149 - Loving the Weaker Christian [B]

Loving the Weaker Christian
Romans 14:1-4

Tonight we're starting Romans 14. Chapters 14 down through 15:13 is the last major section in Romans. After that we have the conclusion and final salutations. This section that we're dealing with now is a specific problem that Paul addressed coming out of a discussion in chapter 13 where he began to talk about the believer's responsibility to honor government and to love others. Actually this begins in chapter 12. I just want to take us back there for a second.

In chapter 12 we have the summary opening for this last section. It covers chapters 12, 13, 14 and part of 15. Paul gives a command, "I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service." The word there for service is latreia, which indicates our personal worship. The focus is that we are saved for a purpose and that is to glorify God. We are saved for a reason and that is to grow to spiritual maturity and to reflect the character of Jesus Christ in our lives. Ultimately that is demonstrated when we love one another as Christ as loved us.

As we go through and as I've outlined the ten spiritual skills that we develop in the Christian life, those that represent that maturity concern love. One is our personal love for God the Father because that is ultimately the motivator behind our advance into maturity. Our impersonal or unconditional love for one another is second because that is a reflection of a mature grace orientation. We love others, especially those in the body of Christ, as Christ has loved us. That takes a tremendous amount of spiritual maturity.

The Old Testament command in Leviticus 19:18 was to love our neighbor as yourself. Notice the focal point in the Old Testament was to love a neighbor. Now it is to love one another. But there is a certain parallelism there because within the concept of the Torah a neighbor was another member of the covenant community of Israel, assumed to be a believer. But the standard of comparison in that command was as you love yourself.

The Bible assumes that every human being is a self-lover. This is the orientation of the sin nature. We're self-absorbed and we're born, coming out of the womb, loving ourselves and developing an expertise in loving ourselves from the moment that we are born. No one ever hates their own flesh, as Paul states in Ephesians 5 so that shows once again that the world system and the psychological orientation that the world has, is that people have problems because they have a low self-image. No, they don't have a low self-image. They have a problem because they think too highly of themselves and because of that they're disappointed in their failures. Because they're disappointed in their failures they make it sound as if they hate themselves but the Bible says no flesh hates himself. The Biblical truth that helps us cut through all the psychological mumbo-jumbo is that everyone has a basic orientation of self-love. That's the pattern that we see in the Old Testament.

In the New Testament Jesus said that we're to love one another as He has loved us. Jesus is the pattern for our love for one another so this is the mark in John 13: 34-35, the mark of a Christian. This is how you'll know that you are a disciple, which is a Christian who has decided to learn and apply the Word of God in his life. Not all Christians are disciples but all true disciples are Christians. Becoming a disciple is an additional step or stage or phase as we begin to grow spiritually. We come to understand that the challenge before us as a member of the family of God is to grow to maturity.

In Romans 12 Paul introduces that we are to serve God. Part of serving God means we are going to put His will over our will. Whether you feel like that's a sacrifice or not, that's determined by Scripture to be a sacrifice. Instead of living for our self we're living for God. That's Romans 12:1. In order to do that Romans 12:2 states that we're not to be conformed to this world. The word there is not kosmos but it is the word aion which indicates the age, the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. When we think in terms of the spirit of the age then we're thinking in terms of self-absorption and self-love. So we're not to be conformed to this world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

Notice it's not the renewing of our emotions. It's not the renewing of our liturgy. It's not the renewal of our ritual. It's the renewal of our mind. Again and again in Scripture the emphasis is on how we think. If we think the wrong way we're going to live the wrong way. We're challenged to think according to the Scripture. The problem that we'll see tonight with some immature Christians is that they don't know how to think. They don't have Biblical knowledge in their soul. But Biblical knowledge is not an end in and of itself. Biblical knowledge or information is simply a means to spiritual growth. We are to learn the Word of God so that God the Holy Spirit can use it in our lives to challenge us in terms of how we live.

