Dealing with Differences of Conscience

Let's turn in our Bibles to 1 Corinthians and chapter 8, please. This is my last time standing before you, so let me say thank you. Thank you, first of all, to the assembly here at Garneville for the invitation and for your work to host the conference.

I've enjoyed being here, and it's great to share with David and Leslie, and I've profited from their words. And I thank you for the welcome, a welcome that you give to an urbanite in a county that doesn't have a single traffic light, I understand. That's remarkable, good for you, and it's a pleasure to be with you.

Of course, the best thing about Iowa is not the corn or the cows, but the Christians, and it's good to meet the Lord's people again. All right, we're reading in 1 Corinthians 8. I want you to think particularly of this truth today, that Christ has died for your brothers and sisters. Christ has died for your brothers and sisters.

I don't find this chapter an easy one to preach. Its principles are not easy, so I feel some hesitancy about it because it convicts me, too. It's a challenge to me, but then you can also be sure that when I'm saying things that I'm not pointing fingers at you, I'm not throwing stones at you, I need to hear these words in my own soul very much.

All right, I'm reading from the Christian Standard Bible, CSB translation. We'll read the whole chapter, 1 Corinthians 8. Now, about food sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. That phrase, we all have knowledge, is possibly in quotation marks.

This may be what they were saying. He's saying, sure, we all have knowledge, but knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

If anyone thinks he knows anything, he does not yet know as he ought to know it, but if anyone loves God, he is known by him. Verse 4, about eating food sacrificed to idols, then, we know that an idol is nothing in the world and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are many gods and many lords, yet for us, for us, there is one God, the Father.

All things are from him, and we exist for him, and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ. All things are through him, and we exist through him. Verse 7, however, not everyone has this knowledge.

Some have been so used to idolatry up until now that when they eat food sacrificed to an idol, their conscience, being weak, is defiled. Food will not bring us closer to God. We are not worse off if we don't eat, and we are not better off if we do eat.

But be careful that this right of yours in no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone sees you, the one who has knowledge, dining in an idol's temple, won't his weak conscience be encouraged and boldened to eat food offered to idols? So the weak person, the brother or sister for whom Christ died, is ruined by your knowledge. Now, when you sin like this against brothers and sisters and wound their weak conscience, you are sinning against Christ.

Therefore, if food causes my brother or sister to fall, I will never again eat meat so that I won't cause my brother or sister to fall. Jamie Dunlop has recently written a book about our relationship with our brothers and sisters in our local churches, and he's called that book, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy. That's a great title.

It's a good book and a great title, Love the Ones Who Drive You Crazy. And he says, I want you to imagine a strong, muscular, chiseled bodybuilder. And if you want to see, if you want to show off the muscles of that bodybuilder, you're not going to give him just a tiny set of weights.

Giving him a tiny set of weights isn't going to prove anything. Likewise, he says, loving people in your church that is natural and effortless hardly shows off the gospel or the glory of the gospel that God has worked into your heart. Love that is difficult is the antidote to hypocrisy in the church.

Love that is difficult is the antidote to hypocrisy in the church. That shows us who is really following Jesus and who's just along for the ride. Well, in the mercy of God, he gives us plenty of opportunities to show love in circumstances that we find difficult.

Maybe there's one sister in the fellowship and she thinks it's important to follow the lead of her manager. She thinks it's no big deal to add gendered pronouns to her email address at work. And there's another sister in that same assembly and she is strongly opposed to that in her conscience.

She thinks that is just promoting a woke agenda. Maybe there's another brother and he shares a Facebook post that is exclaiming the victories that the Israeli Defense Forces are accomplishing in the Gaza Strip. And there's someone else, another brother in that same assembly, and they are thinking of a whole bunch of innocent Palestinians who have no affiliation with Hamas and how their lives are being snuffed out and they're really offended.

Maybe there's one Christian who thinks you should never listen to Johnny Cash and another guy gets up and preaches about him. Maybe a situation like this where two students come from India to attend university in Iowa. They're Hindus.

But while there, they meet you at university and they come and hear the gospel and they convert and they are true Christians. And then they get an invitation to a wedding banquet back at that Hindu temple precinct in Des Moines and one of them thinks this is great. I can go back there and now I know that there's nothing to any of that idolatry.

I know it's all false gods. It's absolutely nothing. And I can go back there and meet with them and keep those relationships and represent Christ.

