Who’s Holding the Reins?
OPENING PRAYER:
Jesus, I was bought at a price I could never have paid myself. Remind me whose I am before I try to decide what I’m allowed to do. Let my life belong fully to the one who already gave everything for it.
READ: 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19-20 (NIV)
“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 (NIV)
Paul closes this same chapter with a reminder of identity, not just behavior, grounding the whole conversation about freedom in the fact that believers belong to someone else entirely.
REFLECT:
Pastor Rodney Elliott called this “an old school thing,” and in a way it is; it’s an ownership claim from two thousand years ago that still cuts through modern confusion. Earlier in the message, he’d walked through the two questions Paul gave the Corinthians, is it beneficial, and am I being mastered, but here Paul gives the reason those questions matter at all. It isn’t a rulebook logic. It’s ownership logic. You were bought. You are not your own. Rodney said something worth sitting with: our generation tends to turn God into our friend, and he is, but sometimes we stop asking whether our behavior is actually honoring the one who bought us.
Think back to the man in Rodney’s office, seventy-five thousand dollars deep into a secret addiction. He would have told you he loved Jesus. He knew his Bible. And still, something else was holding the reins of his life. That’s the uncomfortable truth Paul is pointing at: it is entirely possible to know exactly who bought you and still let something else master you day to day. Ownership and mastery are not automatically the same thing, even though they should be. Belonging to Jesus doesn’t erase the pull of other masters. It just means we have somewhere to bring the fight.
Rodney didn’t offer an easy verdict on gambling, the same way a pastor once gave him decades ago. Instead he pointed people back to a relationship: go ask the one who bought you whether this is beneficial, whether it’s mastering you, and then actually obey what he says. That’s a very different posture than checking a rule against a list.
APPLY:
Say this sentence out loud, slowly: “I am not my own; I was bought at a price.” Then bring one specific area of your life, named honestly, to God and ask him directly whether it honors the one who owns you.
I WILL STATEMENT:
“I will choose to honor God by choosing what is beneficial.”
CLOSING PRAYER:
Father, thank you for buying me back when I couldn’t buy myself back. Let that truth reach into the ordinary decisions of my life, not just the big ones. I want every part of me to actually belong to you, not just in name.
PRAYER REQUEST:
Share your prayer request and pray for others.