Okay, so a week ago we spent a long time, but a very good and robust discussion in Romans 13 verse 8 about this matter of not owing anything to anybody, not owing debts. And we'll just pick up there. Paul, and if, you know, so we won't rehash that. It was a good discussion, and there's certainly a strong case to be made that Paul's saying don't owe anybody any debts except this one debt, which is to love one another. And if you've not heard that or someone's hearing this recording, you can go back and grab the one from the week before about that matter. But Paul says we have a debt to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. This is a fascinating passage. It's not the only place in the scripture that teaches it. And this is really important. This is at the core of New Covenant living, understanding this New Covenant in the terms of what are we to do. I can remember not too long ago being asked to talk to somebody that was caught up in something called HRM or Hebrew Roots Movement. And of course, they are pushing the idea that you have to keep the law to be saved and to be sanctified and that sort of thing. And the question that he kept asking was, well, if I don't have to keep all the law, then there's no rule of what I should do, how I should live. And of course, it's really an absurd thing, but we need to understand we're not under the old covenant. We are new covenant believers. It's beyond what we're doing today to get into all of what that entails. I think a lot of those blessings of the New Covenant are future, but that New Covenant was inaugurated at the cross. Jesus announced it at the Last Supper. This cup of wine is the blood of the New Covenant, that sort of thing. And so the Old Covenant's been replaced. Where does that leave the commands of the Old Covenant? Do they have any importance in that sort of thing? And what Jesus taught, and what is being taught here by Paul and Romans, what's at the core of the primary, you know, one of the primary excitations, I'll say that, of 1 John, is that we love one another. Because the righteousness of the law, those things in the law were not limited to things that are governing How we behave some of it was just as we were talking about before the call law outlines The Levitical sacrifices. There's a lot of things there. There's the feast days, which Paul's going to talk about chapter 14 But when it comes down to those things in the law where God was saying let me show you What holiness looks like in this situation? which is ultimately the big point of the law and the biggest sense God is holy and You, Israel, were called to be holy. And he shows them in various situations what holiness looks like. We as New Covenant believers don't have to follow all of those commands and that law, but there is a sense in which many of them are brought forward in the New Covenant because they all end up ultimately falling under the umbrella of Jesus's command, a New Covenant command. We see it, for example, in John. to love one another, and sometimes people will say, yeah, but the Old Testament said that too. Yeah, but Jesus tweaked it a bit. Jesus came and he demonstrated what the love is that we're supposed to do, and 1 John picks up on that idea. It wasn't merely a command to love one another, but to love one another as I have loved you, Jesus would say. And 1 John picks that up and he says, basically, that quality of love took Jesus to the cross. Now you're to love one another with that quality of love. And if that quality of love is high enough to even require one to lay down their life for another, then all the lesser things we could do out of love, like providing for people's personal financial needs maybe, or something like that, certainly fall on that umbrella. So we have this emphasis on the idea that loving one another carries out all of those Old Testament commands, and that's what Paul's going to say. So when we get the question, well, do any of those commands carry over? The answer would seem to be, in a sense, yes, some do. But they're the ones that deal with they ultimately fall under this umbrella of loving one another. So look at what he writes. The one who loves one another or loves another has fulfilled the law. And that love, of course, is the word agape. So don't think of an emotional bond like brotherly love, like phileo is that kind of love. There's other kinds of love in the Greek language. This is the love of choice and volition to do for another, and it fulfills the law. And then he explains how that works. The commandments, do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet, and all other commandments are summed up. This idea of summing it up pulls together the core righteousness principle that underlies the commands about murder, stealing, coveting, and so forth. They're summed up by this commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law. Now, it's important. Paul brushed up against the law earlier in the book in chapter three, and he says no one's going to be justified. No one becomes a Christian by the deeds of the law. It's not possible. Our becoming justified is entirely based on faith alone, in Christ alone. But that doesn't mean, now that Paul's in the application section about how a Christian ought to live, which was kicked off in Romans 12 with this idea of not being conformed to the world, but being transformed by the renewing of your mind. being a living sacrifice, that sort of thing. He's