Pick and Choose

Romans 14:1
Accept other believers who are weak in faith, and don't argue with them about what they think is right or wrong. (NLT)

I remember a story about cooking the Christmas ham. As the little girl watched her mother cut the end off of the ham and throw it away, she asked her mother why she did that. The mother said that the cut off end was not good to eat. The daughter again asked why. The mother thought about it and said she really did not know why, she learned this truth about the ham from her mother.

When grandmother came over for dinner that day, the little girl asked about the end of the ham that was thrown away. The grandmother laughed and told her grand-daughter she did not know why, that her mother always cut the end off, so she did too.

The little girl was still curious, so she approached the great-grand-mother who exclaimed "I had to cut it off because my oven was too small for the whole ham!"

Sometimes the truth as we know it is not truth at all. We tend to see things only from our own standpoint and not as other may see them. So when a situation comes up where we differ in opinion with someone, we can become argumentative since we know the truth. The truth we know is based on the experience we have had or what we have learned about someone else's experience in this matter. What we know may not be truth.

Even though someone is recently saved, they have the same truth inside them as we do. How much of that truth has been revealed to them has to do with their relationship with God, not in the number of years they have been saved or which classes they have attended. Faith grows in relationship to our experience with God.

This is so unlike our worldly view of knowledge. In that view, the more grades we have gone through in school and the more degrees we have obtained in college gives us an edge over those with less. Knowledge is somehow erroneously linked to experience. However, knowledge without experience is like a closed book. In this worldly existence, knowledge with experience leads to the discovery of new truth.

So we should not argue with another Christian about God. The Bible is the way to discover truth no matter how long someone has been saved. The truth revealed to someone else by the Holy Spirit as they read God's Word may be just what God wants us to hear. Do not argue about or dismiss what others hear. What we perceive as being week in faith may just be a perception based on the box we have allowed ourselves to be in all these years. A new Christian may in fact be stronger in faith then us.