Excess Baggage Part 4

Projectionist: Start with Shoes-HighDefMP4.mp4

Thank you for being with us in this, our final part of Excess Baggage. In this series we’ve looked at the Excess Baggage that we all bring into our faith. And that makes our faith a whole lot more difficult and cumbersome (that means burdensome, awkward, heavy) than it needs to be. We all have it. Even if you are not a person of faith, chances are it is observing these excess things that Christians sometimes cling to or things that cling to Christianity that make it unappealing to you. We all know Christians who look like they’ve been sucking on lemons, right? For them Christianity is a burden they bear rather than a blessing they enjoy. If that describes you or someone you know, maybe the issue for them is one of excess baggage—they are carrying a bunch of stuff that tradition says they need to carry.

What we’ve been trying to do in this series is lighten that load; to help you see some of the things that seem so right, but in reality are so wrong.

We have discovered in this series, for instance, that those who place their faith in Christ are not under Old Testament Law. The Law recorded in our Old Testament was for Israel alone; it is not for you! Christ fulfilled all the requirements of the Law, and He ushered in for us a New Covenant. Instead of 613 laws to follow from the Old Covenant, there is one in the New Covenant: “For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”” (Galatians 5:14, NLT).

So, just to make sure we are clear on this, we said that the Old Testament is important and informative, but it is not incumbent on those of us who live after the cross and resurrection of Christ (that means it is not something we have to obey; we have a different standard, a higher standard).

Now that’s a hard thing for some of us. This series has been hard on those of us (myself included) who have grown up with our treasured traditions and a faulty understanding of the Old Testament. That is, it has been difficult for those of us who grew up believing that while the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament don’t apply to us (those laws regarding the sacrifice of grains and animals), and while the dietary laws don’t apply to us (those laws regulating what we can and can’t eat), the moral laws do apply. But we saw in week two that the Apostle Paul argued that if one law applies, all laws apply and if we move into a system of righteousness based on rule keeping, we move away from the law of grace. If we think we have to do certain things, then it negates completely what Christ has done. We saw that in Galatians 5.

Our struggle with this is not new. The early church also struggled with it. The leaders in Jerusalem dealt with it in a meeting today known as “The Jerusalem Council.” The decision of this early Church Council was recorded for us by Dr. Luke. In short the decision was “We should not make it difficult for those who are turning to God.” (Acts 15:19).

Since Paul is the major Apostle sent to those who didn’t have the Hebrew or Jewish Scriptures—what we refer to as the Old Testament today, some people in the church as well as some false teachers outside of the church decided to follow him around, and wherever he planted a new church, as soon as he was gone they would sweep in and say, “Paul didn’t tell you everything—let us tell you the real requirements if you want to be a Christ follower.” While for the most part in the early church, these men didn’t get very far, in the history of the church their teaching managed to seep into the practice of the church and suddenly today we find ourselves in the church carrying a lot of excess, unnecessary baggage that makes following Jesus difficult.

So how do we deal with this? The Apostle Paul in his letter written in or around 57 AD to Christians who lived in Rome, gives us some practical advice on how to apply the freedom he said all believers had.

We are in Romans 14 this morning. I love this chapter. It revolutionized my own life. I grew up in a church that specialized in excess baggage. We had rules for everything—we were probably as close to being Amish without actually being Amish as they come! If you are not familiar with the Amish, they are a Christian Sect who believe in total separation from the world—spiritually and physically. They still use horse and buggy because modern means of transportation are, well, modern, and therefore somehow wrong.