In the world of Bible study, Scriptural lessons can sometimes suffer when their primary application to our lives is overshadowed by a secondary application. Applications can sometimes take on a life of their own, and when they do, they may grow to overshadow the main lesson that we should take from the passage.
Today, we’re going to take a look at 3 passages that have a secondary application that has grown to overshadow the primary application. Its not that we’ve necessarily misunderstood these verses—rather, we’ve just allowed the spotlight to shift a bit away from where it should truly be fixed. Let’s dive into these verses and I’ll show you what I mean.
1 Corinthians 6:19
In this verse, we have the well-known statement, “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you.” Frequently, when this statement comes up, its in the context of a discussion about diet and exercise. Since our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, we say, then we need to take good care of them and do what we can to maintain our health.
That encouragement is certainly true, and it’s a fine application of this verse, but would you be surprised to learn that diet and exercise weren’t the main thing on Paul’s mind? He had a rather different concern that led him to pen these words [READ 6:18-20].
You can see that Paul’s main concern was with our sexual behavior. That area of life is the first place to which we need to apply this idea. The danger here is that by placing more emphasis on a secondary application, we might end up spending more time thinking about how to avoid saturated fat than how to avoid sexual sin! We might have a detailed plan to get a flat stomach, but no plan for remaining sexually pure. Such an oversight would be terribly negligent in light of the main point of this passage.
1 Corinthians 10:31
This well-known verse states, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” The point of this verse is clear enough—whatever you do in life should be done for the glory of God. But have you ever stopped to ask, “Why did Paul mention eating and drinking?” Why did he choose to mention those activities? And just how do you drink something to the glory of God?
I asked that question once to an audience of teenagers, and you could just see the gears in one boy’s mind come grinding to a halt! He had never thought about that question before, but now that he’d heard it, he couldn’t get past it.
It turns out that Paul had been discussing eating and drinking in the context of this verse, which is why he chose to highlight those activities in this command. You may remember that last week, I described how questions about food and drink were a very sticky subject in the early church as Jewish believers and non-Jewish believers were trying to come together as followers of Christ. In this passage, Paul was encouraging the Corinthians to put their own personal freedom on the backburner in order to promote God’s glory in every context [READ 10:23-33].
We can see from the context, then, that Paul’s command wasn’t simply to glorify God. Rather, it was to choose to glorify God rather than choosing something else—namely, choosing to flaunt our personal freedom in Christ.
The danger in this case is that we might become very faithful in small matters, but unfaithful in more important matters. You might perform a volunteer cleaning job here at church with all your might, but meanwhile, your relationships are strained because you’re very inconsiderate of others in the way you make decisions. It’s the same danger about which Jesus warned the Pharisees when he said, “you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others (Matthew 23:23).”
Philippians 4:8
This verse is often said to be a helpful guide to follow when you make entertainment choices—when you’re deciding what to watch on TV, for example. And it certainly is! If you follow this list as a guide, you’ll make some pretty good choices in that area.
There’s only one problem with that application—it certainly couldn’t have been the application that Paul had in mind, since TV’s didn’t exist back then! Let’s see what his concerns were in the context [READ Phil 4:1-9].
From the context, we can see that Paul’s main desires were for the Philippians to trade anxiety for joy, and that they could live in peace with each other. The main application of verse 8, then, would be along those lines. By focusing on thoughts of this kind rather than their worries or fears, the Philippians could enjoy peace of mind and know joy in their lives. They could also find peace with each other to be much more attainable if they would think about each other along these lines.
Arriving at the Primary Application
The problem we’ve seen in all of these examples is that the main or primary application of the verse has been overshadowed by a secondary application—an application that may be true and good, but that might nevertheless take the spotlight away from the primary application.
So when we’re studying a passage, how do we arrive at the primary application? How do we come to know the main thing that the Lord wants us to do? The essence of the process is this—after we’ve understood the application for the original readers, we then want to extract a universal principle from that application, which we can then apply to our own lives. Let’s look at the steps of this process in a bit more detail.
1. Determine what the author wanted the original readers to do
This step is the most important step in the whole process because it sets the trajectory for everything else that follows. This step is like putting an address into your GPS. If you enter the address incorrectly, it doesn’t matter how closely you follow the turn-by-turn directions—you’re going to end up in the wrong place, because you made a mistake in the very first step.
Even though this step is the most important one, it is the step that we so often rush through. After all, our main concern is our own lives, right? We’re not as concerned about people who lived so long ago. But we cannot ignore or neglect this step if we want to get it right.
2. Broaden the original application into a principle
At this point, we can now look beyond the application for the original readers to the principle on which that application was based. Why did the original author want them to do that specific thing? What larger principle is at work?
3. Look for points of contact with your own life
Once you’ve deciphered the principle behind the original application, then you’re ready to apply that principle to your own life. And you can do so with great confidence that you’ve gotten it right!
A Test Case—Philippians 4:2-3
Let me walk you through this process using some verses that we just read—Philippians 4:2-3. These verses are helpful to use for this exercise because as Paul writes them, he’s referring to a very specific situation involving some very specific people. Nevertheless, we can use this process to discern an application for ourselves today. Let’s read these verses again to jog our memories [READ Phil 4:2-3].
So how do we use this process with these verses? Let me lay out the steps again, and we’ll talk through it.
1. Determine what the author wanted the original readers to do
For this step, I would encourage you to write out the original application in a statement like this: “Paul wants Euodia and Syntyche to live in peace with one another, and he wants the ‘true companion’ to help them.” Its helpful to name any people who are named in the verses because it keeps our thinking back in that time, which helps us avoid rushing forward too quickly.
2. Broaden the original application into a principle
What we then want to do with our application statement is take any words that are highly specific and replace them with words that are more general. This step will move us toward the underlying principle behind the application. In this case, we will end up with a statement like this: “God wants believers to live in peace with one another and He wants other believers to help them.”
This application is now general enough to allow us to apply it to any context. It is just as applicable today as it was back then, and its applicable right now in any culture or country or setting. With this kind of flexibility, then, we can apply the principle to our own lives.
3. Look for points of contact with your own life
Now that we have our general principle in mind, we can look at how this principle should play out in our own lives. Be as specific as possible when you assess your life! With this principle, rather than remind myself to live at peace with believers in general, I should consider if I specific relationships where the peace has been broken. So I can write out the statement like this: “God wants me to live at peace with Brother Bob and He wants me to be willing to receive help in doing this.” Or in this case, we might also think of situations in which we have a real opportunity to help others live at peace. In that case, we might write the statement like this: “God wants my siblings to live in peace, and he wants me to help them do this.”
So now we have a very specific way to apply these verses to our own lives. We can be very confident that it is based on the same principle that Paul was drawing on way back then in order to give his instructions. With that confidence to spur us on, we will be well-positioned to keep the main application in the spotlight.