August 16, 2015 · Romans 14:1–4

We're Sorry For Scandalizing

Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person's faith allows him to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. Who are you to judge someone else's servant?

“This is talking about a faith that is weak, a faith that doesn't quite understand the realities behind things. And so it's saying, hey, someone who has this faith that doesn't quite understand that the Lord allows this — then you allow them to stand before the Lord for themselves. So I want to point out a couple of things with that. The first one is, when we understand Romans 14, we've got to do a few things. First of all, you've got to be true to this text in the context. You have to be true to all of the Bible. … Because very clearly, if you look at the next text, he's talking about matters. Matters are clean, things that are about good, they're acceptable to God, they're pure, there's no condemnation with these things. The next slide will kind of help point out — in Romans 13, moral sins are considered unacceptable. So Paul's very clear, you can't do these moral sins. So he's not talking about sins. He's also in Romans 16, later, shows that doctrinal sins are unacceptable. If you have a wrong doctrine of God, you don't just say, oh, whatever. There's things that we speak to. We're talking about a range of an area which is not in the black or the white. There's this kind of grey area with Christians. And we're saying, what's acceptable and what's not within being a Christian?”