17 Only, everyone should live as the Lord has assigned, just as God called each one. I give this order in all the churches. 18 Was someone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was an uncircumcised person called? He should not be circumcised. 19 Circumcision means nothing, and uncircumcision means nothing; what matters is keeping God’s commandments. 20 Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called.
1 Corinthians 7:17-24 NABRE
21 Were you a slave when you were called? Do not be concerned but, even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of it. 22 For the slave called in the Lord is a freed person in the Lord, just as the free person who has been called is a slave of Christ. 23 You have been purchased at a price. Do not become slaves to human beings. 24 Brothers, everyone should continue before God in the state in which he was called.
God provided His people a list of 10 morally driven guidelines for how we should be living each day. These are His 10 Commandments (in their entirety, from the NABRE version):
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
1) You shall not have other gods beside me.
2) You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;
you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation; but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
3) You shall not invoke the name of the Lord, your God, in vain.
For the Lord will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain.
4) Remember the sabbath day—keep it holy.
Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God. You shall not do any work, either you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your work animal, or the resident alien within your gates. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the Lord has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
5) Honor your father and your mother,
that you may have a long life in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
6) You shall not kill.
7) You shall not commit adultery.
8) You shall not steal.
9) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10) You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
We operate under laws with penalty to keep a certain amount of order in our communities. But at what point did we allow those manufactured laws to go too far and over-step the very God-given rights our country was founded on?
I was reading through 1 Corinthians 7, mainly as a search for passages that mention the commandments, and I came across a startling parallel between present day moral issues and the moral struggles defined by the author Paul in his letter to the faithful people of Corinth. I was initially drawn to verses 18-19, calling out the ways of the Old Testament by mention of circumcision – the old “mark” of the faithful was to circumcise the boy infants.
Paul tells us that now, under the new covenant, the status of circumcision matters not. We only need follow God’s commandments.
“You have been purchased at a price. Do not become slaves to human beings.”
The Lord has already paid our admission ticket to eternal life with Him in Heaven. By sending His son Jesus Christ to live among the humble lay people and ultimately die on the cross for you and me, the debt of our eternal consequence from sin was paid in full for all.
I was going to stop there and simply discuss God’s everlasting love and fierce faithfulness to us under His new covenant (New Testament), then I turned back to the beginning of the book of 1 Corinthians and skimmed through the intro page – which I never do because I’m too impatient to read much biblical history; it tends to get boring and my mind quickly wanders off… The summary page explains that the author Paul had already visited and spent “missionary” time with the people of Corinth, and at the time of the letter, he was currently visiting the people in Ephesus.
He had believed majority of Corinthians to be faithful to the mission – but after hearing what kind of things were taking place in his absence, he wrote this letter to the “majority faithful” as a warning to them:
if they (the majority) continued to stay silent and allow the few members of the turned-wicked minority to continue in their current ways, the wickedness would spread and infect into the majority.
I’m curious if this particular situation sounds at all familiar to anyone else??
Think current transgender issues – EXTREME abuse of children & minors who are being fast-tracked to “Gender Affirming Care” treatment at the advice of medical professionals holding some degree of authority in our society.
Pushing Gender Affirming Care onto minors and their parents (who are also at a loss of what can be done to help their kiddos) is undoubtedly among the most heinous acts of abuse against children allowed in modern day.
Conservative writer and podcaster, Matt Walsh, has done some of the hard work by “putting boots on the ground” as an investigative activist, revealing the true horrors laying behind the scenes of one medical institution that (now formerly) provided “gender affirming CARE” medications and surgeries to minors.
(Read the details here)
I listen to Apple Podcasts almost daily to help me stay focused during the workday. Matt’s show is one of my FAVORITES and really won me over with his activism fighting against the transgender therapies & surgeries that are being conducted like science experiments on our children – the future of our nation, by the way.
His website will give you limited info so also look him up on DailyWire to see what he’s worked on. His documentary “What is a Woman” could not have better encompassed the delusional “individual truth” that is being sold to and devoured by so many.
Here are the types of things Paul hears of taking place while he’s away on mission to Ephesus:
- Interpreting Christian teaching as a superior wisdom for an initiated few (1 Cor 1:10-4:21)
- The community lacked the decisiveness to take appropriate action against one of its members who was living publicly in an incestuous union (1 Cor 5:1-13)
- Other members engaged in legal conflicts in pagan courts of law (1 Cor 6:1-11)
- Others may have participated in religious prostitution (1 Cor 6:12-20) or temple sacrifices (1 Cor 10:14-22)
- In the celebration of the Eucharist, some members discriminated against others; Drank too freely at the fellowship meal and denied Christian social courtesies to the poor among the membership (1 Cor 11:17-22)
- Charisms such as ecstatic prayer, attributed freely to the impulse of the Holy Spirit, were more highly prized than works of charity (1 Cor 13:1-2, 8)
- Matters of conscience: The eating of meat that had been sacrificed to idols (1 Cor 8:1-13), the use of sex in marriage (1 Cor 7:1-7), and the attitude to be taken by the unmarried toward marriage in view of the possible proximity of Christ’s 2nd coming (1 Cor 7:25-40).
- Some of the members, despite their belief in the resurrection of Christ, were denying the possibility of general bodily resurrection.
So, a small amount of these so-called Christians, the minority, get a big head and decide they should have the power to play God and judge their fellow members in unjust ways. This first letter that Paul writes to the majority do-gooders of Corinth serves as a warning to them that they must guard against “the threats posed to the community by the views and conduct of various minorities”.
I’m no theologian – just a mama trying to raise her young kiddos up in a Godly way that might BENEFIT our community somewhere down the line.
At any rate, after reading over the warning by Paul, I’m instantly reminded of the transgender issue that’s rampantly growing among our young people along with the proposed gender affirming care treatment conducted by the very doctors living in our communities.
