The Sacrificial Community

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Don Filcek; Romans 14:13-23 The Sacrificial Community

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsek preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning, and welcome to Recast Church.
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As Dave said, I'm Don Filsek, I'm the lead pastor here, and wanna welcome all of you. I hope that this morning you take this as an opportunity to grow in your faith.
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Really, that's what God has brought us together for. And Recast started 10 years ago as a simple church with a simple goal that we would be a church of very simple programming centered around three areas of growth, that we would continue to grow in three specific areas of our lives.
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And what I'm really getting at is we believe that maturity in the Christian life looks like a lifelong commitment to growth, not just to crossing a line, and then you've arrived and you're there.
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Because that's the way a lot of people think of maturity, right? Like, now I'm mature. But maturity looks like continuing on in the process of growing.
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And those areas, those three areas where we expect everybody to continue to grow is in faith, in community, and in service.
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Our hope is that 2020 is a year of deeper faith, that it's a year of a more vibrant community, that we love one another better in this year, and a year of more sacrificial service toward one another where our skills and our abilities come to bear in the lives of others, and we allow others to allow their skills and their abilities to come to bear in our lives as well.
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And so our text this morning that we're gonna be looking at in the book of Romans has the power to impact all three areas of growth for us.
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You see, as I studied this text this week, I knew right away that it was gonna be a faith stretcher for me. And the way that you can tell that a text is gonna stretch your faith is depending on how much you like it when you first read it.
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If you love it, it's probably not gonna stretch you that much. But if you read it and you're like, that rubs me the wrong way, then that's a place where God is pointing out, you need to listen, you need to pay attention, you need to take this one on.
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If I don't like what the text is saying, it just highlights an area where I need less conformity to the world, less conformity to my own patterns and my own, the way that I think of things, and more conformity to God and his agenda for my life.
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Are you getting what I'm saying? And so when you read a text, it's kinda like sometimes you read it and you're like, ooh,
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I have to read that a couple more times to really get down to what is that communicating to me and what is it saying to me and I don't feel it right away.
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So my hope is that this text stretches all of us in our faith this week and that it also draws all of us into a more radical view of community life and sacrificial service to one another.
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You see, we live in a culture that demands our rights. Did you notice that? Have you noticed that in the world around us?
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It's the American way to stand and to stomp our foot and say, but my rights. But as we dig into this text,
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I think it becomes very clear throughout what Paul is revealing to us and what God is telling us through Paul is that faith demands that we willingly sacrifice our rights in community and service toward one another.
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And the way that that sacrifice looks is a way of righteousness, a way of peace, and a way of joy in our midst as a community of followers of Jesus Christ.
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And so if you haven't done so already, open your Bibles to Romans chapter 14, verses 13 through 23.
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Romans 14, 13 through 23, navigate in your device. You can grab your phone if you got an app on there or whatever, but let's follow along and read the latter half of the book, the chapter of Romans chapter 14.
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And again, as I say every week, this is a privilege that we have recast. This is God's very precious and holy word revealed to us so that we can go to it time and time again.
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We can take this home with us. It's really cool that we have a high level of literacy and we have a high level of availability of God's word so that we can talk about these things this morning and then you can go home and you can wrestle with it.
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And then a month from now, you can read this again. And two months from now, you can read this again. And next year, you can read this again. And we can keep going back to the word of God.
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It's a privilege. It's such an awesome thing. So Romans chapter 14 verses 13 through 23. Therefore, let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother.
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I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean.
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For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom
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Christ died. So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil, for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the
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Holy Spirit. Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.
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So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God.
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Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats.
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It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble.
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The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself or what he approves, but whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith, for whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you that you are faithful to address real life.
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The reality of what happens often in our midst, the reality of the difficulties in the gray areas.
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We struggle enough, as it is, to follow your given rules, the very clear, revealed instructions from scripture.
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And then we get to all of these gray area issues where within the church we want to legislate, we want to create rules, and we want to pigeonhole one another, and we want to be on the right side and we have the wrong side, and these battles can quickly form between us.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would continue here at Recast to be uniting us, continue to allow the weaker and the stronger to come together in a way that is encouraging to one another, giving room at the end of the day for you and you alone to be our judge, especially in these gray area issues.
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Father, I pray that you would allow us to glorify you because at the center of all of this is the cross of Christ.
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At the center of this is you purchasing a people for yourself, and Father, I thank you that we have come to understand, and for those of us in the room who have come to understand what
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Christ has done for us, and that we have indeed been set free from the bondage to sin and to death, and that we have hope for eternal life.
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And I pray that from that hope springs worship from our voices this morning, that as we have an opportunity to sing songs before you, that it would be an exercise of our hearts, an exercise of love and gratitude and thankfulness, expressing hope and trust that our future is secured, and come what may, whatever circumstances we're facing, whatever devastating things or good things have happened this week, all of that pales in comparison to the hope of the glory that awaits those children who are yours.
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And so, Father, I pray that you would ignite us with joy, with delight, with gratitude, with thanks, with hope, and with passion as we sing these songs before you this morning, in Jesus' name, amen.
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Our goal is gonna be to keep the remainder of our time focused on God's word and what he is saying to us, and so it would be also good for you to open your
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Bibles or your devices back to Romans 14, verses 13 through 23, so that you can follow along and see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.
