1 Corinthians 6:20 “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”

We live in a so-called “free” country. There are many things our government gives people the freedom to do, whether or not God approves of such behavior. Even Christians can begin to think that if the USA gives me the freedom, then I have the right to live my life and behave myself any way I want.

At the same time, God doesn’t force everyone to do his will at all times with an act of raw power. Thus it seems that people get away with many sins, including sexual immorality, with no divine intervention. They even become puffed up with a prideful sense of self-importance, defying God and and his commands like the author of the poem Invictus, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.”

Really? God does not give us an absolute right to do whatever we want, and thinking that way is still rebellion against him. We don’t belong to ourselves. We belong to him. We didn’t make ourselves. He made us. Even after we rebelled and ran away from our Creator to join the enemy side, he didn’t leave us there. He bought us back. He executed his own Son to lay his claim on us again, and to set us free.

“You are not your own. You were bought at a price” is a warning for us. It’s a warning not to challenge God’s right to determine how we live our lives, nor to despise the price he paid to make us his own again.

But these are especially words of promise and comfort. You were bought at a price. Guilt over our own sexual sins may make us feel worthless and undesirable. If our sins were the end of the story, that is what we would be.

But by his grace, our Lord has given us another value. The price which he placed on us is the life of his own Son Jesus Christ. God the Father has decided that you are worth as much as Jesus to him. That value defies any comparison, any illustration. There is nothing dearer to the Lord in all this world than just you yourself. You became infinitely valuable, and infinitely desirable, when Jesus gave his life to make you holy and forgive your sins.

Therefore, live like the priceless, holy child God now says you are. Honor God with your body.

1 Timothy 4:12″Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young.”

Having reached my fifties, I am well beyond the age at which I can find solace or encouragement for myself in the words quoted above. If someone looks down on me now, it is probably because I have done something genuinely foolish.

Young people are an important part of the Church’s life and ministry. When their presence or service is missing, the body suffers no less than in the absence of those more seasoned.

We sometimes mistakenly say, “The young people are the church’s future.” I have been guilty of saying this, too. I pray we still have the young people around in the future. But I know that they are here now. The youth are the Church’s present. Like the rest of us, they need to be growing and serving in grace today.

Are we tempted to overlook their gifts because they are in grade school, high school, or college? Is that biblical? The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “Better a poor but wise youth than an old but foolish king who no longer knows how to take warning” (4:13).

Look at the way wise young people served the Lord in the Scriptures. How old was David when he was the only man in Israel with enough faith in God’s promises to go out and face the giant Goliath? Maybe 16? What does David say to Goliath as he marches out to meet him? “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will hand you over to me, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head.…All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands” (1 Samuel 17:45-47). Did David lack the maturity to serve just because he was a teenager?

How old were Daniel, Hananiah (Shadrach), Mishael (Meshach), and Azariah (Abednego) when Nebuchadnezzar took them into his service? They were almost certainly still in their teens (70 years pass between Daniel 1:1 and Daniel 10:1). This pagan king recognized talent and utilized it when he saw it. And did these young men lack the spiritual maturity to make tough decisions or give a clear witness? They answered the king of the world’s threat to kill them for refusing to commit idolatry: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Daniel 3:17-18).

How old was Mary, the mother of Jesus, when God called her to bear the Savior of the World? 13? 15? Look up Luke 1:46-55 and read again Mary’s poetic response to her cousin Elizabeth’s greeting. These theological gems come from the mouth of a girl who would still be in junior high school today. She was well qualified for the task to which she was called: Bearing, raising, and teaching God’s own Son, the Savior of the World. Jesus may have been a first-grader before Mary was even out of her teens.

I am not proposing that we elect teenagers to our church council (though God has given some teens far greater responsibilities). But can we neglect to train and incorporate them into the regular life and mission of our congregations? I don’t know how much the youths listed above would have been interested in a trip to a water park or an all-night lock-in (not that there is anything wrong with those things). But it is apparent they were interested in studying God’s word, especially his saving promises. And they were not afraid to serve their Lord in a way that could mean great personal sacrifice–even death!

Sometimes old people say, “Energy is wasted on the youth.” Maybe that’s because we haven’t channeled it in God’s direction. The Lord will forgive us for poor stewardship of our children’s gifts. May he also open our eyes to better see their place in the Body of Christ.

Luke 6:45 “Out of the overflow of his heart, his mouth speaks.”

Jesus’ word here is a statement of spiritual truth, but it also reflects a principle we see active in everyday life.

