Many of you love to measure your progress. Tools are available to measure your Body Mass Index where you assess your body fat. You have tools available where you can measure your carbon footprint so to know your impact upon the climate. Athletes will measure the size of their biceps. You can even monitor your social media influence over the Internet. Yet, few Christians have a significant handle on how to measure their spiritual maturity. How do I measure myself in terms of my growth as a believer? We measure our maturity by measuring how willing we are to forgo are freedoms.
Today, we read a first century text that purports to do just that – to measure the Christian’s maturity by the yardstick of forgoing his rights. Only this test is quite unusual. The test in question is the freedom to eat what is in front of you.
Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. 2 If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. 3 But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
4 Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” 5 For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— 6 yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
7 However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled. 8 Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do. 9 But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. 10 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? 11 And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died. 12 Thus, sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. 13 Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Corinthians 8:1-13).
The way in which the Bible purports to measure spiritual maturity through this one example is through food. And honestly it causes many who are relatively new to the Bible to scratch their heads. A fair reading of 1 Corinthian 8 will inevitablity lead to the question, “What does what I eat have to do with what I believe?” Meat offered to idols doesn’t make a major moral dilemma for you!
As things go, Americans have little problem with food in general. Whether it’s Julia Childs, Martha Stewart, or the South’s food celebrity, Paula Deen, there is an entire cottage industry related to food. There’s even a food channel! We love our delectable deserts as we count our calories. All the while, the average American likes his freedom to eat.
• Studies show that the average American consumes 2,700 calories a day.
• He drinks about a gallon of coke in a week.
• In a year’s time, he eats approximately 29 lbs. of French fries and another 23 lbs. in pizza alone.
No wonder why so much attention is given to eating healthy! Here in the beginning stages of 2011, many of your New Year resolutions have to do with diets. So how does all this relate to your spiritual maturity? Since September 11, 2001 (the day in which the Twin Towers collapsed), our nation has attuned to the gospel of tolerance. One of the fundamental questions of our day is, “How can people whose different beliefs, practices, and values differ from one another so greatly and yet live together?” How can I live with your beliefs when your beliefs deeply distress me and offend me? Our culture has overwhelming answered the questions with one word: TOLERANCE. The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender-neutral terminology, the State Department says. “The words in the old form were ‘mother’ and ‘father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. “They are now ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two.’” Paul has words of wise counsel for us to move beyond the impasse when two people who differ try to live together.
Today we continue in a series of sermons devoted to the New Testament letter of 1 Corinthians where we left off in early November. We have been in and out of this letter for a major part of 2010. And God willing, I hope to finish preaching through this letter in 2011. 1 Corinthians is the first of two letters to this one body of believers included in our New Testament from the Apostle Paul, a major figure for Christianity. The letter deals with a number of questions the church had asked their founder, Paul. He had been there eighteen months and left Corinth to start additional churches. In his absence, the people of the newly founded church had questions. Christianity was a new religion in the cosmopolitan city of Corinth. This bustling city of commerce was thoroughly pagan as the religion of the Roman and Greek gods were interwoven into the civic life of the city. Corinth’s motto could be summarized that if one god was good, many gods were better. In the eighteen months Paul was in Corinth, he saw many people leave their idols to come to know Christ. The Christians inside this new church did not come from homeschooled, “don’t go to the theatre” kind of families. They were pagans who had mixed it up with the Greek and Roman idols of their day. So these new Christians had questions.
I want to show you how this connects to you in two steps. Today’s Big Idea: Restrict Your Rights for the Sake of the Gospel.
1. Knowledge Alone Can Inflate
“However, not all possess this knowledge” (1 Corinthians 8:7a). Paul makes a turn at the beginning of verse seven. Up until this point, he suggests that everyone inside the church has the same knowledge: “Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge’” (1 Corinthians 8:1a).
There is a knowledge that is universally shared. But in the beginning of verse seven, he makes a shift where he recognizes that not everyone has come to the same knowledge. Some believers in Corinth have concluded that since idols have no real existence, then food offered to idols is a non-issue. Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:7). When they eat food offered to idols, it’s mere food. Nothing more. Yet, other believers associate food offered to idols with their former experience in worshiping idols. So the church is split. Some Christians feel they are “in the know.” They were “in the know” because they felt that idols didn’t exist and the food offered to them presented no real danger. But their knowledge shows itself in a fundamental weakness: it fails to account for their weaker brothers.
“But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled” (1 Corinthians 8:7b).
If you think about food for just a moment, then you know that food is one of the most social things we do in a day. We eat lunch together. We invite one another over for dinner. Our food is the avenue for connecting together. And this presents a unique problem that causes the Corinthian believers to write Paul. Instead of food uniting them; food was dividing them.
Their eating was much like our eating today – it was fundamentally connected to socializing. The “in the know” believers in the church of Corinth knew that eating together with others from the city of Corinth was very important in order to climb the social ladder. When some Christians ate pagan food, they did so out of a concern to please their pagan friends and neighbors. Pagan temples added dining rooms in the temple courtyards when Paul wrote these words. Much like the fellowship halls in our churches today, these dining rooms were used for either religious or social events.
