Transcript

1 Corinthians chapter 8, what an interesting book, 1 Corinthians is. We come to a second major area, and more, its not a second, let’s say another major area. The apostle Paul deals with in this carnal, immature, trouble filled, really backslidden church.

1 Corinthians 8:1, “Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him. Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him. However, not all men have this knowledge, but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled. But food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat. But take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone sees you, who have knowledge, dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols? For through your knowledge, he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died. And thus, by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food cause my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, that I might not cause my brother to stumble”.

I’ve entitled the message, Liberty is for Love. Liberty is for love. Now when you come to these so called gray areas, and by gray areas, I mean those areas that are not particularly and clearly forbidden in scripture. Now there are some things in scripture that we know that we know that we know, that we are to do. And there are some things from the word, that we know that we know, that we know we are not suppose to do. But then there are those other things, we call those maybe the gray areas. And in dealing with this so called gray areas, there are two common extremes.

Now the first common extreme is legalism. Under legalism, everything has to be absolutely black or white. The legalist is the one who lives by rules rather than by the spirit. The legalist has to classify everything as good or bad, whether or not the Bible clearly deals with it. The legalist typically has an exhaustive list of do’s and don’ts. He’s very aware of external observance, and he thinks that equals true spirituality. The legalist is the person who is law controlled, not spirit controlled. The legalist is the one who believes that refraining from doing certain things is spirituality. But refraining from doing certain things is not spirituality, walking in the spirit is spirituality.

Now mind you, if you walk in the spirit, you will not do certain things, but it’s always in that order. You’re not spiritual because you have a legalistic code in your heart, yet you are spiritual because you walk in the spirit, fellowship in the spirit, and that gives you certain do’s or don’ts that you follow. So that’s one extreme, legalism.

Then the other extreme is a license. Or you might just say the liberal. I like using that word. Now the liberal, or the person who sees a license for everything says there are no gray areas at all. Everything’s white. Nothing’s really bad. Unless something is just truly, truly expressly written in scripture, he says hey, as long as your conscience doesn’t condemn you, you’re wide open, you are free, you can do what you please, as a Christian. But both of those are wrong extremes.

Now we come to this thing of gray areas under the message I’ve entitled liberty is for love, and I want to show you four things here, and I think you’ll understand the headings as we go along. Number one, knowledge without love produces arrogance. Now we see this in verses 1-3. Let’s begin in verse 3 and try to understand this. Paul says, “now concerning things sacrificed to idols”. Now, this was one of the questions and the difficulties the church at Corinth had, and they have obviously forwarded these questions ahead to Paul and now he’s written about these questions and he writes it back in this form, of a letter that we have as 1 Corinthians. And one of the things they asked was, is it right for a Christian to eat meat that has been previously sacrificed to an idol.

Now in the heathen temples, when they sacrificed an animal to an idol, they would do one of three things with the meat after it was sacrificed. Number one, it was eaten sacrificially. In other words, though, the heathen worshipper would actually eat the sacrifice as a form of worship unto that false god. Number two, it was taken home and eaten privately in a private home, it was just meat. Or number three, the person would take that meat from the heathen temple and take it down to the meat market—they didn’t have refrigeration and the way we can store and preserve meats today—and it was all fresh, some of the best meat you could get, and certainly the cheapest meat of the market was meat that had been sacrificed to idols. And so the Corinthians had some differences of opinion about this. They were wondering, is it okay for me to go to the market and buy the meat, the freshest meat and the cheapest meat is that sacrificed to an idol, and some of them were, and then other folks at the church at Corinth said that’s evil, that’s wicked, that’s wrong, and you should never do that. And some others were saying, if we’re invited to go to a banquet, or over to a friend’s house for a meal, and he happens to be an unbeliever, and more than likely the meat there is meat that was at one time sacrificed to an idol, is it wrong to eat that meat.