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I'm not making this stuff up. God forbid that we would gather together to hear what I would make up, or what
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I would, my thoughts or my opinions, because at the end of the day, that would be a waste of all of our time, and so we really need to hear from God.
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As the Allied armies landed on Normandy, they began to push east through Europe, and village by village, they began to liberate
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French towns. And as they liberated those French towns and villages along the way, it took a while for those people to really accept the freedom that they were being given.
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The Germans were being pushed out and the Allies were coming in, and it took them a little bit of time to wrap their mind around that, because they had been now living under subjugation of the
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German army for a while. And so fear still gripped their hearts long after the threat was removed.
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Think about that for just a minute. Long after the threat had been removed, there was still fear among the people.
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And as the front continued to advance, but it takes a while for us to really understand and to grasp newfound freedom.
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Newfound freedom is hard to accept, especially when you've lived under subjugation for a while.
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Last week, our text highlighted the potential conflict in the church between those who are strong in their faith and understand their freedoms, and feel free to enjoy life in every area that is right up to that line where God calls it sin.
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So able to draw the lines where God draws the lines, able to accept that which God has said is gray area as free, and those areas where he has declared sin to avoid.
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And so there are those, he said, are strong in their faith, understanding that God has set them free. But then there are others who
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Paul identified in our text last week as those who are weaker in their faith. His words, not mine, weaker in the faith.
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And they would be like the villagers who have been liberated, but still find their knee -jerk reaction is to duck for cover when a book falls off a shelf, or there's a loud noise, and they're like, is it happening again?
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Is that gunfire? What's going on? They find themselves on spiritual high alert, and they have a hard time leaning into the freedom that has been bought for them at the cross of Christ.
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And especially if they were raised with a lot of religious rules like the Jews. Now some of you here in this room, this is exactly your upbringing.
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You were raised with a lot of rules, and you almost kind of had to overcome a very religious, rigid upbringing in order to accept that salvation is by Christ alone rather than by your works and by your behavior.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm not gonna ask for you to raise your hand, but I know that there's many of us in this room who that was our context.
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And we were saved despite the message that it's rules, rules, rules.
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That's what we got when we were a kid. And I have to say that's partly my story. The church that I was raised in,
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I don't think for a second they wanted to communicate to me as a young child that it's all on rules.
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But I got that. That somehow what I assimilated from my youth was the idea that it's primarily,
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I mean, it's really about how you live. The Christian faith is really basically what you live. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
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And so you have to, I mean, salvation comes to us by grace alone through faith, and the freedoms are a little bit hard for somebody raised in that context to truly grasp, to truly understand.
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And so our text picks up on that theme of the weak and the strong, the strong being those who understand the freedoms and can lean into those freedoms, and the weak being those who still have some of those rules and add rules on top of rules to make sure you stay far away from the line.
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But it's very important that during this message we remember that we are not saved at all by keeping commands.
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I keep saying this, and I'm gonna keep saying this till the end of Romans, that the first 11 chapters of this book are there, a big, huge chunk of this letter to the church in Rome to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ, that you cannot be righteous, but you need a righteousness that is given to you from God in order to be saved.
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And we are only saved by the righteousness of Jesus Christ and his righteous and holy and perfect bloody sacrifice on the cross on our behalf, him taking the punishment that we deserved to cover our sins.
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So these commands that we're gonna be looking at in this text are only commands that come to us after an understanding that Jesus Christ has saved us.
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We are now his, we've asked him to save us based on the cross, and now we've come into a relationship of love with him where we want to obey him.
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And then the commands come to us for the purpose in this text, a purpose of community and the purpose of loving
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God. The purpose of loving one another well and functioning well as a church, functioning well in community, and then functioning well with our relationship with God.
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And so our outline this morning is these three commands kind of expounded out and explained a little bit more in detail.
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The first is protect the weak in our midst from stumbling, protect the weak from stumbling. That's verses 13 through 18.
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That's gonna be the bulk of the message, that's the bulk of the text. The other two just take up a little bit less, but they're still vital and important.
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The second point is build each other up. After protect the weak from stumbling, the second is build each other up, verses 19 through 21.
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And then the third point, verses 22 through 23, don't flaunt your freedom.
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So those are the three things that they tie together in terms of our community, our relationship, the way that we work and roll when we have strong people in our midst who feel great freedom in the gray areas, and we have people who feel very constrained with rules and things that they'd like to line their life with to make sure that they're going in the right direction.
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And so how do we live in community? Well, we protect the weak from stumbling, we build each other up, and we don't flaunt our freedoms.
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And so as I mentioned in my introduction, this text sharpens my faith personally. You see, as a pastor, here's the catching point for me.
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When I read it, I wanna do something different than what Paul says, and I alluded to that last week, but I wanna kinda explain it up front, what
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I'm talking about. Why would I read this? Why would I read this and struggle with this? Why would I read this and be like, oh man, this doesn't hit me right?
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You see, as a pastor, I want all of you to live into all the freedom that God has for you.
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Do you understand that? I want you to just be as free as possible because Christ has purchased that for you.
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And so that's where my heart goes when I read about this. Whether you're weak or whether you're strong, I want all of us growing.
