Jesus Only, Part Three
I watched a man get interviewed at a church door once. Not welcomed. Interviewed.
He was new. You could tell by the way he held the bulletin like a foreign object and sat too far to one side. And a well-meaning member found him in the lobby and started asking questions. Where do you stand on this. What do you think about that. Have you been baptized the right way, by the right person, saying the right words. It was friendly on the surface. Underneath it was a checkpoint. The man was being screened. And I could see the moment on his face when he understood that the smile was actually a set of scales, and he was being weighed.
He did not come back.
I have thought about him for years, because I have been on both sides of that door. I have been the one weighed and found wanting. And, God forgive me, I have been the one holding the scales, sure I was protecting something holy when I was really just guarding a fence I built myself.
Here is the strange thing. Jesus opened the door. He tore the veil top to bottom, from the inside, so that anyone could come. And somewhere in the two thousand years since, His people quietly appointed themselves bouncers at a door He already flung open. We stand there checking credentials for a party we did not throw and cannot pay for.
Jesus had hard words for that. Not for sinners. For gatekeepers. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men. For you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.” (Matthew 23:13)
Read that slowly. The people He warned were not the ones outside the kingdom. They were the ones standing in the doorway with their arms crossed, blocking it. They thought they were the security. Jesus said they were the obstacle.
There is a Greek word that runs under a lot of this. Skandalon (σκάνδαλον, G4625). It is the trigger stick of a trap, the thing that trips a person and springs the snare. Jesus warned about causing one of these little ones to stumble, about laying a skandalon in someone’s path. And I have come to believe that most of our gatekeeping is exactly that. We take our own convictions, some of them good, and we lay them across the doorway like a wire at ankle height, and we watch people trip on things Jesus never put there.
He told a whole story about a gatekeeper once, and the gatekeeper is the one you are supposed to recognize yourself in.
You know the parable. A younger son takes his inheritance, wastes it, comes home broke and ashamed, and the father runs to meet him and throws a party. We love that part. We should. But the story does not end there. There is an older brother, and he is out in the field, and when he hears the music he will not go in. (Luke 15:25-28)
He is furious. He has done everything right. He kept the rules, worked the land, never embarrassed the family. And now this. A party for the one who blew it. He stands outside the celebration, arms crossed, doing the math on who deserves to be at that table. And the father comes out and pleads with him. Not argues. Pleads. Come in. Your brother was dead and is alive.
We never find out if the older brother went in. Jesus leaves it open, and I think He left it open on purpose, because He was looking right at the older brothers when He told it, the religious professionals grumbling that He ate with the wrong people. The younger son missed the party for a while by leaving. The older brother missed it by standing guard at the door of his own father’s house, refusing to sit with people he had already judged.
You can be the most faithful person in the family and still spend the party outside in the dark, keeping score.
Now, someone will say, does this mean anything goes? Does “Jesus only” mean we never draw a line, never say a thing is wrong, never protect the flock from real error?
No. And the early church answered this exact question, so we are not guessing.
In Acts 15 the whole thing nearly split over the same fence we saw in Galatia. Did Gentiles have to become Jews to be saved? The apostles and elders gathered in Jerusalem and argued it out, and Peter stood up and said God gave the Gentiles the Spirit “just as He did to us” and made “no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.” (Acts 15:8-9) Then why, he asked, are you putting a yoke on their necks that none of us could carry? They landed on almost nothing. A few things to keep peace at the table with Jewish believers, and that was it. The council’s whole instinct was to lower the fence, not raise it. To find the fewest possible requirements, not the most.
That is the pattern. The apostles guarded the center fiercely, the person and work of Christ, salvation by grace through faith, and they held everything else with an open hand.
Paul spelled out the open hand in Romans 14. He is dealing with real disagreements between real believers. What days are holy. What food is clean. Serious convictions, sincerely held, on both sides. And here is what he does not do. He does not settle it. He does not tell them who is right about the calendar and the menu. He tells them to stop weaponizing it. “Receive one who is weak in the faith, but not to disputes over doubtful things.” (Romans 14:1) “Why do you judge your brother? Or why do you show contempt for your brother?” (Romans 14:10)
The older theologians had a word for these things. Adiaphora. The things neither commanded nor forbidden. The matters where Scripture leaves room, and therefore we must leave room too. Baptism by immersion or by pouring. Communion weekly or monthly. Hymns or choruses or both. The charts about the end times that half of us are certain about and none of us can prove. The drinking question. How the service is timed and where the money goes and whether the carpet should have been blue.
I have watched a church split over carpet. I wish I were joking. But the carpet was never the point. The carpet was just the ground the gatekeeping instinct chose to die on that year.
Here is the honest word, and I have to say it firm because Scripture is not shy about it.
Making a skandalon out of a secondary thing is not a small sin. It is the sin Jesus warned the religious about more than almost any other. When you turn your conviction about a disputable matter into a checkpoint at the door, you are not protecting the Gospel. You are standing where Jesus stood the Pharisees, in the doorway, blocking the entrance to a house that is not yours.
The weak conscience is to be protected, not mocked. The strong conscience is to be humbled, not weaponized. And none of it, not one line of it, is the thing that saves.
So the next time you find yourself sizing up the new person in the lobby, running the quiet checklist, weighing whether they really belong, stop and ask which character you are playing. Because the father is already inside, and the music is already going, and the only people standing out in the dark are the ones who appointed themselves the guards.
Come in. Your brother was dead and is alive.
Next in the series, The Predestination Fence. Two men who love the same Jesus argue past midnight over a doctrine neither will ever see the bottom of, and walk away as strangers instead of brothers.
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