So that’s why Paul begins by saying, concerning things sacrificed to idols. They were having a time with that very issue. Then he continues in verse 1 and says, “we know that we all have knowledge”. Now the knowledge he’s talking about is what he explains further in the text. And that is we know that the idols are false. We know that the gods the heathens worship are mythological, they are not real at all, so the idol that represents the god—see the idol was to be a picture or the symbol of the god—so that means nothing, and Paul basically says, we know once we’ve been saved, that there is only one true God, and this thing of sacrificing to these mythological animals doesn’t hurt the meat at all, it was God’s meat anyway. And once it’s dead and once it’s slain and it’s available, and you eat it, it doesn’t mean you are worshipping a false idol to eat it. Doesn’t mean you are contributing to pagan worship to eat that meat. And so he says, we all have that knowledge, that there’s no such thing as idols and so the meat generally speaking is fine to eat, it doesn’t make you closer to God or further away from God, in anyway.

But now here’s the situation. All believers in this church had that knowledge theoretically, but that knowledge was not necessarily practical or controlling in their heart and lives. Now here’s what I mean by that, here’s a good example in our day and time, and we run into this all the time, as Christian leaders. Someone will receive the Lord Jesus Christ, and what happens the moment they receive Christ? Their sins are washed away. They are totally and completely and unconditionally forgiven of all sin. But how often will they come back and say “well, but. I don’t feel forgiven, or I committed this sin again, how could God have really forgiven me, I have these thoughts and this behavior crept back in my life last week”, a thousand and one well buts, “but you don’t know this, but I fail here, how can I be?” You see, they have knowledge, they do accept theoretically, I am unconditionally forgiven, but their heart practically and in a controlling way, can’t really receive it all yet. So they have a theoretical knowledge, but not really a practical knowledge yet, it hasn’t really affected their heart.

That was the problem with these folks in the church at Corinth. A lot of them had knowledge and therefore they could go buy the meat at the meat market, and it never bothered their conscience, they didn’t feel dirty about it or sinful about it at all, they could go to a Gentile, or rather an unbeliever’s house and they would serve a big meal and have big t-bone steaks and that particular cow was sacrificed to an idol earlier in the day, it didn’t bother them at all, they just ate the meat and went home, it didn’t bother their conscience at all. But then there were others in the church truly saved, knew that theoretically, but when they went and bought the meat, they felt like they were sinning. They’d been so involved in idol worship, so involved in eating meat sacrificed to idols, even though in their minds, theoretically they knew it wasn’t sin, and they knew it was no such things as a false god, there is only one true God, but yet in their hearts they felt like they were sinning.

Now Paul goes on. So he says, “concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know we all have knowledge, knowledge makes arrogance but love edifies”. Now the problem was, some had knowledge, but they had that knowledge that they’re not sinning by eating this meat and they held that with an attitude of superiority over the others who didn’t have that full practical knowledge yet. They were haughty and arrogant about the fact, and they just flaunted their liberty to eat that meat. And tried to make those who didn’t feel that freedom in Christ to feel little and unspiritual. And then when he says knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies, his point is this: Your knowledge should be governed and filtered by genuine love for that weaker brother in Christ. That knowledge that it’s not sin for you to eat the meat should be governed by the love for what is best for that weaker brother who still sees it as a sin to do that, at least for now he does. That’s what he means by love edifies. In other words, knowledge must be the channel—or rather love is the channel through which knowledge flows. Your knowledge is worthless, listen to me, unless you are using that knowledge in Christ, to edify and build up your brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s not for you to go around and be puffed up about it.

