Building Up One Another Without Offending, Part 1
Romans 14:13‑15
Let's open our Bibles tonight for the study of God's Word to the fourteenth chapter of Paul's great epistle to the Romans. I was talking to Chris Mueller for a moment and sharing with him before the service began that I suffer from a sort of frustration in the process of preaching the Word of God. And it comes out today, I suppose, in a double‑barreled way in the fact that I can see in the text a unitive thought, but can't seem to preach it as a unitive thought. What the Apostle could easily deliver in about eight verses takes me about two weeks or more sometimes. And I don't want you to get the idea that because we divide the message, the thought of the text is divided because it isn't. It just seems as though sometimes when you have a rather lengthy unit of thought, it lends itself to more than one message in order to grasp all that's in that thought. And I really do resist being bound by some precast style of preaching that says I have to start at the beginning and end at the end and get it all into one shot and do it all in thirty minutes. And so I trust that you've graciously learned to bear with me if sometimes what starts out to be a unit of thought winds up extending beyond the one message. And I think that is very likely what will occur again as we come to the second major unit of thought in Romans chapter 14.
Tonight our study begins in verse 13 and takes us down through verse 23. Eleven verses but really one basic idea is conveyed here. Now all of this passage beginning in chapter 14 verse 1 down through chapter 13...pardon me, down through chapter 15 verse 13, from 14:1 to 15:13 is really one subject. And the subject that is on the heart of the Apostle is the unity of strong and weak believers. We've already begun to examine that in our last couple of messages, so I know you're up to speed to some degree. But let me just initiate our study with some thoughts that may help you to kind of get your bearings as we approach verse 13.
It's obvious that Christ has granted us in the new covenant great liberty and great freedom. We are free from any encumbrances of Old Testament ceremonial law. We are free from any dietary restrictions, any external things. Coming to Christ we are free from any former religious taboos. We are free to enjoy all of the good gifts that God has created for us. There are really no limits to what we might enjoy of God's good gifts.
Now that, of course, does not include the freedom to sin, but the freedom to enjoy all the good things that God has provided for us. I suppose that we could say that the basic idea of Christian liberty or Christian freedom is that in Christ as recipients of the blessings of the new covenant we are free to enjoy all that God has provided without any restrictions in terms of non‑moral things.
Now there are some people who would tell us that we're not free to eat certain kinds of food. Seventh Day Adventist people would tell us we're not free to eat pork. Some of them would even say we're not free to eat meat of any kind. They would be vegetarian. Some people would tell us that our drink is limited because of some scriptural scruples. Others would tell us that we're limited to our recreation. Some would tell us that we cannot watch television. Some would tell us that celluloid in little squares cut in a strip with holes on the side that runs through a projector is sinful and we should not watch films. Some would tell us that certain activities on Sunday are in themselves evil. Some would tell us that weeds chopped up, stuffed in paper, put between our lips and lit is evil in and of itself. Some would tell us that little cards with funny pictures on them that you throw at each other and then hold in your had are intrinsically evil. Some would tell us that hair over your ears is basically evil...or down your back, if you happen to be a man. Some would tell us that beards are unspiritual. Some others would tell us that not having beards is unspiritual.
Now there are a lot of these things that have nothing to do with morality, having nothing to do with that which is clearly delineated in Scripture as related to sin, these kinds of things, these neutral things are the elements of which Christian liberty is made. And in order to understand how we react to all of this environment of available things that in themselves are not evil, we must have instruction from the Word of God. And the reason is because in the church of Jesus Christ there will be people, strong believers who fully understand their freedom and can enjoy all the good gifts that God has given them as long as they don't abuse them in a sinful way, and on the other hand there are some believers who because of their background, tradition and experience are bringing into their Christian experience a whole lot of taboos and scruples that cause them to believe that these things are not permissible and therefore we potentiate a great conflict in the church. Between those who want to exercise their freedom to the fullest and those who want to confine themselves to very limited perspective in terms of freedom.
