AP

1 Corinthians 9:22-23To the weak I became weak, to win the weak.  I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.  I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Paul’s exhortation in this chapter is quite a challenge to all of us today.  The driving force in his whole life is the winning of souls for Christ.  His own dramatic conversion experience on the Damascus Road had had such a liberating impact on a devoted Pharisee who was burdened by the need to win God’s approval by keeping all the demanding requirements of the Mosaic Law that his one desire was that everyone else should share in the same experience.  The amazing grace and love of God had reached out to him at the very time he was bent on persecuting the followers of Jesus wherever he could find them.  As he would write to the fledgling Church in Rome: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. … … For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” (Romans 5:8, 10).

How do we look back on our conversion experience when we discovered the joy of being ‘born again’?  Does the impact of it drive us to greater desire and effort to be used by God’s Holy Spirit as a ‘channel’ through which this blessing might flow into the lives of others?  If, in Jesus, God was prepared to identify completely with us ‘while we were still sinners’, does it inspire us to want to ‘become weak to win the weak’ – to get alongside people where they are in their lostness, rather than just to tell them to come to us where we are in the blessing of the fellowship of the Church?

In practical terms, what would it look like for me, or you, to ‘become weak to win the weak’?  It’s not something I find easy to do as one who has enjoyed the rich blessing of walking with Christ in the safe fellowship of his Church for nearly four-score years.  My involvement with Jewish evangelism through the ministry of IMJP gives me a regular taste for what it meant for Paul to meet the Risen Christ.  And Paul is reminding me here in today’s verse about the abundant blessing that comes from ‘do[ing] all for the sake of the Gospel’.

When all this stirs my heart so much, why am I so slow at getting beside my friends and acquaintances, where they are, to talk to them about Jesus?  I don’t know the answer to that question, but I will have to work hard to find an answer because I think, at my age (in the light of Psalm 90:10) it will be a question Jesus will soon be asking me!

– Bruce Christian