Feb. 18, 2018 AM No More Useless Wrangling by Pastor Josh Sheldon

We'll now turn in your Bibles, if you would please, to Romans Chapter 14.

We'll continue to work our way through this epistle to the Romans written by the Apostle Paul. This morning we'll look at the first 12 verses of Romans 14, the word of the

Lord. 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 will 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.

Well, a question I want to begin with as we look to these verses is, well, who decides what's important?

Who decides what's worth wrangling over? If it's completely up to each one's conscience, then we too easily can end up with the refrain from the book of Judges, and that could be our own if we did that.

We would say each man did what was right in his own eyes. If it were completely up to me or you to decide what's important and what will the church stand on, orderly church governance would suffer a mortal wound in the unity

Christ intends for the church and that he specifically prayed for on the night before his crucifixion.

If we each individually got to decide what's worth fighting over, what's really important, well, all that would be irreparably damaged.

You know, most controversies that destroy unity and break friendships within a church anyway are biblically based, did you know that?

Or at least they begin that way, or at least the perception is that germ that began it is, well, the scripture says to me, this, and somebody else takes a very different position and both say this is so important that we can grow further and further apart, more inimical to each other.

What kind of things start these fires within a church, these destructive storms, if you will?

Well, one might say, well, we homeschool as the Bible demands of us, Deuteronomy 6 -7 is biblically based.

You shall teach God's word diligently to your children. You see, not the government, but you, the parent.

And of course, Proverbs 22 -6, train up a child in the way he should go, you, not some strange fire teacher, must do this.

Ephesians 6 -4, bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. It's biblically based.

I can show you in the Bible that I'm doing it right, and perhaps you're doing it wrong, so why are you sacrificing your children to Molech?

Why have them in the first place? And then comes the biblical answer, another

Bible answer, homeschool, I prefer to be a light in the world, just like Jesus tells me to be.

I'm not of the world, but as long as Jesus tarries, I'm in the world, and I'm going to represent him. I'm not going to retract like an ostrich putting his head in the sand by homeschooling.

And on and on it goes. And each one can point to a Bible passage and say, this is what the

Bible says, therefore I, paren, not you, am doing it right.

On it goes. Wine at the Lord's table. Jesus never drank wine. I know a guy who has a friend whose father lived next door to a man who once painted a pastor's house, and he said back then wine was totally unlike what we have now, and had no alcohol at all, so you can't have wine at the table.

And the other one says, grape juice, are you kidding? Wine means wine, everybody knows that. That's why we're warned not to drink it, except in moderation.

I'll go on following Jesus' example and drink what he drank, which was of course, actual wine.

Another one would say, grape juice, are you kidding? Wine is wine. And it goes on and on.

I can see Jesus weeping as the amillennial crowd clucks their tongue at the silly premillennials and the postmillennials can't get a word in edgewise, and all three groups can prove that their position is the historic one, they can all cite church fathers, they can all go to the

Puritans and prove that they support that position. Well, I once heard

R .C. Sproul in person, and he was asked during the Q &A portion of his presentation whether he was pre - or post -mill, and he looked and he said, what day is it?

It was a great answer. And then there's the premills, the amills, and the postmills, all looking in wonder at that poor, naive

Christian, newly born to the faith of Jesus Christ, who can't even spell millennium, and has no idea what all the fuss is about, and would ask, isn't it enough just to love

Jesus? This is enough to make

Jesus weep. I think Paul, the apostle, I think his jaw might drop. He might say something like, have you even read my letter to the church in Rome?

You know, the one I wrote by inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Did you get to chapter 14, or did you just leave that part out?

We've been preaching through this letter for a good while now, and back when we opened up chapter 12, there was something of this sigh of relief, because we finally got to the practical side.

We had 11 chapters, doctrine, 11 chapters, theology, and now, finally, I get to tell you what to do.

And you get to hear what to do. Okay, here it is. Do you want to know what to do?

What 11 chapters of the grandest, most magnificent theology we have, all about the gospel of Jesus Christ, all about the righteousness of God, imputed to those whose faith is in Christ because of His sacrifice for your sins, if you by faith will repent.