Now Paul's great concern is that this kind of conflict in the church can disrupt the unity of the church. And so he takes this lengthy passage to treat the matter of church unity and the expression of love as it regards these non‑moral things, these personal preferences so that they may be handled in an attitude of love that conciliates and strengthens the church rather than alienating and dividing it.
Now in this section, Paul divides the large section into four general categories of teaching regarding strong and weak Christians. And basically he sort of gives four general exortations. Number one is that we are to receive one another. We are to receive one another. That's verses 1 to 12. He begins by saying the one that is weak in the faith receive. We are to receive one another.
He gives us four reasons. Do you remember? We studied them last time. First, because God receives us. Because the Lord sustains us. Because the Lord is sovereign to each of us. And the Lord alone can judge us. And we went into all the detail in those particular points.
The second major point after we are to love each other, we are to share with each other, we are to receive each other, the second point begins in verse 13 and runs to verse 23 and that is the idea that we are to build up one another. Not only are we to receive each other in the sense that we tolerate our differences, but we are to do that which constructively edifies each other, strengthening and building up each other. Then as he comes to chapter 15 in the first seven verses, he says that we are to please each other. We are to please each other. We are to be concerned not for pleasing ourselves, verse 2 says, but pleasing our neighbor for his good to edification. And then finally, from verse 8 to 13, his point is that we are to rejoice with one another in the marvelous plan of God that has brought us all together. So, we receive one another with understanding. We build up one another without offending. We please one another with Christ as our example. And we rejoice with one another because of the wonder of God's plan.
Now I want to ask a couple of questions and stretch our introduction a little bit tonight because I think it's important for us to get a grip on what Paul is wanting us to understand. So let me just develop the introduction for just a few moments.
Let me ask you a question. Now we are saying in this passage, we've heard Paul say it already, that a weak person is not to condemn a strong person, nor is a strong person to despise a weak person, but rather we are to be very gracious and receiving of one another. That was his first point. Now he's going to tell us that we are to be concerned with building up one another. Now an underlying thought that comes to my mind is this, and I'll ask you the question: is it necessary to eat or drink or do whatever your liberty tells you you can do to prove you are strong? Is it necessary? Is it necessary for you to do what you believe you're free to do in order to prove yourself to be strong?
The answer is no. The answer is no. It is not necessary for a believer who is strong and understands his liberty in Christ to exercise that liberty to prove his strength. In fact, he will demonstrate a greater amount of spiritual strength for the most part if he does not exercise that liberty. For the sake of whom? The weaker ones. Now listen, the issue is not whether we exercise our liberty, the issue is whether we possess that liberty. So we could say this, when one abstains from the liberty that he has, it may be reflective of a weak believer who abstains because he doesn't understand his freedom. Or it may be a strong believer who abstains because he does not want to offend a weak believer. So we do not want to conclude that in order to prove we are strong we have to somehow flaunt our freedoms. That's not the case at all. No one needs to prove their strength in that regard and certainly no one needs to be pressed into exercising freedom...not the weaker brother who abstains out of unbelief and not the stronger brother who abstains out of love.
You know what this is saying? This is saying in a church there will be a kind of conformity that will develop in that church because the weaker brothers based upon their prior experience and where they've come from will set limitations in their own conscience because they cannot believe they are free to do those things. And the stronger brothers out of love for the weaker brothers will wind up setting the same limitations. And so there will come then a kind of conformity and I trust a kind of developing conformity so that as the strong in love confine themselves to that which will be tolerated by the weak, they build relationships with the weak that eventually will strengthen them and widen that scope of liberty. Now I hope you followed that.
