Same, same but different (Romans 15:1-7)

We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Each of us should please his neighbour for his good, to build him up. For even Christ did not please himself but, as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” For everything that has been written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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

Romans 15:1-7

My high school in Malaysia was next to Petaling Street (Chee Cheung Kai in Cantonese), a place famous for selling imitation goods. Every day, I walked past market stalls selling “Lolex” watches, “Channel” handbags and “Reehawk” sports shoes - fakes made to look like the real thing.

I remember a friend who got the real thing, saving up his allowance to buy a genuine designer t-shirt. The next weekend, his classmates went to Chee Cheung Kai to buy fake versions of the same shirt so that whenever he wore his expensive t-shirt, they would put on their cheapo ones. He was furious!

The Asian expression for this is, “Same, same but different.” What we see in Romans 15 is the Apostle Paul describing the church as “same, same but different.” It’s an important principle for us here at the Chinese Church where everyone looks the same, eats the same food and has the same haircut because the bible reminds us to love those who are not the same - those who are different from us.

Three things I want us to see from today’s passage:

(1) Same but different people

(2) Same but different endurance

(3) Same but different worship

Same but different people

The first thing we see are same but different people. Verse 1: “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.”

A pastor once told me, “The most diverse church in this city is the Chinese Church.” I asked him what he meant. “Everyone is trying to plant international churches. ‘We have forty different nations gathered here,’ they say, but when you go to their meetings, everyone is a twenty-something working professional. Everyone is the same.”

“But when you come to the Chinese Church, you have restaurant workers sitting next to university professors. You have old aunties and young kids. You have people from Hong Kong, Singapore and BBC’s (British-born Chinese).”

People look at us here in the Chinese Church and think, “It’s easy for them to get along,” but that’s not true. It takes a great deal of humility and patience for us to live under one roof. And Romans 15 tells us why: The stronger must serve the weaker.

Verse 1: “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak.” By strong and weak, Paul is not referring to rich and poor (though elsewhere, he reminds the rich not to be arrogant in 1 Timothy 6:17); Paul is not referring to smart versus simple (though he says not many of us were wise by human standards when we were called in 1 Corinthians 1:26).

Rather, Paul is talking about those with strong and weak consciences. Here are two groups divided by a sensitive issue. According to Romans 14, they were divided over food sacrificed to idols.

When your non-Christian uncle serves you roast chicken that has been sitting in front of a statue of Kuan Yin, should you eat it? It’s still got joss stick ash on it. Some will say, “Of course! Don’t waste good food.” But others will say, “Oi, cannot! Pantang!” (Meaning: Forbidden!)

What does the bible say? Romans 14, verse 20 says, “All food is clean...” “Aha!” The strong Christian will say, “Christ has freed us from the law.” But that is not all that verse 20 says.

All food is clean, but it is wrong for a person to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble.

Romans 14:20

Paul is telling the strong to let go of their strength. He even suggests they stop eating meat or drinking wine or doing anything that will cause a fellow Christian to fall (verse 21). That might be hard for us to imagine but have you considered how your behaviour might be affect someone else’s relationship with Christ? Watching Star Wars on Sunday. Raising your arms in worship. Wearing a Transformers T-shirt to church. “But these are small issues,” you say. That’s the point. You can enjoy them but they are small, secondary joys you should be willing to lose.

Verse 2: “Each of us should please his neighbour for his good, to build him up.” That last bit - about building our neighbour up - is important. The reason we please our neighbour is not just to keep the peace, not just to avoid an argument, but because we want to our brother to get stronger. We do this for his good, to build him up.

Notice that nowhere does Paul say, “The strong have got the bible wrong. God forbids you from eating meat!” He doesn’t say that. Rather, Paul begins in verse 1 by siding with the strong. “We who are strong,” Paul says, “ought to bear with the failings of the weak.” It’s a very politically incorrect thing to say. But his point is: The stronger must serve the weaker. It is because they have stronger convictions that they must be sensitive to those with weaker consciences in Christ.

So if you get into an argument with a friend and you know that you are right - you know that you have won the argument - what must you do? Lose. Be the first person to say, “Sorry.” That’s hard, isn’t it? It’s the employee who says sorry to the boss. It’s the waiter who says sorry to the customer. But in God’s family, the strong must serve the weak. The tai lo must lose face to the sai lo.

What do you call this? A difficult love. A humbling love. The bible calls this God’s love.

For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:45

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

Same but different endurance

Or as Paul writes here in verse 3:

For even Christ did not please himself but as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.”

Romans 15:3

Christ is the ultimate strong brother who took our insults on the cross. By the way, the quote from Psalm 69:9 is not talking about other people insulting us. It’s not that Jesus protects us from shame and ridicule. No, Psalm 69 is talking about our insults to God; our rejection of God. The bible is describing how Jesus took all our abuse upon himself when he died for our sins.

What we see here is a God who is the same but different from us. Not just in the sense of the incarnation - Jesus was God become man. That’s true but it’s more than that. According to Romans 15, Jesus knows what it means to serve others and not himself. God is not asking you to do something he hasn’t done himself. When he says, “Be prepared to lose face. Seek the good of your neighbour. Don’t take advantage,” these are not top-down commands from head office (“Do this because I said so!”) It’s the other way around. God is inviting us to join him in Christ’s lowliness and submission. He who was strong became weak for our sakes.

