Christians will disagree about preferences. Romans 14, 1 Corinthians 8, and 1 Corinthians 10 are passages that deal with this exact issue. Preferences of application cannot be sin. This would exclude it from the category of Christian liberty. If your application of the word leads to breaking of a direct command or prohibition, then it is no longer a legitimate application (See Mark 7). Each person is directed by his own conscience in the matters of preference.

I have been thinking lately on the place of conscience, Christian liberty, and how we should relate to one another with our preferences. As a young Christian, I had a very low tolerance for any Christian liberty, and the result was that I was overly prescriptive for those around me, and honestly, I was extremely proud about what I had seen in the Bible. It was not just a way, it was the way to obey God. Thankfully the Lord rerouted my ideas and helped me to value those who were doers of the word, rather than doers of my preferences. Here are a few thoughts on the subject that I wanted to share here.
Conscience
God has given to each person a conscience which helps to discern what is right and wrong (Rom 2:15). God has given a conscience to those who are saved and unsaved. The conscience is like the check engine light of the soul, alerting to the fact that something might not be right. And while the conscience is a guide, it is not infallible. There are those with a weaker or stronger conscience (1 Cor 8). Sometimes the conscience is weak and forbids something that is not actually forbidden by God. Other times it can be seared, allowing what God has forbidden (1 Tim 4:2, Titus 1:15). Even though the conscience is fallible, it is the Christian duty to walk according to our conscience, because to disobey the conscience is faithless, and therefore sin (Rom 14:23).
We must strive to have a good and clear conscience (1 Peter 3:16, Acts 23:1). We need this good and clear conscience within ourselves and before God. Having a good and clear conscience means that there is nothing in our lives for which our conscience pricks us. We have lived our lives as best we know by the direction of God in His word. No matter what anyone else says, we have walked in integrity both before man and before God.
And this is a most important point: Our conscience is subservient to the Holy Spirit through the Bible. Since our consciences are fallible, our consciences must be submitted to the Word of God. If our conscience is pricked when it shouldn’t be, we should yield to God’s word. If our conscience is not pricked when it should be, we should yield to God’s word. The conscience is never to rule over the Spirit and the Bible, but is a servant of the Spirit to guide us.
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Somehow (I still wonder how He did it), God pulled me out of this prideful place, and made me see that I was pushing my preferences and not God’s Word. I actually didn’t change my mind about much of what I thought, I just changed the way that I spoke and thought about it. Now, when people ask my advice, I am sure to point them to the Word. Instead of immediately jumping to how I apply God’s word, I give them the Bible, and encourage them to seek the Lord about what He says. 

As a young Christian, I was always right. Its amazing how right I was about everything. I had Bible verses, and you can’t argue with the Bible. I also routinely read my Bible, and, well, let’s be honest, no one around me read their Bible. But don’t worry! Everything I did and said was verbally affirmed to be in humility. So that covered me. Like the saying goes, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But a weird thing has happened. The older I’ve gotten, the less “right” I see myself. Actually, I’ve come to see that, while I wanted to be a doer of God’s word (James 1:22), I was actually trying to get others to be doers of my preference.
My Preference
It is scary how simple it is for the devil, not to change the Bible, but to twist it (2 Peter 3:16). This was what he tried to pull over on Jesus: He word-for-word quoted Scripture, but he twisted its meaning. He twisted it at the application. And if we are not careful, we can do something similar. When we read God’s word, there are some universal applications that are directly prescribed by God. “You shall not lie, You shall not steal, etc…” But in the vast majority of Scripture, there are commands to obey and wisdom to be applied in a variety of situations that require Christians to use discernment in their obedience. Here’s where I fell into trouble.
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Be aware of the schemes of the devil and avoid being distracted from the main thing. When we go to share Christ, let’s actually share Christ! We need to tell folks about sin, and righteousness, and the coming judgement. People need to hear about their great need, and they need to hear that God in love sent His Son to die for sinners. Jesus died on the cross to save sinners and He was raised from the dead, proving that He is everything He said He was.

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
2 Corinthians 11:3
We used to walk around college campuses to try and strike up gospel conversations after I graduated from college. Its amazing how many people were willing to talk about the state of their souls. Unfortunately, most that we met either gave lip service to the gospel or would outright deny it. One thing that came up fairly frequently, almost like people were reading from the same playbook, was a denial of the sufficiency and authority of Scripture. I can’t tell you how many times I heard someone say, “You know that book was written by men, right?” And I used to, rightly, do my best to show that it was God’s word, written through men, and that it was infallible, authoritative, and perfect. But one thing I began to realize was that this was just a distraction.
What I don’t mean is that the doctrine of Scripture is unimportant and shouldn’t be addressed. It is of paramount importance. We must be willing to stand on the word of God. But as important as the doctrine of Scripture is, there is one thing that it isn’t: It isn’t the gospel. It’s one thing to defend the Scripture, it is another to share the gospel through the Scripture. We give people God’s word like a sower sows seeds (Luke 8:11). We hope that they hear it, believe it, and are saved from the wrath to come. God’s word is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword, so in our evangelism it is crucial that we share the word (Heb 4:12).
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The next time you have a choice to make…ask the question, “Is this good?” We want to pursue those things that build up, as well as avoiding the bad; to walk in righteous paths rather than just avoiding the sinful ones.