It must be understood that our freedom is before God, our liberty is before God. Whether we exercise it or not is another matter. I may in my own heart feel I'm free to do many things that I would never do because I don't need to do those things to prove I'm strong, I rather need not to do those things in order to demonstrate my love for those who are weak. You see, my liberty is vertical. The liberty that I enjoy in my heart is before the Lord and in my heart before the Lord I know I have freedom. But the exercise of that liberty is horizontal. It is between a person and another person, and that is limited by my love.
So, Paul's concern, as we come to verse 13 and all the way through this section, is not to make sure the strong really use their liberty to the limit. His point is not to have the strong flaunting their liberty, defining and demanding their rights, but it is to teach the strong to restrain their liberty for love sake.
John Brown commenting on the epistle of Peter wrote this, "There's a great difference between Christian liberty and the use of Christian liberty. Christian liberty is an internal thing, it belongs to the mind and the conscience and has a direct reference to God. The issue of Christian liberty is an external thing when it belongs to conduct and has reference to man." Then he says, "No consideration should prevail on us for a moment to give up our liberty. Since our liberty grows out of the teaching of the Word of God and the God who alone is Lord of the conscience, we should be willing to die for the maintenance of our liberty, but many a consideration should induce us to forego the practical assertion or the display of our liberty," end quote.
We have liberty in Christ. But that liberty is controlled and it is not necessary for me to flaunt that liberty, to demand that liberty, to even exercise that liberty to prove my strength, but rather it is incumbent upon me to discern the spirit of those in my assembly who are weak and restrain my liberty in line with their weakness so that I in gaining their love may move them toward a greater understanding of liberty.
Now, the Bible places a lot of restraint on our liberty. Paul only deals with really a couple of the restraints in verses 13 to 23. There are others dealt with in other places. For example, the exercise of liberty in the first place is certainly, and let me give you just a few, is certainly number one, not for the purpose of self‑deception. Now what do I mean by that? Look at 1 Peter 2:16...1 Peter 2:16, the exercise of our liberty is certainly not for the purpose of self‑deception. In 1 Peter 2:16, Peter talks about using your liberty for a cloak of wickedness. Now what does he mean by that? He means to say that you can use your liberty simply to cover over your evil. You can be self‑deceived. You can sort of have this wickedness in your life and you cover over your wickedness with the cloak of Christian liberty.
For example, you may have a drinking problem. And you may be drunken from time to time. And that is sin, plain and simple, in the Word of God. But in order to cloak your drinking problem, you flaunt the fact that you are free in Christ to do whatever you want to do because drink in and of itself, the juice from the grape is not inherently wicked.
Or you may be a television addict. And you may sit looking at that one‑eyed monster till you're nothing but a zombie. And whatever garbage parades across there, parades half way across through your brain and then finishes out on the screen so that you compute all of it. And if anybody calls that to your attention, your response is "But I am free, it's only electric impulses." But the truth of the matter is you are using your so‑ called Christian liberty to cloak over what is basically a sinful preoccupation with something that is sucking the life out of your spiritual development. You can use liberty as a cloak to cover your evil.
I mean, it could even be playing golf on Sunday morning. "I'm free, I worship God in the creation." I've heard that one a few times. Yes, there's nothing inherently evil about a little white ball until you get to the sixteenth hole and you're 20 strokes over par, then there's something very evil about that little ball. You say to yourself, "Well, I'm free to do this," and all that is is a cloak to cover the wickedness of a heart that says I'm not really interested in worshiping God. So, liberty is not to ever be for the sake of self‑deception or the sake of deceiving others.
