1 Corinthians 9: Sharing in the Gospel Every Day

Introduction

Yukiko Miyashita is in her thirteenth year at Yonezawa Kojo Church in Japan. At first, her family was worried: "Mom, are you sure it's okay to go to a place like that?" To anyone who doesn't know the church, leaving your job and everything behind to come here looks like madness.

One day, her daughter came to visit the church for the first time. After a while, she whispered: "The people here are a bit special." And when her mother sighed that she was one of them, her daughter answered: "That you were special, I knew from the start." As she greeted Pastor Tanaka, she thanked him for taking care of her mother. The pastor smiled: "Your mom isn't easy, is she?" The young woman nodded. "Don't worry, we're looking after her."

In Japanese, the word used for "looking after someone, having them in your care" is the same as the one in 1 Corinthians 9:23: "that I may be a joint partaker of it." At this prayer meeting on September 30, 2026, the preacher takes that word as her common thread. Paul, who is already saved, writes: "I do this for the sake of the Good News, that I may be a joint partaker of it." What does that mean?

Outline of the message

1. The gospel is Jesus Christ himself

The phrase "sharing in the gospel" sounds a little strange. We instinctively think: being saved, being forgiven, going to heaven. That is true. But Paul is already saved, and he still says he does everything in order to share in it.
Is having the gospel the same as sharing in the gospel? For Yukiko Miyashita, the gospel is Jesus Christ himself.
So sharing in it is not only believing in Christ. It means making his freedom, his love and his way of life your own. It means letting Jesus work in us in everyday life, so that the way we live makes him visible, in concrete ways, in this world.
The message follows three points: sharing in Christ's freedom, in Christ's love, and in Christ's way of life.

2. Christ's freedom is humility

Paul says: "For though I was free from all men, I made myself a servant to all" (verse 19). Free and a slave to all? Usually, being free means living as you please. Paul says that it is precisely because he is free that he is able to serve.
The preacher invites the congregation to put a hand on the heart and close their eyes: to think first of their own freedom, then of Christ's freedom. She herself found her own freedom blurry. As she dug deeper, she discovered a lack of freedom in it. Christ's freedom, on the other hand, seemed transparent to her, like a space opening wider and wider.
Why did Paul become free? On the road to Damascus, this zealous man was on his way to put Christians in prison, and he believed it was his mission. In an instant, he met Jesus in the light. Each of us, in meeting God, has lived something hard to explain to others, an encounter that only we and God know.
From then on, Paul was transformed into a humble, devoted servant of Jesus. Before the excellence of the knowledge of Christ, he counts everything else as "refuse" (Philippians 3:8).
The secret of true freedom is here: because Jesus humbled himself for us, we share in his freedom.

3. The day she was welcomed instead of rejected

To help us understand what it means to share in Jesus' humility, Yukiko Miyashita tells a story she has often shared: the day she grabbed Pastor Tanaka's wife by the neck. "Someone here for the first time probably thinks that a person capable of doing that to a pastor's wife can't exist. She is standing in front of you."
Marked by many negative things from her past, she always had anger boiling inside her and poured it out on someone. Her heart was that sick.
When she came back to herself, she blamed herself: "What have I done? This can't be undone." The pastor's wife wrote her a letter: "You didn't do it because you wanted to. Don't blame yourself. I'm the one who is worried about you. One day, let's take the time to talk."
It took four years before that meeting. That day, the church was on alert. The team suggested leaving the door of the room open and being ready to step in. The pastor's wife refused: "No, I will close the door and see her alone. Even if she grabs me by the neck, I will die without regret."
Pastor Tanaka, who is normally away that day, waited in another room, so that the preacher would not be hurt any further if something happened. A call was also made to a pastor who had been trained there for nine years and who serves in Yokohama, where she was living at the time: "She has carried wounds since childhood, please take good care of her."
"Through this experience, I met Jesus in these pastors who, without any fault of their own, lowered themselves for me and accepted an extraordinary suffering. And I was healed."
That is humility: Jesus makes himself zero and considers the other as a hundred. He puts himself completely in the other person's place. That is Jesus' freedom, and each one of us shares in it.

