This sermon from 1 Corinthians 7 emphasizes remaining in the life circumstances God called you in, serving faithfully and finding contentment in your current status, whether married, unmarried, circumcised, uncircumcised, free, or enslaved.
Transcript
If you would open your Bible to *1 Corinthians 7*, we are going to continue our study in this passage. We’re going to begin with verse 17 and we will read down through verse 24. But before I do that, I just want to remind you of the things we talked about last week. The issue that Paul was raising had to do with guidelines for marriage. He was talking first of all about guidelines to Christians, is there ever a situation where a Christian should divorce another? After that, he addressed the question of Christians married to unbelievers. First of all, those who are married to unbelievers who want to stay married, who are living in peace with them. As he dealt with that issue, one of the things he applied there was that if you are in a situation where you have come to faith but your spouse has not come to faith, then in that situation, as long as you could live peaceably together and your spouse is willing to live with you, you were to stay in that condition.
So that is where we left off. Now he’s taking that and I think he’s underscoring that idea in a broader, more generalized principle that applies to many areas of life.
So beginning in verse 17, we will begin reading from God’s Word.
Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches. Was any man called when he was already circumcised? He’s not to become uncircumcised. Has anyone been called in uncircumcision? He’s not to be circumcised. Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but what matters is the keeping of the commandments of God. Each man must remain in that condition in which he was called. Were you called while a slave? Do not worry about it, but if you are able also to become free, rather do that. For he who was called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord’s freedman. Likewise, he who was called while free is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. Brethren, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which he was called.
Let’s look to the Lord and ask for His blessing on His Word.
Father, we are grateful for Your guidance from Your apostle that You have inspired him and given us this word of application that applies to many areas of our life, wonderful guidance for the Christian believer and encouragement for living a right life before You. We ask, Father, as we explore this passage together today that You would guide us into the truth, that You would help us understand the meaning of the passage, which is evident from the passage, and also, Father, that You would make applications to us, to our own hearts, and give us wisdom so that we would counsel those around us in this way. Thank you for all of Your kindness and grace and the abundant provision You’ve given us in Your holy Word. Bless this Word now to us in Christ’s name. Amen.
Our Calling in Christ
My heading for this, and you may not see it immediately, I hope you see it eventually, my heading for this section is Christians and the eternal impact of a godly life. That is really the way I see what Paul, this principle, the apostle repeats three times and gives a couple of illustrations. He says it three times in 1 Corinthians 7:17: “Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk. And so I direct in all the churches.”
We should pursue peace, be content in the circumstances and the gifts that God has given us. He’s talking about two things that really, when I first started studying this this week, two things stood out that struck me from verse 17. The first one is that phrase “each one,” because “each one” is emphasized twice in that verse. He pushed that phrase first and made it prominent.
That is an interesting thing in itself, because as you read the New Testament, as you talk about the Christian life, as you talk about our being saved, in every aspect of the Christian life, it is almost always, in every place, a corporate idea. God saves us to the body of Christ. He saves us into the fellowship of the body. That is the norm. Even though it is hard for us as Americans living the way we have been brought up, emphasizing the individual. It’s hard for us to see that. We tend to read every passage as if it applies to us individually, and the responsibility and connection is between God and us himself, like saying, “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” emphasizing that individuality.
But God calls us. He saves us to himself and to his people. You see that even in that next phrase, that word “calling.” The word for “church,” which means assembly, is literally a “called-out body,” a called-out body of believers. When we receive a calling from God, God calling us to himself, we hear the salvation, the words of salvation, the gospel, and we put our trust in Christ, and we are called. We are called into the body of Christ. We are called to a relationship with Christ, but it’s a corporate relationship. We’re called to be part of the family of God. So God saves us into a community. The reason that is significant is because this word is *ekklesia*, *ekkaleo*, *ekklesa*, *ekklesa*, church, *ekkaleo*, having been called. The idea here is called from God to something.
It’s interesting that in light of that, in light of the norm, he is singling out to give us advice individually. What he is saying is, at the place you are when God saves you, in the circumstances of life and in the giftedness that He gives, and I see that because the phrase is, “Only as the Lord has assigned to each one.” It is the sovereign working of God in your life up to that point. You have been given all kinds of things from the Lord, all kinds of graces. He has given you talents and abilities, and He has ordered really all kinds of circumstances in your life. When you find yourself in those circumstances, and you find yourself with certain abilities, you are in life in that situation, whatever that is, and it’s very broadly given right here. God saves you in that situation. What should you do? What changes should you make?
