What soldier ever serves at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and doesn’t eat of its fruit? Or who feeds a flock, and doesn’t drink from the flock’s milk? Do I speak these things according to the ways of men? Or doesn’t the law also say the same thing? For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Is it for the oxen that God cares, or does he say it assuredly for our sake? Yes, it was written for our sake, because he who plows ought to plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should partake of his hope. If we sowed to you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we reap your fleshly things? If others partake of this right over you, don’t we yet more? Nevertheless we didn’t use this right, but we bear all things, that we may cause no hindrance to the Good News of Christ. Don’t you know that those who serve around sacred things eat from the things of the temple, and those who wait on the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so the Lord ordained that those who proclaim the Good News should live from the Good News. But I have used none of these things, and I don’t write these things that it may be done so in my case; for I would rather die, than that anyone should make my boasting void. For if I preach the Good News, I have nothing to boast about; for necessity is laid on me; but woe is to me if I don’t preach the Good News. For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward. But if not of my own will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me. What then is my reward? That when I preach the Good News, I may present the Good News of Christ without charge, so as not to abuse my authority in the Good News. For though I was free from all, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are under the law; to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some. Now I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it.
Show the surrounding paragraph
1 Corinthians 9:7-23 sits inside this longer paragraph.
Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Haven’t I seen Jesus Christ, our Lord? Aren’t you my work in the Lord? If to others I am not an apostle, yet at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord. My defense to those who examine me is this: Have we no right to eat and to drink? Have we no right to take along a wife who is a believer, even as the rest of the apostles, and the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas? Or have only Barnabas and I no right to not work? What soldier ever serves at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and doesn’t eat of its fruit? Or who feeds a flock, and doesn’t drink from the flock’s milk? Do I speak these things according to the ways of men? Or doesn’t the law also say the same thing? For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Is it for the oxen that God cares, or does he say it assuredly for our sake? Yes, it was written for our sake, because he who plows ought to plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should partake of his hope. If we sowed to you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we reap your fleshly things? If others partake of this right over you, don’t we yet more? Nevertheless we didn’t use this right, but we bear all things, that we may cause no hindrance to the Good News of Christ. Don’t you know that those who serve around sacred things eat from the things of the temple, and those who wait on the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so the Lord ordained that those who proclaim the Good News should live from the Good News. But I have used none of these things, and I don’t write these things that it may be done so in my case; for I would rather die, than that anyone should make my boasting void. For if I preach the Good News, I have nothing to boast about; for necessity is laid on me; but woe is to me if I don’t preach the Good News. For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward. But if not of my own will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me. What then is my reward? That when I preach the Good News, I may present the Good News of Christ without charge, so as not to abuse my authority in the Good News. For though I was free from all, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are under the law; to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some. Now I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it. Don’t you know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run like that, that you may win. Every man who strives in the games exercises self-control in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an incorruptible. I therefore run like that, not aimlessly. I fight like that, not beating the air, but I beat my body and bring it into submission, lest by any means, after I have preached to others, I myself should be rejected.
Parallel Translations
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What soldier ever serves at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and doesn’t eat of its fruit? Or who feeds a flock, and doesn’t drink from the flock’s milk?
Do I speak these things according to the ways of men? Or doesn’t the law also say the same thing?
For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain.” Is it for the oxen that God cares,
or does he say it assuredly for our sake? Yes, it was written for our sake, because he who plows ought to plow in hope, and he who threshes in hope should partake of his hope.
If we sowed to you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we reap your fleshly things?
If others partake of this right over you, don’t we yet more? Nevertheless we didn’t use this right, but we bear all things, that we may cause no hindrance to the Good News of Christ.
Don’t you know that those who serve around sacred things eat from the things of the temple, and those who wait on the altar have their portion with the altar?
Even so the Lord ordained that those who proclaim the Good News should live from the Good News.
But I have used none of these things, and I don’t write these things that it may be done so in my case; for I would rather die, than that anyone should make my boasting void.
For if I preach the Good News, I have nothing to boast about; for necessity is laid on me; but woe is to me if I don’t preach the Good News.
For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward. But if not of my own will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me.
What then is my reward? That when I preach the Good News, I may present the Good News of Christ without charge, so as not to abuse my authority in the Good News.
For though I was free from all, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more.
To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are under the law;
to those who are without law, as without law (not being without law toward God, but under law toward Christ), that I might win those who are without law.
To the weak I became as weak, that I might gain the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some.
Now I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it.
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who goeth a warfare eny tyme at his awne cost? who planteth a vynearde and eateth not of the frute? Who fedeth a flocke and eateth not of the mylke?
Saye I these thinges after the manner of men? Or sayth not the lawe the same also?
For it ys written in the lawe of Moses. Thou shall not mosell the mouth of the oxe that treadeth out the corne. Doth God take thought for oxen?
Ether sayth he it not all to gedder for oure sakes? For oure sakes no doute this is written: that he which eareth shuld eare in hope: and that he which thressheth in hope shuld be parttaker of his hope.
Yf we sowe vnto you spirituall thynges: is it a greate thynge yf we reepe youre carnall thynges
Yf other be parttakers of this power over you? wherfore are not we rather. Neverthelesse we have not vsed this power: but suffre all thinges lest we shuld hynder the gospell of Christ.
Do ye not vnderstoder how that they which minister in the temple have their fyndynge of the temple? And they which wayte at the aulter are partakers with the aultre?
Even so also dyd the lorde ordayne that they which preache the gospell shuld live of the gospell.
But I have vsed none of these thinges. Nether wrote I these thinges that it shuld be so done vnto me. For it were better for me to dye the that eny man should take this reioysinge from me.
In that I preache the gospell I have nothinge to reioyce of. For necessite is put vnto me. Wo is it vnto me yf I preache not the gospell.
If I do it with a good will I have a rewarde. But yf I do it agaynst my will an office is committed vnto me.
What is my rewarde then? Verely that when I preache the gospell I make the gospell of Christ fre that I misvse not myne auctorite in the gospel
For though I be fre from all men yet have I made my silfe servaunt vnto all men that I myght wynne the moo.
Vnto the Iewes I became as a Iewe to winne the Iewes. To the that were vnder the lawe was I made as though I had bene vnder the lawe to wynne the that were vnder the lawe.
To them that were without lawe became I as though I had bene without lawe (when I was not without lawe as perteyninge to god but vnder a lawe as concerninge Christ) to wynne the that were without lawe.
To the weake became I as weake to wynne the weake. In all thinge I fassioned my silfe to all men to save at the lest waye some.
And this I do for the gospels sake that I might have my parte therof.
Show all 3 translations
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Who goeth a warfare any time at his owne coste? who planteth a vineyarde, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flocke, and eateth not of the milke of the flocke?
Say I these thinges according to man? saith not the Lawe the same also?
For it is written in the Lawe of Moses, Thou shalt not mussell the mouth of the oxe that treadeth out the corne: doeth God take care for oxen?
Either saith hee it not altogether for our sakes? For our sakes no doubt it is written, that he which eareth, should eare in hope, and that he that thresheth in hope, should be partaker of his hope.
If wee haue sowen vnto you spirituall thinges, is it a great thing if we reape your carnall thinges?
If others with you bee partakers of this power, are not we rather? neuerthelesse, we haue not vsed this power: but suffer all things, that we should not hinder the Gospel of Christ.
Doe ye not knowe, that they which minister about the holy things, eate of the things of the Temple? and they which waite at the altar, are partakers with the altar?
So also hath the Lord ordeined, that they which preach ye Gospel, should liue of the Gospel.
But I haue vsed none of these things: neither wrote I these things, that it should be so done vnto me: for it were better for me to die, then that any man should make my reioycing vaine.
For though I preach the Gospel, I haue nothing to reioyce of: for necessitie is laid vpon me, and woe is vnto me, if I preach not the Gospel.
For if I do it willingly, I haue a reward, but if I do it against my will, notwithstanding the dispensation is committed vnto me.
What is my reward then? verely that when I preach the Gospel, I make the Gospel of Christ free, that I abuse not mine authoritie in ye Gospel.
For though I bee free from all men, yet haue I made my selfe seruant vnto all men, that I might winne the moe.
And vnto the Iewes, I become as a Iewe, that I may winne the Iewes: to them that are vnder the Lawe, as though I were vnder the Lawe, that I may winne them that are vnder the Lawe:
To them that are without Lawe, as though I were without Lawe, (when I am not without Lawe as pertaining to God, but am in the Lawe through Christ) that I may winne them that are without Lawe:
To the weake I become as weake, that I may winne the weake: I am made all thinges to all men, that I might by all meanes saue some.
And this I doe for the Gospels sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.
Cross-references (211)
- Matthew 10:10 (vv11, 14) Take no bag for your journey, neither two coats, nor sandals, nor staff: for the laborer is worthy of his food.
- Deuteronomy 25:4 (v9) You shall not muzzle the ox when he treads out the grain.
- 1 Corinthians 10:33 (vv18, 19, 22) even as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of the many, that they may be saved.
- 1 Timothy 5:17-18 (v14) Let the elders who rule well be counted worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in the word and in teaching. For the Scripture…
- Galatians 5:13 (v19) For you, brothers, were called for freedom. Only don’t use your freedom for gain to the flesh, but through love be servants to one another.
Show all 100 cross-references
- Galatians 6:6 (vv11, 14) But let him who is taught in the word share all good things with him who teaches.
- 1 Corinthians 9:4 (v14) Have we no right to eat and to drink?
- 1 Timothy 5:18 (v9) For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle the ox when it treads out the grain.” And, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.”
- Romans 15:1 (v22) Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
- Romans 15:27 (v11) Yes, it has been their good pleasure, and they are their debtors. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things,…
- Acts 16:3 (v20) Paul wanted to have him go out with him, and he took and circumcised him because of the Jews who were in those parts; for they all knew…
- 1 Corinthians 9:19 (v22) For though I was free from all, I brought myself under bondage to all, that I might gain the more.
- Matthew 18:15 (v19) “If your brother sins against you, go, show him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained back your…
- Luke 10:7 (v14) Remain in that same house, eating and drinking the things they give, for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Don’t go from house to house.
- Romans 2:12 (v21) For as many as have sinned without the law will also perish without the law. As many as have sinned under the law will be judged by the law.
- Romans 1:14 (vv16, 19) I am debtor both to Greeks and to foreigners, both to the wise and to the foolish.
- 2 Timothy 2:10 (vv19, 23) Therefore I endure all things for the chosen ones’ sake, that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal…
- Jeremiah 20:9 (vv16–17) If I say, I will not make mention of him, or speak any more in his name, then there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my…
- Romans 11:14 (vv20, 22) if by any means I may provoke to jealousy those who are my flesh, and may save some of them.
- Romans 2:14 (v21) (for when Gentiles who don’t have the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are a law to themselves,
- Galatians 3:2 (v21) I just want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by hearing of faith?
- Galatians 5:18 (v20) But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
- Leviticus 6:26 (v13) The priest who offers it for sin shall eat it. It shall be eaten in a holy place, in the court of the Tent of Meeting.
- Numbers 5:9-10 (v13) Every heave offering of all the holy things of the children of Israel, which they present to the priest, shall be his. Every man’s holy…
- Numbers 18:8-20 (v13) Yahweh spoke to Aaron, “Behold, I myself have given you the command of my wave offerings, even all the holy things of the children of…
- Psalms 104:27 (v9) These all wait for you, that you may give them their food in due season.
- 1 Corinthians 9:15 (v12) But I have used none of these things, and I don’t write these things that it may be done so in my case; for I would rather die, than that…
- 1 Corinthians 9:18 (v12) What then is my reward? That when I preach the Good News, I may present the Good News of Christ without charge, so as not to abuse my…
- 2 Corinthians 11:12 (v12) But what I do, that I will do, that I may cut off occasion from those who desire an occasion, that in which they boast, they may be found…
- Colossians 4:17 (v16) Tell Archippus, “Take heed to the ministry which you have received in the Lord, that you fulfill it.”
- 1 Thessalonians 2:9 (v15) For you remember, brothers, our labor and travail; for working night and day, that we might not burden any of you, we preached to you the…
- James 5:19-20 (v19) Brothers, if any among you wanders from the truth and someone turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his…
- Proverbs 27:18 (v7) Whoever tends the fig tree shall eat its fruit. He who looks after his master shall be honored.
- Matthew 20:26-28 (v19) It shall not be so among you, but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. Whoever desires to be first among you…
- Luke 9:62 (v16) But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for God’s Kingdom.”
- 2 Corinthians 11:7-9 (v18) Or did I commit a sin in humbling myself that you might be exalted, because I preached to you God’s Good News free of charge? I robbed…
- 2 Thessalonians 3:8 (v15) neither did we eat bread from anyone’s hand without paying for it, but in labor and travail worked night and day, that we might not burden…
- 1 Timothy 4:16 (v19) Pay attention to yourself and to your teaching. Continue in these things, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear…
- 2 Thessalonians 3:8-9 (vv12, 18) neither did we eat bread from anyone’s hand without paying for it, but in labor and travail worked night and day, that we might not burden…
- 2 Timothy 2:6 (vv10, 23) The farmer who labors must be the first to get a share of the crops.
- Matthew 5:17-20 (v21) “Don’t think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy, but to fulfill. For most certainly, I tell you,…
- Mark 8:35 (v23) For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever will lose his life for my sake and the sake of the Good News will save it.
- Acts 4:20 (v16) for we can’t help telling the things which we saw and heard.”
- Acts 26:16-20 (v16) But arise, and stand on your feet, for I have appeared to you for this purpose: to appoint you a servant and a witness both of the things…
- Romans 15:4 (v10) For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that through perseverance and through encouragement of the…
- 1 Corinthians 7:19-22 (v21) Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God. Let each man stay in that calling in…
- 1 Corinthians 8:9 (v18) But be careful that by no means does this liberty of yours become a stumbling block to the weak.
- 1 Corinthians 9:20-22 (v19) To the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain Jews; to those who are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain those who are…
- 1 Corinthians 9:25-27 (v23) Every man who strives in the games exercises self-control in all things. Now they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but we an…
- Galatians 2:7 (v17) but to the contrary, when they saw that I had been entrusted with the Good News for the uncircumcised, even as Peter with the Good News for…
- Galatians 6:1 (v22) Brothers, even if a man is caught in some fault, you who are spiritual must restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to…
- 1 Thessalonians 2:6 (v18) nor seeking glory from men (neither from you nor from others), when we might have claimed authority as apostles of Christ.
- 1 Corinthians 9:12 (vv15, 23) If others partake of this right over you, don’t we yet more? Nevertheless we didn’t use this right, but we bear all things, that we may…
- 2 Corinthians 4:5 (vv18–19) For we don’t preach ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake,
- 2 Corinthians 12:13-18 (vv15, 18) For what is there in which you were made inferior to the rest of the assemblies, unless it is that I myself was not a burden to you?…
- Deuteronomy 18:1-5 (v13) The priests and the Levites—all the tribe of Levi—shall have no portion nor inheritance with Israel. They shall eat the offerings of Yahweh…
- Deuteronomy 20:6 (v7) What man is there who has planted a vineyard, and has not used its fruit? Let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle,…
- 1 Samuel 2:28 (v13) Didn’t I choose him out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to go up to my altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me?…
- Amos 3:8 (v16) The lion has roared. Who will not fear? The Lord Yahweh has spoken. Who can but prophesy?
- Acts 21:20-26 (v20) They, when they heard it, glorified God. They said to him, “You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have…
- Romans 15:2 (v19) Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, to be building him up.
- 1 Corinthians 3:8 (v17) Now he who plants and he who waters are the same, but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor.
- 1 Corinthians 10:18 (v13) Consider Israel according to the flesh. Don’t those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar?
- 2 Corinthians 11:7-10 (v12) Or did I commit a sin in humbling myself that you might be exalted, because I preached to you God’s Good News free of charge? I robbed…
- 2 Corinthians 11:15 (v11) It is no great thing therefore if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.
