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Let's come now in the Bible to the book of Romans, chapter 14. Romans 14. I will be reading from verse 13 to the end of the chapter. It's on page 949 in the Pew Bible. Romans 14, reading from 13 to 23. Please give your attention to the Word of God. Romans 14, reading from 13 to 23. 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. 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. 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 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 Holy Spirit. Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual up-building. Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed unclean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats. It is good not to eat meat, or drink wine, or do anything that causes your brother to stumble. The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for 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. How do you look at your brother? How do you look at your Christian sister? and your Christian brother. Now, the Gospels are very short biographies of Jesus. You could say they're not really biographies. They're too short for that. And yet, these very brief Gospels take time to tell us sometimes that Jesus looked on him and loved him. Or Jesus looked at them with compassion. Or Jesus looked at the Pharisees with anger. Now, with all that is left out, why didn't we spend time to note how Jesus looked at someone? We have here assurance of how carefully he looks at us, how lovingly he knows us. We're encouraged also to consider how we look. Are we looking to judge? Or are we looking to encourage? This passage encourages us to resolve never to trip a brother. Now when I say trip, I don't in the first place mean stick out your foot and watch him go to the ground. That would be a secondary application. But I mean to trip him in the sense that this Christian life is walking towards the Lord. It's a consistent metaphor all through the Bible. We are walking. Life is walking. And as we walk, we don't want to be tripped, and we must resolve never to trip a sister or brother who is walking towards the Lord. Whatever trips them up, whatever makes it difficult, distasteful, to continue following the Lord, whatever makes you not want to do the right thing, this is a stumbling block. This is something that trips you. This is something that is a hindrance. We resolve never, as far as we know about it, sometimes we don't. But as much as we know about it, never to put a hindrance in the front of a brother. Now what this passage particularly brings out is what your brother believes to be sinful can trip him. What your brother believes to be sinful can trip him. Now, obviously, if it really is sinful, then that trips him, because whatever is sinful separates us from God. When we sin, it is our sins that separate us from God. We have been turned away from the path of walking towards our Lord. But if it isn't truly objectively sinful, but your brother thinks it is, we have a second-order problem, you might say. a problem in a different way. If your brother thinks it's sinful, when it isn't really, he can only do it by thinking he's disobeying God. He can only do it by saying, God, I'm going to do it anyway. He can only do it, you could say, by trying to ward off God's judgment on what he thinks is sinful and do it anyway. You see how I'm trying with my body to show you what's going on on the inside. If you do the thing which you think is sinful, even if on God's side it is not, you must withdraw yourself from God to some degree in order to do it, because you think He doesn't want you to do it. So that's why we have verse 14. I know and am persuaded that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it is unclean. That is, what your brother thinks is sinful can trip him up. Now, before I go any farther, I want to assure you that this statement is not reversible. You and your brother cannot make a sinful thing good by thinking that it is. You can't sin and say, yeah, but I thought I was doing the right thing. Well, OK, that mitigates your guilt a little bit, but it's still sin. So you can't reverse the statement and make something Unsinful, make it right if God says it is sinful. In other words, you may have rattling around in the back of your head the saying, there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Have you ever heard, does that ring any bells? Yes, it rings some bells. Yes, it's not the Bible, it's Shakespeare. And it's not even what Shakespeare thinks, it's just Hamlet talking about where he lives. All right, so that's not Bible. Maybe rattling around in King James English with Martin James. Or here's another one. The mind can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. I've never heard something like that before. Yeah, it's OK. You've read that. All right. That's Milton's Devil. It's not the Bible again. Both of those are much more sweeping statements, and they're wrong. This here is a more limited and careful statement. I know that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it is unclean. So to pick up the thread again, we're to decide never to trip a brother. And what your brother thinks is sinful can trip him, even if it actually isn't. And so we're to respect our brother's conscience. And what is this word, conscience? Well, conscience is that ability that you have to evaluate what you did and say, I was right or I was wrong. And we all have it. We all have that inner sense that what I did was right or what I did was wrong. In fact, if what we did was wrong enough, we have the sense that I should be punished for it. I remember talking to a gentleman who eventually rose to sit on the EU High Court for Refugees or something, or Human Rights or something. And he had gone to our mission school in