Paul wants us to live with concern for the discipleship of others.  This is part of a larger discussion of the uses and abuses of freedom.  We have been listening to Paul reason and pray his way through this matter of freedom.  We love freedom!  Americans know all about freedom.  Why, we are the freest people on earth.  We’re not about to let anyone or anything get in the way of our freedom.  Not even Jesus?  Many in the Corinthian church were thinking about freedom and living out their understanding of freedom in ways that had become a problem.  The more things change . . .

          We may not be able to arrive at a shared definition of freedom, but I suspect we can for its opposite: slavery.  Even if we’re not entirely sure what freedom actually is or means under Christ, we know bondage is the opposite.  Last week, I spoke about a faithful response to the ongoing concerns of daily living.  Before that, I spoke about the trouble we can get into—without at all seeking trouble—the trouble we can get into when we look to food to free us from our stress, dissatisfaction, and sense of lack of fulfillment.

          The mentality that troubles Paul might be expressed like this: I’m a mature follower of Christ, fully confident in the promises of Christ.  Therefore, I don’t need to spend much time in prayer.  There’s no law saying I have to.  I’m free.  I know enough about the Bible; I don’t need to spend time re-reading what I already know.  There’s no law saying I have to.  I’m free.  I don’t need to attend worship every Sunday, or even most Sundays: pastor just drones on and on, and I don’t like the music, anyway, so I’ll just attend if I feel like it.  There’s no law saying I have to.  I’m free.  There are enough charities and agencies, so my giving or serving isn’t going to make a difference.  There’s no law saying I have to.  I’m free.

          If you won’t cultivate these habits for your own sake, though, might you at least consider cultivating them for the sake of others?  Somehow, the exercise of our freedom has come to mean not thinking much about others, the impact our free choices may have on them.  They’re adults: let them look after themselves.  What about the children?  Consider them: they look to you for an example of discipleship; they will model their discipleship, or lack of it, upon someone.  The most prominent model will always be you.

          Let none be guilty of setting the wrong example for the children—those who are weak as yet, new to the faith.  If you say you know God, believe in God, trust in God, and spend next to no time in prayer, rarely if ever open a Bible to read, if church is somewhere on your list of priorities, sometimes, and you agree that service is good though you give little if any thought to living as one who serves, that has an impact not only upon your relationship with Jesus: it has as effect also, even a larger effect, upon the young disciples.  Paul is concerned for the new disciples.  We know Jesus had special concern and compassion for the children.

          I know all I need to know about faithfulness and discipleship.  I know freedom.  “Knowledge puffs up while love builds up” (8:1).  So, is love better than knowledge?  Can we just focus on the love and not be too concerned about the knowledge part?  Love one another, ignorantly?  No.  Not when it’s put that way.  If knowledge apart from love is arrogance, love apart from knowledge is misguidedness: neither are the way of the Lord.  We say God is love, and how right to say so!  Glory hallelujah, such love!  God is also knowledge.  He gives both: love and knowledge are both spiritual gifts; they go together, supporting and instructing one another.

          Paul is criticizing irresponsible knowledge, irresponsible freedom.  It’s not wrong to think you know something.  What’s wrong, harmful, to yourself and others, is letting this thinking that says “I already know all that” become a license for free choices full of regard for yourself and sorely lacking in regard for others, lacking regard for God’s Word.  I’m continually staggered yet not at all surprised at how eagerly people disregard those parts of God’s Word that fail to fit with their commitments and passions—don’t think I’m excluding myself.  Discipleship is ongoing work; thankfully, we have friends here to help, and the Spirit.

          Underlying the matter of freedom is a deeper question of humility, or that word that drives me nuts: meekness.  Humility starts with us and has the other in view, in heart, God and neighbor.  The mistaken attitude about freedom that Paul cautions against always ends up with Me.  Freedom is not about Me but about God.  For what purpose does God set us free in Jesus Christ?  The miraculous freedom we have been given has sacred obligations.

