Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / July 19, 2020 | [re]START - Acceptance

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July 19, 2020 | [re]START - Acceptance · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Last couple of weeks, I have really enjoyed watching Alex, first Alex, then Arnan, uh preach.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh really proud of those guys.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: They have bright features and uh bright presents.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh yeah, I got the date right.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: So uh this morning we're in the restart series.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're in number seven, it's the eighth week.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: We took a week off for uh for a race panel, as you'll recall.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning, I'm gonna go where Angel Sphere to tread.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to you directly about um the kind of divisiveness that exists in our country, but especially our church today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and my text comes from Revelation, from Romans chapters 14 and 15.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible or if you have a cell phone, flip it open to the uh great epistle to the Romans by the Apostle Paul, chapters 14 and 15.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the chapter begins and ends with a very similar statement.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It ends uh Romans 15, verse 7, New Living Translation, but these words accept each other, key word, accept each other, just as Christ has accepted you.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Restart acceptance.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hey.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so that God will be given glory.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm gonna pray.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, I just uh submit uh what's about to be said to you.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Will you erase from people's minds anything that I say that needs erasing?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And will you confirm anything in their hearts that needs confirming as we go into your text and talk about what it is that I think that you want for the church?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, uh I'm not surprising you when I say it's a divisive time.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most divisive time in the local church that I have seen in my lifetime.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Pastor, uh, one person will say, you need to tell TBCers that we must submit to our authorities and come out against the Christians who are spreading conspiracy theories.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's because of crazies like this that the statistics show we have far more new cases of COVID than ever.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't we be loving our neighbors enough to do anything and everything that might save his life?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Pastor, you need to oppose government power grabs and tell TBCers to stop going along blithely with all these rules which take away our freedoms and hurt society even worse than if we were out and about.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a conspiracy theory because they've said they'd rather shut the country down till the election if it'll make Trump lose.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the statistics show that the death rate from COVID has fallen for 12 straight weeks.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: But do you ever hear that?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so it goes.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Back and forth.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Pastor, take a side.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do not want you to misunderstand me this morning.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am not talking about the division in our country, because that's not news.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually, in my view, 50 years old.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: America has been divided since the 1960s.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid, America came together in grief when John F.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy was shot in 1963.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And America united in pride when first Alan Shepherd and then John Glenn took manned rockets into space.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: We were one people, one America.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: But shortly after that, the togetherness cracked and then shattered.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: The war in Vietnam.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: The demonstrations, Watergate.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: You were on one side or the other side.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: The terms the left and the right replaced, started replacing at least those boring old names Democratic and Republican.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then came the startling cover of Time magazine in 1972.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: It was the heat of the presidential race between Richard Nixon and George McGovern.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the cover of Time Magazine put it bluntly, blurring the words, the two Americas.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Inside, editor Lance Morrow told us that Nixon and his supporters and govern McGovern and his supporters were so unlike each other, so far apart that it was as if we now lived in two totally different countries, two different cultures, two different Americas.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: The left was all about the war, feminism, sexual revolution, racial upheaval.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: The right was all about law and order and free enterprise and the family unit.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: They were protective of it and grateful for it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: The left wanted revolution, radical change.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: The right wanted evolution, gradual growth.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the division in our country is not new news.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sociologists trace it back 50 years to the 60s.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: I will admit the two Americas have grown much fiercer today.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The demands have grown much harsher.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not enough that contraceptives be covered in the government-mandated plan.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: The nuns must pass them out.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not enough that gay marriage is legal.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: You must be forced to bake the cake.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not enough to be sensitive with your words and language.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't say it the right way, you may lose your job.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Even celebrities are being marched to the guillotine this summer for saying the politically correct thing in the politically incorrect way.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing can be moderate or quiet anymore.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everything must be sweeping and shouted.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so people on both sides have started feeling like giving an inch is like giving a yard, and so they won't budge.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And every day it seems.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the other replies, if you really believe that, you'd say it to the protesters.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: One of them says, you're ignoring the skyrocketing number of new cases.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the other says, you're concealing the plummeting numbers of deaths.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: One says, if you loved kids, you'd let them go back to school.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the other says, if you loved kids, you wouldn't put them in such danger.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: One says you're a crazy conspiracy theorist, and the other says you're a big government Marxist who hates free enterprise and individual liberty and just wants to see Trump lose.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And these are brothers and sisters going at each other.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the division in our country today that bothers our Lord Jesus.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's the division in his body.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: For our church is his body and he is its head.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And on the night before he died, he looked up to his father and said, I pray that they all may be one.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the same prayer and the same burden on the heart and lips of the Apostle Paul in our scripture this morning in Romans 14 and 15.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: For in Romans 14, Paul is addressing a divided church.