Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. We welcome all of our new listeners, and to those of you who have been listening for quite a while, there are no words that express our gratitude and appreciation. In this chapter, chapter 9, part 2, I thought I’d throw out a single word, and that word: chameleon. Listen closely. 1 Corinthians 9, part 2. Spiritual flexibility.

I’ve been noticing, well actually for a lot of years now, that I’m not nearly as flexible as I used to be. Imagine that. When I was a kid, even into my 20s, I loved sports. I wasn’t great at any of them. I mean, there were no pro scouts at my high school games, but I was pretty good at most, and I loved the competition. Then I grew up and got a real job.

A few years later, got married. Then children started mysteriously arriving, and lots of adult obligations started controlling my life. Soon, all of those physical activities and sports I used to be into got gradually squeezed out of my life. But as my kids started getting older, I have four, all of them developed interests in sports: gymnastics, soccer, football, skiing. And as they developed some skills in these sports, all of a sudden, I began feeling the need to show them just how athletic I really was. But during my long layoff, you could say, from physical activities, something had happened, and you know what I mean.

I first realized this when my oldest was eight or ten, and she would come home from gymnastics and show me cartwheels and hand springs she was learning, and she’d say, Can you do this, Dad? Of course I can. But when I tried, I found that things just didn’t bend or flex like they used to. It only got worse with each new kid taking up a sport and challenging me to play them. And of course, I’m a slow learner. When one challenged me to go skiing, I said, Of course I can.

And when we got to the slopes, Who needs lessons? That was just before breaking my leg badly when I crashed coming down the very first mountainside. Another time, when I got chided into a backyard soccer game, while trying to prove I could still outrun them, I stepped in a depression in the yard, got my feet tangled up, went down very hard on my shoulder and broke my collarbone. By the time my youngest was a teenager and tried to get me to do something physical, like wanted me to wrestle him or something, I had learned to stop and think about things. Is it really worth it to spend a couple weeks in pain trying to prove I still have it to a 15-year-old? Flexibility.

It’s something we start to lose usually in our early 30s as the elasticity in our joints and muscles starts to fossilize. That’s why professional football players’ careers are so short. As aggravating as that is, you know I’m not here to try to sell you on an all-natural supplement that promises to make you feel like you’re 25 again. I’m drawing an analogy to a kind of flexibility that is far more important, something let’s call spiritual flexibility. By spiritual flexibility, I mean your willingness and ability to bend and adapt as a person. How flexible do you think you are as a person, not as a physical animal made up of bones and ligaments and joints, but as a spiritual being made up of mind, will, and emotions.

Actually, these two things are not unrelated. As we get older, not only are we physically losing flexibility, but usually are at the same time getting more regimented in our lives too, getting more set in our ways, as we say. We develop routines, predictable patterns. Our lives are lived out in days and weeks and years in these patterns with a set of comfortable relationships, comfortable activities, and so on. And we really don’t like those things to be intruded upon too much. The late Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer argued in his book, How Shall We Then Live?

that one of the two most cherished values in Western culture is what he called personal peace, by which he meant being able to live within your own comfortably chosen confines without anybody bothering you. Does that sound familiar? If that describes you, according to the terms we are using now, you’ve got some advancing spiritual arthritis, and it’s likely you’ve become more and more inflexible as a person spiritually. So what? you’re probably thinking. Why would that matter?

Well, it matters if you are a Christian and want your life to count for Christ, especially if you want to be used by God to influence people around you for the gospel. I think most of us would say there’s nothing more important to God than that, right? Than winning souls, as we call it, or being an effective witness. But here’s the truth. It’s how flexible we are, how adaptable we are willing to be as people that will largely decide how effective we will be at influencing other people for Christ and the gospel. And that’s my big idea today.

It’s how flexible we are spiritually that will largely determine how effective we could be at influencing others for Christ and the gospel. Let me tell you why I believe that. I spent quite a bit of time studying the Apostle Paul and his life. I was actually named after him by my parents, and he’s always been a fascinating character for me, like an ideal. And as far as I can tell, he was the most productive Christian that’s ever lived. He had more spiritual children, people he led to Christ, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and was responsible for planting more churches and spiritually influenced his world more than any other individual who has ever lived.

