The 260 Journey

Day 141

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 8

People see Christian maturity as I don’t mess up a lot like I used to. I see it differently. Maturity is when you see others before you see yourself. That’s what 1 Corinthians 8 is about. It’s an encouragement to live the Christian life wider and bigger. And by that, Paul means that our decisions and lives are to help others grow. How I parent, how I treat my wife, what I do with my free time, what I listen to, and what I watch is not just about me, but it’s to be an example to others. As A. W. Tozer said, “There are rare Christians whose very presence incites others to be better Christians. I want to be that rare Christian.”

At our church we have four services every Sunday, each with the same message. One of our elders had a conversation with me one Sunday when I wasn’t preaching but was at each service since I was participating. His words both encouraged and inspired me. At our 5 p.m. service, he said to me, “I can’t believe the way you listened to that sermon. Wasn’t this the fourth time you heard it today?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You looked like you never heard it before,” he said. “You sat on the edge of your seat and took notes as if this were the first time you ever heard that sermon.”

What I learned from that interaction: (1) people are watching our lives; (2) we can inspire others unknowingly by our decisions.

I chose to take notes.

I chose to be excited four times.

I chose to sit on the edge of my seat and put myself in the posture of a learner.

I just forgot that it could be an example for someone else.

I realized that a good example is more powerful than a good sermon.

In 1 Corinthians 8 Paul is showing this same principle but from a different standpoint—but still with the power of influencing others. He speaks about the freedom that Christians have, though we must be careful if our freedom trips up someone newer and weaker in the faith. The challenge Paul gives us is that it isn’t for them to step it up; it’s for me to take a step back and a step down for their benefit.” Here’s what he says:

Christ gave up his life for that person. Wouldn’t you at least be willing to give up going to dinner for him—because, as you say, it doesn’t really make any difference? But it does make a difference if you hurt your friend terribly, risking his eternal ruin! When you hurt your friend, you hurt Christ. A free meal here and there isn’t worth it at the cost of even one of these “weak ones.” So, never go to these idol-tainted meals if there’s any chance it will trip up one of your brothers or sisters.

(1 Corinthians 8:11-13, MSG)

We must care for their growth by adjusting ourselves for their sakes. If a nice hotel that we stay at has a casino and if that trips up anyone who has stumbled with gambling, then guess what? We don’t stay there. For their sake. This could be with the music we listen to or a movie with a certain rating we watch. If it affects a weaker or younger Christian, we stop—for their sake.

Why? Because maturity in the Christian life is putting others first. It’s living a life that is not just about ourselves but about seeing and being concerned for others.

Young Christians are called children in the Bible. James Baldwin said something profound about elders and children that can apply to parenting and even in the church: “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” Paul is preaching that example in 1 Corinthians 8. He wants us to realize that it’s others before ourselves, which is a sign of maturity.

I remember as a teenager in church someone telling me, “Tim, do you know what joy stands for? Jesus first, others second, you last.”

That still holds true today. If you want joy . . . put others before yourself.

Day 140

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 7

The second most-important decision we can make is deciding with whom we want to spend the rest of our lives in marriage. The first is with whom we want to spend eternity. Because these decisions are important, God guides us through His Word to help us.

Good news. If you’re single, today’s chapter is especially for you. What makes this chapter so important is that it doesn’t tell us what kind of person to look for, but what kind of person we are to be while we wait. God takes this season of waiting seriously and wants you to do that too. And He knows we have questions during this season:

Will I be alone forever?

I am so lonely, is there something wrong with me?

Why does everyone else seem to have someone and I don’t?

What’s crazy is that the early church had questions on the same topics. Paul provides answers here in 1 Corinthians 7. Look at these words in verse 1: “Now, getting down to the questions you asked in your letter to me” (MSG).

Because of that verse we know chapter 7 will provide answers to their questions. I find it hilarious that their first question is the sex question: “First,” Paul continues in verse 1 (MSG), “Is it a good thing to have sexual relations?”

