Accepting Strong-Willed Christians
Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgement on disputable matters Romans 14:1
Most of us don’t feel comfortable around strongly opinionated people. They make us feel we know very little and the little we know, we can’t express very well anyway.
We’ve probably all met Christians who come at us with all guns blazing. They dominate conversation and are far more concerned to tell us what they believe than asking what we might think (not that we’d be game to answer anyway).
The church in Rome in Paul’s day was made up of two major groups – Jewish Christians and non-Jewish Christians. The Jewish Christians wanted to hold to the Old Testament food laws and calendar, including Saturday as the true Sabbath. The non-Jewish Christians saw all these as outmoded and unnecessary. Both groups were at logger-heads with each other and neither would give any slack.
In our verse above Paul talks about those ‘whose faith is weak.’ By this he means they feel bound to keep following religious practices they were doing before becoming Christians. He says the other Christians were to ‘accept’ them ‘without passing judgement on disputable matters.’
You and I will meet Christians who want us to believe exactly what they believe before we can fellowship together. Our verse says that’s wrong. In essentials we need to be in agreement, but in anything outside of that, we need to ‘accept’ each other without going through a checklist of beliefs. Areas like which Bible translation you read or which theory you believe about the second coming, come under the heading of ‘disputable matters.’ Paul says these aren’t areas we should be ‘passing judgement’ over.
Richard Baxter, the great Puritan pastor coined the following in the 1600’s:
In essentials, unity
In non-essentials, liberty
In all things, charity