And the other new Christian, convert from Hinduism, thinks you should never enter the temple precincts again because it is all idolatrous evil. Can we have different convictions like that and still be part of the same church fellowship? Well, First Corinthians 8 is teaching us that brothers and sisters with some different opinions, some different calibrated consciences, they can do local church life together. Maybe not easily, but they can do it because they are on the same foundation.

The foundation of the church is not our opinion but Jesus Christ. First Corinthians chapter 3. No one can lay any other foundation than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. That's the foundation.

That's what unites us. So First Corinthians chapter 8 is the spirit of God's guidance to us concerning people with different opinions and different convictions and differently calibrated consciences, how they can worship and serve God together. Now when we do that, we are a tremendous testimony to the grace of the gospel.

The Lord Jesus said in the upper room, you are to love one another as I loved you. By this all men shall know thee who are my disciples if you have loved one for another. There's the badge of Christian discipleship.

And of course, it's worthwhile remembering that when the Lord Jesus said that in John 13, as I have loved you, you are to love one another, that he said that to a group of men that included some fairly diverse people. In that group, there was a former tax collector who the Jews looked upon as a betrayer of their people. He's working for the Roman government.

And in that same group is a zealot who would try and persuade people to rebel against the Roman government in Judea. So you've got one man, and he has worked for the Roman government. You've got another man who's trying to overthrow the Roman government, and the Lord very wisely puts them together.

They obviously have very different views of government, and yet the Lord Jesus has put them together on purpose, and he says you are to love one another. And he does things like that for us in the local assemblies from which we come from. He unites us on the one foundation that is Jesus Christ.

So let's look at verses four to six. First of all, verses four to six, our unity of conviction. Our unity of conviction.

We know that an idol is nothing in the world. Verse six, for us, us who believe, we Christians, for us there is one God, the Father, one Lord, Jesus Christ. We know that.

This is true for all of us. The doctrine of the gospel is unifying. We all believe the same thing about the Lord Jesus.

We know this. We all know that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father. We're united by that.

Our unity of conviction. So around us, there is this lost, divided, pluralistic, religiously confused world. That's what is all around us.

But for us, for us, we've been called out of that. That spirit of worldly division that characterizes the culture, we've been delivered from that and we're united by the same conviction concerning God and the Lord Jesus. And we are family.

We're family. Verse six, yet for us there is one God, the Father. The Father.

We've got the same Father. We're family. And he highlights that as you go down this chapter when he begins to apply the teaching more pointedly.

Notice what he says in verse 11. So the weak person, he doesn't just leave it there. He doesn't just say the weak person is ruined.

He says the weak person, the brother, the brother or sister for whom Christ died. That person who thinks differently than you, that's your brother. That's your sister for whom Christ died.

Verse 12, when you sin like this against your brothers and sisters. Verse 13, if food causes my brother or sister to fall. So the people that we fellowship with in the local church, we're all part of the household of God.

They are brothers and sisters. We're family. Should be family love.

For us, there is one God, the Father. So we have a unity of conviction regarding God, our Father, and Jesus Christ, our Lord. But verses seven and eight now, there is a diversity in our knowledge and conscience.

Verse seven, however, even though we're united about God and the Lord Jesus, however, he says, not everyone has this knowledge. In the context, not everyone's conscience allows them to eat meat that has been sacrificed to an idol or to eat meat in the idol's temple. Some are perfectly free to do that, and some, he says, have a weak conscience.

If they do that, they feel like they're sinning. And even though they don't have the same degree of knowledge and freedom as you know, he says, I want you to remember Christ loves them, and he died for them. Those brothers and sisters that don't see things the same way as you.

And this is how our gospel-powered love gets put to the test. Loving the people that we agree with on everything, that's pretty easy. The people that we find easy to love, that doesn't require a whole lot of gospel grace in my heart, but God puts us together with people of different convictions and differently calibrated consciences so that we can learn and so that we can show the true love of Christ.

In fact, I think this is another wise observation from Jamie Dunlop in that book. He says, while there is nothing inherently wrong about being part of a church where you all agree on the non-essential issues, there's nothing inherently wrong about that. That's not sin.

If it works out that way, that's fine. So there's nothing inherently wrong about being part of a church where you all agree on the non-essentials or matters of conscience, but he says it can be risky because what happens is those secondary issues then become the big issues that you stand for because it's easy to stand for those issues because everybody agrees with you. And so you can sound very bold, but you'll start to apply the Bible in very narrow ways, just in ways that you know everyone agrees with, and you could hammer it and they'll say, amen, preach it brother, yes, and you'll get the compliments after because you all agree on those things and you're just kind of patting one another on the back.

