Wednesday, November 17, 2010

November 17, 2010 (I Corinthians 5-11)

Paul is talking about sin in the church - primarily sexual sin. Hard stuff - how do you expel a Christian from the church because of sexual sin? I guess you are supposed to:

5:1 I can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. I am told that a man in your church is living in sin with his stepmother. 2 You are so proud of yourselves, but you should be mourning in sorrow and shame. And you should remove this man from your fellowship.

3 Even though I am not with you in person, I am with you in the Spirit. And as though I were there, I have already passed judgment on this man 4 in the name of the Lord Jesus. You must call a meeting of the church. I will be present with you in spirit, and so will the power of our Lord Jesus. 5 Then you must throw this man out and hand him over to Satan so that his sinful nature will be destroyed and he himself will be saved on the day the Lord returns.

6 How terrible that you should boast about your spirituality, and yet you liet this sort of thing go on. Don’t you realize that if one person is allowed to go on sinning, soon all will be affected? 7 Remove this wicked person from among you so that you can stay pure. Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us. 8 So let us celebrate the festival, not by eating the old bread of wickedness and evil, but by eating the new bread of purity and truth.

And then here is Paul's warning against sexual sin:

6:12 You say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is good for you. And even though “I am allowed to do anything,” I must not become a slave to anything. 13 You say, “Food was made for the stomach, and the stomach for food.” (This is true, though someday God will do away with both of them.) But you can’t say that our bodies were made for sexual immorality. They were made for the Lord, and the Lord cares about our bodies. 14 And God will raise us from the dead by his power, just as he raised our Lord from the dead.

15 Don’t you realize that your bodies are actually parts of Christ? Should a man take his body, which is part of Christ, and join it to a prostitute? Never! 16 And don’t you realize that if a man joins himself to a prostitute, he becomes one body with her? For the Scriptures say, “The two are united into one.” 17 But the person who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him.

18 Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body. 19Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself, 20 for God bought you with a high price. So you must honor God with your body.

But in that section, I also get more out of it than just the sexual sin part. Our bodies belong to God and He cares about how we take care of them. I can see in the passage above that it is easy to become 'a slave to food', and that is not good. I also know that I need to be more disciplined in taking care of my body by exercising. This is such a struggle for me. God, please help me!

There's one little verse again about the world:

7:23 God purchased you at a high price, so don’t be enslaved by the world.

And now a section for me, little miss know it all:

8:1 Now let's talk about food that has been sacrificed to idols. You think that everyone should agree with your perfect knowledge. While knowledge may make us feel important, it is love that really builds up the church. 2 Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn’t really know very much. 3 But the person who loves God is the one God knows and cares for.

Discipline - in all areas. If we could only think of this life down here on earth for what it really is - a race to earn an eternal prize.

9:24 Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win! 25 All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. 26 So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing. 27 I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.

God, help us to run the race with endurance - looking to You for daily strength.

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