explaining what the Christian's life ought to look like, not what one does to become a Christian, not what one does to validate they're in fact a Christian, merely how a Christian ought to live. At the top of the list is this matter of loving your neighbor as yourself. If you think about it logically, it makes perfect sense. If I steal somebody's stuff, That's a failure to love them. You can't say, I love Billy Bob, but I stole all this stuff. The very stealing Billy Bob stuff proves you don't love him. And again, remember, we're not dealing with emotions. We're dealing with choices and actions. Killing people, yeah, that's not very loving. This isn't a stretch. Committing adultery, right? These things are commands of the old covenant. that they're still binding on us, not because we're participants in the old covenant, that was always limited to Jewish people and to a particular time in history, but because all of these things reflect applications of the fundamental principle to love your neighbor as yourself. And that command, that principle has carried over to the new covenant. Don't covet, coveting other people's stuff. That's a failure to love them, but it's also a failure to love God because coveting suggests that what God has provided for you for the moment is insufficient. Thoughts, comments about this matter of fulfilling the righteousness of the law through loving one another? We'll push on a little bit. Hopefully that makes good sense. Not a hard concept, but it allows us to understand how some of this Old Testament stuff from the law does still, it's one of the ways in which it still has vitality today. Put on Christ, verse 11, besides this, besides loving one another, since you know the time, it's already the hour for you to wake up from sleep. because now our salvation is nearer than we first believed. We've seen, and I've pointed out in earlier chapters, that the Apostle doesn't use the word save or salvation that frequently in this book, and while we tend to use or think of justification, Paul's word in Romans 3 and 4, we tend to think of that when we hear salvation. I mean, that's just my sense of it. We hear being saved or salvation, and we think of becoming a Christian, but often the idea is something different. Not always, but often it is. Clearly, if our salvation is closer than it was before, closer than when we first believed. Well, when we first believed, that's when we were justified. That's Romans 3 and 4. Therefore, you see, it's very clear in this one line that salvation here is not justification. And we've seen that sometimes people will say that salvation sort of has its three different tenses, or its three different types of salvation, from the power of sin, the penalty of sin, that sort of thing, presence of sin. He's looking to the future, clearly. He's ultimately looking to the presence of sin altogether, what we might call glorification, stuff he touched on in Romans 8, And he's using kind of a metaphor that the night has passed and it's daytime. And what do you do when the sun comes up? Well, you're supposed to get up and be active, be about your business, be doing what you're supposed to do. And his idea is really, I think, quite simple here. You know, every day we're still around, still living. The return of the Lord's a little closer. our ultimate salvation's a little closer than when we first believed. Whether we believed five years ago or we were justified 50 years ago, we're a little closer each day and it has implications for how we would live. So he says, the night's nearly over and the day is near. Paul always thought of the Lord's return as imminent. And that of course has caused some to to take a view that, you know, things we read about in the Revelation had to all occur before AD 70. Otherwise, how could Paul and the other apostles think of these sorts of events, you know, and the Lord's return as being imminent? But the fact is the scripture affirms no one knew the hour, and Peter would affirm in 2 Peter about the idea that You know, for God, time's different. He's timeless. So, you know, a thousand years or a day, it doesn't make a difference. So we have our very human sense of time because of the brevity of our own lives. But Paul just, you know, he has this idea that it's soon. And I think for every generation of Christians, that ought to be the mindset. This is soon. We're in the day or the day is near. The night's nearly over, so we ought to be about our business. So he says, let us discard, this is like with changing clothes, like is the sun's just about to come up. You exchange the pajamas for the clothes you're going to wear for the day. And that's the idea here. Let us discard the deeds of darkness. Let us discard the night clothes and put on the armor of light, the day clothes. This is almost like a very abbreviated version of Ephesians 6 that you may recognize because at least in my translation it said armor of light. That word can be translated something like equipment but it doesn't quite help us catch the similarity maybe to Ephesians 6 where we talk about the armor of God and that's an extended passage on this matter. This is Paul's abbreviated version. We ought to be equipped for the time in which we live. And so, like putting on a garment, we've thrown on the armor of light. Let us walk with decency as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual impurity and promiscuity, not in quarreling and jealousy. Those who