Me: “Hey Stacy, do you remember that kids movie?”
Stacy: “Sort of.”
Me: “Do you remember if it’s bad? Should we show the kids?”
Stacy: “I don’t know if it’s bad, but is it good? I think that’s the question we need to be asking.”
Me (in my head): “Ouch. Thank you Lord for a godly wife.”
Sometimes you need a good knock in the head to get your eyes watering and your brain to thinking straight. “Is it bad?” What a terrible question. There are a thousand things that are “not bad” that offer no net positive. And that is especially what we are aiming for with our children. We want to do more than avoid harm. We want to actively pursue good!
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My grandmother wrote this keen observation as she began her time preparing to teach children: “I quickly began reading and studying the teacher’s book, then the pupil’s book, then the teacher’s book – until I realized that I had forgotten the most important Book: the Bible. Believe me, I’ve started with that Book first ever since.” What a great reminder! The kids you teach need God’s word just like everyone else. 

In 1974, my Grandmother wrote those exact words in a magazine titled Children’s Leadership. Here’s the first sentence of that article: “Right now I’m so excited I can hardly concentrate on typing this article. You see, I’ve been asked and elected to teach children again next year!” This is the most quintessential Grandmother thing she could have written. As long as I knew her, she had a deep love for children. And she didn’t just love children, but she loved to tell them about Christ. I remember her talking to me after my sister had her first child. We were looking in the window at a newborn in the nursery and she said, “I wonder when he’ll give his heart to Christ.” Having recently come across some of her writings, and also teaching 5-year-olds myself this year, I wanted to share some encouragements from her about teaching children.
First, can we get onboard with her enthusiasm? You get the opportunity to teach children about the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and you’re bummed? We get to be among the first ones to plant those seeds that could grow into eternal life. We might be the first people to tell these kids words like justification. We are one stepping stone in the path that could lead to salvation, and that’s really exciting! When the children came to Jesus, He didn’t shrug them off like some major inconvenience.
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Christians, let’s be content with what we have. Let’s learn to be content in whatever situation we find ourselves. Remember, God has said that He will never leave us or forsake us. Let’s not seek contentment through adding to our possessions, but rather let us seek to add to our contentment by subtraction.

Have you ever noticed that somehow the richest people often seem the least content? Just this past week I saw an interview with a celebrity (two actually) who, at the height of his career, was the most unhappy he’d ever been. It’s amazing how those who have the most going for them, never actually seem to be content in their success. How does someone find contentment? Specifically, how does a Christian find contentment?
First, let me start by exposing what is our natural method of finding contentment. We start with a desire: a bigger house, more money, a better job. We assume that in order to find contentment, we must raise up our possessions to the height of our desires. “If I just had a better job, then I would be content.” Or maybe, “If my kids were more like this, then I would be content.” This is our natural tendency, and this is the way of the world. We think that contentment is gained by adding to what we have. But the Christian seeks contentment, not by addition, but rather by subtraction.
The Christian understands that the eye of man is never satisfied (Ecc 1:8).
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What glory does God receive from our confession? First, confession is admitting that God is, “righteous in all his ways” (Psalm 145:17). Confession is glorifying to God because we are saying, “God, You are right, and I am wrong!” We are dethroning ourselves and coming to a right view of our sin. Second, confession glorifies God because when we confess our sins, we are acknowledging that only He can deal with our sin. 

