How to avoid being filled with hot air but little nutritional value

By Dean Collins

I just tried my first popover. I don’t know how or why I’ve never eaten one before, but we picked up a dozen at a farmers market last weekend and they were delicious. Just in case you haven’t experienced this delightful breakfast treat, they look a bit like a muffin, but they are very light because on the inside they are mostly air. Crispy and tasty, but not much substance. I looked up the ingredients, and they’re minimal: eggs, butter, flour, salt, milk. You can add a variety of flavors. I had Parmesan, cinnamon sugar, and plain, and each was delicious.

Puffed up

I’m sure I’ve lost you and you are now in the kitchen looking for food, but I’ll try to make my point. Right before I went to the farmers market, I was reading 1 Corinthians 8. In the first verse Paul says, “All of us possess knowledge.” This knowledge, Paul says, puffs up. But love builds up.

The church in Corinth had a particular problem that we can’t really appreciate in the 21st-century Western church. Some in that church came from traditions or cultures where sacrificing animals on an altar to an idol or god was a part of their religious experience. As they prepared the meat for the altar, a lot was carved off and sold for consumption. Some believers who didn’t have this background and knew that idols weren’t really gods possessed knowledge that was different than the knowledge and experience of the former idol worshipers. These believers felt comfortable buying and eating the meat that had been offered in idol worship. But those who came from a background of idol worship felt very uncomfortable about all of this.

Paul spent this chapter and more explaining how just having a lot of knowledge about God and proper understanding of cultural practices doesn’t really help build up a community or help us practice the love of Christ. In fact, if you think you’re the expert and start looking down on others who haven’t learned enough or don’t know what you think you know, you end up like a popover, filled with a lot of hot air but little nutritional value.

‘Superior’ insight

While we don’t see sacrificing to idols in our culture, we may have a big dose of thinking and acting like our “knowledge “ makes us superior in some ways to others. We don’t have to look very far in our social media feeds to discover friends and neighbors and sometimes ourselves claiming to have all the right information and insight on everything from diets to vaccines, Bible doctrine, voting practices, worship styles, parenting, diversity, and just about any other issue. And sadly, the tone of how we express our “superior “ insight and knowledge convicts us of the problem Paul described in 1 Corinthians 8: 1-3.

Reading Paul’s letters along with many other passages of Scripture, we learn there’s a big difference between possessing knowledge and practicing wisdom. And one filter has to do with how we practice love. Paul indicated that loving in the same way Jesus loves actually builds up community. It strengthens people and creates connections with God and with each other. On the other hand, just quoting facts—or theories and speculation— betrays arrogance and maybe ignorance and results in polarization.

‘Free from all’

Paul spends the ninth chapter continuing to explain that even if you do have the right knowledge and therefore have freedom to eat or do something others don’t yet and may never have, you can make sacrifices that promote unity rather than create divisions in the community. Paul set an example for us when he said, “I am free from all, I have made myself a servant of all, that I might win more of them.” Paul knew freedom without restraint is equal to religion without love. Both are shallow and do harm. They do not authentically reflect Jesus.

Popovers are tasty, but you can’t live off of them. They look filling, but there’s not much to them. We probably ought to make sure our Christianity isn’t just about appearance and freedom. We will have better success introducing others to Jesus with our love than by showing off with our superior understanding and insights. My guess is that if we continue daily to seek God in prayer and his Word, we might just discover we don’t really know nearly as much as we think we do.

Your time with God’s Word
‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭8:1-3‬; ‭9: 19, 23 ‭ESV‬‬

Photo by Jeremy Noble from St. Paul, United States, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

To receive daily posts delivered directly to your inbox, complete the form at the bottom of our home page.
To download a printable version of today’s post, click here.