If everyone agrees just exactly how Christians are to dress when we come to meeting, and whether we should homeschool or send our kids to public school, whether you should let your kids go trick-or-treating or not, or what the best political model is for a country, you can thunder your viewpoint on those things every week, and you know what'll start to happen? You'll start to think you're the only one standing for the truth, and you know what else will be happening? You'll be preaching about things that the Bible may not even speak to. What about the truth? What about the doctrine of John 13 that we are to love one another as Christ loved us? What about the Bible doctrine of 1 Corinthians 8, remembering that the people with a different conscience than us are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died? Now verse 8 makes clear to us that the issues that the saints are differing on here in chapter 8 is something that it is okay to differ on. So he says, food will not bring us close to God.

We're not worse off if we don't eat. We're not better off if we do eat. In other words, the person who won't eat the meat, they're not going to lose out at the judgment seat of Christ for not eating that meat.

And the person who is free to eat that meat and does so, they're not becoming spiritually stronger just by eating that meat. The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, Romans chapter 14. Obviously, there are other things that are not harmless issues.

Some things are blatantly, objectively wrong. The Bible says don't get drunk. So you can't say, well, I got no conscience against it.

Well, you should. It's wrong to steal from your employer. Well, I've got peace in my own heart about it.

I feel perfectly comfortable stealing from my employer, so it's okay. We'll just have to agree. No, you can't.

You should have a conscience about that. Using filthy language, objectively wrong. So you need to have a conscience about things that the Bible says are sin.

It's objectively wrong. 1 Corinthians 8 is different. Listen now, this is important.

1 Corinthians 8 is something that is subjectively wrong for one person. Eating the meat isn't objectively wrong by the standard of God. It's not sin to eat the meat.

The idol is nothing, so objectively it is okay. So for the person whose conscience is clear, he can eat it. He hasn't sinned.

It's just a nothing thing. He's enjoyed the meat, but it is wrong. It's actually sin for the person whose conscience is weak.

Sin to go against your conscience. So the same action, the very same activity, can be right for one person and subjectively wrong for the other person. One person knows that God says it's okay.

It is fine for them to engage in it. The other person thinks that it's not okay. It is wrong for them to engage in it.

The same action can be right for one person and subjectively wrong for another. Now one of the challenges in preaching this is just how to apply it in specific circumstances today, because you and I don't all have the same knowledge. So we disagree actually on what are issues of conscience.

That's the problem. And so there could be something, and you think, I'm thinking right now, like what's a good example? And you could shout out to me and say, oh Matthew, it's easy. Like just, you know, talk about that thing there.

That's a matter of conscience, but it's perfectly fine. And I might hear you say that and say, what? No, that's not fine. How dare you listen to Johnny Cash? I don't listen to Johnny Cash, but anyway.

So that's the challenge in applying this, is that what one person thinks is an issue of conscience, someone else thinks is objective sin. Our second difficulty maybe in reading 1 Corinthians 8 is that the example that Paul has given, he gives a specific example. It doesn't seem to many of us to be immediately relevant, but that may change.

In fact, it is changing in many areas today. In recent years, we have had a significant number of believers from India come to our fellowship. And I was speaking about this issue with an Indian couple recently, good friends of ours.

They were both raised in Christian homes in India, but in totally separate parts of the country. One was raised in an area that does have a lot of Christians, though it's still Hindu, it has a lot of Christians. The other one was raised in another part of the country where it is almost exclusively Hindu, and it's very hard for the Christians.

And so I asked them, does this ever happen? Do you get invitations to things like this? And they say, yeah, because inside the temple precincts of a Hindu temple, it's not just the, they would have like banqueting halls where they're not actually worshipping the idols. So you do get invited, there could be birthday parties there, there could be wedding dinners there. And I said, well, were you told that you should go or not go? And one of them who was raised in that area that was more Christian, he was clearly told that he shouldn't attend anything in the Hindu temple precincts.

And the other partner in that marriage who was raised in another area of the country was told, yes, if you get invited, feel very free to go, then you'd be able to invite them back to a gospel meeting as well. Don't invite a recent Hindu convert to go with you, but yes, you could be free to go to that. So that was them trying to carry out 1 Corinthians 8. It seemed to me they've obviously got a different conscience on the matter.

