let's go (d. chang ch. 6 part 1)

i really have to apologize for the scarcity of posts, if you were waiting for them. and if you were waiting for them, maybe you should be the one up here writing. also, to all other contributors, don't think you have to go in order. if you don't get anything out of a chapter, don't exactly feel obligated to write about it. maybe just move on, if you want to keep doing a chapter a day. or, what the heck, break the structure altogether. if you like James or Hebrews or 1 Peter or Daniel, write about that if you want to. just don't make something up. it's not homework. talk about what you know if you write up here, and talk about it with passion, which is something i don't exactly do either.

paul keeps going with this analogy of the body as a temple of God. He says that, if God is actually living in us, then we are held up to all of these new kinds of standards. like we should watch what we say and what we do. but paul goes farther with it - he says that not only is God living in us, he says that we were made for Him...we were made for Him to live in us. so that when we get disconnected from God, when we are defiling His temple, we are in the process destroying our identities. we are substituting our own ideas of purpose and life for what our true meanings are.

"do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot?" that's what happens with sex. two become one. you once held the purity, the beauty of Christ, but now will you compromise that with something else, someone else, just because it feels good? we have higher standards. and it's not necessarily talking about sex, but that's what i read literally. i think it could be extended to point towards questions like where else in your life do you find yourself compromising God with the world?

and i say this to my own disgust, because you don't even want to know what kind of thoughts i think, what kind of things i have done when nobody has been looking. and i say that to God's disgust as well, because He knows how far i have fallen, He knows my direct disobedience, my failure, the way my eyes have turned off of Him onto myself and onto other things of the flesh. and paul must have gone through this too, or at least he sees it in the Corinthians, because he tries to get us to turn our eyes off of ourselves and onto God.

for one, he says to flee sexual immorality. sexual immorality seems to always root from pride - a desire for intimacy, to feel loved, to feel good. part of it could be burning off stress, but it's called lust for a reason - it says that something is wrong, and it's not looking to God to solve it. so we try an alternative from God, and it might work for a while, but it will keep us coming back - it will make us dependent on it, so that we can't live without it.

and then it eventually occurs that whatever we are investing ourselves in that isn't God or of God turns out not to solve our problems. in fact, it only deepens them. after a bad game or a bad test, people will go out to get drunk. it'll make them feel better, but it won't stop the problem. next bad test, they'll be back to dependence on alcohol. it won't help them with their grades, but grades aren't even the problem. they need something that they can depend on to keep them from feeling the hurt of a bad grade in the first place. alcohol is the solution to the problem after the fall, but God is the solution to problems so you don't have to fall. and alcohol won't always satisfy. and sometimes it will kill you. when you invest in God and God kills you... you're gonna have everything you ever wanted.

now the difference between sexual immorality and any other sin, paul says, is that "he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body." this makes me think that the sin is more of being inside of us than outside. it's like, if we tell a lie or something, we can try to set things straight. if we steal some money, we can do what we can to give back that money. i mean, the damage is done, but it can still be repaired. but he who commits sexual immorality... the two become one. there's a part of you that's always going to be someone else, and if that person wasn't of Christ or wasn't your spouse, then you're filling up your temple with things that you're not going to be able to get out, things that defile the temple, that go against God. if two become one, then you're joining the members of the temple with someone else's temple. and if it wasn't meant to be, then you're violating yourself.

but just because there is such a thing as sexual immorality doesn't mean that sex is bad. sex is supposed to be great, it's supposed to be unifying and amazing, and i am looking forward to it immensely. sex shouldn't be abandoned because there is such a thing as sexual immorality - sex should be redeemed. it was intended to be something that brought you closer to somebody, that showed you the relationship that God has to the church, but there's a reason you wait until marriage. how many times do you plan on getting divorced? probably 0. when you have sex, you are attaching or investing yourself into another person. if you have sex with whoever you want, you're probably gonna get hurt or confused or find things start to get pointless cause it's an endless cycle. but if you really just invest into one other person - your spouse, your one spouse - then the love should never die. not only is that redeeming sex, but it's redeeming marriage.

cause i know i struggle a lot with this whole sexual immorality thing, and it really is a defiling of the temple. it's taking a step away from God, which is never a good thing (never). so if you struggle too, we should take an oath. redeem sex. there's a website called xxxchurch.com, it's actually pretty good. there are bunches of testimonies about how God saves from addiction, how lust doesn't have to run our lives and how we can be set free so that we stop defiling our bodies, our temples of the Holy Spirit. if you're fed up with compromising with the world - realize that there's no shame in that and everyone faces this problem. but you also have to realize that the only way you're going to defeat this problem is by being delivered. gotta be God's strength. we're not good enough or big enough to face this by ourselves. we must, however, be willing. and ready to acknowledge that it's by God's strength that we overcome. God bless