Cyprus. And we discussed the great-grandfather of somebody that some of us know from camp. And he said, yes, Weir was a genius. He believed in punishment, but not in imposing it. So if you were brought into his office, the principal's office, for what you had done wrong, he would, with a series of very well-placed questions, bring you to realize the gravity of what you had done. And then he would ask you what the punishment should be for someone who had done such a thing. And whatever you named is what he gave you. And so well did he perform at this. It just actually seemed to have worked rather well for him. You'll notice that Weir was getting at people's consciences. Some people were hard-hearted and said, no, I think I should be punished with nothing. And evidently, nothing was what they got. The conscience is sometimes called the voice of God and the soul. God put it there so that we would have a sense of where we stand with God, of what is right and wrong. But our conscience is not infallible. Our culture can mislead us. Everyone around you is saying it's right, even though it's actually wrong. You may wrongly go with your culture and not with God's word. One thinks of all those American Southerners, who some of them seem to be wonderful Christians and they are holding their fellow man as a slave. What is this? The conscience was blinded on this point. Or, sin may sear it. That is, the first time you steal, you feel guilty. But if you ignore that feeling and you keep stealing, eventually, perhaps you won't feel guilty when you steal. That's because you've messed up your conscience. It's no longer working right. Because you're still guilty, whether you feel guilty or not. And of course, if you have been mistaught, you don't understand the Word of God as it is here, People who did not understand the significance of Jesus coming and declaring all foods clean were then not understanding the change of the times and God's plan. They were misunderstanding God's will and thinking food unclean when it was, in fact, clean. So the conscience is a God-given ability. You can't get away from it. You tell yourself that was right or that was wrong. You may have some inner battle over it. And when your conscience condemns you, you are distressed. Now, what should you do when your conscience condemns you? You should use your brain and say, in fact, by God's standard, have I sinned? And if, in fact, by God's standard, you have sinned, you should repent before God, confess your sin, and ask Him to forgive you. And perhaps you should fix what you did, restore what you sold, restore what you stole, and so on. On the other hand, Having thought about it honestly before God, you conclude that in God's sight this is not a sin, then you can educate your conscience at that point and say, you know, you don't have to feel guilty, because God does not say that is a sin. Now, one of the blessings that Jesus gives us is a good conscience, by which we mean both a conscience that is functioning better and better, but a conscience that is at peace before God. Because we know that although we have sins, We have repented of those sins, and God has forgiven us. And if God has forgiven us, then we are to have peace of conscience. We're not to assert that we are the judge of this, really. Although we are judges of ourselves, through our conscience, God is the judge. We're not to try to override the judge's judgment. And so the blessing of Jesus is a good conscience. In Jesus, we stop denying We stop asserting, we stop arguing, we stop excusing. We say, yes, Lord, I sinned with X and Y and Z, and perhaps A and B and C, and perhaps Alpha and Omega. I have sinned in these ways. Lord, please forgive my sins for the sake of Jesus Christ. And once you have confessed, and God has forgiven you, you are free, and you are to go forward in peace. Now, your conscience may not be perfectly educated. You can think things are sins when they're not. You can think things are not sins when they are. So you need to do two things. You need to educate your conscience with the Word of God. You need to free yourself from your culture's blind spots, and your own personal blind spots, by educating your conscience through the Word of God, read with the Church. so that you can get yourself, your own sense of right and wrong, lined up with God's sense of right and wrong, since God is actually right about it, and you may not be. But the second thing you need to do is to follow your conscience as it is for now. Even if your conscience is not correct about something, say about what you can eat, to violate your conscience means that you will think you are disobeying God. And once you start doing that, once you start, you think, disobeying God, there can be a spiral involved in that. You can end up hardening your heart to be part of the crowd and not do what you believe God is calling you to do. Thus the strong language here of destroying your brother from whom Christ died. Since you are to care for your own conscience, and since you are to care for your brother, you are to care for your brother's conscience as well. That's what it means there in verse 22. The faith that you have, keep between yourself and God. That does not mean to never speak of Jesus to anybody. That violates the whole rest of the Bible. Of course, you're supposed to speak about the Lord Jesus Christ. In context, he means those things that are disputed and not central, those things that are an item for conscience for one and not for another. Don't make someone else trip. There's a different conscience than you at this point. You can keep that between yourself and God. In context, of course, this is talking about the secondary areas in which you differ from your brothers, the things that may grieve them, that may trip them. Don't press the difference upon