Bought, and Still Selling Ourselves
1 Corinthians 7:23 - “You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men.”
In 1951, while teaching at Swarthmore College, a psychologist named Solomon Asch began an experiment. He showed students one card with a single line on it, then another card with three lines of obviously different lengths, and asked which line on the second matched the line on the first card. The answer was so clear that people working without group pressure got it right more than 99% of the time.
But Asch seated each genuine participant among several others who were secretly part of the experiment. On 12 of the 18 rounds, those men confidently gave the same wrong answer aloud, one after another, before the participant’s turn came. About three quarters of the participants went along with the group at least once, calling the wrong line a match because everyone else had. Afterward most admitted they had known the right answer the entire time. They simply didn’t want to be the only one.
Paul writes a short warning to the Corinthians that lands directly on that human vulnerability: “You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men.” He just spent some verses lifting them out of every social category that defined them, and now he warns them about walking back in voluntarily. And this principle reaches into every place where we voluntarily hand people a mastery that belongs only to Jesus. Because he’s not talking about the chains other people put on us, but the ones we pick up ourselves.
There’s a kind of bondage we walk into ourselves. It looks like measuring every decision by what people will think, saying yes when we mean no, laughing at the joke we hated, going quiet about Jesus when speaking up would cost us something, or spending money we don’t have to impress people we don’t even like. No one enslaved us. We just couldn’t bear to be the only one in the room saying the line is short.
And most of us, if we’re honest, know exactly whose face appears when we imagine disapproval. A parent. A boss. A spouse. An old friend whose opinion still carries more weight than it should. A whole room of people whose good opinions we’ve quietly organized our life around. Paul's warning has nothing to do with other people mattering too little. His concern is that we’ve handed them a place only God was ever meant to fill.
This is where our price tag makes a world of difference. You were bought, Paul says. And the Corinthians already knew it the cost: the blood of Christ. That is what you cost him. A person who knows what they cost God carries a strange new freedom into a room full of opinions, because the one verdict that actually matters has already come in, and it was love. We don’t end up needing the room's approval when the Father's has already been given!
This is quietly what makes a Winsome Witness possible: someone free enough from the room's approval to be kind and honest and unembarrassed about Jesus in it. People notice a person who’s not working the room. So the next time everyone around us is calling the short line long, we can say what is true, gently and without contempt, because we were bought at too high a price to spend our lives auditioning for people who didn’t pay it.
Today: Go to God or to someone you trust and ask, “Whose approval has been running my life?” Then say the sentence that goes with it: I was bought with a price, and I do not belong to them.
Prayer: “Father, forgive me for handing people a place in my life that belongs to You. Show me whose approval I have been living for. Remind me what I cost You, and let that be enough. Thank You Jesus for giving Your life for mine! Amen.”
-PK