4. Christ's love is the cross

In verses 20 to 22, Paul becomes a Jew to the Jews, as one outside the law to those outside the law, weak to the weak. "I can't do that myself." Why can Paul go so far? Because Christ did it first.
God did not say: "Come all the way to me." He came himself into our world. The preacher used to belong to another religion. She made effort after effort to get close to God, until she was exhausted. Then she came across a tape by Pastor Tanaka: "The God this pastor believes in is different." A Christ who comes down to where she was: that is the God she wanted to believe in.
After becoming a Christian, though, her anger and her struggle with life had not changed. One day, at the height of her anger, an image came to her. She had fallen to the bottom of a deep well, into muddy water, and was crying for help in the dark. Looking up, she saw a light: Jesus. She thought he would throw her a rope. But Jesus came down into the muddy water.
"If you come into this well with me, you won't be able to save me! What are you going to do?" Jesus answered her: "It hurts with you. So it's going to be all right. I am the one who will save you."
Jesus is always with those who suffer, with sinners, with those who weep. And in the end, he was crucified. The cross is God coming down to the deepest human suffering: he "emptied himself, taking the form of a servant [...] he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, yes, the death of a cross" (Philippians 2:7-8).

5. Father Damien and the power of love

In 2000, the eruption of the Miyakejima volcano forced the evacuation of the entire island. Yukiko Miyashita lived five years as a refugee in Tokyo. There she learned that Pastor Tanaka was preaching in Kita-Urawa. She had not become a Christian by meeting him, but through his tapes. She heard one of his sermons live for the first time, tense at first, then moved, and she went every week without exception. Today, he preaches on Sunday morning in Yonezawa and in the afternoon in Ichigaya, in Tokyo.
Next to the hall in Kita-Urawa is a museum of modern art, with a bronze statue of Father Damien, his face seeming to sag. Intrigued, she looked into it.
Father Damien volunteered as a missionary to the lepers confined on Molokai, in Hawaii. He cared for them, built houses, a church, a school for the children. Children: that means that there, people could marry and have a family.
In Japan, at one time, a person with leprosy was struck from the family register and hidden where no one could see them. They could marry, but were not allowed to have children. They were treated as if they were not alive. Their human dignity was taken away.
Father Damien lived with the lepers, contracted leprosy himself and died on the island. Through him, God gave these people hope and dignity. His love gave them a new life.
We too have met a God who came down to us, and we have received a new life through the love of the cross. Receiving that love, being so moved by it that we cannot help but act: that is the driving force of love. "But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).
Why do people change when they come to Kojo Church? Because they meet genuine love there. The preacher retells a story told by Pastor Tanaka. A young man who found no place anywhere, not even at church, his heart full of loneliness, lashed out at everyone. One evening, he went to see the pastor's wife: "I'm trash. Trash like me has no reason to live." She told him again and again: "That's not true. God loves you."
That young man later sprayed graffiti on a neighbor's wall, and the police got involved. Pastor Tanaka, instead of reproaching him, asked him whether he had done it. "I'd been drinking, I don't really know." So the pastor told him: "If you feel like doing it again, spray it on me." That is the love of the cross: "Your loneliness, your anger, your suffering, throw it all on me." Through the pastor, this young man met the genuine love of Jesus.
To love is not to pull the other person toward yourself. It is to go down to where they are and stay at their side, because you cannot do otherwise. Paul lived by this love, which is why he did not cling to his culture or his position and sought to understand others. By sharing in the gospel, we too are transformed into people who stand close to the pain of others.