Listen to the conversation of your friends for a while. What do they believe is life-changing? Are they overwhelmed by the possibilities of some new high tech gadgetry? Were they deeply moved by the latest best-seller or box office smash? How do you know? What they believe in their hearts and minds eventually finds its way to their mouths. They just have to tell you.

Some companies rely on it for survival. Almost 30 years ago my wife worked for Electrolux Corporation for one year. At the time you never saw a commercial for the company’s products. They depended on customers to recommend their vacuum cleaners to friends and family. You haven’t seen commercials for Krispy Kreme donuts, Rolls-Royce cars, Jiffy muffin mix, or Costco stores. They are all examples of the few companies so confident of their product’s ability to impress that they rely entirely on word of mouth advertising to sell their product.

Don’t we believers all share a common product of infinitely greater importance? The gospel of Jesus Christ–the good news that God forgives sins, and even suffered death for us to make such forgiveness possible–is more than a reliable product, a moving message, a life-changing tool. It is the one and only source of eternal life. It is our only escape from hell and our only admission to heaven. It is the only way to be sure that God loves you.

Faith that this is true opens our mouths. Speaking about this doesn’t make us half-crazy religious fanatics any more than talking up the gas-mileage and safety features of our new vehicles somehow makes us driving fanatics. We seek converts without shame.

But potential converts are not the only people to whom our faith drives us to speak. Consider Aquila and Priscilla. After Paul had converted these two devout Jews to faith in Jesus, they in turn helped him in sharing the message with others.

One of the others whom they met was Apollos. Now Apollos was no stranger to Scripture, nor to God’s promises of a Savior. He already believed all of this. He was even familiar with the baptism of John the Baptist. In fact, Apollos’s faith had already moved him to speak openly about what he believed. That is how Aquila and Priscilla came to know him.

After hearing Apollos confess his faith, Aquila and Priscilla couldn’t restrain themselves from filling Apollos in on the rest of the story. In Acts 18 we read, “When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.”

Apollos may not have been required to come to a formal set of classes. The only class room seems to have been the humble home of this Christian husband and wife. There was simply someone who needed to hear more of God’s word, and someone in possession of that word willing to teach it to him.

Not all of us may become missionaries and evangelists. Not all of us are called to be pastors or teachers. But if we have faith, and if we have God’s word (and we do), then we have all we need to speak the truth to others, whether they are hearing it for the first time, or the fiftieth. Let your heart and mouth overflow!

Daniel 12:2 “Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”

Death is a topic with which we don’t feel comfortable by nature. Death forces us to live with painful separation from people we love. Even when we know that God will raise us again, the prospect of our own death can fill us with frightful uncertainties: Will the experience hurt? Will those we leave behind be taken care of? Death is still the wages of sin.

But death also has a way of sobering us up and restoring a proper perspective on what is important. Samuel Johnson once said, “I know of no thought that so wonderfully clarifies the mind as the thought that I shall hang tomorrow morning.” When we come face to face with our own mortality,  wisdom comes flooding in. We stop filling our consciousness with trivia from TV. Suddenly tiny things like economics, and technology, and politics don’t loom so large. Enormous things like God and religion don’t seem so thin and far away. Nothing impresses the need for God on us like the fact that we are sinners who are going to die.

More importantly, death is the getaway car God uses to speed our souls away from this world to everlasting life. Daniel says that the multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake. Death isn’t the end of all things. It is a transition. Those of us who believe Jesus has made us holy in God’s eyes by his life and death, and promised us life by his resurrection, will wake up to a new morning of eternal life.

This is what we will escape to: eternal life. Do you find that hard to appreciate? We carry the symptoms of death around with us at all times– physical illness, unhappy relationships, broken dreams. These things make it hard to look forward to a life that goes on forever. Sometimes we want nothing more than an end to it all.

But the phrase “eternal life” does not stress only duration–life that goes on forever. It also stresses quality–this is life beyond death with all of its symptoms. This is life truly worthy of the name. From our side of eternity it is easiest to say what eternal life is not. It knows no pain or sadness. It is never spoiled by boredom or monotony. It excludes all worry or anxiety. It never sees frustration or anger. It suffers neither danger nor injury, failure nor fatigue.

Why should the owners of mansions consume themselves with thinking about how to decorate the hotel room they will check out of tomorrow? Why should citizens of heaven be consumed with their temporary accommodations on earth? God promises to wake us from our long night’s sleep in the grave. Better things are waiting for us in eternity’s new day.