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And growth does indeed look like less fear and more trust, more faith, that the cross of Jesus Christ is all that you need.
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Do you get what I'm saying? So my heart would be, if I was writing this, I would write it different, and that's where God corrects my heart.
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Because what I wanna say is I wanna say weak. Those of you who would identify more on the legalistic side,
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Christ has purchased your freedom and live in it, walk in it, but that's not what he says.
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He says, protect the weak from stumbling. And this is to all of us here. This is a corrective to my heart.
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The fundamental thing that I need to lean into as a pastor is to protect the weak from stumbling when it comes to this issue of unity in the church.
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So even the way that Paul addresses the subject corrects me, and I think it's sometimes kinda cool, I don't know if you've had that happen, where scripture, even just the tone of it is like, okay, the angle that it comes at things, even that has the power to redirect us and put us in the right direction.
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So this first point is the fact that our first point, really, in the text is protect the weak from stumbling reminds me where the work in my life as leading the church begins.
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It cannot be overstated how precious and valuable church unity really is.
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And those of you who have gone through a phase or gone through a situation or gone through a church where there was issues and there was division and where there was war, you understand all the better than I do how valuable church unity is.
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You don't know what you have until it's gone. And once it's gone, it gets ugly. And so I'm just so grateful.
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I praise God every day that God has held our church together in unity and love for one another. And I see that.
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I don't think it had to go that way over these 10 years. I know people who planted churches around the same time that they're not functioning anymore and they're unhealthy and things are breaking down.
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And God has continued to bless us here. And that's nothing to do with me. It's everything to do with his spirit and what he desires for us.
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And so in verse 13, Paul begins a paragraph by reminding us that we are not to be judging one another.
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Now, I don't necessarily see that in the church, but I think it's so valuable that we hear that right up front. I think we cast we need this message.
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Even though things are going well here, we need to be reminded of these things regularly and routinely. Don't judge one another.
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And remember that we're talking about the gray area issues of life here. We're not talking about sin. We're not talking about your inability to determine what is and isn't sin.
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We're talking about when you determine that God hasn't written about it explicitly in the word of God. Now, in those areas, in those gray area issues, in the big word that we talked about last week, a diaphora, the
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Greek word that means neither here nor there, the things that are disputable and up for debate in those areas of life, we are not to be judging one another.
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And remember that he concluded last week with a reminder that each and every one of us will give an accounting of our own lives in those gray area issues before God himself.
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He is our only true judge. And so, we should be convinced that what we're doing is acceptable to him in ourselves.
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We should study it. We should, in those gray area issues, you know, you should be convicted and convinced that the things that you choose to do are right.
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Our concern in our daily lives should be, of course, as followers of Christ, well, to follow
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Christ, to live for him, to go after him and to go the direction that we think he's leading us.
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But still speaking about gray area issues, we are not to judge each other. The text is clear. Whether it be enjoying a beer or where we educate our kids or the car we choose to drive or which political party we vote for, there is a wide scope of freedom in which we ought not to judge one another.
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And Paul states clearly that the strong are to never put a stumbling block or a hindrance in the way of a fellow believer.
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You see, throughout the text, Paul will clarify what he means by stumbling block and hindrance and it kind of gets teased out by nuance and the different ways that he talks about this issue between the two.
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What is he talking about? What's a stumbling block? What's a hindrance? And it would be worth us dealing with this up front so we know what we're talking about.
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What is this stumbling block or this hindrance? You see, Paul here is in essence warning the strong person who has a lot of freedom that they need to be cautious in the way that they express and live out that freedom and community.
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In other words, I'm gonna use the topic of alcohol throughout this message just because it's a common contemporary one that still is an issue in the church and a person who feels free to enjoy an alcoholic beverage from time to time must be careful to not flaunt that in front of weaker persons.
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And the trick in all of this, of course, is not knowing who and who isn't weak. They don't come with a label, right?
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I mean, you don't have a label on you. I don't know whether you're a strong person or a weak person and so how many of you think that that might be a barrier in this?
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That might be a little confusing. That might be a little bit hard to practice. How am I gonna avoid? How can I at the same time exercise my strength in my trust in God and rejoice that he gives me the freedom to enjoy a craft beer from time to time and not cause you who are weak to struggle or whatever?
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And how does that all work out? But I wanna suggest to you that that's silly of us because it's very easy to overcome.
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Yeah, we don't come with labels, but we come with mouths and ears. We can talk with one another about these things.
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I can have a conversation with you. A simple conversation about how a person feels about alcohol will reveal very quickly what they think about alcohol.
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Now you know where they're at. All you gotta do is talk about it. Don't be scared. Have conversations.
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And when I find out that somebody struggles with alcohol, that they're a former alcoholic or even just by their conscience they say,
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I've never touched it and I never want to. I'd like to go to my grave never having tasted alcohol and I'm good with that, then that informs me.
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Do you understand what I'm saying? Now I know how to interact with that person. Now I know where we stand on that.
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A simple conversation. You see, there are people here in this church I would never offer a beer to and I would never sit down to have a beer with them.
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And by now I imagine that most of you know where I personally stand on alcohol. Enjoy it if you're free to.
