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 view of sexuality and marriage.

Last week, we saw how following Jesus means we see the body and food differently, and how they are good things God created, but can be abused when used in the ways God didn’t create them to be used.

We also saw how following Jesus means his Holy Spirit lives in us, which is why our bodies can be called a temple. This means we can’t pretend to own our bodies, as followers of Jesus, but instead need to show reverence to God’s presence in us by caring for these bodies, using them as their creator intended.

This is going to be a helpful way to see our sexuality, as well. The passage from the Bible’s first letter to the Corinthians that we explored talked about food and the body as a temple, but Paul, the author, was not really making a point about food. He was using food as an example to show how the Corinthian Christians were abusing their gift of sexuality.

He challenges them not to be distracted, and think that sex is the most important thing in their lives, nor their source of identity, comfort or security. He wants them to stay focused on God, and see all other things in life through that lens. He wants them to think of themselves as people on a journey with a purpose, which necessarily means they will be different than those around them who are not on the same journey.

That’s hard in our world – particularly with sexuality, because we are a culture obsessed with sex, and it’s easy to forget there is more to us than biology! Some Christians or churches have responded by never talking about it, making it seem like sexuality and our bodies have nothing to do with God. But Paul takes neither approach; he says our bodies matter to God, because we matter to God.

See attached video:

Sex Is… from David Tate on Vimeo.

Sex is clearly on people’s minds. One survey asked Canadians how often they’d like to have sex, more than half of Canadians polled said they’d like at least twice a week. 20% of men said they’d like sex every day, but only 3% actually experience it.

There are some limits in people’s minds: In a Today’s Parent magazine survey, 82% of parents say sleep is more important than sex. The magazine readily admitted their sample was skewed heavily toward parents of young children, and primarily women.

On that note, fifty-seven percent of U.S. women would choose their mobile device over sex, according to another survey.

These represent some curious limits on how much sex people want, but God puts some serious limits on sex, that we’ll explore later this week.

In the meantime, here’s a question to consider:

Question: In what ways is our culture obsessed with sex? Think of commercials, businesses, events, etc. Does our culture place any limits on sex?

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.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - February 12, 2014