The first stage is sitting where you are or sitting out in the internet area, live streaming, or listening to some sort of recording. As you're listening you're learning the Word of God. If you're in fellowship God the Holy Spirit is helping you to understand it and apply it in your life. He doesn't apply it for you. Your volition has to come into effect again. You have to choose to apply what you've learned. It's only when we choose to apply what we've learning under the power of the Holy Spirit, walking by the Spirit, the Spirit uses that in terms of producing spiritual maturity and spiritual growth in our lives.

We're transformed by the renewing of our mind as we take in the Word of God and we get rid of the garbage in our soul from all the things we learn from the world system, from our peers, and from others prior to our justification. After we're saved as we're sanctified it comes as a result of walking by the Spirit and letting the Word of God fill up our thinking and fill up our soul. The result is that by application we demonstrate that which is good and acceptable and is the complete will of God. That's the starting point. That's the preface to this next section.

Then Paul focuses on spiritual gifts. He talks about the fact that we are part of the body of Christ. We're all members in one body. It's important to remember that. We're members in one body. We're different but we're all unified, united together in the body of Christ. This is what took place at the instant we were saved when we were placed into union with Christ, 1 Corinthians 12:13. That sets us up in terms of being one body.

1 Corinthians 12 also tells us that we're members of one another. Now that's very important because as Americans who have come out of a tradition of a strong heritage of rugged individualism with a strong emphasis on individual responsibility and autonomy, we have a hard time understanding the concept of this integrated body that is the body of Christ. We are members of one another. There is a certain interdependence in the body of Christ where we don't function autonomously. This is the brilliance of using the body imagery. One person may be an eye. Another may be a nose. Another may be a hand or a foot. Each individual part has an important function but that function is not independent of the function of all of the other parts. There's this interdependency that takes place in the body of Christ. We are all members of one body and members of one another. Romans 12:5 states that as well.

Next there's a list of some of the spiritual gifts. Then in Romans 12:9 Paul shifts his thinking again to the principle of love for one another. He describes the characteristics of love. Romans 12:10 says, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love in honor giving preference to one another." He sets up those various "one another" commands several times in that section. This is further developed by showing that loving one another has to do with submission to authority, which we covered in the first part of Romans 13.

Then he comes to loving your neighbor. Part of our love for one another has to do with our submission to authority because to submit to authority you have to have humility. Humility is always related to love for one another. You can't very well love someone if you're self-absorbed and arrogant so there's a connection there. The long section dealing with love for one another, in Romans 13:9-12 is on the front side of the section dealing with submission to authority and then in the section following verse 7, Paul again refers to loving one another and what that means. The section dealing with government is bracketed by the section on loving one another. So that section is also part of the illustration of what it means to love one another and to carry that out in genuine integrity.

It concludes in terms of a reminder of how we are to walk in Romans 13:11-14 which all leads to this section we're beginning to study now focusing on some specific issues and some specific conflicts in the body of Christ. It's inevitable that we're going to have differences of opinion and that we're going to run into personal conflicts with the body of Christ. There's one reason for it and that's sin. We're all sinners and because we're self-absorbed we're going to get out of fellowship and we're going to come to certain issues with different viewpoints.

Now there are issues that are absolute issues that we can't compromise on at all. Those are issues related to first of all, salvation. Salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. Salvation does not involve any works, whether put on the front side like someone who says we need to believe and be baptized or if someone says you need to believe and join a particular denomination or you need to believe and do certain good works. Or it comes on the reverse side where people say that if you say you're saved and you don't have works that are in keeping with faith, if you don't have the right kind of works that qualify or give evidence of faith, then you didn't have the right kind of faith to begin with. That's called lordship salvation.

I bet there's not a person in this room who hasn't at one time or another, for some of you it may have been many, many years ago when you were a young believer, looked at someone and said, "How in the world can that person claim to be a Christian when they've done such and such? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they vote like that? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they are a socialist? How in the world can that person be a Christians when they are anti-Israel? How in the world can that person be a Christian when they commit flagrant immorality?" And yet the reality in Scripture is that what we do, whatever sins we have, whether they're sins of belief because we're committed to wrong belief systems, whether they're overt sins of murder, violent assault or whatever, whether they're sins of the tongue like gossip and slander, maligning of whether it's just a mental attitude sin of anger, resentment or any of those things, it doesn't matter. Jesus Christ paid for every single sin on the cross.