Someone said, “if knowledge puffs you up, then it cannot build up your fellow believer”. Don’t be proud of what you know in Christ. Now, look at verse 2. He says, “if anyone supposes that he knows anything”. Now that phrase, “if anyone supposes that he knows anything” literally means if anyone thinks he’s got to the bottom of that truth. If anyone thinks he’s studied that truth and knows it all now, he’s got to the bottom of it, he’s exhausted that truth. Paul says, if anybody in the church really believes he understands all there is to know about a particular point of truth or doctrine, he doesn’t really know anything yet. If anyone assumes he’s really exhausted that truth, he really understands it all, he is one who is truly ignorant. Newton said it this way. He said that “someone who gains knowledge is only gathering pebbles on the ocean of truth”. You can take one point of doctrine, spend your entire life studying the word and all that the scripture says about that one point in doctrine, and you will only gather a few pebbles on the ocean of truth. And the truly wise man, the man who has truly learned, says, “man I understand some things, and I’m thankful to God for it, but there’s infinite truth left there to be learned and understood”.

Now look at verse 3. “But if anyone loves God, he is known by him”. Now that’s a rich phrase there and there’s a lot in that phrase. You ought to see the Greek scholars run all over the word and back with that phrase in verse 3. He says, to know God is to love him. If you know him, it’s because you love him. Now, you see, you came to God through knowledge and love. But knowledge alone can never get a man to God. You see, no one knows God who does not love him. Really what the text is specifically saying is this: if anyone loves God, then God says, that man has the right knowledge. You see, there are a lot of people who’ve gathered doctrines in their brain, in their head, but they don’t have a heart of passionate love for God. And God said, they don’t know anything yet. Oh, they could articulate, they could tell you the Greek and the Hebrew and the history and the context, and alliteration and everything else of a text of scripture, but it’s all mind. And, if it’s all head and it’s just all knowledge, and there’s not that heart of “I want to obey him and I want to honor him and I want to sacrifice for him, and I want to serve him, and I want to advance my Lord’s kingdom,” if that heart of love isn’t there, Paul said, you don’t know God at all yet.

I know of churches that are relatively small churches and they haven’t really grown in many, many years, they don’t win many people to Jesus, but they talk about how deep they are. They study deep. They are deep. They are real deep. They just study and they are deep. My friend, if you love God, you know what you are going to do. You are going to love what God loves. You know what God loves? Lost souls. God loves lost souls so much he sent his precious Son to die on the cross for those lost souls. And God said, you need knowledge—don’t be a dummy, keep learning true doctrine—but if it’s not balanced with a heart of love, you don’t know anything yet. Because if you really know God in your heart, that’s true knowledge. Now add the intellect to the heart passion for him, you’ve got everything that you need.

Now let’s go a step further. Generally speaking, there are other truths here, but generally speaking I wanted you to see in verses 1-3, that when we have knowledge but no true love, then we become arrogant. Puffed up and proud. It produces that arrogance. But number two, Paul shows us, knowledge without love will produce sin against my brother. I have spiritual knowledge but no genuine love in my heart, it will produce sin against my brother. We see this in verses 4-7. Paul begins there in verse 4 and says, “therefore, the concerning of eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know there is no such thing as an idol in the world. And that there is no god but one”. We’ve already talked about this, he said, that’s the general knowledge all people have. Some of us have it practically, we’re just free as a bird in our hearts, about eating that meat even though it was sacrificed to an idol; some only know it theoretically, and we’re not yet free in our hearts. Now you’ve got to understand the overwhelming majority of the Greek culture was touched by pagan idolatry. Everything—the judicial system, the social life, everything. The education, everything was touched and influenced. So these guys got saved out of it, and they were having a struggle with it.

Now look at verse 5. “For even if there are so called gods, whether in heaven or on earth” —now he says, sure, there are a lot of people on earth that say this is Jupiter and this is the god Mars, and this is Baal, and there was a thousand other gods they worshiped—he said, there were a lot of so called gods, but he makes an interesting phrase at the end of verse 5: “As indeed there are many gods and many lords”. I think what he’s saying is this: All those gods the heathen have created are false, they are mythology, they don’t exist. But there are supernatural entities, I think that’s what he means by the last of verse 5, when he says there are many gods and many lords. There are supernatural beings, we call them demons, the Bible calls them demons, and they have different ranks and different authorities, I think that’s why he uses the word lords, but his point is—and he carries this out rather clearly in verse 6—yet for us there is but one God. In other words, there are supernatural powers and forces out there, but they are all creatures and there is only one true Almighty God, the Creator. That’s why he says, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him. There’s one self existing eternal Almighty. Everything else is part of the created order. And is totally, absolutely, completely under his dominion and authority.