What does all this boil down to? What does it all come to? Chapter 14.

Get along with each other. How's that? Does that put it all together?

Is that simple enough? I could even get that. Get along with each other. Stop quibbling about nonsense.

Paul's going to write in chapter 15, verse 14, that he's confident that we Christians are full of goodness and knowledge, and we are able to what?

To instruct one another, to counsel one another, to admonish one another, to encourage one another, all wrapped up in that one word, instruct, which means what?

It means that you're able to win the debate, put that other person in their place, prove to them that they got it wrong from the

Bible. We have to do that. There are times when we have to draw the line and say, no, that's sin because the

Bible says it's sin. That's wrong because here's the clear teaching of the Bible and the position of the church, the church at large.

There are times that that is necessary, that that is appropriate, that that's what we're called to do.

Too often, I'm afraid, we just want to win the debate. I just want to prove that I'm right.

If the first 11 chapters of Romans tells us anything, it tells us what's really important, and what's important is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the righteousness of God to those who believe in him.

Jesus' death for sin, his resurrection for our justification, the gospel, the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes.

Now that's important. You speak to Christians. I say you, yes, you

Christian, if you're in Christ, the old man has been crucified. Sin shall no longer reign in your mortal body.

Now that's important. There's therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and that sounds pretty important to me too.

Here are a few things that while they may be interesting, and they do bear on some of the implications of the gospel of God that he accomplished in the

Lord Jesus Christ, and how it should play out in our life, they're a bit less important.

From Romans 14, which I just read, these fall, as you will see, pretty far beneath the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is what those first 11 chapters were all about.

How about meat or vegetables? How about Sabbath or Lord's Day? The church in the first century is no less prone to useless wrangling over days, over foods, over genealogies, over endless speculations than we are today.

And the answer is pretty much what you'd expect, and simply stop that. Understand the priorities.

Get what's important. Romans divides up almost like the book of Ephesians. Ephesians, we know this, there's three chapters of doctrine and theology.

The indicative, the thing that tells you the truth, tells you how things really are, and then chapter four, the imperative.

Therefore, what do we do? Based upon these truths, and if having these truths set out for us in this pattern that Paul does so often, 11 chapters of Romans, and then the rest of it, sort of the same thing, the implications of it, if it does anything for us, that first part of it, that doctrine, that theology, it tells us just that, what's important.

What is worth falling on our sword over? What is worth breaking fellowship over?

Well, we have an entire basis for understanding that. More than just stop that.

A whole basis for it, verses one through three, is just stop judging over trivial things.

Stop judging over trivialities. The error there went both ways. The strong judged the weak, that was judging, and the weak despised the strong.

Who were the weak? Most likely the weak at that church were the

Jewish converts. They were afraid to eat meat because of the risk of violating their scruples about food.

And there's two probable causes of this. First would have been their loyalty to the

Mosaic law. The dietary code in the book of Leviticus, which had many meats that you could eat, like lamb, like steak, but you couldn't eat pork.

You couldn't eat bottom -dwelling seafood. You could only eat seafood that had, or any fish actually, pardon me, that had skin, or fins and scales.

Pork, in that day, in the Roman society where that church was, found pork to be highly valued.

They loved it. It was so prevalent that rather than take a chance of eating a food that had become contaminated by some contact, these

Jewish converts at that church, the ones Paul says the weak, who eat only vegetables, they would eat only vegetables rather than take a chance.

It might also have been that their concern was that the meat had been offered first to an idol, and they didn't want to go into that.

So abstaining totally from meat was the safest way for them to go. So that's who

Paul means by the weak. The weak who are despising the strong. Who are the strong? It's those who are able to eat everything.

But it's not the food that's really the issue here. It's not really the food that's the issue.

The issue is the subject of the entire book of Romans. The question is, how does the gospel fit into this?

How does the gospel fit into this position which you are staking out? How does the gospel bear on this thing for which you are despising one way and judging the other way?

