Welcome back to Series 3 and Episode 3 as we continue this extraordinary story of the book of 1 Corinthians. It is certainly, in my mind, one of the most interesting books in the New Testament and one of the most interesting letters that Paul writes. There are many themes, and so many problems in the background. In the last episode, we found that Paul had been accused of financial corruption and trying to make money out of the Corinthians. I feel really sorry for Paul sometimes. 

Recap and Background 

He was faced with so many problems in the Corinthian church. Why didn't he just give up and leave them to it? When we look back through the letter, we find many painful issues that he had to face. He spent 18 months investing in this church, and now it was in a state of chaos with division, conflicts within, a man committing incest, other men going to the prostitutes in the city, lawsuits, problems about relationships in the church, and tensions about whether they should go to the temples to worship with the pagans. Not only does Paul face all these problems, but he was accused of being part of the problem himself - of being a corrupt leader. It was enough to make many people despair - but not Paul. Paul had remarkable resilience. He was willing to take the pressure of problems in the churches on his shoulders, to be misunderstood and misrepresented in a way that many people would find impossible. His motivation was much deeper than getting the approval of the people that he served. 

In this remarkable episode and passage, we can look into Paul's soul and heart, and we will find a man motivated by extraordinary love for Christ, his Saviour, extraordinary love for people, a willingness to serve them, and a willingness to lay down his life for them for the sake of their salvation. This is an incredible passage - very moving and very powerful. It tells us a lot about Christian leadership, about what it is to serve other people, about suffering and giving and, most of all, tells us a great deal about Paul the man - why he was such a great and remarkable leader who dominated the history of the Church through his missions and most of all through his extraordinary writings.  

We have already seen in the earlier chapters of 1 Corinthians that he was full of courage. He was willing to deal with some very complicated issues with very plain talking: the man who was committing incest should be disciplined and excluded from the church, if he was not willing to change; the men going to the prostitute should stop doing that; and people should not divorce for trivial reasons. He says many potentially very unpopular things. He was willing to do that. But what was in the heart of Paul? What motivated him? What made him continue on this incredible journey of serving Christ?  

The Cost of Leadership 

“Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.” 

1 Corinthians 9 and verse 19 NIV 

Here speaks a true evangelist. Every Apostle in the New Testament was also an evangelist. Paul was quite willing to serve people deeply, in order to have the opportunity to preach the gospel to them and to win some of them for Christ. That was what motivated him.  

He lost his status in society when he became a Christian; the Jewish establishments in Jerusalem, where he lived and worked as a Pharisee, rejected him. He did not have any wealth, as far as we know. He did not have his own immediate family, because he was not married, and he did not have children. He had very few possessions. He was constantly on the move. He experienced persecution, sometimes he was beaten. He had been robbed on the road and shipwrecked at sea. All sorts of things happened to Paul on this journey. Things that many people in churches today would think would be impossible to bear. But the Church is always marked by astonishingly courageous leaders who know what God has called them to do and are willing to pay the price to achieve it. The Church today around the world, in many countries, is served by people who have the same spirit as the Apostle Paul. This is why the Church grows – evangelists: men and women, who are willing to speak about their faith far and wide and to travel and experience great discomfort, sometimes persecution, sometimes injury, sometimes even to risk their life, and sometimes to be put in prison for the sake of the faith they believe in. The spirit of Paul, the attitude of Paul, needs to grip the modern Church in order for the Church to grow and thrive. In many parts of the world today, the Church is growing at a tremendously fast rate and one of the reasons for that is that there are people who take seriously the example of Paul.  

In this verse, he says he is ‘free and belongs to no one’. He was free in the sense that he was free from legalism and the Law of Moses; he had been set free completely. He was free to make his own decisions; no one was telling him what to do. He was not under the authority of any specific person in the Apostles; Peter had released him to the Gentile mission, while Peter and the other Apostles were focussing primarily on the Jewish communities. But he didn't use his freedom for any selfish reason. He used it to serve other people.  

All Things to All People  

We find, in the next few verses, what he means by serving other people. He gives three different types of people that he was committed to serving and reaching for Christ.  