They're married, working it out very happily, learning from each other. I share that with you just to show people are actually still dealing with this exact issue. It does happen.

Esther and I have had people in our home in recent times who do not eat pork because of the connotation it has and because of their background. Well, 1 Corinthians 8 is telling me it's not crucial, it's not crucial that I make them a believer in the blessing of bacon at my table. I don't need to push that upon them.

So while this particular issue might not be one that we have dealt with specifically, there's other issues that we need to apply it to. The broader principle is this, I need to care about the conscience of my brother and sister. I need to care about the conscience of my brother and sister.

And Christ has loved and died for us for those with a different conscience than me. And we want to apply that cross-shaped love to these brothers and sisters as well. You know, one of the big things about love, 1 Corinthians 13, is that love hopes, love believes all things.

I think the idea in that expression is that love tries to see the good in others' actions. Love assumes a good motive, gives them the benefit of the doubt. Romans 14 is similar, but it's slightly different teaching.

Romans 14 is a Jew-Gentile context, but Romans 14 makes this very important statement. He says, whoever eats, eats for the Lord. And whoever does not eat, it is for the Lord that he does not eat.

So you got, again, the issue of should they eat the meat or not, and one person is going to eat that to the glory of God, and one person says, I cannot eat that because of the glory of God. In other words now, what I'm saying is that we want to recognize that people on the other side of the issue are trying to honor God in their action. Okay, that's what love is assuming, that people on the other side of the issue from me, their motive is to honor God.

So maybe instead of the issue of going to an idol's temple, let me give another example, and I hope this doesn't trigger anyone's PTSD, but just hear what I'm saying. Someone may say, I cannot in good conscience allow the government to impose upon how we meet and fellowship as a church. And someone else could say, I cannot in good conscience profess to worship God while violating his direct command to submit to the authorities.

So believers on both sides, they're motivated by a desire to honor the Lord. And believers on both sides feel pain. You're not the only one who's annoyed because of the other perspective.

They're also annoyed and upset. And those believers that are on the other side that are hurt, 1 Corinthians 8 is reminding us they are brothers and sisters for whom Christ died, and he's put you in the same fellowship. Chapter 12, remember, takes the imagery of the human body.

He says those parts of the body that are weaker are indispensable. And you might be thinking, yeah, I know every believer is valuable and indispensable. I just wish they could be indispensable to another assembly.

But God has put them in your assembly. And when there are believers with different opinions and personalities and those different consciences and they clash with you, it's good. This is something I have found helpful.

It's good for us to think about the things that those believers have done to contribute to the work of God. Give thanks to God for them, ways in which they have served God's people, including you and I. Think of reasons to be thankful for those brothers and sisters. Remind ourselves that a variety of perspectives is actually helpful, and a variety of perspectives can show wonderful devotion to the Lord.

Still true. It's possible to be patient with one another and to try and work through things with one another. We should be able to talk about some of these things.

It's great to be able to talk with one another calmly and listen and shake hands at the end and walk away and pray for them. Or pray for them before you walk away. Joseph Hellerman wrote a book called When the Church Was a Family.

Now, as I give this quote, he's not talking about an abusive church situation. And I'm not saying that there's never a time to leave a local church. I'm not saying that.

But the context of this quotation is how God uses the challenges of life in a church community to shape us and grow us. So I'd like you to think about this quotation and you apply it in your own circumstance in the church you're a part of. He says, people who remain contented with their brothers and sisters in the local church almost always grow in self-understanding and they mature in their ability to relate in healthy ways to God and their fellow human beings.

This is especially the case for those courageous Christians who stick it out through the often messy process of interpersonal discord and conflict resolution. Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay grow.

Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine progress in the Christian life. People who stay grow. I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty about things in your past.

I know I have dealt imperfectly with conflict resolution in my life. Let's think about this going forward though. Don't quickly jump ship from a local assembly just because someone has a different view than you on a secondary or a tertiary issue.

Don't jump ship just because a sister's personality rubs you the wrong way. Stick that out. Learn to love them like Christ loves them.

One of the purposes of a local church is to shape us into the image of Christ and to teach us to love like he does. Christ died for those brothers and sisters who disagree with me. Well, that means that person is worthy of my love and my service.

That's applying the gospel of the cross into the life of the church. Let's come down to verses 9 to 11. Our liberties being limited by our love.

