Unity…Liberty…and Love

Do you remember our study on legalism and license? All of us have certain tendencies and lean certain ways. If we’re not careful, our assets can become liabilities. What we perceive as strength can actually be weakness. 

Some of us lean more towards legalism, and some of us lean more towards license. But if you remember, there is a third way—love. God wants to release us from the never-ending back-and-forth tug-o-war between legalism and license by calling us to simply walk in love.

Romans 14:13 says, “Therefore let us not judge one another anymore, but rather resolve this, not to put a stumbling block or a cause to fall in our brother’s way.” The entirety of Romans 14 helps us understand what it means to willingly limit our liberty for the sake of love. We can set aside what we have a right to so that we do not provoke others to stumble or tempt them to fall. Rather than making a list of what’s right and wrong in disputable matters, Paul simply calls us all to love and personal responsibility.

There is an old saying that goes: in essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity (or as we would say, love). Think about it—in the essentials, it is important to have unity because there are boundaries to the core components of Christianity. In the non-essentials (the disputable matters), it is important to understand that there is liberty and personal conviction that can vary. 

But in everything, there ought to be love. We should receive one another—not to argue or to judge—but to love and to serve. We should be ready to lay down our liberty and our very lives as well—all out of love for one another.