready to go and share the gospel with a Gentile, somebody who eats all of this stuff like bacon and just a sinner who eats these kinds of things. And in a vision, God lowers a sheet with pigs, nice crispy bacon, some lobster, a little bit of shrimp maybe with a coconut on the outside, some really delicious foods.

And he lowers that sheet and he says, Peter, take and eat. I have now made this clean for you. So what has happened here is that at the end of the day, the church is open to, those dietary restrictions were removed from the church there.

But can you understand how somebody was raised with very strict dietary religious restrictions would have a hard time accepting that? Peter sure did. Peter said, I have never touched pork since I was born.

How could I do this? And Jesus tells him in that vision, what God has made clean, don't call unclean. I've made this clean for you now. You need to accept that. And so how many of you know that that would be whiplash a little bit?

That'd be some significant whiplash for a person who, it's kind of like a person who was raised in a household where you're not told to go to dances and then you go to a dance and it's like, oh, what do I do now?

So there's an awkwardness about this. So the weak one, the weak one doesn't feel free to apply the freedom that they have received in Christ. But the strong is a person who is leaning firmly on Jesus and is no longer fearful of defilement.

They are okay with where God has drawn the line. The strong person is okay with the standard that God has drawn and doesn't feel the need to add more rules on top of the clear instructions of God. Which by the way, we might actually think the opposite by the way that we were raised.

You might imagine that the strong has more rules, right? And that the weak one is the one who goes out and lives free. Depending on how you were raised, depending on what kind of a church you come from or what your background is.

I was raised in a church where the strong person had a lot of rules. That was the perception. But that's not what scripture is saying here. The strong person is more free to draw the lines right where God draws the lines and be okay with that.

Do you get what I'm saying? Am I making sense? Some of you are looking really blank. Are you getting this? Is it making sense? The strong is the person who is okay with their freedom in Christ. And I find it somewhat humorous that Paul uses the word weak in the faith to describe a subset of the church.

It is indeed a negative word in this text and there's no way around it. No scholar, no commentary that I read thought that this was a positive word. They couldn't wrangle it down to becoming something that's good.

So in this I truly believe that Paul would love for anybody listening to this text to draw closer to a strong position, to experience more freedom in Christ. Just like our church here recasts, we set a goal of growing in our faith, growing in community, growing in service, growing in faith.

I believe that Paul would also like people to grow in their faith in the church in Rome. But here his primary concern, hear me carefully. So why isn't he going there? Why doesn't he just launch out into you weak people, you're more free, you need to study this and you need to come alongside with where I am in my position of strength and more freedom?

Well it's because the purpose of this writing, the purpose of this text is unity in the church. How do we live in community together, unified with a diversity of different opinions and different thoughts?

And he's telling us as a church to make sure we have a room here, we have room available, we have space for a variety of opinions in the gray areas of life. Now one of the beauties in this is the unity and diversity.

Our church is not supposed to be clones of one another and you just look around the room and if you were to follow each other in life you would recognize that we don't all live the same, we don't all make the same decisions day by day.

And there is room for the weak to come among us and to be received here so that they also can grow. And we need to be willing to welcome them, as the text says, not merely to debate, but we need to welcome the weak so that we all can grow together in our faith.

Do Not Judge One Another in the Gray Areas

The second thing, the second movement in the text is don't judge each other on the gray areas, that's verses three through six. Now it's important to keep in mind all throughout this text, keep going back to it, the reality of what are we talking about exactly?

We are talking about a diaphora, we are talking about gray area issues. Things that are open to debate, things that are disputable. Things that require discernment, not revelation. There are things that are revealed in scripture that are sin and we are not talking about a diversity of opinion about sin.

Do you hear me? Hear me carefully on that. We are talking about a diversity of things that God's word gives us freedom in. That where he is open to us having a divergence of opinions and thoughts about them.

We are not to admit those into membership who feel free to murder. We are not to admit those into membership who feel free to commit adultery, who feel free to live in a life of theft. As a matter of fact, the same Paul who wrote that's this text here about unity in the body about these diverse gray area issues is the same dude who wrote 1 Corinthians chapter five where he tells us to avoid fellowship and tells the church in Corinth to avoid fellowship and to literally kick a guy out of the church who is committing incest.

