1 Corinthians 9:27

1 Corinthians 9:27. but (on the contrary) I buffet (or ‘beat down') [1] my body, and bring it into bondage as a slave into submission to his master. When he says, ‘I buffet my body,' he plainly means ‘his whole embodied self, ' as acting and acted on through the body. So viewed, he expresses his determination to beat down relentlessly all those unholy inclinations of which the body is the external organ.

[1] The verb means to ‘strike under the eye,' the part aimed at by the pugilist.

lest by any means, after that I have preached to others, I myself s hould be rejected judged unworthy of the prize.

Note. Here is a man who elsewhere expresses a confident and joyous assurance of his final salvation, while in this verse he holds forth his final perdition as equally certain, should certain indispensable preventives be neglected. Yes, his Christianity did not teach him that he was to be mechanically kept right, and passively landed on the eternal shore. God had given him, not only “the spirit of power and of love,” but the spirit of “a sound mind,” which led him, in the exercise of a sanctified common sense, to do as he taught his Philippian converts to do, to “work out his own salvation with fear and trembling,” and to do this not the less but only the more “because it is God who worketh in us both to will and to work” (Philippians 2:12-13). This is apostolic Christianity. But in luxurious times like ours the question may well be asked Is the estimate of living Christianity here given as inseparable from universal and continuous self-sacrifice, in supreme consecration to the one end for which we were “bought with a price” realized and acted on by those who have experienced its saving power?