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And in that day, the church was not divided over the things that have divided the church in our lifetimes, things like going to movies or dancing or drinking or wearing tattoos or tobacco or coronavirus mandates.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, the issues were century one Christians would rather fight than switch, were eating or not eating pagan foods and working on Shabbat on the Sabbath.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a look.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: The text is Romans 14, and it starts this way: accept the one, our word again, whose faith is weak without quarreling over disputable matters.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Some things are clearly sin: lying, stealing, coveting, murder, adultery, dishonoring our parents, just to name a few.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: But other activities Christians engage in are debatable, disputable.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it is these debatable practices that often cause us to divide, cause tension between us.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Different translations, some of them say debatable.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think NIV might, oh, this is this is NIV.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, disputable.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: New American Standard calls them opinions.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: In the first century, Christians often felt very queasy about eating food which they purchased at a stall in the marketplace, because it was often food which had been offered to an idol.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: The farmer or the meat or meat merchant had brought his basket of meat into the city, and because he worshipped gods of wood or stone in Corinth, for good luck he'd place the basket in front of one of those gods of wood or stone that stood by the city gate or in one of the temples on the way to the market.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: There were always priests or priestesses hanging around these idols like vultures taking their cuts of the best meat, pulling out the ribeye or the chicken thigh.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the merchant got away with most of his stash and he laid it out for sale in the marketplace for people to buy.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And many believers would come to buy food for their evening meal, and many of them felt that it would dishonor Christ to buy and eat food that had been offered to an idol that way.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Other Christians, however, didn't feel that way at all.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Meat was meat, bread was bread, it was God's gifts.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what if it offered to an idol that didn't have anything to do with the food itself?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was good, and it came from God's hand.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: So Christians began to argue about this.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: They took sides and they said some nasty things to each other.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to give you five principles and seven commands this morning that apply to our situation from this older situation.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the first principle goes like this: some things we do are right or wrong, clearly, biblically.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Others are disputable.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: All right?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you agree with that.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because that leads to this command.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Learn to distinguish personal convictions, in brief, perkos, from biblical convictions, which I've titled bibkos.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you don't like those titles, that's fine.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the only person I know who uses those.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: But in short, there are opinions you have about disputable issues that are not, you can't find chapter and verse on in the Bible.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those are your personal convictions about meat that's been offered to idols or, shall we say, uh face masks.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Distinguish those from biblical convictions that you can find chapter and verse on.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Then he says, one person's faith allows them to eat anything, but another whose faith is weak eats only vegetables.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, now this is interesting, isn't it?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because what Paul says is that in every church, in his this church, there's a tension between two groups of people.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: The group that feel the most comfortable with rules, rules about what we wear, the music we sing, what we eat and drink, the cars we drive, the kind of house we live in.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Paul calls those Christians weak because they need rules.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he warns them elsewhere about the danger of becoming legalists.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: The interesting thing is those those people don't seem weak to us.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: They seem quite strong.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who are always talking about rules.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: The group that feels most comfortable with freedom in many areas, Paul calls strong.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: He warns them elsewhere about becoming just carnal, fleshly Christians who live to please themselves, not Christ.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: So the principle is Christians are strong or weak, depending on how freely they live in their devotion to Christ.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm weak, I tend to judge and condemn other people, and I want to control them.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want them to live by the do's and don'ts that I live by, the rules that I live by, and I can give you the reasons why they should.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a little bit like the person that one of us in the room will recognize, a person on the airplane last week who dinged the call button.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when the flight attendant came, indignantly pointed at my friend seated one row in front of her, and said, He's pulled down his mask.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the flight attendant said, Well, he's drinking the coke that I brought him.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: You have to pull down your mask to eat and drink.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the man across the aisle fell asleep and his mask slipped a little bit, dinged the flight attendant again to point it out and demand that he be woken up and pull his mask back over his nose.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: I hope it's okay I stole that story.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Mark.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: My brother Phil, now the pastor of a church down in Texas in New Braunfels, just 50 miles outside of San Antonio, got his start as an associate pastor of a Baptist church in Australia.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one morning, he, as the associate pastor, he wore a red shirt to church.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And they were having a baptism that morning, and he baptized a girl at church wearing a red shirt.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: In the parking lot afterwards, he got soundly and loudly chewed out.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: His spiritual commitment to Christ questioned, because God wants only white shirts worn in the Baptistry.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Whenever there are controversies in gray areas, the weaker brothers and sisters are at the heart of it.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: The question is often asked in the church: is there anyone present in our assembly who might be offended that we think might be offended by a Christian doing this thing?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, then let's ban it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, that church fellowship gets stricter and stricter, or as Paul would say, weaker and weaker and less attractive to outsiders and to young people as they tiptoe around the weaker brothers or sisters.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I won't be a bit surprised if when Christ returns and takes us to be with him and it's time for us to give an account at the Bima, the judgment seat of Christ, some Christians will pick an argument with Christ.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hold it, Lord, you're telling me that it was wrong for me to weigh in on her Facebook page.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was setting her straight.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't letting her get away with her dangerous opinion about schools and churches reopening.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, I know you didn't spell it out in the Bible, but she was questioning authority, and you told us to submit to our authorities, not resist them.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I see Christ smiling a little mischievously and saying, Well, you did read my story in the Gospels, right?
