Jun. 21, 2026

Have you ever caught yourself sizing someone up — quietly deciding their faith isn't quite as strong as yours, or their choices aren't quite as right? We've all been there. And Scripture has something powerful to say about it.

Pastor Dave brought the "‘One Anothers’" series home with one of its most personally challenging entries, drawing primarily from Romans 14. The topic — don't judge one another — sounds straightforward until you realize how deeply the habit of judging is woven into church culture, and how many sincere believers are hurt or divided by it every year. He set the tone early: "Don't look at your neighbor or think of somebody else. The scriptures are spoken to me today, first and foremost."

What Judging Is — and Isn't - Biblical judging, Pastor Dave explained, means placing yourself in a position of superiority over another person's conscience, spirituality, or standing before God. It means assigning motives you can't possibly know, condemning another believer's salvation as subpar, or treating your personal conviction on a non-essential matter as the only spiritually acceptable position. It is not, however, the same as addressing clear sin within the fellowship, practicing healthy church accountability, or speaking truthfully when someone's behavior is genuinely harmful. Those have a proper time and place. The passage is specifically about disputable matters — areas Scripture does not clearly address.

Disputable Matters - The heart of the message was Paul's category of "doubtful things" — areas where sincere Christ followers may hold genuinely different convictions and still honor God. Pastor Dave walked through a list that landed with equal parts humor and conviction: cremation versus burial, Christmas and Easter traditions, homeschooling versus public school, alcohol, and worship music preferences. "If your conviction is that you don't have any alcohol, that's predominantly my conviction for me — but I'll not impose that on you." On each of these, his point was the same: these are not hills to die on, and treating them as though they are causes real damage to real people.

The Roman Church Context - Paul was addressing a live controversy in Rome: Jewish Christians kept kosher dietary laws and observed Sabbaths and feast days; Gentile Christians had no such tradition and felt no obligation to it. Neither group was wrong per se — the issue was contempt and condemnation flowing in both directions. Pastor Dave applied this directly to Faith Community's own diversity of backgrounds and traditions: "We come from different faith traditions. And so some of us hold some different things. That's okay — we're one in Christ. But how we treat one another in those differences matters."

Jesus Is Lord Over All - Romans 14 uses the word "Lord" eight times in just a few verses, and Pastor Dave made that count. Every one of us is a servant of Jesus — not of each other's opinions. "Even if we disagree, he's still your Lord, he's still my Lord, and we're both trying to please our Lord." He recalled Jesus's response to Peter's question about John — "What about him?" — and Jesus's answer: "What is that to you? You follow Me." We are all going to stand before Christ and give an account. That levels the playing field considerably.

Three stories carried the message: a pastor friend who drove to a movie theater on a Saturday night to confront a parishioner and ended up being sent home by the Holy Spirit; a man who kept a pair of pants in his truck to change into before visiting his mother, who disapproved of shorts; and a businessman who deliberately wore T-shirts to church every Sunday so visiting newcomers could always find someone dressed like them.

Pastor Dave closed with five questions for personal reflection: Am I rigid or pliable? Am I peaceful or argumentative? Am I a unifier or do I divide? Am I humble or am I proud? Am I easy to talk to or hard to approach?