It can sometimes feel hollow when individuals tell you what they would do if they were in your situation when, in fact, they are very far removed from your situation. It’s easy to make declarations like, “I’d just quit my job if I were you” after an individual shares his work struggles when it costs you nothing to say that. Those can feel like empty words, something much easier said than done. Well, when you get to the end of 1 Corinthians 8, you might feel like Paul is sharing empty, hollow words. After all, he’s not the one in Corinth, trying to deal with his brothers in an understanding way concerning whether or not to eat meat sacrificed to idols, yet he declares in 1 Corinthians 8:13, “Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.”
You have to wonder how the Corinthians heard that. If they pictured Paul sitting there with a nice steak, cutting off a bite, saying, “Ah, just go without meat then. I’d go without the rest of my life if I had to,” while chewing up that savory bite, then it could sting a bit. They might be tempted to say, “Sure, that’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one that’s going to actually have to do it.” But unless the one reading this letter paused very long between the last words of chapter 8 and what we just read in chapter 9, there would have been very little time for the Corinthians to think such a thing.
Chapter 9, it seems, is written in order to show (at least in part) that Paul is not simply shouting what he would while he is off in the distance, laying down no such rights of his own. Chapter 9 shows us clearly that Paul practices what he preaches. In fact, this chapter probably serves to give substance to the words that Paul will end with in this section that goes from 8:1-11:1, namely, “Imitate me, as I imitate Christ.”
Now, just by way of reminder, the events going on in the pagan temples at Corinth had raised an issue with the Corinthian believers. These temples would be host to pagan religious worship services and festivals where an animal would be sacrificed to an idol that represented a certain pagan deity. However, since not all of the animal would be consumed in the sacrifice, the rest of the animal would be taken to another part of the temple that would then serve as a butcher shop. Furthermore, the temple dining hall would double as a place for banquets, receptions, and the like. And the meat served at such gatherings would obviously be the very meat that had been sacrificed to an idol. Other portions of the meat would be taken to the market to be sold there. So, the question arose, “Should we eat meat that has been sacrificed to one of this idols?”
And the Corinthians’ response to this wasn’t uniform. There was a group saying, “Of course it’s okay to eat meat sacrificed to an idol. After all, that idol is nothing and the deity it supposedly represents doesn’t exist. We know there’s only one God. Therefore, there’s no pagan spirit in the meat or anything like that. So eat up.” But there was another group who had come out of pagan worship and formerly had much association with idol worship. And for them, with their consciences being weak and easily defiled, they couldn’t imagine eating such meat. They felt it would be wrong to do.
And Paul recognized that if these brothers with weaker consciences did indeed eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols that it would be sin for them. That is, it would be sin because they would be doing something they thought was sinful. As we noted two weeks ago, if you do something that you think is sinful, then you are indeed sinning, even if the act isn’t sinful in and of itself.
This dynamic worried Paul. What he didn’t want to happen was for some of these Corinthian believers to go down to the temple dining hall for a wedding reception or the like, eat meat, and one of these brothers with a weaker conscience see them and be tempted to say to himself, “Well, if that brother eating in the temple thinks it’s okay to eat meat sacrificed to an idol, then I think I’ll go eat as well.” The reason why that would be dangerous of course is because the brother eating in the temple would know there’s nothing wrong with eating meat sacrificed to idols per se while the weaker brother who might go and eat that meat would be sinning (again, because he believed it was sinful to eat meat sacrificed to idols).
Therefore, Paul’s exhortation was, “Take care that this right of yours [i.e. eating meat that had been sacrificed to an idol] does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols? And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. Thus, sinning again your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ” (1 Cor. 8:9-12).
In Paul’s mind, it would be preposterous to bring spiritual harm to your brothers – perhaps sending him down a road of his heart growing hard in sinful rebellion against the Lord – just because you want to be able to eat meat. And this led Paul to conclude, “If food makes my brothers stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Cor. 8:13).
