Sermon Tone Analysis

evangelism

The proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, which arises naturally from believers’ love for God and appreciation of all that God has done for them.

The NT stresses the importance of evangelism, and provides guidance as to how it should be carried out.

evangelism, nature of

Evangelism focuses on the proclaiming of the good news of the coming of the kingdom of God in Christ, including the forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

9:19.

Paul had not shackled the exercise of his rights in the area of food and drink alone (as he had intimated the knowledgeable Christians should do, 8:9–13), but he had applied it to numerous facets of his ministry so that though he was free (eleutheros; cf.

8:9; 9:1) he voluntarily became a slave (cf.

Phil.

2:6–7) for the good of others (1 Cor.

10:33) whom he wanted to win (9:22).

9:20.

Though Paul was primarily an apostle to the Gentiles (Gal.

2:8), he never lost his concern for the salvation of his own people (Rom.

9:3).

He made it his custom to seek out the synagogue in each town he entered (Acts 17:2) in order to win the Jews (Rom.

1:16).

No verse points out more starkly Paul’s own consciousness of what he was, both before and after meeting Christ.

Before, he was the Jew’s Jew, faultless with regard to legalistic righteousness (Phil.

3:6).

Afterward, he was a new man (2 Cor.

5:17; Gal.

2:20), who had found in Christ the righteousness he had sought (Rom.

10:4; 1 Cor.

1:30).

He was still a Hebrew (2 Cor.

11:22; Phil 3:5), but he was no longer a Jew living according to the Law (I … am not under the law).

Still, he was willing to subject himself to the scruples of the Jews (e.g., Acts 21:23–36) in order to gain a hearing for the gospel and to win them to Christ.

Yet he never compromised the essence of the gospel at the heart of which was salvation by faith, not works (Gal.

2:16; Eph.

2:8–9) and freedom from legalism (Gal.

2:4–5).

9:21.

In contrast to the Jews, “those under the Law” (v.

20), those not having the Law were the Gentiles.

Among Gentiles, Paul was willing to abandon past scruples of a morally indifferent sort, such as eating meat offered sacrificially to a pagan god (10:27; cf.

Acts 15:29), in order to win Gentiles to Christ.

But though Paul was a forceful advocate of liberty (Gal.

5:1), he did not suggest he was an advocate of libertinism (cf. 1 Cor.

6:12–20).

He was still under authority, but not to the Old Testament Law.

He was responsible to God (cf.

3:9) and Christ (cf.

4:1) and was enabled by the Spirit to fulfill the law of love (Rom.

13:8–10; Gal.

5:13–25), the opposite of lawlessness (cf.

Matt.

24:12 where lawlessness drives out love).

Christ’s law (Gal.

6:2) was to love God and man (Mark 12:30–31), which law Paul obeyed (1 Cor.

10:31–33).

9:22.

In his references to Jews and Gentiles in the preceding verses, Paul explained his voluntary restraint of freedom in order to reach unbelievers with the gospel.

Some suggest that the weak in this verse refers to Jews and Gentiles together in a state of unbelief and so was intended to summarize Paul’s previously stated convictions (cf.

Rom.

5:6 where “the weak” are also called “the ungodly”).

It is more likely, however, that Paul was referring explicitly to the weak Corinthians described in 1 Corinthians 8:9–11 (cf.

Jew, Greeks, and the church of God in 10:32).

His concern to win them was not in the preliminary sense of justification as in the case of unbelieving Jews and Gentiles (9:20–21) but to win the Corinthians in terms of sanctification and maturity in Christ (cf.

Matt.

18:15)—and so to save them for God’s ongoing work in their lives (cf. 1 Cor.

5:5; 8:11).

Paul’s condescension to the scruples and customs of all men (cf.

“everyone” in 9:19) found application on a momentary case-by-case basis since it would be impossible to satisfy simultaneously the penchants of both Jews and Gentiles alike.

9:23.

Paul voluntarily did this in order to gain the widest possible hearing for the gospel and so to share in its blessings as God’s fellow worker (3:9), reaping the joyful harvest of many won to Christ (cf.

John 4:36).

19 From here, Paul launches into his missionary principle of becoming all things to all people in order to save as many as he can.

The beginning statement about his being “free” touches back on 9:1, where he implied his freedom by his use of a rhetorical question.

Here again, then, Paul insists that he is free from external obligation in how he conducts his ministry.

But he voluntarily caters to the personal, cultural, and religious patterns of the people whom he is evangelizing, hoping thereby to win them for the gospel.