And then he says, last part of verse 6, “and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things and we exist through him”. So he says there, there is one Father Creator, and then there is one Lord, who’s been given administration over all the universe, the second person of the Godhead, Jesus Christ. And he says, we exist through him. Now he’s not talking about creation in that point, when he says we exist through Christ, it means our new birth, our born again life is because of what Jesus has done, we are birthed again, our new life is through Jesus Christ. Now look at verse 7. He says, “however, not all men have this knowledge, but some being accustomed to the idol until now eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol”. He said, there are some of your brothers and sisters in Christ, who for many, many years before they were saved had that habit of regularly sacrificing animals to those heathen gods, and in their heart of hearts, even though they know intellectually, there’s no such thing as those gods, and the meat’s fine, they still feel like if they take that meat and eat it or partake of it, they’re weak, they’re immature and they still feel like they are sinning.

Now sometimes in today’s world we think the mature Christian is the one who has all the rules and regulations. Generally speaking, they are immature, so they need a lot of guidance and correction and parameters on their life. Who do we put the parameters on, children or adults? Well, generally children, they have to have the guidance, instruction and direction. Adults should know from inner restraint how to conduct himself, he doesn’t need the external restraints. So the weaker brother is the one who has no, no, no, don’t, don’t, don’t, sin, sin, sin, in all these areas that scripture’s not clear on, because he’s not free in his conscience yet. That’s where he is.

Let’s continue in verse 7, let me read the first again, “however not all men have this knowledge, but some being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol”. They think they are contributing to idol worship when they eat that meat. And their conscience being weak is defiled. Now the conscience is that inner court that judges your attitudes and your actions. And what happens when they go eat the meat, they haven’t sinned against God, but the inner court of their heart, conditioned from their past life says, guilty, sin, wrong. And they live under that guilt, that defilement—defile there in that verse means stained or polluted. Now not that the meat literally itself stained or polluted their soul, but performing an act that their conscience said was out of bounds—that brought the defilement, that brought the guilt on them. Now look at verse 8. Paul makes it clear, but food will not commend us to God. The word commend is a neat word, it means to make you near. And you know the Jews had their strict dietary laws, and the heathens had all kinds of dietary laws, and in their backslidden condition the Jews began to teach that actually those laws of diet and many, many other laws of course, actually made you near God. And Paul says foolish and ridiculous. Both the Jewish backslider and the heathen—what food you do or do not eat, generally speaking, cannot make you any nearer to God.

Now we’ve learned today if you eat a lot of certain types of food, you may go to be near God quicker. Then, then maybe you would have otherwise, but in a spiritual sense, it doesn’t make you any more right with God or any further away from God. Food will not commend us to God, we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat.

Now verse 9. This is really the key verse of the whole chapter. “But take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak”. The word “liberty” there means a grant or an allowance. You’re saved, you’ve grown in knowledge, and you know the things that scripture does not condemn, which areas, and you’re totally free about them, you don’t feel guilty when you do them, your conscience doesn’t’ bother you, it’s a liberty you have in Christ. Nothing wrong with it, except if that liberty causes a weaker brother to stumble.

And you see, if you hold knowledge without love, if you have knowledge that knowledge—that this is not sin, I can do it—but you don’t first say, “first and foremost, the goal of my life is to love and help my brothers and sisters in Christ”. Therefore, as I exercise my knowledge, I will govern and limit the exercise of this liberty, in case it may cause a weaker brother to stumble. You’ve got to be careful in those gray areas. Now the word stumbling block here is the same word that Jesus used over in Matthew 18:6, where he says, “if anyone causes one of these little ones”—immature ones, it doesn’t mean little in age, but it also just means they don’t understand much yet. “If you cause one of them to be offended and trying to follow me, to stumble in being near me. And it would be better”, Jesus said, “that you hung a heavy millstone around your neck, strapped it to your neck, and you be cast into the sea”. The Lord Jesus said, it’s very, very serious, for you to knowingly and willingly do something that’s perfectly okay between you and God, but that particular event would cause a weaker brother to stumble and sin themselves, at least in their own heart.

