The verse we are going to be taking a look at today is a very simple one, for many of us it’s probably a very familiar one. In fact, my wife and I had it put on the bottom of our wedding invitations and as a present one of our bridesmaids had the invitation painted onto a decorative plate which we have hanging in our bedroom. I thought about bringing it with me to show you, but wisely decided against it, for fear of breaking it, but you can see it up on the screen. It’s a great reminder to us what we want our marriage to be about. If you would, grab a Bible and turn to 1 Corinthians 10:31 (pg 1135 in chair Bible). I’m going to start reading at verse 23 and end with verse 33 to fill out the context for us. Read 1 Cor 10:23-33 1 Cor 10:31 You may look at this verse and focus in on the general idea of “ ’whatever’ you do, do it all for the glory of God” and you would be right in doing so and I hope you do. That’s what we had in mind when we put it on our wedding invitations. We wanted to remind ourselves that no matter what we do, we want to do it for God’s glory. But any general idea is made up of many specific parts and I want to focus on some of those today. This verse mentions two very specific things, eating and drinking. To me that begs the question “How do you eat and drink to the glory of God?” When I first started really wrestling with this question, I was asked to lead a devotional time for another ministry in the St. Croix valley. I decided to ask the group what they thought it looked like to eat and drink to the glory of God. The first thing that happened was that everyone dropped their heads and stared at the table in absolute silence. For anyone who’s ever led a group you can probably relate to that. After a minute, a couple of people braved an answer. The two answers that were given were that “you could pray before you eat and you could have a spiritual conversation during your meal.” They are two answers that I in no way want to dismiss and that I think most of us would come up with if asked that question, but what I’ve come to realize was that in those situations you are really not eating and drinking, you are praying and conversing to the glory of God. So what could it look like to physically eat and drink to the glory of God? In this text, Paul is wrestling with an issue faced by the early church, and many non western Christians even today. Meat was often sacrificed to idols and then sold in the general marketplace and served at people’s homes. How was a Christian to relate to something used in idol worship? That was the question. They certainly didn’t want to promote it as something that was ok. So, some Christians at the time believed that it was wrong and maybe even spiritually dangerous to eat that meat under any circumstance and that as a Christian you had to do everything you possibly could to make sure it had not been used in a sacrifice. Could you imagine today needing to walk up to the butcher and asking to see the paperwork on every piece of meat you wanted to buy at the grocery store to make sure it came from the right place? Or even worse, grilling your unbelieving neighbor about the origin of the meat he was cooking after he graciously invited you over for a cookout. No. That would seem absolutely ridiculous. Paul’s theological response to this line of thinking was that it was not necessary, that everything is permissible. “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” Let me qualify that though. Some people will look at a text like this and think it means that anything goes. We can do whatever we want. There are no restrictions. That would not line up with the rest of scripture, though. Paul is not saying that absolutely everything goes. There are specific things that the Bible shows us are morally wrong and that we should not do. They are not permissible. What he is saying in this text is that in all areas where there is nothing Biblically immoral involved, everything is permissible. This was not a moral area. So for Paul, “If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for? Paul lived in freedom when it came to non moral issues. In Paul’s mind, the first way you eat and drink to the glory of God is by freely eating and drinking everything with thankfulness. The second way found in this passage that you can eat and drink to the glory of God is to eat and drink with the wellbeing of others in mind. In Paul’s theology there is a reason for the possible restraint of your freedom to eat and drink. You should restrain yourself in situations where it would not be good for another person present for “Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” You see this in verse 24, 28, & 33. While Paul is advocating freedom in Christ, he also heads the words of Christ in Matthew to Love God and Love Others. We are to eat with thankful hearts & the welfare of others in mind. This second area is one I want to invite you join me in exploring further in your own life. The principle set forth of Eating and Drinking with the welfare of others in mind opens up some doors we might want to consider as we look to aligning our lives in such a way that every area is playing a role in the advancing of God’s kingdom. Earlier this year, I attended the Willow Creek Student Leadership Conference in Illinois with some of the other youth pastors and student leaders in town. As I looked over the title of the six sessions we would be attending, some I was really excited about and others I didn’t know what to think. The one by Jack Groppel on “Increasing your leadership capacity” didn’t