Meat eaters judge the vegetarians, and the vegetarians despise the meat eaters. On the one hand, the

Jews, these weak, these vegetarians there, they seem to not understand what it meant that Christ had freed them, all of us in fact, had been freed from the demands of the law.

Their dietary restrictions have been variously explained back from the Old Testament in the old days. We hear it explained today as necessary because of the problems of food storage and matter of health and that sort of thing.

But the scriptures say something very different. They say something much simpler. It's not because food was hard to store in the desert in the 40 years of wandering.

It's not because of health, or at least it doesn't say so. What does it say?

It says, For I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.

The food laws, like so many other laws in the Old Testament for those people of old Israel, the Jews, were to make them distinct, different from the people around them.

Part of the answer, if we're going to make it very simple, is do it because God said so. Dietary laws, many other rules for this purpose of distinguishing clean, unclean, leprosy or common sores, the holy or the profane.

The Jewish people's identity was found in their distinctness from other people's and that distinctness, that separateness was symbolic of the most basic attribute of God himself, which is what?

Holiness. And holiness has as its core meaning separation, difference, otherness.

So what's the problem with that? What is the problem with that? Well for one thing, Acts chapter 10,

Peter's vision of the foods being declared clean by God makes it clear that God removed those dietary laws.

They are gone. The lawgiver, God, has every right to be the law changer and this he did.

And for another thing, staying fixed to those laws as laws is a misunderstanding of the liberty for which

Christ has set us free, to borrow from the book of Galatians. If they ate vegetables and avoided pork and lobster for preferences, that's one thing.

Were that the case though, Paul wouldn't have called them weak. Their faith was weak because it was still bound up in the doing.

The doing. It's important to note that it's not their saving faith or their reliance on Christ that is weak here.

It's their understanding of the total life impact of the gospel. The gospel has to change everything.

Eat what you will, all foods are clean, Acts chapter 10 verse 15. But don't do it.

Don't abstain from any one food to keep the law or to please God. That's weakness.

Those laws were taken out of the way. And how then do you please God? By faith in Christ. Who pleased

God? Jesus Christ. How do you please God? Faith in Jesus Christ who pleased

God on your behalf. Does that sound circular? That's the gospel.

That in him we have the righteousness of God accrued to us, imputed to you.

To not eat or to eat in one particular way because you think that that's going to give you some favor with God or keep you out of distress with God or out of trouble with him is a misunderstanding of one of the important implications of the gospel.

The liberty of the gospel. The other problem is that God's people are no longer distinguished from others by those laws.

So often in the book of Leviticus, this is the reason given for those laws is so that you not be like those people around you.

The Canaanites to put it all in one word, though there were distinctions amongst them. But the people of God no longer defined by that or distinguished from others by the laws.

Jesus said what? It's our love for each other that makes us different. It's not how we dress or what we eat or what we don't eat.

It's our love for each other with which we imitate as well and as often as we can the love of Jesus Christ for who?

For each other. For that fellow saint sitting behind you, in front of you, to your left or to your right as John even prayed.

Self -sacrificial lives proving out this love. That's what distinguishes God's people now.

Not the manner of dress, not the manner of diet. So ultimately the tension here is between what?

Between the old and the new covenants. All the futility of the doing so well documented back in Romans chapter 7, all the terror of failure which

Romans 8 chapter 1 says has been swept aside is resurrected and bowed down to. It's almost like saying

Jesus isn't enough. Almost. But this is why Paul calls them weak.

The strong weren't trying to help the weak to a better way. They were not imitating Priscilla and Aquila, I remember them when they explained the ways of Christ more thoroughly to Apollos and showed him the better way.

No, the strong were judging and they were judging harshly. And the weak for their part, they weren't trying to fit in, they were being separate just as they had been taught to do.

They despised the strong who had no sympathy for how hard it would be to ignore centuries of tradition.

They weren't cutting each other any slack. And they were drawing this hard line in the sand over what?

