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.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
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Hi, welcome to Redeem The Commute. I'm Ryan your host of the daily challenges. Normally, we follow a weekly rhythm that helps us explore a different topic and how following Jesus impacts topic. This week's going to be a little different. We're going to be taking an opportunity to just see where we are as a community.
Now, you probably know us by mobile app and website for busy commuters, but we're also trying to become a church community. As we explore what it means to follow Jesus as individual people engaged in a busy lifestyle, I want to make sure that we're not completely disconnected from one another, and that even though we're usually quite scattered as a community we want to take time to gather as well.
As a gathered community we want to make sure that we are committed to some of the same things in common. That's why through this week and this week alone, it's going to be kind of a special week. We're going to be looking at each of the things our community is committed to one by one, and see how we're doing as a community by hearing the stories of individuals who are part of our growing online community or our in person courses who are seeing their lives changed. We hope that will inspire you to see some transformation in your own life as well.
Now, the five things that we're committed to as a community start with being committed to growth and discipleship. We have some common content to learn together. We also want to be committed to God and worship, committed to generosity in our resources, committed to Grace in our lifestyles and witness, and finally committed to groups in community.
Today's Tuesday, so we're going to continue in our series looking at the five things that Redeem The Commute is meant to be committed to as we become a church community called Redeemer Church. Yesterday, we looked at how we're going to be committed to growth and discipleship, some common learning content, and then today we're looking at how we're going to be committed to groups. How we're going to try to become a community who spend time together, who learn in gathered mode but also in scattered modes.
Gathered mode is when we gather together in groups, in groups big and small. Sometimes that looks like a course. Sometimes it looks like a small group that meets regularly just to study the challenges together. Sometimes that looks like a large group setting like say, our parenting course or one of the larger scale courses we run like Christianity 101.
Each day we're going to introduce a story of somebody, a real life person who's part of the Redeem Community who's being transformed in the area we're exploring. Today, since it's groups gathering, we're going to talk about the story of one woman who came to us having had some bad experiences with church in the past, really didn't want to have anything to do with a church community anymore having had some bad experiences, but was still interested in exploring learning about God and Jesus. That still mattered very much to this person, just wished it could be explored without the baggage of the church community attached to it for her.
In the end, even though I wasn't able to meet with this person for coffee for a long time, we were able to finally meet up when she came to the Christianity 101 course that we ran live in [Wimpy 00:03:37] last fall. Yes, she learned some good contents, some good discipleship content, but I think what mattered most was being exposed to other people who were learning to follow Jesus at the same time. That included me, the person teaching the course, the person facilitating her table group and also those who were sitting at her table.
That experience of gathering together with others and exploring the same kind of discipleship content can be really transformative because God never intended for anybody to try to follow Jesus alone. There's really very little evidence in the Bible that anybody can do that. There's one person, John, who gets exiled to a desert island, and I suppose you could say he was somebody who'd follow Jesus alone, but other than that everybody in the Bible who's following Jesus has a community from which to do it. Seems to be a really essential part of following Jesus.
Even though that's hard for us as a community of busy commuters, we want to make sure that we've got some opportunity, not just to be scattered all the time but to be gathered as a community together.
A lot of people, like the woman whose story I just told you, start out connecting with community through a large scale course like Christianity 101 or a parenting course, but those courses all have end dates attached to them. Following Jesus is meant to be a lifelong pursuit.
The most sustainable group to be a part of is a small group. A small group is a group that meets regularly, usually to study the Bible, worship God together in prayer, to serve their community in some way and just to have a good time and grow in fellowship with one another. That's what a small group is all about and they're meant to do that not just for a limited time, but as a regular ongoing rhythm in sync with their lives where they're able to make that a sustainable part of following Jesus. Where they can encourage each other and also challenge each other, depending on what's happening.
