The World’s Freest Slave
This month marks the 30th Anniversary of Pastor Doug and Jill Scalise following God’s call to ministry to Brewster Baptist Church. To celebrate, we are having ONE combined service at 10:00 a.m. We welcome Rev. Greg Scalise to preach about the life Jesus gives that frees us to serve and live a life of meaning. We will follow Greg’s message with a Celebration of 30 Years with the Scalises, featuring a collaboration of voices that their ministry has impacted.
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The World’s Freest Slave
Good morning. My name is Greg Scalise, I’m Doug and Jill’s younger son, and it’s wonderful to be back at Brewster Baptist. This church means a lot to me: I got married right on this spot, I interned here in 2022, I preached my first sermon from this pulpit in 2020, I was in youth group here, I spent my teenage years clicking slides in the booth, I was baptized into this congregation, I went through Sunday school here, I grew up in the parsonage, and as a little kid, I remember when this Sanctuary was a construction site and I got to play on the huge piles of dirt. This church is even where we had my baby shower. Not the baby shower my wife Marci had for our son Victor, I mean the baby shower where I was the baby.
My parents came here in October of 1995, and I was born in March of 1996, so that first winter, the church threw my mom a baby shower back in the old Fellowship Hall, or as it was then called, Fellowship Hall. There were snacks and gifts and all the usual baby shower things because they wanted to make sure the new pastor’s family felt welcome. It worked.
Those small acts of kindness and welcome brought us into the church and set the stage for everything else that came after it. Although the women who set up the chairs and got some little gift at the Christmas Tree Shop didn’t expect that baby shower to be remembered or matter 30 years later, it did matter. That act of service in the 1990s helped get the ball rolling for everything that came after. It mattered. It mattered far more than they ever expected.
And in life we often wonder if what we do matters. Are we making a difference? Is anyone going to remember what I did here years from now? Is my work, is my life, making a meaningful impact or not? Is there any lasting significance to all this?
And that’s what our scripture is about today. Our text comes from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, and at this point in the letter, Paul reminds the Corinthians how much he has sacrificed in serving others, and how that service matters, the eternal importance of what we do. Listen to 1 Corinthians 9:19-27 (NRSV).
“For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so 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 I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.”
Paul was free with respect to all. God had set Paul free, free from his sins, free from his past, free from a legalistic religious system of works. But in his freedom, Paul became the slave of all; Paul did everything he could to serve all kinds of people.
And Paul served others so that he would win others to Christ, so that he might by all means save some. Paul served because he knew it could make an eternal difference; the people he served weren’t just being helped, they were being saved. This is the pattern of Paul’s life: he’s been freed by God and now he is the slave of others in order that others might be saved.
Paul presents the pattern of his life so that the Corinthians can follow his example. And I want to do the same this morning, I want to show you this pattern: God frees. We serve. They’re saved. That’s my message this morning: God frees. We serve. They’re saved. I want to show you that pattern so that we can all follow it.
And we’ll look at that pattern in three parts: first, Paul, how Paul lived out this pattern and how he explained it in this text; second, God, how God himself has put this pattern at the center of his creation; and third, us, how we are called to follow this pattern. Paul, God, and us. Let’s start with Paul.
Now we’re jumping into the middle of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, so we need to know some context to understand what’s going on. Paul traveled all over the Roman world telling people about Jesus and planting churches, and Paul had founded the church in Corinth. And after he left, he kept in touch with them by letter, and two of those letters survive today.
And before Paul wrote this letter, he had heard from the Corinthians about trouble in the church. There was division in the church. There was immorality and idolatry in the church. There was theological confusion in the church. And so Paul wrote this letter to straighten things out. And at this point in the letter, chapters 8, 9, and 10, Paul is addressing idolatry, specifically: whether or not Christians could eat food sacrificed to idols.
In the ancient world, much of the meat that was eaten had been part of a pagan religious ritual. If you were a farmer and you had a cow and you wanted to either sell its meat in the marketplace or have your friends over for a barbeque, you would take your cow to a temple, say the temple of Zeus, and the priest of Zeus would slaughter the cow and burn some of the entrails as an offering to Zeus, and the priest of Zeus would take a cut for himself, and then you would take the meat to the market to sell or have your friends over to eat it.
