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In college, my homiletics final was to preach a 20-30 minute sermon and the passage I selected was the same as today’s installment: Romans 14:1-12. I wanted to preach this section because I didn’t fit the mold of what a pastoral ministries major looked like. I had big 80’s hair, and looked more like a rocker than a pastor. I felt the condemnation over my appearance and ended up changing schools because the fundamentalism of my former college required me to cut my hair, siting 1 Corinthians 11:14 that my “long hair was a disgrace.” I knew this kind of judgment was wrong, little did I know that it was the tip of the ministry iceberg to come. I still resonate with Paul’s exhortation:

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. ² One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. ³ Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. ⁴ Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

Paul has been providing an alternative way to live free from the overreach of religious law, free from quarrels, and the unloving prison of living to please ourselves. His framework of faith is bigger than mere belief. Faith is a continuum that includes all people at varying degrees. It is not a merit badge religious system, but a way of living in acceptance and love of others, because we have experienced acceptance and love from God. The give-away that one’s faith is weak(hasthenéo-incapable, limited) or unhealthy, is the religious tend not to be too welcoming, and tend to quarrel and contend. The weaker the faith (implying its existence), the less freedom they experience and the more critical they are of the freedom of others. Where religion doesn’t welcome, Paul reminds us that “God has welcomed him (V.4).”

Faith and Freedom flow synergistically from the law of love. Faith always exists, it doesn’t always function.

In a religiously diverse culture like that of Rome, people would offer animal sacrifices to their gods, and then the priests would sell the meat in the markets. It was considered a horrible sin, which would bring extreme condemnation upon a person, if they ate the meat that was offered to another god. Jews had many rules of Kosher foods, and eating food offered to an idol would have been a grave sin. Paul offers a solution that goes beyond segregation or abstinence… “being fully convinced in one’s own mind.“

⁵ One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. 

Each person is to be “completely certain in his own thinking” is another way of expressing this “faith” that Paul is advocating. Certainty can have a bad connotation, but this “utter confidence” or “lack of doubt” is the architecture through which we can now live. The law is back inside us, not external to us. Thus, Paul drills into the fourth commandment, freeing people beyond the letter of the law.

⁶ The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God. 

⁷ For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself.⁸ For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. ⁹ For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

This is Paul describing what I call the Christological continuum. If we heeded his advice from last week, we are “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13:14). Nothing about our life exists apart from God’s existence. Our existence is the existence of God in and through us, we do not exist apart from God, specifically, the life of Christ who is living out in the modern world in and as you and me. We are the second coming so to speak. I’m not saying we are God, or Christ Jesus himself…I’m saying we are not other than them once we recognize this living Christology (faith that exists) to our life. The application of this is called: FAITH. Faith allows us to see ourselves, within our flesh, as a unique Spiritual life, beloved of God, and capable of living from the inside-out in Love (God).

¹⁰ Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; ¹¹ for it is written, “As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.” ¹² So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

Paul’s question gets at the deeper reality. Why can’t we just let people be who they are, on their own journey with God? Why does everyone need to be at least where we think ourselves to be? Why can’t we extend the freedom to others, that God has extended to us? The hippies in the 60’s understood this far better than the religious mind with their “Live and let live” mantra. They understood love as welcoming and non judgment, or acceptance.

Paul quotes Isaiah again, with a quote that turns Jesus into a North Korean dictator, an overlord, a threatening or dominating presence. Isaiah 45 is nothing of the sort. It is a Christological prophesy inviting everyone home who performed a religion to a god who couldn’t save them. The bowing knee and the confessing tongue, are the uncontrollable responses to a soul who realizes that all along in their life, it was Christ. In the moment of decision, each of us will see the pervasive love of God, the life of Christ existing in and as our own life, we will see the extent of the love and mercy of God, we will be humbled by our undeserved welcome, and collapse from any posture of self-reliance, not out of threat or fear, but out of tremendous gratitude, that God welcomes such as me, and you.

The Greek says we shall each of us will give a (logos-word, message, statement) about our self…our ontological center. In God’s timelessness, the day of decision, the béma seat, is always right now. The seat where the judge sits is where He (Christ) looks at our life, and sees not only all the (erga-deeds) of the flesh, all our careless words that flowed from a life in darkness, but He will also see the life and existence of God in you and in me. Imagine that, the Christ, to whom all judgment has been given, will now judge himself in and as your life. Since his judgment is true, and his justice is based in restoration, He’s not going to fail in you. Each and every life will reflect perfectly and exactly that aspect of Christ for which we were purposed to reflect back to the world. If it were otherwise, what kind of savior would He be? Faith is the confidence of knowing that in that (THIS) moment, when we fall to the ground in joy, that we are receiving the grace that welcomes us, and to which we have and will welcome others.

Christ is in all, and through all. Faith becomes “able” the moment we wake up to this aspect of reality.