- 1 Thessalonians 2:6-9 (v12) nor seeking glory from men (neither from you nor from others), when we might have claimed authority as apostles of Christ. But we were…
- Acts 18:3 (vv12, 15) and because he practiced the same trade, he lived with them and worked, for by trade they were tent makers.
- Leviticus 6:16-18 (v13) That which is left of it Aaron and his sons shall eat. It shall be eaten without yeast in a holy place. They shall eat it in the court of…
- Leviticus 7:6-8 (v13) Every male among the priests may eat of it. It shall be eaten in a holy place. It is most holy. “ ‘As is the sin offering, so is the…
- Deuteronomy 10:9 (v13) Therefore Levi has no portion nor inheritance with his brothers; Yahweh is his inheritance, according as Yahweh your God spoke to him.)
- 1 Chronicles 28:9 (v17) You, Solomon my son, know the God of your father, and serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind; for Yahweh searches all…
- Psalms 145:15-16 (v9) The eyes of all wait for you. You give them their food in due season. You open your hand, and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
- Proverbs 11:30 (v19) The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life. He who is wise wins souls.
- Jonah 4:11 (v9) Shouldn’t I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who can’t discern between…
- Matthew 10:41 (v17) He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. He who receives a righteous man in the name of a…
- John 13:14-15 (v19) If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example,…
- Acts 9:6 (v16) But rise up and enter into the city, then you will be told what you must do.”
- Acts 9:15 (v16) But the Lord said to him, “Go your way, for he is my chosen vessel to bear my name before the nations and kings, and the children of Israel.
- Acts 17:2-3 (v20) Paul, as was his custom, went in to them, and for three Sabbath days reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and demonstrating…
- Acts 20:24 (v15) But these things don’t count; nor do I hold my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I…
- Acts 20:34 (v15) You yourselves know that these hands served my necessities, and those who were with me.
- Romans 4:23-24 (v10) Now it was not written that it was accounted to him for his sake alone, but for our sake also, to whom it will be accounted, who believe in…
- Romans 15:17 (v16) I have therefore my boasting in Christ Jesus in things pertaining to God.
- 1 Corinthians 7:31 (v18) and those who use the world, as not using it to the fullest. For the mode of this world passes away.
- 1 Corinthians 8:13 (v22) Therefore if food causes my brother to stumble, I will eat no meat forever more, that I don’t cause my brother to stumble.
- 1 Corinthians 9:1 (v19) Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Haven’t I seen Jesus Christ, our Lord? Aren’t you my work in the Lord?
- 1 Corinthians 9:2 (v12) If to others I am not an apostle, yet at least I am to you; for you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.
- 1 Corinthians 9:6-7 (v18) Or have only Barnabas and I no right to not work? What soldier ever serves at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard, and doesn’t eat of…
- 2 Corinthians 11:9-12 (v15) When I was present with you and was in need, I wasn’t a burden on anyone, for the brothers, when they came from Macedonia, supplied the…
- Galatians 2:5 (v23) to whom we gave no place in the way of subjection, not for an hour, that the truth of the Good News might continue with you.
- Colossians 1:25 (v17) of which I was made a servant according to the stewardship of God which was given me toward you to fulfill the word of God,
- 2 Timothy 2:3-4 (v7) You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier on duty entangles himself in the affairs of life, that he…
- Titus 2:2-12 (v21) that older men should be temperate, sensible, sober minded, sound in faith, in love, and in perseverance: and that older women likewise be…
- Hebrews 3:14 (v23) For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence firm to the end,
- 1 Peter 3:1 (v19) In the same way, wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; so that, even if any don’t obey the Word, they may be won by the behavior of…
- 1 John 1:3 (v23) that which we have seen and heard we declare to you, that you also may have fellowship with us. Yes, and our fellowship is with the Father,…
- Genesis 24:56 (v12) He said to them, “Don’t hinder me, since Yahweh has prospered my way. Send me away that I may go to my master.”
- Numbers 22:28-35 (v9) Yahweh opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” Balaam…
- Deuteronomy 5:14 (v9) but the seventh day is a Sabbath to Yahweh your God, in which you shall not do any work— neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor…
- Deuteronomy 22:1-4 (v9) You shall not see your brother’s ox or his sheep go astray and hide yourself from them. You shall surely bring them again to your brother.…
100 distinct cross-references across this passage (211 total citations).
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 7. Who hath gone a warfare at his own…
7. Who hath gone a warfare at his own charges? It is the present tense that is used as meaning — is accustomed to go a warfare. I have, however, with the view of taking off somewhat of the harshness, rendered it in the preterite. Now, by three comparisons, and these, too, taken from common life, he makes it out that it was allowable for him to live, if he chose, at the public expense of the Church, to show that he assumes nothing to himself but what human nature itself teaches us is reasonable. The first is taken from military law, for soldiers are wont to have their provisions furnished to them at the public expense. The second is taken from vine-dressers, for the husbandman plants a vine — not to throw away his pains, but to gather the fruit. The third is taken from keepers of cattle, for the shepherd does not lay out his labor for nothing, but eats of the milk of the flock — that is, he is supported from the produce. As natural equity points out this as reasonable, who will be so unjust as to refuse sustenance to the pastors of the Church? While it may happen, that some serve as soldiers at their own expense, as, for example, the Romans in ancient times, when no tribute was as yet paid, and there were no taxes, this does not militate against Paul’s statement, for he simply takes his argument from common and everywhere received practice.
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 20, 22, 23 That he may not seem to burden the Apostles,…
That he may not seem to burden the Apostles, he showeth that it is just that they do, by an argument of comparison, seeing that soldiers live by their wages, and husbandmen by the fruits of their labors, and shepherds by that that cometh of their flocks.
Useth to go a warfare?
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv7–23 7 Who goeth a warfare any time at his…
7 Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?
Ver. 7. Who goeth a warfare, &c.] Ministers as they should be valiant as soldiers, diligent as husbandmen, vigilant as shepherds ( Pastor, arator, eques, &c.), so should they live from their labour, as every tinker and tapster doth. It is a sign of gasping devotion, when men are so close handed to their ministers whose very cold water goes not unrewarded.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv7–23 Who goeth a warfare any time at his own…
Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? The work of the ministry is a warfare, the minister’s work in that age was so in a more eminent manner, as the opposition to those first ministers of the gospel, both from the Jews and from the heathens, was greater than what ministers have in later ages met with. Now, saith the apostle, none that lists an army, expects that his soldiers should maintain themselves without any pay.
Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? It is like the planting of a vineyard. The church, in Scripture, is called a vineyard, Isa 5:1,2. The plants are the Lord’s, but he useth ministers’ hands in the planting of them: none planteth a vineyard, but in expectation of some fruit; none employeth servants to plant a vineyard, but he resolveth to uphold them with food and raiment, while they are in his work.
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Or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? The church is compared to a flock: saith the apostle: No man feeds a flock, either personally, or by his servants, but he eateth, or alloweth his servants to eat, of the milk of the flock. By these three instances, commonly known amongst men, the apostle showeth the reasonableness, that the ministers of the gospel should be maintained by the people, to whom they are ministers.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19 As if the apostle had said, "As soldiers are…
As if the apostle had said, "As soldiers are paid by those that employ them, and as husbandmen and shepherds live upon the fruits of their labours, so may I, and all the ministers of the gospel with me."
Where note, 1. That the ministerial function is represented here as a warfare: the ministers of Christ are spiritual soldiers, they have many enemies to encounter with, and contend against. They are also planters, vine-dressers, husbandmen, shepherds: all which titles given to them do intimate and signify what care and painfulness, what diligence and watchfulness, should be found with them.
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Note, 2. That maintenance, a comfortable maintenance, from the people, is a debt due to the ministers of the gospel, who labour in the word and doctrine amongst them: Who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof?
This is the first argument which our apostle here makes use of, to prove the minister’s maintenance a duty, taken from the law of nations, equity and custom; which do appoint and allow in soldiers, vine-dressers, and shepherds, yea, to all that labour for the use of others in their respective callings, a due reward of wages. What soldier goes to war at his own charges?
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On vv15, 19 Here he tells them that he had, notwithstanding, waived…
Here he tells them that he had, notwithstanding, waived his privilege, and lays down his reason for doing it.
I. He tells them that he had neglected to claim his right in times past: I have used none of these things, Co1 9:15. He neither ate nor drank himself at their cost, nor led about a wife to be maintained by them, nor forbore working to maintain himself. From others he received a maintenance, but not from them, for some special reasons. Nor did he write this to make his claim now. Though he here asserts his right, yet he does not claim his due; but denies himself for their sakes, and the gospel.
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II. We have the reason assigned of his exercising this self-denial. He would not have his glorying made void: It were better for his to die than that any man should make his glorying void, Co1 9:15. This glorying did imply nothing in it of boasting, or self-conceit, or catching at applause, but a high degree of satisfaction and comfort. It was a singular pleasure to him to preach the gospel without making it burdensome; and he was resolved that among them he would not lose this satisfaction. His advantages for promoting the gospel were his glory, and he valued them above his rights, or his very life: Better were it for him to die than to have his glorying made void, than to have it justly said that he preferred his wages to his work. No, he was ready to deny himself for the sake of the gospel. Note, It is the glory of a minister to prefer the success of his ministry to his interest, and deny himself, that he may serve Christ, and save souls. Not that in so doing he does more than he ought; he is still acting within the bounds of the law of charity. But he acts upon truly noble principles, he brings much honour to God in so doing; and those that honour him he will honour. It is what God will approve and commend, what a man may value himself for and take comfort in, though he cannot make a merit of it before God.
III. He shows that this self-denial was more honourable in itself, and yielded him much more content and comfort, than his preaching did: "Though I preach the gospel, I have nothing whereof to glory; for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel, Co1 9:16. It is my charge, my business; it is the work for which I am constituted an apostle, Co1 1:17. This is a duty expressly bound upon me. It is not in any degree a matter of liberty. Necessity is upon me. I am false and unfaithful to my trust, I break a plain and express command, and woe be to me, if I do not preach the gospel." Those who are set apart to the office of the ministry have it in charge to preach the gospel. Woe be to them if they do not. From this none is excepted. But it is not given in charge to all, nor any preacher of the gospel, to do his work gratis, to preach and have no maintenance out of it. It is not said, "Woe be to him if he do not preach the gospel, and yet maintain himself." In this point he is more at liberty. It may be his duty to preach at some seasons, and under some circumstances, without receiving a maintenance for it; but he has, in the general, a right to it, and may expect it from those among whom he labours. When he renounces this right for the sake of the gospel and the souls of men, though he does not supererogate, yet he denies himself, waives his privilege and right; he does more than his charge and office in general, and at all times, obliges him to. Woe be to him if he do not preach the gospel; but it may sometimes be his duty to insist on his maintenance for so doing, and whenever he forbears to claim it he parts with his right, though a man may sometimes be bound to do so by the general duties of love to God and charity to men. Note, It is a high attainment in religion to renounce our own rights for the good of others; this will entitle to a peculiar reward from God. For,
IV. The apostle here informs us that doing our duty with a willing mind will meet with a gracious recompence from God: If I do this thing, that is, either preach the gospel or take no maintenance, willingly, I have a reward. Indeed, it is willing service only that is capable of reward from God. It is not the bare doing of any duty, but the doing of it heartily (that is, willingly and cheerfully) that God has promised to reward. Leave the heart out of our duties, and God abhors them: they are but the carcasses, without the life and spirit, of religion. Those must preach willingly who would be accepted of God in this duty. They must make their business a pleasure, and not esteem it a drudgery. And those who, out of regard to the honour of God or good of souls, give up their claim to a maintenance, should do this duty willingly, if they would be accepted in it or rewarded for it. But whether the duty of the office be done willingly or with reluctance, whether the heart be in it or averse from it, all in office have a trust and charge from God, for which they must be accountable. Ministers have a dispensation of the gospel, or stewardship - oikonomia (Luk 16:2), committed to them. Note, Christ's willing servants shall not fail of a recompence, and that proportioned to their fidelity, zeal, and diligence; and his slothful and unwilling servants shall all be called to an account. Taking his name, and professing to do his business, will make men accountable at his bar. And how sad an account have slothful servants to give!
V. The apostle sums up the argument, by laying before them the encouraging hope he had of a large recompence for his remarkable self-denial: What is my reward then? Co1 9:18. What is it I expect a recompence from God for? That when I preach the gospel I may make it without charge, that I abuse not my power in the gospel. Or, "not so to claim my rights as to make them destroy the great intentions and ends of my office, but renounce them for the sake of these." It is an abuse of power to employ it against the very ends for which it is given. And the apostle would never use his power, or privilege of being maintained by his ministry, so as to frustrate the ends of it, but would willingly and cheerfully deny himself for the honour of Christ and the interest of souls. That ministers who follows his example may have cheerful expectations of a full recompence.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv7–23 Say I these things as a man?.... After the…
Say I these things as a man?.... After the manner of men, reasoning from things common among men, and obvious to everyone's observation:
or saith not the law the same also? As the subject the apostle is upon was capable of being illustrated and confirmed by instances common unto, and easy of observation among men; so it might be supported by divine authority; it was not only a clear point from the reason of things, but was certain by the law of God.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 Do I speak as a man - Barely on…
Do I speak as a man - Barely on the authority of human reason? Does not God also say, in effect, the same thing? The ox that treadeth out the corn - This was the custom in Judea, and many eastern nations. In several of them it is retained still. And at this day, horses tread out the corn in some parts of Germany.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv7–23 Verse 7. Who goeth a warfare - at his…
Verse 7. Who goeth a warfare - at his own charges?] These questions, which are all supposed from the necessity and propriety of the cases to be answered in the affirmative, tend more forcibly to point out that the common sense of man joins with the providence of God in showing the propriety of every man living by the fruits of his labour. The first question applies particularly to the case of the apostle, τις στρατευεται ιδιοις οψωνιοις· Does a soldier provide his own victuals? οψωςιος is used to express the military pay or wages, by the Greek writers; for the Roman soldiers were paid not only in money but in victuals; and hence corn was usually distributed among them. See Clarke on Lu 3:14.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv8, 11, 13, 15, 19, 20 1Co 9:8-10. Say I these things as a man…
1Co 9:8-10. Say I these things as a man — Have I only human authority and reasons for what I say? or saith not the law — The revealed will of God; the same? For it is written — Deu 25:4, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox, &c. — But shalt allow the poor animal to feed while it is labouring for thee, in the midst of food; a circumstance in which its hunger would be peculiarly painful. It is well known, that the people of the East did not thresh their corn as we do; but they pressed out the grain, by causing oxen to tread on the ears, a custom which is still retained in several of the eastern nations. “And, at this day,” as Bengelius observes, “horses tread out the corn in some parts of Germany.” Doth God take care for oxen — Was this precept given merely for their sakes? had he not a further meaning in it? did he not intend to show hereby what equity should be used in rewarding those that labour for us? For our sakes no doubt this is written — Not to oblige us to obey those laws, but to teach us to exercise humanity and equity toward those we employ or deal with. This precept, concerning oxen, being introduced in the law, immediately after precepts enjoining justice and mercy in punishments, it was certainly intended to impress the Israelites with a sense of the obligations of justice and humanity toward rational creatures, as the apostle here affirms. That he that plougheth should plough in hope — Of reaping; and he that thresheth in hope — Should not be disappointed of the fruit of his labour; that is, any one that is employed to work for us, should do it in hope of receiving a meet reward for his pains, whereby he may be encouraged in his work, and should be partaker of his hope — Should afterward receive the reward hoped for. And so ought they who labour faithfully in God’s husbandry.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv7–23 Who goeth a warfare ... - Paul now proceeds…
Who goeth a warfare ... - Paul now proceeds to illustrate the right which he knew ministers had to a support 1Co 9:7-14, and then to show the reason why he had not availed himself of that right; 1Co 9:15-23. The right he illustrates from the nature of the case 1Co 9:7, 1Co 9:11; from the authority of Scripture 1Co 9:8-10; from the example of the priests under the Jewish law 1Co 9:18; and from the authority of Jesus Christ; 1Co 9:14. In this verse (7th) the right is enforced by the nature of the case, and by three illustrations. The first is, the right of a soldier or warrior to his wages. The Christian ministry is compared to a warfare, and the Christian minister to a soldier; compare 1Ti 1:18. The soldier had a right to receive pay from him who employed him. He did not go at his own expense. This was a matter of common equity; and on this principle all acted who enlisted as soldiers.