Paul’s answer comes in verse 2: “Certainly—but only within a certain context” (MSG).

Here is a huge point for us to be clear on, especially in today’s culture: sex has a context. Listen closely to the rest of verse 2: “It’s good for a man to have a wife, and for a woman to have a husband. Sexual drives are strong, but marriage is strong enough to contain them and provide for a balanced and fulfilling sexual life in a world of sexual disorder” (MSG).

Lust is often compared to fire. In the New Testament the apostle Paul encourages men to get married if they’re burning with lust or desire. The fire analogy is throughout the Bible.

Fire is incredibly powerful, not to mention fun and useful. The problem is, it’s also difficult to contain and enormously destructive if it isn’t kept where it belongs. Sex is like that. Wonderful and powerful, but it will destroy everything in its path if it’s used out of place.

Fire in a fireplace? Awesome! Fire in your garage? Big problem! This context is God’s design. God designed sex to be expressed in the correct context. That context is within the covenant of marriage. You can choose to express yourself outside of those parameters and covenant, but you can’t choose the outcome and the consequences when you do.

Here is Paul’s sex-out-of-context verse: “This is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). Let me be clear: sexual immorality is having sex with someone you have not married. If you are doing that right now, if you are living with them right now, it is not God’s will. It is immorality. It is sin.

“I love them” does not change the parameters of what the Bible says. Marry them then, because you love what Jesus says more. If you love that person, sex is not the next step, marriage is.

Every couple I meet with for premarital counseling, I always ask this one question, “Have you had sex?” Why? Premarital sex sabotages the relationship. This is going to get people mad but it needs to be said very clearly. This shows whether they love them or not: the chapter that defines real Bible love is 1 Corinthians 13, and the first characteristic of love is patience.

Why is this important? Listen to what Paul said in the chapter from yesterday’s reading:

Since we want to become spiritually one with the Master, we must not pursue the kind of sex that avoids commitment and intimacy, leaving us more lonely than ever—the kind of sex that can never “become one.” There is a sense in which sexual sins are different from all others. In sexual sin we violate the sacredness of our own bodies, these bodies that were made for God-given and God-modeled love, for “becoming one” with another. Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body. (1 Corinthians 6:17-20, msg)

Sex is not just physical, it’s connected to the soul. It cuts deep and it scars the soul. Sexual sin is not unforgivable, but it can make life unbearable. Sex is like glue. You shouldn’t apply it until you’re absolutely sure you’re ready to stick two things together permanently. Apply it too soon, and you’ll have a mess and you will realize too late the mistake you made.

This is difficult, I know. But in the midst of that we need to remember that singleness is a gift, not a curse. The gift of singleness is that you get time and less distractions to focus on becoming a better you. You can become the person God wants you to be so you can be ready for the second most-important relationship you will ever have.

Couples generally don’t have relationship problems. They have problems they bring to the relationship. The better you that you bring, the fewer problems you bring with you:

When you’re unmarried, you’re free to concentrate on simply pleasing the master. Marriage involves you in all the nuts and bolts of domestic life and in wanting to please your spouse, leading to so many more demands on your attention. The time and energy that married people spend on caring for and nurturing each other, the unmarried can spend in becoming whole and holy instruments of God. I’m trying to be helpful and make it as easy as possible for you, not make things harder. All I want is for you to be able to develop a way of life in which you can spend plenty of time together with the master without a lot of distractions. (1 Corinthians 7:32-35, MSG)

You have to deal with the right questions. When you look in the Bible for “how do I find the right person?” It isn’t there. But once you ask, “How do I become the right person?” The Bible comes alive. If you are as intentional about becoming the right person as you are about meeting the right person, you will position yourself to bypass a boatload of unnecessary pain, regret, and wasted time. Spend your energy becoming the right person, not looking for the right person.