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Don't enjoy it if it's against your conscience or you know that you struggle with overindulgence or you're underage and it's illegal for you.
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But fundamentally, the text of scripture is abundantly clear on this one injunction.
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Never get drunk. Never get drunk. Full stop, never get drunk.
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It's clear. So don't push that line. Don't try to press in on that. But when it comes to the freedom that we have in there, there's freedom to have all kinds of opinions and thoughts about this subject.
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But talk with one another so that you're not causing the other to stumble because when it comes to having somebody over to your house for dinner, you can get into trouble with this.
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If you come over with a group of friends and I know you have a commitment to avoid alcohol, but I say to you, come on, just this one time.
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It's New Year's Eve, dude. We're having champagne. It's all good. Just this once, celebrate with us.
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And you look around, but you've got a weak conscience and you're like, I just, I don't ever wanna do this. But you look around and you see people you respect in the church and they've got a glass of champagne and they're getting ready to toast and you say, sure, just this once.
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And you break your conscience to appease me or to fit in or whatever it might be.
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The text makes a case that in this we have both sinned. Both of us have sinned.
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I sinned by not lovingly putting away the alcohol in favor of what I know is true of you, in not pressuring you or not even wanting to offer that stumbling block in front of you.
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And you've sinned by doing something that you at least think God doesn't want you to do.
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You see, at the end of the text it's gonna say whatever doesn't proceed from faith is sin and what that's getting at is that literally, the way that you think about things in the gray area impacts whether it's right or wrong for you.
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And this is the way that mechanism works. If you think that buying candy cigarettes is evil, just say that.
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Anybody even know what I'm talking about? Anybody ever had a candy cigarette? Don't say it.
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I got some in my stocking for Christmas. I just like the taste of them.
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Okay, now wait, did I just cause the weaker among us to stumble, I don't know. But if you think that that's wrong, no really though, if you think that that is evil and you think that is wrong, then the question becomes, if you do it, who are you doing it against?
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You're doing it against God. You believe and you are convinced in yourself that he doesn't want you to eat candy cigarettes, but you did it.
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Who did you do it against? Not your own conscience, but at the end of the day, against God because you thought he didn't want you to do it and you did it anyways.
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You're thumbing your nose at God by eating candy cigarettes. By the way,
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I am thoroughly, I just want to clarify, I'm thoroughly convinced that I can eat whatever candy that I want, I'm okay with that. Not stolen candy though, guys, but this was a gift.
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In verse 14, it's clear that there is no issue with you knowing where I stand on any host of gray area issues.
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This is not a prohibition against talking about these things. As a matter of fact, I think it's an encouragement to talk about these things so that we know where each other are on them.
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Paul was bold, he was very clear, he was very forthright in verse 14, declaring that he was fully convinced in the
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Lord that dietary restrictions were lifted for the believer. And he says as much, he's not ashamed to say that.
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And by the way, this wasn't read in a secret meeting of the strong, this was read to the entire congregation, which included the weak.
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And he literally says, I think all of you guys need to know that in the Lord, you can eat whatever you want.
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Some of you aren't gonna be able to accept that, but you can eat whatever you want. I mean, nothing is unclean, he says, pertaining to food.
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Bacon, all you can eat shrimp, steak and lobster. Paul says, it's all good.
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And from personal experience, I can tell you, it's all good. But for anyone who thinks it's unclean for them, it's unclean, don't do it.
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In other words, our convictions do actually have a role in defining what is right and wrong for us.
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So knowing that a person is indeed bound to their own conscience on these gray area issues, where we have no command from the
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Lord, but the conviction creates a rule for us that then we ought to abide by if we think that it's from God.
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So verse 15 clarifies then what's at stake for us. If our freedom causes grief to a fellow believer, then we are no longer, as the strong, we're no longer walking in love.
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We've committed a sin. We haven't loved our brother or sister in Christ when we try to press them into our convictions.
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And by seeking to stretch someone to act outside of their faith, we run the risk of setting them on a destructive pathway.
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So then the direct command of this first section, do not destroy the one for whom
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Christ died by flaunting your freedoms. Don't break them, don't break each other on these gray area issues.
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And in case you were not here last week, let me clarify and remind us why he's talking about the illustration of eating.
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Why would Paul be talking about eating food in this? Well, remember that the Old Testament was full of all kinds of dietary laws, and most likely what
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Paul had in mind when he's talking about the week are those who come from that very hyper -religious, hyper -rules, hyper -laws -based religion of Judaism.
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So they came to faith in Christ, coming out of an upbringing in a childhood that was very legalistic and tons of rules.
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And so the Old Testament was full of all of these dietary laws, and many of the early Christians came to Christ from that background.
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And so they were raised with velacet kosher dills. And they sadly, very, very sadly, they skipped the bacon and the shrimp and the lobster and all that.
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So when they came to Jesus, they were told, you're free to eat whatever you want. And as you can imagine from upbringing and how these patterns of life get instilled in us, and they balked at expressing that freedom, and they chose to stay in the kosher camp, and hear me carefully, they chose to stay in that camp by conviction.
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By conviction. Not just out of some external, like, well, I just wanna please my mom or dad, or whatever. They were convicted in themselves that this is,
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I just feel better with God if I do these things. So you can maybe imagine the potential powder keg that this caused in the early church.
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Why is Paul writing about this to the Roman church? Well, it's really interesting to note that in historical documents we see the way that the church practiced church in the early church times in the life of Paul, they had a feast every time they gathered.
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We're gonna have a potluck on the ninth, they would have a potluck every day. They had what they called the love feast, and every week they would get together, they would hear some teaching from the word, they would sing some hymns and some praises to God, and they would eat together.
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And the end of that meal was, it culminated in the Lord's Supper.
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And they would have the bread and they would have the wine at the end of that meal. And actually, you get some really weird things that are centered around that feast.
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You get people getting, in Corinth, people getting drunk at that meal together. Some people showing up with caviar and really great food, and other people sitting there not even having barely half a piece of bread or something, and they're not sharing together.
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So you actually see that in context there was a lot of issues centered around what you ate and how you ate and how you shared and how you did community together.
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So the topic that Paul uses as an illustration isn't really a problem in our culture. We don't tend to judge each other that much over what we eat.
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Like that's just generally not a huge issue. But the need to be sensitive with one another about conviction still remains the same.
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More and more, I mean politics, schooling our kids, there are still some hot button issues and some topics that can really cause people to get their feathers ruffled within the church.
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I've personally chosen to use alcohol as the illustration only because it's the one that I've personally experienced the most.
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But Paul has acknowledged that we are free in Christ. And he has also acknowledged that in the church there are those who do not think they are free.
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And so in verse 16, Paul cryptically is saying that the strong are not to press so hard for their rights that their freedom, the freedom of the strong, will be spoken of as evil.
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And although that sounds like a strange way to say it, to bring it kind of home for us, if people who don't want to drink are constantly being pressured to drink, how is that gonna go?
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How's it gonna go in the church? Eventually, I would suggest to you that what he's getting at is a band of non -drinkers is gonna get together and malign the freedoms of those aggressive boozers who are constantly trying to push people toward drinking.
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And now the very freedom that the strong possess and is able to demonstrate in gratitude to God is being viewed as evil and spoken of as evil in the church.
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If you don't make a big deal out of your freedoms, then you are doing all you can to keep it from being spoken of as evil.
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So to clarify, there will always be people, regardless of how guarded the strong are, there will always be some weak who will malign all freedom.
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And so verse 16, I would suggest to you, cuts both ways. The weaker should also take this verse on and not choose to not malign those who have more freedom than you.
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Choose to be together in unity with one another. But I love this because verse 17 through 18 cuts through all of the darkness of this difficulty and disagreement and paints for us a beautiful alternative, this type of bickering over freedom and rules and gray areas and what you can and can't do and how you should feel about one another and all that.
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Because Paul brings us back in verses 17 to 18 to what the church is made to be and it's glorious and it's beautiful.
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And it isn't about eating and drinking. In other words, the church, Recast doesn't have a whole lot of interest in legislating what you can and can't eat and drink.
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We don't have a lot of interest in telling you what movies you can and can't watch or what music you can and can't listen to or bringing a bunch of rules and laws in to clarify for you all of these gray areas.
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The church isn't specialized in the gray. At the end of the day, Christ and his spirit specializes in the gray because the gray is what you experience
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Monday through Saturday. Do you know what I'm talking about? That's where you live, right? You live in the gray area where the only thing that goes with you is both the word of God that you can open at any time and that you can remember from this message and that you can continue to walk in and his spirit who walks with you to guide you into what to do and what not to do.
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So the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God, the rule and reign of Christ Jesus, our king, is exhibited, that rule and reign is exhibited in and through the church in the present age and it is not about those external things.
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But the kingdom is all about these three things is what Paul highlights, it's about more than this but these are the three that he highlights for the church.
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The kingdom of God is about righteousness and peace and joy, all three in his
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Holy Spirit. Righteousness, peace and joy, that's our specialty.
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That's what we've got, that's what we've got to offer, that's what we bring to the world around us, that's the benefit of our community, that's the benefit of our togetherness, righteousness, peace and joy in his
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Holy Spirit. And for the sake of righteousness, we can skip those things that cause offense.
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For the sake of peace, we can sacrifice our own rights. Yes, I mean, to some degree, some of you might be sitting in this room and you, like similar to me, have had a hard fought battle over some of the freedoms that you can now express in Christ.
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You've actually come to a wrestling match and come to realize in the areas that you're free and now
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Don is up here telling you you need to forego those rights. That was a hard battle to get here. It was a hard battle for me in life, just to be honest, to be able to have a beer.
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It took a while for me to get there because of my upbringing and my understanding, but over the course of time and over reading Scripture and over coming to conviction after conviction and seeing it in Scripture, I felt free to do that.
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But now, for the cause of peace, to forego a beer, sure, I can do that for my brother and sister in Christ who it might actually cause to stumble and cause them to get on a pathway of ignoring
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God in their lives. Yeah, I can do that. Or for the sake of common joy, serve your brothers and sisters by foregoing the places where you sense freedom in your life.
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And these qualities of his kingdom are a glorious map for our community. Let me define them for you in context here.
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Righteousness is used in this text in a horizontal way, not a vertical way. There's a vertical righteousness that's been granted to us earlier in the book of Romans, a righteousness that comes down from God over the life of somebody who receives him.
