Hi! Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the Daily Challenge. Today’s Tuesday; it’s the day we explore in the Bible the topic that we introduced yesterday. We’re in a series called, “Reset” right now, looking at how deciding to follow Jesus resets some really important areas of our lives. We’ve looked at several and this week we’re looking at how it resets our view of food and our body.
We’re going to try to understand it using some of the words that Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. The letter is called 1 Corinthians. He wrote the following when trying to relate how we view our bodies in respect to food and how we view our bodies with respect to sexuality. Here it goes, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be dominated by anything. Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.
The very beginning of what Paul had to say there was actually a quotation, it’s kind of hard to tell when I’m just reading it out loud, but if you’d seen it in print you’d see that, at least our modern translations of the Bible mark that out as a quotation. Paul was quoting a very common saying in his culture, “All things are lawful for me.” You can imagine how that was used. People had very similar attitudes to people today, “You know what, anything goes.” “Do what feels right.”
Paul was using food as an example in this passage of how we view our bodies. Then, he applied it later on to sexuality. We’re going to look at that next week. It’s a little easier to talk about food and our bodies. It’s a little less emotionally charged. We can see some of the same principles at work.
Ever since the 60s in particular, western culture has been very permissive. Simply said, “You can do pretty much anything that feels good to you.” It’s almost unlimited, but most of us, if we really think about it, do want to see some limits. We’ll say, “You know what, do what feels good, do what you think is right as long as you don’t hurt someone else.” Or, “As long as you’re not an elected official.” Or, “As long as it doesn’t involve children.” You can go on. We want things to be as unlimited as possible in our culture, but generally, we recognize that it can’t be completely unlimited. There’s got to be some limit that, even if something feels good, we need to stop.
The reason that Paul talks about this is it seems that the Christians in the city of Corinth were very much adopting the same, “All things are lawful for me” as their own. As Christians they knew that they had been saved by grace alone, not through anything they’d done or not done, but simply because God loved them and wanted a relationship with them. They understood the concept of grace, but then it seems they were running too far with it, saying, “Okay, since we are saved by grace, it doesn’t matter what we do.” “Since we don’t have to earn God’s love by following his law, we don’t have to follow his law at all. All things are lawful for us.”
They were kind of taking God’s amazing gift of grace and abusing it, taking it places it was never meant to go. They were using it as a license for all kinds of things and Paul uses the example of how they were just being gluttons to illustrate how they were using and abusing their bodies in other ways. We’ll talk about that next week, but for now let’s just think about the gluttony aspect of it. It’s clear that they were abusing themselves. They were taking the bodies God had given them and using them in ways that God had never intended. They were trying to use God’s gift of grace as justification for that.
Paul was willing to agree to a point and say, “Yes, all things are lawful for us.” “We don’t need to be saved by following God’s law anymore, but that doesn’t mean there are no limits.” What happens is, if we try to consider something completely unlimited in our eyes, “We can eat as much as we want.” “We can do as much sexually as we want.” All these kinds of things like that. When we take license with no limits, we very quickly become dominated by what it is we think we’re there to enjoy. That’s why Paul used that language. “Yeah, okay, all things are lawful, but I will not be dominated by anything.”
When we leave the domination of the law for grace, we have make sure we continue living under grace and we don’t become bound by some other system of laws, or by something else. For example, I know a friend who found himself, at one point, in his lowest point in life, homeless and on the streets with a drug problem. He eventually found his way out of that life, but it was amazing to see what a shop-aholic he became. He left addiction to drugs for addiction to shopping and spending. It could be equally damaging in his life if he continues to spend like that in ways he can’t afford. It can still ruin his relationship. It can still ruin his relationship with God. It can still ruin his life. He’s just traded one domination for another.
The question is, if we have to be dominated or owned by something, what’s it going to be? What’s the best thing to devote our lives to? What’s the best thing to pursue above anything else? If it’s not going to be food, if it’s not going to be sexuality or drugs, what will it be, since it has to be something? We will always trade one thing for another. We can’t be completely free to enjoy unlimited things in life. That’s not what they were designed for. So, what will it be?