Secondly, Scripture also elsewhere, this time 1 Corinthians chapter 6 would be a point we could touch, tells us that the exercise of liberty is not for self‑destruction. There are some people who given certain freedom can use that freedom until it becomes self‑destructive. Now personally you'll have to agree with me that there's nothing inherently evil in a tobacco plant, it just sits there. I've seen them on the racks in the farms in the mid‑south. Tobacco leaves just hanging over those racks in those places where they dry. And there was nothing particularly evil about that. There's nothing inherently immoral about cutting it up. There's nothing inherently moral or immoral about stuffing it in paper, sticking it in your mouth and blowing smoke. There's nothing inherently evil about that. But when that little thing hanging out of your mouth is sucking out your very life and sucking out your energy and creating the shakes and totally dominating your life, then you have allowed that little thing that is not immoral in itself to become the source of self‑ destruction. I mean, there are some people...and I know myself of a man who was in our church...who literally was so committed to drinking beer that he left the church rather than set that liberty aside and always was saying, "That's my freedom, that's my freedom." The truth of it was it was self‑destructive.
Now look at 1 Corinthians 6:12. He says all things are lawful. Now he doesn't mean unlawful things are lawful, he means all things that aren't unlawful are lawful. You understand that. He certainly wouldn't say sin is lawful. So all that is lawful is lawful. "But all things, though they would be permissible, are not expedient." Simply put. All things are lawful but it isn't smart to do all things. I mean, you don't have to be Phi Beta Kappa to know that if you suck that stuff in long enough it's going to hurt you. Now in and of itself it isn't immoral but it isn't smart either. You could say the same thing about a movie or about a television or about anything like that, when it becomes something that literally destroys a person it becomes unlawful.
I can think of an evangelist well known about 20 years ago, I know his name well, who was preaching in crusades all across the United States. Decided to play golf all the time. Eventually was playing golf for $4,000 a game and it destroyed him...totally destroyed him. He lost everything including his ministry. And again I'm back to the fact that there's nothing inherently evil in a little ball, there's nothing inherently evil in a nice green place to play golf, there's nothing inherently evil in a club in your hand, but when it is for self‑destruction it is an abuse of that freedom.
Again in chapter 10 of 1 Corinthians and verse 23, he repeats that same idea. "All things are lawful for me but all things are not expedient." It doesn't make sense to engage in all things if by engaging I cannot control those things. It's amazing how things can literally destroy people.
Now let's go to a third thing. Christian liberty is not for self‑bondage. Christian liberty is not for self‑bondage. The purpose of Christian liberty is not to bring you under the control of something so that you become its slave. And yet that can happen. That literally can happen. Do you know something? Do you know some people are literally controlled by chocolate? Chocolate is their master. Now you're laughing because you identify with that, you understand that. I mean, they have real trauma if they don't have their chocolate. Some people are totally controlled by a soap opera. And if they can't get home to see the next serial, they're miserable. You don't want to be near them. It's really incredible. They're slaves. They've been brought into bondage. And that's back to 1 Corinthians 6 again and the second half of the verse, he says, "All things are lawful," that is all lawful things are lawful that aren't forbidden by the law of God, "but I will not allow myself to be brought under the power of any," literally to be entangled by any.
I don't want to let myself be under the control. Listen, man was created to be the king of the earth. Man was created to be the sovereign. Man was created and given dominion. And isn't it interesting how things, because of the fall of man, have now had their dominion over him? And people are controlled by things. They're controlled by cigarettes and candy and some people are controlled by food. They literally live to eat. And in our society it isn't even a question of eating, it's a question of eating in an environment that is spectacular. I mean, now restaurants are like a side show. You don't just go there and eat, you go there and it's a happening which you happen to eat. They can't give you food...they can't give you food on a plate, they have to give it to you in a bucket or in a shoe or on a piece of wood, or something else. Or they've got to have all kinds of decor which triples the price of the food and makes you think what is very normal is abnormal or super‑normal. People are controlled by things like that. It's absolutely ludicrous to imagine that any of God's good gifts to us would become our master, isn't it?
