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 17, 2014

Monday - A New Idea - Reset Nature

Reset

Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenges. We’re in the middle of a series right now called Reset, where we look at how following Jesus resets our thinking about various topics in life. This week we’re thinking about how Jesus resets our view of nature. The daily challenges are meant to help us explore what it means to follow Jesus, even in the midst of a busy commuting lifestyle. We have a rhythm that we follow each week to help us explore our topic. We introduce the idea on Monday, then Tuesday’s we study it in the Bible. Wednesday’s we try to let the Bible’s teaching sink in, and change and transform our thinking. Thursday’s we try to act out what we’ve been learning. Friday’s a day for prayer and reflection, and then Saturday’s a day for rest. Sunday is a day for community, because even when we are scattered and busy, it is important that we come together as one community to explore Jesus and what it means to follow him in one place. That’s why this Fall we’re planning to launch a new worshiping community in Ajax called Redeemer Church. Stay tuned for more information. When I say that following Jesus resets our view of nature, you may wonder where I’m going with this. Am I going to say that following Jesus means we don’t need to worry about the environment? That we’re all going to fly away to Heaven someday, so it doesn’t matter what happens here, this is just kind of a disposable world? Well, that’s actually not consistent with Christian belief, and we’re going to explore this week how Christian belief resets our view of nature in a new and unexpected way perhaps. I’m standing here in the beauty of nature. This is a place where a lot of people have moments where they feel particularly in awe of God. A lot of people say things like, “Oh, I don’t need to go to church. I can just worship God in nature.” There’s a lot of truth to that. We can worship God in nature. Nature is a place where we can really appreciate God’s handiwork as a creator. Where we can really see God as an artist. I think there’s more to worshiping God than that. Of course, that’s the importance of Christian community that we’re going to be trying to live out when we come together as Redeemer Church. That doesn’t diminish the importance of those God moments that we can have in nature. A few years ago, one of my favorite parts of my job was that I got to go on a hiking trip every year to the Adirondack Mountains with the counselors in training from a local summer camp. It was the highlight of my year because it was just something I love to do in the first place. The Adirondack’s are one of my favorite places in the world, just all sorts of mountains. It’s like a playground if you’re into hiking and rock climbing. We’d go there and we’d spend about three days. One day just kind of hiking in, and then two days where we’d do a big hike. The first year that we went, I had to think long and hard about how this was going to be more than just a physical exercise. How would we make this trip, since it was a church camp, how would we help this help us to open our eyes to how God had created the world around us, and how God was a part of our lives, including when we go on a hike like this? I found the Psalms of Ascent. They are some of the Psalms that you could find in the Bible, and there were particular ones that were known to be the Psalms that people said, or sang, as they climbed the mountain to the temple in Jerusalem. If they were headed to the temple, they were headed there to worship. What we did, is on our mountain climbing trip, as we hiked, we said these Psalms of Ascent. There were some of them that we just kind of timed out. Every time we took a break, we read one together and prayed. There were other times that I had a Psalms of Ascent ready in case we needed one. For example, somebody eventually did turn their ankle a little bit and got hurt. We had a Psalms of Ascent ready for that, that talked about God keeping us safe and helping us stay protected, and even talked about our ankles not being turned, so it was perfect for that. We were able to bring together our faith in the God who creates, with our enjoyment of what he’d created. We were able to make our hiking and climbing experience a spiritual experience. When we finally got to the top of the mountain, we stopped and we had Communion. We had, “a mountaintop experience,” is what people call them. One of those moments that I’ll never forget, and I know that the teenagers and the supervisors who were hiking with us will never forget it either. It was just incredible to have that moment of Communion with one another and with God, when it felt like there was nothing else to distract us, nothing else to separate us from God, but simply some air. That was my experience with God in nature. You can learn a lot from an experience like that. One base thing that I remember is recognizing that God hasn’t abandoned nature. God created something beautiful and said it was good, and it’s still good, and there’s still a lot of beauty in it. We don’t want to forget that as we try to figure out how to live in this world using the resources we’ve been given wisely. Well, we’re going to explore this topic a lot more this week, but I’ve got a question for you to think about, and I hope you’ll discuss it with other people you know, from the train, bus, or from work, or from home, wherever you connect with people. Question: Have you ever had a God moment in nature? A moment when nature pointed you to God and what God had done? Maybe share it with that person who you’re discussing our daily challenges with. What was it like? What did you learn? How did it change you? Well, have a great discussion. I’ll see you tomorrow as we study in the Bible the connection between God and nature. Bye for now.

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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