We cannot read into this text a complete free for all as if this is a text that just tells you just get along at any cost. That's not what he's talking about. But he's saying in the gray areas, in the issues that are not sin, in the issues that are not clearly revealed in scripture, we have freedom for diversity of thought.

It's in the areas where we have no clear command from the Lord that we are to be generous with one another and non-judgmental. And so when we think of what Paul is saying here, we may recognize right away that in this is found the cause of many conflicts within the church.

We either elevate the molehills, we elevate the gray areas and make them into laws and rules or we ignore mountains, we ignore what is clearly sin and allow sin to go unchecked in our midst calling it a diaphora, calling it disputable when it's clear in scripture.

And this is where we need to study the word carefully to determine when something is a diaphora and when it isn't. Is it sin or is it in the gray area? God has been faithful to give us a standard in scripture, a clear word that we can go back to and research and study and go back to time and time again to hone and sharpen our skill at understanding what God desires of us and where we're free.

But in verse three, the standard is that the strong should not despise the weak. The word despise covers a common temptation for those who are strong in their faith. They look down their noses at people with more rules and more constraint.

But on the flip side is that those who are weaker and live by more rules will often be tempted to pass judgment on others. Do you know what I'm talking about? More prone to pass judgment on others because they don't live according to your standards, according to your rules.

You know, put some flesh on it. Those who refuse to watch TV or those who may be tempted to say sending your kids to public schools like letting Satan raise your kids, right? Or those who might be tempted to call alcohol the devil's brew.

They may be tempted to assume that those who watch TV are at risk of condemnation. By the way, I wanna be clear. It's okay for a person to abstain, to not even own a TV, that's fine. It's okay to homeschool your kids.

It's okay and a good thing to avoid alcohol, but declaring those as the only acceptable option for a Christian is what Paul is opposing here. It's okay to have strong convictions about these gray area issues.

You're gonna be encouraged here in a moment to be convinced in your own mind to have strength in your position while being okay with others differing, not making laws and rules for each other. Are you getting what I'm saying on this?

But be convinced in yourself, the text is gonna say. Paul reminds us at the end of verse three that the key to salvation is God welcoming a person. It's his welcome that we're looking for. And the one whom God has welcomed, recast we should welcome them too.

You hear that? The one who God has welcomed, we must also welcome. Further in verse four, Paul asks the rhetorical question, who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? Who do you think you are to invent commands for other people?

You're not their Lord. You are not their judge. They do have a Lord and they do have a judge. The name just doesn't match yours. Further in verse four, at the end, it ends with a beautiful statement that should give us optimism toward one another.

I love the optimism of verse four. God is the one who upholds his people. And he is the one who is able to make all of us stand. He's able to make you stand. He's able to make the person sitting next to you stand.

Our only hope to stand before him on the day of judgment is his ability to make us stand. That is the foundation of the hope for both the weak and the strong. It all comes down to his ability to make us stand on that day of judgment.

Paul uses another issue in verse five that was common in his day regarding the Sabbath, an issue that I think still resides in the church even today, and it still is common across a variety of denominations.

But the fact is Jesus set us free from strict Sabbath observation. Now, I grew up in a church where it was a pretty strict church. And I remember on one Sunday, my family, there was one real good restaurant in Middleville, Michigan.

It had a bowling alley attached with it, had a bar attached with it, had video game arcade attached with it. It was kind of a fun place to hang out. And as a family, I remember going there one Sunday after church, and my mom literally got a phone call that week from a leader in the church who said, hey, you know, we saw your car outside of the bowling alley on Sunday, and Christians don't make other people work on the Lord's Day.

Now, that's addressing this issue, isn't it? How many of you know that that's what Paul is addressing here in verse five? Some people look at a certain day a certain way, and others, because Jesus has set us free, now is there wisdom in the principle to have a Sabbath day?

I hope you see that, and I hope you personally wrestle with it. And my encouragement to you as a pastor is that you really take on the consideration that on the seventh day, God rested. So there's something to that, right?