If you are married to an unbeliever, should you leave that unbeliever? It’s a terrible thing to be married to someone that you believe is destined to spend eternity apart from you. And yet we have this instruction from God. What changes should you make? Married to an unbeliever? Should you leave that person? If you have been divorced and remarried, and then you come to faith in Jesus Christ, should you divorce your present wife and go back to your first one?
Let’s take a different kind of application that I think is absolutely appropriate. Say that you are a truck driver. There are men and women truck drivers these days. Say you are a truck driver, and God finds you and calls you to himself. Calls you to the family of God. You start reading the Bible. You begin reading the Bible. After a while, you come to the book of *Ecclesiastes*, and it says,
Vanity of vanities. All is vanity. What advantage does a man have in all his work which he does under the sun?
And you read that book. He’s talking about cycles. You do these things over and over again. What benefit is it at all? He’s thinking, “I get up in the morning, I get in my truck. We load it up. We take this stuff someplace. Unload it. Come back. Do it again. And tomorrow morning, we start all over again. What’s the point of it? Moving all this stuff around everywhere. And one of these days, all the stuff is going to be just burnt up. Is there any benefit to it? Shouldn’t I maybe stop being a truck driver? Maybe go into the ministry? Maybe I could be an evangelist, or maybe I could be a preacher?”
He says in this text,
Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in those circumstances in which you’re called, in this way let him walk.
He is talking specifically to the Corinthian church, but he wants them to know something. He says, “This particular principle applies to all the churches. This is what I say to them all.”
Only as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each.
You know the examples that I gave you. You already know the answer to if you were married to an unbeliever, because we looked at it last week. You already know the answer, I expect, for a person who is married, divorced, and remarried. What would you do in that case? I think this principle just clearly applies. What about the truck driver? What about those circumstances? God saves you, and you are in this job. It could be any kind of a job. You could be a laborer. You could be a corporate executive. All sorts of jobs God gives us. You could be a worker in a bakery. You could be all kinds of things. Should you give up your job? And you see the work is so mundane.
Spurgeon in one of his sermons says, “God is most surely glorified in the cobbler’s stall where the godly worker as he plies his awl sings of the Savior’s love, glorified far more than in many a pre-vential stall where official religiousness performs its scanty duties.” Isn’t that true? Do you believe it? Do you believe that a person who is doing the humble work of a shoemaker can be used just as powerfully by God in keeping their job, working faithfully, as powerfully by God as a person who occupies a pulpit like this one, doing his scanty duties? He goes on to say, “The name of Jesus is glorified by the poor, unlearned carter as he drives his horse.” That’s the truck driver today. “Poor, unlearned carter as he drives his horse and blesses God or speaks to his fellow laborer by the roadside, as much as by the popular divine who throughout the country, like monarchies, thundering out the gospel.” Is that true? Is it true that God can use somebody like that just as powerfully as he uses a great evangelist, a Billy Graham, somebody who speaks powerfully? Is it true that the farmer who plows his field is doing the work of God? He plows that field, and the next year he’s got to do it again. It’s the same thing over and over. What a cycle. Is there any point to it? Does his work count for anything at all?
As I was working on this, I remembered a couple of stories. I rarely tell stories. This seems so absolutely fitting here that I thought I probably should mention it. Back in 1815, there was a young lady. She was 18 years old. She had been married and had two children. Her name was Jane LaCricia DeStaer. She was talented, she was beautiful, and she seemed to be without hope at all. She stood on the bank of a dark river in Scotland, intent on drowning herself. Her husband, John, had just been killed in a duel, and there was a terrible disgrace. She was like a social pariah as a result of that. Not only that, but he left her penniless with the two babies. So she looked into those dark waters, and she looked up from those to a field right beyond. On the other side of the field, there was a young man who was plowing the field. He took absolutely no notice of her. He didn’t know she was there. He was so intent on the work he was doing, whistling a little hymn. He occupied himself with the work, and she was amazed at the precision of the work as she looked at it. She looked at this work, row after row, perfectly laid. It was like the beauty of a painting. She thought to herself, “If God can use this man in such a way, surely he is not done with me.” She wasn’t a believer at that point, but God stirred her heart just by looking at this man’s work.
A few weeks later, she came to faith. Then she met another man, not too long after that. His name was Guinness, and she married him. She became eventually the great-great-grandmother of Os Guinness, the well-known apologist of our day. Os Guinness wrote, “If it had not been for the plowman, the tragedy of the dueling husband would have been followed by the tragedy of the duelist widow. My great-great-grandmother was unusual for several reasons, including the fact that she conscientiously prayed for her descendants down through a dozen generations. Ours is a heritage of faith, which I for one am extremely grateful for.”