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sometimes I did submit meekly and obediently to authority, but sometimes, you know, I resisted authority, especially when it came to my father's house, the place of worship.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Did you notice?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are the strong.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm strong, I find it dangerously easy to despise or look down on those people who are rules lovers, those troglodytes, those fundamentalists who can't enter the 21st century, critical as they are of drums or electric guitars, who think that we shouldn't celebrate Easter or Christmas.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: The strong are tempted to despise their fellow brothers and sisters who are fanatics on the six-foot rule or who want to enforce masks on young children.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that's what we're talking about in Romans 14, 1 and 2.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paul moves to verse 3.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: The one who eats everything, technically the strong person, 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 him.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Those are the two temptations, aren't they?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Strong Christians command number two, the indulgers, stop looking down on abstainers.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Weak Christians, that is abstainers, stop condemning indulgers.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Verse 13 ends with this very interesting phrase, for God has accepted them.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is really difficult for us who have staked out sides today on many of these issues.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the principle goes in matters of Purko and matters of personal conviction, where there is no chapter and verse in the Bible, it's actually easier to please Christ than it is to please our fellow Christians.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can you say amen?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that the truth?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So then we move to verse 4.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: Who are you to judge someone else's servant?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: To their own master, servants stand or fall.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Principle, you're not the boss of them.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else is the boss of them.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Someone else is the master.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: You're not their master.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: So don't feel like you have to change their mind to judge them or to look down on them.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: One person, he says, considers one day more sacred than another.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Another considers every day alike.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here Paul really steps himself into a great hornet's nest because the fourth command in the Ten Commandments is thou shalt keep Shabbat holy.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: That is what we would call Saturday.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that was one of the Ten Commandments because God rested on the seventh day.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That seventh day was Saturday, it wasn't Sunday.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so now we come to the New Testament, and now all of a sudden the church is filling with people to whom the Ten Commandments were never given.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: God gave the law to his chosen people, Israel.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Shabbat, the fourth command, was no longer a command for the church, as Colossians points out.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: But you can imagine the church is full of people who are so serious back then about keeping the seventh day holy and are upset already that the church we know is meeting now on the Lord's day, that is on Sunday.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so Paul says one person considers one day more sacred than another.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, they're quoting chapter and verse from Exodus 20.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, one day is more sacred than another, another considers every day alike.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Each of them should be fully convinced in his own mind.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Principle number five, differences of opinion about purcos are not bad.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: God desires diversity in his unity.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, it is to be expected in a church that some people will feel very strongly about one position and others about another position.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: And some will point to chapter and verse, though it's incorrect, though they're not applying it correctly.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so it all becomes the the the temperature elevates in the room.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And God says, I like the diversity.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: I just don't like the fact that you are elevating it over love and over convictions over people.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he says very interestingly, each of them should be fully convinced in his own mind.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a problem that we have today is, of course, so so many people are scared to come up with their own convictions that they just hitch their star.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, either it's either Sean Hannity or The view, you know, and whatever they say I'm going to go along with, and uh and the and the third command is quite critical.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Come up with your own purkos on debatable matters, your own personal convictions, and then allow your brother the freedom to come up with his or hers.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, maybe, you know, um, maybe yours do come from some television program, and maybe theirs do too.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's not ideal, that you're not thinking for yourself.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the most important thing.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't accuse them of watching MSNBC while they accuse you of watching Fox all the time.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the issue when it comes to brothers and sisters in Christ, but do come up with your own personal conviction.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh G.K.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Chesterton, one of my favorite authors, and this is now 120 years ago, the Britisher, the journalist, and so forth, said, What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Humility or modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, no look, we're no longer modest about ourselves.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the greatest, you know.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Modesty has now settled, unfortunately, moved into the organ of conviction.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, uh, where it was never meant to be.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth, and it's been exactly reversed so that people go, well, I don't know, and I don't care what's right and what's wrong.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, no, no, no, no.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: You must, Lord, wants you to come up with personal convictions about everything, about dancing, about alcohol, about whether the King James Version is the only version to use, about drums, about music, whatever.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not wrong for you to care deeply about what people wear on this stage or what kind of instruments they play.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's just fine that you care about it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're supposed to be, have personal convictions about all of these things.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, how do you handle those?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the body of which Jesus Christ is the head and prayed that they may all be one.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in verse 10, Paul continues, you then, so why do you judge your brother or sister?
