We Made Faith The Entrance Exam

Nobody in that family has ever asked him a doctrinal question. That is not what this is.

What happens is smaller and it happens constantly. He says something, in passing, about a thing that happened, and somebody in that room registers it. Nobody says anything. But it goes in the file.

And after about three years there is a shared, entirely unspoken assessment of where he is, and it is discussed exactly never, and it governs about eleven small things.

Whether he gets asked to pray at anything. What kind of conversation people have when he is in the room. A particular carefulness that everybody would deny.

And he is not being excluded. He comes to everything. He is asked about his work and his car and the trip in the spring, and he is liked, genuinely, by everybody in that family.

There is simply one subject that is his and is also, somehow, everybody's, and it has been sitting in a file for three years with nobody's name on it.

The exam nobody set

Let me describe what the family is actually doing, because it does not feel like an exam from the inside.

It feels like discernment. And a family that takes God seriously will inevitably notice things about a person, and noticing is not wrong, and pretending not to notice would be its own kind of dishonesty.

The trouble is what the noticing has been attached to. It has become the thing that determines belonging, and no discernment anywhere was ever meant to run an admissions process for a family table.

You have been marking a paper nobody set, and no amount of genuine discernment has ever once been given to a family in order to sort a table. Romans 14:1 says him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations, which is the written word putting the receiving first and the assessment nowhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can close a file that has been open for three years.

And he is a whole man. He knows there is a file. Everybody knows when they are being assessed, however kindly, and he has been managing it for three years by being slightly careful about what he says.

He is right about at least one thing nobody in that family has conceded. And what he actually thinks about God, nobody has ever once asked him, because asking would require admitting the file exists.

You are able to have a real conversation with a man you have been assessing, and three years of a quiet file has never once told anybody one true thing about him. The Spirit of God is what closes a file and opens a conversation, and it is written in Romans 14 that the receiving comes first.

Him that is weak in the faith receive ye

Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. (Romans 14:1, King James Version)

Look at the order in that sentence, because it is the whole instruction.

Receive ye. That comes first, and it is not conditional, and Paul does not attach anything to it. Whatever assessment anybody has made, and he grants that an assessment may be accurate, the receiving is not affected by it.

And then: but not to doubtful disputations. Not into arguments about disputed things. Receive the man, and do not make the reception into a seminar.

You are being told to receive somebody regardless of where the assessment landed, and no verdict about anybody's faith has ever once been made into a condition of welcome. It is written in Romans 14:1 that him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations, which is the written word putting the reception in front of everything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the actual work in a man that a family cannot do by watching him.

And there is something in that phrase weak in the faith that is worth holding carefully. Paul concedes the category. He does not pretend everybody is in the same place.

What he refuses is the conclusion. The one who is weaker is received, at the same table, without a probationary status, and the rest of the chapter is a long argument against exactly the sorting your family has been doing.

You are able to hold an honest assessment and give it no authority at all, and noticing something about somebody has never once been the same as sorting them. The Spirit of God is the one who does the persuading in a household and always has, and Romans 14 spends a whole chapter refusing to let a table be graded.

Closing the file

Here is the practical part, and it is one conversation and one decision.

The decision is private: the file is closed. Whatever is in it, whatever anybody has assessed over three years, it no longer determines anything about how you are with him. Nobody needs to be told, and there is no conversation with the family about it, which would be a disaster.

You are able to close something in your own head, and a private decision has never once required anybody else in a family to agree to it. The Holy Spirit is the one present when a man stops assessing somebody, and it is written that we receive him and not to doubtful disputations.

And the conversation is the other half, and it is the one thing nobody has done in three years. Ask him.

Not doctrinally. Not as a test with a warm face on it, which he would spot instantly and which everybody has been careful not to do because it would be rude. Ask him what he actually thinks, once, in an ordinary tone, as somebody who is interested rather than as somebody with a file.

What was church like in his house growing up. What he makes of all this, honestly.

And then, and this is the whole thing: do not respond to the answer with a correction. Receive it. That is the verse.

You are able to hear an answer without correcting one word of it, and listening to what a man actually believes has never once been the same as agreeing with him. The Spirit of God is what makes a real conversation possible where an exam has been running, and Romans 14:1 refuses the disputation and keeps the reception.