And the question for Christians was: can I eat meat sacrificed to Zeus? Some Christians, especially gentile Christians who used to worship Zeus, said no, I follow Jesus not Zeus and I don’t want anything to do with Zeus’s temple or his offerings.
Some Christians, especially Jewish Christians who never believed in idols, said yes, I believe in Jesus not Zeus, Zeus is an idol, Zeus is fake, and if some confused pagan priest mumbles a few words over my steak in front of a giant statue, that doesn’t make a difference to me. Jesus made all foods clean, including meat sacrificed to Zeus. So who is right, the eaters or the abstainers?
Paul says you’re both right and you’re both wrong. He says the eaters are right that Zeus is an idol with no real existence, and the abstainers are wrong in thinking that God cares whether or not your steak was cooked in front of a statue of Zeus.
But Paul also says the abstainers are right because if your conscience doesn’t let you eat meat sacrificed to Zeus, you shouldn’t do it, if you feel eating the meat is honoring Zeus, then don’t do it. And therefore the eaters in the Corinthian church are wrong to eat it, too, because by eating it they would encourage the abstainers to do so.
That’s Paul’s take on dietary restrictions in 1st-century Corinth, but I promise it has something to do with our text and our lives.
Let me recast this problem in modern terms; let’s talk about Halloween: some Christians don’t celebrate Halloween because it celebrates ghosts and witches and demons. Other Christians say, the ghosts and witches aren’t real, we aren’t celebrating that, we just like candy and costumes. Who’s right?
Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians is that those who celebrate are right in that you can ignore made-up paganism, but that if your conscience doesn’t let you celebrate you shouldn’t, and that those who want to celebrate need to put the interests of the abstaining Christians first.
Now here on Cape Cod, you probably don’t have many people who worry about celebrating ghosts and witches, and so this church can have a trunk or treat and take part in the town Halloween parade, because we know we aren’t really celebrating ghosts and witches.
But where I live in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the city, my church is full of immigrants who have seen voodoo and witch doctors in their home country, and they want nothing to do with anything with ghosts and witches, and that includes Halloween.
And we respect that, and our church does not have a trunk or treat or anything else for Halloween. We don’t celebrate. Whether it’s right or wrong to celebrate Halloween depends on where you are and who you are with.
And with that in mind, let’s turn back to our text: Paul says he has become the slave to all; whoever he is with, Jewish, under the law, outside the law, weak Paul becomes like them in order to serve them and to save them. What is Paul talking about? What does it mean when Paul says he became “as a Jew” – isn’t he already Jewish?
Paul is talking about issues like, “Can I eat meat sacrificed to Zeus?” He’s talking about these practical cultural questions of religious observance. In the early church, it was things like, “What food can I eat and what holidays can I celebrate?” Today we might ask, “Can I celebrate Halloween?” or “What kind of music should we play in church?” And Paul makes three points.
First, Paul says, I’m free with respect to all. He is not required to follow any manmade tradition about how to worship God. Paul has been set free by God, he is not in bondage to the law, he doesn’t need rituals from a priest to get to God, nobody needs to say the magic words, the food Paul eats can’t separate him from the love of God.
By the power of God, Paul is totally free from these small questions that worry and divide religious groups everywhere. God himself has adopted Paul into his family and no little ritual is going to change that. God has set Paul free.
Second, Paul says, I have made myself a slave to all. Wherever Paul goes, he freely chooses to do what is best for others. When he’s with Jews, he keeps kosher and follows the law, not because he’s under the law, but because they are. But then when he’s with the gentiles, he eats like a gentile and ignores the law. And then when he’s with “weak Christians”, which is the term Paul used early to describe those whose conscience wouldn’t let them eat meat sacrificed to Zeus, Paul eats like they do. Paul does whatever is best for the other person.
He becomes all things to all people so that, and here comes Paul’s third point: so that I might by all means save some. Paul does it in order to save them. Paul wants to save them. But when I read that, I almost do a double take – Paul’s going to save them, I thought God saved people, not Paul, isn’t it God alone who has the power to save? And that brings us to the sermon’s second point: God.
