Romans 14:1-6

The Weak and the Strong
1 Accept those whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. 2 One person's faith allows them to eat everything, but another person, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 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 that person. 4 Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To their own master they stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.

5 Some consider one day more sacred than another; others consider every day alike. Everyone should be fully convinced in their own mind. 6 Those who regard one day as special do so to the Lord. Those who eat meat do so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and those who abstain do so to the Lord and give thanks to God.


Dig Deeper
It was over ten years ago now and I was a very young Christian and was heading off with my wife to our very first married couple’s barbeque. I was feeling a bit crabby but was certainly ready to relax and have fun with my new family. When we got there, though, I saw something that disturbed me immediately. The first person we ran into was walking back to their car to grab something out of it and they had a wine cooler in their hand. I had yet to go around the grove of trees where the rest of the couples were but this already got my sin sniffer turned on. As I came around the bend, I almost passed out. Well over half of the people were drinking a wine cooler or a beer or some type of alcoholic beverage. This was too much. I had grown up in a church that simply did not tolerate alcohol at all and I had a tightly held belief that drinking alcohol of any kind was sinful. I immediately stormed back to our car and told my wife that I would no longer be going around these people at all. She calmly came and talked to me and I uneasily returned to the barbeque, but in my mind I had judged everyone as being deeply in sin and felt that they needed to repent. As I took the issue to one of the evangelists the next day, he explained to me that the Bible never prohibits alcohol but does command wisdom in drinking and prohibits getting drunk. I haughtily decided that he was wrong but decided to look into the matter further and trust his wisdom enough to at least tolerate this behavior for a time. After studying the issue out, and maturing a bit more spiritually, I have realized that the Bible does not, in fact, prohibit drinking alcohol. I still don’t love the idea and I don’t drink myself, but I simply cannot judge others whose consciences do not deter them from drinking alcohol. What I had done was to put my own interests and convictions ahead of love, unity, and giving room for others to have their own convictions. Quite frankly, it’s very easy for Christians to sit back and judge everyone else’s supposed sins and shortcomings and declare the need to withdraw from them because of their faults but that is exactly the opposite of what Christians are biblically called to do.

As Paul urged the new Christian communities to begin to work out the reality of living our the new creation while still in the present age, he was wise enough to know that this would cause conflict. Even people that are deeply committed to making Jesus the Lord of their lives aren’t automatically brought into complete agreement in everything. The Holy Spirit simply doesn’t work that way, as though once someone makes the decision to die to themselves and enter into Christ that our free will and responsibility to partner with the Holy Spirit go out the window. No, Christian communities still have much work to do. We come from different backgrounds, with different beliefs, carrying different faults and flaws, and God is dealing with us at different points of our journey. This means that Christians within the same community will be at different points in their faith so that what is fine for one Christian will not be so for another. One Christian will be dealing with a sin that another one has already conquered or never struggled with. This is why the New Testament has so few lists of rules or laws. The work of the Spirit in each of us is far more complicated than calling a group of people to all follow the same rules in the same way. That conforms behavior but does not transform the heart.

Paul knows that the new creation is about transformed hearts so the difficult work of creating unity through diversity begins with the monumentally important realization that each member of God’s family, and indeed the entire family, belongs to God. We belong to each other, as Paul has said in 12:5, but that means that we belong to one another as brother and sisters of the same family. There is only one Father of the family and we are not him. This demands that we walk the difficult line between holding one another to the truth of the Christian gospel and faith, and trusting that the Holy Spirit is fully capable of working with different people through different points in their faith.

As we have already seen, the Roman church was a mixture of Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians that were returning after the five-year expulsion of Jews from Rome. The church was likely a jumble between Gentile Christians who felt freer and more fully understood the ramifications of the entrance of the new creation through the freeing power of the gospel received in faith. While many of the Jews were probably still quite sensitive to their consciences that called them to observe and respect works of the law such as food restrictions, Sabbath observances, and the drinking of wine. Yet, it likely did not fall perfectly down those lines. There were probably some Jewish Christians who, like Paul, had more fully worked out that they were no longer bound to follow the restrictions of the law. At the same time, there were many Gentiles who well knew that the meat that was available in most places had been sacrificed to pagan gods and they were quite ready to escape that life and were eager to embrace not only the Christian ethic but the comforting discipline of following the rules and restrictions of the Jewish law.