Spurgeon’s comments, he continues, and he says, “Take care, dear reader, that you do not forsake the path of duty, leaving your occupation. Take care that you do not dishonor your profession while in it. Think little of yourself, but don’t think little of your callings. Every lawful trade may be sanctified by the gospel to noblest ends.” I believe that is absolutely true, faithfulness.
Here’s another illustration. You’ve probably heard it before. When you are familiar with Harry Ironside, he was a famous preacher in the early part of the 20th century, famous Bible teacher. When he was, he tells a story about when he was growing up. He, his mother, his father died when he was very young. He would help his widowed mother. As a little boy, as a boy, he would do any work that he could get. After school, and in the summers when there was a vacation, when there was a break, at any point of any type of vacation, he would work. One of the places he worked mostly, he ended up being able to work for, was for a cobbler, a shoemaker. The man was a Christian. If you walked into his shop, Ironside said, “You walked into this man’s shop, anywhere you looked in that room, you’d see scripture.” And there was always a Bible right in the front, and usually it was open. He worked for this man, and his job was to pound leather. The leather for soles, and leather for soles of a shoe was you would soak it. They would soak that in water, and after it had soaked like overnight for a long or a long period of time, they’d pull that out, and his job was to pound it with a hammer until it was completely dry. It was miserable work. He would sit there pounding it, and he hated it, doing that work, so miserable. What made it even worse is on his way to work every day, he would have to walk by another shop. This shop was, the guy that ran it was known for the horrific jokes and things that he told. And yet, his shop seemed far more productive than the one than theirs. It seemed more prosperous in that sense. As he walked by, he would notice that the man didn’t bother to pound the leather all. He would take the leather right out of the water, and he’d start nailing it to the shoe. As he hit it, the water would splash out. Finally, he wasn’t supposed to go in that shop. One day, just out of curiosity, he goes in and asks the guy, “I notice you don’t pound the leather. Why is it that you don’t pound the leather dry?” And he says, he gives him a wicked wink, he says, “Oh, they come back all the sooner that way.”
So he thought he learned something. He goes back to his employer, and he tells him what transpired. “Maybe all this pounding that I’m doing is really not necessary.” And so the man says to him, he actually opened the Bible passage. He opened to a Bible passage, and he said,
Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
He says, “I don’t make shoes for the four bits or six pence that I get for my customers. I am doing this for the glory of God. I expect to see every shoe that I’ve ever made in a big pile at the Judgment Seat of Christ. And I don’t want the Lord to say to me at that day, ‘Dan, this was a poor job. You didn’t do your best here.’ I want Him to be able to say, ‘Well done, you good and faithful servant.'” Doing your work godly, not just for the customer, not just for your employer, doing the work faithfully to the Lord is a powerful witness for Christ. And in that place, the place where you are, you can display the powerful love of Christ in countless ways. You are able to show the faithfully and testify to the wonderful grace that you have received in Christ Jesus.
God’s Purpose in Circumstances
So Paul, having said that, begins to apply this principle to really powerful issues, social issues of the day, issues that divide culture. So in verse 18, he says,
Was any man called when he was already circumcised?
That is one of the issues. Jews, circumcision was extremely important. They saw the uncircumcised, they saw Gentiles, as outside the covenant of God. Circumcision was given to Abraham as a mark of the covenant that God gave to Abraham. Part of Old Testament faithfulness was circumcising your sons when they were born. In the New Testament, that that is not continued. In fact, in a large sense, it’s not the saving thing. We are all, in every situation, all the way from the beginning of *Genesis* to *Revelation*, people are saved by exercising faith in Jesus Christ, and according to His abundant grace, we are saved.
You come into this New Testament situation where you have people in a church. Some of them come from a Jewish background, some of them come from a Gentile background, where it was exactly the opposite. People see it enlightened, as an act of enlightenment, when a Jewish youth would undergo a surgical operation so to make it look like he had never been circumcised. They thought that was a great thing for people to do. If you actually doubt that, you can find that in *1 Maccabees 1:15*, and also Josephus comments on that great thing. But Paul says,
Circumcision? Uncircumcision? It does not matter. It doesn’t matter at all.
