Reflecting
on Pastor David Jang’s sermon on 1 Corinthians 11, we explore how faith that
imitates Christ weaves freedom and order, mutual respect, and the sharing of
the Lord’s Supper into a unified gospel-centered life, and how the church can
be renewed as a community of love through self-examination.
The opening of an iron gate does not necessarily bring a person’s imprisonment to an end. One of the enduring questions Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables leaves with us concerns life after liberation: What will we use our freedom for? Reflecting on 1 Corinthians 11, Pastor David Jang, founder of Olivet University in the United States, illuminates how a community can lose sight of the very meaning of its freedom when the freedom given by the gospel fails to lead to an order shaped by love and consideration for others.
At the heart of this sermon is not a set of rules designed to restrict freedom. Its central question is how freedom received through grace can become a life-giving force within the community as believers grow to resemble the heart of Christ. The Corinthian church experienced an extraordinary freedom that challenged barriers of gender and social status. Yet as that freedom collided with the social customs of the time, it also gave rise to unnecessary misunderstanding and confusion. The passage does not call believers to surrender their freedom. Rather, it calls them to maturity, so that freedom does not lose its love and the gospel becomes visible through order.
Through grace, the church becomes a community distinct from the world, but it does not thereby become a place unrelated to the world. The newness of the gospel must be revealed amid the language and customs of everyday life. In that process, believers must discern what to uphold and what to yield. The question posed by 1 Corinthians 11, therefore, does not stop at “Is this permissible?” It leads us deeper: “Does this choice make Christ visible? Does it build up the community?”
When Freedom Takes on the Face of Love
In 1 Corinthians 11:1, Paul urges believers to imitate him as he imitates Christ. This single sentence serves as a central link between the preceding discussion and the questions of worship and the Lord’s Supper that follow. The first principle for resolving these problems is not to create more regulations, but to look to the life of Christ. His way, revealed through love and sacrifice, self-emptying and humility, and obedience, becomes the standard by which the community makes its judgments.
Faith that imitates Christ does not remain confined to a person’s inner life. It must take visible shape in our approach to worship, in the way men and women treat one another, in service and sharing, and wherever the community’s order is being established. When freedom speaks only the language of personal rights, it can push others aside. But when shaped by the imitation of Christ, freedom becomes the capacity to attend to others. The freedom of the gospel is not the power to prove what I can do, but the power to show what I can lay down for the sake of love.
Mature faith does not merely calculate the boundaries between what is permitted and what is forbidden. When a right I am entitled to exercise unsettles another person’s faith or disrupts the peace of the community, I first reconsider how I exercise that right. This is not because I fear freedom, but because I understand its purpose. Freedom given in Christ is not an instrument of self-expansion; it is a space opened by grace in which we become able to choose love.
Pastor David Jang emphasizes that Paul was not simply a leader issuing commands. He first became an example of a life shaped by the gospel. When teaching and conduct diverge, the community notices the inconsistency before it hears the words. The appeal to “imitate me,” therefore, is not a display of authority. It expresses the weighty responsibility borne by a life that has gone ahead on the path toward Christ.
Gospel Equality Does Not Erase the Other
The discussion of headship and head coverings in verses 2–16 may seem unfamiliar to readers today. Yet this sermon does not interpret the passage as a rule justifying male superiority or female subordination. As the sermon explains, a woman’s practice of covering her head in public was understood in that society as a sign of modesty and honor. Paul urged believers to take that custom into account insofar as doing so did not compromise the truth of the gospel.
What matters here is neither unquestioning submission to worldly customs nor an attitude that mocks every custom in the name of freedom. The church is not an island cut off from the world, but a community that bears witness to the gospel in the midst of it. Believers therefore need the wisdom to reduce unnecessary misunderstanding without abandoning the truth, and to exercise self-restraint for the good of the community. This is why freedom and order are presented not as enemies that destroy one another, but as two pillars that must stand together in love.
Paul goes on to say that, in the Lord, woman is not independent of man, nor man independent of woman, and that all things come from God. The passage’s message is not about hardening differences into a hierarchy. It reveals an equality grounded in mutual dependence, in which neither is complete without the other. The gospel breaks down barriers between people, but it does not permit that freedom to be expressed by erasing the other. Rather, a new order emerges within relationships in which people need and respect one another and grow together.
Equality does not mean eliminating differences. It means an order in which no one’s dignity is diminished because of those differences. Complementarity becomes visible in relationships that acknowledge our need for one another and work toward our shared good. The gospel-centered balance emphasized in this sermon is not about weakening the rights of either side. It is about placing every relationship anew within the mutual respect owed to people whose existence comes from God.