That means sin isn't the issue when we're evangelizing people. We don't say, "You need to believe in Jesus and clean up your life." You can't clean up your life. Only the Holy Spirit can. That's what comes after salvation. You just need to believe on Jesus Christ. Someone will say, "Does that mean that I can continue to sin with impunity?" That's a nasty way to put it but yes you can. Sin was paid for at the cross. Once you become a believer in Christ, you're going to be in the family of God. God promises in Hebrews 12 that He is going to bring discipline on anyone that is a member of His family. So sooner or later God will get involved and start straightening you out. But it's not the evangelist's job to straighten you out. It's not the pastor's job to straighten you out. It's not other believer's job to straighten you out although there's always a responsibility in the body of Christ to encourage and admonish one another. That's done in appropriate contexts. Sooner or later God's going to get ahold of you if you're a believer in Christ, then God's going to discipline you.

You can't compromise on the gospel at all. Another thing we can't compromise on is the spiritual life. The spiritual life is also based upon the grace principle. You don't do anything to earn God's blessing. That's one of the most important things we can get our hands around. It's so common in Christian circles today to hear people use blessing in a lot of different ways. As a greeting they say "God bless you." When they answer the phone or say goodbye to someone they say, "God bless you." They use it so much it's become meaningless. A lot of people have the idea that if they're obedient to God's Word, then He will bless them. That's a works blessing system. What Scripture teaches is that we are not blessed because of what we do. We are blessed because of what Christ did on the cross.

When we're saved, we're not saved because of anything good on our part. We're saved because of what Christ did on the cross and His righteousness is given to us. When God sees that we have Christ's righteousness, He justifies us and regenerates us because we have Christ's righteousness, not because of anything good in us. After salvation He blesses us on the basis of our possession of Christ's righteousness. If we are disobedient, then God will withhold blessing because it might destroy us.

An interesting example of this is let's say you're the proud father of a newborn son. You want everything in the world for your son. You have pretty good financial resources and you go out and buy him a Lamborghini and you put it in his name and it's going to be his when he comes of age at eighteen or you may put a stipulation in there that when's he's an adult or whatever. When he's old enough to appreciate it and properly utilize it then you will give it to him. Is it his when he's three years old? Yes. Are you going to give it to him? No, because he will hurt himself and a lot of other people with it. Are you going to give it to him when he's twelve? No, because he's not mature enough to properly handle it. Is it his? Yes, it's his. It was given to him because of his identity as a member of the family but it's not put into his activated possession until he's mature enough to where it doesn't destroy him.

God is not blessing us because we're obedient. He's blessing us and He's already blessed us with all the heavenly blessing [Ephesians 1:3]. He's only going to distribute them when we show enough maturity to handle the blessing. He's going to hold back because if He gives it too soon, it will become a problem for us. So this is grace. We can't fudge on grace at salvation. We can't fudge on grace in terms of sanctification.

The issue in this passage is that when it comes to the Christian life there are some issues that are definitely moral. There are some issues that are definitely immoral. But there are some things that aren't quite moral or immoral. They are neutral. They're not prohibited in Scripture. They're not commanded in Scripture. They're just somewhere in-between. A term that Paul uses when we get into Romans 14 is "doubtful things". In Romans 14:1 we read, "Receive one who is weak in the faith but not to disputes over doubtful things." So he's saying here that we are to receive or accept the one who is weak in the faith but we're not to get involved in arguments that don't go anywhere, that are non-productive, over these doubtful things.

The only point I want to make now is that there's a category of doubtful things. Things that are neither approved of nor disapproved of in Scripture. So how do we handle these things? It may surprise you but there are some Christians who are really opinionated. They have very firm opinions about whether or not Christians ought to do or not do some of these things. It's just amazing. I grew up in a background that was fairly grace oriented. I didn't know anyone who held to any sort of legalism in their background. That's usually a phrase that's used even though it's not always understood or used well.