The dining rooms in the pagan temples might be used for birthday celebrations, family reunion meals, or civic meals where important socializing and networking occurred. Archeologists have discovered invitations from Corinth: “Apollonius requests you to dine at the table of the Lord Serapis (an ancient Egyptian god) on the occasion of the coming of age of his brothers in the temple of Thoeris (another ancient Egyptian god).” Sometimes meals were for trade guilds, clubs, or they were private dinner parties that were held in a temple dining room. Pagan temples offered parts of animals in sacrifice to the gods, they also often functioned as butcher shops and banqueting halls. Often meat from a temple was sold to the public in the marketplace. The issue of eating the meat offered to idols or eating in the dining rooms connected to pagan temples was not clean-cut.
So how do we handle such issues inside the church today? Paul gives us a pointer. This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up (1 Corinthians 8:1b). Paul recognizes what the “strong group” hasn’t considered – knowledge alone puffs up. People with great amounts of knowledge become arrogant: “If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:2). The word “puffs up” pictures a balloon being filled. It speaks of arrogance or as the Greeks called hubris.
Similar to this situation at the ancient Corinth church, there is a counterfeit humility passing for tolerance today. And I want you to be able to spot it. Today’s tolerance seeks to end conflict by saying, “I am broadminded. I accept everything. I believe there are no right and no wrong. I accept people for who they are.” The “strong” in Corinth has arrived at a more knowledgeable position than their brothers who had come out of idolatry.
Watch the irony of the whole thing for a minute: they were tolerant of those outside the church who worshipped pagan deities… yet, they were intolerant of those who had come out of idolatry to worship Jesus Christ. They were judgmental only their brothers in Christ. They couldn’t tolerate those inside the church who didn’t understand their views on eating food offered to idols. They failed to show tolerance they offered those outside the church.
This is a big sin in our nation today. We believe inclusion to be a greater moral value than exclusion. In America today, we want to exclude those people who exclude others. In essence, there are three ways to exclude people.
1. Expulsion – I don’t agree with you so you need to get away from me.
2. Subjugation – I have the power over you. You must live in that part of town away from me.
3. Assimilation – I’ll relate to you only if you are just like me.
In essence, we say, “We’ll live together if you are just like me. After all, don’t you want to be like me? You are wrong, you know?” Put a bookmark there for we will return in a moment.
Assimilation is another form is another way to exclude someone. The “strong” were simply saying to the “weak,” we’ll let you continue in our church if you become like us. We are going to eat food offered to idols and you’ll eventually come around to our way of thinking: “Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do” (1 Corinthians 8:8). Yet, their “superior knowledge” shows itself in a fundamental weakness: it fails to account for their weaker brothers. It failed to build others up. When you look down on others who are weaker in knowledge than you, and laugh and deride them, you fail to build them up.
But when knowledge is married to “love [it] builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1b). The word “build up” is a construction analogy. We are called to build one another into more complete and stronger believers in Christ. The strong group needs a strong dose of humility. When you flaunt your freedoms in my face, there is an arrogance to your behavior that misses the mark. When you exercise your freedom, consider others. When you exercise your freedom, consider the Gospel. So the first way to measure your spiritual maturity is to consider how you exercise your freedoms.
The first (1st) step… Knowledge Alone can Inflate.
The second (2nd) step the Bible calls for…
2. Forget your Rights; Remember Your Brother
Why take so long to answer the question? Paul doesn’t their answer their question in one sentence. You have to read 1 Corinthians 10:14 and following for his conclusive answer. Why take so long to answer the question? Because he wants the Corinthian Christians to display love for one another. Paul is addressing this one concern throughout chapters eight, nine, and ten. His argument through these three chapters is by stages. By stages, where he moves from his concern for the weak (1 Corinthians 8)… to the example of his own behavior (1 Corinthians 9)… and only then does he directly address the issue (1 Corinthians 10). How do I live with people who are offended by my views because of different practices and values?
“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? 11 And so by your knowledge this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died” (1 Corinthians 8:10-11).
Stumbling block may sound like a minor obstacle to us for if we stumble, we simply catch ourselves and get back up. Yet, the stumbling block may lead a person into idolatry. If the person who didn’t know as much as you saw you eating inside a temple with other pagans, they maybe led to participate in idol worship because of your actions. The word “destroyed” in verse eleven (11) is the word apollumi used in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
Paul differs from the counterfeit called “tolerance” in our day because he has identified a concrete truth: “What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he” (1 Corinthians 10:19-22)?
Again, the counterfeit called tolerance in our days says, “All of have our opinions and there is no one truth.” “The one moral absolute is that there is no one moral absolute.” “And the only way to get along is when everyone admits that truth is relative.”
Paul starts at an agreed upon center, Christians loathe idols. And he works unity around this theological center. Is your right to eat wherever and whatever you want so necessary that you cause another person to be destroyed eternally? Forger your rights and Remember the Gospel. Remember, Restrict Your Rights for the Sake of the Gospel.
As far as Paul, if it meant jeopardizing another person’s eternal destiny, he would just as soon not eat meat at all: “Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble” (1 Corinthians 8:13).
When a weaker brother feels polluted and defiled with certain behaviors, the stronger believer needs to act considerately. When the strong and the weak inside a church fail to make space for another in their lives, the result is disunity and division in the church. When disunity and division happen inside a church, more is at stake than people failing to talk with one another. Unity inside a church is a barometer for those outside the church to verify the truth of Christianity. Only the way we achieve unity is not the new tolerance where everyone agrees that there is nothing to agree upon. The way to unity inside the church is not the new tolerance where everyone is included and no one is excluded. The way to unity is to sense there is a common center, the Gospel.
