Knowledge and Love
by Joey Carroll Corinth Missionary Baptist Church
Every person who will enjoy the presence of God forever in heaven arrived at that blessed state through the person and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. There is no other way and no other name through which we can be saved. It is not just a handful of Bible verses that tell us that; rather, it is the testimony of the Bible as a whole.
Even though we all come to faith through the same Person, we all come out of very different backgrounds — religious and cultural.
For instance, I have known people from cults, legalistic religions, works based religions, agnosticism, and atheism who believed upon the name of Jesus Christ and were saved.
Of course, at that point of belief, they were eternally saved, but all those religious and non-religious backgrounds and influences may continue to shape their thinking in many ways.
It often takes a great deal of time to unravel the various false teachings and beliefs they formerly held.
However, our religious or non-religious backgrounds are not the only things that shape our thinking — the culture in which we live greatly shapes how we think. Our culture today is so divided and volatile.
It has a very powerful influence on how people think. Therefore, when someone comes to faith in Christ, once again, there is a great deal of unpacking to do.
Salvation is the beginning of a process in which the Lord shapes the entirety of our lives to look like His life.
Those changes take place when we are exposed to faithful Bible teaching. As we come to understand the wisdom and thinking of God, we are to respond with repentance and faith.
In other words, His Word tells us how to think and how to live. If we attend a faithful church that teaches the Word of God and we are humble and willing to receive the Word of God as truth, our thinking and our lives rapidly begin to reflect the ways of our Savior.
Church history records the type of religious and cultural influences that were present in the city of Corinth when Paul arrived with the Gospel.
Being a port city, it had influences from around the world. It was known as a hyper-sexualized city that was full of the worship of idols.
As Christians began to grow in their understanding of God’s Word, some of them understood “that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one,” (1 Corinthians 8:4, NASB).
That enabled those individuals to enjoy some things in the Corinthian culture, like dining out at restaurants.
That sounds like no big deal, but restaurants in Corinth often served meat that had been sacrificed to idols.
It is thought that the meat sacrificed to idols was offered to neighboring restaurants at a reduced rate. This caused an obvious moral dilemma for Christians.
Is it okay to eat at a restaurant that served meat which was used in the worship of false gods?
For the Christians that had understood that idols were in reality nothing, they enjoyed the freedom to eat out.
For the ones who had come to faith in Jesus out of worshipping those same false idols, they could never dream of having anything to do with eating out at a restaurant that offered food to the gods they formerly worshipped.
So one Christian thinks that their Christian brother is being immature and needs to understand things more deeply.
The other thinks that their Christian brother is morally depraved and looks just like the world. So how are these two brothers supposed to get along?
Paul says the answer is love, and that love needs to be modeled by the one who has that greater knowledge.
The one who has been following Christ longer and understands more. Paul will say “if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble,” (1 Corinthians 8:13, NASB).
Christian love, as we have often said, is the same kind of love that our Savior displayed on the cross. It was a self-less, sacrificial love that thought more of others than it did itself.
Christians have the right to enjoy many things, but sometimes it is better to sacrifice those privileges for the sake of those around us.
