Peace in the church, Live @ peace series
Eric A. Snyder, Farwell Church of Christ
April 28 2002
It is not our first instinct to accept those that are different than us.
This is illustrated the best in Junior High School.
Have you ever noticed that junior highers have a label or description for everyone.
For instance, if you are really good at sports but not very good at school you are a jock.
If you are a girl and you come from a well to do family you are a snob.
If you look a certain way and are good at school you are a nerd.
It’s like a food chain, and if you’re like me you wanted to work your way up that chain.
Who hasn’t gone through the awkward experience of trying to be something your not.
You join a sports team despite you’re hatred for that sport.
You start to buy different clothes.
You comb your hair differently.
You try to act and be something that will help you gain some sort of popularity, which is the junior high term for acceptance.
Then junior highers become senior highers and senior highers become adults and we realize that we no longer have to alter ourselves to be accepted, right?
I’ve seen a guy work an obscene amount of hours trying to gain the acceptance of his boss and co workers.
I’ve seen a woman bounce from guy to guy trying to find some kind of acceptance.
I’ve seen people trying to find acceptance in peer groups using drugs, alcohol, and sex.
Here’s the problem: finding acceptance in your work, finding acceptance in a guy you barely know, finding acceptance in a beer can is easy way out because what you have found is not true acceptance.
There can’t be acceptance without understanding.
If you get along with someone you don’t know it’s not true acceptance because you don’t really know each other.
Scott Peck in his book the Road Less Traveled tells about how easy it is to find love and acceptance in the eyes of your pet.
Because a pet can’t talk back, and you can place your own feelings and emotions on the pet and just go about your day like everything’s perfect.
People talk back and when you enter into community with them conflict is going to happen, because that is how we are wired.
Some of you have had horrible experiences with community so far.
You have not experienced the acceptance that I will be talking about today.
You’ve experienced the opposite of that, rejection
You’ve experienced the loss of community in your marriage (where a trust was violated or a divorce happened).
Some of you have had horrible experiences in churches with community, where your trust was violated, maybe things fell apart and you got badly injured.
Some of you have friends you haven’t spoken to in years because of broken community. All these things happen because we are dealing with people, and people aren’t perfect, and sometimes those closest to us reject us instead of accepting us. What it does is it makes you a little gun-shy to enter into community again, and it makes you apprehensive of ever sharing your true feelings and beliefs. But sharing our thoughts and feelings is part of the ground work of community.
It is my hope that as you enter into community at Farwell that your experience will be different than you’ve had before. Because all though it’s true that the church is made up of people and people are flawed, it’s also true that the church is guided and directed by the Holy Spirit. We understand that God has a plan for us, and we have his Holy Spirit to help us achieve that plan.
God’s commandment to the church in Romans 15 is to accept one another, and that is what he created us to be. Today, we are going to look at 2 different churches in the Bible (starting with the church in Rome, their story is found in Romans 14.) We are going to discuss what it means to be accepting of one another. How do you handle differences of opinion? How do you handle the sin in our lives when it comes to acceptance?
Let’s read Romans 14
1 Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2 One man’s faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4 Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. 5 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. 6 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
12 So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God. 13 Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way.
19 Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. 20 Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble.
Imagine this, you meet Ted at church one Sunday and begin meeting together for the purpose of Bible Study and you begin to build community together.
Ted converted to Christianity out of a different spiritual background. He was involved in worship with sacrifice of animals to his god, with the consumption of the meat after. Because of his background Ted tells you that he has decided to be a vegetarian. Being a Texas Roadhouse connoisseur you disagree with that assessment and want to argue.
Or what about this, you introduce Jesus to a Jewish co-worker. Because of their background in the Jewish faith they want to observe strictly Jewish holidays.
You disagree that this is the best thing for their faith and want to argue.
These are both things that the early church really struggled with.
Look at verse 5, "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."
Check out verse 14: "As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean then for him it is unclean."
Verse 20 says, "Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food…"
The Bible is pretty clear on this issue.
It says do not judge one another on issues of opinion.
In other words if I am in community with you and we start talking and realize that we have a difference of opinion than we can discuss it and even debate it, but in the end we do not want to jeopardize the work of God.
(Conflict opinion Joke)
The Bible says look at all the great work that is happening in the church.
Do not destroy that work over an opinion
Some of you have been in churches like that. Sometimes the issues seemed important, and people had out their Bibles looking for verses to back up their arguments. Sometimes the issues were obviously petty like the color of carpet, worship style.
And sometimes you’ve seen the work of God destroyed over carpet, or the work of God destroyed over drums or organs, the work of God destroyed over issues of opinion.
God’s work is more important than our pride, do not let that happen.
Look at verse 15, "If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died."
Not only are we to not destroy God’s work we should not destroy our brother either.
Acceptance is not a quality that demands to be always right.
Acceptance means that we love people more than we love our argument.
That’s true for church, home groups, marriages, and friendships, parenting.
Let me ask you a really difficult question, "Do you love the people in your life more than you love being right?"
How many of you either love being right or are sitting next to someone who does?
I love being right, ask anyone that knows me. A friend of mine and I once argued about whether or not cats were more vicious than dogs.
I’ve argued about religion, politics, entertainment, education, and just about any other subject you can name.
You want to know something true about me, sometimes I have to keep in check, which is more important to me the argument or people. Some of us have lost close friends because we had to win the argument. Here’s a hard thing to swallow, sometimes acceptance means that we give up our right to be correct in order to preserve community. That verse we read is dead on. Jesus’ work to save the person is a lot more valuable then you being right.
When it comes to opinion there is 2 things more important than the argument.