I think it's a really essential part of following Jesus. It's a really essential part of being in a church community. Not just to go to big services and big courses, but to have a small group pf people who look after you. If say, life is getting difficult, somebody notices if you're missing. Somebody knows to bring you a warm meal if you're sick. Those kinds of things. That happens best when you've got a few people gathered together on a regular basis to study, have a good time, pray together and to serve their community.
In a lot of church communities, small groups are organized in a pretty top down fashion. There's an organized list of groups that are there that you can join. Sometimes they're capped and you can't join because one is too full, and sometimes they start new groups and are looking for people to join. What really makes Redeemer unique is that we're trying to become a community of organic small groups. Groups that aren't organized from the top down but rather groups that you organize yourself. I think you've got the best connections in your life to those who are best going to support you and challenge you as you learn to follow Jesus. They're probably already your friends or co-workers or people you know from the daycare or the commute. Whatever places you find yourself in life, you're probably connecting with people already who could be helping you follow Jesus.
We want to encourage you to start your own small group with your own people. Not to jump out of your comfort zone and meet a bunch of new people, but rather to connect more deeply with those you already know.
If you're organizing a small group of people to study our challenges, it's easiest if you meet later on in the week because you'll already have seen all our challenge questions at the end of each day, but if you're going to meet earlier in the week just let me know. We're going to have a special study guide available on our website each week where you can find all the study questions for the week. So if your small group meets earlier you can still discuss together how you're learning to follow Jesus through our challenges.
Because of our organics small groups model things are really flexible. I know some of you are meeting together in groups. I've seen you register them on the website. Others among you are just doing it on the fly. Whenever something really grabs you and you want to discuss it with somebody else, you just find the nearest person you know and discuss it with them. Either way is great. What matters most is not exactly what structure you're using but that you are meeting regularly with others in a group with some consistency, and that you're able to be well rounded enough as a group where you're not just learning together, but you can pray for each other as well. That Friday is part of your routine and also that you are finding some way to serve and give to the community around you. That's an important part of being a church community as well.
I've talked mostly about the gathering in small groups mode, but gathering also happens as a large group. We've got opportunities to do that in some of our larger courses like our parenting course that's starting right at the end of this month. Love for you to join us. Even if your parenting is pretty stellar, it's an opportunity to learn a little bit more but also an opportunity to connect with other parents who are part of The Redeem The Commute Community. It'd be a great chance to make some connections that might turn into a small group for you, studying the course regularly.
Another model that we're going to use is overtime, we're going to start gathering together as a church community regularly for worship. We'll talk about that later this week, but a big component of when we have a large group gathering like that is that we'll just have a good time. It's really been the focus of our group gathering so far. Things like our outdoor movie night, the Easter egg hunt that we recently sponsored. These are all just fellowship events, opportunities for people to gather and have a great time before we go deeper and start to worship God together, study the Bible together and so on.
Attached to everyday of content this week we've got a special challenge for you to take on related to the commitments we have as a community to one of these five "G" words. Today being, "gathering," my challenge for you is to let me know, first of all, if you are part of a group regularly or not. We've got a little one question survey today right at the bottom of today's content, where you can let me know if you are part of a group community regularly studying this stuff.
If you're not part of a group yet, you can also use that survey to let me know if you'd like to be part of a group. If I know of one meeting in your area or people like you, then I might be able to connect you with a group that would be a good fit or start a group. If you've got people in your life who you know you could be discussing this stuff regularly with, I'd love to help you get started with them. If you're nervous about maybe leading a group like that, you've never done that before, just get in touch with me through that little survey. I'd love to be able to give you a bit of coaching in leading some small groups. There's a lot of great resources out there and I'd love to help get you in touch with them.
That's your challenge for today. Hope you have a great time putting that into practice and discussing it with your group or developing your group in the first place. Don't forget we're reading the Bible in sync as a community. Check the website or today’s app to see today’s Bible reading, and we've got a parenting course starting soon, April 30th. Visit our website or app's live events listing to see more information and to RSVP because it would be a great way to get connected with others and a great course where you'll have a lot of fun.
