Well, good morning. Wow, silence is deafening.
Let's try again. Good morning.
Hey, it's great to be with you this morning.
It's great to be opening up God's word with you.
My name is Andrew Evans. I'm one of the pastor's here at
Church of the Resurrection. Let me encourage you to turn in
your Bibles to page 900 to the passage from First Corinthians.
We are continuing our series looking at Paul's letter to the
church in Corinth. So before we get started, let me
pray for us. Father, you are a God who does
not stand far from us, but you speak to us and you call us to
yourself, and you call us into what you are doing in the world.
And so, Lord, I pray that you would speak with power through
your word this morning. I pray this in Jesus name, Amen.
Now in the backyard, back corner of our backyard, we have a
little garden. My wife loves to garden.
And so when we moved into our house, she had a vision for
putting a raised bed garden in the this back corner of the
yard. And shortly after we moved in
there, she, she got a line basically on an almost unlimited
supply of very large used pallets, you know, like the used
for shipping things. And so she, she and I hauled, or
actually the contractors hauled a bunch of pallets over to our
yard and I set about cutting them up and prying them apart
and nailing them back together to create raised garden beds.
And so now we have probably 8 or so rather recycled looking
raised garden beds in the in our backyard.
Now think about these boxes that I made out of this recycled
pallet wood. What is the value of those boxes
that I spent hours trying to construct in themselves?
I don't think that they have much value at all.
They're a little bit too big to be burned as firewood.
They don't look that great. Frankly.
The only value that these boxes have is in what fills them
right. They are worthless until my wife
came along and filled them with dirt and compost and seeds and
hours of tender care. These boxes are made to be
filled. Now.
The same can actually be said of so many aspects of our lives
that we place a lot of value in. Those things that we hold so
valuable can actually are actually worthless in a real
sense until they are filled with something.
Both our gospel lesson and our Psalm, we're speaking to the
sort of relative value of money. We can really value money,
right? But what is the value, actual
value in itself, of the number on the bank account, number of
dollars you have, or the amount of cash in your wallet?
It's not in itself. It's not very high.
Until that money is filled, it's potential is filled with
intention and direction. And the same can be true, I
think, most relevantly for our passage of our freedom.
Freedom is like a garden box, right?
It's empty in a sense. It's worthless until you start
to do something with it. Now, if the gospel message gives
great freedom to everybody who believes it, everybody's looking
to Christ is free. But the point of that freedom
isn't simply to be free. Christ sets his people free so
that the garden boxes of their lives can be filled with life.
And this is Paul's point in our passage in First Corinthians
today. Paul is continuing his argument
here about idolatry and about meat offered to idols that he
began back at the beginning of chapter 8.
But his discussion isn't just about idols and meat and temples
and Pagan rituals. Here he's touching on the deep
issues of freedom, rights, community obligations, and then
here today, God's mission, God's mission.
Thinking about idolatry inevitably leads us to think
about God's mission in the world and our role in it.
Paul here in this passage is inviting the Corinthian church,
and he's inviting us to fill our lives with God's mission.
His main point is this. The gospel frees us to go on
mission. The gospel frees us to go on
mission. And we'll look at this by
looking at the two paragraphs that we have in at least the
English translation that we're using right here.
The gospel sets us free first for missional service and then
for missional discipline. Missional service and missional
discipline. That's where we're headed.
So Paul begins our passage by noting that he is free from all
the gospel has set him free from needing the approval, or even in
a sense, needing the support of other people.
He's free, but his freedom isn't a reason for him to indulge
himself. Out of his freedom, Paul chooses
to make himself a servant of all, by which he means that he
is actively seeking to win more people to Christ.
He then goes on to explain what this looks like.
Right. He adapts his life to those of
the people around him. He doesn't compromise on what he
believes, but he readily enters into the lives of the people
around him in order to find a way to tell them about Christ.
So for the Jews, for example, he lives like a Jew.
To those under the law, under the Jewish law, he lives like
those under the law. Now, he's not actually under the
Jewish law in the same way that they are thinking about
themselves, but he eagerly takes on their burdens and their
requirements in order to have access to them.