This thing that divides cultures, that keeps Jews at this table and Gentiles at the other table, that should never, ever be an issue in the church of Jesus Christ. God calls us together where it says in *Ephesians*, He breaks down that middle wall of partition, and we all become one. There is a unity here that belongs to all of us. The matter of whether you were circumcised or not, it doesn’t matter. Don’t change it, He says. If you were born, and you were circumcised, it doesn’t matter. That is wonderful. It doesn’t mean anything. Just don’t change it. If you were uncircumcised, that doesn’t matter.
What matters, He says,
is the keeping of the commandments of God.
Do you keep the moral will of God? He tells us the same thing pretty much in *Galatians*. In *Galatians*, the argument is a bit sharper, because in *Galatians*, people were, people from a Jewish background, or from people who had been converted to Judaism in some way, were coming into the church, and they were saying that unless you are circumcised, you will not be saved. If you haven’t been circumcised, you can’t be saved. You have to be circumcised. You have to keep these things. The gospel of Jesus Christ had been compromised. If you want to read how harsh that is, just read the way he opens that book. Paul does not tolerate that compromise of the gospel. But in *Galatians*, Paul writes,
For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.
Later he says,
For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
You are born again by God. You are made a new creation. That is what saves you. You’re saved through faith and by grace, and you’re regenerated, cleansed from sin, and you become a new person. It is easy to fall into Galatianism. There are, I am departing from, I know I’m moving away from the point. There are churches that you can go to, many, many churches, that are very good, that seem very good at least. But they compromise the gospel. One of the ways that they compromise, I think, pretty clearly, is because they believe, first of all, they take the idea of circumcision, and they equate it with baptism. So it’s done with a child. That’s not necessarily the worst thing. The bad thing about that, if you go to a Presbyterian church that teaches that, is that your children may never have believer’s baptism, which is a problem. But it can get way worse than that, because there are many people who believe that if when that baby is baptized, then it is born again. If later on it also believes truth, then that baptism, that being born again, is affected. It comes to its fruition. And if not, then it’s lost again. And even later, they can be lost again. I think that is a compromise of the gospel when you teach something like that. It’s Galatianism. It compromises the gospel. There is nothing.
So this passage says, we are to keep the moral will of God. The law, when you look at the word “law” in the New Testament, it can become really complicated, because it can talk about a whole lot of different things. It can talk about the ceremonial law of Israel. It can also be talking about, sometimes it’s used simply as a metaphor, as a figure of speech, a synecdoche, for the whole Word of God. You keep His whole Word. You are obedient to His will. Sometimes it’s just talking particularly about the moral will of God. When Jesus says, when asked the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” He says,
You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the greatest commandment, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these, these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
He’s not summarizing the Mosaic Law there, because he says, “all the Law and the Prophets,” not just the Torah, but the Nevi’im. That would include the Kethuvim as well. It includes all of the Old Testament. That’s what He’s saying. He’s saying this summarizes the teaching of the Old Testament. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and you know we fall short of that, of course.
Earlier in *Ecclesiastes*, but you know the conclusion of that book, he says,
When all has been, he said, he says the conclusion, when all has been heard is, fear God, keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil.
So what’s the answer to the confusion here? The answer to the confusion is that circumcision does not matter. Neither does uncircumcision. We are to be one. We have a unity in Jesus Christ. There might be all sorts of things that divide the culture, but it should not divide the church. It should not be something in the church, whether that is racial tensions, prejudices, how much money you make. None of those things are of any consequence when it means coming together in Jesus Christ.
Contentment in Service
Then Paul repeats the principle in verse 20:
Each man must remain in that condition in which he was called.
Then he gives another example. This one may be more troubling to us, I don’t know. He says,
Were you called while a slave?
How does that apply?
Each man must remain in the condition in which he was called.
I think the idea here, what he is talking about is, if you were a slave, if God saves you and your condition is that you were a slave, and that happened a lot because in the Roman world, half of the people, probably more than half, were slaves. Many, much of the early church were slaves. So if you were called while a slave, if you were in that condition, you would think, “Look at me. I’m in the lowliest place.” Could think that. There were different levels of slaves in that society, but it could be the situation. It’s likely the idea. “What can I do? I don’t even, I can’t, I don’t have a free will about a lot of things. What can I do for the Lord?” Paul is saying, “You live a godly life in the place where you are. If God gives you an opportunity,” he says, “to become free, do it.” Now, studying this passage, I’m going to just be absolutely honest and say that it is possible grammatically in this place that he said, “If you’re able to become free, don’t worry about it.” But it is an imperative here. So usually that shifts the idea. So I think that what it should be saying is, “If you’re able also to become free, rather do that.” That fits much more clearly into the context of the passage, because he had just told people that you’d be far better off not being restricted in a marriage, which is a good thing, as far as it comes to serving God. You’d be better off, as far as it comes to serving God in a difficult circumstance they were living, to just be able to devote yourself completely to the Lord, not have to worry about pleasing a wife or family, because you’d have more freedom to serve God that way. Well, obviously he’s going to say something similar here. If you have the opportunity for freedom, and they did sometimes, sometimes they could purchase their freedom, sometimes people would purchase freedom for them. “Do it,” he says.