20 Paul illustrates this principle by talking about four categories of people: Jews (v.

20), those under the law (v.

20), those not having the law (v.

21), and the weak (v.

22).

The first two of these are essentially the same.

Though Paul did not feel personally obligated to keep Jewish laws and traditions (“I myself am not under the law”), he occasionally agreed to honor them if by doing so he would advance the cause of Christ.

For example, on his second missionary journey he circumcised his young associate Timothy, not because he believed that Timothy had to be circumcised in order to be saved, but because he knew that the presence of an uncircumcised Jew in the synagogues, where he always began his ministry in a new city, would undoubtedly erect a barrier to the success of his preaching.

Similarly, when Paul was in Jerusalem after his third missionary journey, he agreed to undergo a seven-day Nazirite vow as a “political” move to aid in the success of his attempt through his collection to bridge the widening gap between Jewish and Gentile Christians (cf.

Ac 21:20–26).

21 The third category is “those not having the law” (anomos, GK 491), i.e., those who had not grown up under the Jewish law.

In a sense, this was the category Paul championed the most, for he preached that a Gentile believer did not have to be circumcised in order to become a Christian, nor did a Christian have to adhere to a host of Jewish food laws (see his personal experience as related in Gal 2:11–14).

In Paul’s thinking, what made a person a child of God was a faith relationship with Jesus Christ.

In this verse, however, Paul does add one caveat: “though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law.”

What is this “law of Christ”?

Since nomos (GK 3795) has a wide variety of meanings and Paul is known to play with the meaning of this word (e.g., Ro 7), presumably he is referring to the life-principle that manifested itself in Christ’s own life and that shaped Paul’s life, namely, the principle of self-sacrifice (e.g., Mk 10:45) and of love as the summary of the law (cf.

Mt 22:37–40; Ro 13:8–10; Gal 5:13–14).

22a Paul’s final category is “the weak,” precisely the category that has been at issue in ch. 8.

In 8:10–13, he admitted that he would voluntarily give up his right to eat meat if in doing so he would keep a fellow believer “with a weak conscience” from falling away from the faith.

So here he may be suggesting that to the weak he acted as one who was weak in order to make sure that he did not destroy the faith of the weak.

However, in the other three examples Paul is referring to “winning” people for Christ, not keeping them in the faith.

While the overall context of this chapter must always be kept in view, Paul may also be referring to his coming to the Corinthians “in weakness” (2:3) rather than trying to cater to the wise and sophisticated (as he had done in Athens).

Since so many of Paul’s converts in Corinth could be classed sociologically as “the weak” (1:27), he is reminding them of his initial style of ministry among them.

22b–23 In vv.

22b–23, then, Paul sums this principle up: “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”

It is not that Paul is wishy-washy; rather, he tailors his message to his audience with the intention of reaching them for Christ—i.e., so that they together “may share in [the gospel’s] blessings.”

REFLECTIONS

Paul’s missionary principle, of course, has practical applications.

For missionaries it means learning the local language and customs to make the gospel understandable in the local environment.

For those doing inner-city work it means ministering in a way that does not patronize the inner-city mentality.

For those in campus ministries it means bringing to college students a message that challenges them in an academic environment and shows that Christianity is not anti-intellectual.

The applications of “being all things to all people” are endless.

Next he picked the city of Athens (17:13–15), the cultural hub of the ancient world.

Paul made little headway against the intellectual snobs of Athens (17:16–34).

Thus he soon left there and headed south to the next large city, Corinth (18:1).

Corinth was on the four-and-one-half mile isthmus that joined the Peloponnesus with the Greek mainland; it was the capital city of the Roman province of Achaia.

All north-south traffic had to pass through this city, and it had three harbors nearby—Lechaeum to the west, and Cenchrea and Schoenus to the east.

In order to shorten the time for travel and to avoid the dangers of the coast of the Peloponnesus, many ship captains either had their boats hauled up on land and dragged across the narrow isthmus on a special track, or they unloaded their boats and took their cargo to another boat on the other side.

Corinth was indeed a crossroad of the ancient world.

Why did Paul usually settle in large cities as part of his missionary strategy?

He knew that if he could establish a church in those major cities, then when people from the outlying areas visited these cities, there was a chance they might also hear the gospel and take it back to their villages and start (to use a modern phrase) “daughter churches.”

And, of course, during the time of Paul’s stay in these cities he would be able to interact with people from a wide area, telling them about the message of salvation in Jesus.

That this was indeed the case is demonstrated by 1 Thessalonians 1:7–9: