Did you know that coffee was almost a sin? In the 16th
century, the clergy called coffee satanic and asked Pope Clement VIII to ban
it. Clement tasted it, decided he liked
it, and decided not to ban it. I can almost guarantee you that if coffee hadn’t
been to that cat’s liking, it would’ve went down in religious culture as
something we just “know” is sinful. Because that’s how superficial sins like that
become a thing.
It’s funny how the little decisions we make about right and
wrong can affect generations to come. (Think about those poor souls at
Starbucks who wouldn’t have jobs had Clement thought coffee was disgusting.) Romans
14 gives us instruction on how to handle it when we disagree on things that
aren’t vital to the faith. It’s some really great advice that we often misuse
(or ignore completely).
Romans 14:1-4 says, “Accept the one whose
faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters. One person’s faith allows
them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables.
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
them. Who
are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or
fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”
There’s a difference in saying that your conscience will, or
will not, allow you to do a thing and saying that thing is indifferent from
God’s word. Our preferences are just that. Ours alone. That runs the gamut from
political candidates to certain foods to music preferences. It can be most
anything.
It’s said that Moody once confronted Spurgeon, pointing at
his cigar and saying that it wasn’t honoring to God. Spurgeon responded by
poking Moody in his rather round stomach and saying that it wasn’t honoring to
God either.
It’s hard to keep our preferences to ourselves. I get that.
Some of those things are so personal and our reasons are so spiritual to us
that we get the idea that others are sinning if they don’t do them. That’s why
Paul’s advice is so important to us. He’s giving us a way to deal with it. It
may not be the answer we want, or the one that’s expedient to our
circumstances, but it’s what God told him to say.
We lack respect for one another to a humungous degree in the
church. Our personalized Christianity becomes the only one that we can imagine
one having, and that’s not cool. We’ve got to respect the weak brother and the
weak brother has got to respect the strong. Why? Because we’re family, and God
said so!
Unless someone is going around telling others that they’ve
got to do something aside from accept God’s free gift of Salvation to belong to
God, then we need to chill. It’s not our job to make everyone like us. We’re
not policemen, we’re brothers and sisters. So assigning ourselves the duty of
correcting every nonessential is both a waste of time and disruptive to the
community of believers we should be. Doctrine should be kept pure, but whether
someone wears jeans to church or votes Democrat should be something we shrug at
and move on.
Love is how Jesus said the world we know we belonged to him.
A supernatural, otherworldly love that overlooks the things that the world
deems important. A love that transcends, race, creed, sex, religion or
political party. We’re so bad at that. I’m writing this because I’m so bad at
it and I do my best thinking on paper, and I’m hoping I’ll say something
inspiring to myself here.
I want so badly for us to fall in love with each other. And
that doesn’t begin with the other guy. It’s on my shoulders and I want to take
that responsibility very seriously. I want to love you, warts and all. I want
to care about your soul whether you agree with me or not on any given subject.
I want to love the jerks and the selfish and the rude and the disingenuous
because Jesus loves me and I’m made up of far worse adjectives than those. I’m
so not there, but God knows I want it (well, sometimes). And that’s all I’ve
got to give. But, with Jesus, it’s enough.
Photo used under CC
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