1 We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. 2 Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up. 3 For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written: "The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me." 4 For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. 5 May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, 6 so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 7 Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.

Paul is still in the middle of an argument. In the church at Rome some believers ate anything, and others kept to vegetables and treated certain days as sacred. He has already said whose side the facts are on. No food is unclean in itself. The ones who eat freely are right.

Then he tells them what to do with being right.

"We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves."

He does not say the strong should correct the weak. He does not say they should wait patiently while the weak catch up. He says bear with. There is weight in that word. It means to carry, to hold up, to take the load onto yourself. Being strong, the way Paul uses it here, is not a rank you hold over someone. It is a job you do for them.

And notice he does not pretend the weakness is not weakness. He calls it failings. He is honest about it. But being honest about someone's limits does not hand you permission to make them carry those limits alone. In Paul's mind the two things go together: you see clearly what they cannot do yet, and that is exactly why you pick up the weight.

The strong are not the ones who win. They are the ones who can afford to give something up.

"Each of us should please our neighbors for their good, to build them up."

Please is a word we are right to be careful with. Most of us know what it is to spend years managing how other people feel about us, and it hollows a person out. So watch what Paul attaches to it in the same breath. For their good. To build them up.

Those two phrases are the guardrails, and they change the whole thing. People-pleasing aims at their approval of me. It is finally about how I come out of the exchange. What Paul is asking for aims at their growth. One asks what will make them like me. The other asks what will leave them stronger than they were.

Sometimes those two look identical from the outside. They are not the same act. You can tell them apart by what you are willing to lose. Approval-seeking never costs you anything you actually wanted. Building someone up usually does.

And look who this is addressed to. Each of us. Not the strong only. The one with the tender conscience has a neighbor too, and the same instruction lands on them. Nobody in the room gets to sit out.

"For even Christ did not please himself"

Paul could have argued this from love, or from fairness, or from what holds a community together. Instead he goes straight to Jesus, and the proof he picks is strange.

He quotes an old psalm: "The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me."

He does not quote a verse about serving. He does not quote a verse about giving. He quotes a verse about absorbing. Insults aimed at God landed on Christ, and he let them land. That is what not pleasing himself came to in the end. Not a preference set aside. Abuse taken on and not sent back.

So measure the request against that. Paul is asking a free man to skip a meal, to hold his tongue about a scruple he finds silly, to let a weaker brother keep his Tuesday. Next to the cross that is almost nothing. But it is the same kind of thing. Small, and pointed in the same direction.

That is usually how obedience arrives. Not as something heroic. As something small that faces the same way the cross faces.

"For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope."

Verse 4 reads like a detour. It is not. Paul has just leaned his whole argument on a line from an old song, and he stops to explain why old words are still ours.

Watch the order he gives. Endurance first. Then encouragement. Then hope. We would have put comfort at the front, because comfort is what we go looking for when things are hard. Paul says Scripture first teaches us how to stay. Hope is on the far side of staying, not on the near side.

That is also his answer to why we read. Not to collect information about God. To be handed what we need to keep going with people who are hard to keep going with. The person who wears you out in your church, in your family, at your table — the reason you read is so you are still there next week.

"May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had."

Now Paul stops instructing and starts praying. He has just told them exactly what to do, and then he turns and asks God to do it in them. That turn is worth sitting with. He knows they cannot manufacture this. You cannot decide your way into patience with someone who grates on you. The same God who gives endurance has to give the attitude too.

And then he says what it is all for.

"so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify God"

One voice. Not one opinion. Paul never settles the menu. He never tells the vegetable eaters to grow up and eat, and he never tells the meat eaters to give it up permanently. The disagreement is still standing when the chapter ends. What he wants is not a room where everyone thinks the same thing. It is a room where people who differ are facing the same direction and saying the same name.

A choir is not everyone singing one note. It is different voices aimed at one song.

"Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God."

There is the standard, and it is not how much you like them. It is how Christ took you in. He did not wait until you had your convictions sorted, or until you were right about everything, or until you were easy to be around. He accepted you while you were still the difficult one in the room.

So two questions to carry today.

Is there someone you are tolerating rather than welcoming? Tolerating is quiet and it looks like peace, but it holds a person at arm's length and waits for them to change first. Welcoming brings them all the way in as they are.

And if you are the strong one in some relationship — you know the facts, you have thought it through, you are right — what would it cost you today to give up something you have every right to?

Christ did not please himself. That is the whole argument, and it is enough.

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

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