In a sense, this means he likely observed Jewish holidays refrain
refrain from eating non kosher food with them.
He took on their restrictive lifestyle choices.
They wouldn't say it's a lifestyle, but he took on their
restrictive lifestyle choices all for the sake of bringing
some of them to Christ. And he does the same actually
for those who are outside of the law.
Paul here is happy to accommodate himself to the non
sinful choices of those around him, all for the sake of being
able to share the gospel with them.
Now odds are that Paul is a good Jewish man, probably did not
have a taste for pork. You know those ribs that you
love? He probably would not have loved
those because he didn't grow up with pork.
But I suspect here that he's saying that he happily gladly
ate non kosher food all for the sake of being able to win some
to Christ. And last Paul mentions here the
week. Now he's talked about the week
earlier as as people who have these scruples about, about
things that they should be doing or not be doing.
And he's happy, happy to accommodate himself to the week,
joining them in their scruples in order to avoid scandalizing
them and so draw them to Christ. So in all these ways, Paul here
is being a servant by laying down his preferences and
accommodating himself to those whom he's trying to win.
This is what he means in the second-half of verse 22.
I've become all things to all people that by all means I might
save some. Paul here isn't being a
spineless wimp, sort of mealy mouthed sycophant who simply
tells you what you want to hear. That's not what he's doing.
He is deliberately and self consciously laying down his
preferences for the sake of those around him in order to
share the gospel with them. Now in, in certain countries,
like in Rwanda, where my wife and I lived for a bit, if a
group of foreigners or a group of dignitaries, you could say,
come to a village, a more rural village, they will often kill an
animal for you in in order to create a feast.
This is how they show hospitality.
Now imagine if you are a, an American vegetarian and you're
working in Rwanda and you, you have a mission.
You need to go to a meeting in one of these villages and you
show up, you know, you drive up in your Land Cruiser and you
walk up and out. They come to celebrate you and
they hand you this plate of rather scrawny looking chicken
legs fried up just for you. Now, you don't like meat, What
do you do? You eat the chicken.
That's what you do. You lay down your preferences.
You become like they are meat eating and all, all for the sake
of your mission to that village. Now this is Paul's vision of
missionary service. Here he is pulled so deeply into
God's mission that he wants to become a servant of all so that
he can win some to Christ. This is, in a sense, one of the
greatest expressions of his true freedom, isn't it?
Christ has given him so much. He is so rich in Christ that he
doesn't have to assert himself. He isn't bound to social
conventions or or social expectations because of who he
is and what he has received in Christ.
He can lay down his own preferences without fear of what
that means for his identity, such as the freedom and the
security that he has in Christ. Well, friends, do you know this
freedom? A freedom that's so great that
you can lay down your preferences in service to
others? Or are you so afraid of losing
your identity and your individuality?
We are right to be proud of who we are.
We're about to be right to be proud of where we came from, of
our culture, our heritage. But the Gospel calls us to a
looseness with our own preferences, no matter how
deeply rooted, and invites us to be willing to subjugate our own
desires for the sake of the Gospel and for the sake of being
able to share about Jesus with other people.
This is actually one of the great reasons for ministry teams
like the Cross Cultural and Justice Ministry here at Res
CCJM has spent time in the past educating clergy and staff and
volunteers on cultural awareness so that we can be aware of how
we bring our own cultural preferences and and and
peculiarities into different situations and thus be better
able to actually lay those down in the service of the gospel.
Now you might have noticed that I am a, you could say a white
guy from South Carolina. I like Chick-fil-A.
I like bluegrass music. And some of you might think that
those are just sort of the the good things in life that God
gave the world. And you know, I don't disagree
with you. I think those are great.
But those are also cultural preferences that I need to be
willing to set aside in certain situations for the greater call
of the mission of the gospel in the world.
Now, for example, I have family who are vegan.
I don't understand that. I I like meat, I don't like
tofu, but I will eat tofu with them in order to love them and
to give me an opportunity to share about Jesus with them.
Now, in a sense, these are trivial examples, right?