One is God’s work and the other is people.
So if your argument is jeopardizing either of those 2 things, drop it.
The natural response is to say “But I’m right”, we need to let it go! Accept people with differing opinions. You’ll be glad you did.
Flip over in your Bibles one book to I Corinthians, chapter 5. We are going to deal with how acceptance plays into the sin that is in each of our lives.
Read I Corinthians 5:1-5
1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?
5 hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.
There were a lot of sick things happening in this church.
They had taken acceptance to a new and unhealthy level.
When a man was discovered to be having an affair with his fathers wife the church not only condoned the activity they celebrated it and bragged about it.
It’s pretty obvious that this was a drastic situation that called for a drastic response by the apostle Paul.
This is not the most accepting passage ever written in the Bible.
Paul says at one point "I have passed judgment on this man".
He also says "hand this man over to Satan."
I want to say again that I think this is an extreme situation.
I haven’t seen very many times where someone was actually open and celebrating their sin
When that happens you do need to deal fairly harshly with that.
What I’ve seen more of is what happens to each and every one of us and that is that we feel bad about our sin and try to conceal it.
But that raised an interesting question; what do you do when you are experiencing community with another person and you begin to learn things about them that you didn’t even want to know? When the walls come down and the garbage gets dumped and you discover who I really am and the sins in my life and I discover who you really are and the sins in your life how do we reconcile the teachings of accepting one another with the teachings of accountability.
On issues of opinion, it’s a no brainier we are commanded to accept, but how does acceptance affect the sin that is in each of our lives. We all have a deep rooted fear that when we are found out to be who we really are we will be rejected.
A free-lance reporter for the New York Times was interviewing Marilyn Monroe years ago. He knew about her past of going to one foster home after another. The reporter asked Marilyn, "Did you ever feel loved by and of the families with whom you live?’
She got teary eyed as she told about the only time she felt loved.
She said, "Once, when I was seven years old the woman I was living with was putting on make-up and I was watching her. She was in a happy mood and she reached over and patted my cheeks…for that brief moment I felt loved."
Farwell does a good job creating an environment where people can feel loved. The Christian community we are building need to be a safe place to reveal the habits and hang-ups that we struggle with.
If you don’t feel comfortable doing that in a small group you need to find another person with whom you have community.
This church in Corinth had a really warped view of acceptance and to view this issue as "hey whatever your into is fine with us", let’s party.
It’s very similar to the view of our society, your own personal behavior and accountability aren’t as important as you feeling accepted.
We’ve been taught to believe that the ideas of acceptance and accountability are opposites.
I want to be clear, I reject that premise. The Christian view of acceptance and the acceptance we experience in community is driven by love.
It says "you can trust me, you tell me anything, and I won’t stop loving you.
Also, I refuse to leave you the way you are and I hope you refuse to leave me the way I am."
(Personal discipline illustrations”
I’ve been spanked, grounded, yelled at, and punished and do you think even for a split second I ever believed that my dad didn’t accept me.
I knew my dad loved but I also knew that he didn’t want a son who would destroy other peoples property.
I knew my dad accepted but he knew that crossing that road was a dangerous thing to do.
I knew that when the yelling stopped, when I was allowed back into civilization, when the spanking ended, I knew he was still my dad.
That’s why the passage in Romans says, "accept one another just as Christ has accepted you."
Because that’s how God is with us. Make no mistake about it he loves you and accepts you but he has no interest in leaving you the way you are. Why? According to verse 5 that our spirits might be saved on the day of the Lord.
When we are in community with each other and we discover the things that aren’t pretty how do you know how to respond.
What if I say the wrong thing.
Sometimes on this issue we feel like the church in Rome (very gentle and compassionate) and sometimes we feel like Paul talking to Corinth (more harsh and judgmental).
We should take our cue from the church in Rome and look to Jesus because Jesus struck this balance really well.
He said to the woman caught in adultery "no one condemns you but go and sin no more".
But he took on a more confronting tone with the Pharisees "you white washed tombs, you look beautiful on the outside but on the inside you are full of dead men’s bones."
When Peter began to sink after walking on the water Jesus reaches out and says, "Peter why did you doubt".
But another time Jesus says, "get behind me Satan."
I think that Jesus also strikes this balance with each of us.
Sometimes I feel very comforted by God like he’s there and helping me to get on the right path.
But other times I feel more confronted and told I better get this thing right. God able to strike this balance so perfectly because he knows us so well. He created us, he loves us and His spirit even lives within us.
He knows us better than anyone.
The answer to this whole issue is we have to enter into better relationships with each other. We should no longer wear masks.
In an attempt to feel secure we should no longer pretend to be people we are not.
When we care for one another in this way we know the things that you struggle with and what you need to hear and when you need to hear it.
Sometimes that word will be very compassionate and gentle and other times it will be hard to hear but in everything it will be done in love.
Blind acceptance is easy.
It’s when you enter into a relationship with another human being that things get really difficult. Can you accept someone once you know the real person because that’s where acceptance really starts.
The amazing thing, this is what God does for us. He loves you despite all the shortcomings, sin, and garbage. If ever someone knew the real you, it’s God and He still loves you. When you accept Him and become a Christian, His spirit resides inside you, fills your life with meaning and purpose as well as so many other qualities.
God recognizes the Spirit of Christ in you and you are allowed the privilege of living for all eternity in heaven.
It all begins with your acceptance of God, He’s accepted you.
People say how could an accepting God send someone to hell.
God doesn’t do that, we do by not accepting him.
I want to urge you if you haven’t accepted Jesus to come forward today.