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you treat them with contempt?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: For we'll all stand before God's judgment seat.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Back in verse 4, he says, You're not the boss of them.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you judge people that you're not the boss of?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now he says, Why do you judge people when the truth is that God will one day judge them?
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let God do their judging.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: You hush.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then in verses 11 through 13, he says, That is, it is written, As surely as I live, says the Lord, every knee will bow before me, every tongue will acknowledge God.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: So then each of us will give an account of ourselves to God, therefore let's stop passing judgment on each other.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: One day we're gonna all stand before the Lord, and he's gonna say, Well, what were your personal convictions?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then hopefully you'll have them, and you'll say so, and he'll say, Now, how did you handle those?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll, well, I mean, I felt so strongly about them, I tried to make everybody else agree with me.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I split a church over it.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: God said, No, no, no, that's not what I wanted.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was glad that you had personal convictions.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then he moves to verses 19 and 22.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, whatever you believe about these things, keep between yourself and God.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: Command number five, limit your liberty, even your liberty to speak up.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Your liberty, limit your liberty by love, prioritize peace, not victory.
• 25:36
  unknown: Shh.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Quiet.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don't shout, don't yell.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when you must speak up, don't make it sweeping and definitive, make it gracious and welcoming and inviting.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: We are to accept or welcome people who have the opposite opinions.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: I love the uh story about it's no wonder that Lincoln was called the great peacemaker when they received an inflammatory letter from a woman who criticized everything about him from his appearance and his beard to the way he was leading the country.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he simply sat down and wrote, Dear madam, you may be right.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, Lincoln.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's a man who understood peace, and that sometimes you just keep your mouth shut and you just nod your head.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter 15, verses 1 through 6.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: We move from the law of liberty, verses in chapter 14, and then the law of love, to now the law of being like Christ.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: And this is Paul's wish, Paul's prayer wish in 5 and 6.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: He says in verse 2, each of us should please his neighbor for his good.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: By please each other, he doesn't mean that you should just fall down and do whatever they tell you to do, that you should always submit to those who say you've got to follow all the rules.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not what he meant, but what he meant was that you somehow are so gracious that you give them complete freedom to believe what they want to believe.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've had the privilege of spending time with the Amish people, especially in Pennsylvania.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some close friends there.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's something that's said about the Amish that I really like about them.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: I love a lot of things about the Amish.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: One is their ethic of really hard work that they start their children on at a very early age.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: But I like the fact that they are, as is famously said, they are neither imposed upon nor imposing.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they resist the anyone, including the government, imposing restrictions upon their freedom or their lifestyle.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: They have staunchly resisted that for hundreds of years.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Neither, however, are they imposing when you spend time with them, even though you're wearing very bright clothes and you're driving a car that has rubber wheels and you're listening to different music and whatever else, they will never for a moment criticize you for the way you live because they are not imposing their attitudes on others.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to plea, and I'm talking about fellow Christians, they're pleasing you for your edification and for your good.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul's prayer wish is may the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Be like Jesus.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: Please, your brother.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Don't inflame him.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't inflame him.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the final verse of the text, leading to our final command, accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Notice how that wraps up, it envelopes the whole passage because our first verse was accept the one whose faith is weak without quarreling over disputable matters.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the final and summary command is restart acceptance of others in honor of the one who accepted you.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: What a great passage for our day and age, isn't it?
