The Most Difficult Part of One-Anothering: How My Love for Jazz Helped Me Understand the Grace of Deference

I minored in music in college. While I was learning about music theory, I was also discovering jazz music. My growing understanding of music theory made jazz even more fascinating because I could understand something of the creativity and originality in the way jazz music is constructed, how jazz musicians and composers bent and reformatted the rules on music composition and performance.

In my new enthusiasm for jazz, I began to buy jazz albums and play them in my dorm room. Then something happened to curtail my forays into the world of jazz: my roommate talked to me about the effects of jazz on his conscience.

He had come to faith as a senior in high school. But before that, he was a party animal. When he heard my jazz, he told me, it awakened appetites in him that he was trying to forget. This was odd, because jazz had no such effect on me. What impressed me as creative and original led him to a dark place he didn’t want to go.

What were my options here?

After all, I was listening to music I had purchased, playing it on my equipment. And there was nothing inherently wrong with jazz music, at least in a chapter-and-verse sense of the word. I surely had a right to listen to my music.

Did you notice all the first-person pronouns in that paragraph? (There were five of them.) I did have rights, and the Scripture doesn’t condemn what I had come to enjoy, but I had to realize that this wasn’t about my rights. I had to weigh the value of my liberty against my love for my brother in Christ.

I knew I had to listen to the counsel of Scripture. In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul devotes an entire chapter to how the fellowship should handle matters of personal conscience (in their case, what foods a Christian ought/ought not to eat). He points out that there is no high moral ground in such debates, neither in abstaining nor in participating. If my participation troubles the conscience (mine or my brother’s), I must abstain.

Paul summarizes: “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up” (Romans 15:1-2).

This is the principle of deference, courteously yielding to a brother or sister in a non-essential matter. To be candid, this choice about jazz wasn’t a difficult choice. My brother’s conscience was far more precious to me than my liberty.

Sometimes the stakes are high, and it is more difficult to make the Gospel-driven choice. If my roommate had taken the posture of the angry legalist, it would have been more difficult to make the right choice. I might have gotten my back up and doubled down on my rights (that is, I might have been tempted to turn up the volume).

Or if I had so deeply identified with jazz that it seemed that my identity was at stake, I might have had trouble doing the right thing.

But regardless of whether it was easy or difficult, it was still right to defer to my brother in this instance.

This is why deference may be the most difficult aspect of “one-anothering.”
 
Deference requires me to examine my motives and clarify what really matters to me. Deference might call on me to give up some innocuous pleasure that I really enjoy, or it might call me to refrain from judging a brother or sister whose conscience is not troubled by some activity that offends me. In matters pertaining to conscience, I must refrain from binding the conscience of a brother or sister who sees things differently.

This is not always easy, but because I follow a Savior who willingly suffered for me, because He gave up His life to bring my brother into the family, the choice between my liberty and my love for my brother must always be obvious.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship