My Thoughts on Romans 15:1

Romans 15:1 “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.”

I have a confession to make: I am bad at this. When I am strong in something I often have an arrogant mindset and refuse to “stoop down” in a sense to the weak. Sometimes I make excuses like I don’t want to be pulled down. A good example of this is the group of girls who go on a run at 6 in the morning. We start it off with prayer and when I first started Sefora shared her vision for this time of running with us. She made it clear that we were going to run together and it was not a competition. If someone fell behind we would run back to them. No one was to be left behind. Sometimes this is hard for me because I like sprint-jogging more than I like running and I like to keep my pace. I realized, though, while reading this verse that this principle behind our morning runs is a good principle for the Christian life and maybe the fact that I fail at this mindset in my morning runs shows something about what I lack in the Christian life. I confess that there have been times where I looked at the Christian life as a competition or even a comparison game. I didn’t stoop down to pick up people where they were at or run the race with them. It was about me selfishly sprinting forward in an effort to look good and impress others, but God calls us to run together. Christ didn’t come to please himself, and I am not here to please myself. I see now a beautiful picture of running the race together without comparison or competition and I long to live that out in my daily life in the community that I am in.

Application: The next 3 times that I talk to people about where they are at I will be a listener and not try to bud in and give them all my knowledge which won’t help them anyways, but I will listen and let God work.