So the big point of this chapter is that my personal behavior is to be controlled not by my rights, not by my knowledge of Christian freedom, but my behavior is to be controlled by my love for my brother and sister for whom Christ died. This is the theme of 1 Corinthians 8 to 10, is love limiting our liberties. That love may limit what conscience permits.

And I know this rubs against us a little bit abrasively because we love our freedoms. We sing that we're in the land of the free. And we sing in Canada, it's the true north strong and free.

We love our freedoms. We love our liberties and we cherish them. It's my right.

And Christ calls us to love our neighbor as ourself. And that's the essence of love is thinking of the good of others. And that's what the Lord Jesus does on the cross, right? I mean, it's all about, it's all about others.

He's putting the needs of others ahead of his own rights. Who had a right to life more than the Lord Jesus? Nobody. And he lays down his right for our blessing.

Now, let me give a little check and balance here because we do need to guard against the teaching of 1 Corinthians 8 being applied unjustly. I know that. There are three statements in verses 9 to 11 that help me to clarify what's actually in mind.

Verse 9, he talks about putting a stumbling block in the way of the weak. That's a big thing, a stumbling block. Verse 10 warns us of the danger of encouraging or emboldening their conscience to do something they think is sin.

Verse 11 speaks of the weak brother being ruined or destroyed or perishing. In other words, my point is these are all serious things. So if my going to a wedding reception at a temple banqueting hall, if that may encourage my former Hindu brother to go with me, but he actually has a conscience against it, and it may even lead to him falling back into idolatrous things that he has left for Christ's sake, it may lead to him committing gross objective sin and suffering real spiritual harm.

So my liberty could ruin that individual's life for Christ. Well that's a very serious thing. I don't want that on my hands.

May the Lord preserve me. That's the sort of thing that 1 Corinthians 8 is dealing with. 1 Corinthians 8 is not saying that every single thing I do in my life has to match everyone else's preferences.

That would be impossible. No one's to take advantage of what I say today and then try to restrict a strong brother or Christian sister to try and restrict their liberty by saying, no, you can't do that anymore. See what he just said? You can't do that because you're going to offend my weak conscience.

You know what that is? That's being a passive, aggressive, manipulative bully. That's what that is. And a lot of Christians have had to deal a lot too much, far too often, with Christian bullies who have abused this and tyrannized them.

Bullies sometimes need to be stood up to. And people who just want things done the same way forever because they're more comfortable with that, well, you don't just get to run the church your way forever. Sorry.

Nor should it be my generation saying, well, we want to take over and run it our way. No. It should never be about running things my way or your way.

We want the timeless principles of Scripture applied to life in today's world. But with that balance, don't let that be a cop-out from you in applying 1 Corinthians 8 and its teaching. Sometimes there's going to be some competing principles, competing objectives, and he's teaching us we want to let love dictate our behavior more than my rights.

And that's following the example of Christ on the cross. He had the right to life. He sacrificed that right out of love.

That's how 1 Corinthians 16, you know, near its very end, I just, in my reading through 1 Corinthians just a little while ago, the Scripture stood out at me again because I forgot it was there. He says, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong, do everything in love. Do everything in love.

So a striking thing about this chapter is that Paul doesn't seem to be overly concerned about who is right and who is wrong. He doesn't put much emphasis on that. His concern is the unity of the church, the spiritual welfare of the weak Christian.

Knowledge puffs up, love builds up. He's saying, I'm more interested in your loving consideration of one another than your knowledge. So very often the issue at hand isn't the big issue.

It's how we deal with that issue with one another. It's not just the issue, but it's how we interact about that issue. So I'll touch on this one because I have no idea whether this is an issue here or not, so I'm not getting at anybody.

One family may think it is entirely unconscionable to allow their children to go trick-or-treating. You know, there's all these ghosts and wizards and all these crazy things, and you should have nothing to do with that. It's all about death and gore.

And another family says, no, I'm just going to dress my daughter up as a princess. It's harmless fun. She's going to get candy that's going to last her for the next 10 conferences, and it's really a stewardship of our funds for the Lord.

So now you may feel that there's a right or a wrong on that issue. I'm not making light of that, honestly, but my point is that the bigger, immediate issue is how you relate to each other about that. The bigger threat to the gospel is not actually the existence of Halloween in the culture.

The bigger threat to the gospel is whether the church is going to divide over it. That's the issue. By this will everyone know that you are my disciples.

