Faith or Fear

The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin. (Romans 14:22-23)

Here's one of the scenarios as Paul has set it up in this passage. A person comes to feel liberated from the superstitions of believing that somehow food that has been offered to pagan idols before being set before them on the table contains some sort of supernatural contamination. They understand that the idea that somehow this food is “unclean” simply because of its physical locations en route to the table is a silly idea, because idols don't really have any power at all. God states plainly in the Scriptures that idols are just rocks or pieces of wood created by foolish people with vivid imaginations. So this person has no problem or stress about eating food that may or may not have been offered to idols ahead of the meal.

This person has matured in their spiritual growth and their faith in God so that they have peace about this issue and it no longer bothers their conscience as it once did to sit down to a meal with friends without obsessing over finding out whether their friends (or otherwise) secretly arranged a rendezvous between the food and an idol previously. They are living in a different perspective of reality than many around them based on their knowledge of God's supremacy and are learning to rest in the truth of Scriptures.

However, they are also with fellow-believers, some who are not so sure and confident about this idea of “no fear” when it comes to the potential problems involved with things pertaining to idols. These other possibly newer believers still have not had this issue sufficiently settled in their hearts to feel free to participate in such activities because from their own background there was enormous significance attached to eating food offered to idols. They believed that in some way you were accepting some authority of that false god over your life or ingesting some spirit force by eating food that was spiritually linked to that specific idol.

For this person there was still a remnant of fear lingering in their heart that they would be compromising their allegiance to their new Master, Jesus Christ who had redeemed them from sin and the power of demons, if they indulged in activities that used to hold so much spiritual significance for them as an active pagan. For them, to eat food that was offered to idols, even if you did not do so intentionally, was to commit treason against God and to spiritually commit fornication with that idol.

So when these two kinds of believers found themselves at the same meal together you can see that there could be a great deal of potential tension. One believer feels free and confident that they don't have to worry about the spiritual dimension of food on the table and the other believer is wondering if there are still demons lurking within the food waiting to infect an unsuspecting guest and take over their soul. To the first believer this is all a bunch of silly nonsense that seems just superstitious and ludicrous. To the second person this is an issue of principle, of morality, of spiritual significance that cannot be ignored except at your eternal peril. As a result they even go to the extent of not eating any meat at all so as to avoid any possibility of involving themselves with demon worship, since it was always the meat that was offered to the idols. By becoming vegetarians they could preempt any attempts through food to draw them back into the world of demon worship and control.

What Paul is trying to point out in Romans 14 is that resolving whether or not it is right or wrong to eat that meat that might have been offered to an idol previously is not nearly so important as the attitude and spirit that each of these believers have toward each other. If the person who has more mature faith looks down on the other, more insecure individual with any amount of contempt for their superstitions and fears, then Paul says this is far more injurious than whether his opinion about the food is actually correct. And if the more confident Christian flaunts his beliefs by deliberately eating food that he knows to be offered to idols just to force his point on the other and thereby damages the faith of the newer believer, then Paul declares that the first believer is tearing down the very confidence and trust that God has been quietly working to build up in the heart of the one still weaker in faith.

Furthermore, this new believer may be trying to shed his superstitions but is still very bothered by them and his conscience smites him every time he eats this food offered to idols. If he were to just go ahead and join his friends in eating the food anyway or if they pressured him into doing so because they insisted that he must in order to prove that their opinions and Biblical proofs were valid, Paul says that he is going to suffer feelings of condemnation if he does so in spite of what the other believers insist. If he deliberately violates his conscience just to conform to peer pressure from other Christians he is not acting from trust in God but is only reacting in ways to avoid judgment from his friends.

This verse reveals to me a very important aspect of God's character and dealings with us that is nearly always eclipsed in the hearts and minds of many Christians. God does not use threats and intimidation to squeeze us into the mold that He wants us to look like. That is the method of the world and God never uses the world's methods to accomplish His desires for us. God is far more gentle and patient and wise than we ever give Him credit for and He knows just how to gently shape and attract the heart so that it learns to reflect that same gentleness and goodness.

