The Bible Study Podcast, episode 293. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues a study on faith with part eight.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. As we get into this study today, I want to do something

a little differently, and I want to look at some verses that you may not think about when you

think about faith verses. And I want to do that because so much of my life, and I think many of you,

is formed by a very Western and often a U.S.-centric view of Christianity and of our faith.

And I don't think we always understand how different that may be from a biblical context

or how different that may be from many, many different parts of the world.

And I say that because on a scale

from individualistic to communal, in terms of what's important, we tend to be, or I tend to be as

one of those people who lives in the U.S. in North America, a very individualist society. And so even when we

talk about faith, we tend to be focused on things like my faith and your faith. And we don't

tend to be talking about faith within a context of community. And I want to look at some verses

that put faith in that context. And what we're going to look at today is Romans 14.

And Romans 14, to put it in the context, is about the weak and the strong, those people

who have strong faith and those people who don't.

And there is, there are disputed matters between them in the context that Paul is writing

to here in Rome.

And specifically, one of them is about eating meat.

And the big reason for eating meat isn't just because some people have decided to be vegetarian,

but in part because that meat that they're getting, it probably is from a butcher shop that is the back door for a pagan temple. This meat has possibly

been sacrificed to idols, or probably at this point been sacrificed to idols. And so some people

are saying, we should just eat vegetables. We shouldn't eat meat. And into that conversation,

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