Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Over the past few weeks we have been listening to what God’s Word tells us about the role of our conscience in our lives.

Your conscience is God’s gift to you to know the difference between right and wrong, and it is a powerful voice in your life that can either accuse you or excuse you.

It is dangerous to ignore your conscience, and it is spiritually harmful to violate your conscience—if you deliberately do what you honestly believe to be wrong in God’s sight, you are sinning against God.

Last week we considered the fact that there are so many matters of conscience facing us in the world today that we must have a conscience that is “calibrated” according to God’s standards, and not our own.

You must be utterly convinced in your own mind about where your conscience draws the line for you in the battles that are sure to come in the coming days and months.

Towards the end of last week’s sermon we considered some specific examples of where we may be called to make a stand on the basis of conscience: Will your conscience permit you to violate a government mandate that prohibits you from gathering for worship because of some new virus variant?

Or would your conscience convict you that you need to obey the government’s prohibition?

If the nest of vipers on Capitol Hill make good on their bloody threat to outlaw any attempts to protect unborn children and provide Federal funding for murdering children in the womb, will you begin figuring out how to evade your income taxes with a clean conscience?

Or would you have a clear conscience to keep paying your taxes?

If the tinpot tyrant in the White House tells you you can’t cross state lines without your “vaccine” papers or your employer knuckles under and threatens to cancel your healthcare coverage unless you show proof of “vaccination”, would you use a fake "Vaccine Passport” with a clear conscience?

Or would your conscience allow you to go ahead and take the vaccine and show your papers whenever you were asked?

As we have observed before, your conscience is your conscience—you cannot bind other people to your conscience, and you cannot be bound by other people’s conscience.

Over the past eighteen months or so thousands of churches descended into fights and acrimony and division and even church splits over mask wearing, social distancing, mandated prohibitions on worship and the like—and I am convinced that so much of that came about because they were completely unprepared and unskilled at understanding how matters of conscience are to be handled according to Scripture.

So for the sake not only of your own conscience this morning, but for the sake of the unity and love and fellowship of this body of believers at Bethel, we must consider what the Word of God says about how to live together and fellowship together and love other believers—even when their convictions of conscience differ from yours.

This is such a perilous endeavor precisely because of how powerful the voice of your conscience is in your life—when you are utterly and thoroughly convinced in your own heart and mind about a particular matter of conscience, it can seem threatening to encounter someone who is just as convinced in their conscience on the other side of the issue.

For instance, say you are bound by your conscience that you cannot take the COVID shots because it was developed using stem cells from aborted babies—but another church member went and got the shots with a clean conscience.

The temptation is to look at them as if they had broken faith with Christianity, and are guilty of a “bad testimony” and complicit in the scourge of abortion.

And their temptation is to look down on you for not getting the shot, that you are legalistic and narrow-minded and need to get a grip.

Neither of those attitudes is healthy—both of those attitudes will eventually split a church.

And we must not let that happen.

In many ways, this is the same kind of dynamic that was arising in the church in Rome that Paul addresses here in Romans 14.

The issue in their case was whether it was lawful for a Christian to eat non-kosher foods.

There were divisions between Christians who came from a Jewish background that said it was sinful and dirty and shameful to eat non-kosher foods and Christians from a Gentile background who were digging into their lizard fritters without a second thought.

And others were so uncertain of what was the right thing to do that they just quit eating meat altogether.

One side thought the other was breaking faith with Christ, the other side thought the first side needed to get a grip, and the rest were just giving up on trying to figure it out.

And so Paul writes these chapters to address the issues of conscience in community.

There is much to unpack about what was going on in their church, and there is a great deal that we can learn as we consider together the challenges of different consciences within our own church family.

So today we will take some time to get a broad overview of the passage and the issues relating to it, and over the next couple of weeks dig in further to some specifics.

But the overall message of this chapter, and the truth that I want you to go home with today, is that

The DIVISIONS of our CONSCIENCE must never outweigh our UNITY in CHRIST

Now, one of the first things that we need to do as we consider what God is telling us in this passage is to figure out whether there are any issues that should actually divide us—in other words, are there things that we hold as convictions that ought to separate us?

So in order to figure out where we have room for differences, we need to understand those places where fellowship may really be either inadvisable or impossible.

So the first step in understanding our conscience in community with other believers is that

I.

We are called to SPIRITUAL TRIAGE

At one time or another you’ve probably experienced triage—most likely in a medical setting.

Several years back I took Caleb into the ER because he had fallen and cut his scalp pretty badly.

(And if you don’t know, a scalp wound can bleed in a simply spectacular fashion!)

So we got to the ER and had a triage nurse take a look at his injury.

She directed us to the waiting room (which I thought wouldn’t take long, since he was actually bleeding from the scalp!!!

But the nurse knew as well as anyone that a bleeding scalp may look life-threatening, but was actually a pretty minor injury.

So we got to spend our couple of hours in the waiting room while people with more serious injuries went ahead of us.

But that’s what triage is—its a way of prioritizing issues so that the most important things are given the most important place.

The Scriptures tell us that, in fact, some teachings are more important than others—Paul says, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15:3 that he delivered to the church “as of first importance” what he also received—

1 Corinthians 15:3–4 (ESV)

3 ... that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

This is an example of what we would call a “First Order issue”—articles of belief and conviction in the Bible that are so important that you must believe them if you are to be a Christian.