And then I would add a fourth thought. Our Christian liberty is not for the sake of self‑retardation...self‑ retardation. God didn't give us our freedoms, and back to 1 Corinthians 10 again and that twenty‑third verse, he says "All things are lawful for me but all things do not build up." So he says our freedom, in a sense, are not to do the things that tear us down, that don't build us up. And so I guess what we have to say is because I love my relationship to the Lord I'm not going to get controlled by some things. I want to avoid what tears me down. And there may be things in your life, there may be recreation in your life that tears you down spiritually because it keeps you away from the people of God. Television may keep you away from the Word of God. Movies may keep you away from the Bible study. And in effect, these things that in and of themselves if indeed they are not immoral, and I would venture to say that 99.9 percent of movies are immoral to one extent or another, either in what is depicted or what is sort of implicit, but these kinds of things that tear us down, retard our development even though in and of themselves they are not moral, we have to recognize that we do not have freedom so that we may engage in that.
Now those are all personal. But I wanted to give you those cause I think you need a full picture. I have liberty in Christ. But my liberty is not for the sake of self‑deception, not to cloak my vice. And my liberty is not for self‑destruction, not to get me under habits that ultimately destroy my effectiveness for God. And my liberty is not for self‑bondage so that I can be controlled by some thing. And my liberty is not for self‑ retardation so that whatever it is that I engage in literally pulls me down spiritually. That's all personal for me.
But I want to turn the corner now and take you to Romans chapter 14 and show you that Paul talks about Christian liberty here not in the sense of how it effects me but in the sense of how it effects my brother and sister. And this is a very important dimension of understanding Christian liberty because it effects the church. So Paul's concern from verse 13 to 23 is for other Christians, how we are to build up other Christians without offending. And that calls for limiting our exercise of liberty. Don't let anybody take your liberty. Don't let anybody threaten your liberty. Don't let anybody bind your conscience to things that are not in themselves evil. But at the same time, you don't have to flaunt that liberty to prove you're strong, right? You don't want to do that because it may turn out to be bondage for your own sake and it may turn out to be unloving and divisive for the fellowship of believers.
Now how do we avoid offending each other? How do we look at our liberty in terms of each other? There are six kind of little hooks that we'll work through as we go through this passage tonight and next Lord's day. First of all, let me show you the key in verse 15. It's the key to everything. There's a little phrase in verse 15, "Now walkest thou not in love." The point there is really the point of the whole passage. What you want to do is be sure that your conduct in the exercise of your liberty is not unloving, is not insensitive to other believers. If we can just make a positive out of that statement, we would say that the objective of Christian living in the church, the goal of a strong believer is to conduct himself in love toward a weaker brother. That's the essence so that there's no offense.
Then he works through six ways in which we avoid offending and build up each other. First of all is in verse 13 and the first one is don't cause your brother to stumble...don't cause your brother to stumble. "Let us not therefore judge one another anymore, but judge this..." there's a little play on words..."let's not judge one another, but let's judge this...let's determine this...rather, that no man put a stumbling block or an occasion to fall in his brother's way."
Now notice the "therefore" since the Lord receives each Christian weak or strong, as he's shown in the first twelve verses, since the Lord is able to hold up the strong and hold up the weak so we don't have to worry about each other, since the Lord is sovereign to each and each does what he does to please the Lord, and since only the Lord will be the final judge, therefore don't you judge...don't you judge. You just be responsible not for judging or condemning but for being sure you don't cause that brother to stumble. That's what you're to be involved in doing.
It's not our task to sit on the throne or the bench and judicate...judiciate...judicate, I mean to say, got to get that right, to sit on the bench‑‑as it were‑‑and to judicate in the case of everybody. It's not for us to render the verdict of condemnation to those that we feel are deserving of such. So he says let's not judge, krino, let's not condemns, after all, verses 10 to 12 says the Lord's the one that's going to judge. That's not for us. The weak are not to judge the strong, and that's what the tendency was we saw in the first 12 verses, the weak were condemning the strong because they saw that as an abuse to freedom. Nor are the strong to condemn the weak for their lack of faith and their small mindedness. That's not for you to do.
Instead of that, you make a decision. It's an aorist imperat