It always surprised me when I ran into some folks that had come from this kind of background. This happened when I was in high school. I looked at these people like I was looking at someone with a third eye or a horn between their ears or something. It was very strange. Gordon Whitelock who was the founder and director of Camp Peniel had gone through Moody Bible Institute with a man whose name was Nelson Miles who was the President of Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music which was reduced to an acronym called GRSBM. It was a school that was part of a denomination known as GARB, the Greater Association of Regular Baptists.

That's one of several conservative Baptist denominations that originated in the North from the Northern Baptist denomination prior to the American War of Northern Aggression, as I always refer to it. There was a split in the denominations over the issue of slavery. Northern Christians did not want their mission money supporting someone who came out of a southern Christian church as a missionary. They thought their money would become soiled by supporting someone who might have been connected to slave owners. So this reached pretty virulent proportions in the late 1840's and 50's. All the major denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, all split north and south. So you have the Southern Baptists and the Northern Baptists.

Now the Northern Baptists denomination went liberal fairly early, by the mid-1880s they were already having legitimate heresy trials of seminary professors who had slipped completely into 19^th century liberalism. They denied the inerrancy and infallibility of Scripture. They denied the virgin birth, the miracles of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, the Resurrection, and they denied the literal, future coming of Christ. That was just about the essence of where they focused the battle lines. That became known as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. In the North you had more and more of these modernist beliefs filtered down into the local churches.

There were a number of groups that split off from the late 1920s to the 1930s. One of them was the Conservative Baptist Association. They aren't very big here in the south. One of the founders of the Conservative Association was Pastor Thieme's father-in-law. He started that out of church in Tucson, Arizona. The GARB were the same way. They had a lot of rules and they still do. You couldn't watch TV, except for Gomer Pyle and one or two other shows. There were even bad new shows censored. Now in light of the 150 channels on TV, we might not think that's such a bad idea. But back then when you only had black-and-white ABC, CBS, and NBC and educational networks, that seemed kind of extreme that you couldn't watch most of the shows on TV. You couldn't go to the movies. If you went out on a date, a chaperone had to go with you and you couldn't get within 6" of each other and many, many other rules.

Well, these kids would come down to Texas and go to Camp Peniel as counselors. Most of the counselors came out of Houston and came out of churches influenced by Dallas Theological Seminary and Pastor Thieme and were grace oriented. On Saturday night, which was our night off, we fell in a car and went to a drive-in in Austin or somewhere and see a movie. These kids had never seen a movie before. It was culture shock for them. There was a bit of a culture shock for us because we'd never met legalists before. By the end of the summer they'd gotten pretty grace-oriented. They kind of liked all this ability to do things but this has always been a problem in the history of Christianity because from the very beginning, you had people who didn't really understand all the significance of the cross in paying for our sins and they added certain kinds of things as absolutes in terms of how Christians should live and what they should do or not do. They would make absolutes out of things that are doubtful, things that weren't clearly stated in the Scripture.

This has its history as we studied in Acts. Turn with me to Acts 15. This was one of the first problems, if not the first major problems, that the apostles in the early Church had to deal with. I want you to notice that the issue that was coming up was what should we do about these Gentiles. They've been unclean for centuries. They do all of these unclean things. They eat unclean food. How can we let them fellowship together with us? What are we going to do about these Gentiles? So they had a meeting among the apostles that we refer to as the Jerusalem council described here. Look at Acts 15:6, "The apostles and elders came together to consider the matter." That means they wanted to think it through Biblically and rationally. I want you to notice something here. They don't come together and pray, "Lord give us revelation as to what we should do." See, that's how lots of modern evangelicals would go about it in a completely wrong way. God's not going to all of a sudden turn on a light in your head or give you a new revelation to answer the problems that you face. He wants us to think through the issues in our life on the basis of the doctrine that's in our soul.

This is one thing I love about the Jerusalem council. This is exactly what the apostles did. They don't get a new word of revelation even though these guys still had the revelatory gifts available to them. But God was showing them that this wasn't going to be the normative procedure for decision making in the Christian life. Decision making in the Christian life comes from putting your thinking cap on in terms of Scripture and getting into the Word and thinking it through in terms of the circumstances of your life. So they had a great discussion.

