Stumbling Blocks Series

If you want to follow along, the primary passage we will be looking at is Romans 14. We will be skipping around a little bit, but that is the area we will be in. The good news is that my sermon will probably be a little bit shorter than normal. The bad news is it might be very convicting for some and confusing for others. I will just give you that warning. You know we have been going through the series called The Story: God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. Most recently, the part of the story we have been in is the book of Acts. Over the last few weeks we saw how God used people like Philip and Peter and Paul to plant churches around Judea and Samaria and on to the known corners of the earth at that time. They would convert these people and put them into communities that we would think of as a church and that place would be a place where they could learn about God, each other, and themselves. Now, as we go toward the end of the year, we are also going towards the end of the series called The Story. We are really getting towards the end of the Bible.

For the next few weeks, we are going to be looking at the portion of the Bible that is collectively referred to as the Letters or Paul’s epistles. As many of you know, Paul wrote the bulk of the letters. He was the one who was planting most of the churches. He didn’t want to abandon the churches out there in the middle of nowhere, so he would do his best to keep in contact with them. His first preference would be that he would go and visit them himself, but it wasn’t always realistic to do that. Sometimes he would send delegates like Timothy or Silas or Barnabas to go and check on the church. If he couldn’t go and the delegates couldn’t go, then his third choice was to simply write a letter to the churches. I suspect if Paul was around today, he wouldn’t be writing letters but he would probably be using things like email and texting. He would use every means available to keep in touch with his church. What we find in these letters is really that Paul was writing these letters to deal with specific situations. In fact, they are called situational letters or occasional letters because he is writing to deal with different things that are going on in the church. Some of those things were not always good. He was dealing with all sorts of problems. We know even nowadays when you put a bunch of people together from different backgrounds, from different races, with different personalities, and a lot of different opinions, there is a chance you might have a little bit of challenge. Paul knew that. He could easily turn his back on those challenges or he could face them. He faced them because he knew if things like division and loyalties and sin and gossip and those types of things were to continue on unchecked, they could destroy the stability of the church. Paul wasn’t just about maintaining the rights of the individual. He was about maintaining the stability of the church. He would deal with a lot of different issues. Not only issues related to things going wrong like sin and that sort of thing. He would deal with what we would call theological issues or doctrinal issues. Basically things that had to do with right belief about God and man. You have to remember at this particular time in the church, we are still talking first century, there was a lot of confusion. This thing called Christianity was just getting off the ground. Everything was up in the air. There was a lot of confusion going on. Nowadays, occasionally we have doctrinal issues, but for the most part most of our theology has pretty much been settled a long time ago. Back then, everything was pretty much up in the air. It was a work in progress. Paul didn’t have manuals to draw from. He didn’t even have the completed Bible that we have to draw from. He had to piece it together.

One of the biggest challenges he had was trying to help explain how the Jewish people, particular the first five books of the Bible, fit in relation to this new thing called Christianity. People were very confused about it. As you can imagine, Paul was just bombarded with question after question about things. Things like do we have to keep all the old laws now that we are Christians or can we just keep the big Ten Commandments? Do we have to go to all the Jewish festivals? Do we just have to honor the Sabbath? The one that is addressed in today’s book of Romans is whether or not it is acceptable to eat meat that has already been sacrificed to a pagan God. We think about something like that as just bizarre. We don’t have to worry about those things. Back then it was a very real issue. The Jewish people were taught don’t mess with any food that has been used in sacrifice to a pagan god or goddess. This was a problem because when somebody wanted to buy meat down at the meat market they don’t know where the meat has come from. Because there were so many pagan cults, there was a good chance that probably half of the meat down there may have come from a pagan temple or something like that. It was a valid concern. With the coming of Christ, all of a sudden those types of laws didn’t matter in the way that they used to matter. Paul would probably say when it came to things like meat sacrificed to idols it really doesn’t matter. If we had time we would look in the book of Corinthian, and in his view these idols were nothing. They were not gods and goddesses. They were just stone or wood or whatever. There is only one God. That is our Father and Lord Jesus Christ who is our Messiah so there is no such thing as other gods. A sacrifice of meat offered up to this god or goddess would be basically okay. If the god or goddess that you are trying to sacrifice to is meaningless and has no value, then the meat is fine. His view is go ahead and eat it. We know there is nothing to it. It is not tainted. It is just meat. He was experiencing and a lot of the people following him were experiencing this new found freedom from some of the Old Testament regulations.