pecanpie

I was once in the same "church limbo" as you. It took praying and visiting some churches to find a place where we felt welcome. Don't give up. Hope you connect with a church you can call home very soon.

These verses teach about our duty and trust in God's grace for our reward. Jesus uses an illustration relating the nature of faith to actions. The emphasis here is on the danger of self-righteousness. Jesus asked his disciples to put themselves in the role of a master who owned a slave and asks if they would greet the slave returning from his daily tasks with a prepared dinner and an evening of rest. The answer is a rhetorical.. "of course not!" This may seem as harsh and unfair to us today, but it was a perfectly normal description of the slave-master relationship of Jesus' days. As you can read... Jesus doesn't condemn or approve. He merely used this relationship to illustrate His teaching on the life of faith. The slave received and deserved no special treatment or thanks for doing his assigned tasks as they were his duties. He was expected to prepare the master's meal before he ate, even after a long day's work. Paul expresses this clearly in 1 Corinthians 9:16 with the words, "For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of... For necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!". God owes us nothing, but that He has a great task for us to do. We are called to reject materialism, to oppose injustice, and to tell the whole world about our Savior, Jesus Christ. In vs. 10 Jesus put his disciples in the slave's shoes to make His point. When we do godly works, when we live the faith, we should not expect to receive a special commendation from God. We are merely doing our duty. The Pharisees of Jesus' times believed in their self-righteousness that their good works constituted a claim upon God. Jesus repudiated this attitude, saying that good works are our duty; we cannot put God in our debt. No matter how "good" we are, salvation is still a gift of God by grace. We cannot earn it.

Perfection in the Biblical sense will not happen until we are fully transformed. Now, if we talk about "holiness" that is something completely different. Being holy means being set apart for God. As part of being set apart a series of behaviors are expected... under the direction of the Holy Spirits by surrendering ourselves to him and with the power of the Word we are in a process of transformation while on this earth.

Sex is part of God's creation, not part of the fall. However; sin corrupted God's intention for sex.