Day 277- With Freedom Comes Responsibility
📖Daily Reading
1 Corinthians 10
🎥 Video
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📝 Reflection
1 Corinthians 10: 23-24
'You say, “I am allowed to do anything” —but not everything is good for you. You say, “I am allowed to do anything”—but not everything is beneficial. Don’t be concerned for your own good but for the good of others. '
This was a mind blowing chapter that I don’t fully understand. I am going to have to sit with it for a while. I felt like I could ‘see’ something in it but not fully. Especially in the first few paragraphs where Paul is referencing Exodus quite a bit. This is really interesting because we experienced dense fog this morning in our area. So I am going to focus mainly on the last section of the chapter. Which focuses on the temptations of freedom to do whatever we please now we are free, without thinking about the consequences for others in our sphere of influence. Or the temptation that because we are so full of God’s love and the freedom it brings that we can’t imagine how it could hinder or have negative consequences for others.
As I am receiving the fullness of the message of grace personally, I am also beginning to experience the freedom that Paul is talking about here. It is quite intoxicating and something I can’t quite put into words myself. But I get what he is saying here, because I have felt this tension and the temptation myself. When you realize, and not just know in your head that you are loved, but you know in the depths of your soul, your being-ness, and your heart is bursting because you finally ‘get’ how loved you are there is a freedom that comes with that.
With freedom comes power and with power comes responsibility. It is interesting that the word intoxicating came through my fingers. There is a saying that people can become ‘drunk with power’. Drunk people are irresponsible, reckless, and they create chaos and havoc not only for themselves but for others as well. Maybe newly free people especially are vulnerable to this. Like some young adults and college freshmen that go wild, they haven’t experienced it before, they don’t know what to do with it or how to manage it.
Going back to love, when you feel this kind of love one of the natural responses is to want others to feel it to. This is the good news. This love is available to all of us, we are the ones that block it because we won’t open our hands and our hearts to receive the grace that God freely offers to all. The grace and love that God offers is so unbelievable so unlike the way humans love, that we don’t really trust it. This is why is requires faith on our parts. Once we receive it we want to share it and we want to automatically want others to feel the same freedom, but we can’t impose this on them before they are ready. They have to initiate it themselves.
We have to be careful and sensitive to where they are and their beliefs. We also have to be on guard that our freedom does not lead us to be careless and lead us down a dark path as well. He gives an interesting scenario as an example. Let’s say you get invited to dinner by someone who is not a believer. You should feel free to eat whatever is offered to you without question. But if they happen to mention that they offered the food to an idol you should then not feel free to eat it. But you might say to yourself, but why should it matter, since I am free and I can just bless the food and eat it. But you are then willingly participating in something that misrepresents that you are in agreement with their offering. This is not good for their conscience.
When we love others well from this genuine overflow we are inviting them into the same love. As I am reading this example, we are not going into someone’s home and asking inappropriate questions or being invasive we are guests in someones home so if we ate the meal and didn’t know, then we can have a clear conscience but if information is offered to us then we have the responsibility to respond in a way that is for the higher good, and therefor should willingly limit our freedom in that scenario. Our love allows us to use our freedom with an ability to respond to others that will benefit them not hinder them.
✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt
How does this change your perspective on freedom? Have you thought of needing to be responsible with it?
📖Tomorrows Reading
1 Corinthians 11
Coaching Opportunity
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