Two Believers, Opposite Practices, and One Instruction to Both

There is an argument in this community that has been running since before I was born, and I am not going to name it, because the moment I name it half of you will stop reading and start defending.

You know the one. Every family has a version. It is a practice, it is genuinely disputed, both sides can quote something, and the temperature around it is out of all proportion to its size, which is how you know something else has attached itself to it.

What I want to talk about is not who is right. I have an opinion and I am keeping it, and that is not a dodge, it is the point of the whole article.

What I want to talk about is what it does to a house when a matter of conscience gets quietly promoted into a matter of salvation, and everybody starts sorting each other by it, and a nineteen year old sitting at that table works out that the way to be safe is to have no view at all.

Because Paul wrote to a congregation with exactly this problem, and what he did with it is genuinely strange the first time you see it.

He describes both sides and does not correct either

The Roman church had two groups in it and they were doing opposite things about food and about days. Paul lays it out with no scoring.

One believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. (Romans 14:2-3, King James Version)

Read the two verbs, because they are precise and they are different. The one with liberty is warned against despising. The one with scruples is warned against judging. Those are the two characteristic sins of the two positions, and he hands each side its own.

And then the reason, tucked on the end: for God hath received him. Which one? Both. The sentence covers whoever you were about to look down on.

You are received, and it was not the practice that did the receiving. Romans 14:3 gives that as the reason both sides must stop, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:9, whose presence is named as the mark of belonging rather than any position on a disputed matter.

The question that ends most of these arguments

Then he asks something that has stopped me in my tracks more than once, usually about an opinion I was fairly pleased with.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand. (Romans 14:4)

Another man's servant. The picture is a household. Somebody has walked in and started correcting a man who does not work for him, in front of the one who actually employs him.

And the last clause is the one that undoes me. God is able to make him stand. Not: he will probably fail without supervision. The opposite. The person being worried about has an employer, and the employer is competent, and the holding up is His job and He is good at it.

That verse, taken seriously, removes about eighty per cent of what gets said around a table in this community, and it removes it from both directions at once.

You have a Master who is able to make you stand, and He has never delegated that to a room. Romans 14:4 says God is able to make him stand, in those words, and it is by His Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that a person is strengthened in the inner man rather than propped up by a consensus.

He tells them to be persuaded, not to be quiet

Here is where it stops being a plea for everybody to stop talking.

One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. (Romans 14:5)

Fully persuaded in his own mind. That is an instruction, and it is an instruction to think. He does not say the matter is unimportant. He does not say have no view. He says get a view, hold it with your whole conviction, and hold it as yours.

Which means the safest posture, the one a young person adopts at nineteen to avoid trouble, having no opinion at all, is the one thing this verse actually rules out. Silence is not the peace Romans 14 is asking for. It asks for two persuaded people who have stopped sorting each other.

And notice what makes that possible: verse 6 says each of them does what they do unto the Lord. The practice is aimed at a Person in both cases, which is what keeps two opposite practices from being two opposite religions.

You are asked to be persuaded, and being persuaded is not the same as being loud. Romans 14:5 gives the instruction plainly, and it is the Spirit of truth, John 16:13, who is described as the one who guides into it, which is how a conviction becomes yours rather than inherited.

Paul says out loud what these things are

In Colossians he puts the whole category in one sentence and gives it a name.

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ. (Colossians 2:16-17)

A shadow. Not nothing. A shadow is cast by something real and it points at it, and it is genuinely worth looking at. But nobody argues about the shape of a shadow once the body is standing in the room.

That is what a disputed practice is on this list. Real, meaningful, pointing somewhere, and not the thing itself, and the reason feelings run so hot around it is usually that somebody has quietly started treating the shadow as the body.

I want to say clearly that this does not make anybody's practice contemptible. Shadows are how you know something is coming. I keep several. I just try not to check anybody else's temperature by mine.

You are not judged in these things, and Scripture forbids the judging by name. Colossians 2:16 says let no man therefore judge you and lists the categories, and it is the Spirit who makes Christ known as the body rather than leaving a person to argue about outlines.

The limit, so that nobody misreads this as indifference

There is a boundary here and Paul draws it hard, because liberty is not the highest value in the passage.

But take heed lest by any means this liberty of yours become a stumblingblock to them that are weak. (1 Corinthians 8:9)

So the person with the freer conscience is the one carrying the heavier obligation. He is the one told to watch where he puts his foot. That is exactly backwards from how it usually goes in a family argument, where the freer party feels entitled to be free and the stricter party feels obliged to police.

And on the other side, Romans 14 ends by telling the man with scruples not to condemn himself in what he allows, which is a mercy for anybody who was raised to feel guilty about the loosening as it happens.

Both instructions are protective. Both are aimed at keeping a person at the table rather than at winning.

You are being protected here, and neither side of this was left without an instruction. 1 Corinthians 8:9 charges the strong and Romans 14:22 charges the strict, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 14:17, who is named in that very chapter as the one in whom the kingdom is righteousness and peace and joy.