So Paul says it is but equitable also that the soldier of the Lord Jesus should be sustained, and should not be required to support himself. And why, we may ask, should he be, any more than the man who devotes his strength, and time, and talents to the defense of his country? The work of the ministry is as arduous, and as self-denying, and perhaps as dangerous, as the work of a soldier; and common justice, therefore, demands that he who devotes his youth, and health and life to it, for the benefit of others should have a competent support. Why should not he receive a competent support who seeks to save people, as well as he who lives to destroy them? Why not he who endeavors to recover them to God, and make them pure and happy, as well as he who lives to destroy life, and pour out human blood, and to fill the air with the shrieks of new made widows and orphans? Or why not he who seeks, though in another mode, to defend the great interests of his country, and to maintain the interests of justice, truth, and mercy, for the benefit of mankind, as well as he who is willing in the tented field to spend his time, or exhaust his health and life in protecting the rights of the nation?
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At his own charges - His own expense. On the meaning of the word “charges” (ὀψωνίοις opsōniois) see the note at Luk 3:14; compare Rom 6:23; 2Co 11:8. The word does not occur elsewhere in the New Testament.
Who planteth a vineyard ... - This is the second illustration from the nature of the case, to show that ministers of the gospel have a right to support. The argument is this: ‘It is reasonable that those who labor should have a fair compensation. A man who plants a vineyard does not expect to labor for nothing; he expects support from that labor, and looks for it from the vineyard. The vineyard owes its beauty, growth, and productiveness to him. It is reasonable, therefore, that from that vineyard he should receive a support, as a compensation for his toil. So we labor for your welfare. You derive advantage from our toil. We spend our time, and strength, and talent for your benefit; and it is reasonable that we should be supported while we thus labor for your good.” The church of God is often compared to “a vineyard;” and this adds to the beauty of this illustration; see Isa 5:1-4; see the notes at Luk 20:9-16.
Who feedeth a flock ... - This is the third illustration drawn from the nature of the case, to show that ministers have a right to support. The word “feedeth” (ποιμαίνει poimainei) denotes not only to “feed,” but to guard, protect, defend, as a shepherd does his flock; see the notes at Joh 21:15-17. “The wages of the shepherds in the East do not consist of ready money, but in a part of the milk of the flocks which they tend. Thus, Spon says of the shepherds in modern Greece, “These shepherds are poor Albanians, who feed the cattle, and live in huts built of rushes; they have a tenth part of the milk and of the lambs which is their whole wages; the cattle belong to the Turks.” The shepherds in Ethiopia, also, according to Alvarez, have no pay except the milk and butter which they obtain from the cows, and on which they and their families subsist” - Rosenmuller. The church is often compared to a flock; see the note at Joh 10:1 ff.
The argument here is this: “A shepherd spends his days and nights in guarding his folds. He leads his flock to green pastures, he conducts them to still waters (compare Psa 23:2); he defends them from enemies; he guards the young, the sick, the feeble, etc. He spends his time in protecting it and providing for it. He expects support, when in the wilderness or in the pastures, mainly from the milk which the flock should furnish. He labors for their comfort; and it is proper that he should derive a maintenance from them, and he has a right to it. So the minister of the gospel watches for the good of souls. He devotes his time, strength, learning, talents, to their welfare. He instructs, guides, directs, defends; he endeavors to guard them against their spiritual enemies, and to lead them in the path of comfort and peace. He lives to instruct the ignorant; to warn and secure those who are in danger; to guide the perplexed; to reclaim the wandering; to comfort; the afflicted; to bind up the broken in heart; to attend on the sick; to be an example and an instructor to the young; and to be a counsellor and a pattern to all. As he labors for their good, it is no more than equal and right that they should minister to his temporal needs, and compensate him for his efforts to promote their happiness and salvation. And can anyone say that this is not right and just?
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv11, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23 Is it a great matter? The apostle is here…
Is it a great matter? The apostle is here speaking of what he had given to the Corinthians, and what he had received from them; and this he does under the comparison of the sower and the reaper. Can any of you think it hared that we receive some part of your temporal goods, when we have bestowed upon you spiritual: nevertheless, we have not used this power, but we bear all things, &c. (ver. 12.) (Estius)
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv7–23 The minister is spiritually a soldier (Ti2 2:3), a…
The minister is spiritually a soldier (Ti2 2:3), a vine-dresser (Co1 3:6-8; Sol 1:6), and a shepherd (Pe1 5:2, Pe1 5:4).
of the fruit--The oldest manuscripts omit "of."
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv7–23 2. Ministers are entitled to support by the law…
2. Ministers are entitled to support by the law of compensation, 1Co_9:7-14.
By this law the soldier, the vintner, the shepherd, nay, the very oxen, are entitled to their recompense.
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7. Who feedeth—Literally, who shepherdeth the flock.
Eateth—Not the milk, but of or from the milk; that is, food made from the milk.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv7–22 7. Who goeth a warfare any time at his…
7. Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges?] The charge is now refuted on five different grounds. The first argument is derived from the analogy of human conduct. Three instances are given, (1) the soldier, (2) the vine-dresser, (3) the shepherd, who all derive their subsistence from their labours.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv7–23 (7) Who goeth a warfare any time at his…
(7) Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges?—Three illustrations from human life and business show that the principle which has been adopted in the Christian Church is not exceptional. A soldier receives his pay; the planter of a vineyard eats the fruit of it; and the owner of a flock is supported by selling the milk. The best MSS. omit the word “of” before “fruit.” It probably crept into later texts from the occurrence of that word with the “milk”; but a vineyard owner actually eats his fruit, whereas not only would it be strange to speak of “eating” milk, but the owner of flocks would really be sustained chiefly by the sale of the milk and the purchase of food with the money so obtained. He would eat “of” the milk. It is worth noticing that St. Paul never (with the one exception of Act_20:28-29) takes up the image supplied by the Lord Himself of Christ being the Shepherd, and the Church His flock. Even here, where the occurrence of the word “flock” must have suggested it, it is not alluded to. On the other hand, St. Peter’s favourite image is that of “the flock.” The command, “Feed My flock,” would have made it touchingly familiar to him. St. Paul’s imagery from nature and country life are on the practical rather than the poetic side; whereas his images from military, political, and social life have the vivid reality which we should expect from one whose life was spent chiefly in towns. It has been observed that St. Paul’s vindication falls naturally into three divisions. (1) The argument from induction, 1Co_9:1-6; (2) that from analogy, 1Co_9:7; (3) that from authority, 1Co_9:8.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv7–23 Who goeth a warfare, etc.? In this and the…
Who goeth a warfare, etc.? In this and the following verses he adduces six successive arguments to prove the right of a minister to be supported by his congregation.
1. From the ordinary laws of human justice (ver. 7).
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2. By analogy, from the Law of Moses (vers. 8-10).
3. A fortiori, from the obligations of common gratitude (ver. 11).
4. From their concession of the right to others who had inferior claims (ver. 12).
5. From the Jewish provision for the maintenance of priests (ver. 13).
6. By the rule laid down by Christ himself (ver. 14). Goeth a warfare. Analogy from the payment of soldiers. (2Co_10:4) At his own charges. The word used for "cost" means literally rations (Luk_3:14; Rom_6:23) Planteth a vineyard. Analogy from the support of the vine dressers. (Mat_9:37) Feedeth a flock. Analogy from the support of shepherds. (1Pe_5:2) The two latter classes of labourers are paid in kind in the East to this day.
Vers. 7-12.
The duty of supporting the ministry.
The separation of certain members of the Christian Church to the specific work of the pastor, the teacher, or the missionary, may be said to have begun at the election of the "seven," commonly called "deacons," which is narrated in Act_6:1-6. Then certain persons gave themselves up to the study and ministry of the Word and to prayer. The question how they were to be fed and supported was at once met by the members of the Church, who, in response to a natural and reasonable demand, and in full accordance with the principles and practices of the Mosaic dispensation, made provision for their material necessities. Our Lord, in sending out his disciples on their trim mission, had laid down the principle that they should not supply their own material wants, because "the labourer is worthy of his hire." Much has been said in recent times against an organized Christian ministry, dependent on the good will of the several Churches they may serve; but the Scripture cannot be read with unprejudiced mind, and the reader fail to perceive that "they who preach the gospel should live of the gospel." In the verses now before us St. Paul urges the duty of supporting the ministry by three lines of argument and illustration.
I BY COMMON WORLDLY ILLUSTRATION.
1. The soldier, who, if he fights the battles of his country, reasonably expects his country to provide for his maintenance and his comfort.
2. The vine dresser, who expects to reap in fruitage the reward of his labours in the vineyard.
3. And the keeper of a flock, who day by day lives upon the milk of the flock. These illustrations only touch the general principle that the worker has a claim to a portion at least of the results of his labour. The illustration of the soldier is the one most to St. Paul"s point, because, while doing a special kind of work for us, he looks for our care of his temporal necessities. So the minister, in doing a spiritual work for us, commits to us the care of his "carnal things.
II BY SCRIPTURE RULES. (Ver. 9.) The law is taken from Deu_25:4. The figure is that of the oxen, who were driven to and fro over a hard space of ground, called a threshing floor, on which the cornstalks were spread, so that by their "treadings" the grain might be separated from the husk. Those oxen were engaged in doing work for the good of others, and it was only fitting that they should be provided for while they laboured.
III BY THE RITUAL LAWS OF THE OLDER MOSAISM. (Ver. 13.) Priests and Levites had special maintenance, and this almost entirely by the offerings and good will of the people. They had certain towns allotted for their residence, certain portions of the sacrifices for their food, and certain tithes for the supply of their other necessities, and such a regulation could in no sense be regarded as an unreasonable burden. St. Paul even declares, upon his apostolic authority, that "Even so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel." When we have sufficiently proved that the material support of a spiritual ministry is one of the first duties of the Christian professor, we are prepared to argue and to illustrate further that a generous, liberal, hearty, and even self denying provision is comely and noble; and that in securing such generous provision our thankful love may find a most fitting expression. R.T.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv7, 15, 17, 20 Who goeth a warfare any time at his own…
1Co_9:7-14
Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges?
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The baffle of life
We have here--
I. An inspiriting metaphor. When life is represented as a warfare, some peaceful minds may feel a little alarmed, yet there are others who feel their blood pulsing the stronger at the thought that life is to be one continued contest. It were ill for us if our love of peace, as a nation, should degenerate into a fear of danger or an indifference to exploits. For me the battle-field has no charms; but I buckle on my armour at the very thought that life is to be a conflict in which it behoves me to get the mastery.
1. It is wise to begin the battle of life early. We have all so little time to live, and our first years are so evidently the best, that it is a pity to waste them.
2. We have to fight with that trinity of enemies--the world, the flesh, and the devil.
3. This is not an engagement to be quickly terminated. Unlike the laconic despatch of the ancient Roman--Veni, vidi, vici, this is a continuous fight. Like the old knights who slept in their armour, you must be prepared for reprisals--always watchful, and ready to resist.
4. You may hope to conquer, for others have done so before you (Rev_3:21; Rev_7:14).
5. You may be defeated. Make bankruptcy in your secular business, why, you can start again; but once make bankruptcy in soul affairs, and there is no second life in which to start afresh. If you are defeated in the battle of life you can never begin again, or turn the defeat into a victory. If you go down to your grave a captive of sin, the iron hands will be about you for ever.
II. A kindly hint. There are charges in this life-battle. Let us just glance at some of them. If any man shall get up to heaven he will have to meet a demand for--
1. Courage. How many enemies he must face!
2. Patience. How he must bear and forbear!
3. Perseverance.
4. Watchfulness.
5. Zeal.
6. Strength.
7. Wisdom.
The difficulties of an expedition may be intensely aggravated by a lack of knowledge as to the country to be invaded; and in the battle of life who knows what lies next before him? Hence I beseech you to consider the greatness of the charge of this warfare. Our British soldiers must press forward, though they are landed on a blazing beach, before steep mountains, dismal swamps, or savage tribes. But in our eventful battle of life the checks and bars to progress are more than I can describe. No marvel that Pliable should say, as he turned back, You may have the brave country yourself for me, Apart from Divine strength Pliable was a wise man. There is no royal road to heaven, except that the Kings highway leads there. There is no road skilfully levelled or scientifically macadamised. The labour is too exhaustive, the difficulties are too serious, unless God Himself come to our help. Who, then, can go this warfare at his own charges?
III. A gracious reminder. You cannot go this warfare in your own strength. Then do not try it. If you do you will rue it. But you may rely on God to help you. You may reckon on--
1. His watchful Providence. You little know how easy the Almighty can make a path which otherwise would have been difficult and dangerous. All things shall work together for good to them that love God.
2. The help of Christ. He will be always present to revive you with His precious blood, to sprinkle your hearts from an evil conscience, to wash your bodies with pure water.
3. The assistance of the Spirit. There is nothing too obdurate for the Spirit of the Lord to overcome.
Conclusion: Let me urge upon those who are beginning this battle--
1. The wisdom of diffidence. Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.
2. The dignity of reliance upon God.
3. The importance of prayer. If all our charges in the life-war are to be paid us by the Paymaster, let us go to the treasury.
4. The necessity of holiness.
5. The power of faith. The beginning of true spiritual life is here--trusting what Christ has wrought for us. The continuation of spiritual life is here--trusting still in what Christ has done and is doing. The consummation of spiritual life on earth is still the same--trusting still, trusting ever. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Christ present with His servants
About two centuries ago, during the persecutions in Scotland, Margaret Wilson, a girl of eighteen, along with an aged widow of sixty-three, was doomed to die for insisting that Christ alone was the Head of the Church. They were to be fastened to stakes driven into the oozy sand that covered the beach, and left to perish in the rising tide. The stake to which the aged woman was fastened was farther down the beach than that of the young woman, in order that, being sooner destroyed, her expiring sufferings might shake the firmness of Margaret Wilson. The tide began to flow, the waters swelled and mounted to the chin of the old woman, and when almost stifled by the rising tide, they put to the girl the question, What think you of your friend now? What do I see, she answered, but Christ in one of His members, wrestling there? Think you that we are the sufferers? No; it is Christ in us, He who sendeth us not a warfare on our own charges.
Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?.
Principles of equity
1. Commend themselves to human reason.
2. Are enforced by the law of God.
3. Are of universal application.
4. Contribute by their operation to the best interests of all. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
Human consciousness of the right
1. Is but an echo of the Divine law.
2. Is only explicable on the principle of moral government.
3. Establishes the authority of the law. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
For it is written in the law of Moses.--
The inspiration of the law of Moses is established by
1. Its ascription to God.
2. Its moral bearing.
3. Its comprehensive application.
4. Its beneficial tendency. (J. Lyth, D. D.)
Doth God take care for oxen?--
Oxen unmuzzled
This is a favourite text with Paul (1Ti_5:17-18). If Paul wrote this twice we may be sure the words were often on his lips; and if the Holy Spirit has twice put this fragment of the old law into the New Testament, we may be sure the lesson is an important one. The text is racy and suggestive.
I. Ministers and their work.
1. They are a distinct class. Have a function all their own like oxen.
2. Their work is humble.
3. And hard.
4. And requiring patient routine.
5. And withal of vital importance.
II. The saviour has taken care for their support. They have the same wants as other men, but are not at liberty to supply them in the same way: they are oxen whose strength is spent in the service of others. Therefore the Master laid down His will as to their temporal support. The labourer is worthy of his reward (1Co_9:14). Both charity and ordinary bargain are excluded by this rule: the matter is raised to a higher level altogether.
III. The rule is reasonable (1Co_9:11). Whatever a man pays for his Bible there is no kind of proportion between the money given and the thing got: the wealth of the world could not buy one text of the Word of God: the money is the equivalent only of paper, printing, binding. So conversion, sanctification, organised fellowship, godly training of the young, the Lords Day, the sacraments, comfort in sickness and death--are things which man cannot buy, because man cannot give them. All the more reasonable, therefore, that the simple and inexpensive channel by which God dispenses them to us and sends them on to coming generations should be maintained.
