Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenge. Today is Thursday, so it’s the day we try to apply and live out what we’ve been learning all week. We’ve been looking this week at how followers of Jesus are meant to treat their bodies as a temple for the Holy Spirit. As something that doesn’t belong to us, but that belongs to God. That is something that God uses to have a physical presence here on earth. That’s how we’re meant to see our bodies. It’s a wholly new way of seeing our bodies because up until we became followers of Jesus, we were probably tempted to see our bodies as our own. As something that nobody had any businesses influencing how we use but us.
But Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, makes it clear that our bodies are not our own. They were bought at a price. The price was Jesus’ blood shed on the cross, so we want to take our bodies really seriously because they were bought at a very high price. The price of God coming to earth as one of us. Taking on a body of his own and then sacrificing it for us and our bodies.
When we do take what God has given us, our bodies bought at a price, and we abuse them. When we over indulge, when we over consume or we have too little activity in our lives, when we abuse ourselves, that has very serious affects on our body. We know that when we over indulge, when we eat too much, we immediately don’t feel good. But then there are long terms effects as well. When we do that as a regular pattern, it leads to diabetes, to obesity, to all sorts of physical health concerns that have a real impact. Not just on our physical bodies, but on our emotional and spiritual health as well.
Drug and alcohol abuse have a physical toll on our body, yes, but also a spiritual and emotional toll as well. It clouds our minds. It clouds our judgment. It clouds our ability to focus and rely on God for our stability, our hope, our contentment in life. We very quickly learn to depend on a substance for our meaning in life, and it takes over and becomes our God.
The Corinthians attitude was that anything goes. Basically, as long as it feels good do it. We might add today in our culture as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody else, it’s fine, but that whole attitude, whether it’s the Corinthian 1 or Western 1 today needs to be countered. One way to counter it is by intentionally limiting our consumption in this world. In a world that tells us we can and should have everything with no limits, what we can do as followers of Jesus is actually put limits on our consumption.
One way Christians have long done this is by fasting. By intentionally setting aside periods of time, like one that’s coming up, lent. 40 days before Easter, minus some Sundays, was the traditional time that Christians intentionally limited their consumption. People do it in traits way today by “Oh, I’m not going to eat chocolate.” Or, “I’m not going to drink coffee.” But in a larger sense, Christians were meant to actually refrain from eating. From eating during the day or from eating certain foods. Christians were intentionally limiting themselves and it had not just a physical impact on their bodies, but a very real and spiritual impact.
When Christians fast, they identify with those around the world who don’t have food to eat. Who don’t choose not to eat. They simply have nothing to eat. It’s not a choice at all for them, and so the Christians can intentionally choose to identify with them and understand a bit better what’s going on in the life of somebody with too little food to eat.
Fasting also has a very real spiritual impact in that it reminds us that we are not our own. That our food is not something we’ve earned, something we’ve created, but rather something that God has put on this earth through powers completely outside human control. God has made food available to us in this earth. He makes the sun shine and the rain fall. Willingly breaking our daily, weekly routine of consumption can remind us of what it’s like not to have God, and to remind us that the rest of our lives are completely reliant on God whether we realize it at the time or not.
It’s often in fasting that people find their ultimate strength is truly in God. They find they’re able to worship God in a new way because they are focused solely on him. The emptiness in their stomach quickly gives way to reminding them of the emptiness that would be in their lives without God. It’s a great way to focus your thoughts on God and to recognize his place in your life, and I encourage you to do it. It’s actually going to be our challenge for you this week. To set aside some time this week to fast. That might look like skipping a meal or it might look like skipping something else you find yourself over dependent on in this life. You find you’re watching too much TV and it’s preventing you from having some physical exercise in your life, then fast one night a week from television and do something physical instead.
If you’ve been finding you’re overly reliant on something like alcohol or caffeine or some other substance, then take a break from it. Find a way to break that cycle of dependence and learn to depend on God instead. If it’s something that’s truly awful for you, like dependence of a substance overly dependence on alcohol or a drug, then break that cycle completely and get some help doing that. You won’t be able to break it just by taking a day off. But if it’s something like caffeine or an occasional drink that you want to take a break from, then take a break to remind yourself of your dependence on God. Then moving forward, maybe, continue to enjoy what God’s created, but not as the center of your life. Not as the source of hope and contentment, but rather as just one thing to enjoy that God happens to have created in this world among many.
Challnge: Try fasting. Not just once, but try to make it a regular thing in your life by skipping a meal once a week or once a month, or think ahead to when lent starts. I’ll remind you in these challenges of that, but think ahead to when lent starts and what you’re going to do during those 40 days before Easter to focus yourself more on God and his provision for you, and his having bought your body with a price. The price being his own body dying on a cross and how you’re going to honor that, rather than using your body to pursue all sorts of things in this world as if they were God himself.
So we’re going to fast to focus on God as our ultimate source of contentment, of nourishment, of everything we need in this life. Here is your challenge: What do you find yourself depending on, more than is healthy? Take a fast from it, and use that opportunity to think “Big Picture,” about physical changes that are going to help you grow on dependence and Christ alone.
Have a great day putting that into practice. Might to be today that you do it, but it might be today you decide when and how you’re going to do it. Maybe discuss that with your friends from the train or bus or from work or from home. Discuss together how you’re going to do that and how you’re going to support and encourage one another when it gets hard. Have a great one. I’ll see you tomorrow as we pray and reflect about this. Bye for now.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
Loading Content...
