Everything That Does Not Come From Faith is Sin (3 of 3)

God's Judgment or Man's Convictions

I remember once telling my friends they shouldn't listen to music with bad lyrics because it was against God's will. I told others that God wanted them to read the Bible a certain way. Others told me that my baptism wasn't valid, or that my clothes were inappropriate, or that my car was too new, or my hair too long, or my Sundays too void of silence, or that I simply was wrong because I did not do as they did.

"The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves." I had the hardest time understanding this verse before I studied the difference between convictions and faith. You see "faith comes from hearing the message" while convictions derive from our understanding of His message. When people say that "faith is personal," what they really mean is that each person's convictions are personal because all Christians' faith comes from God's word, but each believers' convictions are created by an interpretation of this common faith.

Of course, it is easy for immature Christians to exclaim, "'Why do you pass judgment on your brother?' You shouldn't judge another person's sin since each of us have our own faith." That's like disobeying gravity since we are all different weights! The problem is that Christians like to judge each other based on their convictions and not our shared faith. That is, we condemn those who do not do or believe as we do rather than rebuke those who do not do or live as God commands.



"So then each of us will give an account of himself to God" (Rom 14.10-23). In many ways, Jesus' command to make disciples "teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" is God's way of preparing us for this individual accounting we will give to God. A wise young Christian will adopt the convictions of his or her elders while a loving, mature believer will teach those young people the difference between a conviction and faith. Unfortunately, many of us won't learn the difference until we are enduring this accounting....