IV. The support should be generous. While the ox is working he will not be the worse for all he can eat: let him not be muzzled. Muzzling is poor economy, and not even just. All the more should this part of Bible teaching be plainly uttered, because the true minister will be ready to forego even righteous claims rather than allow Gods message of love with which he is charged to be discredited by urging these (1Co_9:15-19). The minister should receive freely--not what his education, time, gifts, may be worth in the market, for gain and bargain have no place here--but what is needed to maintain his position. There should be nothing so grand about him as to estrange him from the poorest, and nothing so mean about his dress or personal habits as to render him unfit for the most refined society; for, like the gospel, he belongs to no one class of society, but stands equally related to all (Php_4:10-19). (A. M. Symington, D. D.)
That he that plougheth should plough in hope.--
Ploughing in hope
When you go into the country and see the farmers driving their ploughs, you have no occasion to ask them why they are turning up the soil. You understand as well as they that it is the crop they have in view. If it were not for the hope of the harvest they would forego this toil. And what is true of the farmer is true of the mechanic, of the manufacturer, of the tradesman, of people of all occupations and conditions. Men are swayed by an endless variety of motives, good and bad; but the one element which blends with all other springs of action is hope--the desire and expectation of future good. St. Paul takes the plougher as a representative character. It may be useful to us to consider the same principle in its application to the religious life and the service of God generally. The spiritual, no less than the natural husbandman, has ample reason to go on with his work in hope. That is to say, in doing the Divine will we have ground to hope for a beneficial result. It may be just the result at which we have been aiming. Herein the case differs from that of the ploughman, who can always forecast the nature of his crop from the seed. And yet the difference is rather apparent than real. For the spiritual husbandman does after all reap what he sows if we inquire into the grounds of that hope which should animate all true workers in this field, it may be observed that they are doing what their Heavenly Father has directed them to do. Our Saviour said, on a certain occasion, My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work. We are every one of us sent into the world on a similar errand--i.e., to do the will of Him who placed us here. The few who do try to conform to it are fulfilling the end of their being. They are living not for themselves, but for God. We affirm the right of the believer, and of all who have their faces Zionward, to labour or suffer for God in hope, because He cannot deny Himself. In His infinite condescension He has been pleased to link His own glory with the toils and trials, the prayers and praises, of His people. To an eye capable of taking in its vast proportions, our globe must present a busy scene. We may not assert that the overthrow of an empire or the founding of a dynasty is a matter of no moment to God; but we are warranted in saying that events of this kind are of small moment with Him as compared with changes in the condition of the Church; and, indeed, that He orders or permits those very events, with a continual reference to His Church. We are sure, then, that He looks with approbation upon the efforts of His people to follow and to serve Him; and that in doing this they have more reason to be hopeful than in attempting any other service whatever. Let us rather consider the lesson of the text in its bearing upon various parts of the Christian life. To begin at the beginning--our first plougher shall be one who is just awaking from the sleep of sin, and pondering the question, Shall I now attend to the matter of my personal salvation? Can I hope to secure this greatest of blessings? Many an one, brought to this point, has been discouraged by the apparent obstacles in the way, and declined the effort. Had it been an earthly scheme they would not have abandoned it. Men do not so lightly forego the prospect of wealth and honour. But where the soul is concerned the quest is too often relinquished on the vague report that there is a lion in the way. Without striving there is no entering in at the strait gate. But is this peculiar to religion? Do you win any earthly prize without striving? Why, then, complain that Christianity denies its treasures to the torpid and the indifferent? The blessings it proposes to us are as much superior to the noblest distinctions of the world as the heavens are higher than the earth. There is nothing a man may go about more hopefully than an honest and faithful endeavour to obtain forgiveness and reconciliation to God. How can you help seeing this? For what means this day of rest, this house of worship, these Christian ordinances, this precious Bible revealing a crucified Saviour, a throne of grace, and an ever-present compassionate Spirit? If, with these testimonies around you, you cannot plough in hope, you will be likely to wait until all that now invites you to hope gives place to remediless despair. But coming to Christ is only the first step: it is simply securing the charter and the gracious equipment which prepare us to begin the work of life. The ploughing must go on. The field is large, and much of the soil intractable. But the allotted task can be accomplished, provided only we keep up a good heart as we tread the weary furrows, and abound in hope. You will know what is meant by this intractable soil. Look at the human heart, even the renewed heart, and see what a work is to be done there before it can bear the image of the heavenly! This whole work of self-discipline must needs be arduous and painful, because it is in the face of nature. Its aim is the subjugation of nature. We need this conviction as a stimulus to effort. You have to deal, e.g., with some wayward passion, some obliquity of temper, some inexorable habit. You are well aware that it is more than a match for your own strength. But you must also understand that you henceforth bring into the contest auxiliaries which insure your ultimate victory. It is part of His plan that you should be holy and without blame before Him in love. And what He proposes, He can and will accomplish. There is nothing in the case which need discourage them. Let them plough in hope. We have all seen the proudest men clothed with humility; the profane become patterns of godliness; the passionate put on the gentleness of the lamb; even the parsimonious turned into generous givers. They ploughed in hope, and were made partakers of their hope. And thus it will be with all who tread in their steps. We may extend the application of this principle. It deeply concerns parents and teachers to understand it, and all who have to do with the training of the young. How disheartening this work is may be seen in the ill success which so often attends it. What is done frequently is to leave them to themselves. The fruit answers to the culture. Their early infirmities have ripened into vices; and the habits which were barely endurable in their youth are intolerable in their manhood. The Scriptures teach a more excellent way: That he that plougheth, should plough in hope. It will be conceded that the field here indicated is not very attractive. One would not choose for his ploughing a common that was overrun with brambles, or a hill imbedded with stones and matted roots. But if that happens to be your only inheritance, you have no alternative. And many a farmer has transformed just such a plantation into a scene of surpassing fertility. These uninteresting children, so dull and torpid; these malicious children; these deceitful children; these coarse, unkempt children; it matters not what they are, they belong to your patrimony: at least they are, for the time, committed to your guardianship. It is idle to look abroad and say, with a sigh, Oh, that this or that child had been confided to me instead! God has given you this field to plough; and however ungenial the task, He has bid you plough in hope. For consider that He who made nothing in vain could not have designed that these children should remain in perpetual bondage to their wayward tempers and repulsive habits. And is there anything in the sort of problems here presented which should prevent your ploughing in hope? The question may be answered by another: Is there anything too hard for the Almighty? For no one expects these children to be roused into action, to be toned down into submission, to be cured of their vicious propensities, to be moulded into shapes of symmetry and beauty, except by the help of a superhuman arm. But God can do it. And He can do it through your agency. And if it be thus with teachers and parents, so also with ministers of the gospel. No one can understand, except from experience, the greatness of their work, or the trials and discouragements which are incident to it. But what can they do? What ought they to do? They hear a Divine commission. They preach a Divine gospel. The truth they proclaim is precisely suited to its end. It is the only cure for the worlds maladies, the only means for bringing men back to God. They must publish it. And they may well publish it in hope. Appearances may be adverse. But there is no alternative. And precisely such conditions as these have often been followed by a generous harvest. It has proved thus even amidst the appalling wastes of paganism. Let them plough in hope. The cause they have at heart is Gods cause. His eye is upon them. His ear hearkens to their intercessions. Especially will this be the case with those who make it a part of the real business of life to seek the conversion of their fellow-sinners. There are such Christians. They are always on the alert for opportunities of this kind. And they who do this, who make the conversion of sinners one of the cherished ends of life, not only have full warrant to plough in hope, but uniformly avail themselves of it. Hopefulness is of their very nature. There is another field for the application of this maxim, covering too many broad acres to be traversed now; but we may just glance at it. I refer to the multitudes of sufferers--those who are struggling with inward conflicts, with poverty, with misfortune. There is a lesson in our text even for these sufferers. It is not in mockery of their troubles, but with a full appreciation of them, we say, in the face of these trials, you must plough in hope. Despair will ruin you. Despondency will paralyze you. Hope will bring peace and strength. These troubles have not come by chance. They are from the hand of an infinitely wise and merciful God. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord (Lam_3:26). Satan will if possible prevent this, Still another wide sphere invites our notice in connection with the text, merely glanced at in the opening of this sermon--viz., the importance of this principle to the young in prosecuting even their secular plans. It is, under God, one of the great secrets of success, this ploughing in hope. No one quality has been more uniformly characteristic of the worlds heroes, both its benefactors and its scourges, than hopefulness. The main thing is to assure yourselves that you are in the right path; that your ends and aims have been sought in the fear of God, and your powers dedicated to Him. With this condition precedent, you may and should be hopeful. You will encounter difficulties. But never despond. Look to God for succour, and plough in hope. I feel that I have done injustice to this text by restricting it so much to the present life, to immediate, or at least palpable, success, whether in temporal or spiritual things. But you will all contemplate it in its higher and nobler aspect. It is the blood-bought privilege of the Christian always and everywhere to plough in hope, because he may be certain of his harvest hereafter, even if it fail here. Nothing he does for Christ can miss its fruitage there. There is one hope, and only one, that never misleads and never disappoints. Its foundation is laid in the blood and righteousness of Christ. Its object is the friendship of God and the glories of the heavenly state. (H. A. Boardman, D. D.)
Ploughing in hope
Ploughing the land may properly be considered as one of the most laborious of those services to which husbandmen are called: much strength, skill, and perseverance are required. The same field must be frequently retraced by weary steps, till the whole is regularly and deeply furrowed. But arduous, difficult, and wearisome as this employment is, we find persons cheerfully and habitually engaged in it, although it yields no immediate return of profit, and is only preparatory to their other toils. Hope animates their exertions, not the expectation of a direct benefit, but the hope of suitable weather for sowing; the blessing of heaven on the springing of the seed; and, remotely, the returns of harvest. It will be our purpose to illustrate this one position--that those more difficult duties of religion which do not promise immediate advantage, yet should be promptly and perseveringly engaged in. He that plougheth should plough in hope.
1. We shall see the propriety of applying the sentiment of our text, primarily, to repentance towards God. This is indeed the gift of God, but clearly the duty of man. Painful, tedious, and distressing as this toil is, it is preparatory to that state of rich cultivation which is the honour of the Christian character. Then those of you who are convinced of sin, and are sorrowing in the bitterness of your spirits, persevere.
2. May not the sentiment of these words be considered as applicable to that reformation and regulation of heart and life which invariably accompany, yea, may be considered as essential parts of true repentance--as the necessary products of genuine contrition? Self-inquiry, like the searching and separating ploughshare, will be driven over every part of the heart: irksome as the service may appear, no nook or corner of that barren field shall be left unbroken.
3. There are numerous acts of self-denial required by Him who for our sakes bare His Cross and hung thereon. These, like the toils of tillage to which our text alludes, require much skill and perseverance in their discharge; and but for a better hope would be in every case neglected.
4. Various are the duties of benevolence He performed towards His fellow immortals.
Not only are we called to cultivate our own hearts, but to labour for the good of others, that they may not be barren and unfruitful in knowledge of our Lord and Saviour: but frequently this toil is so irksome, and the advantage, if any, so remote, that but for the principle presented in our text, we should refuse to commence our work, or cease in the midst of our labours.
1. Are there any here who must be charged and convicted of having put their hand to the plough and looked back?
2. Let me offer consolation to such as have long toiled, and have hitherto wrought unrewarded in the field of exertion.
3. I congratulate such as patiently persevere, even where success appears withheld. (W. Clayton.)
He that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope.--
Threshing
The toils of the field are succeeded by those of the flail: and perhaps the peasant has no employment more laborious than threshing; indeed, none to equal it in severity of exertion, but ploughing; for which reason St. Paul, in the verse before us, selects these two branches of agriculture to illustrate the work of a minister.
I. On entering a barn and seeing the thresher beat the corn with his flail, a casual observer would almost conclude the grain would be materially injured, Censures, in ignorance of the process, might be heard; and ministerial efforts are open to this misconstruction (Isa_41:15-16; 2Co_7:8-16).
II. He who thresheth intends, and hopes, to succeed in separating the grain from the husk; and he does succeed. So shall the Word of God be, by it character is detected and displayed. After our Lord had urged the necessity of self-denial, from that time many walked no more with Him, they were offended at His doctrine: while His genuine followers became by the same means more confirmed in their attachment, and renewed their allegiance to their chosen sovereign. Labours for the spiritual good of others must be discriminating to be successful: each must receive his portion of meat, or medicine, as the case may require, in due season.
III. Does not the toil of the thresher receive a remarkable and instructive commendation in the removal of the chaff when the corn is winnowed? He hopes that he shall so thresh as that the subsequent process of the fan shall thoroughly purge the floor. Terrible will be the sanction that God, the Judge of all, will give to every rejected message: the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous: they are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
IV. The termination of ministerial toil is suggested by this metaphor: when the husks and chaff are separated from the grain, the husbandman threshes it no longer. Further, this specific toil of all who labour for the immortal welfare of others shall cease for ever when the number of the elect is accomplished: the dusty and tedious process of threshing is not needed in our garners; and it is in hope of this remoter happiness that he that plougheth and he that thresheth engage in their respective labours; they shall rejoice together. To conclude, let it ever be remembered that though the Word of God is the ordinary threshing instrument, yet it is not the only one; for there is a variety of implements used for this purpose (Isa_28:27). So where the Word fails of producing the desired effect, He will try the flail of adversity; by this, therefore, shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged, and this is all the fruit to take away sin. (G. Clayton.)
If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?--
Christian ministers
I. Are sowers.
1. They toil and cast in the seed.
2. In obedience to their Masters command.
3. The result depends on the soil and the Divine blessing.
II. Bear precious seed. Spiritual things as--
1. Truth.
2. Hope.
3. Promise.
III. Have a right to participate in the fruit. The reasonableness of some return is shown by--
1. Gratitude.
2. Justice. (H. H. Beamish, M. A.)
The obligation of the Churches to support the ministry
I. The Divine appointment, that Churches should support their ministers.
1. Under the Mosaic dispensation.
2. As enjoined by Christ under the gospel.
3. As the dictate of natural religion.
II. The various modes adopted to attain this instituted end.
1. Tithes.
2. Taxes.
3. Voluntary support.
III. The extent to which this duty should be carried.
1. To satisfy the claims of justice.
2. To accord with the language of Scripture.
3. To promote the highest interests of the Church.
4. To promote in the best way the conversion of the world.
IV. The agents by which this work must be accomplished.
1. The deacons.
2. The people. (J. Bennett, D. D.)
The Christian ministry
Had the preaching of the gospel been committed to the ministry of angels, their superior natures would have rendered them incapable of receiving those services of gratitude which are evidences and effects of faith and obedience. But when men, subject to wants and griefs, come to us in the name of the Lord, we feel ourselves called upon to consult their temporal comfort.
I. From the nature and design of the ministerial office, forcible arguments result for the gratitude and liberality of those for whose benefit it is employed. We sow unto you spiritual things. We are the ministers of a spiritual dispensation which has for its object the present happiness and everlasting salvation of mankind; we endeavour to implant in your mind those sacred principles which, when nourished by Divine influence, ripen into all the fruits of righteousness and peace; we willingly spend our strength for your improvement. Just is the plea, good men will reply. From your ministrations we have enjoyed advantages which we can never repay; through your instrumentality we have, by Divine grace, been rescued from the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity; have learned the vanity of created joys, and been taught to set our affections on the nobler things which are above. We know, indeed, that to the God of all grace belongs the supreme unrivalled praise of those supports and joys we have experienced. But ye are the servants of the Most High, who have shown unto us the way of salvation, and as such we honour you; ye have administered to us benefits far more valuable than all the honours and treasures and joys of time. And what can we render you in return? What can we do for you, or for your sons or daughters?