Over the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ? Is he eternal God? Is he the never created, only begotten

Son of God who became flesh? And as flesh did not cease to be

God, that's pretty important. No, it's over meat and vegetables.

Are you kidding? Meat and vegetables going to split the Roman church? The church of Christ there in that pagan land, that one light of truth?

And people are going to look in and see what? Green peas versus lobster.

And I could see Paul saying, are you kidding me? They were both as wrong as can be.

Someone once gave me a perfect definition of a legalist. You've heard this before, I really like it. Who's a legalist?

It's that person who follows one more rule than I do. And who's the crazy liberal libertine?

You can anticipate that, right? It's the one who follows one less rule than I see as important.

Paul's demand in verse 3 of chapter 14 puts the kibosh to both sides.

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.

So just stop it. In verse 17 he says that none of this has anything to do with the kingdom of God.

It's all a distraction. I mean, do you want to see the gospel seized up like an engine run with no oil?

Do you know what happens then? It can run from about here to the end of a block.

And the pistons will scorch inside the piston walls and the engine is done. And that's sort of what happens to the gospel in the church as we're trying to live it out.

We get bogged down in the minutia. You find something you're good at and you judge those who aren't.

You take your preferences as though they were handed to you personally by God and judge whoever follows a different course, if ever even so slightly.

I mean, what could the strong have done with the weak, remembering that it's not their faith in Christ that's strong or weak?

Tell me please, how might I accommodate you when I welcome you to my house? That's what it means that God has welcomed them.

It's something even beyond hospitality. Rather than judging, rather than despising, how can

I accommodate you? I'd like to have you over for dinner and I know you have some scruples about the sort of foods that I eat.

Let me accommodate you. Tell me what I can put on the table there as we enjoy fellowship together in Christ. Some Christians smoke.

Did you know that? Some Christians smoke. Now it's not a good idea, but being the temple of the living

God doesn't disallow tobacco. So what to do? Well, don't smoke where it'll bother non -smokers.

Don't condemn smokers but appreciate their effort to not bother the rest of us with it. Wine, beer, sports games, movie ratings, within reason, these are not kingdom issues.

They're food. They're days. Nothing more. Verse four speaks to both groups.

It speaks to all of us. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? Whose servant are they? Well, it's not their faith that's in question, so they're servants of the

Lord Jesus Christ. Paul goes on. It is before his own master, that's

Jesus, that he stands or falls, and he will be upheld for the Lord is able to make him stand.

You see, when we judge like this, we're passing judgment on one for whom Christ was judged.

One for whom Christ was judged. On the cross, Christ was judged as if he was sin itself.

On the cross, Christ was judged for your sin and for mine. And judging here, it's almost as if they're saying, that judgment was enough, so I'm going to judge you even further.

So whether you're strong or weak in the sense of Romans 14, it's the same Lord makes us able to stand firm in the faith.

It's before him, not you or me, but before Jesus, that you or I will fall or stand.

Of course, he ends that verse on a positive note. The Lord is able to make him stand.

The keeping of special days follows the same logic as the food. The weak ones, the Jews, were undoubtedly keeping the

Sabbath. The stronger ones probably exercised more flexibility in what they did on Sundays. But the issue is the same.

What does it say about the gospel? What does it say about the death and the burial and the resurrection, the ascension and the return of the

Lord Jesus Christ? The issue is the same, always, it's that.

Has the new covenant taken over for the old, or is it sort of nudging itself into place? That's another way to put that.

The second point is from verses 5 -9, and it's simply this, Jesus is

Lord of us in life or in death. You see, it's a matter of perspective. If these things are worth rending the body of Christ apart, then they must be at least as important as life or death, which of course they're usually not.

Now some issues, as I said before, we're not going to list them all out, but the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ, the extent and the efficacy, the power of his atoning death on the cross, those are things that are worth dying for.

Those are things which we draw the line in the sand and we have a sword -warded fall on over issues like that.

Mostly, the things that we talk about are a little less than that. If someone said that Jesus isn't eternal

God, that's a problem. If someone came along and taught that his death on the cross couldn't quite satisfy

God's wrath, that we have to add our good works to it, and therefore by our works appease God's wrath, even to a small extent, that's a sword we'd fall on.