If you all have the same view on Halloween, no, but if you love one another. So there are going to be issues of life that not everybody in my local assembly shares the identical viewpoint. Hopefully we can talk about some of those things calmly, some of these practical issues of life, but what is crucial is that we love one another through it.

Now, you know, Paul is so ordered and brilliant and inspired by the Holy Spirit and how he writes these things. So this is chapter eight. In first Corinthians chapter nine, he takes the same principle of love limiting our liberties and he then applies that to his gospel outreach.

So he says, I have become all things to all people. I adapt so that I may by every means possible save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel so that I may share in its blessings.

Andy Naselli and J.D. Crowley have a very helpful book on the conscience, how to train it, what it is, how to train it and how to love those who differ. Notice what they say. This is very good.

The Bible gives clear evidence that God intends the little clashes of culture in your local church to get you ready for the really difficult clashes of culture in missions and evangelism. The little clashes of culture in our local church are to prepare us for the big clashes that we encounter in missions and evangelism. They say the church is supposed to be the laboratory, but there are so many Christians in America that have the luxury of dividing up into smaller and smaller subsets so that we can be part of a church where members hold very few uncomfortable differences of opinion on matters of conscience.

No, flexibility in church life gets us ready for flexibility in missions. That's good. That's true.

Our unity of conviction regarding God, our Father and the Lord Jesus, verses four to six. Our variety of knowledge and conscience, verses seven to eight, our diversity. Verses nine to eleven, our liberties limited by love, verses 11 and 12, viewing my brother and sister in relation to Christ and his cross.

He doesn't just say the weak person. He doesn't just say this weak person, the brother or sister. No, he says the weak person, the brother or sister for whom Christ died.

With all of their foibles and lack of intelligence, they're precious to Christ. He gave his life for them. Will I sacrifice a freedom for them? I know that's easier, much easier to say than to practice.

That's when it's good for us to remember, you know, the cross wasn't easy for the Lord Jesus either. That was not an easy thing that he went through. And the truth is, I don't think I can remotely approach that Christ-like love without really appreciating that Christ has died for me with all of my sins.

You see, when it's hard for me, when it's hard for me to love someone and I'm feeling like they really don't deserve my love, that's when I should think about Romans 5 and 8, that God has proven his love towards us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. I didn't deserve mercy or love. So to practice the gospel of the cross in my life, I need to appreciate the gospel of the cross.

Remember, we never graduate from Golgotha. We never get beyond our need for the cross. The cross, 1 Corinthians says, is the wisdom of God.

That's where we start. That's where we make our progress. And that gospel of the cross needs to be worked out in my life and in our church fellowship.

And it takes the love of Christ within me. So Christ has attached himself to that weak brother or sister. He identifies himself with his people.

And when I sin against them, I've sinned against my Savior. The flip side of that is this. When I show love to them and I serve them, that is showing love and service to Christ.

Because Christ identifies himself with his people. And when you patiently love your brother and sister through their weakness and their annoyances to you, I think the Lord Jesus is delighted. It's like he's saying, yes, now you're finally getting it.

You're loving as I have loved you. Let me suggest a practical step here to help us in carrying this out. If there is someone in your local church fellowship who does sort of rub you the wrong way, who thinks very differently from you, ask yourself this question.

Would I rather that brother or sister leave the fellowship? And I suspect your answer is no. So how can I show love? How can you show love to them that will encourage them to stay with you? How can you honor Christ by honoring them? And another thing, maybe maybe as I speak these words today, maybe you're like me and you say this. This is getting to me.

I'm I'm not sure I've done this very well. I'm feeling a little bit guilty. Well, here I am stressing that Christ has died for your brothers or sisters.

Let's also remember that First Corinthians 15 says Christ died for our sins, our sins. So, yes, we have come short of the standard of Christ's love, but the Lord Jesus has died for our falling short. Surely we are all more sinful than we realized and we are all more loved than we would have ever hoped.

We're more sinful than we could have realized, but we are more loved than we would have ever hoped. And the Lord Jesus is teaching us patiently. Remember our words from this morning, how he welcomes us and he's patient with us and he disciples us.

There's nothing as liberating as the gospel. Not only am I liberated from that guilt and shame and sin, the gospel liberates me to love people freely, can love them with the love of Christ in my heart. Let me learn more of it, because when we show the beauty of the gospel in this way, when we love one another.

We are showcasing to the world that we belong to Christ. By this will all men know that you are my disciples. If you have love one for another.