The Bread and the Cup Reveal the Truth about the Community
In the latter half of chapter 11, the focus turns to the Lord’s Supper. The Corinthian believers gathered together, yet failed to become one. At their communal meals, some began eating their own food while the poor were excluded and left hungry. The bread and the cup called them to remember Christ’s broken body and shed blood, but the spirit of sacrifice and sharing had disappeared from their actual table. A deep fissure had opened between the sacred liturgy and the reality of the community’s life.
The problem was not merely that they had failed to follow the proper procedures for the Lord’s Supper. The sacrifice of Christ they commemorated and their actual treatment of fellow believers were moving in opposite directions. When the hunger of the poor is neglected beside the abundance of the wealthy, a community may sit at one table and still fail to make the Lord’s body visible. The Lord’s Supper is not a curtain drawn over that contradiction, but a light that exposes it.
The Lord’s Supper is not merely a religious ceremony. It is a symbolic liturgical act that makes the heart of the gospel visible before our eyes. Remembering Christ’s sacrifice does not end with recalling the event in our minds. It must lead to a life of waiting for fellow believers, caring for the vulnerable, sharing what we possess, and making more room for love within the community. When we participate in the Lord’s Supper while excluding our neighbors, we fall into the contradiction of commemorating the Lord’s death with our lips while opposing its meaning with our lives.
At this point, the sermon brings the church’s spiritual condition before the Communion table. The question is not who possesses more, who arrived first, or who occupies the center. It is what tangible form Christ’s self-emptying is taking among us. To share the bread is ultimately to make room for others in our lives; to receive the cup should be a confession that we will not turn away from another’s pain.
Grace First Brings Us Face to Face with Ourselves
Paul urges believers to examine themselves before participating in the Lord’s Supper. This self-examination is not merely an inward look at personal feelings. It is an honest inquiry into whether injustice, imbalance, and a lack of love are growing within the community. Before the church speaks the gospel to the world, it must first ask whether that gospel is alive within its own life.
To examine ourselves does not mean confining all responsibility to the realm of individual conscience. When someone is repeatedly marginalized, when the vulnerable are pushed aside rather than waited for, and when the convenience of those with resources becomes the community’s standard, those structures must also be examined. Self-examination before the Lord’s Supper must move beyond inward remorse to the reordering of relationships and the life of the community.
Pastor David Jang’s sermon does not regard this examination merely as an interrogation intended to condemn. It is a process of restoring a broken order within grace and nurturing a healthy community in which the weak and the sick are not neglected. Worship and service, the use of financial resources, our treatment of neighbors, and even our responses to social issues all come under these questions: Does the truth we seek to uphold take the form of love and consideration? Does the freedom we enjoy build up the community and reveal the light of the gospel?
The order described in this sermon is not order for the sake of control. It is the form love takes when it opens a way for grace to flow, safeguards each person’s dignity, and helps us remember Christ’s sacrifice in everyday life. Conversely, order without love becomes a framework that stifles life, while freedom without order can readily breed confusion and conflict within the community. Gospel maturity does not separate these two, but brings them together within a heart that seeks to imitate Christ.
Ultimately, 1 Corinthians 11 is more than a passage explaining ancient dress conventions or procedures for the Lord’s Supper. It asks what face today’s community of faith will present to the world. Are we marginalizing someone even as we speak of freedom? Are we worshiping while erasing Christ’s sacrifice from our relationships and our sharing?
The passage’s final resonance reaches toward the community, yet also returns to the inner life of each person. Do the rights I cling to, the familiar ways I defend, and the attitudes I consider right truly resemble Christ? Just as I examine myself before the bread and cup of the Lord’s Supper, is the gospel also finding an ordered expression in my life today—in the meals I share, the words I speak, and the choices I make? Only in those who linger before these questions will freedom begin to take on the face of love.
Dr. David Jang has proclaimed the gospel in various regions of the world through field missions and digital media ministry, and as the fruit of that ministry, many people devoted to the Great Commission have been raised up. Based on this missionary vision, Olivet first began as a small church school for missionary training. Later, in order to provide more systematic theological education and cultivate missionary leaders, Olivet Theological College and Seminary was established in Los Angeles and Seoul in 2000.
As the school grew, Dr. Jang officially founded Olivet University in San Francisco in 2004. In the diverse and dynamic environment of San Francisco, Olivet expanded its educational fields beyond theology to include music, journalism, art and design, and technology. The university also strengthened its educational capacity by recruiting faculty members, including Dr. William Wagner, and in 2005 moved to the former UC Berkeley Downtown Extension campus, further solidifying its foundation as a university.
In 2006, Dr. Jang transferred the presidency to Dr. David James Randolph in order to focus more fully on missionary work, while continuing to lead global missions as International President. Olivet University later received institutional accreditation in 2009, added a language education college and a business college, and continued to grow as a Christian educational institution for world missions by expanding its degree programs and international partnerships.
David Jang Official Website: www.davidjang.org
David Jang Sermon Video:
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
