The Lutheran Hour
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"No Command from the Lord"
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Text: 1 Corinthians 7:6-7
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They were supposed to turn right.
The command was as clear as it could be: go down Summit Drive and turn right. “Do you hear me, Helen? Gladys? You two, go down Summit Drive and turn right.” They’d even been given a map. It was all planned out. Step by step instructions: go right at the end of the street. But Helen and Gladys, both approaching 80, and both having served as schoolteachers for most of their working lives, were apparently more accustomed to giving instructions than taking them. Because when they got to the end of Summit Drive, looked both ways, checked for traffic, and proceeded on their merry way, Helen and Gladys, despite what they’d been told, turned left, and consequently, evangelized the wrong neighborhood.
So begins the story told by William Willimon, the pastor who’d been a witness to Gladys and Helen’s rogue left turn, and the result that followed.i It was part of a neighborhood canvassing activity—door-to-door evangelism. To “evangelize” means to “good-newsify” someone, to share the Good News about Jesus with them. It’s another one of these weird things we Christians do. I’ve been part of several of these door-to-door neighborhood canvassings. In fact, I’m part of a planning team for training young adults to go door-to-door later this summer. And I’ll tell you from experience—it’s pretty awkward for everybody involved, usually.
So, why do we do it? Same reason Christians have been reaching out to their neighbors for 70-some generations since Jesus rose from the dead; same reason we do this program every week: we Christ-followers believe what the Bible says—that the whole world has been infected with a sickness, that this sickness leads us to worship ourselves, that it cuts us off from each other and from life with the God who created us, and if untreated, this condition will kill us and cause us eternal suffering. And Jesus, who was crucified and risen and is returning for us, is the only cure—trusting Him is the only way we get pulled out of ourselves.
And no one can find this cure on their own. Someone has to tell you, to knock on your door, to announce it over the airwaves, or bring it up in conversation—this word from God, that His Son, Jesus, is for you! You simply must come and join us! Follow Him, for life. And when you send Christians out with a message like this, you never know what might happen. Gladys and Helen might turn left.
Now, if they had done as they’d been instructed, things would have been different. They would have knocked on the doors in the nice neighborhood. And maybe even some of those nice folks who lived there would have taken a brochure about the church. And they would have admired the pictures of Pastor Will, smiling and accessible, inviting them to church. And maybe some of them would have come. And that would have been good.
But instead, they got Verleen.
Nobody else on Gladys and Helen’s spurious route was interested in church. No one except Verleen. She lived off to the left from Summit Drive in the projects in a three-room apartment. Verleen had never been to a church in her life. And God only knows why she accepted Helen and Gladys’s invitation. But she did. And the next Sunday she showed up at the 11 o’clock service with her two feral-looking children. And Verleen liked the church so much, she wanted to attend the Women’s Thursday Morning Bible Study! And Helen and Gladys agreed to pick her up. And no thank you, they didn’t need directions. They knew how to get there. Just go down Summit Drive … and turn left.
At the Women’s Thursday Morning Bible Study that week, Pastor Will was leading a discussion about temptation. They had read the account of when Jesus, the Christ, the King, just before He began His public ministry to bring God’s kingdom, was tempted by the devil in the desert, and resisted that temptation. So, Pastor Will asks the group, “Have any of you ever been faced with temptation and, with Jesus’ help, resisted?”
One woman raised her hand and shared with the group how she’d been in the grocery store, and after she went through the checkout line, in the parking lot she realized she had a loaf of bread in her shopping cart that she hadn’t paid for. And at first she thought, “They have enough money in there as it is. Why should I pay for it?” But then she thought, “No, I’m a Christian.” So, she went back into the store and paid for the bread.
Pastor Will smiled and made an approving comment: “Does anyone else have an example of resisting temptation?”
Verleen raises her hand. “A couple of years ago,” she began, “I was into cocaine really big. You know what that’s like! You know how that stuff makes you crazy. Well, anyway, my boyfriend, not the one I’ve got now, the one who was the daddy of my first child, that one, well, we knocked over a gas station one night—got 200 dollars out of it. It was as simple as taking candy from a baby.
Well, my boyfriend, he says to me, ‘Let’s knock off that 7-Eleven® down on the corner.’ And something in me, it says, ‘No.’ ‘No, I held up that gas station with you, but I ain’t going to hold up no convenience store.’ He beat the hell out of me, but I still said no. It felt great to say no, ‘cause that’s the only time in my life I ever said no to anything! Made me feel like I was somebody.”
