Do Christians have food rules?

The plates come out at a family function in Zirakpur and somebody leans across and asks what you eat now. Half the table is listening. You have known these people your whole life, and suddenly you are not sure what the right answer is, or whether there is one. This page is about food, and about what the Bible actually says.

Do Christians have food rules?

No. The Bible does not give Christians a list of foods to keep or avoid, and what a believer eats is left to their own conscience before God.

Peter learned this on a rooftop in Joppa, hungry, waiting for lunch. He saw a sheet let down with every kind of animal in it and heard, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15). The lesson was not really about food. God was preparing him to walk into a Roman’s house that afternoon, and He took the food rule away first, because that was the wall.

Paul says it plainly: “Food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). No better if we do. That sentence cuts in both directions.

So can a Christian eat meat?

Yes, and a Christian may also eat none. Both are free choices, and Scripture refuses to rank them.

“One person’s faith allows them to eat anything, but another, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them” (Romans 14:2-3).

Read that again, because it is aimed at both sides of your family table. The one who eats is told not to look down on the one who does not. The one who does not is told not to sit in judgment on the one who does. Paul does not resolve the argument. He ends it.

Is a vegetarian Christian less spiritual?

Not in the smallest degree. Nothing in the Bible makes a person’s food a measure of their faith, and anyone who tells you otherwise has added something God did not say.

Paul goes further and warns about teachers who “order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:3), and in the same breath he is writing to a church where many ate no meat at all. His concern is not the plate. It is the person who makes a rule out of it and then measures other people with it.

In our own church some families are vegetarian and some are not, and if you sat through a Sunday you would not be able to tell which. Nobody here is watching what you eat. Nobody here thinks less of you either way.

What do I say when I am asked?

Say what is true: that you are free, and that you would rather not eat anything that would make the person across from you uncomfortable.

That is not a dodge. It is the rule Paul actually gives. “If what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again” (1 Corinthians 8:13). He had the freedom and he was willing to hand it back, because the person mattered more than the plate.

So the answer at that family function is short, and it is kind. You are not under a rule. You are not making a point. You are eating with people you love.

This week

• If somebody asks you what you eat now, answer them kindly and do not make it a sermon.
• If you are eating at a home where meat is not served, do not carry it in and do not mention it.
• Thank God for a meal out loud once this week, whatever is on the plate.

May the God who made the grain and the rain give you a good appetite, an easy conscience, and peace at every table you sit at.