would say that if you teach that we're under a new covenant, that the law is gone, We have no, there are no guiding principles, no rules or whatever, just haven't read the New Testament. There is a standard for living, and we're reading it here. Let us walk with decencies in the daytime, not in carousing, drunkenness, but put on, he says, and here's that idea, like as if Jesus is a cloak, put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision For the flesh to gratify its desires. I think the King James has that similar wording don't make a provision for the flesh but Zane Hodges points out that word provision, you know, it's like a metaphor in a sense and if you think of it as provision, but The same word can mean to have forethought about something or to you know, to refer to that thing for which you forethought, that is, to have a preparation or provision to do something. And probably the forethought may fit better here. And the reason I say that, think of it this way. He says, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and I would say something like, you know, have no forethought for the flesh to gratify its desires. If you remember back in Romans 8, it's been a long time, Paul said something along the lines of, the mindset on the flesh is death, but the mindset on the spirit is life and peace. It had to do with what we're thinking about. That was key, the mind. We're in a section that's still elaborating on this matter of renewing the mind. When you start having that initial thought, that initial forethought, that proceeds doing the gratification of the flesh, you're already in a bad spot. And I think that's what he's saying, is to put on the Lord Jesus Christ, don't have this forethought, don't have this thinking in your mind toward how you might gratify the flesh. The question is, and I want to see if you have some thoughts, how do I put on lord jesus christ like what does that look like any any comments thoughts about that i'm not really sure what if you put on the lord jesus christ i guess it's a it's being in fellowship so it's trying i don't know it's it's the holy spirit leading you to be to be more Christ-like. It's the only thing I can think of. Mm-hmm. Any other thoughts about that? Yeah, I always thought that too, that before you say anything, especially things that you have major emotion about, like the election. Look, just things that you have incredible feelings about to come to totally pray about it. And if you're not sure of what to do, not to do anything till you're sure of what to do. I think that whole thing about one move at the right time is worth a thousand moves at the wrong time. And you have to be guided by God or you're just going to get slaughtered in this Satan's world system. Yeah. And it's easy to get there. We're inundated with so much information. Some of it makes us mad. There's a contrast here between putting on the Lord Jesus Christ and this matter of making a provision, which I would suggest is a forethought. I think Hodges is right about this because What happens in our mind, this renewing the mind, it matters. And that's where it all starts. The conduct that we shouldn't do comes out of that. The conduct that we should do comes out of that as well, out of the mind. And for example, loving one another, that's a choice. We make a choice in our mind before we do the thing which is loving. And this matter of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ is to be somewhat, I think, contrasted with beginning a thought process that is Bent toward the flesh to gratify its desires back in Romans 8 what Paul wrote there and it's just important to remember this it started in Romans 8 with him saying that Essentially to walk in the spirit. Okay, he says in in Romans 8 for and I'm starting mid-sentence, but we'll get the thought, in order that the law's requirement would be fulfilled in us. Well, we just read that we could fulfill the law's requirement by what? Loving one another, loving our neighbors ourself. So Paul raised this issue. He's giving the practical command here in Romans 13, but back in Romans 8, he didn't say love one another, he said, in order that the wall's requirement would be fulfilled in us, we know that happens when we love, he says, us who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. I think our key is there in this matter of walking in the spirit. I'll come back to this matter of love, but I want to say something about that. Can non-Christians do good things? Yes. Can they love in the way that Paul is commanding, and let's say Paul, but Jesus commanded, when he said to love your neighbors yourself? That's a question that we could wrestle with. But in Romans 8, Paul says, we're the ones that walk according to the spirit, and that's how the righteousness of the law gets fulfilled. The implication is that even as a Christian, I cannot fulfill the righteousness of the law apart from walking in the Spirit. I'm not saying I could do nothing good, but the righteousness of the law, and the walking in the Spirit, which we know can produce the fruit of the Spirit, thinking about Galatians 5, you can't do that in another way. You can't produce the fruit of the Spirit without walking in the Spirit. You don't have of the resources to do that apart from the spirit. He goes on, those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the spirit, meaning the Holy Spirit, have their minds set on the things of the spirit. Now the mindset on the flesh is death, but the mindset of the spirit is life and peace. The mindset of the flesh is hostile to God. He's bringing up, I think, in Romans 13, a very similar application of what he said earlier. He's changed the wording a little bit. This matter of walking in the Spirit, I think, is probably the equivalent here. And this thing of having the mind set on the things of the Spirit is probably the equivalent here of putting on the Lord Jesus Christ. If I could put on the Lord Jesus Christ as throwing on a cloak or a garment, how would I look to the observer, right? How would I look to the observer? Well, the idea is they would see the character, the speech of Christ in me because I put on the Lord Jesus Christ. And I think that is a reality that we can experience, but it's experienced as we walk in the spirit. Does that make sense? Comments or thoughts or questions? Yeah, that makes sense. The matter of love to one another, I don't remember if I mentioned this last week, but I would mention it here just to understand it. This is from 1 John, but 1 John really emphasizes this matter of love, and he makes a statement that Paul didn't make. And it's one of the many things where we have some unique content in John. We don't want to read him in the shadow of Paul, but let the book of 1 John stand on its own legs. 1 John says in two places that God is love. God is love. How is that different from saying that God loves? You can love a person, but to really love them, it's an action. Yeah. So people, you can love someone from afar, but if they're in need, you need to, if that's put on your heart, you need to act on it. Yeah. Love is an action. We talk about doing loving things. It's, it's an action. And so if I say God loves us, uh, it's, it's, it's a love of choice and action. And in fact, John chapter three, that gospel would say, I'm paraphrasing, but he loved us this much or in this way that he gave his only begotten son, right? What does it mean? The love began far before that. The love began in the creation. He loved us, so therefore he created us to love him, not to create us as robots, which he could have easily done. We'd all love him. he gave us that choice. We have that choice. And I just think, gosh, my poor little dog doesn't really have much of a choice. He only has me. He might love someone else a lot more if they gave him better food or took him out more for walks. Yeah. But it's, it's really an action. And it could be just a smile. It could be providing something that could just be in a look. But it's, it's more than just loving from afar, saying, Oh, I love that person, but I don't even know him. There is some personal aspect to it, typically, right? And like I said, it takes so many forms. Praying for other people when you're aware of their needs. Love. Sometimes doing for them. Doing, not necessarily giving money or something like that, but doing for them. Sometimes it is maybe providing for a financial need, but it looks like so many things. Susan? Back in the day when I was studying under Robert Robert Thiem, he called the type of love that we have to have for the human race or for anybody. is impersonal love. That's what he called it, which doesn't sound good, but that was what he called it. But the idea was that you don't love the person because of their attractiveness to you. You love them because you have the love of God inside of you. You have integrity. It's it's your it's it's the Holy Spirit inside of you. It's what God has done with your insides that allows you to not be judgmental or not be or to feel not feel but to um to have that type of love it it's it's a god love more so than you know human human love is you know based on attractiveness And it's interesting, you said something right at the end there, God love. I put a link to the draft form of it last week, this book on 1 John that I've been working on. I wanted to distinguish the kind of love that John talks about from the kind of love the world talks about, because we're using the same word that the world uses. And the way I chose to do that is I call it God love with a hyphen in the middle with regard to this command to love one another. It is to demonstrate or exhibit God love. And then the question becomes, and this is kind of where I'm, what I'm getting at is who can do that and how can they do it? Because it's, it's easy to, to just look at it. Oh, we just need to love one another. That's a good rule for everybody. Everybody can't do it. It's the problem. If you think you can, you're overestimating yourself. Again, I'm not saying that we don't have some aspect of love that's good. I'm not saying in the reform way that anytime we think we love somebody, the motives are just bad. I'm not saying that. But there is a quality of love that is different because God is love. It's not just that God does loving things, it is that he in fact is love. And then, as John says in 1 John 3, and he says this in verse 9, Everyone who's been born of God does not sin because his seed, God's seed, God's sperma in Greek, remains in him. He's not able to sin because he's been born of God. There's something new about us as Christians, that we have this seed of God, and God's spiritual, so God's a spirit, so this can't be a physical thing. This is a spiritual reality. that there is something of the nature of God within us. And what John would say as he continues later in chapter three, as he talks about Cain