them. Now, again, should you violate your own conscience? Should you violate your conscience because you realize that you have violated someone else's or to confess your sins? And so we have verse 22 again. Blessed is the one who has no reason to pass judgment on himself for what he approves. So how are we to look on our brother? To encourage him. And then what must we avoid? We must avoid tripping him. We must avoid urging him to violate his conscience. Or you could say pressing our differences on him by our own conduct in his presence unnecessarily, saying, see, it's OK if I drink beer and eat pork. Yes, it is okay, but let's not do it in such a way that grieves our brother. In other words, what your brother wrongly believes to be sinful does not control you, but it does inform you. It doesn't control you. You notice, Paul is very clear here about food. He is not agreeing, since you think it's sinful, it's sinful. No, he's not saying that at all. He's very, very clear which side of this food debate he is on. He says, I'm with Jesus. There is nothing unclean in itself, referring to food, not to all sins, right? With food, food is food. Nothing is unclean about food. But once we have that principle firmly laid down, let us now exercise our liberty about food in love. Let us, as we eat, take care not to make someone else stumble." Notice how he's, on the one hand, very clear. He does not give up Christian liberty, but he insists, then, that we must exercise it in love. I may, but for your sake, I choose not to. For example, that is why it is good that in this denomination we have a dry church culture. Now, what do I mean a dry church culture? Well, first of all, this language of wet and dry is old language. It refers to where there is alcohol is wet, and when there is not alcohol is dry. Our church culture is dry. Does that mean every house is wet? No. There's a bottle of wine in my fridge right now. So my home is not dry, but our church culture is dry. I don't think there's any alcohol downstairs at our fellowship lunch today. And we ought to keep it that way. Because it is good not to drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble. And since wine is a very potent thing that makes many stumble, let us not bring it into our fellowship dinners here together. You don't know who is struggling with alcohol. You don't really need to know. But let us not make a brother stumble with something that we know causes widespread stumbling. At the same time, however, let us not relinquish the point. It is not that I am sinning by having a bottle of wine in my refrigerator. Each family will decide for itself what is going on in the family, only with sobriety and no drunkenness. But the Church is God's rescue station, and so we are not to put a stumbling block in front of our brother. We have liberty. We are to exercise it in love, caring for our brother. And what the brother wrongly believes sinful does not control you. Jesus did not go along with the Pharisees' rules about hand washing. As Hodge says, he considered that more good would come of his breaking with their traditions and pressing a confrontation so that the church could be educated about the place of tradition as compared to God's word. And Paul, he did not go along with Peter When Peter withdrew from eating with Gentiles and ate only with Jewish Christians, no, he had a confrontation. He considered it necessary to nail down the principle that there is no food that is unclean in itself, and that we all ought to eat together. God alone is Lord of the conscience. He tells us what is right and wrong, and we're not forced to believe a lesser authority on that. So if your brother is wrong, that does not control you. but it does inform you about what might trip him. And out of love for him, you are to seek not to trip a brother. So do not trip your brother by what you eat or by what you wrongly require of him. You're not to indulge your liberty before him and so grieve his soul when he thinks it is sin. And still less are you to pressure him. Should you find a brother or sister from a more restrictive church culture than you, Your mission is not to loosen him up. That's contrary to the whole passage. It is not your mission, your duty, to loosen him up. Because who knows how far the loose thing is going to go? You do not seek, then, to have him violate his conscience. You notice here the goal is, once the principles are laid down and firmly understood, the goal then is peace and mutual up-building. And as we start to get this building language, we're to think of the church as God's building. and ourselves as stones in this great church. And we're not to be putting cracks in the other stones together. Jesus, of course, is building his church on the rock. And so we are to participate in that building and not carelessly crash around like a bull in a China shop. Now, it's hard to keep caring about weak people. So why should you? It's all very well to Talk about principles and the safety of a nice warm room, but what about when someone is really irritating you? Or when you are very tired? Well, consider your priorities. The world's priorities are clear. Eating and drinking. And having pleasure. That is what the world focuses on. We're told here the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking. Certainly the Kingdom of God gives us more joy than that eating and drinking. And so eating and drinking can be made a picture of the Kingdom of Heaven, because that conveys the joy that we have together in the Kingdom. And yet he says here, the Kingdom of God, for all that Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a wedding banquet, it is still not really a matter of eating and drinking. It is a matter of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. Now why should you think that these things are better? than