Disagreement on “First Order” issues means

First order issues: Fellowship is IMPOSSIBLE - Separate Christians from NON-CHRISTIANS

If you do not hold first order issues with a good conscience, you cannot be a Christian in any meaningful sense.

Fellowship is impossible if there is no agreement on these things, because these beliefs separate believers from non-believers.

In addition to Paul’s statement about the “first importance” of Jesus’ death for sinners, burial and resurrection, we can add other “first order” beliefs:

- That God is one God eternally existent in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matt.

28:19; 2 Cor.

13:14)

- That Jesus Christ is both one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man, and that He was born of a woman who was a virgin (Matthew 1:18-25)

- That Jesus Christ actually and physically came back from the dead, and that the Resurrection is an historical event that actually happened (1 Cor 15:13)

That we are justified by God’s grace through faith alone, and there is nothing that we can do to save ourselves (Eph 2:8-9)

That Jesus Christ will actually and physically return to earth someday, and that His Second Coming is an historical event that actually will happen (John 14:3; Acts 1:11; 2 Thess 1:7-8).

There are others, but these are examples of first-order issues in Christianity—to deny them is to deny the Gospel itself, and so denying these truths makes fellowship impossible, because holding these things with a good conscience is what divides Christians from non-Christians.

One step “down” from those first order issues are issues of secondary importance.

These are issues that are not Gospel issues, but they make fellowship improbable.

Second order Issues: Fellowship is IMPROBABLE - Separate Christians into DIFFERENT FAMILIES

A number of years ago there was a TV show with a terrible title, but actually an interesting premise—do you remember the show Wife Swap?

The premise of the show is that two women would live in each other’s homes for a week, and try to live according to the other’s house rules.

The drama of the show usually came from the families they would pick—a family that lived off the grid in Montana would swap with a family who lived in downtown Boston, for example.

And you can imagine how hard it was for those two families to get along with each other when they had such different outlooks on life.

In the same way, there are some issues in the Bible that make fellowship very unlikely—not necessarily impossible—if there is not a common agreement.

For instance, some Christians believe that baptism should be administered to infants as a sign that they belong to the New Covenant, while other Christians believe (rightly!!) that baptism is administered to someone as a sign of their personal confession of faith.

It is very difficult (but not necessarily impossible) for a church to have a healthy fellowship if there is disagreement on whether baptism should be reserved for believers or given to children before they believe.

So this is an example of a “second order” issue that can cause a healthy separation between churches.

Other examples of “Second Order” issues would be the role of charismatic gifts in the church (e.g., speaking in tongues)—and so we have charismatic churches and cessationist churches.

There is a difference of opinion on whether each church should govern itself independently or should be part of a larger system of authorities.

And so we have Presbyterian and Episcopal churches and we have congregational churches.

Some Christians see the role of God’s sovereignty in salvation as paramount, others are convinced in their own minds that each individual has the self-determination to choose salvation for themselves.

And so we have “Reformed” churches and “Free Will” churches.

Christians who agree on first order issues may differ on these “second order” issues, which makes it more practical and profitable for them to separate into different “families” with different “house rules”.

So there are Gospel issues where we must have unity, because to deny them is to deny being a Christian at all.

There are some issues that are fellowship issues, where we naturally gather into different church “families” with common convictions about particular distinctions in the faith.

But there are other issues that we may call “third order issues”—issues that are not “Gospel” issues or “fellowship” issues.

Also known as “matters of indifference” or “matters of conscience”, they are issues that Christians should be able to disagree on and still maintain the fellowship of unity in the bonds of peace.

First order issues divide Christians from non-Christians, making fellowship impossible, second-order issues separate Christians into different “families” to make fellowship easier.

But with

Third order issues: Fellowship is IMPERATIVE - Christians should not QUARREL over these things (Romans 14:1-2)

These third-order issues include the issue Paul was dealing with here in Romans 14—whether or not it was okay to eat meat that was not what is commonly today called “kosher”.

There were some members of the church in Rome who had no issues of conscience whatsoever about what food they ate, while others took it very seriously indeed—to the point where they quit eating meat altogether because their conscience wouldn’t let them do something they believed to be a sin.

And this is a reminder that just because we call these issues “third-order” issues or “matters of indifference”, it doesn’t mean they are unimportant.

Calling them matters of “indifference” means that it doesn’t matter for your salvation whether you hold to one side or another on a particular issue—but they are important issues in so far as they impact our ability to fellowship together.

In our day, these sorts of “third order” issues would include such questions as

- How we are to observe the Lord’s Day—what should we do or not do on Sunday?

- What sort of clothes is it appropriate to wear to church?

- Is it okay for Christians to have tattoos?

- Should Christians observe holidays like Halloween or Christmas?

- Should Christians smoke or use alcohol?

- What Bible version should we read?

- Should Christians take the COVID shots?

-Should we wear masks in church?

Again, these matters aren’t unimportant, but church members ought to be able to disagree on these sorts of things and still maintain healthy fellowship with one another.

This is what Paul is saying in the Romans 14:1:

Romans 14:1 (ESV)