and Abel and how Cain, you know, is the sort of prototypical negative example for his failure to love. He in fact hated his brother Abel because Abel's deeds were righteous. But he goes into this matter of loving one another, what Paul's talking about. And what John would tell us is essentially, God is love. Part of the very nature of God is there within every Christian, including, of course, his love. And it is only when we walk in fellowship with God that we are able to, and in fact, it's the proof that we are walking in fellowship, not the proof that we're Christians, but that we're in fellowship, that we are loving one another with this God love. The Apostle Paul gets at the same issue from a little different perspective, but it is as we walk in the spirit, he would say. Jud? Yeah, I think the key is, and Sue was getting into this with Colonel Thiem, is that in modern English, we've come down to only one word for love. So we don't have the vocabulary in modern English to be able to describe love the way the Bible describes it, because we've only got one word. In earlier English, there was cherish, and there was love. Cherish was a more intensified form of love. But in Greek, there's actually four words for love. There's agapi, philos, eros, and storgi. What Sue said, what Colonel Thiem taught was that the impersonal love was a love that was based on the integrity of the subject, not the attractiveness of the object. That's it. I can engage in impersonal agape love with an unattractive object. Mm-hmm. The way the world operates is that the world can only engage in those other three forms, right? The world can engage in belos, right? They can love an attractive object. And that's a lot of people when they get divorced. The reason for the divorce is I just fell out of love with him. Which means that he's no longer attractive to me as an object, right? So that ignores impersonal love at all. Right? Because when the object is not attractive to me, then I just switch to impersonal love based on my integrity. The object doesn't have to be attractive to me. And the storgi, that's not used very much in the Bible, philo-storgi. That's a love for your family. The unbeliever can do that too, right? The unbeliever can love their children. The unbeliever can love their parents, their spouse, and act with integrity toward them. And then Eros, of course, all members of the human race can engage in Eros. And what Colonel Thieme taught too was that the reason why the divorce rate is so high is that people fall in love, quote unquote, that's just Eros, but that wears off after six months, right? You can't function in that type of love for a very long time. at all, because you become familiar with the other person. And if you can't switch to that agape love, then eventually that relationship is going to flounder. And the longer you're married, right, the more that you have to be able to use impersonal love, not just personal love or eros love or love for your family members. So believers should be able to shift gears into any of those types of love. Unbelievers can never go into that high gear of impersonal love. Is it too simplified to call that eros love lust? No, that's accurate, I think. But not to put a negative connotation on it necessarily. Right? I mean, like Paul would say that the marriage bed is undefiled, something along that lines. It doesn't make it bad, but like what Judd was saying is spot on. There's a sense in which people fall in love with love, but when I say that, It's the Eros, not the others. And that's not altogether bad that that's there. In fact, it kind of needs to be there. But I remember C.S. Lewis describing it as the explosion that makes the train leave the station, but that's not enough. But this is good because when you put yourself in John's Theology We have light and darkness. We have the world and we have God and those are the two spheres of reality He'll call one sphere of the truth. The other is the world of the darkness and the world traffics in the in the language of love and this is what exactly what you are getting at with with what the theme taught and it's just it's so helpful here to understand it and They traffic in the language of love, but don't really have this concept that's uniquely the Christian concept, as was being said, the impersonal. And not only that, I would suggest two things. One, they need and want it in some way, but can't quite grasp what it is. They have poor substitutes for it. We are wired by our very design to love. even though that design's been tainted by the fall, we're wired to need that kind of love, the kind of love that impersonal, that moves beyond whether you look attractive at the moment, that sort of thing. And what John would say, and I'll read 1 John 4, 7, he says, dear friends, in my translation, it's a word formed from agape, dear friends, agapeitas, Dear friends. Let us love agape one another now listen listen closer to what John says And this is first John 4 7. Let us want love one another because Love is from God That's a powerful statement the very source of a type of love we're talking about this agape love is used in the New Testament and It is sourced in God himself. It's the difference between someone doing something that's loving and God, who is in fact love. It is a part of the very nature of God. And this love is sourced in him, and therefore, of our own resources, we can't possibly do it. Love is from God, and here's