"Full Identification," 1 Corinthians 9:19-27, Andrew Evans

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.