Week 44 Romans 14 15
I don’t know how many different types of ranking systems there were in the NT church but Paul talks about one of them in Romans. It’s a Relative Strength Appraisal Scheme. I doubt that it was an officially mandated assessment tool but even so church people would have had an individual sense of being along a line ranging from very-high-strength to great-weakness. The ticklish thing about it was that it measured spiritual strength – the strength of personal faith.
Anyway I noticed two pieces of advice Paul gave to strong people:
First: accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters
Second: we who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.
I broke the two into four phrases.
a) Accept a person with weak faith
b) Don’t slam the weaker guy’s opinions
c) Be patient with his blunders
d) Don’t please yourself
The natural tendencies of a guy who’s already pretty strong in his faith might be to:
a) Reject a person with weak faith
b) Judge a weak person’s opinions in a critical way
c) Not tolerate a weak person’s failures
d) Please himself
Outside the church it might be fair-game and standard practice to pan a weak person or trivialize his opinions or lose patience with his gaffs & repeated stupidities. Better to just indulge yourself.
But inside the church things are supposed to be a lot different.
Note: quotes from Romans 14:1 15:1 (NIV)