Romans 14:4-20

⁴So you can’t tell anybody else they are wrong. God is their boss, not you. So only God can tell them if they do good or go wrong. And he can help them to keep on doing good.

⁵Here is another thing. Some people think like this, “Some days are special for God and the rest are not.” Other people think, “Each day is the same as every other day.” Each of us has to make up his own mind about this.

⁶Those that make one day special do so to give respect to God on that day. And those that eat all kinds of food do so to give respect to God. They say thank you to God for that food. And in the same way those that don’t eat some sorts of food do so to give respect to God. They say thank you to God too.

⁷None of us is his own boss. We belong to God and he is our good boss all the time that we are alive, and he is still our good boss after we die.

⁹Remember that Jesus died and then became alive again. So now he is the good boss of people that are alive and also the boss of people that are dead.

¹⁰So then it is God, not you, that can tell other Christians that they are wrong. You can’t think that you are better than any other Christian. No. We’ve all got to stand in front of God one day. Then God will tell each of us the things that we did right and the things that we did wrong.

¹¹Like we read in God book, “God says, ‘This is for sure. Everybody will get down on their knees in front of me to give respect to me. And everybody will say that I’m really good, the only great God.’”

¹²This means that one day every one of us will have to face God and tell him all about everything that we ever did.

¹³So we have to stop being like judges. We have to stop telling each other, “You are wrong.” Instead of that we have to make sure that we help other Christians, and make sure we don’t do anything that makes them go wrong.

¹⁴I know, and I’m really sure, that our leader, Jesus, taught like this, he said, “There is nothing wrong at all with any food.” But somebody might believe that it is wrong to eat some sort of food. Alright, it is wrong for that person to eat it, but not for anybody else.

¹⁵But if you know something is all right, so you think you will eat it, and if you know that another Christian will get upset if you eat it, then leave it. Don’t eat it. If you love other Christians you will not do things that hurt them. Remember, Jesus Christ died for those people, so don’t eat that food. You know is good but leave it anyway. Then nobody will blame you.

¹⁷We belong to God. He doesn’t give us rules about the things that we can’t eat or drink, but he wants us to have his spirit in us so that we do the things that are right, and we will always be calm and settled, and always be happy. If we live like this as we work for Jesus Christ, then we make God happy. And other people are happy with us too.

¹⁹So we have to do everything we can to help each other. We have to try to agree with each other and to help each other get strong.

²⁰God is getting all his people to come together into one mob, but if you eat something that upsets one of these new Christians so that they go away, you will mess up God’s work. So don’t do that. You know that there is nothing wrong with the food itself, but it is wrong for you to make another person to stop believing.