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 family.

So what is family for, if following Jesus comes first in someone’s life?

Does this mean not loving family at all?  No way.  Here’s how Pastor Tim Keller put it: “If we have made idols of work and family, we do not want to stop loving our work and family. Rather, we want to love Christ so much more that we are not enslaved by our attachments.”

One Christian author, Stanley Hauwerwas said: For Christians do not place their hope in their children, but rather their children are a sign of their hope . . . that God has not abandoned this world.”

We can see this in how the Bible set out the requirements for an overseer – a pastor or bishop.   They were written by a church leader named Paul, addressed to his protégé, Timothy.

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church? (1 Timothy 3:1-5 ESV)

You can see where leadership is supposed to be practiced: at home first, then in the Christian community.  This isn’t saying every leader needs to be married – Paul himself was not.  But if a leader is, they need to be leading at a Christian home already.  The most important line is, “if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?”

A family is a miniature church of sorts.  Martin Luther said centuries ago ago: “A house is actually a school and a church, and the head of the household is a pastor in his house.”

Family is a place to learn essential skills for Christian living, learn to follow Jesus.  This is one reason among many churches baptize children.  We are celebrating that they are starting school, not graduating.  A Christian family commits to teaching the basics of following Jesus when their child is baptized.

Family becomes a training ground for the kingdom of God.  How does that look in pracitce?  Look at one example from ancient Israel that surely informed early Christians as well:

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Their faith was meant to be everywhere in family life, so children encountered it daily.

Question: How do this?  What skills do you think are essential for Christians, and learned in the family?

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - February 19, 2014

Wednesday - Change It - Reset Body and Food

Reset

Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host of the Daily Challenges. Today’s Wednesday, so it’s the day we try to let our thoughts be challenged and transformed by the words of the Bible that we saw yesterday. This week, we’re looking at how following Jesus resets our view of food and the body. We saw yesterday how God didn’t give us things in this world, like food, or our bodies, or any other resource we have, for unlimited use and abuse. When we do that, what happens is it can become something to be worshipped. It can dominate our lives and control what we do and how we do it. Just think, if we allow food to become the center of our lives, if we pursue food to excess … we keep trying to find emotional stability, or love, or whatever it is, through food … it very quickly destroys our lives. It very quickly controls our lives. You just look at some of these stories of people who weigh hundreds or almost a thousand pounds, who are confined to their homes. Food has absolutely come to dominate their lives. It determines what they can do for a living, if anything. It determines when they can leave their house. Food has completely consumed them, even though they thought they were the ones consuming food. It’s an extreme example, but this can happen in smaller ways in all of our lives. When we take something in this life and we assume it’s ours to enjoy to unlimited excess, it very quickly takes over. It controls us. To use the language of idol worship, when we take something in this life and we pursue it to unlimited excess, we’re basing our lives around it. It’s like we’ve begun to worship as our god. Since it is just something physical in this world, that’s idolatry, whenever we take something God created and we pretend it’s Him. God has always given us limits on the resources that he’s given to us as a gift. First example was in the Garden of Eden, when God created a garden with all the food that the humans He put in that garden could ever need. He said, “Don’t eat from that one tree, of the knowledge of good and evil.” God gave a limit, that this world wasn’t created for us to destroy and overrun. It was created for us to live in under God’s care and guidance. When humans went ahead and ate that fruit they weren’t supposed to eat, they were jumping out from under God’s care and guidance, and saying they wanted to worship themselves, and their decadence, and their feelings of contentment, and their feelings of power, more than God. Later in the history of the Bible, we see the nation of Israel being given all sorts of explicit instructions by God, especially around food. What kinds of foods were safe for them to eat, what kind of foods were unclean. Some of those laws seem arbitrary to us today, but we can see how, looking back, they were made to preserve the Israelite people to be God’s people through history. God had a plan for them, and food was at its center. Limits on food were at the center of God’s laws for that people. God wanted them to know that they were under God’s care and provision, and under God’s love as His chosen people. Part of that was symbolized in how He gave them limits on their consumption of food. Paul reminds the Corinthians that they were bought at a price, kind of like the Israelites were brought at a price when God led them out of Egypt, out of slavery into freedom. The same way, he’s saying, Christians in Corinth, you were bought at a price. He uses the language of ransom, somebody paying the ransom, not to free somebody who was kidnapped, but to free somebody with such a debt they could never repay it on their own. Somebody would come to a market, find somebody like that, and buy them out, buy them essentially as a servant, and say, “I will release you from your debt. You don’t have to pay that debt to other people, that now you work for me. You can pay it off by working for me.” Kind of like when at a restaurant, somebody can’t pay their bill, they might end up doing dishes in the back until it’s all paid off. Paul uses the language of ransom. He says, “Corinthians, you have been paid for a price,” reminding them of that, to remind them that their bodies are not their own. They didn’t create themselves. They didn’t buy themselves. God created them. Even when they rebelled against God, God bought them back with His own blood by coming to Earth as Jesus Christ and dying for us. Jesus bought our debt for us, paid it off, a debt we could never repay on our own. We so separated ourselves from God through something called sin that we could never get back to Him on our own. The ultimate sign of that separation was our death, our spiritual and physical death being the final end of our lives. Jesus took that debt upon Himself, He took death upon Himself, die for us, so we could have freedom. He paid the price to free us, not to have unlimited freedom and just run off, and run amuck, and do whatever we wanted, but so we could now work for Him. He paid the price that we needed to pay. He paid our bill here at the restaurant so we could now work for Him. When the Corinthians, or we, abuse our bodies, when we don’t treat them well today, what we’re doing is we’re basically pretending they’re our own. That we weren’t bought at a price but that we own everything we have, that we created it all from nothing, that we’re essentially God. That’s why Paul wanted to remind the Corinthians they were bought at a price. You are not God. You owe a debt. Your freedom was bought at a price. Your bodies were bought at a price. Treat them as if they were precious, knowing how much you lost before and how much you gained through Jesus Christ. Followers of Jesus don’t have the luxury of pretending our bodies are our own. We always need to remember that we were bought at a price by Jesus. Following Jesus resets everything, including how we view our bodies and food. There’s another line from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Shortly after Paul applied this whole food argument to sexuality, he concluded by talking about our bodies in a very specific way. He said, “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, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” This whole body-is-a-temple thing is a common line for bodybuilding guys to remind people around them, especially women, that their body is a temple and should be worshipped. No, the temple was never made to be worshipped. For the Jewish people, the temple was a building where God’s physical presence on Earth was going to reside. God was the one to be worshipped, not His building. When Paul says “your body is a temple,” he’s reminding them that since they were bought at a price, the Holy Spirit now resides in them. God’s spirit is now in them. Their body is a temple. All the reverence that was once shown to the physical building of the temple now needs to be shown to their physical bodies, since God resides in them and God bought them. Their bodies now belong to God as followers of Jesus. 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. Here’s the question. Question: How should a Christian treat their body differently, since it is a temple for the Holy Spirit? How can we show reverence and respect for the body as a temple bought by God, and not our own? 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.

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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