In Acts 15:17 we read, "There had been much dispute." So they were going after it. They were arguing both sides of the issue, back and forth, and after there had been much dispute Peter rose up and gives a summary of what had happened. In this he rehearses what happened when he took the gospel to the Gentiles with Cornelius back in chapters 10 and 11 and he reminds them that God who knows the heart acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit just as He did to us. When the Gentiles believed we see in Acts 11 that they received the Holy Spirit. They didn't have to do anything. They didn't have to change. They didn't have to get circumcised. They didn't have to submit to the Mosaic Law. They didn't have to do anything else. It was faith alone and at that instant God gave them the Holy Spirit just as did to the Jewish believers.

Peter goes on to say, "He made no distinction between us and them purifying their hearts by faith." Then he hit them between the eyes saying, "Therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke [the Mosaic Law was too controlling for those who didn't have the Holy Spirit] on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they." That Jew and Gentile are both saved by faith alone in Christ alone. Notice it's both based on grace.

All of this we're going to study in Romans 14 and 15 is related to understanding grace and what it means to be gracious to others who may have different opinions in areas that are not important. It may even be that you're right and they're wrong but they're wrong because they lack knowledge, they lack training, they lack instruction. So we're going to learn how a more mature believer, identified as a strong believer, is to exercise and show his love for a weaker brother, a weaker believer. Now when it came to the end of the council they basically made a summary statement which is given to us in Acts 15:19 when James says, "Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood." Now the reason they're asking that is not because it's inherent to the spiritual life. The reason they're saying that is because this was a cultural problem for the Jews and if they're going to have peace and harmony in the synagogue then let's not practice things that are going to get our fellow believers all upset when they don't quite understand all of the issues. So these things did not have to do with absolutes but with things that are relative. It's an aspect of loving one another.

Now let's go back to Romans 14. This chapter begins with a command, "Receive one who is weak in the faith." In other words there's a tendency and I know no one here would ever do this when mature believers are around someone who doesn't quite understand things the way you do and who might be immature in their faith and they might be a little legalistic and we just don't want to associate with them because we want to relax and enjoy life the way we understand it. We don't want to put up with these little sniveling babies running around. You know they're always messing in their spiritual diapers and we don't want to have to clean up the mess.

Paul addresses this and he's addressing mature believers. He says, "Receive the one who is weak in the faith." This word for receive means not just accept them and let them sit in church. Sure we're going to let them come and sit in church and hopefully they'll get straightened out but we're not going to invite them over for fried chicken either because we'll have a glass of wine and we don't want to be worried about them. The word has the further idea of accepting someone into your company or your fellowship. Now look at Romans 14:3, "Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat." So the one who eats is the mature believer. He understands that this issue with the dietary law is not that big of a problem. He may just get really upset and irritated with the immature believer who is trying to make an issue out of the dietary law.

I get the sense from these commands that there was definitely a group, sort of a clique, within the Roman Church that knew they were mature and understood their freedom and they didn't want to be bothered by these messy little immature believers who want to get involved in some kind of legalism. So the first thing Paul says is to receive the one who is weak because apparently they weren't receiving them. This should be an ongoing thing. It's a present imperative indicating this should be an ongoing action.

Then he gives a prohibition in verse three, "Let not him who eats despise him who does not eat and let him who does not eat judge him who eats for God has received him." That word for receive here is the same word as before, proslambano. God has accepted him into fellowship meaning eternal fellowship, our union with Christ forever. So if God has accepted this little whining, messy, legalistically baby believer who hasn't learned very much yet, so should we. Don't let the fact that he's a bit of a problem to deal with be a reason why you don't have fellowship with him and accept him.

Now this is an important principle to understand for a small church. A lot of us have known each other for a long time. Some of us have known each other too long, maybe. I've known some of you since…I can't remember when I didn't know some of you. We've known each other since I was an infant and maybe some here were infants as well. So we've known each other a very long time. We have a lot of history together. It's typical in churches where you have people who really like and enjoy one another's fellowship to sort of develop little cliques. You enjoy the people that you know and ones you spend a lot of time with but as a church and as a congregation we constantly have new people to come into the church.