the thing, and this verse just throws people off. It's not a hard verse. But we have that whole popularized view of 1 John that it's a test to see if you're a real Christian, and it's not. He says, love one another because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. What a powerful statement. And this is where you can tie together the idea from earlier in 1 John 3, that when you become a believer, there is a part of God's nature implanted within us that is called his seed. God's nature includes the fact that he's truth, that he's love, that he's gracious, these things, and it's within us. This enables us to love other people in that way, but we only do it when we're knowing God. And I'm not gonna get too much further into that other than to say that within John's epistle, Knowing God is not the equivalent of being a Christian. Knowing God is having a deeper relationship that reflects a fellowship, a walking with God. And for the Christian, that's not an automatic. It's a possibility. And I think John contemplates that we could generally walk with God in that way, walk in fellowship, It is when we do that, when we're in fellowship, that we love in the way that, as I said, I like that word impersonal love. I call it God hyphen love, God love, because just what Judd said, we've got one word instead of the four, and it really has caused a lot of misunderstanding. It makes it easy for us to read love in English in our Bible and import worldly concepts into it that are not there in the Greek. And so we need this love that allows us to love our enemies, which is what Jesus said. That's the way in which it's impersonal. That enemy is certainly not attractive to us, but we can love them. And what I wanted you just to make sure is clear, you can't just open to Romans 13 and say, okay, we just need to be about loving one another. We don't need all this doctrine. Without this doctrine, you're never going to love one another. It's gonna become a matter of having your mind set on the things of the spirit or in the language of this chapter putting on Jesus Christ as a cloak and and when you do that, you won't be having the forethought for Fulfilling fleshly desires, but instead you're gonna have a mindset of on Christ himself, on his person, his nature, and that's going to be what generates this love for others, love your neighbor as yourself. So, comments before we move a little bit into 14 here? Hope that helps and at least gives a little connection to another, to John, who's getting at some of the same things, but in a different route. Chapter 14 is a fascinating chapter. I think it's a chapter that's been heavily misunderstood in a way that's always been a bit disturbing to me, a bit ironic. And I'll show you why. He starts off right out of the gate. Welcome anyone who's weak in the faith. You're like, what? Weak in the faith? He's gonna deal with Matters that are not in and of themselves sinful and that that becomes very important as we read this chapter He's also going to introduce the Bema Judgment. In fact, this is one of the I think only two places in the New Testament that actually use the word Bema okay, because it uses judgment seat in verse 10. I think that's used twice I think it's also in maybe 2nd Corinthians 5 but in any event He's going to tie this matter of certain kinds of conduct that are not in and of themselves sinful, but some people think they are sinful. And he's going to tie that into the Bema, so it's very interesting. But it's not things that the Bible actually calls out as sinful. That is, as we move through here, sometimes people lose sight of what Paul's dealing with in the larger context, because he'll say, you know, everything, uh, you know, every, everything's is, you know, I can do all these things. They're all fine for me. And he's not talking about just any kind of conduct. What he's going to touch on is this matter of, of food and drink, uh, and, and holidays, basically, if I could call it that, but kind of put it in our language. And he, he mentions the person who's weak as, as Christians, if I could overview where he's going. We do have, we're not under the law of Moses for one, and we never would have been if we're not Jewish. But under the law, there were dietary restrictions. You had to have kosher foods, certain things you couldn't eat at all, right? And then there were certain days that were held above others, feast days, the Sabbath, things like that. But I think Paul's even looking beyond that as he deals with some of these issues. You would have Gentiles who might have come out of some pagan religions that had some similar concepts. For example, sort of the ascetic lifestyle where you only eat vegetables, what we call vegetarian now. And so there might be some of that that he's got in the background. But he's dealing with these issues of food and days of the week and people keeping holidays, celebrating Christmas or not, those sorts of things. And there have always been people who Paul calls weak in the faith that don't understand that as Christians, we have liberty to celebrate a day or not. Of course, we don't have Christmas as a holiday in the Bible at all. And that's caused a lot of people to say, it's not even biblical. Neither is the 4th of July, right? But I have liberty to shoot fireworks on the 4th of July and celebrate Christmas. And I also have liberty not to do those things. A friend of mine doesn't like Christmas because it's