And this brings us back to where we started this morning. Is that an empty claim by Paul? Are these the words of a man who shouts from the sideline about what others should do but really isn’t willing to get into the game himself? Chapter 9 answers this question, “Absolutely not.” What we’ll see, rather, is Paul showing how he’s practiced this principle in his own life, the principle of being willing to surrender one’s own rights, if necessary, in order to love others and see them love and obey Christ.
What then does Paul teach us in 1 Corinthians 9? There are four things I want to note from this chapter that will aid us in living our lives following Paul’s example that he’s laying out for us here. The first is that:
Now, I say this because we can be tempted to call something sinful that is actually a Christian liberty we have, and we can be tempted to call something a Christian liberty that is actually a sinful practice. But I say this mainly because this seems to be one thing that Paul is showing us in this chapter.
In the first fourteen verses of this chapter, Paul argues that he has the right to be paid by the Corinthians for his labor in their lives as an apostle. He states in the first two verses that he is obviously an apostle. He has been commissioned by the Lord, as one who saw the resurrected Christ, to carry apostolic authority and build the church. Even if other churches would argue with him about this, the Corinthians shouldn’t. He’s the one that brought the gospel to them. He’s the one that founded the church there. He’s their father in the faith.
And as an apostle, he notes in verses 3-7 that he has the right to benefit from them financially for his labors over them spiritually. Surely he’s allowed to be fed by them. Surely he’s allowed to take a wife and have her provided for as well if she accompanies him as he travels to go care for the churches. Or, he asks, “Is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living?” (v. 6). Of course they have that right. He notes that a soldier doesn’t serve at his own expense and the servant who cares for a vineyard obviously benefits of its fruit. Therefore, obviously he has the right to be cared for and provided for by those whom he is taking pains to minister to spiritually.
And if they’re not convinced, he notes that the law teaches this same thing. He quotes Deuteronomy 25:4, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Then Paul asks, “Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly speak for our sake?” (vv. 9-10). And the answer is that it is indeed for the sake of man that the law spoke.
You see, the command not to muzzle an ox while he treads out the grain probably pertained to an ox that you would borrow or rent from your neighbor. After all, if it were your own ox, it would make no sense to muzzle him. A weak, malnourished ox cannot perform well for you. But if you borrowed or rented your neighbor’s ox, then you might be tempted to muzzle him, thinking you’ll get more grain, and when the ox is weak and unable to work, that’ll be your neighbor’s problem as you return to him his weakened, malnourished ox.
Paul understood, then, that the law was not given because God was stressing our need to care for oxen. The law was given to say, “Don’t do evil to your brother. Treat him justly when you borrow or rent his ox.” Paul is taking that principle and saying, “Surely it applies to man then. Surely I must be treated justly and fairly in my labors.” He asks in verses 11-12, “If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more?”
Finally, in verses 13-14, he appeals to the practice of priests in the temple and the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. He notes in verse 13 that those who are employed at the temple get food from the temple. Therefore, the logic follows, he should benefit with provision from the church as he ministers for and in the church. And finally, he writes in verse 13, “In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.” And that is probably a reference to Luke 10:7 when Jesus set out the seventy-two to minister the gospel and said, “And remain in the same house, eating and drinking what they provide, for the laborer deserves his wages.” That is, as you minister to these people, let them feed you and provide your shelter. Paul’s point then, is that he has every right to say to them, “Care for my needs. Feed me. Provide me a place to stay. After all, I’m here to minister to you for your good.”
But what’s interesting is that this isn’t the point of the passage. Other places Paul makes similar arguments so that he might say to the churches, “Therefore, provide for your elders, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17). But that’s not his point here. In fact, he’s arguing all of this so that he might say what he does say in verse 15, “But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision.” Again, this isn’t his point.
