“Therefore, do not let your good be slandered, for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Whoever serves Christ in this way is acceptable to God and receives human approval.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I had a conversation the other day with a young man who is going through a tough season. He loves the Lord and earnestly desires for his life to reflect that, but his road has been rocky all the same. One of the questions he kept coming back to as we talked is what God’s will is for this or that. I finally told Him that while God cares about the details of our lives, He’s more concerned with the forest than the trees. If we are committed to honoring and glorifying Him in the large things, the small things will fall into place. That’s something like Paul is getting at here in instructing the church in Rome on how to get along together. Let’s take a look.

Sometimes a movie captures cultural sentiment better than a thousand essays or books saying the same thing. The movie Footloose did this in 1984. The movie was a ton of fun and featured a lot of great music and dancing, but the villain of the movie was clearly the church. The church controlled the community, and wasn’t interested in letting anyone operate outside the moral bubble it had determined was where all good people needed to be living. John Lithgow’s thundering sermon against the evils of dancing is a true classic in that it perfectly captured how a great many thought about the church at the time and for a long time afterwards.

The image of the church that so many had in that day—which is still how many today imagine the church operated in that day—is that the church was far more concerned with telling people what to do than it was telling them anything else. And, that reputation isn’t necessarily entirely unfair. The church then was generally a great deal more concerned with addressing personal behavior than the church often is today. Now, there’s an argument to be made that we’ve swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, but given where the church was then, the overreaction is understandable.

Before we join the writers of Footloose in writing off the church then or in any age, though, let’s acknowledge reality. The Scriptures spend a fair bit of time talking about what people should and shouldn’t be doing. More specifically, the New Testament authors spend a fair bit of time telling followers of Jesus what they should and shouldn’t be doing. Pursuing a path of righteousness really does matter. Sin dishonors our God and when we are in a pattern of sin, that is an indication that we aren’t really following Jesus like we say we are.

In the church in Rome, there was an ongoing debate over a matter of behavior. We’ve spent several days over the last couple of weeks talking about it. Some members of the church knew it was okay to eat whatever they wanted (notably, meat obtained from a pagan sacrifice), while others were just as sure that nothing of the sort was the case. Idolatry was evil and should be avoided by God’s people wherever and however they could.

While eating idol meat isn’t so much a hot topic in the church today like it was then, we have always had one issue or another (or several issues) that we placed a great deal of energy into making sure our people were pursuing it in a certain way. To put that another way, we have always been concerned with behavioral regulation and, if necessary, modification.

As Footloose memorably lampoons, the focus of our attention has been dancing and playing cards. It has been alcohol, various forms of sexuality, the occult, political parties, musical styles, and so on and so forth. Occasionally the behaviors that have fallen on our radar have been genuinely sinful practices; things which cannot be done to the glory of God because doing them violates His character and command by their very nature. Even as we oppose these things on absolute grounds, though, how we do so matters. Being harsh or unloving in our opposition puts us on the exact same regrettable footing as our supposed opponents.

More often, though, the attractors of our ire have been things like eating idol meat. They aren’t necessarily or inherently wrong, but for many folks they fall into a kind of morally gray area because of the ease with which they can lead someone into sin. We don’t tend to like gray. So where we see it, we either color it in extra dark or else pull out an eraser and get to work.

Doing this, though, will easily see us running afoul of Paul’s instructions here. “Therefore, do not let your good be slandered.” The “therefore” here refers back to the rest of chapter 14. I’ll let you go and reread those posts if you need to in order to save rehashing all of it any further here. More to the point, how can our good be slandered? When we let ourselves get all caught up in these kinds of attempts at behavioral regulation rather than leaning into the love of Jesus in our interactions with the people around us.

When we start looking down on people who don’t practice their faith in the same way we do, or judging them for falling short of our standards (and conflating our standards with God’s standards), whatever good we might have accomplished for the sake of His kingdom is going to be overlooked and forgotten about. It will be received as less good than it actually was. It will, in other words, be slandered. If people think you hate them or are constantly judging them, they aren’t going to be much interested in celebrating the Gospel good you are doing.

Yet the Gospel is not primarily concerned with any of those things. It’s not that our behavior doesn’t matter—it very much does—but rather that our behavior is a secondary concern. When we get first things first with the Gospel, our behavior will follow suit. Focusing so much on behavioral regulation can actually be a distraction from the actual Gospel. Worse, it can be a cover for those who have lost it entirely. If we behave publicly in ways that belie a commitment to Christ, we can convince both others and ourselves that we have one when the truth is that we don’t have anything of the sort.

Paul, though, offers a better explanation than this for why an obsessive focus on behavior isn’t the best approach for the church to take when it comes to advancing the Gospel. “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Strict behavioral regulation is not something that should be the primary concern in the church. Our primary goal should be to make committed disciples of Jesus who love the Lord and seek His glory in all things. If we do that successfully, we won’t have to worry about behavioral regulation or modification. We can’t miss the forest for the trees.

Behaving the right way won’t get someone into God’s kingdom. Flipping that around the other way, a certain model of behavior isn’t the best evidence that someone has entered into God’s kingdom. It could simply mean that she has adopted a new community as her own with a higher set of moral expectations than her previous community and has adjusted her behavior accordingly. Living with the righteousness of Christ, the peace of Christ, and the joy of Christ, however, are all pointers to a much more significant change.

If we get this right, everybody wins. When we learn to love one another like Jesus did, bearing with differences and distinctions on non-essential matters with graciousness and hospitality, we please both God and other people. “Whoever serves Christ in this way is acceptable to God and receives human approval. And isn’t that the thing we are trying to do anyway? The thing that pleases God is loving like Jesus did, not making sure that everyone conforms to some narrow standard of behavior that looks really good from the outside, but which isn’t something the Scriptures themselves demand. If we try for the second thing, we may build the community we want, but it won’t be a Gospel-centered community. It won’t be a kingdom-advancing community. That won’t ultimately glorify God, and it will drive people away. Taking Paul’s counsel here and creating communities that are marked by righteousness, generosity of Spirit, graciousness, gentleness, humility, hospitality, and love is the way to go. So, let’s go that way.