commercialized, and he does Hanukkah, and it's his choice. He's got liberty to do that. What he doesn't have liberty to do is to tell me that I have to celebrate Hanukkah as well. Some people, out of choices about healthy living, don't eat fried pig, right? Bacon. Others do. They have liberty to do or not to do. There may be a wisdom issue there about whether a food is unhealthy, but you have liberty to eat these things or not. What you don't have liberty to do is tell other people that they must or they must not. These are all moral things in and of themselves, but Christians can start sinning against one another, start being unloving toward one another, over these issues because some are weak in the faith, and that weak in the faith here is the idea that they don't fully understand the liberty they have. In our country, within certain circles, and particularly within the Baptist, there's been a real struggle among people, many of whom are in the pulpit, who, according to Paul, are weak in the faith. And the struggle is over this matter of whether a Christian can drink any alcohol. Their prejudice against the idea of drinking alcohol is so strong, unfortunately, that it has caused them to twist certain scriptures so that you know, in a passage like John 2, Jesus didn't make wine, he made juice, that kind of silliness. At the Lord's, you know, at the Last Supper on, you know, just the day before Jesus went to the cross, everybody knows, and it's just a matter of historical fact, that the Jews used wine as part of that Seder meal, and Jesus did too. He even specifically says that I'm not going to drink again the fruit of the vine with you until we're in the kingdom. But they would say it was all grape juice and that kind of silliness. Now, I want to say with a great amount of caution here, it is true that we've had a real struggle, not only in this country, but in a lot of countries with high incidence of alcoholism. The teetoler movement in the United States in the 1800s, it would lead to the prohibition for a short time. Was was a time when people twisted the scriptures to support the idea that the Bible prohibits drink when in fact in the Old Testament It is held up as a sign of God's temporal blessing of people None of this has anything to do with the idea of being being drunk or being an alcoholic which the Bible Does specifically call out, you know being drunk is is a sin. It's a lack of self-control It's gluttony, okay But but understand that this is this is the one area most of us don't have the food issue among most people though I do know and I run into Christians who who believe it's immoral to eat a chicken because it has a face and so They want to make me a vegetarian. I've seen a little of that But the drink issue has been a big deal and I've had a number of occasions. I say number I've had a couple of occasions where where I was asked in order to Engage in teaching at a church. It's like a Sunday school teacher that I not drink any alcohol, which was never a problem for me. I can drink or not drink. It doesn't have a big hold on me. But, and I agreed to do that under the understanding that they agreed with me that what they were asking, that there was no scriptural mandate that I couldn't drink. I required that because I feel like somebody with seminary education all go and put two and two together and get four. But that said, when they explained to me why I shouldn't drink, it was because I would cause people to stumble. People in general would stumble. So I said, what does that mean? What does that really mean? I'm gonna cause people to stumble. When we read Paul's passage here in 14, he's talking within a local church context. He's not talking about a preacher being at dinner with his wife, has a glass of wine out on the table, and a non-believer sees him drinking the wine and starts thinking, well, that preacher's not living out his faith. I mean, that's the furthest thing from Paul's mind. So anyway, there's like a lot of baggage that goes into this and some twisting people have done because they have a personal conviction against drinking, which, and this is why I was willing to to stop drinking at their request in order to have a teaching ministry, which is obviously more important than a glass of wine, which is why I agreed to it. We can make some accommodation within the local church itself to those who are weak in the faith. What's bizarre about it is typically those people who tell us that you can't eat that, drink that, or keep that holiday, or not keep that holiday, Believe they're the more faithful ones paul makes it very clear. It's a weakness in faith the faith he has in content in mind isn't a a belief in christ is the is the Savior of the world or something like that But the the reality that we have this liberty Uh as christians and and that's where their faith is is weak. They haven't embraced. Um this liberty So let's just get we'll just kind of touch the surface here. We've got a few minutes here. Just kind of introduce it Paul says to welcome anyone. I like that word welcome. There's a lot of debate about how that word should be translated. I will tell you that You can make a reasonable argument that what he has in mind is he starts to talk here about food and such is That it was common for the early churches the local churches to have a sort of communal meal As part of their church service, you know after the service you'd have a meal and a lot of us still do that