These words are very constantly employed as though they laid down a rule of action concerning things indifferent which might lead easily to sin, and set before us a way of helping men against vicious habits at the cost of some personal self-sacrifice. That may be a very important subject, and it has plenty of passages bearing on it in the word of God. But it is not the difficulty here. This passage has quite a different bearing. It is a case, not of a weak will, but of a weak judgment, a weak conscience, in which there is danger of false beliefs or of a lowering of the tone of the conscientious principle of action. It is this, and not any question of vicious habits, which draws from the apostle, who had fought his way through the whole jungle of doubts and difficulties and perplexities in which the weaker brethren were struggling painfully still, these ardent and decisive words.
I. At the root of this declaration lies the conviction that there is no consideration which may compete in a man's motives with the desire to promote the spiritual welfare and progress of mankind. It is the object dearest to God. It was the object dearest to the apostle's heart. It seemed so great to God, so essentially glorious, that God came forth in the form of a man to die for it. This is the true form of the Calvinistic tenet that to God His own glory is His highest end. And Paul was prepared to die for it too. "_And as we tarried there many days, there came down from Judæa a certain prophet, named Agabus. And when he was come unto us, he took Paul's girdle, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles. And when we heard these things, both we, and they of that place, besought him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? for I am ready not to be bound, only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus._" (Acts xxi. 10-13.) When a man has settled that, and has taken his life in his hand to fulfil a ministry to mankind, he has but one supreme consideration; his own interests vanish; man's interests, the estate of the poorest and most wretched of mankind, fill the sphere of his aims and hopes. (1 Cor. iv. 9-13.) No wonder that nothing could move him from this ministry, and that life was valueless save as it might be a "_finishing his course with joy, and the ministry which he had received of the Lord Jesus to testify the gospel of the grace of God_." Of course, if life was freely laid on that altar, "_as the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment_," meats would be freely offered as a sacrifice too. The man who was ready to die for man was not likely to suffer a morsel of meat, any worldly possession, any physical or mental pleasure, to stand for an instant in the way of any help or guidance which he might offer to the weakest of mankind. "_For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, that I might gain the more. And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; to them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. And this I do for the gospel's sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you._" (1 Cor. ix. 19-23.) We must take this sentence then, as explaining the full readiness of the apostle, as far as his own tastes, habits, and appetites were concerned, to eat no meat to his dying day, if he saw that such a course of action would remove effectually an offence, a stone of stumbling, from the path of the weakest of his fellow-men.