I'm not jumping on the congregation because you haven't done this but just as a reminder, most of the time this congregation is very welcoming of new people and you accept new people very well. You're very gracious and generous in that respect. I think there's a few cases here and there were some haven't been that way on occasion but not as a norm. That's also understandable but we need to recognize as a small church we don't want to run into sort of the syndrome of a small town, where you just have a few cliques. Everyone knew each other and anyone that's new has to be there for ten or fifteen years before they're considered to be part of the church.

My first church down in LaMarque had that syndrome. The mean age in that church, including all the bed babies and the nursery was 58 years of age. There was a huge gap right in the middle of the congregation. From 35 to 55 there were three couples and that's because ten years before I became the pastor the church had split. The people that were all 60 and older weren't willing to relinquish the power and the control they'd had in that church for 30 years to their children. The pastor had been the pastor for 40 years and he'd retired in 1974 and this older group were still in lockstep. They weren't going to open up to anyone new even though many of them were their own children. A huge split occurred and everyone from about 25 to 45 left. That's why when I got there no one attended between the ages of 35 and 55 except these three couples, two of whom had come to the church since the split. There was a terrible example of this sort of clannishness and cliquishness.

That was bad enough I won't even go into the really fun story of my very first candidating at the first church I went to. Talk about clannish. It was in the heart of Cajun country. It was so Cajun that one of the deacons was like Amos Moses. His left arm was gone clean up to the elbow and his son had to translate into French the questions and answers during the interview. That was an extremely clannish church. I've spoken in a lot of churches over the last 40 years and without exception, I've been invited out for coffee or lunch. I went to that church in Oppolusa, Louisiana and I stood at the backdoor. Everyone filed out and went and got in their cars. I didn't even know where the closest Popeye's was so I didn't even know where to go for lunch. It was so clannish.

That's one thing we need to avoid, any kind of appearance of excluding new people, especially if they may not come from a similar background that we have. That's what Paul is addressing here. "Receive the one who is weak in the faith." Now this word weak is one of my favorite words to do a word study on. It's one of the first words I ever really got into in terms of doing an in-depth word study. This is the Greek word astheno in the verb form. The "a" at the beginning is like our English negative prefix "un". It negates the main root. The root means strength so this is someone without strength which means they're weak. Now word meaning do not derive from their etymology. When people do that it's called an etymological fallacy. Word meanings come from usage. This word has two primary uses and it's really interesting how they play out in Scripture. It means to be weak in a physical sense in the sense of an illness. This is used about 80% of the time the word astheneo is used in the gospels and Acts. Jesus is healing those who are sick. But there are a few examples in the New Testament when Jesus says "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" it's not talking about sickness there. He's talking about a spiritual inability. So there are a few examples where the word emphasizes a spiritual weakness, not a physical weakness.

When you get into the epistles and start looking at how the word is used in Romans all the way through Jude, it reverses its primary connotation. About 20% of the uses refer to physical illness, maybe not even that many. It usually refers to spiritual weakness, spiritual inability, someone who's really struggling in the spiritual life. They just want to give up and fade out. They're not persevering. This is a major concept in the epistle of James. So the second meaning is to be spiritually weak in the sense of being weary of obedience as in James 5:14.

If you're familiar with the James passage, this is a passage that usually stumps a lot of people when they read it because it just doesn't seem to make sense to them. It seems to be talking about healing. In James 5:13 we read, "Is anyone among you suffering?" That sounds like someone who's ill. Later in the next verse he says, "Is anyone among you sick?" That word for sick is this word. To translate it sick, means the translator interpreted the word for us. If he was translating correctly, he would have said "Is anyone among you weak?" Then he would leave it up to the reader to discover whether he's talking about weak physically or weak spiritually so immediately we're slanted in the direction of talking about physical illness.

It's actually not talking about physical illness at all. That would be like James is talking about cooking apples all the way through to James 5:12 and then all the sudden he switches and starts talking about how to prepare a prime rib roast. It doesn't fit the context. He's been talking perseverance in times of spiritual testing. The problem here is a person who's so spiritually weary that they want to fade out. So James 5:13 says, "Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing songs. Is anyone among you weary or weak? Let him call for the elders of the church."