sometimes today, and we may have even grown up at a time when that was a thing every Sunday. And the welcome might be the idea, because this puts the issues of food and drink kind of front and center, that we welcome them into the fellowship in a genuine way. Welcome anyone who's weak in faith. The very idea there, if I know for a fact that a certain Christian believes that it's immoral to have a glass of wine. It hasn't become, it's not my mission to convince them they can have the wine. God will work through that with them. And if they live their whole life not thinking they can have wine, that's fine too. So I'm welcoming them, I'm not, you know, I'm not rejecting them. But he says, but don't argue about it. That's the part about trying to convince them that they can eat catfish and shrimp and that kind of thing. One person believes he made anything. That's me. No, I don't think you ought to eat anything But I kind of think you should and and this this could be certainly with the Jewish audience Whether you could have you know could have kosher or non-kosher things but but even even with the Gentiles they might have come out of a background Paul talks about this in the letters to Corinth and It may be second Corinthians, but in any event, they had a real concern about eating animals that have been sacrificed in a sort of a pagan religious ritual. So you have those who think they can't eat anything, and others who think they can eat anything. That's those who understand the Christian liberty. So you have one person that thinks they can eat anything while another eats only vegetables. Now that's not a Jewish person necessarily. Some argue it is because in Rome they couldn't buy kosher meat, but there's no evidence to support that. This is someone who believes, probably because the meat may have been sacrificed to idols or something, that they should eat only vegetables, but it could also be that it's an ascetic lifestyle. In the very early centuries of church history, this asceticism, where you didn't eat any meat, was real common. Whatever it is, though, they have a moral conviction that you can only eat vegetables. Paul does not tell us that they get to dictate what we eat at home or what we drink at home. One who eats must not look down on the one who doesn't eat. That's important for us. I understand my liberty to eat catfish and bacon and to drink wine. And I may be aware of a Christian, I know a lot of Christians who really have a strong conviction on this about the drinking. He's telling me don't look down on them. I mean, it's really important not to have that mindset, but to show some respect for that conviction. By the way, and I just say as a practical matter, sometimes I have found, and this is why it's all the more important to respect that conviction. It's a different thing to say they have a right to impose it back on me, but to respect their conviction. I've met a number of Christians who shared with me, they get it. They have the right to drink, but they personally have a history of being an alcoholic. They've come out of that. they're whatever 12 years clean and sober and so they have this this sort of conviction or I've been told by people they can remember how growing up their father was a drunk and when you get drunk He'd beat people you beat the family that kind of thing. There could be a lot of reasons. We need to be careful We're told and Paul's gonna say it explicitly don't pass judgment on the person Who doesn't fully understand their Christian Liberty to eat and drink what they want. Don't look down on them The one who does not eat, and this turns it around the other way, the one who doesn't eat must not judge the one who does. So the idea that the one who won't touch wine or won't touch bacon, because of their weakness of faith, would be critical or judgmental of those who do, is also, Paul says, that that's unacceptable. So he says, because God has accepted him, both of these people, these hypotheticals, the one who eats bacon, the one who doesn't, the one who drinks wine, and the one who doesn't, they're both Christians. They're both people God has accepted. And it's not our place to accept or not accept them. It's God's place, and he's accepted them. Who are you, he says rhetorically, to judge another's household servant? And the answer, of course, is we have no right. In God's household, probably the local church there, this person who believes they can eat meat or believes they should only eat vegetables, they're God's servant. And they're his to approve or disapprove. This is all proleptic of what he'll get to later that we'll cover next time, that we're all gonna stand before God at the Bema judgment. God'll do the sorting of those things out Before his own Lord, he stands or falls. Not before me, with my preference or my sense of my liberty, but before God. And he will stand. This is an interesting thing he adds, because the Lord is able to make him stand. I think it has to do with the idea that sometimes will come from those who have that strong conviction about, for example, not drinking, well, if you're gonna drink you just you're running too high a risk of becoming a drunkard or whatever and You know if we're walking in the spirit, that's not a real that's not a real threat We can we can live out our liberty Without without falling so I'm gonna stop there and and stop the recording But if there's any any comments or questions, we can take those up. I