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Full Episode
Hey Bible Readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap. If you're doing our New Testament plan, today we finished our 11th book. And if you're doing the whole Bible, we finished book number 50. Yesterday, we finished up with Paul telling us what it looks like to love each other well. And today he opens by continuing that line of thought.
He reminds us that there's room for a lot of different personal opinions and preferences in the body of Christ, and that we shouldn't give each other grief over those differences. Quarreling can provoke feelings of superiority and inferiority. It incites our flesh and promotes pride. It brings more division than unity.
When it comes to your own convictions, walk according to how the Spirit directs you. But trust the Spirit to guide other people in their convictions as well. They may be at a different part of the journey than you are, and that's okay. God is sovereign over their steps too. Verse 4 reminds us that God is the one who upholds us and sustains our obedience.
Ultimately, when it comes to the non-essentials in life, even the religious aspects of life, Paul says it's better to agree to disagree than to argue and try to prove your point. The time when we should be concerned with another believer's actions is when our actions are tripping them up. Serve your brothers and sisters well by your actions.
If you have to lay down some rights and preferences for them, that's okay. Love is a good reason to pivot. We don't just expect peace to happen naturally. We have to actively pursue it, to disengage from the flesh and engage with the spirit. And he says to not only pursue peace, but mutual up-building.
If this were a sliding scale, we could put division and quarreling as a negative number, and peace would be a zero or neutral. then mutual up-building would be on the positive end of the scale. This isn't just peace, this is progress. Verse 22 is often taken out of context by people who prefer to keep their faith on the DL.
It says, Given what we read earlier in this letter from Paul about sharing the gospel, and given what we've read from Jesus and what we've seen both of them do with their days and their lives, do you think for a second that this verse means, your faith is private, don't talk about it? Of course not. The word keep here means hold firmly, not be quiet about.
Paul is telling them to hold firmly to their convictions from God, to live them out. It means let it show up in everything. It's the exact opposite of keeping things private. In chapter 15, Paul tells us why the Old Testament exists. He says, The Hebrew Scriptures exist to instruct us, to encourage us, and to give us hope. Hope!
Many of you who were with us during the Old Testament have testified to the fact that it did that very thing for you. You found hope in unexpected places, hope in the laws of Leviticus, hope in the slaughter of judges, hope even in the weird visions of Ezekiel. Who knew? It is stacked, Genesis to Malachi, with instruction, encouragement, and hope.
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