Share a Link to this Message
The link has been copied to your clipboard; paste it anywhere you would like to share it.
Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan your host of the Daily Challenges. Here we are in nature. And that's because this week we're studying how following Jesus resets our views of nature, the natural world around us.
And what did Jesus say directly about nature? Well not a lot. There's a time where he kind of admired the lilies of the field and the birds. Other times he calmed nature like calming a storm. He clearly had control over nature.
Jesus also withdrew to natural places when he needed a quiet moment of prayer. He clearly enjoyed the opportunity to have undistracted time with His Father. And nature was the place to do that.
It doesn't seem Jesus had anything against nature. There was a time He cursed a fig tree. But that was very much a symbolic act, showing how the people of Israel, the tree that they represented and the temple that was their connection to God were starting to wither away. And that their time was coming to an end. That was what he was showing with cursing the fig tree. It wasn't that he hated trees and thought they had no place in the natural world that He'd created.
So to really get a good sense of what Christian faith has to say about nature, we have to look to one of Jesus' first followers, one of the first church leaders, who was named Paul. When he wrote a letter to the church that was meeting in Rome, called the Letter to the Romans, here's what he had to say that's really instructive about the importance of the natural world and how it fits into the big story that we keep studying here at Redeem the Commute.
"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."
Well there's a tendency in our modern world and in some world religions to really think of nature as being perfect. To think that nature is this perfect and uncorrupted, innocent reality. And that we humans are a bit of a virus or a parasite within it. I think what Paul makes clear, though, in this Letter to the Romans is that there is something wrong with the natural world around us. It's not as it should be. And that's not just a functional thing where we have simply abused it and done nothing else wrong. He says it's very much connected to human corruption and rebellion against God. That our human corruption and rebellion against God has led to the corruption of nature and that this wasn't the fault of nature itself. He uses a lot of really passive language there, to say that nature was subjected to something. And it became futile. He's using some very submissive language there to say this happened to nature.
And it happened to nature because of the human rebellion against God, but it started with a man named Adam. The first man, Adam, rebelled against God. And this had an impact, not just on his own life, but on all of humanity to follow and then on all of creation around him. There's something wrong with us and now there's something wrong with the world too.
But Paul also makes clear that creation is waiting for something and so is humanity. We're waiting for redemption. Redemption is a great word. That's why we named our church Redeemer Church and our main outreach Redeem the Commute. We love the word redeem. Because redeem suggests that there's great value in something that's not being realized right now. I like to think of a gift card. It's a piece of plastic that holds within it some great value. You could have a $200 gift card contained within a piece of plastic. And what you have to do is you have to go to the store in order to redeem its value, in order to release all that value. In order to release all that value, in order to turn it into a DVD player or a computer, or whatever it is. You have to release all that pent up potential.
In the same way we humans were created for something amazing and wonderful, as part of an amazing and wonderful creation. God had great plans for us. God created us for a relationship with Him, created us for a relationship with one another and with the natural world around us. There is huge and wonderful potential in the human race. And yet because of our rebellion against God, our sin, a lot of that potential is not being realized right now. It's all locked up and needs to be redeemed. And that's why Paul says we humans and the natural world with us are waiting to be redeemed. When humans are redeemed, he says we'll be the sons of God. It'll be clear that we were created to be the children of God. And even though we've rebelled against God and pushed ourselves out of His life, He still wants to adopt us back into His family.
Creation itself, the natural world around us, the animals, the plants, the structure of the world itself, Paul says is also waiting for our redemption so it too can be redeemed.
We humans got ourselves into this mess by rebelling against God using our free will to push Him out of our lives. And so this is our problem to fix. And that's why since a first Adam, a first man, broke the world, a second Adam, a second man, who represents all of humanity, needs to fix it. And that's what God has done in coming to earth as Jesus Christ. What Adam broke, Jesus fixed.
There's great hope in this, and it's not just a spiritual kind of idea about what might happen in the future somewhere else. What Paul is doing is very much rooting the reality of our sin and our redemption that needs to follow in this physical world. This isn't just a spiritual thing that, oh, someday our hearts are going to change and that's it. No, he says our hearts will change and our whole body will change and the world around us will change when we are redeemed by Jesus Christ.
This is very much connected: the physical world, the spiritual world. There is no disconnect. The Kingdom of Heaven isn't some place far off in the clouds disconnected from the natural world here. The natural world isn't something to be hated or thrown away or disposed. It's very much connected to God's plan for the world, for God's plan called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. And followers of Jesus, having been reset by Jesus Christ, are invited to start practicing that now, to start practicing the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. As Jesus said, "as it is in heaven." So we're supposed to practice a little bit of heaven right here in the physical world. What does that look like? Well, we'll see later this week what that might look like in practice.
And in the meantime I've got a question for you to think about and hopefully discuss with others who you know are also watching these videos every day. Or maybe you can invite some friends to do that as well, to start watching the videos on the same days as you. And when you do come together and have a spare moment, you can discuss what you've been learning.
Question: What about this passage gives you hope? Have you ever seen the natural world groaning? Does this give you hope that someday that groaning ends?
Have a great discussion. I'll see you tomorrow.
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.
