First Letter to the Corinthians 9

¹ I, personally, am free: I am an apostle and I have seen Jesus our Lord. You are all my work in the Lord.

² Even if I were not an apostle to others, I should still be an apostle to you who are the seal of my apostolate in the Lord.

³ My answer to those who want to interrogate me is this:

⁴ Have we not every right to eat and drink?[*a]

⁵ And the right to take a Christian woman round with us, like all the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

⁶ Are Barnabas and I the only ones who are not allowed to stop working?

⁷ Nobody ever paid money to stay in the army, and nobody ever planted a vineyard and refused to eat the fruit of it. Who had there ever been that kept a flock and did not feed on the milk from his flock?

⁸ These may be only human comparisons, but does not the Law itself say the same thing?

⁹ It is written in the Law of Moses: You must not put a muzzle on the ox when it is treading out the corn.[*b] Is it about oxen that God is concerned,

¹⁰ or is there not an obvious reference to ourselves? Clearly this was written for our sake to show that the ploughman ought to plough in expectation, and the thresher to thresh in the expectation of getting his share.

¹¹ If we have sown spiritual things for you, why should you be surprised if we harvest your material things?

¹² Others are allowed these rights over you and our right is surely greater? In fact we have never exercised this right. On the contrary we have put up with anything rather than obstruct the Good News of Christ in any way.

¹³ Remember that the ministers serving in the Temple get their food from the Temple and those serving at the altar can claim their share from the altar itself.

¹⁴ In the same sort of way the Lord directed that those who preach the gospel should get their living from the gospel.

¹⁵ However, I have not exercised any of these rights, and I am not writing all this to secure this treatment for myself. I would rather die than let anyone take away something that I can boast of.

¹⁶ Not that I do boast of preaching the gospel, since it is a duty which has been laid on me; I should be punished if I did not preach it!

¹⁷ If I had chosen this work myself, I might have been paid for it, but as I have not, it is a responsibility which has been put into my hands.

¹⁸ Do you know what my reward is? It is this in my preaching, to be able to offer the Good News free, and not insist on the rights which the gospel gives me.

¹⁹ So though I am not a slave of any man I have made myself the slave of everyone so as to win as many as I could.

²⁰ I made myself a Jew to the Jews, to win the Jews; that is, I who am not a subject of the Law made myself a subject of the Law to those who are the subjects of the Law, to win those who are subject to the Law.

²¹ To those who have no Law, I was free of the Law myself (though not free from God’s law, being under the law of Christ) to win those who have no Law.

²² For the weak I made myself weak. I made myself all things to all men in order to save some at any cost;

²³ and I still do this, for the sake of the gospel, to have a share in its blessings.

²⁴ All the runners at the stadium are trying to win, but only one of them gets the prize. You must run in the same way, meaning to win.

²⁵ All the fighters at the games go into strict training; they do this just to win a wreath that will wither away, but we do it for a wreath that will never wither.

²⁶ That is how I run, intent on winning; that is how I fight, not beating the air.

²⁷ I treat my body hard and make it obey me, for, having been an announcer myself, I should not want to be disqualified.