II. The stated labours of a regular ministry are of much importance to the community. The preservation of a state depends far more upon the prevention of crimes than upon the punishment of them. Civil legislation needs to be aided by an authority which reaches the heart, by a dominion over man which extends to his sentiments and pursuits, and by considerations calculated to subdue his worst dispositions, to restrain him from every evil work, and to regulate by internal and governing principles the whole tenor of his conduct. This is the empire which religion establishes. If this representation of the importance of religion to human society is just, it becomes a prudent measure in all well-regulated governments to secure a succession of persons who are qualified by education, by talents, by principle, and by conduct, for explaining the rules of piety and morality; and for recommending that glorious scheme of salvation which Christianity reveals to us--that blessed doctrine of salvation which came down from heaven, which alone can conquer the depravity of human nature, which alone can secure the reign of tranquillity on earth.
III. The labours of a regular ministry are of much importance to individuals, A faithful pastor, dwelling amongst his people, observing their tempers and their habits, and enjoying their confidence and affection, feels himself sincerely interested in the welfare and happiness of every individual committed to his charge. He regards them as his family, and the evidences of his pastoral care will bear a proportion to the variety of their situations. Animated by his careful inspection, and awed by his reproofs, the young are trained up to habits of application, temperance, and subordination; and thus are fitted for appearing with advantage in the station which Providence allots them. In estimating the advantages of religious institutions to individuals, keep it in remembrance that ministers of religion are messengers of consolation to the afflicted. The trials of life are far too numerous to be mentioned in detail; suffice it to remark that the consolations of the gospel extend to all the variety of human woes. Another evidence of the importance of pastoral ministrations to individuals is taken from their tendency to prepare them for everlasting happiness.
IV. The hardships and difficulties which ministers have to encounter vindicate the reasonableness of the expectation expressed in my text. Long before they enter on their sacred employment, they look forward to it with the mingled emotions of hope and fear. They enter on the arduous work with the solicitude of men who know that earth and hell unite to impede their progress and to ensnare their steps. They perceive the importance of preparing new and diversified instruction for their people. (A. Bonar.)
The duty of ministerial support
I. The work of the minister is costly to himself.
1. All the energies of the minister must be devoted to his work, or it cannot be well done.
2. The ministers work is relatively expensive. He occupies a position which exposes him to expenses that cannot be met with small means.
3. Then there are the public meetings of the churches and councils, all necessary for the good of Zion, yet they cost something to the minister. He must also read much; he must therefore have at hand all necessary facilities for the study and illustration of truth.
4. The work of the ministry requires a large amount of skill and a sound judgment, and imposes great responsibility upon the minister.
II. The ministers services are valuable to the people. The pulpit is in no wise indebted to its supporters. It gives them many times more in temporal good than it costs. It has ever been the first, the most important, means of civilisation and social refinement; of gathering around the family home the tokens of thrift and comfort; of the increase of wealth, and of the productive value of real estate. Life and property are more secure under the influence of an evangelical ministry than where the gospel is not preached.
III. The standing and reputation of a minister is affected by his compensation.
IV. Justice requires that ministers should be paid like other men.
V. The system so prevalent of supporting the minister as a gratuity degrades the ministry in the estimation of the people and tends to make the minister servile.
1. To avoid misapprehension, it is proper to say that this discourse refers to the duty of churches in forming their estimate of a ministers claims; not of the ministers duty to preach, whether paid or not. Necessity is laid upon him, he must preach the gospel; but it does not follow that he must give his services to those who able to pay him.
2. Ministers should preach to their own people on this subject.
3. Churches may not expect the rich effusion of Divine grace while they do not acknowledge their just obligations to their minister.
4. If the church that is able to pay a just compensation to their minister does not and will not do it, their minister should leave them. (M. H. Wilder.)
If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather? Nevertheless we have not used this power.--
Rights asserted and foregone
I. The just rights which the apostle asserted--that like other teachers he had a claim upon his scholars for recompense and support.
1. He supports this by striking illustrations (1Co_9:7) and by Scriptural proof (1Co_9:8-9).
2. He urges the superiority of the advantages bestowed by the teacher over those which he is justified in expecting by way of acknowledgment if not of return (1Co_9:11).
3. This right he claims for all ministers, himself included.
II. The nobility of spirit with which the apostle was wont deliberately to forego these rights. Observe--
1. The fact. Paul had acted on this principle from the beginning, and remembered that it involved hard manual labour. Like every Jew he had been taught a trade; he wove the Cilician goats hair into the fabric used for tents and sails. It was a tax upon his energies whilst he was thinking, writing, and preaching, to spend part of the day in hard rough toil.
2. The exception. From the Macedonian Churches, for a special reason, he consented to receive a gift (Php_4:1-23.).
3. The motive.
(1) Not pride: whilst preaching was a necessity in his case, so that he could take no credit and make no boast for his ministry, he gave up the right of maintenance that he might have the pleasure of a voluntary sacrifice, a ground of lowly glorying.
(2) That there might be no hindrance to the progress of the gospel. It might have been thought that he preached for gain, and such a supposition would render his hearers suspicious and unreceptive. (Prof. J. R. Thompson.)
But suffer all things lest we should hinder the gospel.--
How Christians may hinder the gospel
1. In one sense the gospel cannot be hindered. As well speak of hindering the advance of the sun, or of an avalanche. God has promised, My word shall not return unto Me void, &c., and Christian history is but the fulfilment of this prediction.
2. But whilst this is true it is not less true that the work of sinners salvation may be impeded. I will not refer to so-called hindrances by the enemies of truth, for these have often been the most effective aids to its advancement; nor to the major hindrances such as Romanism, superstition, hypocrisy, rationalism, &c., for these are so prominent that we cannot overlook them. But I call attention to some serious obstacles which are too much overlooked.
I. Churches may hinder the gospel.
1. By the want of a clear and definite line between the Church and the world. During the first three centuries this was distinct enough, and then the Church prospered. And if this distinction is less manifest to-day it is not because the world has become less carnal. A false respectability is threatening the spiritual life of the Church. A cause is often accounted prosperous according as its finances are large and the hearers influential. This cold respectability does not believe much in conversions or aggressive effort.
2. By the want of self-denial. Instead of suffering all things for the advancement of the gospel, is there one single thing that we really suffer? The manifold artifices we have to adopt, the violent efforts we have to make to raise the means of spreading the gospel are an evidence of the unreality of much religious profession and a powerful hindrance to the truth. How different in those early days amid the glow of the Churchs first love, when they that had money brought it and laid it at the apostles feet.
3. By the refusal of personal and active service. We speak, indeed, with anxious concern of the heathen abroad and at home, pray for their evangelisation, and bid God-speed to the official labourers among them; but something more than this is required before these masses will be brought under the power of the gospel. As in the early days the responsibility must be felt by the entire Church; every believer must be a herald and an evangelist. The Epistle to the Hebrews rebukes those who are still babes in Christ, but ought to be teachers; and if the day is to come when it will be no longer necessary to say Know the Lord, because all shall know Him, it will only come by every one teaching his neighbour that knowledge. The living Church has not yet stretched herself Elijah-like upon the dead body whose quickening she prays for. Like the atmosphere she must press with equal force on all the surfaces of society; like the sea flow into every nook of humanity; and like the sun shine on all things foul and low as well as fair and high, if she is to accomplish that for which she has been commissioned and equipped.
4. By self-complacency and spiritual pride.
5. By a spirit of captiousness, ever ready to pick faults with existing arrangements, but doing nothing to make them better.
6. By our failure to recognise the absolute sovereignty of God in the salvation of souls.
7. By our want of humble dependence on the Holy Spirit and our neglect of earnest persevering prayer.
II. Ministers may hinder the gospel. If Paul felt the possibility of this, why may not we?
1. By a cold perfunctoriness in the discharge of our duties. It is no easy matter to escape this. To address to the same people every week the same verities and still retain freshness and power, can only be done by sustained communion with God and living contact with the realities of which we speak. Incessant preaching apart from careful cultivation of the inner life will make us little better than sermon machines.
2. By forgetfulness of our absolute dependence on the Holy Spirit, and by reliance on human strength.
3. By the assumption of a certain distinctness of order from our people. Our office, authority, and work are all spiritual. We have no priesthood in any other sense than that all believers are priests. The more we make our people feel that we are not above them, but of them, the more influence will oar preaching exert upon them.
4. By our want of confidence in the success of the gospel. How many sermons have we preached of which we have never seen any fruit because we never really looked for it?
5. By our want of the spirit of self-sacrifice and consecration indicated in the text. (Thain Davidson, D. D.)
They which wait at the altar are partakers with the altar.--
Partakers with the altar
Archdeacon Farrar says that Mr. Gladstone once told the late Bishop Magee that he had never heard a sermon preached on the text, They who wait at the altar are partakers with the altar. The bishop thereupon promised to preach on the text, and on the occasion Mr. Gladstone was present. Most preachers would have seen nothing in the text but a sermon on the right of ministers to maintenance. But Dr. Magee drew from it a sermon on the congruity between the nature of a mans life and the results he reaps from it. I shall never forget, says Dr. Farrar, one passage, in which he described the bitter disappointment and disillusionment of the man who had lived for sense, for pleasure, and for self. He described such a man--his own worthless idol--in his hoary and dishonoured age seeking in vain for comfort and sustenance from the source of his idolatry; the hungry worshipper holding out his withered hand to his dead idol, and holding it out in vain.
Do ye not know that they … which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.--
The pastors duty and claims
I. The business of the pastor is implied: he is to preach the gospel. Note--
1. The subject of his ministry--the gospel, i.e., all the gospel fairly implies, its promises, commands, &c. The term taken thus comprehensively, clearly instructs us in--
(1) The fallen condition of mankind.
(2) Gods great pity on our fallen race (Joh_3:16).
(3) The obligation of those who believe to act worthy of their relation to the Saviour.
2. His duty with regard to it. He is to preach the gospel. Every pastor is bound to do this out of regard to--
(1) The honour of Christ.
(2) The edification of the Church.
(3) The conversion of sinners.
II. The duty of the flock pointed out, viz., to support their pastor. There are two ways of doing this, either by compulsory laws or by voluntary contribution. The former has, indeed, some advantages. It renders the minister independent, and if his flock is destitute of principle it is well for him that the law compels them to the performance of duty. But the law of Christ binds the people voluntarily to the support of their minister, i.e., it binds them to the duty, but leaves the amount to them according to the rule in 1Co_16:1-2, and Mat_10:8. Now this is to be done--
1. From a principle of justice. It is not benevolence, but equity, and he is not just who withholds from the minister the due remuneration of his labours (verse 7). The person who refuses to meet the just claims of the physician is reckoned dishonest, and is he less so who withholds from the pastor his equitable support?
2. From a regard to our own advantage. We all know that our prosperity depends on the Divine blessing; and should we not be chiefly concerned respecting soul prosperity? Gods blessing may be hoped for in the use of the means when those means are suitably valued and employed. But are they so when the support we could give is sinfully withheld? (2Co_4:6-10).
3. From a regard to our final account. (J. Dorrington.)
Ministers, pay of
Ministers are not as well paid as cricket-players, and for a good reason--religion is not the national game. The utmost a minister can say is what the farmer said of his cow when grazing on the bare top of a lofty hill, If she has a poor pasture, she has a fine prospect. (J. A. Macfadyen, D. D.)
Paying the ministry
In 1662 the town of Eastham agreed that a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of the ministry. The ministers must have sat on the cliffs in every storm, and watched the shore with anxiety. And, for my part, if I were a minister, I would rather trust to the bowels of the billows to cast up a whale for me than to the generosity of many a country parish that I know. (Thoreau.)
Payment of ministers
It must be remembered as among the anomalies of Welsh religious life, that it combines an insatiable appetite for sermons with a marvellous disregard for the temporal comfort of the preacher. On one occasion a woman said to Mr. Evans, as he came out of the pulpit, Well, Christmas Evans, we are back with your stipend; but I hope you will be paid at the resurrection. You have given us a wonderful sermon. Yes, yes, was his quick reply; no doubt of that; but what am I to do till I get there? And there is the old white mare that carries me--what will she do? For her there will be no resurrection. But what will you do? What reward will you get for your unfaithfulness at the resurrection? Its hard, but I shall get on at the resurrection; but you, who got on so well in the world, may change places with me at the resurrection. (Paxton Hood.)
Support of the ministry
A clergyman in Wales was appointed by an ordaining council to address the people who had impoverished their former pastor and were now to receive a new one. He recommended in his address that Jacobs ladder be let down from the skies to that Welsh parish, in order that the new minister might go into heaven on the sabbath evening after preaching, and remain there all the week: then he would come down so spiritually minded and so full of heaven, that he would preach almost like an angel. Now, the people insisted on having their pastor with them on other days than the sabbath. That may be, replied the speaker; but then, if he remain among you, he must have something to eat. The dignity of the angels was not inconsistent with their ascending and descending on a wooden ladder; and one ladder on which our ministering angels may go up to their heavenly studies is such a material sustenance as will make it unnecessary for them to grovel in the earth. (Prof. Park.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 7–10. Who goeth a warfare at his own charges?…
7–10. Who goeth a warfare at his own charges? Soldiers were paid while on a campaign; but he and Barnabas were Christian soldiers. The husbandman ate of the vineyard; but they worked in the vineyard of the Lord. The feeder of a flock drank of its milk, but they were feeders of the flock of God.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On vv15, 23 1Co_9:15. Used.—As in 1Co_9:12. “Have not availed myself of…
CRITICAL NOTES
1Co_9:15. Used.—As in 1Co_9:12. “Have not availed myself of my right, nor urged upon you the Law of Moses and the Lord Christ’s command.” For Paul’s sensitiveness about being misunderstood, sec Php_4:11; Php_4:17. Glorying.—“Boasting.” Twenty-nine times occurring in a few chapters of these two Epistles (especially in 2 Corinthians 10, 11, 12), and only twenty-six times in all his other writings. (Farrar; who compares the “puffed up” of 1 Cor. passim, elsewhere only Col_2:18.)
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1Co_9:16. Though.—Better “if” (R.V.).
1Co_9:17.—Choose between two slightly divergent lines of interpretation:
(1) In so far as I act voluntarily in foregoing my right to maintenance, I have my reward; in so far as I act without my choice, but under compulsion of the “woe,” I am only His servant, His steward but His bondslave, whose whole service is duty, and needs no thanks; and what then is my reward, that I should thus preach gratuitously? Why, the ability to appeal to men with the more effect, because I am independent (as in 1Co_9:19-20). My concessions to them have greater force of appeal.
(2) More usually, the “reward” is taken simply to mean (as 1Co_9:18) the privilege, and the satisfaction to himself, of preaching gratuitously. But this would have no self-centering value to Paul, and only would be to him desirable as giving him the vantage-ground for 1Co_9:19-20. Evans (in Speaker) thinks that 1Co_9:19-20 formally specify the “reward”; most find it in 1Co_9:18. The “reward” is hardly one given by God. If it be, yet the act rewarded is done in strength which is entirely grace. There is no such independent worthiness in the man as to claim reward as a right; yet it is fitting that the right act should have its recognition from God. Stanley, happily, says: “This contradiction [i.e. of 1Co_9:16 to 1Co_9:15] is … specially characteristic of the Apostle’s style when he speaks, as here, of ‘boasting.’ He can hardly mention a ‘boast’ without instantly recalling it.” He adds: “In one sense he clings to his boast, in another sense the necessity of preaching the Gospel sweeps it away. And thus the construction of 1Co_9:17 was probably meant to be, ‘Whether willingly or unwillingly, I have a stewardship entrusted to me.’ ” But (he proceeds to suggest) probably as in 2Co_5:13, with a sudden change of conception (cf. 1Co_8:3) an intrusive thought gets into the former clause.
1Co_9:19.—Well expounded in Gal_5:13, compared with 1Co_9:1.
1Co_9:20.—Keeping the great feasts and observing vows, circumcising Timothy, [but not Titus].
