The Banana or the Peel?

Text: Romans 14:23-33

Focus: Living for each other

Function: To help Believers consider how their actions affect other Christians.

Form: Storytelling.

Intro: Without exaggeration, I could say that because of the love and commitment of my wife, and this very passage of scripture, I would not be alive today.

There is a story to be told in my own life about how God used this scripture to set me free from years of bondage to sin and its control in my life.

But, it's not about me, it's about God's word. I can tell you though, that God's word is powerful and effective and my testimony, at the end will help you see that.

Before I get there, let us look again at what this passage is telling us.

And we are going to do that by looking at the first scripture that we read this morning.

Acts 15:19-21

Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood. For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues.’

I can imagine that when we read those verses this morning people were going: “Huh?” What in the world does that have to do with worship.

Well, it has a lot to do with worship.

Worship is both individual and corporate. Worship is both private and public.

If we are spending private time with God during the week, then we are better prepared to gather for corporate worship. That private time reminds us that during our worship service here at church, God is the audience and we are the ones presenting ourselves to God.

Pray regularly, read scripture, get to know God on a personal basis. When we do, we begin to realize just how much God gave up to know us.

God won us to Himself through His own personal sacrifice.

And in corporate worship, when we come with an attitude of personal sacrifice, then the welfare and development of others becomes a priority that is just as important as us getting our own needs met.

We are created to live in community.

And these passages of scripture, both the one from Romans and the one from the Book of Acts, are about the problems that we sometimes have when we worship together.

In the Acts passage, they were having a real big problem in the church. The first converts to Christianity were Jews. 5,000 were saved on the day of Pentecost. They were from all over the world and they went home and established churches.

Then Brother Paul came along and not only preached to the Jews but the Gentiles as well.

And that was where the problems started.

It stated over dietary restrictions.

You see, the passage in Romans tells us that we are free to eat anything we want; we are free to worship on any day we want; we are free to drink wine; we are free to abstain from wine, we are free to eat meat; we are free to abstain from meant.

He says: “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but just living, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

God's Kingdom is not about religious rules, but believers are righteous -that means two things, they are saved from sin, and their nature is changed into people who are just, people who love their neighbors as much as they love themselves. This, not what food we do not eat, are the marks of being a believer.

But, when people with different values get together, and those values are held with fierce passion, how do we live out our freedom to live as we feel convicted to when someone else has a different conviction?

What should be our proper response?

It is like someone eating a banana and someone else slipping on the peel.

He doesn't want us, even though we are free to cause someone else to stumble.

It was causing a big problem across the world since the church was about half and half Jewish and Gentile.

The Jewish diet restrictions were pretty strict.

The problem was, the Jewish people were and still are very faithful to those diet restrictions. And when Gentile believers got together with Jewish believers, it became a problem when the meal was surf and turf and not just turf.

It caused conflict. The Jewish believers had this thought in their minds: “When God gave the law, including the dietary restrictions, He said it should be followed forever.” And, “since the faith came from Jesus, who was Jewish, and shouldn't the gentiles follow the same practices?”

Some of them were offended that they didn't.

And the text from Acts explains why. It says: “since those laws have been read for generation after generation in those cities.”

Because of the conflict, the apostles got together and decided to act in a way to promote Christian love. They discussed if we gentiles had to obey all the laws of the OT or not. They came up with 3 or 4 suggestions to promote unity: 1). Abstain from things polluted by idols, 2). be sexually pure and 3). don't eat meat that is either strangled or meat that still has blood in it.

The first two make a lot of sense. Idolatry is one of the bigs sins of the Old Testament. Sexual purity has everything to do with respect for the way God created us, our husbands, our wives and the value of our children.

But why does he mentions things strangled and meat with blood in it?

This is interesting. The big thing was that in Jewish law, symbolically, the soul of a creature somehow exists in the blood. To drink the blood was to drink in the soul.

Every sacrifice was to be cut at the neck, the blood drained out. Every sacrifice, before it was eaten was to be boiled to make sure the blood came out of it.

And the only sacrifice, throughout the entire bible where it is permitted to drink the blood is the sacrifice of Jesus Himself when we symbolically partake of His blood during communion.

So, for these Jewish believers, the idea of eating rare meat, or blood, especially for those who are trusting in Christ, that idea was to take away from the one sacrifice that can save the soul. The blood is very holy.

Does that mean eating rare meat is a sin? No. Paul says in the passage that once we pray over food, blessing it in the name of the Lord, God purifies it. It makes no difference what its past was.

There was another problem that is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 8. During this time, one could buy “day-old” meat stores. You could buy meat at the local pagan temple. It had been sacrificed the day before to a pagan idol. Some Christians wouldn't eat it because of its previous history.

Other Christians knew that once they prayed over it, their prayer overcame any spiritual tainting that the previous sacrifice caused.

They had lesser and bigger degrees of faith.

And again, conflict rose.

So why did the apostles ask the gentiles to abstain from these practices when they were worshiping with their Jewish neighbors?

Well, that is the entire point of this passage.

When we gather for worship, it isn't about us. It is first and foremost about God. And it is secondly about the mutual love and support we have for one another.

When we worship, we get more out of it, it becomes meaningful when we gather to worship with the express purpose of lifting up God and each other.

The problem was that people were worshiping and all they were really caring about was what was in it for them.

There was a selfish attitude in the worship.

So, the apostles asked the gentiles to do these four things in order to keep from offending others.

Worship is about God. But Jesus said the purest expression of faith in Him is love for one another. So, if the music isn't your bag of tea, but it does resonate with others, then with the same attitude, we should be happy that others are being blessed, not offended when it isn't our kind of music. I submit that when we start to be happy that others are being blessed, we are beginning to work into a deeper lever of worship.