God has much more interest in genuine heart transformation than in outward correctness or knowing all the right facts. So when it comes to understanding the true nature of real faith, it can be seen here that faith must be based on a level of intimacy and trust from the heart of each individual person. Faith must be based on a personal, growing, dynamic relationship that works itself out from the inside, not imposed from the outside. So if a person forces themselves to do certain things based on other people's convictions but are not convinced of themselves, then they are likely to have a heart filled with doubts. And according to the Word of God, doubt and condemnation seem to always hang out together and even feed off each other. Whatever is not from faith is sin.

Faith needs to be based on our own personal conviction before God individually. If our faith is based on other people's convictions instead of our own we are trying to base our relationship with God on someone else's foundation and that simply is a recipe for disaster. But unfortunately that is the basis for the faith of far too many people today. It seems so much easier to trust a pastor or teacher or popular evangelist or a denomination to do our thinking and decide how we should view and relate to God. But faith that is motivated by peer pressure or waits to see what is popular with our friends or church is not faith in God but faith in other humans.

What I see in this chapter is a warning to each one of us not to try to make ourselves the object and basis for someone else's faith. I am coming to be convinced that instead of putting so much emphasis on teaching people what to believe, we need to put far more effort into teaching people how to think, how to discover truth, how to listen to the Holy Spirit for themselves and then turn them loose to be impelled and drawn by the magnetic attractions of their Creator and Savior. If we are afraid that they won't conform to our doctrines or comply with our restrictions then we will interpose ourselves between their conscience and their God. And that is no place for any of us to try to be.

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Faith and Conscience

The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. (Romans 14:22)

I want to take a little time to explore this verse to see what facets may show up as I look at it from different perspectives. I always find that to be a very rewarding exercise with nearly any passage that I come across.

As far as I can tell, the way this word faith is being used here is to describe a system of beliefs held by a person about how they should properly live before God. The Greek word used here is the very same word for faith used much of the time throughout the New Testament which often has much stronger implications in other directions, I believe, along the line of a personal, interactive trust that grows from the heart level, not just an intellectual, factual trust. But in this context it seems to lean more toward describing a person's opinions or perspectives about what they think is right and wrong from their own experience with God arising out of their unique background.

Because every person necessarily comes from a background in some respects that differs from every other person, it is impossible that individual believers growing into a trusting relationship with God will hold the same ideas or beliefs about God or about what is right or wrong. Over time, as they become more and more transformed by closer association with Jesus and become more saturated with the Word of God, their differences will become less and less. But in the meantime we all must learn how to properly relate to the discrepancies and variations of opinions about how we should live out of our conscience, for these conflicts will inevitably arise sometimes when coming into contact with other minds from other perspectives.

Paul seems to be saying in this chapter that from God's perspective the choices and attitudes of our spirit in relationship to others is of more importance to Him than being correct and “right” in every opinion that we hold about religion. I am not trying to say that it makes no difference whatsoever what you believe – that is reading into my words something I am not saying at all. However, I have seen all too often a spirit of self-righteous superiority that tends to easily view others with contempt and criticism who are not willing to quickly conform their opinions to our own.

But this attitude betrays a spirit of false judgment, for not even God, the true Judge of all, treats people with the contempt and superiority that most religious people tend to have toward others who differ from them. God does not flaunt His perfection and wisdom and correctness of knowledge in our face in order to shame us or intimidate us into changing our minds. He works through humble ways, quiet, loving avenues as much as possible in order to draw our hearts out to Him and to connect us to His heart with cords of compassion and affection. This is the way that we too, believers who claim to be following His lead, are to relate to each other. That seems to be part of the main thrust of this whole passage.

So what does this mean to have my own conviction before God? I looked at a number of different translations of this verse which often helps to flush out more nuances that often are lost by reading only one version. I came across some that helped to open up another dimension that I had not noticed before.

So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. (Romans 14:22 NIV)

I found two things here that jumped out at me. The first is that I can treat people with the highest level of respect for their opinions while internally holding quite different opinions myself in my own relationship with God. I do not have to feel compelled to adopt another person's or group's beliefs about certain things to relate to them and accept them as siblings with me in God's family.

Second, I noticed in the way this was worded that I not only need to avoid self-condemnation and the negative effects that that brings into my own experience, but the potential also exists that in treating others improperly with attitudes of contempt or superiority that I may induce condemnation from others as well. Condemnation from any source is not something that is part of God's ways and is not what He designed to be part of our motivation for living. If I are living my life based on motivations revolving around condemnation from any source I am not yet in sync with the will of God for living life as Jesus came to give me.

So there are at least two potential sources of condemnation that I need to avoid as I see in this verse. One is when I am not fully convinced in my own heart about something that others find no problem with and I violate my conscience by deciding to do it anyway simply because of peer pressure. Paul seems to be saying here that it is not only wrong to exert peer pressure on others to conform to our opinions but it is also harmful to violate our own conscience by conforming to peer pressure if we feel that God does not approve of our choices. The issue is not so much about whether my conscience is right or wrong but how I relate to it.

I am very familiar with this scenario in my own life. As I look back over the growth I have experienced throughout my life I easily see many times where my conscience was very condemning toward me in things that had nothing to do with real convictions from the Holy Spirit. It is very true that a misguided, misinformed conscience can be a real problem for us – I know that painfully well. It has been an unmerciful source of unnecessary torture for me at times. But it is not enough to just try to force my conscience by simply violating it because someone else believes that its O.K. to do something that I find deeply disturbing. God does not desire service from a confused, conflicted heart. That does not honor Him and does not produce attachments of love and affection with Him. It only tends to confuse my own emotions and produce painful false guilt within my soul.

We must have a great deal more respect for the role of conscience in our lives. While it is extremely important that our conscience needs to have its opinions and standards constantly under review and updated by fresh revelations of the truth about God to our hearts, we must be very careful about developing habits of ignoring our conscience in favor of following other motives for our actions and choices. We may find too late that our flesh is using this as an excuse to lead us into a counterfeit experience based on selfishness instead of leading us closer to God's heart.

There have been some times when I had to take the word of God to my heart and act on it in defiance of my conscience that was manipulating my emotions of fear. Those were usually turning points in my life where God was retraining my conscience by helping me to see that many of its assumptions about God were based on false premises. But conscience is a gift from God given to each one of us and though it is often confused and many times perverted in some ways, it is still a part of our soul that God wants us to respect, to train and to listen to, for it is the primary way that the Holy Spirit usually chooses to speak to our hearts.

And maybe that is the main point that Paul is trying to make here. We need to respect both our own conscience and the right for others to respect their conscience even though it may be telling them something very different than what ours believes. Respect and acceptance for others to follow their own conscience is at the very heart of true religious freedom, so when we try to impose our religious beliefs on others without respect for their conscience we violate their fundamental freedoms that even God will never violate. When we violate other's freedoms then we bring condemnation upon ourselves as a result.

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Arguing Definitions

The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin. (Romans 14:22-23)

Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. (1 John 3:4 NKJV)

Anyone who has a background similar to my own will immediately recognize the tension set up by putting these two verses in close proximity. I could not count the number of heated arguments that have been generated over the years between people taking rigid positions on one side or the other using one of these verses as the “true” definition of sin as opposed to the other verse.

But it doesn't take much reasoning by a sensible, open-minded person to realize shortly that it doesn't make much sense to try to pit one verse against another from the Bible while claiming to defend the true Word of God. The tension that arises from looking at these two verses together is completely artificial and arbitrary within the minds and heart of the people caught up in the argument, not at all in the Word of God itself. In fact, upon closer examination it can be quickly seen that the verses and their supporting contexts are actually saying nearly the very same thing but with different word descriptions and from different human writers.