There’s never been a more productive Christian, I don’t think. And I wanted to understand why and how. Just what made Paul so incredibly effective? From my time searching for answers to that, I found several, but the concept I’m going to share now with you is probably the most important among them. You know, it’s not enough to say the Apostle Paul was spiritually flexible. That would be inadequate.

He was more like a spiritual contortionist. Paul would bend any way but the wrong way. He would become anything he needed to become. He would adjust to any situation and adapt to any audience. He did whatever was necessary to share the gospel effectively where he found himself. And realize this: his years of incredible spiritual productiveness were not in his twenties, thirties, forties, but rather in his forties, fifties, sixties.

So how old you are, whether you can still do a hand spring, has no bearing on how effective you can be at sharing your faith in Christ. The Apostle Paul is proof of that. So listen to this key section from 1 Corinthians chapter 9, in which he reveals his secret. This is verses 19 through 23. Though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew in order to win Jews.

To those under the law I became as one under the law, though not being myself under the law, but that I might win those under the law. To those outside of the law I became as one outside the law, not being outside the law of God, but still under the law of Christ, but that I might win those who are outside of the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people that by all means I might save some of them. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings. You know, in that passage, Paul makes three statements that give me some insight into his spiritual flexibility, and these are concrete ideas that we can implement.

Any Christian who wants to be more effective at influencing people for Christ can apply these to be more effective. Looking first at verses 20 to 22, there’s a word that he uses there five times, and the word is became or become. Remember, the Apostle Paul’s travels took him to all kinds of different places, into different cultures, among different kinds of people. He traveled mostly on foot between 9,000 and 10,000 miles during his ministry years, carrying the gospel to new places. So what he is describing in those verses was his willingness to adapt himself to the people in those places he was trying to reach. He learned what was important to them, and it became important to him.

He figured out what made them comfortable, and he behaved in that way around them. He even ate their terrible unkosher foods, and he smiled while doing it. Too often Christians do the exact opposite. We convey the attitude, maybe without even realizing it, that if people want to be accepted by us, they must first become like us. Consequently, only people who are pretty much like us already ever feel comfortable around us or would ever want to come to our church, or at least would ever come back a second time. Paul, in contrast, was willing to adapt to them, to the people he was trying to win to Christ.

He became who he needed to be to connect with them. Now, you and I are probably not going to be traveling 10,000 miles, walking from here to there in different cultures and societies, but can we do what Paul did where we are? I think we can. Let me explain with a personal story, because this was the result of when I first understood and implemented this principle myself. I heard a while back from a guy I met in the first church I pastored in western Pennsylvania. He tracked me down on Facebook.

His wife was a member of that church, but at the time he was not a Christian, and she was requesting prayer for him on a regular basis. They lived several houses up the street from me in a tiny mill town on the Kiskiminetas River. But I had never had any personal interaction with this fellow beyond, Hi, how are you? at the post office or at the store. I will never forget the first time we did personally communicate. It was at a funeral service for one of his wife’s relatives where I’d been asked to speak.

After the service, when everyone was leaving, stopping by to tell me my message was an encouragement to them or whatever, Joe sort of held back. And when the place had more or less emptied out, he approached me to tell me that all the things I had just said about Christ and about hope and about resurrection and so on were, in his opinion, a lot of baloney. Actually, baloney was not the word he used, but it did start with a B. He made it clear he thought it was just a lot of wishful thinking for weak people who couldn’t deal with reality. I quickly picked up on the fact that Joe was not too interested in Christianity, and on the surface, we had very little in common. Nevertheless, a few days later, I stopped by to see him and his wife, not to talk to him about Jesus.

He already told me he was not interested in that, but to find out what he was interested in. And I found out in a hurry. Joe was more than a little interested in hunting. That day at his house, he showed me his hunting pictures, hunting rifles and shotguns, hunting catalogs, his hunting dogs penned up in the backyard. Our whole conversation was about hunting, and I showed an interest in that too because I was very interested, not in hunting, but I was interested in him. I guess I showed enough interest that he invited me to go hunting with him.

