Building Your Faith

10 September 2026  1 Corinthians 8:1-7,11-13 

“Thus, sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.”  (1 Corinthians 8:12)      

For people who lived in the cities and towns of the Roman world, their chief source of meat was not the butcher shop, which was an expensive luxury. Most people got their meat already cooked from pagan temples. It was from animals sacrificed there. The parts not used by the temple priests were given to commercial meat vendors, who in turn sold it to the people.  

For some early Christian communities, this presented a pastoral problem. Even though, as St. Paul said, the Olympian deities “had no real existence” (1 Corinthians 8:4) some new members of the church couldn’t shake off their paganism all at once, and they believed that meat sold by these vendors was morally contaminated.

It is entirely possible that some of the new believers that St. Paul is so concerned about have already been sitting in pews for some time, and no one has ever approached them with a plan to build up their faith. Maybe they would be a good place to start.

It scandalized some to see other Christians eating it, and others came to believe that it wasn’t really necessary to make a clean break with their pagan past. Maybe, they thought, they could be Christians and pagans at the same time, that the Christian part of their lives didn’t have to affect their pagan behavior.

For St. Paul, this was a “love your neighbor” issue. It could be perfectly true that that the pagan gods don’t exist, and the meat on the table, obtained from pagan temples, had in fact been sacrificed to nothing. But, St. Paul taught, if your neighbor is so new to the faith that they can’t see what you see, nor understand what you understand, to insist on eating this meat in front of them is a gratuitous burden and insult to thir conscience, and could very well be the cause of their falling away from Jesus, which would constitute a “sin against Christ” (8:12) in St. Paul’s book. “Therefore,” Paul said, “if food is a cause of my brother’s falling, I will never eat meat, lest I cause my brother to fall” (8:13).

It would be easy, and not at all inappropriate, to substitute alcohol for meat to make this teaching relevant in our own time, but consideration for new believers extends rather far beyond that. St. Paul is concerned not just about protecting the vulnerable consciences of new believers, who can’t shake off all the trappings of their lives as nonbelievers all at once, but also about strengthening their understanding, which would certainly mean, as a first thing, strengthening their understanding of the Bible.

It is, generally speaking, terrible advice to tell new believers to read the Bible cover to cover to build up their faith. There are too many parts of the Bible that are simply undigestible for newcomers, and they come up almost immediately in Genesis. It is a far better idea to guide new believers first to the gospels. Read them, slowly and carefully, several times, and begin to get your mind around the person and work of Jesus. After novice believers have done that for a period of months, or longer, a next phase might be a “Bible in a Year” project (the one published by the Augustine Institute is a good one) where selections from the Old Testament, New Testament and Wisdom Literature of the Bible are presented each day that can be read in 20 minutes or so. Some of the tougher texts are presented with the more easily digestible ones, so that they can be taken in with more understanding.

It is entirely possible that some of the new believers that St. Paul is so concerned about have already been sitting in pews for some time, and no one has ever approached them with a plan to build up their faith. Maybe they would be a good place to start.