2023-02-07 A Meditation on Allowances

“Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love. By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died. So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.” (Ro 14:13–19 ESV)

Allowances in our lives may be the source of unexpected blessing. Fearing to break fast, kept on our toes, unnerved about even the gentlest acts of fellowship, we shun allowance and maintain rigor. But somehow this our shell, this our cage even, this our veneer, is itself to be brought to the sacrificial altar of our God; we dwell supreme when we dwell in the unexpected, in the allowance, in the broken rigor or routine. These events accumulate, until we though bracing ourselves for the loss of our “calling”, the loss of our “sanctity”, the end of our “fast”, find instead nothing is lost. We can afford the fireside chat with nominal unbelievers or those who walk in sinful ways. We can indulge the meal together with a peace-loving partner. We can awake as though to new dawn on the flipside of a forbidden union.

Union in all patience and chastity of the term, yet we still touch and are touched by a spiritual combinatory haste, completion, duality, trio. We still touch and are touched by the strange ways we were found to be useful to a neighbor. We chalk up yet another life experience that the average pew-sitter is too fussy about, too chaste about, too much on retreat, to indulge ever.

Allowances in our lives call to the far side of this our earthly sojourn, with the remarkable beauty of a soul, even a soul utterly and criminally captured to do ill deeds at times. “Am I ever going to be holy?” Our response is that the sins of some fly ahead of them, whilst others’ sins are hidden (1 Ti 5:24). So the common worship in exact proportion to the common sin; the singing voice ascendant or the head bowed in prayer; much must be untaught; much must be reprogrammed, yet not by forgoing our principle or our walk of purity. Ask the true penitent and they will say that it isn’t the drug or the lust that earns one’s badge of honor, but the simpler things in life, the desire writ large to know each other and to be known, to make holy acknowledgement of just what-all is calling to the addict in the heart, the lustful in the moment, the liar in the call to testify.