6. Christ's way of life is to serve

Paul writes: "that I may by all means save some" (verse 22), then "that I may be a joint partaker of it" (verse 23). He wished for only one thing: that people would meet Christ. That is exactly Jesus' way of life.
"For the Son of Man also came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). Christ never stopped serving. The washing of the disciples' feet on the last evening is the symbol of it.
Yukiko Miyashita works in a nursing home. She too washes the feet of elderly people, but with a very different purpose: "I wash them thinking: I hope I don't catch their athlete's foot." Jesus, on the other hand, was king, and he took the form of a servant to save.
Every morning, before going to work, she prays to be able to serve the elderly residents and her colleagues. But once there, the words and attitude of a servant do not come easily.

7. "Bad attitude": serving begins with recognizing

One day, she was helping a man in a wheelchair get into his bed. He looked at her and snapped: "Bad attitude." She told the scene to a nursing school, asking what the students would have answered. One student answered: "Thank you." Surprised, she understood that he had heard "you've got guts," whereas the man had really said "bad attitude."
As for her, while she was helping him, she was searching her mind for what to answer: "I listen to sermons, I do my devotions every day, I pray to be able to serve." And what came out of her mouth was the same words, thrown back: "Bad attitude!" The old man replied: "Yes, I have a bad attitude side." Instead of serving him, she was the one who got served. "That is the reality: I don't know how to serve at all."
In the morning, she prayed: "I answered him in the same tone. What should I have said?" In prayer, God made her aware of one thing. Yes, she has that side: she cannot bring herself to lower her head before another person.
A bad attitude, she explains, is not the word itself. It is measuring everything by your own standard and never yielding to others, a heart that is not free. For a person like her, Christ, with no sin at all, humbled himself and accepted an extraordinary suffering.
On the cross, in place of the one who does not know how to ask forgiveness, Jesus prayed: "Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). She paraphrases it this way: "Don't make them carry this sin, I will carry it." Jesus himself asked forgiveness for her.
When this sank into her heart, something changed: her heart without freedom became free. She got ready: next time, she would answer "Yes, I have a bad attitude side. But thank you for letting someone like me help you." She looked forward to that moment. The old man only said to her: "I said that?"
Shaped each day by others and made little by little like Christ, she feels gratitude rising in her. Riding her bicycle home from the nursing home, she says to herself: "Thank you again today."
When a new life united with Christ takes shape in us and we are transformed more and more into him, we do not merely know the gospel: we share in it.

Key takeaways

The gospel is Jesus Christ himself. Sharing in it means letting his freedom, his love and his way of life become ours in everyday life.
Christ's freedom is humility: making yourself zero and considering the other as a hundred.
The love of the cross does not pull the other person toward itself. It goes down to them, into the muddy well, and stays at their side.
Christ came to serve. We learn to serve by recognizing what in us measures everything by its own standard.
It is the love received at the cross that moves us to act. We cannot do otherwise.

Personal application

With a hand on your heart, compare your freedom with Christ's: what do you find blurry or not very free in yours?
With whom do you find it hard to make yourself "zero" so you can consider the other as "a hundred"?
Into which muddy well has Jesus already gone down with you?
Who around you needs you to go down to where they are rather than draw them to you?
The last time someone made a hurtful remark to you, did you hit back? What could you acknowledge and say next time?

Verses cited

Frequently asked questions

What does "sharing in the gospel" mean in 1 Corinthians 9:23?

For Yukiko Miyashita, the gospel is Jesus Christ himself. Sharing in it is not limited to being saved and forgiven: Paul, already saved, still speaks of it. It means living Christ's freedom, love and way of life as your own, every day, so that they can be seen concretely in this world.

How can Paul be free and a slave to all?

Christ's freedom is not living as you please. It is humility: Jesus makes himself zero and considers the other as a hundred. Because Jesus humbled himself for us, we share in his freedom. It is this freedom that allows Paul to make himself a servant to all after meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus.

Why is Christ's love tied to the cross?

God did not say "come all the way to me": he came down into our world, to the deepest human suffering, the cross. According to the preacher, to love is not to pull the other person toward yourself, but to go down to where they are and stay at their side, as Jesus did for us.