It’s not easy. It requires years of carefully tending the garden of your conscience. Or to use our original metaphor, it requires years of calibrating and recalibrating your conscience. It requires spiritual maturity, theological conviction, Christian love, personal discipline, and an unswerving commitment to the gospel. It should come as no surprise, then, that the paragraphs before and after 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 are all about self-denial and self-discipline for the sake of the gospel and the sake of the