“To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.  To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.  To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.  I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”
1 Corinthians 9: 20 – 23 NIV 

Paul, on the Damascus Road, was commissioned to preach far and wide. He travelled further and more frequently, as far as we know, than any of the other original Apostles. The first people he served were the Jews, those ‘under the law’ mentioned in verse 20. He was called to the Jewish people. This is amazing because they had already rejected him and yet he loved his own people. He expresses this very movingly in the book of Romans at the beginning of chapters 9 and 10 which we studied when we did a Collection on the book of Romans. His love for the Jewish people is tremendous. In order to reach the Jewish people, he needed to behave like a Jew when he was with them. He could do that because he knew what to do. The most characteristic thing Paul did first when he travelled to a new city, was to go to the Jewish place of worship before he went anywhere else. The Jewish place of worship was usually a synagogue - a worship centre, a building in a Greek or Roman city. Sometimes, if they hadn't built a synagogue, there was a place of prayer. He would go to the synagogue, and greet his fellow Jews, and go through the Jewish worship in the synagogue with them. Then, characteristically, in the Jewish synagogues, when somebody came in from another town or city, it was a custom that the synagogue ruler would invite that person, especially if they were well-educated (and Paul was a Pharisee, so he was very well-educated) and they would invite them to come and address the synagogue. Paul would frequently find himself in a Jewish environment with his fellow Jews, in a city he had not been to before and was welcomed into the synagogue. They would ask him to go to the front and read something from the scriptures and give a message. Paul wouldn't start to preach about Jesus. He would open the Old Testament prophets and read from their own scriptures. He would read words like these:  

“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Isaiah 53, verses 5 and 6 NIV 

Then he might ask them what the prophet Isaiah meant. What was he talking about? To whom was he referring? And then Paul would begin to start preaching about Christ. 

To be accessible to the Jewish people, he would change his customs and his behaviour. Not only would he follow Jewish worship, but, for example, one of his companions who travelled with him was Timothy, who had a Jewish mother and a Greek father, but had not been circumcised as a child. All male Jewish children had to be circumcised; it was compulsory. So, Paul told Timothy, who was a young adult at this stage, that he needed to be circumcised if he was going to travel with Paul. This was so that when he came to the synagogues and introduced his friend Timothy to the other Jewish people, he could say, “This is a fellow Jew who has been circumcised like you have.” He did it purely to make it easy for the Jews to respond to his message. When he went up to the Temple in Jerusalem, he would fulfil the sacrifices, the prayers and the financial offerings that were required at that season in the Temple. He became like a Jew, like those under the Jewish law.  

At the same time, he said, in verse 21: “To those not having the law” (that was the Law of Moses) “I became like one not having the law.” This is a reference to the Gentiles - the primary group that Paul was seeking to reach. He didn't behave in a Jewish way when he was talking to the non-Jews. He would speak to them in their own language, being fluent in Greek. He sometimes quoted to them their own writers, philosophers and poets. He would socialise with them. Jewish people didn't socialise with Gentile people in those days because they had food laws that restricted them from eating foods that Gentiles would eat. It was characteristic, in those days, for Jewish people to always eat separately. They didn't mix with Gentile people socially. But Paul, because he was not under the Jewish law, sat down with them at their tables and went into their homes. He was adapting his behaviour culturally, according to who he was with for one reason only - to get close to them, to be able to communicate deeply with them so that he could preach the gospel to them. When he went into Athens, the cultural capital of Greek civilisation, he was invited into the debating chamber of the philosophers and the lawyers and he spoke to them mostly about pagan gods, statues, and about their philosophers, and poets. There was no mention of the Old Testament in this discussion because they didn't know the Old Testament. It wasn't their book; they hadn't read it. He spoke to them in their own language, and then he told them about Christ and his resurrection from the dead. Paul adapted his behaviour according to his context, to get close enough to people so that he could communicate Christ to them. 