But maybe because I'm getting older, I just don't see enough time or benefit for hair splitting.

I just don't get excited about a lot of these differences. Does that mean that we'll accept anything?

That we're unwilling to fight for the gospel? A man came here a few years back with a heretical view of Christ, and when he came to my attention,

I confronted him about it. He'd been here for a while before I found out where he was really at with all this, and his reply to me was that I had to prove him wrong,

I had to cite church history, I had to go into the Bible and give good interpretations, good exegesis, and defeat his arguments, and I said, no,

I don't have to win a debate, all I have to do is tell you that you're wrong, and that that's not what we want here.

So you go somewhere else for arguing, I haven't the time or the inclination. We don't just let anything in.

We don't say that there's nothing worth arguing for, or fighting for, or even dying for.

It's just not everything. Verse 6 gives us a good guideline.

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. Paul's saying essentially that the meat eater and the vegetarian only folk, the observer of various days from the old calendar, and the one who wants to make no distinction of days, both do what they do or don't do in honor of one and the same

Lord Jesus. And it seems that that's okay with the apostle, because that's okay with God.

And if it's okay with the apostle, because it's okay with God, it should be okay for us.

But notice before we move on, verse 9, for to this end Christ died and lived again, there's death and life, or life and death, that he might be

Lord both of the dead and of the living. If these things are to be valued against life and death, here it says

Christ's death and resurrection, which encompasses pretty much his whole incarnation, his suffering, his vacating of the tomb, was for the very purpose that he, and not you or me, but he would be

Lord of all. This is the filter through which our judgments must pass.

Is it important enough to hold up here? Some matters are, as I said, but not many.

Not all of them. Not as many as we so often contend over. It may sound, it just struck me, it may sound as if I'm trying to address a problem within this church, and let me tell you explicitly and distinctly, no, that is not the case.

One of the things I really appreciate about this church, and when visiting pastors come here, they comment on the love and the unity and the vitality of our walk together with Christ and the responsibility and the care that we take for one another.

So perhaps this is a caution, because the church in Rome was filled with sinners like the church in Providence in Sunnyvale, and so perhaps we take this as a caution, but let me just say explicitly and plainly to you all, no, this is not preaching to any one person or any group that on the whole

I think that Paul would look and say, yes, this is a loving, not a perfect, but a loving and unified fellowship.

But this is the filter. When we have something that we're starting to think, okay, I need to confront, I need to start drawing a line,

I'm gonna take my little toe and start making that little line in the sand, and maybe I'll make it deeper and wider as I go.

This is the filter through which it must pass. The death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus.

Is it important enough to hold up against that? None of us lives to himself and none of us dies to himself.

If we live, we live to the Lord. If we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the

Lord's. It's just not usually so important as that. And finally, it's verses 10 through 12 that tell us something that really has to stop us in our tracks.

This has to make us feel pretty small. What is it? God will judge.

Emphasis on God. God will judge. You know, the old quip about millennial arguments is that I'm a pan -millennial.

Have you ever heard that? Not a pre - or post -millennial. I'm pan -millennial. It all pan out in the end.

God will sort it out, and that sort of fits here. It doesn't really work very well with millennial discussions, but it works here.

It will pan out in the end because in the end, God will judge everything and everyone. It'll pan out because he will make his judgments and his wisdom fully known.

And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the

Father when he judges. And it is God who will and God who does judge.

When we judge the way Paul has in mind in Romans 14, these weaker judging the stronger, the stronger despising the weaker, and vice versa, when we judge that way, we imply that we're seeing into another person's heart, which is a realm that God leaves between himself and that person.

Honestly, he gives me no insight. He gives you no insight into anyone else's heart. That's why

Jesus is so clear in Matthew 18 when there's an affair, he says, He says, you need to take one to others. So what? Every matter be established.

No assumptions, no reading between the lines. Get the facts out on the table. Because what?