Now, let me say this. It’s totally non-Christian for the stronger brother to exercise his liberty in Christ at the expense of his weaker brother. In other words, don’t let “liberty in Christ” or “I’m under grace” be your battle cry to indulge in your own whims and fleshly pursuits, regardless of the effect on others. Because that’s knowledge without love. And in reality, there’s such a shallow understanding of the local church in today’s Christian culture. A shallow, immature, unbiblical understanding. And we need to understand again, you were saved and left here chiefly for your local church family. Your brothers and sisters in Christ. And so when God grows you in knowledge, it is so that you might exercise and live out that knowledge, totally concerned with the edification and the benefits of your brothers and sisters. Not what liberties you have that you can enjoy on earth, but what builds up my brother and sister in Christ.

That’s my thinking. Now why is that my thinking? Now think about it for a moment. Who lives in you? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ lives in you in the person of the holy spirit. Now how much did he love your brother or sister in Christ? He loved them so much he sacrificed himself on the cross for them. So as I walk in the spirit—and who sheds love abroad in my heart? The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by what? The holy spirit. If I’m walking in him, I will be consumed by a love to build up, bless and edify my brothers and sisters in Christ. I’d never stand up and say, “I’ve got a right to do this, I’m under grace, I have liberty in Jesus”. You know nothing about knowledge Paul says. Because unless you exercise knowledge with a genuine love for your brother and sister and what’s best for them, you don’t have any knowledge at all. You are just a dead computer is all you are. Bunch of knowledge up there, but no heart passion for your brother and sister in Christ.

So Paul basically has told us that knowledge without love is going to produce arrogance. And then also knowledge without love will cause you to sin against your weaker brother. It may not have been a sin for you, but when they did the action or the deed that you did, it was sin for them, it still defiled their conscience. And you never want to teach a man to defile his conscience, even if his conscience is uninformed and unenlightened. A person should never get in the habit of defiling his conscience. You should be patient, and self-sacrificingly wait until they mature to understand the knowledge that you have.

And then number three, Paul shows us, knowledge without love is sin against Christ. Knowledge without love is sin against Christ. Look at verse 10. “For if someone sees you, who have knowledge”—what’s that mean again? You understand, there’s nothing wrong with this meat, it’s God’s meat, it’s God’s cow, who cares where it was killed. You know, it’s just meat, and you can eat it, no problem. Okay, that’s you. And someone sees you have knowledge, “dining in an idol’s temple”. Now we don’t know all that that means, because that’s a little stronger than just going to the meat market and taking it home, you are in the idol’s temple. More than likely, some historians would tell us there may have been a wedding banquet that had nothing to do with worshipping idols, but it was at the facility, the physical structure where the temple was. Alright. And probably the meat was bought from the heathen temple, because they have a lot of meat hanging around, they do a lot of sacrificing. But anyway, we won’t go into that. Let’s just get the truth Paul’s pulling out here.

“For if someone sees you who have knowledge, dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols?” So Paul pulls out a hypothetical case, he says, you’ve got a brother in Christ, who intellectually knows he can eat that meat, but in his heart if he does it he feels condemned and sinful and guilty. And you knowing that, accept an invitation to go eat at a table where meat is going to be sacrificed to an idol, so your brother, the next time he’s offered the opportunity, he will go ahead and eat. When you ate, it didn’t hurt your conscience at all, but when he ate it defiled his conscience, and he left feeling guilty and sinful before God. In other words, you embolden the weaker brother to do what he still believes is wrong. A. T. Robertson said this about this verse: “How often defiance is flung in the face of the unenlightened brother”. You just, by your so called knowledge and maturity and freedom, you fling the defiant spirit on that weaker brother.

Now look at verse 11. “For through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whom Christ died”. What a poor use of your maturity. To flaunt it carelessly and with no love and allow it to destroy a weaker brother. In reality Paul is actually saying that’s not maturity at all, that’s not intellectual at all, that’s not knowledge at all. Because it had no love. You ruined the brother for whom Christ died. The reason why he says ruined there is when that brother goes ahead and did—he saw you do it, it wasn’t sin, but he’s weaker, and you were—now, the context was, you know he believes it’s sin, and you know he’ll be influenced by your example. And you know when he eats it what’s going to happen. He’s going to feel guilty. What happens when a person feels guilty? They are alienated from God, and there’s a cloud barrier between them and God. They feel guilty, there is a barrier, there’s an alienation from God, and that opens them up to the devices of satan. You’ve set a brother up for ruin by exercising your liberty, knowing it would encourage him to do the same thing which would defile his conscience. Do you see how it ruins a brother? How strong that is.

And then he goes on to say, a brother for whose sake Christ died. What is his point again? Jesus lives in you, his love—if he lives in you—is shed abroad in your heart for that brother and sister in Christ, you ought to be acting on that love, using your knowledge to edify the brother, never, never, never, never in your knowledge or intellectual understanding of spiritual truth, doing something that might encourage a brother to do something that he feels is wrong. And defile his heart before God, feel guilty before God, which will make him feel distant from God, which will open him up in that bewilderment and that discouragement to be open to satan’s destructive temptations. Ruining your brother.

He goes on, makes this stronger, verse 12. “And thus by sinning against the brethren, and wounding their conscience”, he says, what you do when you cause that brother to stumble, you wound the conscience—it means a blow, literally you could use this word to slap, to say it’s a slap in the face. It could very well be that the greatest blow or wound you could put on a brother or sister in Christ is to encourage them to do anything that violates their conscience. Because that will turn to guilt, that will alienate them from intimacy from God, and that will cause them to be subject and vulnerable to Satan’s ploys and destructive temptations.

Then when he says in the last part of verse 12, “you sin against Christ”. You sin against Christ. In Acts chapter 9, verse 5, when the Lord Jesus Christ struck Saul of Tarsus down and he fell to the ground, what did the Lord Jesus say to Saul? He said “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me”? Saul when you lock up Christians, when you run Christians out of their home, when you vote against them and they are being stoned to death, Saul, don’t you know you’re persecuting me, the Lord Jesus Christ? So it is when we cause a weaker brother to ruin themselves by defiling their conscience, and we wound their conscience by our actions. Then we are wounding the Lord Jesus Christ. He identifies as one with us; we are his body.

In the gospel in Matthew 25 he says, “these things people do for the least of these my brethren, they do it for me”. You see, when you love your brother and sister in Christ, you are loving Christ. When you hurt a brother or sister in Christ, you hurt Christ. He said, “don’t wound your brother because you sin against me”. How many of us carelessly think I would never do that to my Lord, but I’ve done it to another Christian—you’ve done it to your Lord. You slapped his face, you’ve dealt a blow, when you hurt your brother or sister.

You see, we have such a naive, unscriptural understanding of the body, don’t we? We’re his body, he’s the head, we’re the body. That’s why I never can understand the person that says, “I love the Lord Jesus, I just don’t want to come to church”. That’s like the man at the marriage altar saying “honey, I want you to know something, I love your head, but I don’t like your body, so I’m going to cut your head off and carry it with me, but I’m going to leave your body behind”. Guy walking down the street and got a woman’s head in his hand, what are you doing? Well, I liked the head, just didn’t like the body. He said, that’s absurd and ridiculous, that’s how absurd and ridiculous it is for you to say I love Jesus but I don’t like the church. It’s his body, it goes with the head, and the head goes with the body—how many of you guys have married a wife, you learn that, don’t you? You get the whole package. Now the body’s not glorified and it’s not perfected, and if it was, if you joined it, you’d mess it up. But loving our brothers is loving Christ, hurting our brother is hurting Christ, sinning against our brother is sinning against Christ.

Now look at verse 13. Paul throws himself in this thing. He says “herefore, on the basis of all the truth I’ve laid out before you, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again”. Now he’s hypothetically speaking, not making some vow that this is absolutely what he will not do, but he says, in this kind of setting, in this situation, if necessary, I become a vegetarian. I wouldn’t take something that’s optional in life that might ruin a brother and wound a brother and cause him to have a cloud of guilt between him and his Lord and alienate him from God and throw him into a vulnerable position before satan, I just wouldn’t do that. Food is not that important. My brothers and sisters in Christ are more important. Paul uses a double negative here, it adds strength. He says, no, not ever would I do that. You see, your knowledge in Christ, your knowledge that gave you liberty in that area, your knowledge that gave you freedom in that particular area, you can use that knowledge toward your brother or sister as a weapon to fight with, or as a tool to build with.

You see, knowledge must be channeled through love, and when you have that knowledge, you exercise your knowledge out of love and consideration for what edifies your brother and sister in Christ, because if it doesn’t flow through love, you’ll end up with a big head instead of an enlarged heart. Puffed up. Arrogant.

Warren Wiersbe quoted a man that says some Christians grow and others just swell. Have you ever been around a swollen, head knowledge Christian? Oh, they are terrible to be around. Give me a seventh grade boy in the youth department that loves Jesus, I’ll take him over one of the head knowledge guys any day. And then he says, if it causes my brother to stumble. Now the question is, what causes my brother to stumble? I don’t think we have the problem of eating meat sacrificed to idols, do we. And I can’t tell you what areas you ought to be concerned with.

I would say look closely at your Sunday school class. Some new person comes into your class either from another church or especially if they come in as a new believer, be especially sensitive to the areas of their background that were struggles for them, or maybe sin strongholds, because that’s going to be the area that they’ll struggle with. If they see you exercising liberties there, it may not be a sin for you, but it could cause them to stumble. Now here in Alabama there may be some things in the gray zone that a lot of new believers have a struggle with and we could be causing them to stumble once we’re more knowledgeable and free in that area. And then you move out to California, it would be a whole different area. It’s whatever causes your brother; it depends also on the circumstance. We know on one occasion, Paul had Timothy circumcised so it wouldn’t be a distraction and a stumbling block; on another occasion he refuses to circumcise Titus. Dependent on the situation. I can’t define it for you, I can’t give you the specific.

But I can tell you this: you walk in Christ, you will be passionate with the love that says “I want to edify and build up my brother and sister, and never do anything to bring them down”. And it’s awful serious because Jesus said, “if you cause a little one to stumble”, knowingly and willingly, “you’d be better off to strap a millstone around you and throw yourself into the depth of the sea”. Let me close with this verse. 1 Peter 2:16 says, “act as free men”—don’t go back to the legalistic bondage of law. Sure there are some biblical absolutes that are for all believers of all ages. But generally speaking, don’t go back to the legalism of the law, act as free men. But then he qualifies that, and says “do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bond slaves to God”. You see, if I have true knowledge, and I govern it with and channel it through love, then it will what? It will edify my brother and sister in Christ.

And as my brother or sister in Christ is matured and edified, they are drawn close to God, not driven from God, then what happens? They become more like Jesus, they can influence others to become more like Jesus, and as the body of Christ does this one to another, we are increasingly becoming more and more like Christ, and therefore increasingly winning more people to Jesus, and the more people who know Jesus and the more people who are more like Jesus, the more glory our Lord gets, and that’s why we’re here. To give him glory, amen.

So when I exercise my knowledge, governed by and channeled through love, then I’ll edify the brethren, I will glorify my Lord. Because your liberty in grace, and your liberty in Christ is for love. Let’s stand together.