Through the stunned silence of the white-haired ladies of the Thursday morning Bible study group, Pastor Will says, “Well, er, uh, that’s resisting temptation … sort of what this text is about …”ii And in my mind, that’s when I hear Gladys lean over to Helen and say, “I like her.”
Evangelizing. It’s risky business, because the Gospel says that there are no wrong neighborhoods for God, and there are no wrong turns that God can’t redeem. The Gospel, it’s an odd message—“so odd,” says Pastor Will, “that we never get so good at hearing it and living on the basis of it that we don’t need to hear it again.”iii
It’s an odd message—that God, the God who created everything and needs nothing, that God, who overflows with joy, the joy of community and conversation between Father and Son and Holy Spirit from eternity, that this God, He doesn’t just love the world. He likes it. He liked it enough to call it out of the chaotic nothingness, to make it someplace rather than no place, and to make a place in it for us, nobodies who’ve become somebodies.
And that God would do all this, knowing full well that we would reject Him, opting for self-worship instead, and that the cure would cost God dearly—patience and pain and sacrifice incalculable—culminating in the crucifixion and bitter death of God’s Son—which Jesus paid gladly. And He rose from the dead, walked out of His borrowed tomb, and turned left—came to your door because He likes you. He wants to hear what you have to say, what you’re thinking about, what you’re thinking of doing next because He’s interested in you. He doesn’t just love you. He likes you.
And when you and I remember that we were once the oddballs God invited to His Thursday morning fellowship, maybe that helps us be a little more hospitable, a bit more patient, a bit more willing to risk it all on someone like Verleen.
The Gospel has this effect on us. That’s what it did for a Jewish man named Paul, one of the early followers of Jesus. Paul had been suffering from that self-worshipping condition, just like the rest of us. He had covered it well with religion and rule-following. Just under the surface, Paul was just as wrapped up in himself as Verleen’s gas-station-robbin’ boyfriend.
And then Jesus, risen from the dead, appears to Paul, “good-newsyfies” him, and Paul becomes an evangelist for Christ (see Acts 9). He travels all over, talking to his fellow Jews, telling them that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ they’d been waiting for. And if ever some of his own people wouldn’t listen, Paul would head out of the local synagogue, down Summit Drive, and turn left.
That’s how the church got started in the ancient city of Corinth (see Acts 18:1-17). A bunch of people from the wrong neighborhood started coming to Bible study. Paul stayed with them for over a year. But then he moved on to evangelize others. After he left, the Corinthian Christians had questions—lots of questions—questions about how to resist temptation, how to be somebody in Christ even as they still struggled with the relapses of a self-worshiping way of life.
When Paul got the report about the Corinthian church, in a lot of ways, they looked like the same, old convenience store bandits. They were high on themselves, bragging about who was more popular or powerful. Some of them were suing each other, turning petty grievances into lawsuits. Some were still visiting Corinth’s red-light district. One man was even having an affair with the wife of his father—shacking up with his step-mother? And then, there were others among them who were so hypervigilant, so against all this filthy worldliness, that they wanted strict rules about everything, how to be better, how to be different, how to be holy (see 1 Corinthians 7:1).
They wanted clear commands, step-by-step instructions. Do this, not that. Stay in these neighborhoods, and out of those ones. So, they wrote Paul and asked for directions. But Paul did not give them what they wanted, not exactly. Instead of an exhaustive set of rules, he gives them a foundation to build on. Instead of play-by-play instructions, he gives them sidelines to play within.
In the first four chapters of the Letter to the Corinthians, Paul doesn’t answer any of their questions. Instead, he sets the foundation—the foundational truth about the world. It’s called the Gospel—the Good News of Jesus, or “Christ crucified,” as Paul says it. Christ crucified because of our sin (the deadly consequence self-worship)—Christ crucified and risen because God chose to love us despite our sin—that’s the foundation.
And living on that foundation means that everyone and everything we have is a gift from God, and we’re each called to care for and share these gifts with others. And that we have to say no to some things so we can say yes to others. That’s how we build. We’re not building on ourselves or for ourselves, but on Christ, for Christ. He’s the Foundation—sturdy, deep, wide. And there are boundaries, edges, foul-lines. And when we stray from Jesus and try to build on the sinking sand of some other foundation, we need to be called back, turned around. Repent.
That’s what we hear Paul discussing in 1 Corinthians 5-6. He’s teaching them to resist temptation with Jesus’ help. He’s teaching them when to say no and when to say yes.
