He Has Studied Every Form

He can give you the case for every one of them, properly.

Not a caricature. The strongest version, the one its best people would recognize and nod at, with the reasoning intact and the objections handled. Four shelves of it, read carefully, over about nine years.

He has adopted none of them.

Not one. There is no hour, no shape, no practice, nothing he actually does on a Tuesday that came off any of those shelves.

Here is the reason, and it is not laziness and it is not indecision in the ordinary sense.

To choose one is to say the others were wrong.

That is how it presents itself to him. If he adopts a particular shape, he is making a claim, and the claim lands on people he respects who have spent their lives inside the shapes he did not pick. He is not prepared to do that. He has met some of those people. Two of them changed his life.

So he keeps the landscape, and he keeps nothing else.

And here is what he has been sitting with for about a year.

The fairness that stopped him condemning anybody has left him with less than any of them have.

Every person on every one of those shelves has something. A shape, an hour, a practice that has held them through things. He has an accurate map of all of it and nothing whatever under his own feet, and the reason he has nothing is a scruple that he now suspects nobody else has ever felt on his behalf.

If you have understood everything and chosen nothing, pull up a chair. The coffee is good and nobody here is defending anything.

The chapter written for exactly this

There is a whole chapter in Romans about people doing different things, and the instruction in the middle of it is the one that has never been obeyable.

One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.Romans 14:5

Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.

Read what that instruction actually asks. It asks each person to come to a settled position. It does not ask them to reach the same one, and it explicitly describes two people reaching opposite conclusions about the same question.

And it does not treat the choosing as a verdict on the other. That is the whole point of the chapter, which spends its length telling both parties not to despise or judge each other, precisely because both of them have chosen.

Choosing is required. Condemning is forbidden. Those are two separate instructions in one chapter, and you have collapsed them into each other.

You are being told to settle on something and separately forbidden to condemn anybody for settling elsewhere. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind while describing two people who disagree, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both the choosing and the not-despising in the same chapter, which means the requirement you invented is not in the book you have been reading for nine years.

Where the scruple came from

Now the scruple itself, because it is a good instinct and it deserves respect before it is set down.

You have watched people be condemned by somebody's choice. That happens constantly and it is ugly, and a man who has read four shelves has seen every shelf used as a weapon against the others at some point. Refusing to be that man is right. But the way you have refused is by declining to have any position at all, and that is not the only way, and it is not the way the chapter suggests. Paul is telling people who genuinely disagree to hold their own practice with conviction and to hold each other with honor, at the same time, without either one being reduced.

You have avoided a real fault by means of a self-imposed emptiness, and Scripture asks for something harder and better. Romans 14:6 says he that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord, and he that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it, and it puts both practices in front of the same Lord without ranking them, and it is the same Spirit who leads each believer, which means two people can each hold something and neither be a verdict on the other.

What nine years has cost

Here is the honest arithmetic, said once.

Nine years of nothing under your feet, in order to protect people who never asked to be protected and who would be dismayed to learn what it cost.

You have paid a price nobody set and nobody wanted, and it is not being counted against you. Colossians 2:16 says let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, and it is written to free somebody from other people's assessments rather than to free them from having a practice, and it is the same Spirit who brings liberty where He is, which means the freedom in that verse was always meant to be freedom to keep something.