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Amen to that? Are you glad for a given righteousness? But righteousness is a tricky word because the root of that word has a whole host of meanings, including justice in our relationships.
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A person who is a righteous businessman doesn't cheat other people, does what is right, produces a good product, and sells it at a fair price.
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A person who is righteous in their generation, like Noah, is not saying that he was completely holy and right in everything that he did.
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He was righteous in his dealings with others. He was just. And so we're talking about justice and uprightness in all of our interpersonal and social dealings within the church of righteousness, that type of relationship with one another that we specialize in.
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Peace is the presence of good and rightly ordered community together, working through our issues.
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And I wanna point out that what we think of when we hear the word peace is the absence of war, the absence of conflict, but that just doesn't get anywhere near the biblical definition of this word.
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It is the presence of good and rightly ordered life and community.
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That's what shalom means. That's what peace means. And joy, joy, another area that the church specializes in, joy is the gladness we share that is only possible for those who have a genuine hope that supersedes our circumstances.
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As Dave was saying in the introduction to the song, you know, it's that hope is secured in heaven for us.
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The things that happen down here, when you realize what eternity looks like for you, all of these things pale in comparison.
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Circumstances that are good, circumstances that are bad, all of it kind of fades in light of an eternal glory that is waiting for us.
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And so look with me at verse 18. After talking about the way that we roll in the church with righteousness, with peace, and with joy, he says, whoever serves thus, whoever serves in this way, whoever serves
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Christ in righteousness and peace and joy. And what he's saying is by serving the body in righteousness, by serving each other in peace, by serving each other in joy, we are serving
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Jesus. We're serving Jesus by doing that. And one who does this service for Christ, for him, with him in mind, that we would forego our freedoms for Christ, that person shows themselves to be acceptable to God and approved by men.
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So acting this way doesn't make a person acceptable to God. That's antithetical to everything that Paul has said in the first 11 chapters of Romans.
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But it is, as you do these things for Christ, it demonstrates where your allegiance already lies.
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Do you get it? It demonstrates what's already transpired in your heart. And as far as approved by men, we know, and I think you know this is generally true, that living in justice, living in peace, leaning into joy will make for good fellowship among the people of the church.
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Do you agree with that? Is that true? If you make those your priorities, if you make righteousness and peace and joy a priority in your life,
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I'm convinced that our fellowship will just be sweeter and sweeter in 2020, that we will love each other better this next year if those are genuinely our priorities.
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So the first point that we see here in the text is to protect the weak from stumbling. And we do that by knowing one another and then being careful to avoid pressuring one another, avoiding quarreling with one another, not boasting before one another regarding our personal freedoms in the gray areas of our everyday life.
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The second point is to build each other up. So we protect the weak from stumbling. Second, we build each other up. In verses 19 to 21,
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Paul speaks about the flip side of tearing one another down. Our last point, by the way, the first point in the text is kind of negative.
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Don't do something. Don't put a stumbling block to cause others to fall. But now look at verse 19.
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What should we be doing? Well, that righteousness, that peace and joy, he kind of carries that thought forward. He says, pursue peace.
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Here's the pro side of it. Here's the active side of it. What are we being called to do? Not just avoid causing others to stumble, but pursue peace and mutual upbuilding, he says.
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Mutual upbuilding. We are not doing our calling. Hear me carefully, church.
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And those of you that maybe this is your first time here and you're just, you're kind of like, I don't belong to a church. I don't connect with a church. I just go around and visit churches or church is kind of not that big of a deal or maybe somebody's listening on the podcast, you're not even connected to a church.
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But we are not doing our calling. We cannot obey this text if we are steering clear of others.
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Like some of us, in all honesty, think, boy, people are a mess. How many of you have honestly ever had that thought?
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Man, why do I enter into these relationships? Because people are messy. Only five of us? Really, raise your hand.
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Raise your hand if you've ever had that thought. I thought it was gonna be more than that. We have this thought and you cannot withdraw from community and do what
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God desires of you. You must be connected. And I'm not, this is not a pitch for joining Recast. This is a pitch for getting involved in church.
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That might be here and I would love it to be here and I would love it if we could just connect together and that was a good fit. But man, if you need help finding a church and this one's not the one,
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I'd be the first, I would love to be a resource for you to point you to other churches in the area that might be a better fit for you. But get connected and get vitally connected to a church where you can pursue peace and pursue mutual up -building.
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The image we should have in our minds about this mutual up -building is not two people deciding to work on an external project together.
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Like hey, let's get together and work on the deck that I'm adding to my house. A project outside of us.
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That's not the image that we should have. It's not just joining one another in projects that's in mind here.
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What is being built up in this mutual up -building is us. It is people.
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The people of the church being built up together, mutually. Each one of us is both a recipient of the strength and help of others, simultaneously being called to give strength and help to each other.
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And that requires each person to do two things. Give and receive.
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And I would suggest to you that probably everybody in this room would lean towards one of those being the more difficult. Receiving, right?
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I like being the strong person. I like to be the one who can come in and rescue people.
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I like to be the one who can come in and give you advice and give you counsel and really build you up. How good are we at receiving?