To say no to despising your father and mother (or stepmother) and yes to honoring them according to God’s command; to say no to treating a person like a sex object and yes to God’s design for marriage between one man and one woman for life; to say no to using your fellow Christians for compensatory damages in a lawsuit; and yes to loving them as fellow members of the body in Christ; and also to say no to knockin’ off a 7-Eleven, and yes to Thursday morning Bible study with Gladys and Helen.
When we begin to hear the Gospel and build our lives on it, we learn to respect the edges of the foundation. We learn where the out-of-bounds lines are and how to play within them. But within the boundaries of that field, and on that foundation, God doesn’t give us an exhaustive list of directions. He doesn’t provide case-law for every situation. He doesn’t always tell us when to turn right and when to turn left. In 1 Corinthians 7, we hear Paul reckoning with that. He tells them that he can’t give a definitive answer to all their questions (many of their questions were about marriage, how to be married, whom to marry, whether to be married or to be single, whether to have children, whether to change jobs or neighborhoods).
Three times, Paul more or less tells them, “I don’t have a command from the Lord” in these cases (see 1 Corinthians 7:6, 12, 25). I can give you my opinion, my judgment, but I’m not your judge. I’m just His messenger. And the Judge, the Lord God has left many of these choices up to you and your community. Because they’re not choices between good and evil—some are—but others are between good and better. You can turn right or left. Both are good. And God is pleased to leave it to you and your community to decide which is better. And your “better” might be different than somebody else’s. And your “better” today might be different than your “better” five years from now. And that’s okay. Because what God wants most is you, on the foundation. What God wants most is you, fully alive in Jesus. What God wants most is you, with Him.
Imagine a loving father or mother, what they might want for their young children. The kids are all there at home. One is out back, playing in the yard. Another is inside, reading a book. Another is drawing. One’s in the kitchen, having a snack. And mom and dad—they don’t have a preference as to what exactly each child is doing, or when or where or how they’re doing it, because what they really want is for their kids to grow, to be strong and wise and reliable. They don’t want compliant robots or sycophantic yes-men, or yes-kids. They just pray that their kids become mature adults. And so, mom and dad don’t try to micromanage their decisions. They’re just happy to have ‘em around, safe, learning, and not fighting.
It’s something like that with God.iv God created us and bought us back from sin and death with the blood of His Son. Which means, I do not belong to myself. And you are not your own. You are a bondservant of Christ, because you were bought with a price.
But God is a special kind of master. He’s the kind of master who wants His servants to become sons and daughters—adult children who can help run the family business.
He doesn’t want you to dissolve back into elemental dust in His presence. He wants you to be somebody because you are somebody to Him. He’s interested in you. With all these good gifts before you in Jesus, He’s interested in seeing which one you’ll pick.
He gives you the freedom to go right or left, because He doesn’t just love you—He likes you.
Which was clearly the consensus about Verleen among the ladies of the Thursday morning Bible study group. Pastor Will, still slightly stunned from the morning’s excitement in the Fellowship Hall, afterwards was visiting with Helen in the church parking lot. As he helps her into her Plymouth, she tells him, “You know, I can’t wait to get home and get on the phone and invite people to come next Thursday! Your Bible studies used to be dull. I think I can get a good crowd for this!”v
In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
i William Willimon, The Intrusive Word: Preaching to the Unbaptized. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans (1994), 1–2.
ii Ibid., 3.
iii Ibid., 5.
iv Dallas Willard uses this analogy to good effect in Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press (1984), 11.
v Willimon, The Intrusive Word, 3.Reflections for March 15, 2026
Title: No Command from the LordMark Eischer: You’re listening to The Lutheran Hour. For FREE online resources, archived audio, our mobile app, and more, go to lutheranhour.org. Now back to our Speaker, Dr, Michael Zeigler.
Mike Zeigler: Thank you, Mark. Today I’m visiting with Dr. Jeff Gibbs. He’s an emeritus professor at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and a Bible teacher and a frequent guest on this program. Welcome back, Jeff.Jeff Gibbs: Thanks very much, Mike. It’s good to be here.
Mike Zeigler: We’re continuing this study of Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, and it sounds like the Corinthians, they had some questions for Paul and he’s written six chapters and has finally got around to answering the question they actually asked about, chapter 7. Maybe deal with some other issues they didn’t want him to deal with first.
Jeff Gibbs: Correct. In 5 and 6.
Mike Zeigler: Right. And then he finally says, “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote.”
Jeff Gibbs: Right.
Mike Zeigler: The first question that he deals with, maybe not their first question they had, is about human sexuality. What are they asking and why are they asking it, I guess is the question.