But his argument does demonstrate that Paul knows his rights as an apostle. He knows his rights as a Christian. He’ll later show the same thing. In verses 19-23, when he speaks of adjusting his life so that he might with others to the faith (something we’ll focus on more in a second), Paul says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law” (vv. 20-21).
Now, again, I’ll focus on this in more detail in the second, but notice that Paul knows where he stands in terms of what are his rights and what is sinful. He’s basically saying that when he goes to Jews, you’ll find him observing food laws and the Sabbath (among other things) because he doesn’t want to put anything in the way of them hearing the gospel. However, he knows these things aren’t sinful in and of themselves. In the privacy of his own home, Paul would have been frying up bacon, grilling pork chops, and dusting his furniture on a Saturday. As he acknowledges, he’s not under the law (meaning the Law of Moses). He knew his liberties and rights as a believer under the New Covenant. At the same time, when he went to Gentiles, he would have said, “Bring on the bacon,” becoming as they were, namely, those who had no association with the Law of Moses. However, if the Gentiles had said, “Hey, after we eat up this nice bacon, let’s go down and get together with the temple prostitutes,” Paul would have said, “No.” And the reason why he would have said, “No” is because though he’s not bound to obey the Law of Moses, he is not without law. Under the New Covenant, he’s bound to obey every command of Christ, and Christ commands us through the Holy Spirit not to have even an ounce of sexual immorality in our lives (Eph. 5:3).
Paul knew his rights. He knew his liberties. And he also knew things that weren’t liberties but were sin. We need to know and understand our rights and liberties as believers as well. But that simply paves the way for these next truths Paul lays out. After all, the next thing we need to see from the text is that:
Paul makes this huge argument about his right to get physical provisions from the Corinthians for his labors, and then he says in verse 12b, “Nevertheless, we have not made use of this right, but we endure anything rather than put an obstacle in the way of the gospel of Christ.” Or again, in verse 15a, he says, “But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing these things to secure any such provision.”
This is a beautiful picture of Paul. If you said that believers who didn’t get circumcised were sinning, Paul was going to come out swinging. He would fight tooth and nail to make you see that believers were not sinning to remain uncircumcised. They had liberty to be circumcised or not be circumcised. But when he took Timothy to preach the gospel to the Jews, he encouraged him to discard his right not to be circumcised and indeed be circumcised so that there might be no obstacle to the Jews hearing and believing the gospel. And he’s arguing the same thing here. He argues tooth and nail, “I have the right to be provided for,” only to say, “But I lay down that right so that there might be no obstacle in your way of hearing and believing the gospel.”
Paul didn’t want there to be any thought that his preaching of the gospel had any hidden motives. Was he simply trying to make money? Was he trying just to make a name for himself? No, he didn’t take money, and not taking money actually made you less respected in that culture. He said that his boasting is that he was preaching simply because he’d been commissioned by Christ to preach the gospel. He writes in 15b-18, “For I would rather die than have anyone deprive me of my ground of boating. For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward, but if not of my own will, I am still entrusted with a stewardship. What then is my reward? That in my preaching I may present the gospel free of charge, so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.” Paul said that his reward was found in getting to put nothing in the way of the gospel, even when that obstacle is getting paid for his labors (i.e. something that was his right).
Now, knowing that Paul is going to tell us eventually to imitate him as he imitates Christ, I think Paul wants us to hear that this needs to be our heart as well. We must be willing, if necessary, to lay down any right we have if it might stand in the way of another hearing and believing the gospel. If my unbelieving neighbor is caught up in some religious cult that thinks men should not have beards, I should be willing to shave my face as smoothly as I can so that when I try to reach out to him with the gospel, there’s nothing that stands as an obstacle to him hearing and believing it. Now, do I have a right to have a beard? Obviously my appearance would suggest I think I have that right. But doesn’t the love of Christ compel us to do what is necessary – even laying down our rights – in order to see others hear and believe the gospel? Absolutely it does. We need to be willing to let go of our rights, if necessary, for the sake of the gospel. But that’s not all we see here. Paul says something I think even more strongly, namely,
You see, it’s one thing to say, “Yeah, I’d be willing to shave my beard if necessary so that my neighbor might more easily hear the gospel and believe” but then go out and think nothing about your neighbor’s need for the gospel and do nothing about reaching your neighbor with the gospel.