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We need that in the church. We need both to be mutually built up. We need to listen to the voices of others who would seek to invest in us while at the same time we're investing in them.
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Is that making sense? How many of you know that that's hard? And it takes time, and we're busy people, and there's
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Netflix to watch. Yeah, I don't wanna get off on that rabbit trail.
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If we allow ourselves to slide off into petty quarrels and bickering over gray area issues, we run the risk of destroying, it says in the text, this is interesting.
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It says we run the risk of destroying the work of God. The phrase, if you're reading this text, it might not even stand out to you that much.
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It's almost kind of a passing comment where he calls what's going on in this mutual upbuilding, he calls it the work of God.
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Has deep implications despite the fact that you could miss it easily the first time that you read through this. What is happening in our midst here as we mutually build one another up, as we mutually pursue peace with one another, is
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God's work in our midst. His work being worked out in our relationships.
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And the word for destroy here in the text is literally to tear down, and it's the opposite of the word used in 19.
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It's an antonym to the word upbuilding in verse 19. We are called to build one another up.
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We are not to tear down. Well, we're the ones building up into one another, right?
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But no, it proves to be actually God who is doing it in the end. And don't tear down what he's building in our community.
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Pause for a second and consider, really think about it. Do you truly think of relationships within the church as the work of the
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Almighty God? I would contend to you that every church that splits over petty squabbles has left this text in the dust.
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It is far behind them in the rear view mirror, and they are churning headlong in the opposite direction of what this text is calling for.
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How quickly, how easy it is for us to forget that the matters of the kingdom are righteousness and peace and joy.
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And the calling is a mutual upbuilding that is nothing less than the work of God and his
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Holy Spirit among us. God forbid that we would ever leave the work of God in smoldering ruins.
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But it's easy to do. And here's part of the reason why. Because as verse 20 goes on to say, everything is indeed clean.
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And on that basis alone, the strong could tear the church. On that one truth claim alone, the strong goes, see, here it is again.
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It's all clean, folks. I'm in the strong position. And all of you need to agree with me.
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And the strong could drive division on that one truth alone that's found in verse 20. And so that's why
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Paul is appealing to the strong to not cause the weak to stumble.
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But now, says Paul, your freedom becomes wrong when you use it to pressure the weak into following you without a change in their convictions.
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Now, you can have conversations about this, and there's nothing wrong with talking to one another about this, but the only goal needs to be that you allow people to rest in their hearts with their own convictions.
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Do you see what I'm saying? Without a change of conviction, if somebody thinks they should never drink a beer, without conviction, they should never drink a beer.
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Now, can their conviction change to being like, oh, I'm free in Christ, and I can do that from time to time? Yeah. Yeah, their conviction can change.
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But without that change of conviction, they should avoid it altogether. It is good, it says in the text, to avoid meat or wine or anything else that causes your brother to stumble.
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That's a good thing. And if you know someone is weak about something, avoid it around them.
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But I wanna point out that on the flip side of this, this is not a license for the weak to abuse the strong.
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What I'm saying is, I think that there are people who would be weaker that would say, ah, you can't do that, you can't do this, you can't, and they would now assume the strong position of ruling and reigning in the church, saying, oh, no, nobody can drink alcohol here, nobody can do this here, everybody has to homeschool their kids here, everybody has to drive a
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Prius, whatever it might be, maybe everybody has to drive a pickup truck, I don't know what it is. But you can see it, can you see what
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I'm talking about? Can you see how the weak could take this text and abuse it and bash the strong into submission?
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Say, you have to do it my way. But hear me carefully, because I think that this gets confusing in our minds.
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I don't believe for a second that if someone weaker inadvertently runs into me at Main Street Pub with a half empty, that I am flaunting my freedom.
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I don't believe I've abused you, I don't believe that I've done harm to you by that, I didn't invite you into it,
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I didn't ask you to have a beer with me, I didn't buy one for you, I didn't say, come on, dude, get a life,
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I didn't say any of that. I'm just there on my own, enjoying it. Do you see what I'm saying, how that could be confusing?
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Now, where do we draw the line? Is it okay for me to go to Main Street Pub and have a brew?
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I think it is. And I think as a leader, there is something unique to the calling on Paul in this text, and even myself as a pastor.
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It is tricky to both say and model, you are indeed free, and that's my role as a pastor, that's my job as a pastor, to clarify the freedoms that we have in Christ through his cross.
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But those of you who know you are free, don't pressure those who are not.
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You need to hear that from me. Let the weaker person study, let their own convictions lead them in their own progressive growth as they seek to understand their own freedoms, their own responsibility, their own judgment before God.
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And so it's with this in mind that we get to the final point of the text here. Don't flaunt your freedom. We've teased at this final point throughout the sermon, but Paul states it directly in verse 22, it could be kind of cryptic, but it says this in verse 22 at the start.
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The faith that you have, keep it between yourself and God. And that is the verse that everybody wants to write down and use if you're afraid of evangelism.
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That's not what it's talking about, that's not the context. This is where context drives it. If you were to just grab that verse and throw it up on a mug, it's like I'm not sharing my faith with anybody, this is mine, it's between me and God, you know, do you know what
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I'm talking about? That's not what he's getting at. This is not that passage about evangelism.
