Sermon "Liberty in Christ"
Rev. Lonnie Richardson
Sunday, September 12, 1999
Romans 14:1-12
I remember reading an anecdote in Reader's Digest a number of years ago that was entitled, “Keeping the Faith.” A Roman Catholic priest told of his encounter with a mugger in a dark alley—in back of the church. As the priest was making his way down the alley to his parked car, a man suddenly emerged from the shadows, thrusting the muzzle of a revolver into his ribs demanding, Hand me your wallet!”
Offering no word of protest, the priest immediately began to comply. As he reached into his inside pocket, his clerical collar became evident in the dim light, catching the robber off guard. “Are you a priest?” He exclaimed. “Yes, I am,” the priest replied. “Oh, I don't rob priests,” the thief responded, “I'm Catholic, too.”
Greatly relieved, the priest withdrew a cigar from his inside pocket and offered it to the penitent thief. “Oh, no!” I can't do that,” the thief exclaimed, “I've given them up for Lent.” This thief was a man with convictions, which he refused to violate.
We all have our convictions. Sometimes others may wonder about them, and sometimes our convictions may be detrimental to others. Personal convictions are very important to the apostle Paul. No subject is dealt with in greater detail than our convictions concerning Christian liberties.
The dominating thought in our reading this morning comes at Romans14: 7-8. "For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or die, we are the Lord's". This brings us to the essence of the Christian faith. We are no longer our own. The essence of freedom is that we belong to God. One of the results of this status is that we are free. There is true liberty in Christ. Paul sets this in this section of the epistle in a three-fold context.
I. We can know God's will for our lives.
Liberty in Christ means that we can know God is directing and guiding our lives in this world. Paul is referring to what the reformers called "the right of private judgment". For centuries the medieval church had a stranglehold on the people, declaring to them that only the church could declare the will of God.
But the reformers recovered for the people of God the great, central Doctrine of Romans 14:5: "Let each be fully convinced in his own mind".
Take, for example, the Christians at Berea, who heard Paul preach in Acts 17:10-12. As they listened to Paul and Silas, they did not accept what they said on the basis of who said it: they "searched the scriptures daily, to see if those things were so". They took what they heard to the Bible, and made the scriptures their measure. Not tradition, not ecclesiastical dogma, not the sayings or the practice of the fathers, but the Bible - that was their rule and guide.
There are some things, says Paul in this section of Romans, that are indifferent - matters of taste, of culture, of observing days, and so on.
Our liberty in Christ means that on such matters each of us has to weigh up the teaching of the Bible for our own lives and for our own situations, and glorify God by our observance of and obedience to his truth. For at last, the great mark of Christian liberty is that we are yoked to Christ, to his word and its precepts, his cause and his will. When you study the Bible ask: What do I hear? What do I see? What do I feel? What does it call me to?
II. We are to respect the decisions of other's.
Paul adds a disclaimer, a qualification to all of this. Some people, he says, are weak in the faith (14:1). Their Christian lives have not reached the maturity that would enable them to eat what we eat, or do what we do, or go where we go. Some things that we can handle, they can't. It is all too possible for us to look down on such Christians, to judge them and to put a stumbling block in their way.
Paul argues that those who know Christ, and who know the liberty there is in him, will do all that they can to build up the body of Christ, to give place to others in the Lord, even when there is disagreement on certain matters. Nothing is more important than unity among God's people.
Jesus stressed this in the Sermon on the Mount! Cast out the beam in your own eye ... Be reconciled to your brother. How different the church would be - and how different the world would be - if we learned to bring all our differences to the touchstone and measuring-line of the Bible. Liberty in Christ does not mean judging our brother, or looking down on him, or knocking him. It means living not just for ourselves, but for God; and in living for God we live for each other.
III. We are to live in the light of God's future.
Christian liberty also means knowing that a day of reckoning is to come "We shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ... Each of us shall give account of himself to God" (14:10,12). We are responsible to God even in a democracy! It was said of the puritans that because they knew how to die, they knew how to live. Only those who know that their lives are open books, and that the eye of God is on them, are truly able to know the blessing of Christian freedom here.
The one who lives in the grip of alienation from God and others, whose world is so small that it is confined to himself, who makes himself the measure of all things - this is the one who is in the greatest bondage of all. But the one who has caught a glimpse of eternity, of Christ's mercy, and of what awaits all of us at last, is the one who lives here for God's glory and kingdom. And the kingdom of God is a place where God's hopes for people come true. Amen.
