Dan Herold | Romans 14:5-8 | October 9, 2016
(Sermon begins at 27:22)
If I were to ask each of you, “How do I get to Dallas from here?” how many different ways to get to Dallas do you think I would hear? If I look up directions on the internet, it gives me 3 main routes to choose from. But, in addition to those three I could tell Google to find me a route that doesn’t have any tolls, or one that avoids the interstate, or one that is the shortest distance, or one that takes the least time. But even more than that, I could book a flight to Dallas, I could take a bus, I might even be able to take a train. I could walk, and take a route that you can’t drive on. I would guess that there’s probably an infinite number of ways I could find to get from here to Dallas.
Now, would it be wrong to take one route over another. It might take a little longer, but would there be anything wrong with taking one route over another? No, of course not! If there’s more than one way to do something you can pick whichever way you want. The human mind likes rules though. It likes to think it can figure everything out and find the best one when there are a bunch of options. So if you pick one route or you find a new backroad that shaves 5 minutes off your trip, from then on that’s the route you’ll stand by as the best because it worked the best for you.
Well what happens if you tell your friend about this new route and they try it out and they run out of gas in the middle of nowhere because their vehicle can’t go as far between stops as yours can. Then that route isn’t the best one for them—they’ll need to find a new one that works for them.
It’s not always that easy though. There are lots of things that we have to deal with in life and which God says very little or nothing about it in the Bible. Our nature though is to make rules when we want to know what to do—what God says to do—in every situation, but the fact of life is that the Bible isn’t a step by step manual for every situation that we encounter in life.
What the Bible does do, though, is it gives us a foundation to build on and work with. It tells us everything we need to know about our Savior Jesus, who died to take away our sins. The Bible includes some examples of how God wants his people to respond to that gift of forgiveness and salvation. But in many circumstances God has given us freedom—freedom to choose how best each of us can live out our faith.
Paul talks to us in Romans 14 about how we are to use that freedom with which God has blessed us. Our tendency is always going to be to make rules—to say, “This is how it has to be.” But in many circumstances God doesn’t tell us how it has to be. So, when we get to those times Paul gives us two principles to remember about Christian freedom…he says to respect another Christian’s decision and to defend their right to freedom.
Listen once more to Paul’s words from Romans 14.
“One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone.”
Paul is talking about the freedom we have as redeemed children of God. We aren’t bound by the Old Testament law that tells us what day we need to worship on or what kind of food we can eat anymore. Jesus kept all those laws perfectly for us and that’s all it took! Jesus kept the law on our behalf and then gave up his life as a sacrifice so that everyone who trusts in him as their Savior would be purified by his life and his death—and then set free to live a new life for Him.
So, when we encounter a situation in life where God hasn’t said, “You must do this,” and he hasn’t said, “You must not do this” Paul encourages us to respect your fellow Christian’s decision in the matter. You may not agree that it’s the best thing to do, and you might decide to do something different when you find yourself in the same situation. But, if God hasn’t prohibited it, then we have freedom to use our judgement for what is best.
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There are some people, though, that insist that there is only one right day when you can worship God and to worship on another day is sinful. To that claim Paul says that it is up to each man, and
“each man should be fully convinced in his own mind.”
God hasn’t given us a law on this subject, but he has given us something that guides us in deciding what is right and wrong—he has given each of us a conscience.
Now, for Christians, your conscience is one of the ways God guides you in your life. Your conscience is the voice of your natural knowledge of God—it tells you what is right and what is wrong. And beyond that God created you with a conscience! So, when your conscience tells you something it’s a good idea to listen—in fact it is dangerous to ignore it. When Martin Luther was asked to take back his teachings he famously replied he could not and he would not because, “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
But still that doesn’t mean that in a situation where God hasn’t commanded something you can say that there is one definite right way to do it because everyone’s conscience is different. What may be right for you in a certain situation might not be for your brother or sister in Christ. That is why Paul encourages us to respect the decisions of others. If a person decides to go to a church that has services on Monday evening or Saturday afternoon that’s ok! It might not be what you would prefer, but you can’t say that it’s wrong according to God’s word. The same goes for a person who chooses not to eat meat or not to drink alcohol. You may choose to do both of those, but respect the decision of your brother or sister in faith.
Now, the second principle Paul gives us is to defend your fellow Christian’s right to freedom. The reason that defending Christian freedom is so important is because it was won for us at a very costly price. Our freedom came at the price of Jesus’ innocent life. He suffered and died on the cross after living a perfect life and he did it to set us free from the demands of the law. So, if we put ourselves back under the law we would be rejecting what Christ won for us.
The natural inclination is to think of the Bible as a rule book. And it does contain rules—God tells us all about the rules that the Old Testament Israelites lived under. And it even includes rules and guidelines for us in the New Testament time as well. But the Bible is more than a rule book. In fact if it were just a rule book it wouldn’t be a very good one because there are so many situations that you encounter in everyday life that the Bible doesn’t have rules for. So, if we only think of the Bible as a rule book or only look in God’s word to find those rules that our human nature so desperately wants, then we sell it short of what it is.
What the Bible is, is a record of God’s promises—of historical fact and of things yet to come— that is all about how much God loves us. God loves us so much that he created a beautiful and amazing world for us to live in. He loves us so much that when mankind fell into sin, God promised to send a Savior to rescue them. And then God loved us so much that he sent his only Son, Jesus, to be that Savior whom he had promised. And he loved us so much that he set us free. He set us free from sin and from the requirements of the law.
He set us free to live lives that reflect the love of God. He set us free to love others as Christ loves us—not to be a burden and make new laws to follow, but to respect and defend the freedom that God has granted to his people through their Savior.
You might not always do things the same way as your fellow Christians—but that’s the beauty of freedom in Christ. Each of us is able to be our own unique person and find our own unique ways to serve God so that the whole church, the whole body of believers, can be built up and strengthened. So that we can carry the message of freedom and peace that only comes from God to the ends of the earth.
Amen.