The third category he mentions is a very interesting one. Verse 22: “To the weak I became weak.”  Who were the weak? Usually, in that society, the weak meant the poor - those who were in serious financial need and struggling with their lives. Another group of people who were very weak were slaves, who worked in harsh conditions; they didn't have any personal freedom. They worked in households where they did what their masters and mistresses told them to do; sometimes they worked in little mini factories or in mines; and sometimes they worked rowing in galley ships that travelled across the Mediterranean Sea. They had a hard time. Paul drew alongside these people whenever he had an opportunity. One example of this is that Paul had a friend in one of the churches that was planted from his ministry, whose name was Philemon. Philemon had in his household a slave by the name of Onesimus. This slave escaped from the household of Philemon, the Christian, and travelled to another country to find Paul. Paul helped this runaway slave who, if he had gone back home, risked being executed or severely punished or beaten, as was common in those days for those who escaped slavery. But Paul spent time with Onesimus and came close to him, discussed all the distress that he felt about being a slave. Paul preached Christ to this slave, who then believed in Jesus. We find in the letter that Paul wrote to Philemon, and he told him he was sending Onesimus back to Philemon even though Onesimus had left as a slave but had now become a believer. He asked Philemon to have mercy on him and not to punish him too harshly but rather to receive him back into his household; he was now a brother rather than a slave. You can see that Paul has drawn alongside the slave, the weak. What he could have done when Onesimus came to him, was send him straight back to accept his punishment. But no, he drew alongside him, and he won him for Christ. “To the weak I became weak.” He felt the pain of the person who was on the margins of society. 

This is a truly wonderful example of what it means to be a Christian and one who shares our faith. We seek to identify with the different types of people that we meet. We get alongside them. We try and understand their story. We get close to them. We love them, and then we share Christ with them. We want to win them for Christ. 

The Race of Life 

“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.  Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore, I do not run like someone running aimlessly; I do not fight like a boxer beating the air. No, I strike a blow to my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”
1 Corinthians 9: 24 – 27 NIV 

The Christian life is like a running race. In different stages of my life, I have run lots of races. When I was young, I would run 100m, 200m, 400m as fast as I could. As an older person, I run races that are 5km or 10km or longer, and I have always run to win. But I have never won a race in all my life, and I never will. But I have adopted the attitude of Paul, ‘Run your very best.’ As a Christian, put your very best energy into everything that God calls you to do, hoping to win the race. I have never won a race, never come second and never even come third in a race. But I have tried. I have trained and got myself fit. I am just not a very good runner! We can all run the race of faith. We are not all like Paul. There are very few Christians ever who function and minister like Paul, but he is an example for us. We are all in the same race.  

What is the prize - ‘The crown that will last forever’? It is quite clear in the New Testament from Jesus' teaching onwards, particularly the parable of the talents or the parable of the bags of gold, that appears in Matthew 25, which I deal with in the Collection ‘The Life of Jesus’, that for Christiansthere are two things that we achieve when we die. The first is, we enter into our salvation because we have been saved by grace, through the blood of Jesus. We didn't earn it. We didn't merit it. It has been given to us as a free gift. That is absolutely wonderful! We enter into glory. But the second thing, is what Paul is talking about here - for those who are faithful to what God called them to do, there is also honour, reward. He calls it a ‘crown that will last forever’. The words that Jesus mentioned in the parable of the bags of gold or talents: “Well done, good and faithful servant!” are the words that we should want to hear Jesus say when we finish our Christian life. That is what Paul wanted. He wanted to finish the race, to reach every person that God had for him to reach, to go to every place, to plant every church, to share every truth he could with as many people as possible. 

Reflections 

This has been a very challenging and exciting episode as we have looked into the heart of Paul and understood something of his missionary strategy. We notice a love of the gospel and a real love for other people which motivated him.  

We have to apply these principles to our cultures. What sort of people do you need to reach in your village, in your town, neighbourhood, district, city, or in the place where your church is set? How do you find a way of communicating with them effectively? How do you get close to them? That is the question Paul is asking us through this passage. He made big steps to get close to people who were sometimes very different from himself, and as a result, he built bridges of communication and could win people to Christ, who came from very different cultural backgrounds to himself. He could also win people from the Jewish background who were very similar to himself. 

This is a powerful message for us concerning the mission of the church. Paul's motivation explains why he was not discouraged and overwhelmed by all the problems in the church. He had another agenda in mind, another goal. He wanted the gospel to keep spreading at all costs.