I. St. Paul's words, "Be not ye the slaves of men," have an important bearing upon the exercise of the understanding. "Bought with a price" by one who claims, not one part, but the whole of you, not more the conduct than the will, not more the energies than the affections, not more the soul than the reason, it cannot be safe, it cannot be right, it cannot be honest to resign into another's keeping the exercise of the intellect upon matters of evidence or matters of doctrine; to make one man's view, or one man's thought, or one man's faith, serve for ten or twenty or a hundred others; to attach yourself to a school, or a party, or a system, in such sense that you yourself shall be absolved from the task of proving all things as a necessary preliminary to the other duty of holding fast that which not others but you yourself have found to be good.
II. That which is true of the understanding is true also of the conscience. There is a sanctuary within each one of us into which no minister and no brother can enter without presumption and without profanation. It is the conscience of the man in the sight of God it is that spirit of the man which no one knoweth but the man it is the secret shrine of motive and will, of memory and responsibility, and of the life's life. It may be instructed, it may be informed, it may be influenced, it may be moved; but in every aspect save one it is free no dictation and no direction can intrude within its precincts, for One is its Master, even Christ, and all else, even the ministers of Jesus Christ, are here not lords, but brethren. To establish over the individual conscience a right of inspection, or a right of discipline to lay down rules for its habitual or periodical self-disclosure to say without this there is no safeguard for the life, and no security for the death, this is to deny or to obscure the great characteristic of the gospel; this is to speak a word against the all-sufficiency of the Holy Ghost as the Light and the Guide, the Remembrancer and the Comforter, of Christ's people.
III. At common times, under usual circumstances, the Church's directory is the pulpit, and the Church's confessional the congregation. There, where the bow is drawn of necessity at a venture, the arrow flies to its mark the more felt because unseen. There, where the prayer of the preacher and the prayer of the hearer have jointly invoked the guidance which is omniscient wisdom, the voice behind will be heard saying again and again in each emergency of the spiritual being, "This is the way, walk ye in it." Independence of all save God is the prerogative of the conscience. Not in pride, but in deep self-knowledge of the difficulty of telling into any human ear the very thing itself that is, knowledge of the perils of spiritual intimacy, alike on the one side and on the other knowledge of the facility with which an indolent will may pass from seeking help to trusting in man knowledge, finally, of the infinite strength which comes into us by being quite absolutely alone with God in our confidences and in our struggles we shall feel, the weakest of us with the strongest, that on the whole, and with a view to the eternal future, we are best as we are, without confessor and without director save the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, one God blessed for ever we shall come back to the text, and think that it has a voice for us in this thing, "Ye were bought, each and all, with a price; be not ye servants of men."
C. J. Vaughan, Oxford and Cambridge Journal,Oct. 18th, 1877
I. Look first at the assertion, "Ye are bought with a price." This is one of the ways in which, in Scripture, the great effect of Christ's death in the room of sinners is described. In the words of the text the Apostle seems to say, "Ye are not your own," you belong, by right of His purchase, to Christ: your intellects are His to be instructed by Him; your consciences are His to be regulated by Him; your lives are His to be ruled by Him; absolutely and entirely you are His. Now at first sight that looks like a consignment of us to the most abject slavery; for no human oppression can thoroughly enchain the spirit. But here it must be remembered that what on the Lord's side is a purchase, is on the believer's side a voluntary consecration, and that the Master is not a man, but the God-man, with whom oppression is impossible. Thus it comes about, that the Divine ownership of us by Jesus is the charter of our deliverance from our fellow-men, and the paradox that the service of Christ is perfect freedom is made good.
II. Paul does not mean to say here that all manner of service of men is inconsistent with our ownership by Christ; we have only to read his exhortations to servants in his various Epistles to be convinced of that. What he desires to allege is that Christ's property in us emancipates us from abject slavery to men in every form which is inconsistent with that property. No man can deprive us of that which already belongs to Christ; and it is through the assertion of that principle by Christians that all the victories of religious freedom have been won in the world. The most absolute devotion to Christ is the most complete declaration of individual independence, even as the defiant rejection of Christ on this score of liberty issues in the most degrading form of slavery. These things may seem to be contradictory, but they are true, and they have often been demonstrated to be so in the history alike of individuals and of the race. Therefore choose to be ransomed by Christ that you may be delivered from servitude to men.
W. M. Taylor, Contrary Winds,p. 65.
References: 1 Corinthians 7:23. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xx., No. 1163; W. E. Collen, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 20; Preacher's Monthly,vol. vi., p. 118; H. Stowell Brown, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 208.