Consider this: the medical doctors pushing our children towards hormone blockers and approving them for mutilating surgeries that aim to remove healthy biological tissue from these MINORS on purpose… every single one of those doctors that have prescribed blockers or performed surgeries on MINORS, to remove or create biological parts of the opposite sex, have taken and sworn to uphold the Hippocratic Oath as practitioners.
In the oath, the physician pledges to prescribe only beneficial treatments, according to his abilities and judgment; to refrain from causing harm or hurt; and to live an exemplary personal and professional life.
Hippocratic oath | Definition, Summary, & Facts | Britannica
YET… here we are.
Living in a world where our trained medical professionals are voluntarily chopping off the healthy breast tissue of 15 yr-old girls within a matter of mere months of that child confiding in a trusted adult that she may be feeling confused or unsure of her true identity… solely due to, I’m convinced, the outlandish whims of fellow classmates having been validated (and accommodated) by the adults around them.
“stacey said she loves cats so much that she wishes she had been born a cat… she just loves everything about them!”
~said by every child about every cute animal that has ever existed in the history of the world
Stacey loves cats.
that’s great! maybe she’ll grow up to be a veterinarian or have a cat farm of her very own.
stacey cannot be a cat because stacey is a human female child (that likes cuddly, furry, cute little animals – sounds Consistent with the typical inclination of an average human female).
stacey is normal. she does not need to be confused by the adults in her life by allowing her to think “she could actually be a cat” if her heart so desired.
Thank GOODNESS I grew up in a time where it was still normal to be raised by stable, “grounded” parents who loved and cared enough for God’s children to constantly work on guiding me towards truth (instead of impressing multiple/infinite gender identity theories upon my already incredibly fragile, young mind).
Life can be tough, difficult, tragic: ‘no one gets out alive’ (as my dad likes to say). We are called by the Lord to struggle and trudge through certain periods in our life. Experiencing tragedy and hardships is meant to be a gift, benefitting us in the long run.
If we can truly reflect on our periods of suffering and allow ourselves to lean further into the Lord at each struggle, our personal relationship with God, as well as our ability to remain steadfast in Him through future conflicts, will only be strengthened.
I think we may be offering too many “easy outs” where trial is supposed to be shaping character. I feel like the children and teens of today are so flippant about their identity because they have been presented with the option of being anything they feel in every moment: they are given the option to run from whatever uncomfortable feeling they may have in any given moment without the consideration of rational reasoning…
“Had a bad day, kid? Perhaps it’s because you are physically in a male’s body and maybe, JUST MAYBE, God mistakenly formed you in the womb with typical male body parts but you may feel happier without them. Maybe your physical body is to blame for your current shade of unhappiness – who’s to know? Let’s begin treating your mental delusion by first chopping off those physical characteristics, erasing all possibility of returning back to your original physical state and, more than likely, rendering you sterile for the remainder of your life.”
<< Mark another win for population control. Weird, huh? Smells a tad fishy to me, too. >>
OK, enough of that silly-ness.
What I’m hoping you’ll agree with me on, here, is that the standard treatment under Gender Affirming Care for CHILDREN (minors) is, in reality, an egregious act against our very own species. It’s abuse, quite simply.
Taking an emotionally unstable & confused child, convincing them that the first line of treatment is to delay their natural state of puberty THEN surgically remove healthy biological tissues (or manufacture a synthetic body part), mutilating their body into something not recognizable by any gender…
That, right there, is the undeniable abuse of children in the highest form.
These cases are irreversible. Most of these children will be rendered sterile, and more than 50% of those who go on to have altering surgeries claim to experience ongoing pain, well after the surgery, that impacts their lives on a daily basis.
It’s disgusting and tragic down to the core. Regardless of how much they try to “dress it up”, it is downright wicked for us as a nation to allow medical professionals to continue practicing these science experiments on those most vulnerable.
We, as parents, should have more say about the health and wellbeing of our own children than their teachers and doctors have over them. The power of the “final say” belongs back with the parents, not handed over to someone with a degree that’s supposed to be looking out for what’s in “their best interest”.
God loves our children SO much – I’m told, even more than I am capable of loving them – & I believe it with my whole heart.
Next to God, NO ONE ELSE is going to love and protect your children like you can. Keep that in mind next time your “gut” disagrees while others are following sheepishly… the Holy Spirit has prompted you with a purpose. Continue to ask the Lord to show you the right path through the Holy Spirit.
Paul asks that we remain in the state of which we were called. Changing the physical state of a child’s (or an adult’s) body to another gender, species (whatever), is likely gonna be a “NO” for Him.
SO THEN, MAJORITY –
Let us heed Paul’s warning to “guard our hearts” this very day. The minority cannot continue spreading wickedness if we commit to digging in and refuse to give up on the fight for our children.
We have big problems to solve but I believe that we hold a righteous majority; I pray we’ve still got the numbers on our side.
What gifts & skills have you been given by the Lord? I believe we owe a little reflection time towards what kind of future we are cultivating right now.
I’ve been called to motherhood. I am assured by this mainly in the fact that I am not particularly great at anything else. Please don’t misunderstand that statement – I’m not claiming to be GREAT and perfect at mothering, either. But, I believe the Lord has formed certain characteristics within me that allow & prompt me to shepherd my babies well. And when I’m overwhelmed and feel like I’ve tried everything yet I still don’t know how to handle situations or behaviors, I have learned to go to the Lord in prayer – not doom scroll thru a million how-to articles. I simply ask the Lord for help in my current situation, that He would place in my mama heart, just the right thing to do at the right time. The outcome has not failed me yet.
Do what you know, do what you can, but I think it’s time we definitely start DOING.
