Stewarding Our Bodies

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. It's good to have you here. Welcome, and welcome to June. It's June, and welcome to hurricane season. I know. It started, right? It has started here, and you can feel the weather has changed. But in the middle of this series yet called Embodied, we're going to finish it up next week. And we're going to be looking next week at 1 Corinthians chapter 15, which is the whole idea of, or the teaching of the resurrection of the body. Not just a spiritual kind of wispy, we'll live forever, but God is going to renew all of creation. He's going to renew you and me. Isn't that amazing? I am just so thrilled with that idea that God is going to renew us all. And so we're going to be looking at that. But after the series, we're going to start a new one called The Big Relief. And that is the urgency of grace in a worn out world. Now, I'm not being really creative here. A book just came out recently by David Zoll. He's written a couple of others, and that's the title of it. And each chapter is dealing with just different ways of the gospel, from atonement to the imputation of Christ's status and righteousness upon us. All of those things, God's grace, God's forgiveness, God's mercy. Each chapter kind of focuses on how that is a relief for this worn out world. Because, boy, are we status and power hungry and we're grasping for our own identity and all of these things. And these are all given us in the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is amazing. So we will be looking at that over the course of the summer, and I think you're going to be enjoying that. But for now, and that starts, by the way, on Father's Day, which is really early this year, right? June 15th is Father's Day. And maybe somebody's birthday. No? Nobody's birthday? No big day coming up? I think this is the big 3-0. Oh, come on. When I was turning 30, I was single with no prospects. Boy, that was an existential crisis for me. God knew what he was doing, I didn't, right? Okay, anyways, enough said. You can guess what's going on on that day, too, right? Anyway, so, we are in, today, the idea of something that's really actually common for you to understand. You're going like, oh yeah, this makes sense, until we look at it a little deeper. It's actually very weird language. We'll get into that today. We're going to be a little weird. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God and what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and with the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members one of another. Now, I said it's weird because if you're living in Paul's day, these words, to the Roman Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, together in this one church, those inside the church and outside of the church, especially outside of the church, these words would be weird. Okay? And we're going to explore that in these three points today. The weird, the why, and the wonder that I find in these verses, I think you'll see as well. So, it's weird, odd language. Why I say that is because Paul says, present or offer your bodies, this stuff, all of you, to God as a living sacrifice. And from the Greco-Roman mind, especially the Greeks, well before even Aristotle and Plato, hundreds of years before, they've always thought that this thing, they called the body the tomb of the soul. That's not a high value towards the body. They called it the fetter, that is the chain that hung you up in different ways. And they thought the desires of the body are what hold the soul down. And Paul is saying in this text, this is actually who you are, is the location of spiritual worship. Is that wild? So contradictory to that, but it's even going beyond that. It'd be weird for the Roman as well, because he's talking about a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice. Nije Gupta wrote in his book, okay, nobody's back there to put the next slide up. Okay, the idea goes, in his book, Strange Religion, how the first Christians were weird, dangerous, and compelling. And that's our challenge too, by the way. I want you to be weird, dangerous, and compelling. Won't be hard. Weird is normal in our house, okay. Yeah, he says this, the idea goes far above the expectations of Roman religion. Roman people recognized that inhabitants ought to be respectful to the gods in order to secure the pax decorum. That is, keep the peace in all of society. But to become living sacrifices would be a paradox that was difficult to grasp. So I can imagine a conversation. If you were a Christian in Ro...