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 sexuality and marriage.

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. This is the same passage as last week, on food, but this time we’ll highlight how Paul used it as an example for sexuality gone wrong.

12 “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. 13 “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. 14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. 15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined[a] to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin[b] a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

Paul has heard what’s going on in the Corinthian community. They are notorious for prostitution, as a port city. They have a reputation for sexual promiscuity, since the temple to Aphrodite (the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality) was there, and temple prostitution a common thing.

Promiscuous and unlimited sex was quite common and accepted in that culture, something the Corinthians had within their rights, or at least knew they could get away with. But Paul isn’t worried about the City of Corinth and the rights of its citizens today, he’s worried about the City of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, and its citizens.

He wrote in Chapter 5 that a church member was sleeping with his stepmother. And from this passage, we can tell that church members are involved in prostitution as well, and he alludes to all sorts of other practices where sexuality has gone wrong.

Worse, it appears they’re justifying it using Paul’s teaching, using them like slogans. They are saying things like: All things are lawful for me! I can understand Paul saying words like that – he’d have been teaching about how Jesus fulfilled the law. They no longer had to try and make themselves acceptable to God by following laws, but Jesus’ death and resurrection meant that God had made them acceptable once again.

That is great news people need to hear: Christianity is not about a list of what’s wrong, and trying to fix that before we’re right with God.

The problem is they took that too far, and basically said that God’s grace, through Jesus dying on the cross, means anything goes! They were left with no law at all.

But Jesus only said he came to fulfill the law, not throw it away.

Jesus gift of grace isn’t about saying nothing’s wrong, but it’s about what is right, what we were created for and what God has done to allow us, through his power, to experience that once again. He invites us to begin practicing what is right now, in anticipation of the day when his work is completed and we live in his kingdom.

God created us from one ancestor, a’dam, and separated a’dam into two genders, male and female. In the first allusion to sexual intercourse in the Bible, sex is the rejoining together of what was once united as one, where there is potential to reproduce and extend God’s love to create other human beings. God’s original plan for us included sex as a good part of his creation, and a necessary one. But we and all humans have rebelled against God’s plan in numerous ways, pushed God from the center of our lives, and put other things there instead. Sex is a favourite – so many people act as if sex is the center of life, taking it out of its proper place and putting it in God’s place.

Remember, sin is simply when we take something good, pretend it’s the ultimate good, and it becomes very bad. Those who take sex out of context often experience the negative consequences in the moment or in hindsight. Sin can trap us. If you have ever tried to stop sexual sin on your own, you’ll know how impossible it is and that it has relational, emotional and spiritual effects for years, if not a lifetime.

But the good news is God has begun to transform our world into the kingdom of God, to reform the world as he originally intended it. He made it possible for us to practice life as God intended it, to fully experience all he created in all its goodness, which includes experiencing sex not as a simple biological act, as exercising our rights or as a false God. He made that possible for his followers by destroying sin, which had originally separated us from God and led us to rip sexuality from its context.

The bottom line for Paul: Having acknowledged God as creator means we are free to use our gifts, including our sexual bodies, as God intended them, rather than as we wish.

I’ve got a question for you to consider today and hopefully discuss with others you know from the commute, or from work, or from home.

Question: From this passage, how do you anticipate Paul sees God’s plan for humans to use their sexuality?