          What the children see is what the children will do.  This is what concerns me so greatly for things I’m hearing recently about some of our local schools.  At most, we Christians can only make beachheads and inroads there.  Until recently, I failed to understand just how deeply the enemy has entrenched himself there.  What our children, these young, new disciples, and these potential disciples need, badly, desperately, is a clear, attractive, meaningful counter-example.  Those of you who teach in the schools can be that in your school.  I pray that you will answer that calling with integrity, meekness, and the courage and strength that come with faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.  You aren’t alone in this!  You have our prayers and support.  You have mine.  Those of us who are not in the schools can be that God-glorifying example here, and out there.  To our students, I urge you to seek out other Christians, support one another, find strength together in the Holy Spirit: pray together, sing together, serve together.

          Paul writes, “whoever loves God is known by God” (8:3).  We hear similar language in what John writes.  I take Paul’s words probably to mean something like this: God knows who truly loves Him and those who profess a love that isn’t truly there.  Jesus himself speaks to this, in yet another of those passages we don’t much talk about—can we be done with a truncated Jesus?  He says,

                    Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the                            one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  Many will say to me on that day, “Lord,                        Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your                              name perform many miracles?”  Then I will tell them plainly, “I never knew you.  Away from                            me, you evildoers!”  (Mt 7:21-23)

Not you negligent, you sluggards, but “you evildoers.”  Though they claimed, even knew, they were doing all these things in the name of Jesus, they never knew him.  If they don’t truly know him, they can’t truly love him, and if they don’t truly love him, they can’t truly know him.  If we’re not doing the will of our Father in heaven, according to Jesus, we are doing evil.  There is no middle category.

          What is the will of the Lord, then?  Is the answer so simple?  Can we be so sure?  Can I?  Isn’t that arrogance?  Aren’t doubt and uncertainty more honest?  We just can’t know, so let’s just love?  If someone tells us, with the greatest sincerity, that something that seems to us quite clearly contrary to the will of God as written in Scripture is not at all contrary to the will of God, what are we to do?  Say You’re right in your way, and I’m right in my way?  And as for God’s way? 

          The Bible is clear about what God expects of us, how He expects us to live before Him and treat one another, within the family of faith and outside it.  Let’s not make excuses because we fail to live up to what God asks of us or because we don’t happen to like or agree with Scripture on a particular point.  Instead, let us all, together, turn to Jesus Christ, confess the truth, and have faith in all Jesus is for us.

          Let us think and feel our way, conscientiously, always farther into what it means that Christ sets us free and that we are free, in Christ.  Apart from Christ we are not free.  When we go astray from Christ, we stumble out of the way of freedom into other ways.  But who among us stumbles?  Our conscientiousness, which is our prayer to the Holy Spirit, is not for ourselves alone, but for others, because we live in Christ to bless, encourage, and support one another, to do all this in Spirit and truth, making no accommodation for the values, imperatives, and attractive lies of this fallen world.  Paul puts this forcefully:

                    Be careful, however, that the exercise of your rights does not become a stumbling block to                            the weak.  For if someone with a weak conscience sees you, with all your knowledge, eating in                      an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols?  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.  (8:10-12)

In place of this foreign talk of eating meat sacrificed to idols, substitute doing as you like, doing what seems “right” to you, regardless of the discipleship of your sisters and brothers in Christ or the eternal Truth of all God’s Word.  Too much teaching in too many churches today, teaching from pastors standing before their congregations, to my anguish, is just such emboldening to disregard what we don’t like or just don’t care to try to understand.  “I don’t agree, so I will disregard God’s Word.”  By that emboldening, the weak and the young, the new disciples are destroyed: destroyed by love without knowledge, by knowledge without love.

          We know, we’re quite ready to agree, there is an arrogance of knowledge, as though there were not also an arrogance of love.  Consider this, there is also a love which is a sin against Christ.  Just as the one is knowledge that is not true knowledge but calls itself so for its own self-aggrandizement, so, too, there is love that is not true love but calls itself so for its own self-glorification, self-justification.  True love, like true knowledge, glorifies God.  Living for the glory of God is the way to mentor and guide the children, new disciples, weak disciples.  Knowledge and love that glorify God: this is freedom and the enjoyment of it.  The alternative is bondage, slavery, no matter how seemingly kind, loving, and right.

          And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.