I said, Sure, when? Over that fall and winter, we hunted all the game birds that lived in the fields and forests of western Pennsylvania. We followed his dogs through the cornfields, hunting ringnecks. Through the forest, hunting grouse, woodcock. Woodcock, I remember those little things. The challenge was not so much shooting them, but finding them in the leaves after you did.

During that time, you could say, I became a hunter. Did you hear the key word? I became. I don’t remember anything about what I brought home from those outings, probably not very much. But I do remember that once I had made friends with John through hunting, hanging out with him, and once he considered me a friend, we had some better conversations about what I believed and why I believed it. And I was able to get beyond some of his defensiveness.

And I remember that at a point of crisis in his life, I was the person he turned to. And I was able to ultimately lead him to faith in Christ and see his family united in faith. I was really glad to hear from him after all these years because I learned that he was still following Christ. He was sharing his faith with others. That’s something from that era of my life that mattered, and it happened because I was willing to become, in that case, become a hunter for a while. Do you see a little more clearly now what I mean by spiritual flexibility?

If you’re willing to become, like the Apostle Paul was willing to become all things to all men, as he put it, you can build a bridge into most anyone’s life that you know. People who need to understand about Christ, they may not be interested in the gospel at this point, but if you show an interest in them, in time you’ll get an opportunity to share with them what interests you. The big question is, how flexible are you willing to be in order to reach them? Let me point out a second idea that ruled the Apostle Paul’s thinking that made him so effective at reaching people for the gospel. It’s in verse 19 here. The Apostle Paul is a free man, both politically and spiritually.

He valued and defended his freedom. Early in chapter 9, he’s making the case that although it’s good and right to pay those who spiritually minister to you, like church leaders, teachers, nevertheless, he chose not to take financial support when he was in Corinth, when he was planting the church there, because he did not want to feel beholden to anyone. He preferred to remain free, free to go anywhere and at any time God led him. With all that freedom, what do you think Paul chose to do? What does he say in verse 19? He says, Though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them.

That’s really an insightful statement. Paul is revealing to us his self-concept, how he thought of himself. What exactly is a servant? Well, it’s someone whose life revolves around serving others, meeting others’ needs, right? Paul regarded himself as a servant of Christ and of the people Christ died for. So, he dedicated his life to finding ways to advance Christ’s interests and meet lost people’s needs.

If we claim to be Christians, a fair question is, what is our self-concept? Do we see ourselves as servants? When we see ourselves as servants of Christ, like Paul did, and are looking for opportunities to meet needs in the people around us in their lives, you know what? There is no limit on how God can use us, as the Apostle Paul proved. Tell me, do the unbelievers around you have any needs? Of course they do.

And the better you get to know them, the deeper the needs you’ll discover. That widow down the street from you needs friendship and companionship. The kid across the street whose dad is rarely around needs somebody to play catch with. That single mom you work with probably needs somebody to fix things from time to time or keep a check on her car. Maybe she can’t afford to get those things done. The busy guy down the road who’s always flying past your house too fast can’t find time to keep his grass mowed.

The harried young couple you met at the school open house haven’t had a night out with just the two of them in months. They could use a babysitter they could trust. Me? Do that? Does the suggestion strike you as odd? If so, why?

Is it because most of us are not spiritually flexible and don’t see ourselves as servants of Christ’s interests? Hmm. You see, the servant of Christ whose goal it is to win more people, as Paul puts it, sees the guy’s grass that always needs cut and cuts it. Sees the fatherless boy and becomes his mentor and coach. Sees the overworked young couple and becomes their babysitter. Sees the lonely widow and becomes her friend.