Jeff Gibbs: Yeah. He begins with the husband-wife relationship and the uniqueness of that. He says, “Here’s the way you think about it.” He’ll move on to people who aren’t married yet, and it’s okay to get married, but it might be better to say single. And he goes on and talks about all those things. But the first thing he wants to nail down for them is the attitude of husbands and wives towards each other and their sexual life together. So again, that’s kind of revolutionary, especially because in a way that’s equal to the husband owning the wife’s body, the wife owns the husband’s body. See, it’s her property and nobody else’s. And so the apostle Paul, he goes into this place and he plants—or God plants a church. You know, he planted, Apollos watered, and God gave the growth—Paul’s head must have been spinning when he encountered all these, some of which he knew already, of course, all these attitudes and ungodly claims about what it means to be human and what it means to be a sexual being and all those kinds of things. But the thing he wants to nail down first is, let’s get the marriage thing right and that this gift is a mutual … once again, it’s a mutuality.
Mike Zeigler: So I was talking about this passage with a friend, and he’s really pushing back on Paul, saying, “I wish everybody were like me.” I wish—he says he wants to hold up marriage and hold up the state of singleness and celibacy, but it sure just seems like he says it, in fact, “I wish everybody were like me” and he doesn’t seem to be doing justice to marriage in this passage. You know, marriage is something you do if you can’t control yourself. But the real better calling in Paul’s opinion here, and he even says, this is his opinion, not the Lord’s.
Jeff Gibbs: That’s right. That’s right.
Mike Zeigler: So just these sorts of things. When am I allowed to agree or disagree and push back against the apostle in his teaching? And what’s that mean for Scripture?
Jeff Gibbs: Well, I think you’re allowed to push back and disagree when you’ve read all of his letters.
Mike Zeigler: Okay.
Jeff Gibbs: And you read Ephesians 5 where marriage …
Mike Zeigler: Pretty high view of marriage there.
Jeff Gibbs: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to find a higher view of marriage. So again, that would be part of the context of reading 1 Corinthians is to—this is not the only thing the apostle Paul says about marriage, right? But again, the Corinthians are …
Mike Zeigler: They’re a special case.
Jeff Gibbs: They are a special case. In Ephesians, it’s like Paul just expects them to get it. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might present ….” You know, he just lays it out. And there’s no indication that his readers are going to say anything other than, “Yeah, isn’t that beautiful?” See, our marriage, the husband (gulp!) “I’m supposed to be Christ to my wife!” And the wife (gulp!) “I’m supposed to be church to my husband!” Right? So that’s a challenge, but it’s just right out there. And again, it’s hard to get any higher than that.
Mike Zeigler: So Paul gives us this foundational truth to live by here: you do not belong to yourself. You belong to Jesus, and He’s given you to your neighbors, your closest neighbor being your husband, your wife, your family, your church family, and that just changes everything.
Jeff Gibbs: I really like 1 Corinthians, in a sense, when you compare it to Galatians. Whatever’s going on in Galatia, Paul, he takes no prisoners. It’s black and white, it’s this or that. But see, you can see him working almost like a pastor would with these kind of fractious, confused believers. I mean, he knows at least many of them well. And as Christ said in a vision to him, “I have many who live in this city.” I mean, so the mission went forward and the church succeeded in that sense in Corinth during Paul’s ministry there. He’s just saying, now, okay, now remember this and remember this. And then when he gets to the whole thing about meat sacrifice to idols, you know, there it kind of actually matters where you eat the meat. Are you in the worship service itself? Okay, now you’re face to face with demons. Don’t even think about it. Get out of there. But if it’s in an unbeliever’s home and he’s serving you dinner and he says, “Oh, by the way, I got this at the idol temple. I bought meat there.” Now your reaction is different. You don’t eat, not for your conscience sake, but for his. So again, he’s trying to show them how to love one another, how to love their neighbors, even their unbelieving neighbors. And as we all know, that can be very difficult. And we see Paul doing that.
Mike Zeigler: And it’s on, again, this foundation of, you don’t have to look for something better because you’re in Christ. And I love how he ends his section in chapter 7, of there let each one remain as he was called in—there with God or something like with God is the emphasis.
Jeff Gibbs: The road to Damascus experience was the seed by which he began to rethink everything. Oh, this Jesus is not crucified, but crucified and risen. And now He’s the center. And you can imagine all those years as Paul prayed and thought and read the Old Testament, trying to get them to work through the implications of what it means to be in Christ.
Mike Zeigler: Amen.
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“I Trust, O Christ, in You Alone” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.