In the church at Rome, one Christian ate everything on the table without a second thought. Another ate only vegetables, unwilling to risk meat that might have touched something unclean. One treated every day alike, and another set certain days apart as holy. Neither position was reckless, and both grew out of devotion. Both sides, Paul saw, had begun treating the other as a problem to be corrected in place of a brother to be welcomed.
1"welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions." The word behind "welcome" means to take someone fully into your own circle, your own home, your own life. Paul asks them to receive each other as God has already received them both.
3"God has welcomed him." Two sins are named, aimed in opposite directions. The one with more freedom looks down on the one with less, contempt dressed up as confidence. The one with less freedom condemns the one with more, judgment dressed up as conviction. Both make the same mistake. Both act as though God's welcome needed a second opinion.
4"Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?" The picture is a household slave, and the absurdity would have been obvious to any first-century reader. Correcting a servant who belongs to another house and answers to another master was already a breach of manners. How much more when the master is God. 4"the Lord is able to make him stand." Whether this brother's convictions look weak or strong from where you sit, keeping him standing was never your job.
One thing unites the eater and the abstainer, the day-keeper and the day-ignorer. 6"The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord." The one who eats and the one who abstains both act in honor of the Lord and both give thanks to God. The practices differ and the aim is the same. Both are trying to honor the same Lord with the convictions they hold, and sincerity aimed at God deserves more credit than either side has been giving the other.
Then Paul widens the lens as far as it goes. 7"none of us lives to himself." 8"we are the Lord's." Every argument over food and calendars shrinks next to that claim. Christ died and lived again to be Lord of the dead and of the living. The cross and the resurrection aimed at ownership, total and complete, over everyone who belongs to Christ, whichever side of these small disputes they land on.
The question presses on us: 10"Why do you pass judgment on your brother?" Paul adds a verse of Isaiah, that every knee shall bow to God. That text was spoken about God alone, and Paul applies it without hesitation to the judgment seat every believer will stand before. 12"each of us will give an account of himself to God." On that day the question will be whether we ourselves belonged, honestly and wholly, to the Lord both of us served.
Who is the brother you have been keeping under review? Give him back to his Master, and welcome him.
Prayer
Father, we have too often played judge over convictions that were never ours to rule on, and welcomed with conditions people you welcomed outright. Thank you that Christ died and rose to be Lord of us both, the weak and the strong, whichever we are on a given day. Teach us to receive one another as you have received us, and to give our own account and not someone else's. In Jesus' name, amen.