We're only able to see what was done. We can only make some presumptions about the heart that might be behind, might be behind what was done.

But that's as far as we can go. And that's why the wisdom and the collective assent of the church is required as you go through that process.

God will ultimately judge. And when we judge the way these people are judging, we're saying implicitly that we know the heart.

And more than that, we might even be implying that God's taking too long, that judgment is needed now before that weakling observes another of those dreaded days or refuses to eat a good juicy steak slathered with bacon and topped with a lobster.

Ultimately, the problem in Rome was the problem today, over 2 ,000 years later. What's the problem in Rome?

What caused Paul to have to write these verses in Romans 14? Well, sin.

It's sin. Because of sin, we care more about being right than what's right. I mean, we could ask ourselves, again, we want to filter to work this all through.

Look back at 13 .8 of this book. Oh nothing, oh no one anything except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Think about that for a moment. Fulfilled the law. I mean, that's clear, that's simple. Not a verse of the law here and there, but the whole law fulfilled in this, that you love one another.

That's what Jesus prayed for over and over the night before he was crucified for our sin. That we would love one another.

By this the world will know that you are my disciples. By your love for one another. By your unity together, which is why

I had John read Psalm 133. Not a verse here and there.

Not a part of a precept. The whole law. Not fulfilled over winning the contest over Sabbath observance versus freedom from the law.

Nowhere in view can be found a word about my conscience or even my preferences for food. You know, in chapter 3 and chapter 9,

Paul listed many of the advantages that came to observant Jews. You remember this, they had the oracles, they had the worship, they had the prophets.

What advantages has a Jew much in every way, says the apostle. In chapters 3 and 9, showing some of these.

And in chapter 9, verses 30 to 32, that was some time ago we were there. But do you remember how he shows that the

Gentiles obtained the righteousness of God while the Jews, pursuing that same goal by means of their efforts, missed it.

The Israelite nation, trying to attain the righteousness of God revealed in the law by the doing of the law, missed it completely while the

Gentiles obtained that righteousness with virtually no knowledge of the law. Because they attained it by faith.

It's sort of come full circle here. The law, which only frustrated their goal of achieving that righteousness of God, is something they can't quite let go of.

Talk about these weak ones, the ones who won't touch meat for chance that it was polluted with some pork or something like that.

They can't quite walk away from that old law, those centuries of tradition. The effort to make themselves acceptable to God, yes, they surrendered that effort and they pursue the righteousness of God now by faith.

Had that not been the case, I think Paul would have been saying something different about them. And, in fact, anyone who hasn't given up on their own effort at being right with God honestly doesn't have the gospel.

You know, the gospel, if it speaks of anything, it speaks of full reliance on Jesus Christ, his perfect sinless life, and his completely adequate, efficacious, as we say, death on the cross, the atonement that he won.

It's an abandonment of self. It's a complete admission that, Lord, I can do nothing to please you, zero, and Jesus Christ did all to please you.

Oh, if they were relying on their food laws, just not eating meat in order to gain any bit of righteousness,

Paul would have said something very different than what he did. Jonathan Swift had something when he wrote

Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver comes to the Lilliputians, do you remember them?

And he finds them terribly concerned over what? It's which side of the egg to break. Now that's silly, and it's meant to be a little bit silly because either side of the egg you break, you're going to be able to make a fried egg or a scrambled egg just as easily.

It makes no difference. I'm trying to make sure

I pronounce this next word right. The Blefuscudians, did I get that right? Blefuscudians?

The Blefuscudians, they break theirs in the original style on the big end, but by royal edict, the

Lilliputians break at the little end. But there's rebels in Lilliput, there's 11 ,000 of them, big

Indians, and they've been put to death, and others have fled to the court of Blefuscu, and he explains further that the

Lilliputians have lost 40 ships of war in the battles regarding the eggs and which side to break, and the dilemma's hopeless.

And there's a loosedrog, the prophet of their religion. What does he say? All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end.

Are you a vegetarian? I mean, sheesh. Have you ever heard of paleo?

My favorite. If God didn't want us to eat meat, he wouldn't have made it taste so good. Which is really a way of just humoring someone out of something that they might be taking seriously.

They might even have, they're telling me that meat is not as good for you as you might think, and this might be a better diet.

They might even have my best interest at heart. I think that's more of a gospel way of viewing it.

There are important issues that derive from the gospel. The place of women in church government and leadership, for example, is a big one.

One I think that we do right here at Providence Bible Church, and on which we're not going to budge. Our refusal to condone marriage outside of what the

Bible defines as marriage, which is one man, one woman, equally yoked together before God. That's another one.

There are issues outside the core truths of the death and burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ that become that sword upon which we must be willing to fall.

Romans 14, 1 through 12, doesn't allow each one to define his own sin, by the way.

It doesn't allow us each to define sin your own way. That would be silly. Nor does it mean the church is barred from any and all forms of judgment.

That would be worse than silly. That would make this gathering something less than the church. The church does, collectively, judge things.

I think what it does tell us is to get a grip. Is it important enough for harsh judgment to flow one way, only to be returned with spite the other way?

Does it rise to the importance of Christ's lordship? I mean, ask yourself, is it a matter of life and death?

Are we stepping in judging? Are we stepping in where only God belongs? Most of all this, is that practice that so offends you, that thing the other person does or doesn't do, which you just can't get off your mind, does it put the gospel at risk?

Is it such a misunderstanding that they've missed the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, the nature of him in his incarnation as God and man, fully both?

Does it speak about the extent and the power of the atonement, the mercy of God that he showers down upon sinners who repent of their sins and flee in faith to Jesus Christ, seeking forgiveness from God because of the work of his son

Jesus? Does it impinge on that? The final verse says that each of us will give an account of himself to God.

The weak will answer for his vegetables and the strong will answer for his meat. The strong one who judged the weak one will explain that to Jesus Christ, just as the weak one will answer for despising the other one.

What do we get from that? As we think through these kinds of issues, as we think through what we're going to confront someone about, and there's many things we need to be confronted about.

You need to be confronted for your sin. I need to be rebuked for my sin. We all need the scripture to speak to our hearts and to show us our errors and to remind us that God does forgive those who in faith confess their sins and he does cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

We need to remember those things. We need to remember also that each of us will give an account for ourselves to God.

The weak for his weakness, the strong for his strength. The strong who judged the weak are going to explain it to Jesus Christ and the weak who despise the strong are going to explain that to Jesus Christ as well.

You will answer for you, no one else, and I will answer for me. Praise God.

As we think about judgment, praise God that Christ was judged for us.

That there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, our Lord, knowing that we will stand before him judged in my place and yours and the meat guy and the veggie eater is this sort of thing what we want to answer for.

I told my wife some time ago how the lights, the traffic lights in Fremont were driving me nuts.

It's like every two blocks there's a full cycle with the left turn for each direction and it's a two lane parking lot going across a six lane boulevard and you have to stop and then you get to go two blocks and you have to stop and wait for the whole cycle.

And I said, if I ever get to the city council, I'm going to find out whose cousin runs the stoplight company and gets to install all these because this is ridiculous.

And she says something to me like, is that really what you want to be known for? I mean, if you had before you the microphone and you're going to stand for something, you're going to stand for traffic lights and not

Jesus? Is it really worth all that? Is it really worth fighting over like that?

May God be pleased to grant us welcoming tolerance where needed. May he give us backbones of steel where necessary and do all things for his glory.

In Jesus name. Amen. Heavenly Father, we're again grateful, Lord, for your word and for the instruction it gives us, for the rebukes that we have from it and for the encouragement we get from it.

And I pray, Father, that we would follow the instructions ways here. I pray, Lord, that you would give us wisdom, discernment, and godly knowledge to know where the issues are, where we need to stand and fight, and where we need to promote the kind of give and take that Romans 14 seems to advance for us.

So, Father, be glorified in this place. Be pleased, Father, to bring us more and more into the image of your

Son and help us along the way as we look to your word for all things.