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 reading is. Have a great one. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - March 10, 2014

Monday - A New Idea - Reset Compassion

Ryan:Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan, your host for the Daily Challenges. Each daily challenges are meant to help us explore what it means to follow Jesus, even in the midst of a hectic, busy commuting lifestyle. If you've never explored following Jesus in the first place, I'd encourage you to start with our Christianity 101 course. It's a great introduction to the basic things that we build on in these challenges. We follow a daily, weekly rhythm to help us explore a different topic each week. Every Monday we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday we study in the Bible. Every Wednesday we see how the Bible challenges and transforms our thinking and every Thursday we try to live out and put into action what we've been learning all week. Friday is the day for prayer and reflection; Saturday, a day for rest; and then finally, Sunday, is a day for community, especially Christian community because it's hard to follow Jesus alone. We're going to be starting a brand new Christian community that meets in person regularly in Ajax starting this fall. Get in touch with me if you'd like to be part of the team that gets it off the ground. We're working through a series right now called "Reset." We're looking at how following Jesus resets our views of all sorts of things in life. We've looked at several already. We're coming close to the end of our series, but this week we're talking about how following Jesus resets our views of compassion. Now, this might seem a surprising topic to you. Why would we need to reset views of compassion? Surely if somebody is compassionate, they're already on the right track. They're already doing what Jesus would want. That's partly true but there's more to it. For example, I recently saw an ad in Facebook. The ad was for something called "No Piracy" and said, "Valentine's Day leave you broke? Get some of that cash back. Report unlicensed business software. Get paid." Now, paying for software is a great thing to do. Those who wrote it obviously need to put food on the table and they didn't write the software with the goodness of their heart. It's a business and it's important to pay the price of somebody who's done great work. However, you'll note that the ad isn't encouraging people to use licensed software and pay for it out of the goodness of their hearts. It's encouraging people to blow the whistle on businesses that are stealing software in order to get paid themselves. They have intentionally put the selfish pursuit of money upfront and said, "If you want money, if you're low on money at Valentine's Day, then you should really snitch on somebody." You see what's happening here. They're taking something that is good and noble but they're asking people to do it for the worst reasons possible. Think about it. Why does somebody steal software? Because they're being selfish. Because they want to save as much as they can. They want to use something without paying for it. They're stealing because they're selfish. Now, why does somebody turn somebody in for money? Because they're selfish. They're trying to counter selfishness with selfishness, and it doesn't really work. Now, we can run into a similar problem with compassion. When people are compassionate and caring for all the wrong reasons, it doesn't make it right. People can do good and kind things for others just to get some volunteering hours, to be seen as a good citizen, to raise their profile in a political campaign. You can imagine a list of reasons. Or they might be doing it for what they think of as good karma. I think if I do good and kind things for others, then they'll have to do good and kind things for me. Or what I've done won't go unnoticed and God of the universe or whatever will pay me back for my good work. This is why stories if compassion for just purely altruistic reasons are so refreshing to hear. There was a story just a couple of weeks ago about a man walking along the side of the 401. Some people have seen him walking through Scarborough and it was only when he walked through Ajax that a tow truck driver actually pulled over and asked him if he was okay. He found the man severely hypothermic, probably with frostbite, hardly able to communicate, not able to say why he was on the highway at all. He took the man, got him into his tow truck, and brought him to a church in Ajax before he was taken to hospital by ambulance. When the tow truck driver was interviewed he said he was just doing his job. Yes, I suppose he could say this was part of his job as a tow truck driver but not really. His job is to make money and he only makes money by towing cars, helping people out with vehicles, not people who happen to be walking along the highway. I'd like to think the fact he brought that man to a church was a sign that there was another deeper reason why this man cared enough to stop and help another. The fact he consider the church a good first place to go suggest maybe when he says he was just doing his job, he was saying he was doing his job as a Christian, a follower of Jesus, not just doing his job as a tow truck driver. I don't really know. I don't know the tow truck driver. I don't know his back story. What does it look like for somebody to care and be compassionate because it's their job as a follower of Jesus? We're going to see this week how Jesus challenges us to reset our views of compassion, at something we do to take advantage of others or to promote ourselves, and instead to see compassion as something we do simply because we are his followers; that it's part of our job as followers of Jesus. We're going to try to see that, but first I've got a question for you to explore. When have you seen someone show compassion for the right reasons and when have you seen them show compassion for the wrong reasons? What do you think might be the right reasons? Have a great discussion. 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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