Hi! Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, you host for the daily challenges. These daily challenges are meant to help people explore what it means to follow Jesus even during our busy commuting lifestyle. If you’ve never looked into what that means in the first place, I’d really encourage you, check out our Christianity 101 course first. You can take it live in-person or through our mobile app; great introduction to the basic concepts of what it means to follow Jesus that we try to build on in the Daily Challenges.

Every day and week, we follow a rhythm to help us, as one community, learn what it means to follow Jesus even when we’re not physically together. Every Monday,we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday, we see what the Bible has to say. Every Wednesday, we allow ourselves to be challenged in our thoughts. Every Thursday, we try to apply it and live it out in our lives. Every Friday, we take time to pray and reflect on the topic. Saturday is a day for rest and then Sunday is a day for community. We’re going to start gathering together as one community soon. We just recently had a great baptism service and celebration where a number of our members came together in one place to worship God. We’re going to do that more and more often over this year. So, stay tuned for some of our upcoming gatherings.

We’re in a series right now called, “Reset.” We’re looking at how deciding to follow Jesus resets everything in our lives. We’ve looked at a number of areas that it impacts. This week we’re going to look at how following Jesus impacts our views of food and the body. That’s why I’m here in a Chinese buffet, a place where people indulge, enjoy a huge selection of food and can have as much as they like.

This kind of a topic about food and the body might surprise you. You might expect Redeem the Commute to be focused more on spiritual things, not having much to do with what we eat and what we do with our bodies, but the two are very closely connected. Tomorrow we’re going to see how the Bible says that these two are connected, but it’s probably something that you know from experience as well. Think of those times in life when somebody’s struck with a serious illness. You almost immediately turn to prayer. We have this sense that spirituality and our physical bodies are both connected.

Just look at people’s interest in yoga today. It’s amazing to see how people are longing for a way to connect spirituality and physicality in a way that Christianity has maybe neglected. Christianity does connect body and faith in a lot of different ways through things like the Lord’s Supper, breaking bread and wine, connecting Jesus’ death on the cross with actual bread and wine. There’s a physical sign of something amazing that happened a long time ago. Or, baptism where somebody’s washed cleaned spiritually, symbolized with water washing them clean on the outside. There’s a huge connection between the two. Maybe you can think of some others. That’s what I want you to think about today.

Question: I hope you’ll join with some other friends from the train or bus, or from the neighborhood, somebody else you can discuss our Daily Challenges with. Discuss with them today’s question, “How else do you think the spiritual and physical are connected for Christians?” What examples have you seen?”

Well, have a great discussion. Don’t forget, we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community. So, check our website or app to see what today’s Bible reading is. Have a great one. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - April 2, 2014

Wednesday - Change It - Reset Death

Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan your host of the Daily Challenges. Here we are in a cemetery because this week we're studying how following Jesus resets our views of death, and in fact, Jesus resets death itself. In yesterday’s passage, a Christian leader named Paul calls dead Christians “those who are asleep”. The suggestion is that they will wake up in the kingdom of heaven, and be no different from those who might be alive when the kingdom of heaven arrives fully. How does Paul figure? They will wake up because Jesus woke up. There is a direct connection. Jesus Died – definitely. We have lots of great textual evidence that matches science to say that Jesus definitely died, it was no mistake. See Christianity 101 for more! He spent Saturday in the tomb, and rose on Sunday. In that time in the tomb, he destroyed death’s power. Usually death is final, but Jesus treated it like a 3 day nap. Death is nothing to fear for one of Jesus’ followers. Paul asked elsewhere: death, where is your sting? He taunts it, knowing it has no power. Jesus’ victory is not just someone else’s victory to celebrate. He was the first, not the last, so we can follow him not just in life, but through death to new life. He doesn’t promise that we’ll never die a physical death, like the Thessalonian Christians apprently thought. But if we do, he will raise us. One pastor asked a child whose mother died: would you rather be run over by a truck, or its shadow. It’s shadow, because it wouldn’t hurt. Well, your mother has not been run over by death, but by the shadow of death. Regardless of whether we are alive or dead when the kingdom comes, it comes. We arrive there not by our own power, religiosity, etc. but by Jesus’ pioneering work on the cross. He went through death, conquering it first, and invites you to follow. But that’s just death, how does this impact life? You may know the song, “Live like you were dying”. The idea in that song, and else where, is that if you’re dying you waste everything you have, party it up, before it’s all gone and you’re over. But if death is destroyed by Jesus, death is now a state we pass through, so living like you were dying means living like every day brings you closer to God’s kingdom. That means using our resources wisely, no wasting them. It means preparing for the kingdom of heaven, so often described as a party, not just partying it up for a moment. For a Christian, living like you were dying means not taking the short view, but the long view of eternity. Question: How does Jesus’ death impact your own view of life, and death?

From Series: "Reset"

When our computers get bogged down and unmanageable, we know to hit a reset button to simply start over. Wouldn't a reset button be great in life? We know it would be complicated, with all our responsibilities and routines to consider, but imagine the freedom and refreshment of a new start in life! What would you do differently? What would you pay more attention to, and what would you ignore? How would you avoid getting bogged down and broken again? The great news is, in coming to earth as Jesus Christ, God has begun to "reset" our universe, our world, and even us. We're invited to start over with him, in what he calls his kingdom. We're invited to start a new life with a clean slate. What gets wiped clean, and lived differently, when God resets our lives? We'll explore how God resets these key areas of our lives: Reset: Goals Reset: Time Reset: Money Reset: Work Reset: Body & Food Reset: Sex & Marriage Reset: Family Reset: Compassion Reset: Nature Reset: Society Reset: Death Join us for the next several weeks, and invite God to reset your life.

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