13 Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister. 14 I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean. 15 If your brother or sister is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy someone for whom Christ died. 16 Therefore do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil. 17 For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, 18 because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and receives human approval.

Paul is writing to a church that is arguing about food. Some believers in Rome ate anything. Others kept to vegetables, or treated certain days as sacred, because their conscience would not let them do otherwise. Both groups were sure they were right. Both were looking down on the other — the free ones thinking the careful ones were small-minded, the careful ones thinking the free ones were careless with God.

Paul does not settle the food question by picking a side. He does something else. He tells them to stop.

"Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another."

That word "therefore" points back to what he has just said: each of us will give an account of ourselves to God. The judging seat is occupied. It is not ours. So the first thing to do is get off it.

But he does not leave the sentence there. He gives them something to do instead.

"Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of a brother or sister."

Notice the shift. We stop making decisions about each other and start making one about ourselves. That is the only decision left to us. And it is a real decision. "Make up your mind" is deliberate. You settle it in advance, before the moment comes, not in the heat of the moment when you already want to win.

Then Paul says something surprising. He agrees with the free ones.

"I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself."

He is not neutral on the question. He thinks the food rules are finished. He says so plainly, and he says he is fully persuaded. This is not a maybe.

Then he adds a sentence that changes what to do with it.

"But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean."

Being right does not tell you what to do next. Paul holds two things together here that we usually pull apart. The food is clean. And the brother who cannot yet see it that way is not being silly — for him, eating it would be sin, because he would be doing what he believes God forbids. His conscience has not caught up yet. But it is still his conscience, and going against it damages him.

So the person with more freedom now has a choice. He can be right and press it. Or he can be right and hold it loosely.

Verse 15 is where the passage gets heavy.

"If your brother or sister is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love."

Paul does not say you are being rude, or unhelpful, or a poor witness. He says you have stopped loving. The thing you did might be perfectly permitted and still not be love, because love is not measured by whether you had the right to do it.

Then comes the line that should stop us.

"Do not by your eating destroy someone for whom Christ died."

Put the two halves of that sentence next to each other. Your eating. Christ's dying. One is a small preference exercised at a table. The other is the Son of God on a cross. Paul sets them side by side on purpose, so we feel how badly matched they are. Christ gave up his life for this person. You cannot give up a meal.

That is the weight of it. The people we are quickest to overrule are people he died for. Whatever we think of their reasoning, that fact sits over them and does not move.

"Therefore do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil."

This is a strange and very practical instruction. Paul assumes the freedom really is good. It came from Christ. It is not a loophole or a concession to weak faith. And precisely because it is good, it is worth protecting — and the way to protect it is to use it carefully.

A freedom used without love gets a bad name. Watch someone insist on their rights at the cost of a weaker believer, and the freedom itself starts to look ugly, even though there is nothing wrong with it. People stop hearing grace in it and start hearing arrogance. You can discredit a true thing by the way you hold it.

So the question is not only whether I may. It is what this will make grace look like to the person watching.

Then Paul lifts the whole argument up.

"For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit."

He is not saying food does not matter at all. He is saying it is not what the kingdom is made of. The Romans were treating a secondary thing as if it were the centre, and both sides were doing it. Once you see what the kingdom actually consists of, the argument shrinks.

Look at the three things he names. Righteousness — being put right with God, and then living rightly with people. Peace — with God, and then between us. Joy — not a mood we manufacture, but something the Holy Spirit gives. All three are relational. None of them can be secured by winning a dispute at the table. In fact all three are damaged by it. You cannot fight your way to peace.

That is the test Paul is handing us. When we are gripping something tightly in the church, we can ask what it is producing. If it produces suspicion, tension, and a joyless kind of correctness, then whatever we are defending, it is not the kingdom.

"anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God"

In this way. Not by being right. By giving way.

Most of us are not arguing about meat. But we all have our version of it. A preference in worship style we are sure is better. A settled view on drinking, or schooling, or politics, or how a family should spend a Sunday. A conviction that is genuinely well thought through, and that we bring out a little too readily.

Paul is not telling us to give up the conviction. He kept his. He is telling us to give up the insisting.

Two questions to carry today.

Where am I right about something, and using it in a way that costs someone else? Not whether I am allowed — whether it is love.

And who is the person my freedom keeps bumping into? Ask what would make their walk easier rather than harder, and then decide it now, before the next meal, the next conversation, the next time it comes up.

There is a kind of strength in giving way that looks like weakness and is not. Christ had every right and laid it down. When we do the same for a brother, we have not lost an argument. We have served him.

All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen. 🤍

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