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Tomorrow I will be starting a new series within the high school ministry at Calvary Community Church that will extend through the month of January.
The title is “Your Series.” When I first told someone about it, they replied, “my series? What do you mean?”
Their response is the exact reason why I have wanted to do this series. You see, as someone who has been raised in a consumeristic, individualistic Western culture, I have been taught to read the bible through that same lens. Pastors and bible study leaders would ask questions like, “what does this passage mean to you?” or “what does this mean for you in your life?” At a surface level, these aren’t bad questions…however if we dig a little deeper, what they have done is created a mindset that it’s all about “me and God.”
I have misunderstood passages like 1 Corinthians 2:19-20 where Paul says, “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit” because I had been taught to read the bible from an individualistic perspective.
I have been told, “Drew, your body is God’s temple. Therefore you need to not smoke, not drink, not get tattoos, and eat healthy.” I have walked around my adult Christian life believing that my body was God’s temple and that my Christian brother’s body was another one of God’s temples and so on. I had been taught that whatever impure or immoral I do to my body…it only hurts God.
The problem is, this is a COMPLETE MISUNDERSTANDING of what Paul is saying.
Dr. Ward Powers, the Director of Tyndale College has a fantastic post on the proper understanding of this passage.
So, starting tomorrow, we are going to take a look at how we have misunderstood many passages in the Bible where we have read the word “your” in an individual manner when the author clearly intended the “your” in a corporate manner.
