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Liberty not license, parts 1 and 2

Lynne Baab • Friday July 10 2026

Liberty not license, parts 1 and 2

Overall theme from January through next week: God’s law is love

Lesson 13: Liberty not license, parts 1 and 2 (1 Corinthians 8; 10:23–11:1)

Key verse: “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up.  1 Corinthians 10:23b

Stepping into the Word

Sophie remembers the heady feeling of freedom that she experienced when she left home for college. Her parents were strict, and she had chafed against their values and rules during her high school years. At college, she could eat what she wanted when she wanted, stay up late and sleep late, study on her own schedule, and wear her favorite clothes even if her parents wouldn’t have liked them. She also felt the freedom to get drunk a few times, an unpleasant experience. When Sophie read the Apostle Paul’s words about freedom, she wondered how his version of freedom related to her experiences in that first euphoric year away from home.

Will loves American history. His greatest joy is finding a new book on the first centuries of life in America, and he frequently listens to podcasts that focus on American history. As a young adult he took a vacation to Boston and walked the Freedom Trail, and he was hooked on pursuing his love of history on vacations. He has visited Williamsburg, St. Augustine, and Savannah, and he has toured numerous Civil War battlefields. When Will encountered Paul’s teaching about freedom, it took him a while to figure out that the word “freedom” has been used throughout American history in ways that are not the same as Paul’s notion of freedom.

Paul writes about freedom as a state of not being imprisoned or enslaved, and the source of that imprisonment is sin. Jesus has freed us. Many people think of freedom as the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants, without hindrance or restraint. Paul argues that we are restrained by our love for others and by our desire to be transformed into Jesus’s image. This is voluntary self-control that comes from love.

Jesus our Savior and Redeemer, in a world that emphasizes freedom as self-focused permission to do whatever we want, teach us what your freedom means. Help us rejoice in the freedom from sin, death, and evil that you have given us. Teach us the freedom of loving like you love. 

Limiting freedom for other’s sake

1 Corinthians 8 lays out Paul’s guidance about how Christians should approach the question of consuming meat that has been sacrificed to idols. Paul notes that idols are not real, therefore the meat itself has not been changed in any real way by being offered at one of Corinth’s many temples. Christians are technically free to eat that meat. However, if eating it would damage the faith of other believers by encouraging them to engage in pagan worship, Paul believes that abstaining from that meat would reflect the love of Jesus Christ.

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul describes the rights he has as a Christian and as an apostle. He chooses not to exercise many of those rights in situations when he perceives that his act of freedom might damage his preaching of the gospel. “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all” (v. 19). He opens chapter 10 with a description of the way the people of Israel went astray. Then he returns to the question of freedom. These three chapters, focused on exercising freedom appropriately, indicate the significance of this topic for Paul. Evidently the Corinthian Christians have heard and misinterpreted Paul’s “law-free” gospel as permission to do whatever they like in any area of life. One man is even sleeping with his father’s wife (presumably stepmother), and the freedom-at-all-costs Corinthians are boasting about it (1 Corinthians 5:1-2).

It is widely believed that Paul had received a letter from the Corinthians in which they have written the phrase “all things are lawful for me,” and he is here quoting them in his response. For evidence of a back-and-forth correspondence, see 1 Corinthians 5:9 and 7:1. Paul’s retort is that while all things are lawful and those in Christ are no longer imprisoned by the law, “not all things are beneficial” and “not all things build up” (10:23). His concern is to show that while Christians are free from the law, we should not exercise our freedom in a way that causes our neighbors to go astray.

Paul’s advice is situational: If the meat is presented and the host does not say where it is from, the believer may eat it knowing that all things belong to God (v. 27). However, if someone indicates that the meat has been sacrificed, the believer should refrain from eating, not because he or she believes in idols or other gods, but because by eating the meat, the believer may cause others to stumble (v. 28). This specific situation illustrates bigger issues of how Christians exercise freedom.

What specific situations in twenty-first century life raise questions of freedom versus nurturing faith in others?

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Next week: Liberty not license, sections 3 and 4. Illustration by Dave Baab.

A previous post and an article about freedom:

This lesson appeared in the Fall 2023 edition of The Present Word adult Bible study curriculum published by the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Used with permission.

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