A friend of mine once said, “You know why we don’t confess our sin? Because we want our lives to look like a George Muller biography.” What he meant was, we often fail to confess our sin because we so badly want to be perceived as strong in the faith. If we confess, then people will know that we are just as weak and sinful as the next man. And that kind of knowledge doesn’t work well with the image we are trying to maintain. It is an unfortunate fact that you and I want people to think better of us that we deserve.
The sad thing is, sometimes we get away with it. Sometimes we let the praise of men linger too long. We hear others speaking well of us, too well of us, and we love it. Sinful pride creeps into our hearts, and we begin to deceive ourselves and believe our own press. But deep down we know. We know that we are not good. We understand it theologically, but we also know it experientially. Even our best days are riddled with mixed affections and conflicted motives. Our willingness to hear our own praises, mixed with a lack of confession, presents a faulty reality to those around us. We set up a false image of ourselves for others to marvel at. And when we fail to acknowledge our shortcomings and allow people to think better of us than we deserve, we perpetuate a culture that lacks confession, sin remains undealt with, and ultimately God is not glorified.
A Culture Without Confession
When we fail to confess, others are less likely to confess. This same friend said to me, “It’s really hard to confess my sin when everyone around me just wants to go die for Christ.” Those extreme feelings of devotion are good and godly, but they’re not the whole truth.
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Believing that God moves in spontaneous ways is not unbiblical or sinful, but I think it has been overemphasized. The Spirit cannot be manipulated or placed under constraints (John 3:8), but a mark of the Spirit is that He works in an orderly fashion through means. He is the third person of the Godhead, meaning that whatever we see of God, we see of His Spirit. And if God is not a God of confusion, then we should expect for Him to most normally work through the orderly means of planning and preparation.

“Could you see how well that guy followed his outline? That dude was clearly in the Spirit!”
No one ever

Have you ever heard someone say that? I haven’t. Or what about this one? “That dude was really in the Spirit. Did you see how well-practiced the worship team was?” Normally, when you hear of someone being “led by the Spirit,” it is because that person was being spontaneous or bold or animated or loud. And where there is biblical precedence for the Spirit producing spontaneity (Luke 12:11-12) and boldness (Acts 4:31), I want to try to help balance the scales a bit on what “Spirit-led” preaching and worship can look like.
Spirit-Led Preaching
I often hear of preparation and planning for sermons in this way: “You want to prepare and plan your sermon out, but you need to leave room for the Spirit.” As I’ve already said, there is a place for willingness to be acted upon in the moment, but this type of language produces a false dichotomy between prayerful preparation and the Spirit’s leading. I want to push back here. Why is planning seen as non “Spirit-led”? This seems to be precisely the problem in the church at Corinth. They were really “spiritual” and had all kinds of things to prophesy about, but Paul tells them to stop the spontaneity and wait their turn (1 Cor 14:28). In other words, he wanted them to stop and think about it and carefully prophesy in order to help the church.
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Don’t ever let it cease to amaze you that you, Christian, have peace with God. Don’t let another day go by still an enemy of God. Turn from your sin and trust in Jesus. He offers peace and reconciliation through His cross. May God be praised for His incredible grace.

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.Romans 5:1
I remember telling someone once that I was committed to reconciling with them. Their reply was, “I didn’t even know anything was wrong.” Sometimes that’s how it goes: You learn about a problem from someone telling you that they’ve found the solution. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when reading the Bible too. Paul tells the Romans something absolutely mind boggling. He says, “you have peace with God” (Rom 5:1). Before I get to how amazing this is, I want to tell you what this solution tells us about the problem.
War With God
For some, that verse might be the first time they’ve considered that they don’t have peace with God. “Wait a minute. Peace with God? Why would I need peace with God? I thought I was ok with God.” Wrong. Apart from Christ each one of us is at war with God. There is no one neutral with God. The Bible calls it enmity or war or rebellion. You are not just uninterested in God. You are at war with the living God.
And not only are you at war with God, but God is at war with you. You have broken his law. As R. C. Sproul famously said, you have committed cosmic treason against the King of the Universe. And God plainly tells us that the soul who sins will die (Eze 18:4) and that the wages of sin is death (Rom 6:23). God is a just Judge and is angry with the wicked every day (Psalm 7:11). God is not wicked so as to sweep your sin under the rug. He is just and will bring every deed into judgement (Ecc12:14). By nature you are a child of wrath (Eph 2:3). By default you do not have peace with God.
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We are in a warfare that requires the prudent be on the lookout for evils to avoid. In your hearts, acknowledge the traps that are all around you. And if you really need to, say it out loud to shake you from your apathy and turn from the temptation. 

When I was in college, it’s very likely that people thought I was a little weird. Around 2008, I started to really seek the Lord. I had been saved a few years before then, but around that time I had someone show me that I could read and understand the Bible for myself. I was soaking up everything and growing like a weed. I was also a little weird (still am?). Put those two things together and you get an interesting outcome. Here’s what I mean: I used to wear one white sock and one black sock to remind me that the flesh warred against the Spirit (Gal 6). I made a little Bible carrying pouch to wear on my belt and called it my “sheath” for carrying around my “sword” (Eph 5). And if you were walking by me on campus, sometimes you might hear me exclaim, “It’s a trap!”
As anyone who has sought the Lord will tell you, the more you see of God, the better you see yourself. Specifically, the more you see of your own insufficiency.
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