Now Paul would be the first to tell you that God alone can save. Paul himself wrote in 1 Timothy: there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Again and again in his letters, Paul reminds his readers that our works, what we do, cannot save us.
By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result in works. Ephesians, Galatians, Romans, again and again Paul proclaims, Paul insists that we are saved not because of what we have done, not because of our works, but because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
But if you keep reading Paul, sooner or later you’re going to stumble over one of these verses where Paul talks about someone other than God saving people. That’s what happened to me when I was working through this text. I got to the end of that paragraph: Paul has become all things to all people, so that by all means he might save some. And there’s more.
In Romans, Paul talks about doing this and that, to save his fellow Jews. In 1 Timothy, Paul tells Timothy to do this and that as a teacher in order to save himself and his hearers. Earlier in 1 Corinthians, Paul talks about marriages where one person is Christian, but their spouse is not, and says maybe the believer will save their unbelieving spouse.
How can we make sense of this? How do these two things fit together? There’s a lot that could be said here and the details of this are the subject of huge theological debate, but there is one main answer that all Christians can agree on: God uses people to save people.
God uses people to save people. For example, the Corinthian church was saved by the grace of God through the preaching of Paul. God used Paul to save them. Paul was the means, the instrument, the tool in the hands of God. It is through human beings that God has chosen to deliver his message and his free gift of salvation.
Brothers and sisters, God wants to use you to save others, God wants to use your life to change the lives of others. When God frees us from sin, when God liberates us from the forces that imprisoned us, he does it so that we might serve others and even save others. God frees us so that our lives can be examples of love and service that would win others to saving faith in Christ.
But the truth is, we often fall short of that. And that’s nothing new, that’s why Paul was writing this letter to the Corinthians two thousand years ago. Unlike Paul, who put the interests of others first, who with Jews was like a Jew, with gentiles like a gentile, with the weak like the weak, unlike Paul who put others first, the Corinthians put themselves first.
We see the same thing in churches today, Christians who are unwilling to put the interests of others first. We turn practical, culture questions into questions of orthodoxy and heresy. When it comes to church music, or church dress, when it comes to Halloween, the media we watch, what we post online, our language, our aesthetic, our budget, our use of alcohol, our schedule, when we do this or do that, are we choosing what’s best for us or what’s best for others?
Remember the pattern Paul has set for us. God freed him, freed him from his past as a violent persecutor of the church, freed him from his feeble attempts to please God with his own righteousness, freed him from the cultural expectations laid upon a Hebrew of Hebrews. Paul was free with respect to all.
And then with his freedom, Paul made himself the slave of all. He became all things to all people. On every cultural question of food and tradition and propriety, he chose not what’s best for him, but what’s best for others. Paul served. And he served so that others might be saved, not just helped, but saved.
God uses people to save people and Paul wanted to be used by God to make an eternal difference in the lives of others.
And this pattern is more than just a moral example. It’s more than good advice. It’s more than another rule for good behavior. This pattern is a fact about how the God of the universe treats us. And we see this most clearly in the life of Jesus.
God took on flesh as Jesus of Nazareth. God lived among us as a man named Jesus. And wherever Jesus went, he set people free. He freed people from diseases. He freed them from demons. He freed them from overly strict, manmade rules. He freed them from falsehood. He freed them from their sins.
Of all the things he could have done, Jesus chose to set people free. Jesus had all power and glory in heaven, but he chose to become a servant. He chose to spend his time with the sick and the possessed and the poor and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
He chose to be a servant. And he did all this so that they might be saved. He didn’t just want to see people healed or in their right mind or living a better life now; he wanted to change their life, to save their life forever.
And Jesus loves us so much, he was willing not only to serve mankind in his life, but also in his death. On the cross, Jesus laid down his life for us, taking the punishment we deserved for our sins, suffering in our place so that we could be forgiven. And on the third day, he rose from the dead as a sign that now all who believe in him will be saved. And that is the gospel, the good news about Jesus.
And if we believe that good news, it has consequences for all of us. And that’s our last point, us, what this means for all of us. Most of today’s scripture is Paul’s reflection on his own life in ministry: how he has been freed by God to serve others so that they might be saved.