Day 139

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 6

Columbia researcher Sheena Iyengar has found that the average person makes about 70 decisions every day. That’s 25,500 decisions a year. Over 70 years, that’s 1,788,500 decisions. The twentieth-century philosopher, Albert Camus once said, “Life is a sum of all your choices.” You put all of those 1,788,500 choices together, and that’s who you are. As Stephen Covey said: “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”

Job opportunity

Ministry position

Dating

Marriage

Investments

One person insightfully said: “Many people today want filet mignon results but make hot dog decisions. It doesn’t work that way!” I want to help you with your filet-mignon results and give you filet-mignon decision-making skills from the apostle Paul. In fact if we take one verse in 1 Corinthians 6 and add one more verse from 1 Corinthians 10, I think we can take from Paul a good decision-making grid for our daily lives. In these two verses, Paul gives us three questions you and I are to impose on our choices each day. And they all start with “all things are lawful”:

All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.

(1 Corinthians 6:12)

All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify. (1 Corinthians 10:23)

Another way to say “all things are lawful” is to follow how The Message describes it: “Just because something is technically legal doesn’t mean that it’s spiritually appropriate” (1 Corinthians 6:12). What Paul is saying to us is just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

These are not things that “send you to hell” but they can be things that cause hell in your life if you aren’t careful.

Scrutinize your decisions with these Pauline questions. Impose questions on things that will take up your most precious resource—time.

First question: All things are lawful, but is this thing profitable?

That word, profitable, meant a traveling companion. Does it travel well with my travel partner Jesus? Can Jesus and this new decision go well together? Or will there be tension in the house?

Second question: All things are lawful, but will it control me?

One version of this verse says: “Even if I am allowed to do them, I’ll refuse to if I think they might get such a grip on me that I can’t easily stop when I want to” (TLB).

One test of being controlled or mastered by something: Do you get angry when people ask you to stop? Or when people challenge you on it?

This can be a great question to impose on anything as simple as . . .

Social media

Video games

Sports activities

Fantasy football to watching football every Saturday

Old friends and relationships

The list goes on. All these things are lawful, but is this thing profitable? Will it control me and master me—or get a “grip on me that I can’t easily stop when I want to”?

The third question to ask is from 1 Corinthians 10:23: All things are lawful, but will it edify others?

Say this with me, “It’s not all about me.” The word edify is from the word edifice. It’s a building word. It’s about helping people build their lives. If you say, “I don’t care what other people think about what I say or do,” you’re clinging to a belief that is unbiblical. You and I have to care, because we are responsible for their growth. We don’t live by people’s opinions but we do live to help them grow.

One Christmas someone became upset because I put a Christmas tree up in the church and they thought it was a druid idol. So I took it down. I am not going to fight over a Christmas tree, but I will fight over the truth of the Bible. I will yield on preference but not on biblical conviction.

Let’s sum up the decision grid Paul gives us: All things are lawful, but . . . can Jesus hang out with this choice? Is something hanging on that won’t let go? Am I hanging someone up by my choices?

The great Russian author Dostoyevski reminds us why these three questions are important for us: “The second half of a man’s life is made up of the habits he acquired during the first half.”

Let’s get some good first-half habits.

Day 138

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 5

These verses are going to be tough today. It’s about hurt. At some point we are all going to be hurt, that’s life. But what makes hurt confusing and difficult is when it comes from unexpected people and places. And when we are hurt, those are the times we want to isolate and self protect. This is dangerous and unsafe for our hearts.

Listen to what C. S. Lewis said about hurt and isolation:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

Today in 1 Corinthians 5, Paul speaks to something that has affected all of us—hurt. But not just any kind of hurt, hurt that happens from Christian on Christian. It’s when the source of our problem comes from a place and person we would expect better and more from. This is what Paul says about when this happens within the church:

I am saying that you shouldn’t act as if everything is just fine when one of your Christian companions is promiscuous or crooked, is flip with God or rude to friends, gets drunk or becomes greedy and predatory. You can’t just go along with this, treating it as acceptable behavior. I’m not responsible for what the outsiders do, but don’t we have some responsibility for those within our community of believers?