Wednesday - Change It - Reset Work

Reset

Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan your host for the Daily Challenges. It's Wednesday. It's the day we take the topic we've been exploring all week. We try to see how the bible's words on it challenge and transform our thinking. This week we're talking about how following Jesus resets everything including our views of work. We saw that yesterday in the bible by exploring a challenging passage one where Paul was writing to the church in a city called Colossae and he spoke directly to those who were bondservants, kind of a mixture of employees and slaves in our thinking today anyway, and those who owned them. The jest of what he was telling them was to act as if they were not wholly owned. Even though a slave was wholly owned by somebody else they were to act as if God owned them and to remember that those who thought they owned them on paper were their earthly masters not their real ones. The same way those who own slaves were to treat them with dignity and respect as human beings owned by God, not owned by another human being. Challenging stuff for us to wrestle with because of the ways these passages have been abused and used to condone terrible oppressive slavery, but also the way that it applies to our world today it's not always easy to see. That was my question for you yesterday to try to figure out how this actually connected with our world of employment in the 21st century. I think it's pretty true though to say that slavery is alive and well. It's alive and well for real when people are enslaved for sex trafficking and things like that or when they're paid extremely low wages overseas and oppressed and we don't even know it. We're just buying products and we don't know where they came from and who made it under what kind of conditions. Those are examples of modern day slavery. Another form maybe a bit closer to home we can be slaves to work. We can be slaves to our own work yes we can. There are some signs that Christian author and speaker Timothy Keller tells us to watch out for. One thing to watch for is if our work becomes our sense of security in this life. If we don't have a sense of what we would do if we lost our job. If everything underneath us would crumble. If we would have no foundation in life. If we feel that our work and our income is supposed to insulate us from life's tragedies then we need to be careful. Tim Keller says that he gets asked often by those in high level jobs and positions how terrible things can happen to them. People say life wasn't supposed to be like this. He says I have never heard a working class person say that. So many working class and poor people simply know that life is full of challenge and difficulty and tragedy and yet those with resources tend to think implicitly or explicitly that wealth and work can insulate us from life's reality. When our work becomes our sense of security we need to pay attention to what kind of work we're really pursuing. What our real goal in life is. If it is something eternal, unchanging and safe and solid and secure or whether it's something that simply has that appearance. The other thing that Tim Keller says to look out for is when our work begins to give us our sense of identity and confidence in life. He spoke about people he knew who because of their success in one area of life would pontificate at dinner parties about every other area of life about which they knew nothing. Their sense of confidence and authority in their work made them think that the whole of their being was completely knowledgeable about everything and completely confident and completely correct. We take our work one aspect of our lives and we make it the whole of our identity and that's very dangerous. The other way our sense of identity and confidence in ourselves can get all out of whack because of our work is when we start to think that we are our own saviors. That our work whatever we are a part of whether it's our work ourselves or our work as a human race can somehow save all that we've done wrong. That we can completely fix our environment and the destruction we've caused. That we can completely find ways to be at peace with one another and end all wars. When we think that we eradicate all disease. When we come up with these things that we think we can work hard enough to achieve what we're doing is we're putting ourselves in the place of God. We have thousands of years of human experience to show that we cannot save ourselves. Every time we get close to eradicating polio some other country has an outbreak. It's tenacious. It's like sin. Sin is tenacious as well when we think we're going to eradicate war. When we think we're going to eradicate famine. When we think we're going to eradicate any of these things that enslave us in this life we're starting to elevate our work to the level of God and we're saying that we can work hard enough. We can be good enough, perfect enough to save ourselves and it's a very distorted view of our work. If you've taken our Christianity 101 course you'll recognize some of those things I just said as what we call the consequences of sin in Christianity 101. Sin messes with our sense of identity. It messes with our self-worth. It pollutes our lives. I can go on, but when we take work and we elevate it to God level that's actually sin. Remember we defined sin last week as when we take something in this world even a good thing and we pretend it is our ultimate good and that's ultimately very bad for us. We do that with work a lot. In the passage we explored yesterday I see three things that Paul specifically advises the workers, the bondservants to do given their present situation. The first one he says is to keep working. He doesn't tell them to run away. He doesn't tell them to quit. He tells them to keep working. He doesn't want followers of Jesus to withdraw from every area of life except those that have somehow been blessed and considered holy. He wants followers of Jesus to be in every area of life working for his Kingdom so he wants them to stay where they are. Now we live in a different world where slavery is not a reality for most of us who are watching this video and in that case we actually do have the option of leaving. We just want to check our motives though. Are we leaving because we are enslaved to something dangerous and we need to escape it or are we leaving simply because we're tired, lazy, bored, running away from something that's difficult. We need to check our motives, but I definitely want to make sure that this isn't seen as a message saying slaves who are oppressed, who are being violently abused need to stay where they are because God says they should stay where they are and bless people somehow. This isn't meant to be used as justification for that. It is talking about a very different mode of slavery than what we would see around the world today or what we've seen in the last few centuries. We talked about that more on Tuesday. The second thing that Paul said the bondservants should do is they should work well. They should not just be people pleaser's, but they should actually genuinely work hard, work to do good work. The reason for that is that God created us to do good work. He said work was good. He gave humans jobs to do. He said it was good. God himself did work by creating the world. It was seen as work in balance with rest. What He wants us to do through the words of Paul and the Colossians is continue to work and continue to work well. Work as if those we work for are human beings who need us. Serve them as real human beings. Do our jobs in ways that show the dignity that's in every human being that makes the world a better place that builds the Kingdom of God. Whenever we can find work that is consistent with God's values for the Kingdom that's a good thing or whenever we can do our work in ways consistent with God's Kingdom that's a good thing too. Finally, he wants the bondservants to work for God to recognize they are not wholly owned by human beings. They are wholly owned by God and to work as if they work for God to see a higher purpose in everything they do. A higher identity in them than just servants. They are created in the image of God. He wants the bondservants to start living in God's Kingdom even as they live in the broken Kingdom of this world. Even as they live in a world that uses slavery for all sorts of terrible things He wants them to start practicing the Kingdom of God even if they can't escape that. He wants them to remember they are created for a different kind of world than the broken one we live in. Imagine how that would impact the life of an employee today. What difference would we see when they're working well and working for God. How would we work differently? Would the gossip change? Would the griping change? Would the stealing change? Would the laziness change? It sure would. As a challenge if we're going to be followers of Jesus in the working world we need to watch ourselves and say am I working or am I just going through the motions. Am I working well? Am I working to care for others and to be generous even to my boss? Even when they don't deserve it. Even when they use and abuse me. Finally am I working for God? Do I recognize that everything I do here is for my true owner God who created me and not for my employer, not for anyone else. This is between me and God and so I'll work well because God created work and it's good for me to do good work. You can see how connected all three of these things are. To continue working, working well, working for God. My question for you today is to think about how this looks in your work. What aspect of your work have you stopped doing that you need to start again? What aspect of your work have you not been doing well? How can you do it for God? Think through some of the aspects of your work and where that might apply. I gave some examples earlier. Maybe those apply to you. Maybe different ones apply, but think through the aspects of your work where you have been less than attuned to God's Kingdom. Don't do that alone. It's going to be hard so do it with a friend. Share this with somebody you know from the train or bus or from work or from the neighborhood. Make sure you're sharing these challenges. Start a little discussion group where you watch the videos wherever you are through the week and when you do come together in person you have something to discuss. It could be the start of a great friendship. Have a great discussion. Don't forget to read the bible on sync and I'll see you tomorrow.

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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