Then he says,
Because the one who is called while a slave is the Lord’s freedman. Likewise, he who is called while free is Christ’s slave.
That is a powerful thing. God calls you, and you’re not, you’re absolutely free. He frees us from sin. He frees us from all sorts of things, but he also calls us to himself, and he becomes our Lord. We serve him. He said,
You were bought with a price; don’t become slaves of men.
Then he says it again.
Brethren, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which he was called.
Can you imagine though, if you were a slave, there have been all kinds of slaves and still are slaves in the world. To be in that place, how do you serve God in that situation? It would be tough. But with the grace of God, it can be done. I don’t know if I should mention this at all or not, but I didn’t really develop it. I didn’t stick it in my notes. You remember back in, with the Civil War, one of the things that brought that, that actually occurred, encouraged a great deal of opposition to slavery, was a little story. It was a novel. It was a book called *Uncle Tom’s Cabin*. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book. Today, if you, among black people, to call somebody an “Uncle Tom” is not a compliment at all. But Uncle Tom was the hero of that book. He was a martyr. He was a Christian who worked in this, in this situation, pretty much with this idea. He had a clear testimony for Christ continually throughout his life. The story is his last words. He says, “Nothing shall separate us from the love of Christ.” And so he, he had that type of a character, and he’s the hero. He’s, he’s killed because he won’t tell his new wicked master where other slaves had, had left. He was asking him for information. He’s beating him. He beats him unmercifully until he dies, until he is beyond being able to continue to live.
You have that interesting thing in that story. The book, which people as they read it, recognized that it must be true. Uncle Tom is not a fictional character, but there were many Christians who were slaves who loved God and served God even in their servitude of an evil master and recognized the injustice of that. God moved many hearts to to oppose that. There was another section in that book that strikes me. That’s another situation that might be similar. It was, one of the men in the book describes his father, who was a really wicked plantation owner. The book describes people who were plantation owners, who weren’t all that wicked, and people who were particularly wicked. This person grew up, this man grew up, and he’s talking about his mother and his father, and he’s talking about his father’s ambition, and all that he had. And he also talked about his mother giving up eventually of being able to influence her father at all. But she’s a Christian. She’s a believer. What she did was not to contradict him or to do anything to oppose him, but she would talk to her children, her sons, about the grace and the love of God. One of the things, in the passage it goes like this. August is the one talking, and he says, and she was his mother. He says,
She never contradicted nor formed anything my father said or seemed to differ from him. But she impressed and imbedded into my very soul, all the force of her deep, earnest nature, an idea of the dignity and worth of the lowest human soul. I’ve looked in her face, in solemn awe, when she would point up to the stars in the evening and say to me, ‘See there, August. The poorest, meanest soul on our place will be living when all these stars are gone forever. And lives as long as God lives.’
That’s one of the things that takes place today. A person married to someone who is ungodly, but willing to live in peace. How do you live in such a circumstance? Well, you live faithfully. You live for the other. Maybe God will use you to convert your spouse. Maybe He will use you to convert your children. It’s tough, this passage, when you think about it. Don’t be overly ambitious. Be faithful in the place that you are. God may give you something far better. But in the meantime, trust Him, trust Him and be faithful. Let’s pray.
Father, we are so grateful to You today for Your kindness and Your grace and Your faithfulness to us and the outpouring of Your love for us. This morning, Lord, as we share from the Lord’s table, we thank You for our Savior, for the sacrifice that He made, and we thank You for Him instituting the Lord’s table for us as a means of us being able to continue to celebrate His precious work for us, the sacrifice of His body, and the forgiveness of sins that we enjoy because of His shed blood. We ask, Father, for Your mercy today as we continue and take up the cup. We thank You for what it represents. We pray that as we, as we participate in this, that some, just a portion of the wonder of what we’ve received in forgiveness of sins and a right relationship to You and fellowship in the body of Christ. Father, that some of that wonder we would be able to know and to celebrate and thank You for. We ask Your blessing on the cup in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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