It gets back to flexibility, doesn’t it? Every person without Christ you know has needs, and if you’re willing to become their servant for Jesus’ sake, chances are very good that you will down that road earn an opportunity to address their deeper needs, which are, whether they realize it or not, to know Christ as their Savior and Lord. I am very excited as a teacher to see Christians grasp and implement biblical principles. I remember after teaching on this very subject one time at another church where I was a pastor, some women in that congregation learned about a young mom who was pregnant with twins and was having some complications. Her doctor had pretty much confined her to bed rest because there was some danger that the babies might be born too prematurely. Her husband was working a couple jobs.

They had another older child to contend with too. They needed help, especially with meals. I don’t remember all the details, but I think it was her mother-in-law who had visited our church and mentioned to someone there about their situation. In any event, several women decided to respond to that need and organized a schedule to have meals taken over to that young family on an ongoing basis till they were past this crisis. A few times a week, a different woman from our church went over, took dinner, and helped out around the house a little bit. The first time it happened, I learned later, Kay called her mother-in-law and said, Hey, these people from that church you told me about were over at our house and brought dinner for us, and they said they’re going to keep bringing dinner as long as we need it.

Her mother-in-law told me that Kay was crying on the phone when she told her about this. She said, My best friends have not even done anything for me like that. Well, by and by, the twins were born safely, and you know what? The very first Sunday Kay was home from the hospital, she and her husband came to check out this church and to thank these people who had been interested in them enough to serve them. I don’t remember what my message was about that day, but that Sunday. Kay opened her heart to Christ and accepted Him as her Savior, a decision that not just affected her but soon her whole family.

Why did that happen? Because some women were willing to become her servants for a while. There is no more effective means of entering people’s lives than a willingness to meet their real needs without strings attached, simply because you care about them, like Jesus cared about the people we see Him crossing paths with in the Gospels over and over. Let me quickly discuss a third statement Paul makes in that paragraph that jumps off the page to me. It’s at verse 23. After he discusses his willingness to become whatever he needs to reach more people for Christ and to become a servant in the interest of advancing the gospel, he makes an even more comprehensive statement.

In fact, he says, Everything I do, I do for the sake of the gospel. Everything I do. What do you suppose he meant by that? We compartmentalize ourselves and compartmentalize our lives. Paul says, Everything I do, I do for the sake of the gospel. I think what he meant was that his concern to win people to Christ was so central to his life that no matter what else he was having to do, he was going to try to interweave that.

Winning people to faith in Christ was always somehow interwoven. So, let’s say you are going golfing on Monday. Is it possible to go golfing for the sake of the gospel? Of course it is. You invite someone to come along with you who you’ve been praying for and want to deepen your relationship with. Golfing together might be the bridge that connects you to their life.

And will enable you to build a relationship with them where they will open up to you about deeper needs. But you’re thinking, I always play golf with my buddies, Ralph, Jerry, Ed. Don’t be inflexible. Invite the guy instead you know who’s having a marital problem or who recently got an unsettling medical diagnosis. He probably needs someone to talk to and may really respond when he realizes you care. Can you go shopping for the sake of the gospel?

Of course you can. Maybe your husband will feel better about you spending the grocery money on new shoes when he realizes you invited a woman along who you met recently to see if you could befriend her for the sake of the gospel. So you hit a couple stores, and then you do lunch on you, of course, and you see where the conversation goes. Paul said, Everything I do, I do for the sake of the gospel. It was the higher purpose he integrated into everything else, and it’s part of the secret why he was so amazingly productive for Jesus. Okay, let’s be honest.

If we say that we believe heaven and hell are real, real destinations at the end of people’s lives, and that we care about the souls of the people around us, don’t most of us need to break out of the comfortable but spiritually fruitless routines we have let take over our lives and more intentionally live for the sake of the gospel? This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. What a great insight and directive on how to live our lives to share the gospel. Relationships are such a key part of our lives. Where there’s a relationship, there’s conversation rather than a shouting match.

And Paul did everything he could to establish those relationships that would give him the ability to have influence in the lives of those around him and introduce the good news of the gospel. In our world today, we value track records and results. And well, the Apostle Paul had the best track record and results around. And he’s even given us the how-to manual. Doesn’t it make sense to emulate what he did? From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.