Faithful Where You Are, Building Others in Christ

Scripture References

• 1 Corinthians 7:17-24
• 1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Introduction

• The men’s 19-week study through 1 Corinthians caught up this week: the group had skipped a session two weeks earlier to help grill in North Dallas, and last week covered the end of chapter 7 (“a disciple lives for eternity”). The teacher combined the skipped lesson on 7:17-24 (“a disciple is faithful where God puts them”) with the scheduled lesson on 8:1-13 (“a disciple uses freedom to build others up”), since the two fit together as one heart issue.
• Context refresher on Corinth: a strategically placed port city on an isthmus, wealthy, busy, full of sailors, and mostly given to pagan, cultish, or demonic activity. One man’s summary: “Las Vegas crossed with Amsterdam.” Right in the middle of it Paul planted a church that was blowing up, and he wrote to remind them who they are in Christ and then, at much greater length, to tell them what they were doing wrong and how to fix it. The parallels to Lake Pointe’s situation in a culture that rejects it were not lost on the group.
• The teacher opened with a sentence on the whiteboard that he believes most men finish in their heads more often than they admit: “I deserve ______.”
• Next week’s teaser from the man teaching it: the lesson is “a disciple pursues their one more,” probably the most powerful lesson of the series. The question to carry into the week: what would I need to change in my life to be able to invest in my one more?

Key Points / Exposition

1. “I Deserve ______”

• Going around the room, the men were asked to finish the sentence honestly, not with a churchy answer. One started there anyway (“for my sins, I deserve death”) before the real scripts came out: respect after 20 years of teaching, to do what I want, a wife who wants to have sex with me, money and business after working a deal for months, a vacation, recognition, a season of peace after the storm, a promotion, a raise, a boss who is not on my back, the right to say whatever I think, a nicer house, a nicer car.
• One man raised in the Midwest said this was hard to flip, because he was taught you don’t deserve anything. But the instinct is still there: “How many times have we finished a round of golf and said, ‘I deserved a better score’?”
• Another described it as a gumball machine: I put my money in, so I deserve my gumball. I do, I do, I do, so I deserve something in return.
• The teacher’s point was not that these wants are wrong. Many are reasonable. The issue is what happens when what I think I deserve starts controlling whether I am willing to be faithful.
• Paul asks two questions in these chapters that wreck the “I deserve” mindset: What if my circumstances never change? And what if I really do have the right to do it?
  • Chapter 7: you don’t get to postpone faithfulness until you get what you think you deserve.
  • Chapter 8: even when you are genuinely free to do something, love may lead you to give that freedom up for someone else.
  • Written on the board: “It’s not about me.”

2. Faithful Where God Puts You (1 Corinthians 7:17-24)

• “Each person should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has called them. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches.” Paul repeats the idea three times: remain in the situation you were in when God called you.
• The question that had been burning a hole in the teacher’s mind all week: how does a circumcised man become uncircumcised? (The group’s best guess: not in the physical sense.) Circumcision and slavery were loaded identity markers that meant far more to the Corinthians than to us, but Paul’s point is that none of those circumstances determine whether you belong to Christ and have to obey Him.
• Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say circumstances can never change. Verse 21: “If you can gain your freedom, do so.” He is not telling anyone to stay miserable forever and call it spiritual. We have all met people who martyred themselves in a crummy situation.
• The point is simpler: I don’t need a different life before I can start obeying Jesus.
• The men were asked what they catch themselves saying, “Once I get past this, then I can really focus on following Christ”:
  • One man said it used to be chasing money. He reached a certain income, lost it, and chased it again, and realized a few years ago that God would not give it to him because he knew he would not be faithful with it.
  • That reminded the teacher of a car salesman he met in a cigar shop in Frisco who had won about five million dollars in the lottery when he was first eligible, then burned through it on gambling, prostitutes, and drugs, did jail time, and went bankrupt before rebuilding his life. His line has never left the teacher: “Don’t ask God for what your character can’t handle.”
  • “I’d be a lot more content with my life if only…” One man: if he could get out of his own head, with less needless anxiety and a little more peace.
  • Have you looked at someone else’s job, money, marriage, influence, or schedule and thought, “If I had what they have, God could do a lot more with me”? Everyone has, if honest. One man called it selfish, since you are striving for something God has not given you and may not want you to have yet, if at all. The group’s better word: coveting.
  • What is the one thing you keep trying to get settled or fixed so you can finally relax? One man answered: a heart change. He is struggling with what that means, how to have a contrite outlook and let God soften his heart, and he hears from others that they would like to see it too. “If I achieve that, then yes, I can finally relax.”
• Does Paul say any of that has to change first? No. One man described how for a long time he wished he looked like that guy or was as successful as that person, and found that when you start acting a certain way, you become that person; wanting to be brave and acting brave eventually becomes real bravery. The teacher affirmed pursuing what is good, just, and true, and wanting a better heart tomorrow than today. But while you are working on it, you still belong to Christ today, right now, right where you are.
• The identity statement: “You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings.” Your circumstances don’t own you. Your salary doesn’t own you. Your bravery doesn’t own you. Your covetousness doesn’t own you. Jesus Christ owns you.

3. Knowledge That Loves (1 Corinthians 8:1-3)

• “Hard gear shift” to chapter 8, a different subject on the surface, but the teacher connected the two as a heart issue.
• “We know that we all possess knowledge. But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.”
• In plain terms: however much we know, next to an infinite God it is impossible to scratch the surface. Some people genuinely know a lot; the guest pastor rattling off Bible verses from the stage that afternoon was impressive. But when I start thinking I know, I am made a fool.
• Paul is not attacking knowledge or the pursuit of learning. He is attacking knowledge that makes me impressed with myself for having it, which then makes me careless with somebody else.

4. Winning the Argument and Losing the Person

• The teacher asked what it means to win the argument and lose the person, and whether it had ever happened to anyone:
  • One man: you can win the argument, but you have to weigh whether you are willing to lose the friendship. You win the battle, the person is gone from your circle, and you do not win in the end.
  • Another told of a friendly debate at a bar with an unbelieving friend about abortion. Since he could not use Scripture, he argued from logic and philosophy, got invested and passionate, and “lost the plot.” He had to stop and apologize: “I’m so concerned with winning this argument that I’m risking losing you,” not as a friend, but as someone who would ever want to have that conversation again with a guy who claims to be a Christian.
  • Another pointed to his kids. He can prove all day why grades matter and why a choice is bad for them, but will they ever want to talk to him again? Sometimes he has to say “okay,” let it go, let them live it out, and wait for them to come back and say, “You were right.” Then he has more buy-in to speak into the next thing.
  • The teacher added the next level: how much more influence do you have when they know you could have driven the point home and proved them wrong, but stepped back? They see the wisdom and the grace, and they come back knowing they will not be made to feel like an idiot. You earn respect that way.
• This is the confusion of being correct with having handled something correctly. The teacher confessed a rule he made up and ran his organizations by for years: there is what gets said and how it gets said, and what gets said matters more. He now believes he was wrong his whole life. What matters most is how the person hears what you say.
• Being right does not automatically make me right in how I use what I know. Maturity is not just knowing more, though knowing more is a good aspiration. It is knowing how to use what I know in love. “Paul’s a punk. He doesn’t make it easy. But he’s right.”

5. Meat Sacrificed to Idols (1 Corinthians 8:4-8)

• “We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one… But not everyone possesses this knowledge. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat sacrificial food they think of it as having been sacrificed to a god, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.”
• The background: new Corinthian believers were with the pagans yesterday and still live and work among them. Animals sacrificed at the temples produced meat that was eaten in the temple or made its way into ordinary meals. So “Can we eat it?” was a legitimate question.
• One man’s take: idols only ever give immediate gratification, like food that fills you up temporarily and leaves you empty, while God gives complete fullness.
• The mature believers had the theology right. An idol is not a god, meat is meat, and eating it brings you no closer to or further from God. Paul agrees. But another Christian came out of actual idol worship, and for him that meat is still tangled up with his old life. Same meat, two very different histories, two very different consciences.
• So the mature Christian asks a better question than “Am I allowed to do this?” The real question is, “Will this help build somebody up?”

6. Freedom That Yields for Others (1 Corinthians 8:9-13)

• What is a Christian completely free to do but might choose not to do because of who is around him?
  • Praying before a meal at a work lunch, which the teacher noted is the flip side: something you should do but might decide not to in that setting.
  • Drinking: “I can have a beer or a glass of wine, but if I’m with someone I know struggles with it, I’m not going to.” The group agreed alcohol is the most obvious example.
  • Eating whatever you want, even if someone else feels convicted about it or the optics bother them, which one man noted is literally Paul’s example. “All things are permitted, but not all things are beneficial,” as Paul says later in the letter.
  • Watching the Victoria’s Secret show when a friend struggles with lust. How you spend your time. Swearing. Political talk (“I could talk about it all day and all night, but it’s not beneficial for the people around me”). The jokes you tell, what you brag about, the music you play, what you watch on TV, social media, gambling.
• This is not legalism. We are not making up rules God did not make. The thing may be genuinely allowed. But love asks me to consider something besides myself. Not about me.
• The world says freedom means nobody gets to tell you no. Paul says Christian freedom is strong enough to voluntarily say no to itself. That is a much harder version of freedom.
• “Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to the weak… So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ.”
  • Did you catch verse 12? Wounding a weak conscience is sinning against Christ. That is how seriously Paul takes how we use our freedom.
  • Verse 11 describes the person inconveniencing me as “this weak brother or sister for whom Christ died.” We forget that Jesus went to the cross for everybody we look in the face. Paul puts a serious value on the guy making my life a little less convenient. Jesus thought he was worth dying for, and I get irritated because it might cost me something I have every right to do.
  • The soul-searching question the teacher sat with all week: who in your life are you most tempted to see as an inconvenience instead of somebody Christ died for?
• Paul’s radical close: “If what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again.” Not because meat suddenly became sinful, but because that brother is more important than my right to eat it.

7. From “I Deserve” to “I Belong”

• Christian freedom is not proved by exercising every right I have. Sometimes it is proved by being willing to give one up.
• Back to the sentence on the board. Maybe the deeper Christian sentence is not “I deserve.” The teacher erased it and wrote: “I belong to Christ.”
• Chapter 7: my circumstances don’t own me. Christ does. Chapter 8: my rights don’t own me either. Christ does.
• So I don’t need perfect circumstances to obey Him, and I don’t have to exercise everything I’m allowed to do. I can be faithful here, and I can willingly give something up if it helps somebody Christ died for.
• Which is harder for you: being faithful in circumstances you wish were different, or giving up a right you know you have for the good of somebody else?
• Maturity isn’t getting the life you want and the freedom to do what you want. It is being faithful where you are and using your freedom to love the people God put in front of you.

Major Lessons & Revelations

• Obedience is possible today. No future condition has to be met first.
• Entitlement thinking (“I deserve…”) quietly decides whether we will be faithful.
• “Don’t ask God for what your character can’t handle.”
• Correct theology delivered without love puffs up the speaker and wounds the listener. What matters most is how the person hears what you say.
• Christian freedom is authenticated when we willingly limit ourselves for another’s good.
• Every person who inconveniences you is someone for whom Christ died, and wounding their conscience is sinning against Christ.
• Your circumstances don’t own you, and your rights don’t own you. Jesus Christ owns you.

Practical Application

• Name the circumstance you have been waiting to change before “really” following Christ, and choose faithfulness in it this week.
• Replace the “I deserve” script with the declaration, “I belong to Christ. I was bought at a price.”
• Identify one legitimate right you can gladly lay down this week to build someone else up: a drink, a joke, a political conversation, a show.
• Before sharing truth, ask: will this build the listener up, or just inflate me? When winning the argument would lose the person, value the person over the point.
• Write down the name of someone you tend to see as an inconvenience, and ask God to show you how He valued that person enough to die for them.
• For next week: what would I need to do differently to invest in my one more?

Conclusion & Call to Response

• Paul’s twin challenges cut against the culture: be faithful in the life you actually have, and leverage your freedom for the sake of others.
• The closing question: if somebody watched the way you handle disappointment and the way you exercise the freedoms you are allowed, would they conclude your life belongs to you or that it belongs to Christ?

Insights

1. Stop waiting for a promotion before obeying; your mission begins right where you stand.
2. Knowledge makes us loud, but only love has the power to actually build people.
3. Real freedom isn’t flaunting your rights; it’s choosing to lay them down to lift someone else.
4. Entitlement whispers, ‘I deserve’; identity declares, ‘I already belong.’
5. Win the argument, lose the soul; choose words that make people feel heard and held.
6. Your circumstances don’t own you, because Jesus already paid the price to claim your future.

Flash Cards

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