excite me very greatly, until he began to speak. He took some of the ideas from this passage and put them in a framework and practically fleshed them out in ways that really made a lot of sense to me. I’d like to share a little bit of that with you now. Jack Groppel Video 6:11-13:08 What I love about Jacks message, which I hope you caught was that it is all about the mission. It has the wellbeing of others in mind. He deals with the question of how we can arrange our lives in a way that we can weather the storms and still complete the mission. If we look at life realistically, it’s not always easy to navigate. We have great desires and ideas to serve God & others, and then life happens. Storms come, we find ourselves at a point where we need to run away, like the football players, instead of facing the storm and moving on to finish the mission like the FBI agents, and our great desires and ideas go out the window. As Christians, we have a mission placed in our hands by a sovereign God who chooses to use us to do His work. And as you realize more and more what you’ve been given, you realize that failure is not an option. As I’ve pondered that reality, I’ve asked myself the question, “How do I put myself in the best position to accomplish the mission given to me. That’s when I started wondering how the way I eat, sleep, and exercise might be affecting my accomplishment of the mission. Groppel talked about the many ways we are not prepared for the storms that derail us from our mission. Of the four areas, one of them dealt with how we in American culture approach the physical side of life. We live in a Go-Go-Go society. On average, we eat poorly, and sleep too little as most modern studies are showing. It’s sometimes seen as a badge of honor to go with as little sleep as possible and to eat as quickly and as few times as you can. But if you examine the way the body works you see a pattern that goes like this /VVV. If you look at an EKG from the heart it looks like this /VVV. An EEG from the Brain looks like this /VVV. An EMG from the muscle looks like this /VVV. Glucose cycles go /VVV. Sleep cycles go /VVV. Everything about a person looks like this /VV. But how do we tend to live our lives? --------Go-Go----------. A Linear line When you see an EKG or EEG that looks like this ------------------what does it mean? Your missions is over. In life it means that when a storm comes your way you most likely won’t have what it takes to weather that storm and stay on mission. Remember, the goal is the mission. In John Piper’s material titled “When I don’t desire God, How to fight for joy,” he lays out many spiritually based disciplines to help us in the Fight for Faith. Towards the bottom of his list he considers something a little bit different. The idea of diet, rest, and exercise. He is very intentional in pointing out that they don’t belong at the top of the list, nevertheless they are important things to consider when Fighting for your Faith. All of these areas, diet, rest, and exercise are designed by God to play a role in the life of his created beings, physical beings. Our bodies were designed to need these things. And not only that, but each of these areas has the potential to affect the other areas of our lives as well. For example, have you ever read Ephesian’s chapter 5 where it says that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, and so forth? Have you ever noticed that your ability to love, or show patience has a tendency to go up or down depending on how much sleep you’ve gotten or how long it has been since you had your last meal? I don’t know about you, but I’ve often wondered, “What are those things?” Are they fruits of the spirit, or just crazy emotions dictated by physical realities? If they are the Fruit of the Spirit, they shouldn’t change based on our emotions. If they are controlled by our emotions, then they probably shouldn’t be in scripture. Piper admits that this is an area that he doesn’t fully understand. What he does know, though, is that in some mysterious way, our emotions and our spirit are interwoven and cannot be separated. The qualities mentioned in Ephesians 5 are the Fruit of the Spirit. Where we make the mistake is thinking that in producing fruit, the Spirit raises our patience bar and then holds it there indefinitely, no matter what we do. There are times the Spirit might do this for a period of time as a result of direct intervention. Piper uses the example of a doctor who has to stay up for three days straight and remains patient in difficult circumstances. But the Spirit more regularly works in more indirect ways, like revealing areas of your life that by the way you are living are causing you to be impatient and then empowering you to make changes in your life that line up more accurately with the ways God designed you to be. So why did God create us as physical beings who have to eat and drink? Why do we spend a third of our lives unconscious and drooling. The Bible doesn’t say exactly, but here is my best guess. He does it in order to humble us and to help us realize that we are not God. When we honor God’s design and get the sleep he designed us to get and eat the way he designed our bodies to eat we honor God by acknowledging that the world needs him and not us. The world will keep going even if I stop for lunch and get an extra hour of needed sleep. According to Psalm 121, God is the magnificent one who does not sleep and watches over the world. We need to let God be God, and let ourselves be the physical being we were created to be. One thing I am aware of