formidable, eternal, Roman world, has gone and left but a shambles of broken masonry. But this is not what he is saying. There is no scornful cynicism here. Paul knows that the fashion of this world is passing away because a new world has already dawned. The hour has struck on the clock of world history. For Christ has come and made all things new. This world is giving place not to nothing, not to anarchy, but to Christ. This is what determines our attitude to the world. The ultimate test of the lives we live as Christians is this—when people look at us, what do they think of? What do we suggest? A sex symbol? The world of social relationships? Business, the making of money? Intellectual abstraction? Or do they look at us and think of Christ?
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“ALL THINGS FOR THE SAKE OF THE GOSPEL”—1 Corinthians 9.23
[Preached fifteen times from 2/23/77 at Harrowgate Hill to 1/23/00 in Willington; This sermon was also delivered in Kansas City 5/22/83]12
St. Paul was an odd man and he did some strange things. No wonder then that often he found he had to explain himself. He’s doing this here. You can understand the bewilderment that people in Corinth must have felt. On one occasion you look at Paul and you see him behaving like any pious law-abiding Jew. He keeps the Sabbath, observes the food laws, carries out the appropriate practices for taking and fulfilling vows. Very well: he is a Jew. But next week, if you didn’t spot the unmistakable nose, you’d think he had never heard of the practices of Judaism. He goes about with Gentile friends, eats what they eat, drinks what they drink, lives their life. And we haven’t begun to see him yet as a Christian. Put him in the Church and you can’t tell what party he belongs to—high or low, or whatever it is. Sometimes he is as rigid as anyone, most frequently about the proper kind of behavior, and other times he is as free as can be, and doesn’t seem to mind what he does. How can you explain, how can he explain behavior like that?
He never explains himself better, and he never explains himself more succinctly than here. “Whatever I do, I do for the sake of, on account of the Gospel.” The Gospel is the sufficient explanation for all Paul does, and indeed of the man himself. You can look at this from a number of different angles. It will not be wrong to say today that this is the explanation of his conversion, what happened on Damascus Road. Here after all is the oddest of all the odd events in Paul’s life.
He sets out from Jerusalem with the settled determination to stamp out the Christian faith, and to do it by stamping out Christians. Any he can find in Damascus he will bring home to Jerusalem in chains, and they will be lucky if they get away with a better fate than Stephen’s. That is how he sets out, but it is not how he arrives. He has left in one of his own letters a note about the astonishment with which the Christians of Judaea greeted the news when it came back to them. “Our former persecutor is preaching as Gospel (for the noun is in Paul’s verb) the faith he used to try to destroy. The Gospel has got hold of the persecutor, it has beaten him at his own game. He is a prisoner of the Gospel now, and he will never get away from its service.”
This leads us to another point, as the familiar stories in Acts explicitly do. The Gospel is the explanation of Paul as an apostle. He is not the official of an organization. Such organization as there was, was always slow to recognize him. He was a rather upsetting person. He was not in the business for what he could get out of it; for the most part he had to earn his own living, and be an apostle in his spare time, and he got many more kicks out of it than half pence. He was not an apostle because he enjoyed public speaking, it was a terror and trembling to him. He was not an apostle because he enjoyed putting other people in their place, imposing his beliefs and ethics upon them. There is only one explanation of his apostleship; it was a task the Gospel forced upon him. “Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel.” Being a preacher, an apostle, was a hard life, but trying not to be one was worse.
Nothing in his apostolic career gave him more trouble than the Church. Wherever he went he founded churches, and nearly every time it gave him trouble. He can’t have founded churches like the one in Corinth because they are such fun to have! They came nearer to breaking his heart. Why did he do it? How can you explain Paul as a churchman? We have grown familiar with the answer by now. He founded churches because the Gospel demanded it. People came to new life because he had begotten them in the Gospel and he could not leave these members of his family to starve and perish in isolation. They had to be brought together, they had to learn to live together; they were the Church, whether Paul wished it to be so or not, created by the Gospel.
We come back to where we started. It is the Gospel that explains Paul the convert, the apostle, the churchman, but above all Paul the man. He behaves like a chameleon—among Jews as a Jew, among Gentiles as a Gentile, among strong or weak Christians as one of them. Why? For the sake of the Gospel. “If by any means I may win some of them for the Gospel, for Christ the author and theme of the Gospel.” What is it that makes him endure trials, hardships, dangers without number? ‘Five times I received the Jewish punishment of thirty-nine lashes, three times the Roman punishment of beating with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked.” And so the record continues. The man goes through life never considering himself, because his life is dominated and controlled by the Gospel. That is what explains him. But this is where we have to take another step. We have been talking about the Gospel and assuming we know what Paul means by it and how it controls his life. But what is the Gospel?
WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?
This is the point at which one could embark on not a new point or even a new sermon but a whole series of sermons or a pile of books. But it would be wrong to forget that Paul could define the Gospel in half a dozen words. It is, he said, God’s power leading to salvation. It was this for him and for the world, and the one thing that appropriated it was faith, trust in the God who made the offer. It was something God had made available simply on his own initiative, by sending his Son into the world to live, die, and then rise from the dead. God had done everything for those who deserved nothing.
That this had made a new man of Paul is true, but it is not the point that I am dealing with. “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new act of creation. Old things have passed away, new things have come into being. We have died with Christ to sin, that henceforth we may walk in newness of life.” This is true but what I am concerned with is the way in which the Gospel controls the actions of the man Paul, who has come to know what it meant. Many things could be said about this—let me say two.
First, Paul knows “the Gospel is for me. Therefore, I must be grateful. The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me. There is therefore nothing I cannot do, nothing that is too much for me to do for Him. If God makes available to me, Paul, a right relation with himself—righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Spirit, then imprisonment, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks all the lot are a small return. I can put up with this and much more in the service of the One who has done so much and given so much.” “The love of Christ,” says Paul, “leaves us no room for choice. Gratitude constrains me, and the Gospel itself makes possible the life of grateful obedience. I can do all things,” says Paul, “through Christ who strengthens me.” He is willing to accept any kind of situation—hardship, affliction, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, the sword, and in them all he discovers that we are more than conquerors, through him who loves us.
George Adam Smith was a Scottish Old Testament scholar of a couple of generations ago. He found himself once in an unexpectedly ecumenical situation, more surprising in those days than it would be today, travelling in the same railway compartment with a young Roman Catholic priest. They got into conversation and in spite of himself Smith found himself admiring and loving the young man. He was, it appeared, going home to say goodbye to his parents, before setting off as a missionary to a part of Africa where, at that time, a white man’s life was reckoned in months rather than in years. Smith was so impressed that he urged the young man not to go. Of course he had to serve Christ, that was obvious but at such a cost? When the priest left the train, Smith