1Co_9:21.—“Under law” in both cases. Too absolute to say that without the article “law” in general, and with the article, the Mosaic law, are meant. Truer statement in Cremer, Lexicon: “The article is usually wanting where stress is laid not upon its historical impress and outward form, but upon the conception itself; not upon the law which God gave, but upon lam as given by God, and as, therefore, the only one that is or can be. So especially in passages where the article is alternately found and omitted, Rom_2:14-15, etc. But that νόμος without the article also means the law which was given to Israel, is clear most manifestly from Rom_5:13” (pp. 430, 431). Augustine’s “law” for a Christian life, “Dilige, et quod vis fac,” is not practically enough. Christian liberty is within the bounds of the will of another—Christ “the Lord.” And this is now the great law of “God”: “Be ye under the law and will of The Son, Christ.” (Cf. Joh_4:29.)
1Co_9:22. All … all … all … some.—If only he could have said “all” in the fourth instance! But some will “perish for whom Christ died” (1Co_8:11); no great wonder, then, if some are not saved for whom Paul preached, and used this holy, self-sacrificing versatility, but all in vain! Obviously “all things” has its limits. “To do wrong can save no one” (Beet).
1Co_9:23.—“That I may obtain, in company with these whom I hope to save, the blessings promised in the Gospel” (Beet). Good exposition in 1Ti_4:16.
HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.—1Co_9:15-23
Subject: The Independence of the Minister. The central word of this section is “Free” (1Co_9:19).
I. Free from all men.
II. Free, yet under compulsion to preach.
III. Free, yet under willing bondage to men’s weakness and ignorance.
I. [Sufficient said, in Critical Notes and in Analysis of preceding section, as to the literal, special sense in which Paul used the word and asserted his “freedom.” But the freedom, and the independence it gave him, as well as the ground of appeal with which it “rewarded” him in his approach to men of all classes, coming to them, as he did, a man under obligation to no man,—all these points have their widely applicable analogies in the relations between minister and people still.]
1. If he is to be faithful, he must be free. His people, if they know their own interests, need that he shall be faithful; they should therefore carefully, for their own sakes, if for nothing else, guard against anything which would even appear to put constraint upon him, or limit his freedom of judgment or action. [E.g. the rich man should, with even “gentlemanly” feeling, and much more with a fine sense of Christian propriety, carefully abstain from doing or saying what might seem to “put the screw on,” and the more so if the minister lives very much upon supplies drawn from his pocket. The strong politicians in the Church should let the minister’s politics alone. And so on.] If they want a “man of God” amongst them, who will lift them out of the secular round to a higher level with its larger life, let them give him all freedom to say out all that God gives him to speak. [A Homiletical Commentary of the character of this is not the place in which to deal with the question of the degree of liberty in doctrinal teaching a Church should permit or prescribe to their minister.] Let the congregation, or the meeting, or the council which may be its official representative, for their own good jealously guard their minister’s fullest liberty for feeding and ruling the flock as their pastor.
2. His independence will not be a thing to be obtruded in every face, or a banner to be flung out ostentatiously in every petty skirmish or bit of friction. There are boasters of their “independence” who are simply offensively discourteous in speech; their “freedom” of tongue is only the expression of coarseness of feeling and of mere vulgar pride and self-assertion, in season and out of season. [So Robertson, Expos. Lectures, in loco: “Even the bold unpopularity that cares not whom it offends may be, and often is, merely the result of a contentious, warlike spirit, defiant of all around, and proud in a fancied superiority.”] This “free” Paul can say, “Ourselves your servants,—your bondservants, your slaves,—for Jesus’ sake”; and that to these very Corinthians (2Co_4:5). The verbal, surface discrepancy runs down to a very real agreement and unity of conception and feeling beneath. The “freest” and most “independent” man is the one who can best concede something, and abridge his liberty “for the Gospel’s sake” (1Co_9:23). He may give up something of his liberty (say) for peace’ sake; but the Church should not ask it; they have no right to demand it. The loving, wise, patient, diligent, faithful minister in the Church will usually get all the honour he can wisely desire, and all the “freedom” he can wisely use.
II. Free, looking manward, Paul is yet under most urgent compulsion, looking Christward. (See “constraineth,” in the Notes on 2Co_5:14.)
1. No worthy heart can look unmoved upon need or misery, and know and possess the remedy; no worthy heart can refuse the “constraint” so put upon it. The beggars of the street stand silent, simply exhibiting their sightless eyes, or crippled hands, or mutilated members; they know they need say nothing to move really compassionate hearts; their needs have “poor dumb mouths” which “speak for them”; their very necessity is a plea which the tender-hearted patron will not, cannot, resist. [So may we say that, if in our ignorance or weakness we “cannot pray,” if we are brought so low, physically, mentally, spiritually; then if we can only lie helpless before God, exhibiting ourselves in our need, to Him, it will be a most effectual appeal to His heart, a prayer He cannot but hear. He cannot sit upon His throne, and see, and know, and do nothing (Exo_3:7-8).]
2. The man, who is himself saved, and then for the first time, by contrast and by new insight, understands in any real sense what peril and misery it is to be “lost,” who is daily walking in the blessedness of “salvation” and of fellowship with God in Christ, cannot selfishly keep locked up within his own bosom the news, the secret, of the new possibilities for sinners through the Gospel. He must be an evangelist, telling out the good news; he must be missionary in instinctive impulse, in motive and activity. “Necessity is laid upon him.” And no man will ever be of use as a minister of Christ in whose soul this inward, urgent necessity is not continually present. He should jealously watch against the first beginnings of its decline; he should mourn before Christ over its absence; he should guard it as a most precious possession.
3. But Paul lies under the (almost) coercion of a more mighty impulse still. “Woe is unto him if he preach not.” (See Separate Homily, 1Co_9:16.) The first, original “call to the ministry” is the Master’s call. And that call is a “claim” which it were rebellion—sin—to ignore, or refuse, or resist. The Church in its “calling” is only the organ of the Spirit of the Master, and has no power, or function, beyond that of ascertaining, so far as man may, who are the men called by Christ. Above all:
III. This “free” Apostle is under willing bondage to the prejudices, the imperfectly enlightened conscience, the liabilities consequent or weakness of principle or character in those whom he approaches.
1. His Divine Master, to save him, “humbled Himself,” “emptied Himself,” and, Lord of all as He was, “became obedient,” the servant of His Father’s will, and that even to the length of “dying,” and that dying a death upon a cross (Php_2:8). His Master had “stuck at nothing,” of self-surrender and self-sacrifice, when it was a question of saving him and his fellow-sinners. Nothing was too much to do, to suffer, to give up, if only men might be saved. And Paul is His Master over again in this. The Jew found him ready to concede all that involved no unfaithfulness to Christ, and was not inconsistent with the very meaning and raison d’être of the Gospel,—ready to accommodate himself in all really indifferent points to the prejudices of a Jew’s education and lifelong habits of feeling and practice. Within the same—happily broad—limits the Gentile, “without the law,” found this Jew, “born, made, under the law” (Gal_4:4), ready to meet him, to lay aside any Jewish habit or practice, which would stand in the way of their getting perfectly into that touch and that sympathetic understanding of each other without which Paul could do nothing to help him; indeed, a Gentile found no more resolute and steadfast champion of Gentile freedom from the Mosaic ritual law than this ex-Pharisee Paul. Paul would walk with shortened steps by the side of the weakest, that he might lead them to his Christ; keeping to their pace “with equal steps,” lest, by insisting on their moving onward at his own pace, he should leave them behind, fallen out, unable to follow, to become a prey to the Enemy of souls. Anything of innocent concession, of innocent accommodation, to any man, if by any means he might save him.
2. What a model of method and of aim for a minister! Anybody can drive away or cut off a troublesome, obstinate, stupid, prejudiced member from a Church. The business of a shepherd is to keep all his sheep. His aim is to save them,—all. It is too much the inclination of the natural heart to grow impatient with the slow-paced, the mentally sluggish or warped; the men tied hand and foot with what we see to be needless, morbid scrupulosities about trivial points of teaching or practice; too easy to say, “Let them go. We cannot be troubled with such weaklings. We cannot narrow our action, or check our advance in the development of the congregational life, by waiting till these get to see what every man of sense sees already.” But the Church and the minister exist to save even the “weak”; the prejudiced, narrow Jew, the half-instructed, “lawless” Gentile. “If by any means I may save some.” Even one soul is too precious to be neglected, or left behind, or cast over.
3. No pains are too great to find out how to approach a soul, in order to save it. Sympathy means “feeling with.” It means laying oneself alongside of the man; projecting ourselves into his position; getting to his standpoint; trying to understand and see what he sees, as if with his eyes; contracting ourselves to his measure, that we may understand his deepest life; endeavouring to make our heart beat pulse and pulse with his, that then we may understand his difficulties and remove them, and may lead him up and out with us into our higher and larger knowledge and enjoyment and life. [See how Elisha (2Ki_4:34) applied himself to the body of the child of the Shunammite, mouth and mouth, eyes and eyes, hands and hands, till his own warm life made the cold body beneath him warm again into readiness for life. How every teacher, even on secular subjects, especially in dealing with the young, finds the urgent necessity of sympathetically understanding the pupil’s mind, and entering into his position, if he is to teach, and to give what himself knows.] He who would teach and help and save must begin by serving.
4. The unsympathetic observer cries, “Mr. Pliable!” The honestly narrow Jew says, “What shocking lawlessness! Why, the man makes into matters indifferent some of the most explicit and long-binding laws of Moses! Rank Antinomianism! Rank infidelity!” “No,” Paul would reply, “I am not lawless. I am under law, [and in a very real sense “under The Law”] to my Master, Christ.” If principle were touched, or any point which concerned the honour of His Lord, then no one could be more rigidly uncompromising than Paul. Circumcise Titus? When that meant, either that the Christ was no Saviour, and that the Circumcision must save, or at least that salvation depended upon Christ and Circumcision, Christ being no complete Saviour; then, “No, not for an hour!” (Gal_2:5). Concede to a Gentile inquirer, or Gentile convert, any liberty in (say) the matter of sexual license? No; such a one “shall God destroy” (1Co_3:7). Paul is “free” again in an instant, and with all the independence of his freedom—he is no man’s servant to say “yes” and “no” as his master calls for “yes” and “no”—he speaks his mind. Nay, he is the minister of Christ, and independent, first to be loyal to his Master, and next “to save, by all means, some” souls.
SEPARATE HOMILIES
1Co_9:21. The Principle of Law under the Gospel Order.
I. “Under law” or “under the Law,” which?—(For a lexical decision, see extract from Cremer in Critical Notes.) A “burning question” to the Hebrew Christian community, the members of which stood, historically and personally, on the line of the “meeting-place of the ages” (Heb_9:26). The fire of that day is for all practical purposes extinct in ours. [The council of Acts 15 met on account of this difficulty of practical action. The conflict of Paul’s middle life with the Judaisers shows the urgency then of a decision.] We, standing clear of the temporary controversy, can see that the Law of God is one and continuous through all the dispensations, and as truly extant and binding outside Judaism as within it. If God once speak, His word is man’s law. By His expressed will every man, of every age and race, is bound to shape his life. For a special purpose, arising out of local and national emergency, “The Law” was a thing interjected [between Abraham and Christ], a remarkable historical incident and episode in God’s whole government and ordering of the religious history of the world, and particularly of the covenant people, one in Abraham and Christ. [Two passages are the key to this: Gal_3:19; Rom_5:20.] But it was only a passing, temporary embodiment of permanent principles. Even the Decalogue has local colouring in four of its enactments. Part of God’s expressed will toward mankind is His judgment of and against sin, and the plan on which alone He will be approached by a sinner. These had a local, temporary expression given to them in the ritual law, with its defilements and purifications, and with its sacrifices of atonement, of consecration, of fellowship [sin, burnt, peace offerings respectively]. Detached from [do not say “purified” from] the temporary, national, theocratic accompaniment; stripped of the dispensational, and (e.g. 1Co_9:9) very temporary enswathement; all local, Jewish colour washed out; the “law” in “The Law” has come forward into Christianity, which is the newer, world-wide, race-suiting form of the one continuous government of the world by the God of Redemption. Every principle of man’s relation to God, or to man, which can be proved to underlie the enactments—even the “trivial ones”—of the Mosaic code and ritual, is in full validity under Christianity. “God is one” (Gal_3:19) in all the dispensations, and His law is one. The Christian is, e.g., “under the law” about “not muzzling the ox,” “unto Christ,” as a matter of loyal obedience to God in Christ. The “law” in “the Law” of the Passover is still a fully valid part of the Christian scheme (1Co_5:8). “The eternal morals of the old economy are rewritten in the pages of the New Testament, as the standard of requirement, the condition of the charter of privileges, and a testimony against those who offend” (Pope, Theol, iii. 173).
II. The Gospel still employs the principle of a law external to the man.—No doubt an ideal Christian “perfection” requires no code. All the old statute-book is consolidated and codified into one law, “Love.” All obedience lies in germ in the service of Love. A perfectly instructed Love would enact, from instance to instance, a perfect law for the individual. On the basis of the grace of the Gospel, the man whose status before God is that of a sinner accepted for the sake of, and in, Christ, finds the law and the obedience prescribed and secured by even an imperfectly instructed Love, accepted by God. Love is the ideally sufficient motive and force for all obedience. Ideally the life springing from a perfect and perfectly instructed Love coincides with the whole requirement of a perfect Law. The external code says no more, asks no more, than Love teaches and enacts and secures. Very glorious approximation to all this is the privilege of all in Christ, and very glorious embodiments of the possibility and privilege are found in every Church, in every century. But “no code, no law, but that of love,” can only be acted upon simpliciter as between one soul and its God, alone together. God’s law and His government need not only adapting to an individual case, but to men in associated life. The enlightenment of conscience and of love varies as between individual and individual, and between stage and stage of the spiritual growth of the same man. A merely subjective law would be one of continually varying interpretation, and of often mistaken interpretation. Even the greatly advanced Christian man is often in need of an external, objective, absolute, standard. His newborn instinct of love will often be the best, or only, expositor to himself of the external commandment; but, on the other hand, he will often need this to interpret and correct the dim, or hesitant, or biassed verdict or direction given by Love within. “The best Christians need a remembrancer: they obey the law within, but are not always independent of the teaching of the law without.” The law without is the safeguard, and the trainer, and the instructor, of the instinct of obedience within. [So an inborn taste for music, or drawing, or poetry, needs the discipline, and the check, and the help of a constant reference to the best models. A Mozart makes laws in music for others, not without first giving a thorough study and obedience to the laws of his predecessors] And much more does the man who has not yet even the new directing principle of the new, and specifically Christian, life within him, need the external law. It is the straight-edge which convicts of sad irregularity the best line traced by his life. [Kingsley, At Last, chap, i., says all this well, with special reference to the Fourth Commandment: “It would be wiser to consider whether the first step in religious training must not be obedience to some such external positive law; whether the savage must not be taught that there are certain things he ought not to do, by being taught that there is one day at least on which he shall not do them. How else is man to learn that the laws of Right and Wrong, like the laws of the physical world, are entirely independent of him, his likes or dislikes, knowledge or ignorance of them; that by Law he is environed from his cradle to his grave, and that it is at his own peril that he disobeys the Law? A higher religion may, and ought to, follow; one in which the Law becomes a Law of Liberty, and a Gospel, because it is loved and obeyed for its own sake; but even he who has attained to this must be reminded again and again, alas! that the Law which he loves does not depend for its sanction upon his love of it, on his passing fancies and feelings; but is as awfully independent of him as it is of the veriest heathen.…” And the supreme Lawgiver is not even the tenderest and most enlightened Conscience, but Christ. Indeed, the tenderness and the enlightenment are all His grace at work. His own Pattern is the one absolute all-comprising standard of human life in its perfectness. His teachings—and not least those embodied in His acts—are abiding Law for His people. All the express directions of the Epistles are the legislation of Christ for “the kingdom of heaven,” given by the Inspiring Spirit through the Apostolic writers. The Inner Light needs interpreting by, whilst in turn it flashes its own illuminative interpretation upon, the Word without. Under the Gospel Love fulfils the Law,—in principle, perfectly, from the first,—but it needs the support, the defence of itself against its own weakness or ignorance, the education, of an external standard and Law. Gospel Ethics ought to be the noblest and most perfect in practical embodiment, as the result of this co-operation of the internal and the external methods of regulation of a Christian life.