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Context drives the meaning. I think a way to help us get this point of what he's saying in verse 22 is to consider that you cannot loan your freedom, you cannot loan your freedom to somebody else.
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You cannot loan your faith or your trust in the freedoms that God has granted you in these gray areas, you cannot loan them out.
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You can't give them to other people. You may be convinced that you're free to drink a beer, but loaning that freedom to someone who thinks it's a sin will never work.
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So don't try to give your convictions in these gray area issues to other people.
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They're gonna need a process of personal convincing by the word and the spirit before they will ever feel free to give
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God thanks for a brewski. And I wanna clarify that I know that there are people here who have deeper struggles with alcohol, so I keep using that as an illustration, and let me just suggest to you that if you know yourself to have a history of alcoholism, that does not make you a weaker brother or sister.
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That's not what this is talking about, because to you, it's becoming more black and white, isn't it? It's knowing yourself to actually recognize, hold on a second, it might be just better for me to avoid places that serve alcohol.
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It might be better for me to just avoid those contexts, and my suggestion is that you never work through this to try to get convinced that it's okay for you to drink if you're an alcoholic.
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Do you see what I'm saying? So I am saying that if it's just only by conviction and only based on conviction, then work through that by God and come to your own stance.
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But I don't know if I'm making sense. If somebody has any questions about that, I kind of babbled and it's not necessarily in the notes here, but just to clarify, the way that this text intersects with somebody who struggles with alcoholism, if you want to talk more about that,
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I would love to, because I don't believe that the alcoholic should be giving thanks to God for a brewski at the bar.
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Does that make sense? And so we're trying to work through that on more of a personal level, but the end of verse 22 offers a blessing to anyone with a clear conscience.
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That's a beautiful way to conclude this. Blessing on anyone with a clear conscience, and that cuts both directions.
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You should have a clear conscience. Everybody in this room is being called to a clear conscience, and for the strong, the clear conscience comes from not pressuring the weak.
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Clear conscience. Don't pressure the weak. And for the weak who avoids things they feel they shouldn't do, clear conscience.
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Avoiding the things that you believe God desires for you to avoid. But the text ends with a stern warning.
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Whoever has doubts about a gray area issue like eating meat or drinking a beer, meaning that they actually think it's a sin, but then go and do it anyway, to that person, it is sin.
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And it causes them to live in a very strong term here. It causes them to live in a condemnable, damnable way.
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Opposing God to his face in what they believe he desires of them. And I wanna remind you that this same
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Paul who writes this here at the end of chapter 14 also wrote at the beginning of chapter eight that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.
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Yet this is an intentionally strong word of judgment here at the end of this text. And I believe Paul is using it intentionally as stark, shocking language for the one who lives a life against their own conscience.
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In other words, what's he getting at? Don't play around with this, church. Whatever does not proceed from faith, whatever does not proceed from trust in God is sin.
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And so let's wrap up by applying this text real quick. Just a couple of bullet point applications. First, don't pressure those weaker than you.
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Second, build one another up. Third, avoid flaunting your freedom.
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I wanna just encourage you to do something that you never do when I ask you to do it. Look around.
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Look around at the risk of making eye contact with somebody. Look around. Every person you see will be judged based on their own conscience.
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Everyone. And then I want you to just, now you've thought about each other, think about yourself.
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Whatever you do that does not proceed from trusting in God is sin.
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Think that through. And then go out and live based on your convictions accordingly. And with that stern reminder from Paul, I think it's a great time with that heavy dose of damnable sin against our own consciences and therefore sin against God.
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Let's turn our attention to communion. We need that. Here at these tables, all of us who have asked
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Jesus to wash away our sins, we've asked him to be our Lord and our king. We're gonna take a cracker to remember his body that was broken for us, the centerpiece of our faith, and the little cup of juice to remember his blood that was shed for us.
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And we need this reminder for so many reasons this morning. But this morning, I would like you to particularly focus on the way that he has called us to unity together in the gathering of his people.
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We are not called alone. But he has brought us together to grow us together, to build one another up mutually, to sacrifice for one another in service.
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And this doesn't come naturally. Did you guys already know that? It doesn't come naturally to us. And so what we're looking for in our midst is a supernatural work of his spirit that guides us and directs us into righteousness and peace and joy.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the beautiful thing that you're doing here called church.
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A word that just simply means gathering, the gathering of your people. So much structure and order and organization to what's going on here, and it's all brought about by your spirit.
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You faithfully bringing people and bringing souls and bringing lives together for mutual upbuilding. It's a beautiful thing to see it working in the church, to see acts of righteousness and justice being expressed outward towards one another and building one another up, to see peace manifested in our midst where we are clicking on all the cylinders and people are taking care of each other.
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And that joy, Father, that joy that can't be squelched by circumstances, but a joy that recognizes our destiny in Christ.
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And so, Father, we thank you, and we thank Jesus for the sacrifice that he made as we come to these tables.
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Just allow thanks to just flow out of us with gratitude for bringing us together.
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You've been faithful to bring us together in community. Father, I pray that if anybody here is neglecting community, they could come to church here 52 weeks a year and never really engage in this pursuit of peace and mutual upbuilding.
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Father, I pray that you'd move people from the fringes into the center of what you desire for them today. In Jesus' name.