Paul is suggesting that for the Christians in Corinth, it’s meant to be their devotion to Jesus Christ. That’s meant to be the number one thing in their life. What that leads to is the resurrection of the body. It’s a term that Christians have long used to describe that what we’ll pursue in this life, what we’ll have in the next. If we pursue a relationship with God, we’ll have a relationship with God after death as well. If we’ve avoided, then we won’t have it. But we want it, right? In the same way what we do with our physical bodies matters now.
If we see them as God’s, something to be treated as if they belong to God and used for God, then after death, we can expect our bodies to be raised. It’s clearly something we’ve been pursuing in this life, something that will belong in the next, kind of why Paul says something about stomachs, he says, to elaborate on the saying tha t all things are lawful, he says, “The stomach was made for food and food for the stomach, but God will destroy both.” What he’s saying is that there are some more important things than just filling our stomachs today. We want to treat our bodies as if they belong to God today. We want to treat our bodies as if they matter. We want to treat our bodies as if they matter forever and they will be with us forever, that this isn’t just about feeling good for the moment.
That’s something I want you to consider as you discuss with some friends what you’ve learned today.
Question: “How does what we eat and do with our bodies impact our resurrection bodies?” “What does it tell God about our interest in heavenly bodies when we abuse our physical bodies now?”
Well, have a great discussion. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
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Hi, welcome to Redeem The Commute. I'm Ryan, your host to the daily challenges. Normally, we follow a weekly rhythm that helps us explore a different topic and how following Jesus impacts that topic. This week is going to be a little different. We're going to be taking an opportunity to just kind of see where we are as a community. You probably know us as a mobile app and website for busy commuters, but we're also trying to become a church community. As we explore what it means to follow Jesus as individual people engaged in a busy lifestyle, we want to make sure that we're not completely disconnected from one another and that even though we're usually quite scattered as a community, we want to take time to gather as well.
As a gathered community, we want to make sure that we are committed to some of the same things in common. That's why through this week, this week alone, it's going to be kind of a special week. We're going to be looking at each of the things our community is committed to one by one and see how we're doing as a community by hearing the stories of individuals who are part of our growing online community or our in-person courses who are seeing their lives changed. We hope they'll inspire you to see some transformation in your own life as well.
The 5 things that we're committed to as a community start with being committed to growth in discipleship. We have some common content to learn together. We also want to be committed to God in worship, committed to generosity in our resources, committed to grace in our lifestyles and witness, and, finally, committed to groups in community. We're going to be looking at each of those points one by one this week.
Today, being Monday, we're going to start by looking at growth in discipleship. Today, we're going to talk about the last of the 5 things we'll be committed to as Redeem The Commute becomes Redeemer Church. We talked about groups, generosity. We talked about worshiping God. We've talked about growth in discipleship. Finally, today, we're going to talk about how we can be committed to grace in how we live and how we speak, in our lifestyle and in our witness.
A few weeks ago, we shared with you the story of April. April was the first person to be baptized as a member of the Redeem The Commute community and Redeemer Church. She came to the Christianity 101 course after getting to know me through her work. When she first came to the course we held at All Saints' Church in Whitby, she was actually quite nervous to come. She didn't know what it would be like to come to a church. She was a little bit afraid to even come to the building. Her life and her encounters with churches in the past couldn't really be described as grace-filled. She'd found people in churches to be kind of judgmental and was afraid that her encounter with church people at this course would be similar. Thankfully, when she came to Christianity 101, she learned all about grace, that grace is a free gift that God gives us.
We describe that, GRACE, as God's Riches At Christ's Expense. She learned that we don't earn our place in God's kingdom. We don't earn our love from God through our actions, by being good, by being perfect, by being holy and godly, but rather through a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, by turning our lives over to Him, recognizing Him as our sole source of salvation. Then we have that relationship with God that's built on His unconditional love, His grace, His giving a free gift to us of a relationship with Him. From there, we can then become good and wonderful people through the power of His holy spirit, rather than under our own power. That's, in a nutshell, the amazing gift that Christianity is to the world, that it's not about we need to do for God, but rather about what God has done for us.
That was the message that April encountered when she took our Christianity 101 course, and I hope it's the message that you've encountered through our daily challenges, through our courses as well, a faith that is built on grace. Now, we took a video of April describing her encounter with grace as part of her baptism and you can watch that now.