III. The text holds the safe middle between two extremes found practically perilous.—A sentence of “Rabbi” Duncan (Colloquia Perip., 109) thus states them: “Ethics without law is as bad in theology as law without ethics.” (He has some pregnant sentences re the former peril (pp. 42–44).] In the one direction tends [or from that quarter comes] all theology which minimises the expiatory, reconciling, atoning element in the death of Christ; which eviscerates the force of the phrases, “forgiveness of sins,” or “the wrath of God,” or which practically leaves out of its scheme any true “anger” in Him; which makes the death only the culminating point of the example, or of the appeal of the love of God to the alienated heart of man. In the revolt from (say) the hard, formal “governmental expedient” theory, and of the “compact” scheme between an angry Father and a loving Son; in the desire to find in theology a worthier and truer place and expression for the love of God toward even those who are alienated from Him and from goodness; there would seem a real danger lest due recognition should not be given to the universal sense of guilt, nor to the way in which even the crudest and least carefully stated formulations of the principle of “satisfaction to Divine justice” have always met and satisfied the demands of the awakened heart and conscience. And this means a defective recognition of the element of law in the relations of God in Christ towards redeemed man. The liability is towards a pattern of life marked by a sentimental goodness rather than Sanctification, and towards a view of Sin which makes it only the fall of the weak child who has not yet learned to walk; or ignorance which misunderstands God; or the limitation of the finite creature. [Teachers and taught, needless to say, are nearly always better, and their lives nobler, than their theory.]
The other peril is Antinomianism, “the Heresy of the Christian Church,” the peril of all communities; the shame of all Churches, and creeds, and confessions. It may be the coarse type of Gal_5:13, or Rom_6:1, which took advantage of the freeness with which pardon may be, even repeatedly, sought and found through Christ, and which dared to live in sin, even gross and sensual sin, presuming on the abounding grace of God. More often—though constantly tending to this uttermost practical licence—it has based itself upon theologies which stated unguardedly such truths as “dead to the law through the body of Christ” (Rom_7:4), “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness,” etc. (Rom_10:4), “Ye are not under law, but under grace” (Gal_5:18); theologies of “imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the believer.” [“Putting a surplice over a sweep, without first washing him,” was hardly a caricature of some extreme forms of this.] The “Antinomian” regards the requirement of perfect holiness as so fully met by Christ that he needs not measure his conduct by any law. Obedience is to him expedient, proper, perhaps rewardable; disobedience may be chastened by a Father, not eternally punished by a Judge. Obedience is to him not a condition of acceptance as to the past or negative salvation, neither is it a condition of acceptance as to the future or positive salvation. But the whole and balanced Gospel knows of no salvation which does not mean holiness of heart and life. It knows of no faith which does not work by love, in all its practical exhibition towards God and man. [The old Jewish desire of a “glorious kingdom of God” for all Israelites, apart from any question of their personal character, reappears in the tendency of every heart to desire heaven, without the trouble of holiness; to make Christ and His cross a convenient help from a deathbed into heaven, although the life may have been spent over self, the world, or in plain sin.] The most conspicuous honour ever done to the supremacy of moral law was seen where Christ hung upon the cross of Calvary. Law is so sacred a thing, Sin that violates it is so terrible a thing, that He who is no sinner, but only the representative of the race of sinners, died, not merely an example, but a “curse” under “the curse of the law.”] [It were strange, if in days when “law” is more completely than ever seen to hold in its grip Creation and God’s order in it, the New Creation should not be thought to run on analogous lines. There is no possibility of trifling with natural law with impunity. In the moral world we should expect it to be as certain that punishment must light—the curse must “come to roost”—somewhere, where law has been broken.]
1Co_9:16. “Woe … if I preach not the Gospel.”—Do not think the ministry “an honourable profession” for your sons before whom nothing else seems definitely to open, or for yourself—perhaps not exactly successful at anything else; “good pay, good social status, not too much work.” Think of its responsibility; you understand in business what it is to pay for responsibility as well as for ability in employés: for how much pay will a man undertake to answer for immortal souls?
I. A great task—“to preach the Gospel.”—Not to be too narrowly conceived and interpreted. [Even John Wesley complains (Works, xii. 130): “Of all preaching, what is usually called Gospel preaching is the most useless, if not the most mischievous: A dull, yea, or lively, harangue, on the sufferings of Christ, or salvation by faith, without strongly inculcating holiness. I see, more and more, that this naturally tends to drive holiness out of the world.”]
1. A complete Gospel should be preached.
(1) The sanctions of the Law of God, the threatenings of the Word of God, are an integral part of the Gospel. [No teacher speaks, e.g., of “fire” so often or so explicitly as Christ.] It is “good news” to know the dangers of disobedience or neglect, as certainly as to know the possibilities of forgiveness and of help toward obedience. A complete human nature includes fear. The whole message of God to men does not disregard this motive. Men need awakening, as well as directing to Christ. “Mere promise-mongers are no Gospel ministers” (Wesley).
(2) The Ethics of the Gospel should be preached. To preach a crude, hard, unguarded “Election” led to Antinomianism (“What does it matter how we live, if we are elect?”). So to preach an unguarded “free grace” leads to Antinomianism (“Let us continue in sin; grace will abound; pardon may always be had!”). “The Gospel” is good living as well as good news. St. James’s teaching is as really a part of God’s whole revealed will as is St. Paul’s. Holiness on earth, as well as heaven after earth, is contemplated by the Gospel. It knows of no peace which is not connected with righteousness. “We are created in Christ Jesus unto good works” (Eph_2:10). [For a young tradesman to go on year by year contentedly losing money, because his kind, wealthy father year by year clears off his balance for him, “is not business.” So for a “Christian” to be less careful about falling into sin because the forgiving mercy of God is so free, and so constantly cancels “the debt,” “is not Gospel.”
2. Yet the Ethics should be Gospel ethics, distinctively. Christian morals all converge upon Christ. Love to Him is the summary of all motive, the one master-impulse. What He would have done, or been, in our circumstances is often a compendious, but sufficient, rule of action and standard of character. He is Himself the Mercy and the Morality of the Gospel, embodied. Natural systems of morals appeal to the sinner’s own force of character, to his own strength of will, to his self-respect, his self-interest, to some recuperative force within the man himself. In Sin they see only failure because of inexperience or weakness; or the finite, because of its limitations, missing, coming short of ideal obedience; they know nothing of guilt, guilty shame, guilty fears. The motives and the power of obedience, of moral elevation, of growth, are all posited within the man, and are his own. Gospel Morals transfer the centre to God. The whole power is that of the Holy Spirit; man cannot raise himself, or obey of himself. All moral power is grace, a gift, is ab extra, and gratuitous mercy for Christ’s sake. [Every topic of the “Gospel preacher” should be exhibited in its close, direct relation to Christ and to God’s purpose in Christ.]
3. Thus treated—exhibited in relation to Christ—every style of preaching, the utterance of every cast of mind, may be made really “preaching of the Gospel.” The preacher of doctrine, dogma, theology, may be of course only an utterer of theses, mere scientific, professional prelections or disquisitions on Scripture topics; but he may be as really a Gospel preacher—laying the foundation of correct, clear thought, and of intelligent experience, in his hearers—as the fervent evangelist, full of illustration, poetry, wit, pathos, and appealing mainly to the emotions. Theology is the Science underlying the preacher’s Art. The Old Testament may yield up Gospel teaching to a student as really, if not as clearly, as the New. Some men will preach from the Proverbs; others from St. John’s writings. But no style of talent, no method of treating Scripture topics, no special class of topic, must be narrowly excluded as not compatible with “preaching the Gospel.”
II. No matter of self-glorification to or by the preacher.—
1. As Christ is central in the matter of the Gospel, so He must be in the preacher’s manner and thought about, and during, and after, his work. Christ must be to the front, the preacher hidden behind Him. Attention must be made to centre upon the theme, not upon the speaker. [“He shall glorify Me” (Joh_16:14; but not “of Himself,” 1Co_9:13; quite another thought). The Holy Spirit is the model preacher of Christ and His Gospel. How, in 1Co_9:9-11, all His “convincing” work moves toward and centres in Christ!]
2. All success is traced up to His power, and must be laid at His feet. [1Co_2:5; Php_2:17, a believing people is brought by Paul and laid upon the altar before Christ, and then his own life is poured out as a libation over the offering.]
3. The preacher is not the discoverer of the Gospel he preaches. It is no credit to him to have such a message to deliver. He can claim none of the deserved plaudits which greet and reward a scientific discoverer or a successful inventor on announcing his new thing. He is barely, only, a reporter. “Ye shall be witnesses—no more—unto Me” (Act_1:8).
4. He is himself only a sinner whom the Gospel has saved. His whole status before God rests, and will eternally rest, upon God’s mercy to him for the sake of another—Christ. It is an honour which is mercy, as well as responsibility, that he is “put in trust with the Gospel” (1Th_2:4). He is only the “earthen vessel”—the crock of common pottery—that holds the golden treasure (2Co_4:7). An ambassador who was once an enemy, sent to his fellow-rebels. Not a source, but a channel, for the water of life. The honour of his office is not personal, but is reflected from his King.
5. He is unworthy to fulfil such an honourable function; he is, in himself, quite unable to fulfil it aright, or worthily of its tremendous issues.
6. Do not praise the preacher, or congratulate him on his success. His zeal, his skill, his success, are all from the outside, from Christ. Above all:
III. He has no choice; he dare not but preach.—[Yet this is constraint, not compulsion. Like Jonah or Balaam, men may refuse the commission of God, or only half discharge it; and must take the “woe” which is the consequence. The model of the spirit of the preacher, called to be the servant of Christ in this work, is, in its culminating example (cf. Psa_40:6-8, not merely “targumed,” but authoritatively applied to, and expounded of, Christ, Heb_10:5-7), Christ Himself, in His voluntary, self-devoting (Joh_17:19, “I sanctify Myself”) acceptance of the call.] He feels the compulsion of (a) gratitude; (b) compassion for men’s need, and consideration of their danger (perhaps, here, “knowing the terror of the Lord,” 2Co_5:11; but this not certain); (c) a sense of right; he ought to tell what has been such a blessing to himself; (d) above all, and this here, he dares do nothing else. “Free” as regards man’s power and payment (1Co_9:1), but bound as to God’s call. [An old missionary, in his journal (penes me), speaking of his “call” to the ministry, writes: “When I am at my best religiously, the impression is the most powerful and persistent. The everlasting salvation of my soul is intimately, if not inseparably, connected with my obedience in this respect.”] No question whether he shall “choose the ministry.” He is “called” to it. God designed him for it “from his mother’s womb.” Pity the man who gets into the work without this call and commission, and who finds it out in later life, when perhaps too late to retrace his steps and undo the past. But “woe” to the man who, being called, will not hear; who ought to preach the Gospel, but who chooses some easier, or more lucrative, or more congenial, line of life! What sin is there like it, to refuse the honour of being an ambassador who may save souls? [Yet how patient God is with reluctant Moses, who is almost petulant and rebellious in his urgent protest against going to Egypt (Exo_3:11; Exo_3:13; Exo_4:1; Exo_4:10), excuse after excuse, until finally, 1Co_9:13, “Here am I, but do not send me; choose, and send somebody else.”] Do not envy the “preacher of the Gospel,” even if he be very successful. “Brethren, pray for us.”
HOMILETIC SUGGESTIONS
1Co_9:15; 1Co_9:23. Paul an Example of—
I. Self-denial.
II. Humility.
III. Disinterestedness.
IV. Affability.
V. High motive.—[J. L.]
1Co_9:16.
I. What to preach: “The Gospel.”
II. How to preach: “Without glory to self in any way.”
III. Why preach? “Woe.”—[J. L.]
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv11–23 11. “If we have shown unto you spiritual things,…
11. “If we have shown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?” This is clear on temporal support.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv16, 19 1 Corinthians
1 Corinthians
THE SIN OF SILENCE
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1Co 9:16 - 1Co 9:17.
The original reference of these words is to the Apostle’s principle and practice of not receiving for his support money from the churches. Gifts he did accept; pay he did not. The exposition of his reason is interesting, ingenuous, and chivalrous. He strongly asserts his right, even while he as strongly declares that he will waive it. The reason for his waiving it is that he desires to have somewhat in his service beyond the strict line of his duty. His preaching itself, with all its toils and miseries, was but part of his day’s work, which he was bidden to do, and for doing which he deserved no thanks nor praise. But he would like to have a little bit of glad service over and above what he is ordered to do, that, as he ingenuously says, he may have ‘somewhat to boast of.’
In this exposition of motives we have two great principles actuating the Apostle-one, his profound sense of obligation, and the other his desire, if it might be, to do more than he was bound to do, because he loved his work so much. And though he is speaking here as an apostle, and his example is not to be unconditionally transferred to us, yet I think that the motives which actuated his conduct are capable of unconditional application to ourselves.
There are three things here. There is the obligation of speech, there is the penalty of silence, and there is the glad obedience which transcends obligation.
I. First, mark the obligation of speech.
No doubt the Apostle had, in a special sense, a ‘necessity laid upon’ him, which was first laid upon him on that road to Damascus, and repeated many a time in his life. But though he differs from us in the direct supernatural commission which was given to him, in the width of the sphere in which he had to work, and in the splendour of the gifts which were entrusted to his stewardship, he does not differ from us in the reality of the obligation which was laid upon him. Every Christian man is as truly bound as was Paul to preach the Gospel. The commission does not depend upon apostolic dignity. Jesus Christ, when He said, ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature,’ was not speaking to the eleven, but to all generations of His Church. And whilst there are many other motives on which we may rest the Christian duty of propagating the Christian faith, I think that we shall be all the better if we bottom it upon this, the distinct and definite commandment of Jesus Christ, the grip of which encloses all who for themselves have found that the Lord is gracious.
For that commandment is permanent. It is exactly contemporaneous with the duration of the promise which is appended to it, and whosoever suns himself in the light of the latter is bound by the precept of the former. ‘Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end of the world,’ defines the duration of the promise, and it defines also the duration of the duty. Nay, even the promise is made conditional upon the discharge of the duty enjoined. For it is to the Church ‘going into all the world, and preaching the Gospel to every creature,’ that the promise of an abiding presence is made.
Let us remember, too, that, just because this commission is given to the whole Church, it is binding on every individual member of the Church. There is a very common fallacy, not confined to this subject, but extending over the whole field of Christian duty, by which things that are obligatory on the community are shuffled off the shoulders of the individual. But we have to remember that the whole Church is nothing more than the sum total of all its members, and that nothing is incumbent upon it which is not in their measure incumbent upon each of them. Whatsoever Christ says to all, He says to each, and the community has no duties which you and I have not.
Of course, there are diversities of forms of obedience to this commandment; of course, the restrictions of locality and the other obligations of life, come in to modify it; and it is not every man’s duty to wander over the whole world doing this work. But the direct work of communicating to others who know it not the sweetness and the power of Jesus Christ belongs to every Christian man. You cannot buy yourselves out of the ranks, as they used to be able to do out of the militia, by paying for a substitute. Both forms of service are obligatory upon each of us. We all, if we know anything of Christ and His love and His power, are bound, by the fact that we do know it, to tell it to those whom we can reach. You have all got congregations if you would look for them. There is not a Christian man or woman in this world who has not somebody that he or she can speak to more efficiently than anybody else can. You have your friends, your relations, the people with whom you are brought into daily contact, if you have no wider congregations. You cannot all stand up and preach in the sense in which I do so. But this is not the meaning of the word in the New Testament. It does not imply a pulpit, nor a set discourse, nor a gathered multitude; it simply implies a herald’s task of proclaiming. Everybody who has found Jesus Christ can say, ‘I have found the Messiah,’ and everybody who knows Him can say, ‘Come and hear, and I will tell what the Lord hath done for my soul.’ Since you can do it you are bound to do it; and if you are one of ‘the dumb dogs, lying down and loving to slumber,’ of whom there are such crowds paralysing the energies and weakening the witness of every Church upon earth, then you are criminally and suicidally oblivious of an obligation which is a joy and a privilege as much as a duty.