But Paul isn’t just saying all this to brag or to establish his authority; Paul is telling his readers the pattern of his life as an example for them to follow. And he says they should pursue this type of life, with the discipline and the drive of an athlete seeking to win a race. And the pattern Paul gives to us is this: God frees. We serve. They’re saved. And I want to touch on how each of those apply to our lives today.
First, God frees. The Christian life begins with being set free. With God setting us free from our old self, from our fallen human nature. Left to our own devices, we tend to chase after perishable crowns. We seek all kinds of things that don’t last and don’t satisfy. Human beings love to pour out their life in service of a goal. It’s just that so many of the goals don’t matter in the end.
So I ask you: are you chasing a perishable crown? Is your heart still set on something that doesn’t have eternal importance? Trying to get a certain job. Trying to get a certain amount of money. Trying to please your parents. Trying to undo your past. Trying to meet certain expectations. Are you chasing a perishable crown, or have you been set free from that?
The good news of the gospel is that you can be set free from that. There is more to life than that job, that money, more to life than your parents, more to life than your past, more to life than you expected. If we believe in Jesus, we can be set free from all the small things people spend their lives on.
Second, we serve. The Christian life means becoming a servant. It means that once we have been set free from all that, once we stop making those perishable things our goal, we instead seek to serve others. Are you seeking what’s best for you or what’s best for others? Are you exercising self-control in all things like an athlete, or are you being self-centered?
I believe a great deal of this church’s success is the fruit of servanthood. And I don’t mean that just in the sense of volunteering time and giving money, though those are both important.
I mean in terms of what Paul talked about here, in terms of being willing to become all things to all people, being willing to compromise on secondary questions like music and clothes and Halloween and all the other little things Christians love to fight about.
On those secondary, cultural, practical questions, there is a huge range of beliefs in this church, which usually leads to division, but it has not led to division, because we are servants.
We put others first, we put the good of the church first, we put the gospel of Jesus Christ first, not ourselves. Are you part of that? Are you exercising self-control in all things like an athlete, or are you being self-centered?
Third, they’re saved. The good we do in serving others is part of the work of God bringing salvation to all who believe, and that has eternal consequences. We are not just helping people, we are saving people. Jesus saves. Paul saves. And you can, too.
God uses people to save people, and he can use you. And therefore, whatever we do as a Christian to serve others has eternal importance. It matters.
And I want to illustrate that with a story, and if you’ve been listening to my dad preach long enough you’ve certainly heard this story before, but it bears repeating. My great-grandfather, Victor Frank Scalise Sr., came to this country from Italy as a teenager, and he spoke no English. He moved to North Adams, Massachusetts, where he worked in a tailor’s shop, and he would scratch English words into his desk as he tried to pick up the language.
One day a well-dressed man came in and invited Victor to a free English class held at the Baptist Church. That man was Rev. Wilcox, the pastor of the church. He began to teach Victor, and loaned him books. And out of that small invitation and act of service, my great-grandfather came to faith, got educated, and became a pastor, and any good done in the Scalise family after that is a consequence of Rev. Wilcox’ act of service. It mattered.
Brothers and sisters, what we do here on earth matters. Or at least it can. Whatever service we do for the cause of Jesus Christ matters. Clicking the slides. Sweeping the floors. Saying hello to a guest. Inviting someone to church. Giving our time and our money. Swallowing our pride for the good of others. Forgiving others. Telling the truth. Serving in pastoral ministry for 30 years at one church. These are not just good deeds, these are eternal deeds. We serve that we might save souls. What we do here matters. What we do here saves souls. Let’s pray.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.
1 Corinthians 15:58
Questions for Discussion or Reflection
- Do you feel like what you do matters?
- Do you see yourself as a churchy person or not?
- What “perishable crowns”, what worldly achievements, do you find yourself competing for?
- What are your top priorities in life, and how do you know?
- God frees. We serve. They’re saved. Being a Christian includes experiencing God’s supernatural work in our life, taking on the servant-hearted attitude of Jesus, and making a positive difference in the lives of others. Do you focus on one of these three more than the others? Is there one in which you need to grow?