In the late 1950’s, Mabel Williamson, a missionary with the China Inland Mission, now the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, published a book that bore the title, Have We No Rights?1I read that book years ago and was very impressed with it. Early in my ministry, when I was preaching on the Sermon on the Mount, I had occasion to refer to it. Years later, when Moody Press was about to republish it, they wrote to me to see if I would write a forward, commending it to a new generation of readers. I said something in that forward that I feel is true of this subject of rights even now. I predicted that the book would not become a bestseller in its reprinted year, and that it was not likely to make many lists by distinguished Christian leaders as one of the ten most influential books. But I said that it should be a bestseller and regarded as influential because Williamson was simply saying what the apostle Paul does so clearly in the ninth chapter of 1 Corinthians. Like Paul, she was saying that we do have rights, but if we are to be the servants of Jesus Christ and effective in ministry, there are situations in which we must be willing to waive those rights for His sake and for the sake of the Gospel.
There is a connection between this subject in chapter 9 and what he was talking about in chapter 8. In that chapter he was answering their question about whether or not to eat meat that had been sacrificed to an idol. He said that because an idol is nothing, eating or not eating such meat is really a matter of indifference as far as your Christian life is concerned. But where other people are involved, it may well be that for them, it is not a matter of indifference because of the meat’s association with a pagan temple. If you are really thinking about others, you ought to be willing to forego eating food that has been offered to idols for the sake of your weaker brother whose conscience is troubled by where this meat came from.
This fits with chapter 9, where Paul once again discusses the subject of rights, though this time it is the rights that he has as an apostle. Paul is not giving instructions in chapter 8 that he himself is unwilling to also follow. He says that he laid aside even greater rights in order that the Gospel might come to the Corinthians. If he is willing to do that for them, they ought to be willing to give up something like meat for the sake of some of their brothers and sisters in the church. It is the obvious point that we do have rights that can make this difficult.
[1]Mabel Williamson, Have We No Rights? (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1957).