Oh, brethren! I do want to lay on the consciences of all you Christian people this, that nothing can absolve you from the obligation of personal, direct speech to some one of Christ and His salvation. Unless you can say, ‘I have not refrained my lips, O Lord! Thou knowest,’ there frowns over against you an unfulfilled duty, the neglect of which is laming your spiritual activity, and drying up the sources of your spiritual strength.
But, then, besides this direct effort, there are the other indirect methods in which this commandment can be discharged, by sympathy and help of all sorts, about which I need say no more here.
Jesus Christ’s ideal of His Church was an active propaganda, an army in which there were no non-combatants, even although some of the combatants might be detailed to remain in the camp and look after the stuff, and others of them might be in the forefront of the battle. But is that ideal ever fulfilled in any of our churches? How many amongst us there are who do absolutely nothing in the shape of Christian work! Some of us seem to think that the voluntary principle on which our Nonconformist churches are largely organised means, ‘I do not need to do anything unless I like. Inclination is the guide of duty, and if I do not care to take any active part in the work of our church, nobody has anything to say.’ No man can force me, but if Jesus Christ says to me, ‘Go!’ and I say, ‘I had rather not,’ Jesus Christ and I have to settle accounts between us. The less men control, the more stringent ought to be the control of Christ. And if the principle of Christian obedience is a willing heart, then the duty of a Christian is to see that the heart is willing.
A stringent obligation, not to be shuffled off by any of the excuses that we make, is laid upon us all. It makes very short work of a number of excuses. There is a great deal in the tone of this generation which tends to chill the missionary spirit. We know more about the heathen world, and familiarity diminishes horror. We have taken up, many of us, milder and more merciful ideas about the condition of those who die without knowing the name of Jesus Christ. We have taken to the study of comparative religion as a science, forgetting sometimes that the thing that we are studying as a science is spreading a dark cloud of ignorance and apathy over millions of men. And all these reasons somewhat sap the strength and cool the fervour of a good many Christian people nowadays. Jesus Christ’s commandment remains just as it was.
Then some of us say, ‘I prefer working at home!’ Well, if you are doing all that you can there, and really are enthusiastically devoted to one phase of Christian service, the great principle of division of labour comes in to warrant your not entering upon other fields which others cultivate. But unless you are thus casting all your energies into the work which you say that you prefer, there is no reason in it why you should do nothing in the other direction. Jesus Christ still says, ‘Go ye into all the world.’
Then some of you say, ‘Well, I do not much believe in your missionary societies. There is a great deal of waste of money about them. A number of things there are that one does not approve of. I have heard stories about missionaries being very idle, very luxurious, and taking too much pay, and doing too little work.’ Well, be it so! Very probably it is partly true; though I do not know that the people whose testimony is so willingly accepted, to the detriment of our brethren in foreign lands, are precisely the kind of people that should talk much about self-sacrifice and luxurious living, or whose estimate of Christian work is to be relied upon. I fancy many of them, if they walked about the streets of an English town, would have a somewhat similar report to give, as they have when they walk about the streets of an Indian one. But be that as it may, does that indictment draw a wet sponge across the commandment of Jesus Christ? or can you chisel out of the stones of Sinai one of the words written there, by reason of the imperfections of those who are seeking to obey them? Surely not! Christ still says, ‘Go ye into all the world!’
I sometimes venture to think that the day will come when the condition of being received into, and retained in, the communion of a Christian church will be obedience to that commandment. Why, even bees have the sense at a given time of the year to turn the drones out of the hives, and sting them to death. I do not recommend the last part of the process, but I am not sure but that it would be a benefit to us all, both to those ejected and to those retained, that we should get rid of that added weight that clogs every organised community in this and other lands-the dead weight of idlers who say that they are Christ’s disciples. Whether it is a condition of church membership or not, sure I am that it is a condition of fellowship with Jesus Christ, and a condition, therefore, of health in the Christian life, that it should be a life of active obedience to this plain, imperative, permanent, and universal command.
II. Secondly, a word as to the penalty of silence.
‘Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.’ I suppose Paul is thinking mainly of a future issue, but not exclusively of that. At all events, let me point you, in a word or two, to the plain penalties of silence here, and to the awful penalties of silence hereafter.
‘Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.’ If you are a dumb and idle professor of Christ’s truth, depend upon it that your dumb idleness will rob you of much communion with Jesus Christ. There are many Christians who would be ever so much happier, more joyous, and more assured Christians if they would go and talk about Christ to other people. Because they have locked up God’s word in their hearts it melts away unknown, and they lose more than they suspect of the sweetness and buoyancy and assured confidence that might mark them, for no other reason than because they seek to keep their morsel to themselves. Like that mist that lies white and dull over the ground on a winter’s morning, which will be blown away with the least puff of fresh air, there lie doleful dampnesses, in their sooty folds, over many a Christian heart, shutting out the sun from the earth, and a little whiff of wholesome activity in Christ’s cause would clear them all away, and the sun would shine down upon men again. If you want to be a happy Christian, work for Jesus Christ. I do not lay that down as a specific by itself. There are other things to be taken in conjunction with it, but yet it remains true that the woe of a languid Christianity attaches to the men who, being professing Christians, are silent when they should speak, and idle when they should work.
There is, further, the woe of the loss of sympathies, and the gain of all the discomforts and miseries of a self-absorbed life. And there is, further, the woe of the loss of one of the best ways of confirming one’s own faith in the truth-viz. that of seeking to impart it to others. If you want to learn a thing, teach it. If you want to grasp the principles of any science, try to explain it to somebody who does not understand it. If you want to know where, in these days of jangling and controversy, the true, vital centre of the Gospel is, and what is the essential part of the revelation of God, go and tell sinful men about Jesus Christ who died for them; and you will find out that it is the Cross, and Him who died thereon, as dying for the world, that is the power which can move men’s hearts. And so you will cleave with a closer grasp, in days of difficulty and unsettlement, to that which is able to bring light into darkness and to harmonise the discord of a troubled and sinful soul. And, further, there is the woe of having none that can look to you and say, ‘I owe myself to thee.’ Oh, brethren! there is no greater joy accessible to a man than that of feeling that through his poor words Christ has entered into a brother’s heart. And you are throwing away all this because you shut your mouths and neglect the plain commandment of your Lord.
Ay! but that is not all. There is a future to be taken into account, and I think that Christian people do far too little realise the solemn truth that it is not all the same then whether a man has kept his Master’s commandments or neglected them. I believe that whilst a very imperfect faith saves a man, there is such a thing as being ‘saved, yet so as through fire,’ and that there is such a thing as having ‘an abundant entrance ministered unto us into the everlasting kingdom.’ He whose life has been very slightly influenced by Christian principle, and who has neglected plain, imperative duties, will not stand on the same level of blessedness as the man who has more completely yielded himself in life to the constraining power of Christ’s love, and has sought to keep all His commandments.
Heaven is not a dead level. Every man there will receive as much blessedness as he is capable of, but capacities will vary, and the principal factor in determining the capacity, which capacity determines the blessedness, will be the thoroughness of obedience to all the ordinances of Christ in the course of the life upon earth. So, though we know, and therefore dare say, little about that future, I do beseech you to take this to heart, that he who there can stand before God, and say, ‘Behold! I and the children whom God hath given me’ will wear a crown brighter than the starless ones of those who saved themselves, and have brought none with them.
‘Some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship, they all came safe to land.’ But the place where they stand depends on their Christian life, and of that Christian life one main element is obedience to the commandment which makes them the apostles and missionaries of their Lord.
III. Lastly, note the glad obedience which transcends the limits of obligation.
‘If I do this thing willingly I have a reward.’ Paul desired to bring a little more than was required, in token of his love to his Master, and of his thankful acceptance of the obligation. The artist who loves his work will put more work into his picture than is absolutely needed, and will linger over it, lavishing diligence and care upon it, because he is in love with his task. The servant who seeks to do as little as he can scrape through with without rebuke is actuated by no high motives. The trader who barely puts as much into the scale as will balance the weight in the other is grudging in his dealings; but he who, with liberal hand, gives ‘shaken down, pressed together, and running over’ measure, gives because he delights in the giving.
And so it is in the Christian life. There are many of us whose question seems to be, ‘How little can I get off with? how much can I retain?’-many of us whose effort is to find out how much of the world is consistent with the profession of Christianity, and to find the minimum of effort, of love, of service, of gifts which may free us from obligation.
And what does that mean? It means that we are slaves. It means that if we durst we would give nothing, and do nothing. And what does that mean? It means that we do not care for the Lord, and have no joy in our work. And what does that mean? It means that our work deserves no praise, and will get no reward. If we love Christ we shall be anxious, if it were possible, to do more than He commands us, in token of our loyalty to the King, and of our delight in the service. Of course, in the highest view, nothing can be more than necessary. Of course He has the right to all our work; but yet there are heights of Christian consecration and self-sacrifice which a man will not be blamed if he has not climbed, and will be praised if he has. What we want, if I might venture to say so, is extravagance of service. Judas may say, ‘To what purpose is this waste?’ but Jesus will say, He ‘hath wrought a good work on Me,’ and the fragrance of the ointment will smell sweet through the centuries.
So, dear brethren, the upshot of the whole thing is, Do not let us do our Christian work reluctantly, else it is only slave’s work, and there is no blessing in it, and no reward will come to us from it. Do not let us ask, ‘How little may I do?’ but ‘How much can I do?’ Thus, asking, we shall not offer as burnt offering to the Lord that which doth cost us nothing. On His part He has given the commandment as a sign of His love. The stewardship is a token that He trusts us, the duty is an honour, the burden is a grace. On our parts let us seek for the joy of service which is not contented with the bare amount of the tribute that is demanded, but gives something over, if it were possible, because of our love to Him. They who thus give to Jesus Christ their all of love and effort and service will receive it all back a hundredfold, for the Master is not going to be in debt to any of His servants, and He says to them all, ‘I will repay it, howbeit I say not unto thee how thou owest unto Me even thine own self besides.’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
J. W. McGarvey 1914 · Public Domain On vv7–23 What soldier ever serveth at his own charges? who…
What soldier ever serveth at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [In the East, vine-dressers and shepherds are still thus paid in kind. Work without wages would foster rascality, and it is therefore an unhealthy principle to use in church matters. Second argument: The law of Moses allowed wages for work.]
J. W. McGarvey (with Philip Y. Pendleton), Commentaries on the New Testament (The Fourfold Gospel, 1914; Acts; and the epistles) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On vv11, 21, 22 i.e. things for the body.
carnel
i.e. things for the body.
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On vv8, 13, 16, 19 The Scriptural proof and its application:
The Scriptural proof and its application:
v. 8. Say I these things as a man? Or saith not the Law the same also?
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v. 9. For it is written in the Law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treads out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen?
v. 10. Or saith He it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written, that he that plows should plow in hope, and that he that threshes in hope should be partaker of his hope.
v. 11. If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if we shall reap your carnal things?
v. 12. If others be partakers of this power over you, are not we rather? Nevertheless we have not used this power, but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the Gospel of Christ.
The apostle by a Scripture-passage here substantiates the principle that the servants of the Lord have a right to expect the material support of their congregations. For he expressly says that he is not arguing the matter as any man might do, in accordance with general human practice, and he adduces a positive divine ordinance. He thus obviates the argument that he is taking examples from daily life to support his claim for the support of pastors. It is written, and therefore stands for all times, in the Law of Moses, in the book which bore the name of Moses, Deu 25:4: Thou shalt not muzzle a threshing ox. See 1Ti 5:18. In the Old Testament text this is one of the passages enjoining humane treatment of animals. Threshing was usually carried on either by having the oxen tread out the kernels from the hulls, Mic 4:12-13, or by hitching them to a heavy sledge which they dragged over the threshing-floor, 2Sa 24:22. The rule prohibited the muzzling of the oxen during this work, and they were thus left free to pick up stalks of grain whenever they became hungry. Paul defends his application of the Old Testament passage to the point in question by asking: Is it for oxen that God is concerned, or does He not by all means say it for our sakes? "It is a proverbial saying, which Paul explains at some length, so that he says: Does God care for the oxen? As though he would say: Though God takes care of the oxen, still He does not have this written for the sake of the oxen, since they cannot read; this is the meaning of Paul: This verse is to be understood not only of the oxen, but of workers in general that they should live of their work. " So Paul is right in making the application: For it is written for our sakes, on our account, namely, that it is necessary for the plower to plow in hope, and that the thresher do his work in the hope of partaking. Both plowing and threshing is laborious work, and therefore the picture fits into the context well; it exhibits typically the labors of Christian teachers in the language of the statute and under the forms of farm labor. The expectation of partaking of the fruit is due to the laborer, beast or man, and therefore the application is obvious. The hope of him that does his plowing and threshing in the spiritual world is indeed directed forward to a spiritual fruit, Joh 4:36, but since he employs the work of his body, of his physical life, in his calling, he has a right to expect, according to the rule of God, that the faith which follows preaching will also be active in love, and thus the physical needs of spiritual workers will be taken care of in the proper manner.
This deduction the apostle frankly makes: If we unto you sowed spiritual things, is it a great thing, is it too much, that we reap your carnal things? This question strikes the conceit of such Christians as place a high value upon the gifts which they communicate to their pastors, since they themselves place a low valuation upon that which they have received from them. For all the spiritual things that are to be found in the midst of a congregation: the gifts of the Spirit, faith, love, hope, knowledge, zeal, fervency in prayer, etc. , are all the fruit of the Gospel as it is sown by the teaching of the pastor, publicly and privately. Surely the Christian that realizes even faintly the inestimable value of these gifts will not hesitate about making at least an attempt to repay the spiritual blessings by offering the fruit of his hands, since to make a full return is impossible. Luther says: "I do not like to explain such texts as are on our side, as servants of the Word. It may seem, when such texts are properly expounded before the people, as if it were on account of greed. But it is necessary that the people be instructed in order that they may know what kind of honor and support they owe their teachers under obligation from God."
Paul now sets forth his own case in a still stronger light by comparing himself with other teachers who made use of the support of the congregations: If others be partakers of this power, make use of their right over you, why not we rather? Paul had a better claim to share in their domain, in a way to exercise dominion over them, as the first teacher of the Corinthian congregation, since he was the man who broke the ground and did the planting. But, he says, we did not make use of this right, not because he was too proud or because he did not dare, but because he wanted to bear everything in silence, he chose to endure without complaining, in order that he might not offer a hindrance to the Gospel of Christ. In the Gentile world the acceptance of pay by a wandering teacher was explained as avarice, a fact which naturally harmed the cause. Besides, Paul did not want to be tied to any certain congregation, since his call included the care of all the congregations founded by him and the establishing of others as occasion offered. Here was a fine proof of Paul’s unselfishness, on account of which he even waived a right which was in his hands, lest he be misunderstood and the preaching of the Gospel suffer in consequence.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?
Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?
Paul uses a question to emphasize that he knows the Corinthians agree with what he is saying. AT: "We all know that no soldier has to buy his own supplies." or "We all know that every soldier receives his supplies from the government." (See: Rhetorical Question)
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Who plants a vineyard and does not eat its fruit?
Paul uses a question to emphasize that he knows the Corinthians agree with what he is saying. AT: "We all know that the one who plants a vineyard will always eat its fruit." or "We all know that no one expects someone who plants a vineyard not to eat its fruits." (See: Rhetorical Question)
Or who tends a flock and does not drink milk from it?
Paul uses a question to emphasize that he knows the Corinthians agree with what he is saying. AT: "We all know that those who tend flocks get their drink from the flocks." (See: Rhetorical Question)
Do I say these things based on human authority?
Paul is shaming the Corinthians. AT: "You seem to think that I am saying these things based on merely human authority." (See: Rhetorical Question)
Does not the law also say this?
Paul is shaming the Corinthians. AT: "You act as if you do not know that this is what is written in the law." (See: Rhetorical Question)
translationWords
servant
vineyard
fruit
flocks
authority
law, laws
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19 9:7-10 These examples support Paul’s point that he and…
9:7-10 These examples support Paul’s point that he and other Christian workers had a right to be supported by those they served.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.