They only scratch the surface of ways that we can be called to
set aside our own preferences and be all things for all people
in the service of the gospel. But when we do these things,
when we adopt this mindset of a servant, set aside our own
preferences to enter into somebody else's culture, into
somebody else's world, we were actually entering into the heart
of the gospel message itself, because the the gospel is a
message fundamentally of salvation, crossing cultural
boundaries. Christ, you could say, left his
own culture. He left his home, took on the
form of a servant. He left the comfort and the
glory of heaven, crossed over into our world, becoming like us
in every way so that he might win US.
Christ served us by becoming like us, knowing us, and all of
our frailty and weakness. The source of our salvation is
one of cross cultural service. And then the Gospel message has
gone out, spread across the entire world through cross
cultural movement. Christianity doesn't bring or
offer a culture when it encounters a new people.
It doesn't import a culture. It adapts to the new culture
even while drawing those people to Christ.
You can actually contrast this with Islam.
I had to go to a a mosque a few years ago.
It was a class assignment and seminary and one of the things
that really struck me was the bathrooms in the mosque.
This is in in northwest DC. They have modern plumbing.
They have access to all the normal, normal things that we
would have in our bathrooms. But their bathrooms were what
you would find in the Middle East.
That is, that is what they had because the mosque was bringing
a sort of culture to Northwest DC.
But that's not what Christianity does.
Christianity brings the message of Jesus, and that message of
Jesus adapts to culture. And so you have manifold
different expressions of Christianity all throughout the
world. Christianity is perhaps uniquely
among all world religions, cross culture cultural.
And the root of that cross cultural capacity is Paul's word
here in the actions of Jesus before him.
Now, this kind of cross cultural missionary work can be very
exciting, but Paul's point here isn't to say that we are all
called to a kind of intense cross cultural missionary work.
Maybe you are called to do that. I'm so grateful that we have the
sons here with us. They will be sharing about their
work in the Middle East that former members here.
What a privilege to have them here to talk to us about their
work. But Paul here is inviting every
single one of us to lay down our preferences in order to serve
those around us, in order to strive to win them for Christ.
Maybe you have a Mormon colleague.
You've been talking to her about orthodox Nicene orthodoxy,
Christianity. Now, even if you really like
going out to happy hours and having a glass of wine or a cold
beer, maybe you pass up that wine or that beer, that happy
hour, in order to open the door to more conversations with your
teetotalling Mormon colleague. Or maybe you have a neighbor
from a different ethnic background and this this person
loves to talk, and they clearly have a very different conception
of time and of social obligations than you do.
It is very tempting to be frustrated with this kind of
person because we got to get somewhere man, time to wrap it
up. But maybe instead of just being
frustrated, maybe what we are called to do is to lay down our
preference for punctuality and to carve out more time for him
in order to allow for conversations about Jesus.
This kind of self sacrificial service can be very hard, but
Paul here is inviting all of us to do it all for the sake of the
gospel. It requires that adaptability.
It requires creativity, It requires focus.
But it can be so exciting and so rewarding to be on mission for
Jesus in this way. So if Paul here is first
inviting us to fill our lives with missional service, he next
calls us into missional discipline.
Missional discipline. This is the point of the second
paragraph, verses 24 to 27. Now remember that Paul's
overarching argument is about what we should do with our
freedom, how we should hold our freedom.
He calls us to fill it with missional service, but here he's
warning US against the dangers of selfishly indulging our
freedom. Christ sets us free, but the
proper and effective use of that freedom requires discipline.
Paul points to the example of runners in a competition in a
stadium. All of the runners had the same
goal to win the race. And in pursuit of that goal, all
of the runners must exercise discipline, self-control in all
things. I remember reading about the
great Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge.
He may still be be active. He's sort of declined a little
bit, but he has this incredibly Spartan lifestyle.
While he's preparing for marathons.
He has this training camp in the Highlands of Kenya.
He lives there for months away from his family, monitoring his
diet and his exercise so closely.
He's cleaning toilets with the other runners.
They're all with a single minded focus on becoming the best
marathoner he can be, and the result is that he's the only
person to ever run a marathon in under 2 hours.
This is the image that Paul has in mind for all Christians.