This is why Paul doesn’t simply break things down in terms of the Jewish Christians wanting to do one thing while the Gentiles another. In addition, why reinforce the very types of walls that Paul is trying to break down? Instead he classifies the sides of these issues into the strong and the weak. Those that were strong in their faith were those that had thought through the implication of their Christian faith fully and realized that God, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, had unleashed his new creation into their lives. The weak were the ones who were still wrestling with and coming to understand some of these things and tended to be much more restrictive in what they felt was okay to do.

When you have two groups like that, conflict is bound to happen. Some, the strong, believed that the world was God’s and everything in it, and there was nothing inherently wrong with meat or wine so why prohibit it. They weren’t after all, getting drunk or in any way worshiping pagan gods. Yet others, the weak, did not feel free to do these things. It pricked their consciences and felt truly wrong and sinful to do. The strong felt that no day was any different from another and that each day was an equal opportunity to honor the Lord while the weak seemed to believe that Jewish festivals and Sabbaths still needed to be followed in order to properly worship and honor God.

When you get a mix like that it is almost inevitable that the strong, as Paul calls them, will begin to think of themselves as the liberated and free ones who really understand what the Christian faith is all about, all the while looking haughtily down their noses at the unenlightened and ignorant who are stuck in the “old school” ways. On the other side of the coin, however, the weak can just as easily criticize the strong. They can start to consider themselves as the truly righteous remnant, the only ones who are really pleasing God and look at the strong as dangerous ones who constantly flirt with liberalism and sin that will take the church down a slippery slope of diminishing convictions.

The key to living in the covenant family is to realize that it is God’s family and to not haughtily look down at one another and imagine that God is pleased with one school of thought over the other when it comes to disputable matters that have not been clearly delineated in the word of God. What matters is not so much the actual actions that people take but that whatever decision you make, you make to honor the Lord. This demands great trust on the part of each member of the community and the Christian maturity to not try to bind others to our particular convictions. It also takes discernment, wisdom, and a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures to know which issues are core doctrines that are not negotiable and which ones fall into the category of disputable matters. Our emotions can simply not be the deciding factor in that decision. The whole point in these disputed matters that Paul has brought up is that each side felt strongly that what they were doing was right. It takes a great deal of maturity and trust in God to watch someone else engage in behavior that you genuinely believe is wrong (Paul will have more to say about that as the chapter goes on). Being part of God’s family requires the difficult discipline of bearing with one another despite differences and despite the fact that we sin against one another. We become the manifold wisdom on God to the world (Eph. 3:10 ) not because we have become a group of near-perfect people that bring nothing but joy to one another’s lives. We become God’s glory when we are united around Christ despite our incredible differences and very real flaws

What is equally important to what Paul says in this section is what he does not say. The issues that he brings up may not seem that important to us but they were extremely central issues to the first century church. Yet, Paul never steps in and says, “okay, this group is right in this area and this other group is right over on this issue, so the rest of you need to repent and get in line so that you are unified and all thinking the same things.” That would be uniformity but not genuine unity. Paul, instead calls them to recognize that the Lord is the master in this situation and each person is answerable to him. He basically says throughout this passage to love one another, to trust one another, to put each other’s interests first, to recognize that the Lord is the master, now “go work it out.” Paul gives no details and no orders. Instead he wants them to think through each situation in love and learn how to love one another. That is far more important than merely taking one side of an issue and pressuring everyone into the same behavior. A Christian community that holds to the same gospel and core doctrines but then allows one another the space to work that reality out in the way that each one is led by the Spirit is truly a mature and loving community. Yet, I believe that this principle applies not just to individuals but also to churches. Some are stronger, some are weaker, but they must accept, love, and embrace one another with the same patience for one another and reverence for God that individuals are called to do.


Devotional Thought
Have you found that it is easy for you to sit back and point out everyone else’s mistakes and flaws and then feel like you should withdraw from your church community because of everything that they have done wrong? What would Paul say to you? How do you need to change your thinking?