The problem arises largely because people who end up in arguments do so because they have a strong personal agenda that they want to promote with far-reaching implications that need to be carefully shored up and protected from careful, objective analysis. Truth never suffers from close, positive critical examination, so if a person becomes defensive about their choice of how they string their proof-texts together then it is quite likely that their careful arrangements of verses (and even the required translation they insist on using) cannot hold up under more honest scrutiny.

I again sense that the real problem in most arguments is the condition of the spirits of the people involved far more than the congruency of the texts they are using to discount another text. These two definitions of sin are not in the least in conflict with each other but are highly complimentary. So if I find myself feeling defensive when one or the other is used then there is very likely a lie-based belief deeply rooted in my own heart that is unwilling to be exposed or examined. Defensiveness itself is one of the most obvious symptoms of a lie embedded in the heart trying to avoid detection.

Another problem with truly understanding the meaning of these verses is the often repeated problem of faulty definitions themselves. When words are used to define other words, it is necessary to have a working definition of at least a few words that are correct to start with or faulty thinking and assumptions will only produce more faulty assumptions. In this verse in Romans it is necessary to have a somewhat proper understanding of the word faith in order to arrive at a proper definition of the word sin. Otherwise nothing will be accomplished by trying to argue one opinion against another.

I have come more and more to realize that useful definitions require much more than simply achieving a high level of intellectual accuracy in the use of linguistics as helpful as that may be. Yes, it is important to go back and do some research many times to correct our faulty assumptions about the real, factual meaning of many words – that is extremely important and helpful many times. But unless the spirit of a person is also listening and open to the promptings of the Spirit of God who alone can provide us with the real significance of what we are studying, all of our attempts to “prove” what we think the text is saying will amount to nothing more than an exercise in futility.

As I have looked at these two verses that talk about the definition of what sin really is this morning in their respective contexts, I am surprised that so much controversy has occurred and so much bad blood has been generated in the arguments that have taken place. Those who typically argue that the “best” definition of sin is law-breaking usually argue with a spirit of animosity which is exactly the opposite of the context from which they lift their proof-text. Take a look at where this verse comes from.

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when He is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as he is. And all who have this hope in Him purify themselves, just as He is pure. Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. (1 John 3:1-4 NRSV)

The whole surrounding passage is filled with the context of living in a spirit of genuine love. So is the verse in Romans in a different context? Is Romans emphasizing faith more than love as John does? Take a look at what Paul just said a few verses earlier.

For if because of food your brother is hurt, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy with your food him for whom Christ died. (Romans 14:15)

I can remember myself being caught up in these very heated arguments with my own Dad about which of these verses should be the more accurate description of what defines sin. And I also remember being convicted right during the argument that I needed to pay attention to the condition of my own spirit and the effect it was having on him far more than I needed to “win” the argument that I already knew he was unwilling to concede. For the real issue behind the heated debate was not really about who had the better definition of sin but was about the pain being generated at the spirit level that was far more significant in God's eyes. I was being brought to realize over a number of years that the real problem was not just my definitions of the words in the Bible but more importantly was the relationship between me and those I was supposed to love at the level of the spirit.

The more that I have learned about the true definition of real faith the easier it has become to see the full integration of these two verses with each other. I have come to realize that nearly all the definitions that I grew up with about all religious words and phrases had to be repeatedly challenged and updated as the Spirit was leading me deeper and deeper into a heart relationship with the Source of everything I was reading. But in the process I also had to remember the admonition given in the previous verse that I needed to apply to myself. The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. (Romans 14:22)

I came to realize that it is not my responsibility to get everyone else to believe exactly the way I believe, as hard as that is to accept. What is far more important than having perfect theology is having a humble heart willing to accept and love those who do not view things in agreement with me. I do not want to end up in the group described by Jesus as those recounting their many achievements in His name as the reasons why they should be able to get into heaven. I want to learn to know Him intimately so that He will not have to say to me, “I never knew you.”

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:12-13)

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