(1 Corinthians 5:11-12, MSG)

Another version says verse 11 like this: “I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people” (NIV).

Forgiveness is never optional for us as Christians. Forgiveness is a mandate. When someone offends us, we must forgive. Why? Because God has forgiven you and me. As Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:32: “Forgiv[e] each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.”

But this is very important. I used to think that once I forgive someone for their offense, afterward we go out to eat and forget all about the offense. But Paul says something very insightful: if brothers or sisters in the church have dangerous flesh patterns, we are not even to eat with them. This is deep. We can forgive, but we must exercise caution of proximity, it seems.

It is important to define the difference of forgiving and giving. You can give forgiveness without giving proximity. We must offer forgiveness completely without reservation. Giving is caution that we exercise based upon the other person’s repentance and flesh patterns. Because there may be flesh patterns that are unhealthy for our souls and could be damaging.

I can love you and forgive you without giving you access into my life, because of your destructive habits. That’s what Paul is saying. He is reminding us that even though it’s called the church, there are a lot of people still under construction.

The little saying is so true:

To dwell above with saints we love,

That will be grace and glory.

To live below with saints we know;

Well, that’s another story!

It is biblically acceptable to distance ourselves from certain believers who are abusive and are toxic to our souls. Remember forgiveness is not an option. But proximity is. It takes one to forgive but two to reconcile. Forgiveness and reconciliation are different. Reconciliation starts with repentance. And forgiveness starts with you and me. Always remember that the pain of hurt is never wasted.

Day 137

Today’s Reading: 1 Corinthians 4

Children do not always appreciate what parents do for them. They have short memories. Their concern is not what Mom and Dad did for them yesterday, but what are Mom and Dad doing for them today, right now. The past is meaningless and so is the future. They live for the present. Whereas those who are mature are deeply appreciative for past, present, and future.

Thanksgiving is the language of heaven, and we need to learn it here before we get to heaven. Just as we, who are parents, are committed to teaching our children to say “Thank you,” God also is committed to teaching His children gratitude.

Many of us don’t think too often about gratitude. Author William A. Ward convicts us when he said, “God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say ‘thank you?’” One out of 86,400 to say thanks, to show gratitude. That’s .00001 percent.

Remember the days before Kindles and Ibooks when we used to have to go to libraries to get a book? I remember having to read newspapers on microfiche film and going through card catalogues to locate where the books were on the shelves. My family and I still use the library, and we always seem to have overdue books because my children can’t find them to return them. Most of us who frequent libraries have brought back overdue books and paid the few pennies’ fine. It’s irritating, of course, but it’s what we get for being so forgetful. When I read this story about fines, though, our family’s fines didn’t seem nearly so terrible.

George Szamuely borrowed books from the New York University library but never returned them. In fact, he’d hoarded more than five hundred books! That’s taking overdue books to a new level. Police finally called on him to get him to pay his fine and return the books. The fine exceeded $31,000! He couldn’t pay it, So George was hauled into court, where he faced grand larceny charges, meaning possible jail time. The forty-four-year-old was charged with possession of stolen property. It’s kind of a funny story, and yet it’s also irritatingly sad. How can a man let so many books be overdue and neglect to return them?

I think worse than overdue books are overdue thank you’s to God.

I am in arrears in gratitude to God. Steven Furtick once said, “You can’t be grateful for something you feel entitled to.” And the truth is, you’re not entitled to anything, because it’s all a gift from God. First Corinthians 4:7 is one simple sentence that sums up the motive of our gratitude: “What have you that was not given to you?” (AMPC). Meister Eckhart said, “The most important prayer in the world is just two words long: Thank you.” I owe a lot of those to God today. I’m betting you do too. How about we pause today and give God one of our 86,400 with a “thank you”?