We are free to pursue the prize of the gospel, to run after
Christ with all that we have. Christ didn't set us free just
so that we could indulge our passions and live however we
want. That isn't freedom, but slavery.
Instead, he sets us free to run after Him, to pursue the prize
of eternal life with him. And that requires discipline,
discipline. And Paul gives us a sense here
for the intensity of what he's talking about in verses 26 and
27. Paul has a single minded focus
on eternal life. And the result is that he
disciplines his body and keeps it under control.
A more literal translation would be I beat my body and enslave
it. What he doesn't want to happen
is that. He preaches the gospel to other
people, but then finds that he is disqualified from enjoying it
himself because he was not disciplined.
So there you could say there's a sense here in which in which
Paul is concerned directly about a mission to himself.
He wants to preserve his own eternal life.
But there's a real sense in which our discipline as
Christians can make or break our witness to other people as well.
What good is the salvation that doesn't break the power of sin
and evil and vice over our lives?
Christ calls us to a consistency between what we proclaim and how
we live. How many people have had their
faith shipwrecked by pastors who were great in the pulpit but had
a substantial moral failing? How many people look at the
church and see only hypocrisy and selfishness and say, I don't
want to have anything to do with that.
I love Jesus, but I don't want what they have?
The way we live not only as a demonstration of the reality of
our own faith, but it can be a help or a hindrance to our
participation in gospel mission. And striking here that at the
end of our passage, Paul returns to this idea of being a servant
or a slave. Paul knows he is free.
This is the glorious truth of the gospel.
But he voluntarily makes himself a servant, all for the sake of
the gospel. Here at the end, he talks about
making his body a servant again in order to preserve his own
salvation. Walking faithfully in our
freedom requires discipline that can feel like servitude.
The reality is, though, that we will all serve something or
someone. We will serve ourselves, our own
appetites, anxieties, ambitions, or we will serve someone else.
The idea of being completely free is either false or so
abstract as to be meaningless. The real question for all of us
is whom will we serve? And Paul makes it very clear
whom he will serve. He is eagerly serving the
mission of God, the mission of Christ.
He wants salvation for himself and for as many others as
possible. And he's inviting us all to
follow him in that service of God's mission.
That service can be hard. It requires discipline, but it
is so, so good. In fact, it's the only service
that ultimately leads to life. Athletes in Corinth, when they
won the race, received a, you know, a Laurel of wilting
leaves. We are disciplined here in our
city in order to receive money, power, prestige, status,
pleasure that will all pass away.
But filling our lives with Christ and with His mission
gives us an imperishable prize. There is nothing more beautiful,
nothing more satisfying, nothing more lasting than eternal life
with God. Jim and Elizabeth Elliott were
missionaries in the 50s to South America trying to reach
unreached tribes there. Jim Elliott was martyred by the
tribe he was trying to reach, he wrote in his journal before he
died. He is no fool who gives away
what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
Now, Jim Elliott laid down his life to follow Jesus on mission,
But I think the life of his wife and his daughter perhaps even
more powerfully illustrate what it means to follow Jesus on
mission. They could.
Elizabeth and Valerie Elliott could have just gone back to the
United States. That would have been the obvious
rational, prudent thing to do, right?
But they continued Jim's work, and a few years later, they
actually made contact with that same tribe that killed Jim.
They lived with them. Perhaps we're the first people
from outside the tribe to meet the tribe, live with them, and
actually come out alive. They learn the language in order
to translate the Bible for them. They became like that in many,
many ways, adopting their cultural customs for a time,
laying down not only the comfort of life in America, but the
desire for retribution, their physical safety, all in order to
win them to Christ. And the result of following God
and his mission was an eternal harvest of souls.
Many in that tribe came to know Jesus because Elizabeth and
Valerie didn't want to hold on to their freedom, but instead
filled it up with Christ like service and discipline, all so
that they might win some to Christ.
They did it for the sake of the gospel.
My friends, you are free. The gospel sets you free.
So what are you using your freedom for?
Let's follow the example of Paul, the example of our Savior,
and use our freedom for the sake of the mission of the gospel.
In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit,
Amen.