Which is why Paul keeps praying for endurance and encouragement in verses 4 and 5.

For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ.

Romans 15:4-5

To endure is to Teng Chu (Cantonese),  to Tahan (Malay) - that is, to bear up under a heavy load. It is a strange thing to pray for: “God, help me to endure the people in my church.” Earlier, Paul said that the strong should “bear” with the failings of the weak (verse 1). Another strange thing to say: “Put up with them.”

Last month, I was at a Christian retreat for three days with thirty plus people under one roof. For three days it was fun - singing together, living together, eating together. I said to someone, “If we stayed for thirty days, we will have World War III!” (Well, I hope not) My point was: Love is sweet in the short term. Long-term relationships, on the other hand, are long-suffering. It’s patience and sacrifice. That’s the kind of relationship Paul prays for the church, one that goes the distance.

What we see in these verses are the source and the mark of such an enduring love.

The source of this endurance is the bible. “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us.” (Verse 4) The reason we have the bible and the reason why we read the bible is because God speaks to us through this book. He is teaching us about himself; about what it means to live for him. You can’t say that about a newspaper or your favourite movie. But when it comes to the bible, everything there is written so that “we might have hope.”

Hope is defined as our long-term relationship with Christ. (NB. Verse 12: “The Gentiles will hope in him.” Verse 13: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him.”) God reminds he is in this relationship for the long-term. Christ is the ultimate investment for each joy and sorrow, for each moment of our lives. In the bible, God’s says to us, “Christ is worth it.”

Secondly, the mark of this endurance is unity. “May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the spirit of unity,” literally, “the same mind towards one another” in Christ Jesus (in verse 5). It is a change is character, not a change in circumstance. The different groups with different problems are still there, Paul is not saying those different circumstances go away. But what God changes is their attitude towards one another. They have the same mindfulness. They submit to one another as they submit to Christ.

Here in the Chinese Church, being one in Christ does not mean having one service or one language or doing the same one thing in the same location. Unity means having the same mind. We are in this together. You and I are just as sinful; you and I are just as secure in our salvation in Christ.

Again, such unity is a mark of godly endurance. It takes time investing in God’s word and God’s people for there to be unity in God’s church.

Same but different worship

Finally, we see a same but different worship.

So that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 15:6

We have already seen a same but different people, and we get that. It’s easy to love someone who loves the same things but the church is made up of very different people. Not all Chinese are have the same level of Chinese-ness but all who are in Christ are chosen and loved as God’s children.

We have also seen a same but different endurance. It means having the same love in the long term. You might love each other today but what will keep you loving one another ten, twenty years from today? Paul prays for God to change our hearts and minds to be like Christ’s.

Yet the most important sameness and difference we need to see is this last one: Worship. Why? Because it is the reason God gathers different people and causes them to love one another. So that He gets the glory.

So that He gets the praise.

Verse 6, “So that… you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In verse 7, we “accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, to bring praise (or glory) to God.” This theme of praise and glory carries on:

So that the Gentiles may glorify God for his mercy, as it is written:
“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles;
I will sing hymns to your name.”

Again, it says,

“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his peoples.”

And again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,

and sing praises to him, all you peoples.”

Romans 15:9-12

If you are praying for unity here in the Chinese Church, God loves to answer that prayer but the reason is not simply so that we will get along. Unity is never for the sake of unity. It is so that He ultimately gets all the glory.

When you are planning the church picnic, when you are choosing the songs for Sunday, when you are counselling a married couple or when you teaching a bible passage on unity - you have to be very careful of thinking, “How can I get these people to like one another?” It is tempting to turn church unity into an idol, to use unity as an excuse to avoid conflict and to gloss over real issues like sin and ungodly behaviour. That is a fake kind of unity, the kind you get from Chee Cheong Kai, that looks the same but is very different from the real thing.

But Romans 15 is clear. Christian unity that is authentic results in God’s glory. Real Christians might still disagree with one another and there’ll always be some niggling issue that hasn’t been resolved. And yet, it glorifies God when these same believers love another because the biggest issue of our sin and God’s approval has been resolved in Christ.

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

Romans 15:7

The ESV has, “Welcome one another.” I like that word “welcome” because Paul is saying something practical at this point. We glorify God not simply by singing at the top of our lungs or preaching a sermon. We can glorify God by asking a brother out to lunch. By helping someone with homework. By taking an interest in what’s stressing them out.

When Paul say “accept” or “welcome” one another, he is saying, “Make this person a part of your life.”

The opposite of acceptance is rejection. It’s saying, “Not interested, go away.” We take it for granted when the pastor says, “It’s time for a friendship break.” After two minutes of asking what college you’re from or what job you’re doing, you don’t expect to see that person again.

Paul says, “Think of Christ’s acceptance of you.” He sought you out when you didn’t know him. He died for you while you were rebelling against him. He reminds you of his love, pouring out his grace into each moment of your lives. Do that for your brother and your sister in church as your worship. “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you.”

This is a same but different kind of worship. People get preoccupied thinking about what they can do to worship God. “What gifts do I have?” “What can I do to serve?” But really the question to ask is not what but who. Who is my weaker brother? Who gets on my nerves sometimes?

Who is God calling me to accept with Christ’s love today? Do this to the glory of God.

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

Romans 15:7

By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 13:35