For example. My mom and I like different styles of music. I doubt if I ever get her to appreciate jazz and blues like I do. She is improving in her love for classical music. But mom is relentless in her passion for Country music. And I know this about my mom. She has an artistic and creative soul. And yet, Country music, which isn't really my bag if tea resonates with her soul, it feeds her emotions in a healthy way.

And maybe, just maybe, I have been missing something by automatically dismissing the music. And because of love, all of a sudden, I find that some of it is pretty good.

And, if I didn't love and trust my own mother, I would have missed out on the blessing of it all my life.

Do you see what Paul is talking about? When our love for God is reflected in the way we love and respect others, all of a sudden worship becomes more genuine.

And in this passage in Romans, the same thing is happening. The disagreement had gone beyond the type of food to the day of worship, vegetarianism and in the end of this passage the practice of drinking wine.

That is a good illustration. Imagine a man or a woman who has been bound for a lifetime to an addiction to alcohol.

Now Jesus turned the water into wine. Drinking wine is nowhere condemned in the Bible. Alcoholism and excess is condemned through the bible.

But the new Christian, who is bound by the old desires of their human flesh may not be able to tolerate the freedom of a Christian who isn't bound by alcohol.

Paul is telling us to consider just what kind of effect our actions can have on others.

Now I will tell you how this passage of scripture saved my life.

You know that I was raised in a godly home. I was taught the scriptures by my mother from a young age. My father lead me into the depth of them and was always there to guide me through the tougher questions. He was patient and faithful.

In spite of a godly heritage, a terrible thing happened to me when I was 11 years old. I was the victim of a crime from which I am lucky to have survived. As it happens in almost every instance of rape, the victim blames herself, in this case, himself.

And the shame can be almost unbearable. Sometimes it turns into self-destructive behaviors. I have seen drug addiction, alcoholism, obesity, cutting and other terrible actions as a reaction to it.

Jesus came to heal us, both spiritually and emotionally, but until a person comes to that point of surrender, sometimes terrible things can happen.

For me, I turned to drugs from the age of 16 until I was almost 21.

And I turned to drugs with a vengeance. I have shared how I was almost murdered at the place of business where I was working during a robbery attempt at 18. That night Jesus saved me. And I remember, as I was laying in the cooler to the Restaurant, locked inside, after I had been unconscious for nearly an hour, with severe blood loss and hypothermia. I remember praying to God that I was glad that I was going to die in that cooler because I knew that if I went out that door, I would be back to my drug habit.

But as I was laying there praying, God spoke to me. God said: “I am the one who sets you free.” I was locked inside the cooler because the internal latch had been broken off. And when those words came to me, all of a sudden supernatural strength came over me, I found a pen that was just the right dimension to jimmy the lock and I was set free.

I always thought that that was what God meant.

And I wish I could say that was the end of my drug use.

But I was an hopeless addict.

God began to change me in other ways. I would see a car broken down on the side of the road and God would lay it on my heart to stop and help. God's love for others broke down some prejudices that I had. God was working on me. But the drug thing wasn't going away.

My twin brother had the same problem.

The sales job I was working with required a pretty good amount of deception. I was convicted about making money through dishonest means.

So I prayed about it and God provided a job that was not hundreds of miles away from my family.

He provided it miraculously, the next day after I prayed for it.

My twin brother was going back to church, we stayed with him and his wife when I interviewed for the job and we had a great time talking about Jesus and doing drugs.

It was all wrong, but God was at work.

He had this new church, access to some of the finest dope available and I had a job back in the area. It seemed like everything was perfect.

Kathy and I were packed to move back home and we were saying goodbye to some good friends we had made in the city we lived in.

I was doing drugs and I was witnessing to him about how he was not right with God and that Jesus came to give him eternal life and that God was real.

And I could feel the Holy Spirit speaking out of me toward him.

My friend, almost in tears said to me: “Phil, I hear what you are saying, and I wish it was true, but how can it be real when you are preaching to me while you are getting high.”

I started to respond with something like “God told Adam that all the herbs were given to us for our pleasure.”

He interrupted with: “Everyone knows that Christians don't do drugs.”

That was in March. For Christmas that year, my mom had given me a copy of the New International Version New Testament. I was hungry for spiritual things and I had started reading through it. I had just read this passage in Romans that morning. I had read that if I felt free to do something and it caused somebody else to miss the kingdom, then my freedom ends at the salvation of the other person.

I thought, if my so called freedom keeps him from heaven, what good is my right? His soul is more important than my freedom.

I looked at him and told him that in the name of the Lord I would never do drugs again. I flushed my drugs down the toilet, destroyed all my paraphernalia and asked him to reconsider his choice to reject Jesus.

But that is not the biggest miracle of this evening.

I was moving back home the next day. And my twin brother and I are very close.

Our mutual drug habit was a point that we really bonded over. I knew that if he wanted to get high with me, the temptation would be too great.

It was 1:30 in the morning. I called him to tell him not to ask me to get high with him. However, just as he answered the phone he shouted that he had was just picking up the phone to call me.

I told him what I had to say was important and he said what he had to say was more important.

He told me that a Christian brother took him out after his second shift of work and that during the conversation, God convicted him of the sin of his drug habit. He told me not to ask him to get high with him.

The miracle was that God knows temptation, and the struggles we are in. So, 200 miles apart, at the exact same time, God, by His Holy Spirit, set us both free from the bondage we were in. And God used this scripture to do it in my life.

So. God's Word works.

The essential truth is this: We live for God and others.