Now this is written long before the pastoral epistles. It's probably the first epistle written in the New Testament. I think that word presbuteros there should simply be mature Christians, not an elder in a sense of an office. "Let him call for the mature ones of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil." In some denominations they go and get oil and they will anoint someone because they're sick. That's supposed to heal them.

It reads like an unconditional promise. It says, "And the prayer of faith will save the sick." That's how James 5:15 is translated so this is an absolute promise. How many people here have prayed for someone who was sick with cancer, leukemia or some kind of fatal illness and may have even anointed them with oil and yet that person died? The answer you get from the healing charismatics is that you didn't have the right kind of faith, faith like a child. I always ask, "Really?"

When I was born my mother had polio. She contracted polio two months before I was born. I never knew my mother to walk. She was in a wheelchair. She was in an iron lung because the polio had advanced to where it had paralyzed her diaphragm and her ability to breathe on her own. So they would put polio patients into this contraption that would breathe for them. Somehow it had a mechanism on it that would pressure on their diaphragm that would push in and then release and push in and then release to help and enable them to breathe. Those ladies who are here who have gone through natural childbirth know that one of the things required of them is to push. You have to have diaphragm muscles and abdominal muscles to push. My mother didn't have any. This was really a remarkable situation because they basically would pull her out and trying to get me out at the same time.

I remember when I was a little boy my mother had these braces that would hook into holes into her shoes and she would put these braces on her legs and these crutches and she did this physical therapy for years until I was nine or ten, thinking that somehow this would reenergize these muscles. I became a believer when I was six years old and I would pray every night that my mother would walk again. I think when I was six, seven, eight, nine, and ten I had the faith of a child. I believed God could do it. No qualifications entered my mind from Scripture or anything like that. I didn't know about this promise. I just believed God could do it.

That's not what this is talking about and that's not a promise we have in Scripture. This is talking about the fact that if you're struggling spiritually and you are weak in the faith then you're to call for mature believers who can pray over you. The word for anointing with oil is an interesting word here. It's the word aletho. Now there are two words for anointing in Greek. Aletho and kreo. Kreo is the word from which we get our word Christos, the anointed one, the word for Messiah. That is a ceremonial ritual term. This is the term aletho. Every morning when you ladies get up, you go and wash your face, you anoint your face with various creams. Some men do that as well. You don't have to do that so much in Houston because we're in such a humid climate it keeps all of the woman just looking young. But if you go to the Middle East where it's an exceptionally dry climate, everyone would put oil on as part of their daily toiletry in order to take care of their skin. This was the normative thing.

Remember in Matthew 6 Jesus tells the disciples that when you fast, don't be like the Pharisees and go around looking like you're fasting, but anoint yourself so that when you're out no one knows you're fasting. They can't look at you and say, "That guy's fasting. He hasn't had a shower in a while. He smells bad. He looks bad. He must be fasting. He's miserable." No, Jesus says to anoint yourself.

This has to do with the fact that in the situation here the person who is weary in their spiritual struggle is depressed. They're down. If you've ever struggled with depression, sometimes you don't want to get out of bed in the morning and when you do, you don't want to go take a shower or do anything. You just feel like you have a heavy weight on yourself so you don't want to do those things. This is very practical advice. The elders are to pray over him and then he's to go take a shower.

I remember going through some tough times at one point in my life and one of my seminary professors would call me every morning and say, "Did you have a good breakfast? Did you take your walk this morning?" That's this kind of advice. You need to do those things every day and that will physically help you to get through them. That's all that's being said here. And then the prayer of faith will save or lift up or strengthen the one who is weary and the Lord will lift him up and if he has committed sins he will be forgiven. If sin has entered into his life because he's failed in times of testing, then this prayer is appropriate. This is the background for understanding this particular word. In Romans 14:2-3 this refers to someone who is weak spiritually and immature. It's used that way in 1 Corinthians 8:11-12 as well. So we are to receive the one who is weak in the faith. That is, they don't know enough doctrine to know the truth so they're operating on a false set of standards. Now we're going to come back next time and get into this in a little more detail to understand how we are supposed to handle this sort of person and what the issues are for us.