a good steak and a wonderful meal. Let's consider this word righteousness. Because that is what Jesus has given us. That is what this book of Romans is really about. How it is that God can rightly accept a sinner like you and me into His presence for eternity. And to be in His presence at all. is far greater than anything in this world. How much more if we are welcomed by Him for eternity? And so to be righteous, that is, to have the right to be before God without condemnation, because Jesus has absorbed the penalty for your sin, and He has adopted you, so that you stand before God as His child. This is clearly greater than anything the world has. Much greater than any eating or drinking. You know, we just said Thanksgiving. I'm sure many of you were really wrapped up in the food for a while. And I hope you enjoyed it. And you know that terrible thing happened at least by the next day, if not by that evening. Hey, you're hungry again. There you go. OK. So then, if you still have leftovers, I hope you don't have them by next week. Yes, eating and drinking. It's great stuff. Righteousness of God is an entirely different level and a far more precious and glorious thing. Because when we have that righteousness with God, then we can have peace in our conscience. And so we have peace here. The peace at first means peace with God. And that can secondarily mean peace within ourselves. And if we have peace with God, because He's the judge and He does not condemn us, and we have peace with ourselves, because it's not for us to keep condemning what the Lord has forgiven, Then how can we not seek as much as we can to have peace with others? The Kingdom of God is righteousness and peace. When you have this righteousness and this peace, you have the right soil for joy. You have space for joy. You are not in your conscience ever going to war with what you did, trying to rationalize it to yourself in vain, because you know it was wrong. Instead, you can have joy. And it's not the passing ecstasy of something of a chemical haze or a certain circumstance. It is, in fact, great peace and joy in the Lord, because you know you are his forever. Yes, Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, did not only take bread and wine and give us supper. He also said, my peace I give to you. And a few verses later, my joy I give to you. And to the Kingdom of God, it's a matter of righteousness, the right standing before God that we have only through Jesus Christ. It is also an increasing righteousness of our own, you could say, as we walk as the Lord calls us to walk. And this generates both these things, peace increasingly within the heart. Let us pray also peace in the home, in the church, Indeed, let it flow out to all the world. This is why we are to pursue the kingdom of God. For here we have a much greater good than any worldly priorities of eating and drinking. And so the real question is how to pursue the kingdom of God. And with that word pursue, we circle back to the picture of movement, of walking, of running. How do you pursue the kingdom of God? You walk with your eyes on Jesus. You walk in the path that Jesus walked. You walk, not returning evil for evil, but giving a blessing, as he did. You walk after Jesus. And so you see how everything must proceed from faith. Jesus is not here to be seen. We follow after him in faith. We read of what he did and what he said in faith. We pray to him and follow him by faith. And so thus we have, whatever is not proceeding from faith is sin. Yes. Why is faith suddenly in here at the end of the chapter? We're talking about eating and drinking. Why does the word faith reappear? Faith is faith in the Jesus who died. as it says back in verse 15, the one for whom Christ died. Jesus is Lord, as it says in verse 14. It's the Lord Jesus who has persuaded him. We are to serve this Christ, as it says in verse 18. For when we serve Christ, then we are acceptable to God, His Father. Verse 18. It's Jesus who came to build the kingdom of God, verse 17. His building work we are not to destroy, verse 14, but to build with Him, verse 19. or to pursue the kingdom of God by faith in the king, by walking after him, so that we might know the righteousness and peace and joy that he gives. Consider while your life, you need to live not for the passing pleasures of eating and drinking, or of ambition and accomplishment, or of influence or security. No, you need to live for the kingdom of God, whose pleasures are already greater and will only increase in value as you go into eternity. So consider yourself. Are you walking in love? Consider the Lord Jesus and the freedom that He gives. Are you walking in love? He calls us together and makes us one body. So resolve, not only not to trip yourself by breaking your conscience, but also never to block a brother or sister. by putting a stumbling block in front of them. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, we ask. We ask that You would speak clearly to us in Your Word. Speak clearly to us in our consciences. Help us to hear Your voice, Lord. Not the voice of mistakes or the voice of our culture. Don't let your voice be deadened by our own sin. Help us, Lord, to respond to you in faith, responding to you truly. And help us, Lord, to know how to do this. Give us wisdom. We may see how to stand on true principles and how also not to hinder a brother. Help us, Lord, to do all these things in charity and in peace. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Respect Both Consciences
Series Romans
In this sermon we discuss the role of conscience -- our own, and our fellow Christian's -- in our Christian walk.
Sermon ID | 12219182691403 |
Duration | 29:46 |
Date | |
Category | Sunday Service |
Bible Text | Romans 14:13-23 |
Language | English |
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