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: My goodness.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: So once a Nebraska corn farmer was asked if he didn't think all of the fences which separated the farms marred the landscape.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the corn farmer admitted that yes, they did, but he said the corn grows so high that you can't see the fences.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: God has no problem with fences in the church, with people believing different things, different things about the mandates, about school opening, about social distancing and masks.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Just as he doesn't care, he appreciates the differences between male and female, and between black and white and Hispanic, and between Baptists and Presbyterians and Bible churches.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: But he believes that those differences should be hidden by the greater priority we have of bringing praise and glory to God.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because Christ and Paul want unity and peace in his body.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: For the important thing is not the issues that we disagree on, but what effect those disagreements have on the church.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Those controversial issues we need to see as opportunities for demonstrating love and building each other up and creating peace in the church.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And our disagreements about these debatable issues are never, never, never to be at the expense of destroying peace and tearing the body apart.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because when that happens, you have a situation as painful as the famous one at the beginning of our country with Ben Franklin and his son William.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of the American Revolution, had one son.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: William was his name.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: The two men were about as alike as you could get two family members to be.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: They both, as adults, they looked alike.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: They both cut an imposing figure with foreheads as massive as Mount Rushmore and strong, straight noses and chins that were set and jutting out.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And both Franklins were type A personalities.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: They were men with very strong convictions, determined to succeed no matter the cost.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they were both prominent politicians in pre-1776 America.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there is loads of evidence that dad and son were close intimates for many years.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: For example, when his dad was doing electrical experiments.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: William was his lab assistant.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then young William, as he grew up, was his, became his father's personal secretary, and then his chief military advisor, and then his closest confidant, and even his bodyguard.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: But there was one area in which the two Franklins, father and son, did not see eye to eye.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was political.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: Dad liked America and thought that King George was imposing too much big government authority on America.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Son William loved England, believed in the divine right of King George, and thought that America was being way too rebellious and not submissive enough to government.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: Usually, of course, it's the older generation that's rigid, while the younger generation rolls with the punches.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just the opposite here.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: William was the stiff-necked legalist, while old Benjamin was the pragmatist and everybody's favorite patriot in America, sort of the grand old uncle of the American Revolution, while the son was sort of the strict English gentleman type who believed that King George should be obeyed no matter what he said.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: The two Franklins could have simply agreed to disagree and go from there, but they didn't.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they let their political difference ruin their love and their life together.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Benjamin Franklin actually made an official request to the Continental Congress that William be clapped into prison, his son be sent to prison for resisting the American Revolution, and they did it.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Father then completely ignored his son's three years in prison, including eight months of solitary confinement at the same time his wife, Elizabeth, was dying.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: It was precisely 235 years ago in 1785.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: Father and son saw each other, sort of, for the last time.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: They were in England at the time, American Revolution was over.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was 1785.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: They were living in the same very large house.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Father 80, getting old, suffering from gout, wanted to come back, wanted to die in America, was waiting for the tides and the wind to be just right.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he woke up, he looked at the newspaper, the tides and the winds were just right.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: And without walking down the hallway and saying goodbye to his son William, he got on a ship, came back to America.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: They never saw each other again.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's tragic, isn't it?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: When homes and churches, when families and fellowships split, when love turns cold, when people just like you and me, because we have a difference or differences, are too proud to swallow those differences for the sake of love and unity and peace.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: And just let God do our judging for us.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: When I judge you and you judge me, and we all despise each other, listen to me.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I think God would tell us this morning.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: You and I, each one of us, should have our strong convictions.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing wrong with that.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Make up your lists, if you want to, of the differences between us, but make up your mind today that you are not going to allow those differences to turn our love cold.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: A love which once for Ben and William was warm and warm and then turned frigid cold because they disagreed about a debatable matter.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: But we here at TBC will accept each other as is because we want to give praise and honor to the Christ who accepted us just as we are.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's close in prayer.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, thank you for giving us such clear guidance in Scripture in such a difficult day.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, may we be known as a church that contains people who believe very different things but who love each other dearly.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: For your sake and honor and glory and praise, we pray.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for coming.