in our culture and a group this size is that I may be misunderstood because of the filters we all have in place. In our world, when people start talking diet, sleep, and exercise our mind immediately starts thinking about health. Please hear me clearly. This is not about health. Health should never be our main goal. Many people who live healthy lives die young, and many people who live very unhealthy lives live to a ripe old age. These things may result in health, but health is a byproduct. I am talking about mission. Eating and drinking to the glory of God is about putting yourself in a position to serve others. It’s about cooperating with the Spirit to discover what level of humbleness we need and building it into our lives so that whether our life is full of blue skies, or we are getting hit by a great storm, we can be in a primed position to stay on mission and serve those whom God has called us to serve. So what does this look like? Let me start by saying that I don’t believe there is a norm or an exact pattern to be followed. All of our bodied respond differently to food and require different amounts of sleep and exercise to function well. Also remember that these are non moral areas and that when you partake in a giant Banana split or a late night at the drive-In movie theater with thankfulness, you can be glorifying God. But what I will do is give you two small examples that have reenergized me for the mission and let you take it from there. The first thing that I did was revolutionize my eating habits. My whole life I was taught to eat three square meals a day of which I ate two. I never used to be a breakfast person. At points in my life, I tried eating breakfast and saw little difference so I just thought forget it. After learning that our bodies require food every 3 hours or so to maintain proper glucose levels which provide energy for the body and mind, I made the switch and begun eating six smaller meals a day with the first one being right after I got up. Immediately, I had more energy consistently throughout the day and I noticed that my thinking was a lot sharper. I also started waking up an hour earlier, fully refreshed. If you know me, this is a big deal. I’ve always been made fun of around the church staff for needing to sleep 9 hours a night. But I learned that the reason I was sleeping that much was because without the consistent level of glucose intake from food, my body had to look to other sources for that glucose. It actually began eating away at my muscles to get the glucose it needed. This was what was causing me to sleep so much and feel drained. Making this change to regular meals /VVV has reenergized me for the mission. Another small thing that I do that has made a difference is run and I don’t just mean setting aside a time to go to the gym or hit the road. Many of you are like me and spend a lot of time in meetings and in front of a computer. Our muscles are not meant to be inactive that long. I hesitate to say this because nobody at church knows I do this, but when we have long staff meetings and we take a short break in the middle, while everyone else is following Mary towards the bathroom, I head to the back hallway and just start running sprints back and forth. It gets the muscles moving and provides oxygen to the brain. Where as I used to start dragging in long meetings or while working at the computer, now because of one simple move I find myself much more engaged and reenergized for the mission. /VVV Well, this is me. Whether I eat or drink, or whatever I do, I want to do it all for the glory of God. So, where are you at on this journey? As an adult? As a young person? I’d like to take a moment and address my High School students directly. I know this stuff affects you guys. My heart goes out to you. I see so many of you who long to live for God and embody the fruit of the Spirit but agonize over your struggle to do so. And as I observe your lives and you describe your lives to me it becomes obvious that these factors play a major role in that. I know it’s not popular, but the sleep you get and the meals you eat are so important in your relationship with God and navigating the storms of the teenage years. I pray that you will really consider how this passage relates to your spiritual lives. Now back to all of us. To some of you this may have seemed like a very unspiritual message. I couldn’t disagree with that more. I believe we are worshiping God when we bring all areas of our lives under his reign, including the physical. I want my physical life to serve his Kingdom. What I am inviting you to do today is to think missionally and explore what it might look like for you to pursue Christ’s reign in how you eat and drink in life, to advance God’s kingdom in all the earth, For His glory. Father, Whether we acknowledge it or not, you reign over all things big and small. There is not a detail you have overlooked, there is nothing you have designed that wasn’t intended to show us more about who you are. God, open our eyes to even the most seemingly meaningless areas of life, like eating and drinking, that we may engage every part of our being in the service of your mission. We ask that your Spirit would convict us of pride and humble us in areas where we believe you are not adequate to do your job and that we must work longer and harder hours to make up for you. You are the one who is trustworthy. You are the one who is faithful to all His promises. You are the one and only God in heaven who does whatever He pleases and does not sleep. May our lives display your Glory. Amen