Unity Amidst Disagreement (Romans 14)

Wearing masks is really important, everyone should do it when in indoor public spaces. Wearing masks is worthless and stupid. It is simply another way the state is trying to control us. We need to open the economy up today. If we don’t many will lose everything and then the death due to suicide will be numerous. If we open the economy up now more people will die, don’t you care about life? The church should never have closed. They responded in fear and lack of trust in God. The church should not open yet, they need to honor government and love others. This virus is the most dangerous thing we have ever faced in our lifetime. This virus is nothing more than a bad flu. You can find everyone of these statements made by good people who love God. Each one of them believes strongly in their opinion, many times they support it from Scripture, and they struggle to understand how anyone can disagree.

We live in a divided age. This crisis has done nothing to alleviate it. It has only exacerbated it. As we begin to open the church back up, Satan would love nothing more than to take these diverse opinions and to divide the church over them. He would love to divide us over the economy, masks, vaccines, physical distancing, and changed worship structure. We have a diversity of opinions in the church. We have disagreement. So how can we have unity in the midst of such stark disagreement? How can we remain a strong church with so many different views? This problem is not a new problem. In two separate texts, Paul addressed unity in the midst of disagreements. But through these texts, we learn that we can have unity in the midst of disagreement. We will focus on Romans 14 today (although we will refer to 1 Corinthians 8). In this text, we learn that we can have unity in the midst of disagreement if we recognize three things.