So why were you thinking about you and your daughter being baptized? What was going on?
April: I'm finding out that it’s a big change and I wanted to embrace being Christian and embracing faith. I wanted to be able to be ... I wanted to be baptized, and I wanted my daughter baptized. I feel that my daughter was meant to be part of my life and part of my baby's life. Even at Christianity 101, church with you, I've learned that God works in different ways and sometimes you don't see it at first. Once you open your eyes and your heart to Him, you'll see that He is there helping guide you. The birth of my daughter, I found she helped me and my sister reconnect. We weren't in a good spot before as I was pregnant. With the birth of my daughter, it helped us reconnect, and I realized through your course, I'd have to go there for the week of grace, when you talked about grace, and it really opened up my eyes. It was a big turning point for me, and I saw that He was there helping guide me and my sister back to each other.
Ryan: Now, as part of her baptism service, we read a story from the Bible called the story of the prodigal son. You may know it. We've talked about it before in our challenges. It's a story where a man has two sons. One runs away, does his own thing, wastes all his money, and the other son stays at home and does good. We're preconditioned, usually, to think that he's the good boy, and the other one was the bad boy, and that these brothers are an example of how to follow Jesus and how not to, but in fact, we found that neither son was actually in a very good place with their father. They both seemed to think their father was a man of law. One thought he'd earned his father's love. The other one thought he'd lost it and wasted it when, in fact, their father loved them unconditionally. Through that story, we see how that father wants to have his sons back and will do anything to get them back, even undermining his own dignity.
That's what happened in the story, and we told that story because it was such a great illustration of April's life and April's return to God through her relationship with Jesus Christ. God simply wanted her back. See, no matter where she'd been, no matter what she'd done in her past, what mattered most when she came to that Christianity 101 course was where she went from here, how she was going to transform her life from here on in, not what she'd done in the past. That's our message for you, of course, and of course, we want that to be our message for others, as well, in our community, who learn what it means to follow Jesus through this mobile app and community.
The first Christians, following Jesus after his death and resurrection, were really a community known for their love and their grace. They could be counted on to care for those that nobody else would care for. The sickest of the sick were being cared for by Christians, and that's what really stood out to people. We want Redeemer Church, forming out of Redeem the Commute's mobile community, to be known for the same kind of grace, through our generosity like we talked about yesterday. We want people to ask questions and say, "What motivates these people? What kind of a story would lead them to be so grace-filled and so generous?"
In pursuit of us becoming a community known for grace, we'd love to hear your story of grace. You just heard April's story of grace on our baptism video there. I'd love to hear yours, so your challenge today is simply to tell me your grace story. Tell it to your group first. I hope you're working through our challenges with a group. If you're not, think of who could be part of that group. Share your grace story with them. How has grace changed your life? Maybe you used to be somebody who was highly religious, and you realized one day that wasn't going to save you. Only relying on God's grace. Or maybe you were somebody who tried to be as least religious as possible. You tried to burn all your bridges with God, and you realized that god was still running out to meet you like He ran out to meet his son in the story of the prodigal son.
I want you to share your story with us. There's a form to do that attached to today's challenge, where you can tell us your story. Make sure to include grace in it. We'd love to hear your story. Maybe to really step up the challenge, you could tell that story to somebody else, too — somebody in your life, somebody you work with, somebody from the train or bus, not somebody who you're already discussing what it means to follow Jesus with, but somebody who maybe would be hearing that story for the first time. Listen to their story first. Then, tell your story, and eventually, you'll find they're open to hearing God's story.
Have a great day trying to figure out where your grace story fits into your life and how you can tell it to me and then to somebody else. Don't forget, we're reading the Bible in sync as one community, and we've got a live parenting course coming up, which would be a great way to connect with some other parents who are trying to parent with grace in mind, as well. It's not easy, so join some other parents in discussing and learning what grace looks like in a family.
Have a great discussion. I'll see you next week when we start a brand new series. It's going to be focusing on the book of Acts in the Bible. We're going to be looking at it through the lens of it being a pioneer story, a formative story of how followers of Jesus first organized themselves into what we know as the church today. It's going to be a really interesting series, not only because of the interesting book of the Bible we'll be exploring but because we're looking at it through the lens of pioneers.