The way Paul worked with the Corinthians (i.e. not accepting pay so that nothing would provide an obstacle to the gospel) was no exception. This is how he lived his whole life. That’s what he’s showing in verses 19-23. When he’s with Jews, he lays down his right to eat pork and abstains. When he’s with Gentiles, he may well eat things he was never served in his Jewish household growing up, even things he is disgusted by, for the sake of providing no obstacle in the way of them hearing and believing the gospel. He does the same to the weak so that he might win the weak. As he says in 22b-23, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.”
This is what drives Paul. This is the aim and intention of his life. Listen how he describes his position in verses 24-26, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercise self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do no box as one beating the air.”
Do you hear that? Paul’s got a mission. He wants to see the gospel advance. He wants to see the church built up. He wants to see Christ’s name honored and exalted. That’s what drives him. He lives, filtering all things through the grid of what might help the gospel advance, what might build up the church, and what might honor the name of Christ. He doesn’t think about eating meat on the one side and helping Jewish unbelievers hear and believe the gospel on the other and think, “Man, this is tough because I really like meat.” No. He’s got an intentionality about his life.
Not eating meat, or being circumcised, or not accepting pay, whatever it is, is just part of the deal. He fully recognizes that fulfilling the Great Commission is going to call for him to surrender his rights in different situations, and he’s fully on board. When he’s in the moment of seeing he might need to surrender a right, he doesn’t wrestle with it. The decision has already been made. That’s why he can say so freely in 8:13 that if he needed to he’d never eat meat again. That’s what he’s showing in chapter 9. That’s just his way of life. He loves the gospel and loves his brothers and sisters in Christ more than he loves any right he might exercise. He has an aim.
We must have that same aim and intention of seeking to live our lives in a way that we are seeking to advance the gospel, edify fellow believers, and exalt the name of Christ. That must be our intentional aim as well. In fact, let me ratchet that exhortation up a bit by making one more point:
Notice what Paul says twice in these closing verses. First, in verse 23 he says, “I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.” Then again, in verse 27, he says, “But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Now, aren’t we tempted to say, “Whoa; wait a minute.” I mean, why does Paul talk about what he’s doing to make sure he shares in the blessings of the gospel? He’s a believer. And why does he guard against being disqualified (from dwelling with Christ)? Again, he’s a believer.
Well, what he’s showing is that if his life weren’t characterized by love for the gospel, love for Christ, and love for the church, then he sure wouldn’t be showing himself to be a believer. And he knows that there is temptation around him all the time to focus on exalting himself, seeking his own good, and discarding others for his good. Like with Cain, that sin is always crouching at Paul’s door. So, he disciplines himself so that he might always remember and reflect the reality that he loves Christ, the gospel, and the church more than he loves indulging in riches, foods, drink, or whatever else. And if you and I are astounded at that commitment, I think Paul would say, “Isn’t that just basic to the Christian life? Isn’t that your commitment as well if indeed you know Christ?”
And I want us to be able to answer, “Yes” to that question. I want us as a church to lives intentional lives, aiming to do what we need to do in our lives to see the gospel advanced, the church edified, and Christ exalted. Let’s not live our lives aimlessly, like a boxer boxing the air. Let’s live with an intentionality, examining our lives and asking what we need to do in order to spread the message that Christ lived a perfect life, died to pay the penalty for sinners, and was raised on the third day so that any who believes in him might have eternal life. Let’s live with an aim of seeing how we might edify our brothers, never tempting them to sin. And let’s live with an intentional aim of seeing how we might bring honor to Christ through our lives. Let this be our aim and prayer as we come to the table. Amen.