First of two pieces on 1 Corinthians 9:19.
For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them.— 1 Corinthians 9:19
Paul does not say he became a servant. He says he made himself one.
That’s not a small difference. Something that happens to you and something you do to yourself belong to different categories entirely. One is passive, absorbed, endured. The other requires a will already standing on its own feet, choosing to bend. And notice where Paul starts. I am free from all. Underneath that sentence is a man who has been forgiven, released from sin, and knows it. The servanthood comes second, and it comes from a free man. A freedom so complete it could afford to kneel.
Which raises the older question underneath it. Why does freedom matter so much to God in the first place?
I think of Aladdin, oddly enough. In the version most of us grew up with, a poor young man is handed a genie who can produce anything he asks for. Gold. A palace. A crown. But when he asks for the one thing he actually wants, that the princess would love him, the genie stops. That, he says, I cannot do. Even a story built on the premise that wishing makes things real understood something. Love that is manufactured stops being love. It becomes a spell. A trick. Not the thing itself.
Love is not a thing you can pick up and carry off. It’s alive, and living things don’t survive being taken. The commandments seem to know this. Three of them stand in a row (Exodus 20:13–15). Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. A life, a love, a possession. Each one can be taken from someone. But a stolen ring is still a ring in the thief’s hand. A life cut short was still, until that moment, a life. Love is different. Force it, and what you’re holding isn’t love. It never was. It’s the one thing on that list that has to be given, or it doesn’t exist.
C.S. Lewis, facing the question of why God would give us a freedom we could misuse, answered that free will “is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.” A world of creatures that could not refuse Him, he said, would hardly have been worth creating.
I understand that sentence better than I used to, and the reason is asleep on my kitchen floor as I write this, snoring like a person. Loudly. Her name is Toffee. Feed her late and the drooling starts. She sheds on everything I own. When she was sick, I stood at the stove at odd hours boiling chicken and rice for someone who cannot say thank you. She drops a toy in my lap exactly when I am tired. When she wants a treat, she walks to the cupboard, points at it with her whole head, and looks at me like she has not been fed in days.
There are robot dogs now. They don’t snore. They don’t shed. They don’t get sick. They never need to go out in the rain. They are, in every measurable way, less trouble. And I have never once wanted one, because every bit of it is designed. Every wag, every tilt of the head, every “affectionate” response was decided in a lab before I ever walked in the room. It cannot choose me. It can only perform.
Toffee can choose. That’s the difference. When she gets up from the warm spot by the window and crosses the room to lean her weight against my leg, nobody programmed that. She could have stayed where she was. She didn’t. And that small, ordinary, unnecessary act is worth more to me than every clean floor I will never have. The trouble is not the price I pay for the relationship. The trouble is the relationship, and the relationship is why she is mine.
Lewis was right. A creature that cannot refuse you cannot love you either. God knew that before He made us. He made us free, and left the door open.
God, who made us in His image and told us to grow (Genesis 1:27–28), was never interested in manufactured devotion. He wanted the real thing, which meant risking us walking away. There was no shortcut around that. Paul, at the end of his chapter on love, says where all of it is going.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
— 1 Corinthians 13:12
Known as we are known. Loved back the way we were loved first. That is what the growing was always for. Not a rule to keep, but a relationship to arrive at. And no one has ever been dragged into love.
Tozer put it in a sentence I have never been able to shake: “God waits to be wanted.” Not obeyed. Not managed. Wanted. I have come to think that what grieves Him most is not our failure. It’s our compliance. The obedience that looks right from the outside and has no one home inside it.
This is where the verse stops being about Paul and starts being about us.
If love has to be freely given to be love, then faith can’t be handed down like an heirloom either. John says the children of God are born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man (John 1:13). Not of the will of man. Not even a good man. Not even a mother who prayed over us every night of our childhood. Her believing was hers. Ours has to become ours, somewhere along the way, or it’s still sitting in someone else’s name.
I think about Peter here. After the resurrection, on a beach, Jesus doesn’t ask him to recite a creed. He asks the same question three times: do you love me? (John 21:15–17). Three times, beside a charcoal fire, because the last charcoal fire Peter stood beside was the one where he denied Him three times. Jesus wasn’t rubbing his face in it. He was giving him the chance to say something himself, out loud, that no one could say for him. He had been called. He had been chosen. He had been forgiven. Peter had followed, yes, but the words had always come from Jesus. This time he was the one speaking. I love you. His own words, finally caught up to his own heart.
And then, each time, the same answer comes back. Feed my sheep. Love what I love. Serve what I serve. The freely spoken love becomes, in the very next breath, servanthood. That’s 1 Corinthians 9:19 in a single conversation.
Which is what Paul is doing in this verse, if we read it closely. He isn’t issuing a command. He’s explaining himself. This is who I am. This is what I did with my freedom.
A man who was set free, used that freedom to kneel, and then called the kneeling itself freedom. That is his interpretation of his own life.
I’ve started calling it beautiful submission, because I can’t find a better name for it. A surrender no one demanded, offered by someone who had every right to keep himself.
Before Peter could give himself away, he had to own what he was giving. So did Paul. So do we.
Most of us can trace our faith back to someone. A mother’s whispered prayers. A grandfather’s Bible, worn soft at the spine. A pastor’s voice that still sits in the back of our memory.
That inheritance is a gift. But it was never meant to be the whole story.
Jeremiah pictures a person standing at a crossroads, told to look, to ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and to walk in it (Jeremiah 6:16). Standing. Looking. Asking. Walking. Every verb belongs to the one at the crossroads. No one is carried down that road. God showed us the way because He wanted us to see, for ourselves, how beautiful it is. To want it. To walk it. To find in that walking the rest He promised.
A borrowed faith eventually goes back to its owner. A chosen one has nowhere to go but deeper.
And if we ask where anyone finds the courage to make a free choice that costs something, we end up somewhere unexpected. A garden outside Jerusalem. At night. Someone else, making the same kind of choice, first.
That’s where we’re going next.
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