One of the best known Biblical texts is found in I Corinthians 12:12-31, where Paul equates the church to the human body. Paul points out that just like the human body the body of Christ, the church, is made up of many parts and that all parts are needed and vital to the work of the body. We all know this and yet we often struggle to live it out. We sometimes work so hard at being right and getting what we want we forget that we are in this together. The evil of the world keeps this going so that we waste all our time and energy fighting, trying to prove our side and living angry because we don’t get our way. This is found in the individual church and in the corporate, universal church. Paul was trying to point out that we have to look past our differences and focus on the gospel of Christ. This has not changed, even now in 2016 we must see that every person is needed and all of us play a part in sharing the love of God. Sometimes this means we will not get what we want; sometimes we make sacrifices for the need in someone else’s life. Sometimes we need to sing songs we don’t know, participate in worship we don’t like and learn that our way is not the only way to share the gospel. When the hand gets angry and only wants things done their way the whole body suffers. We have to willingly give in to someone else’s way so that we all can work together. One of my simple ways to get this across is to share that no one ever comes to me and says I was talking with the folks next to me and they stated they are cold could we do something about that. Most of the time folks come to me because they are cold or hot with no real concern for the other folks in the room. This is our human condition and our desire to be comfortable. We grow in our understanding of God when we willing sacrifice our comfort for the comfort of the other persons in the room. We grow even more when we do it without telling anyone. We here at JUMC are a body of Christ, together with our Christian brothers and sisters we are The Body of Christ! We must continue to work on getting and keeping our body healthy so we can be used by God to improve The Body of Christ around the world. Enjoy the video from SkitGuys.com performed by onetimeblind to see the unhealthy behavior of the universal Church body.
Over the next few weeks we are going to walk on through I Corinthians. This Sunday get ahead by reading I Corinthians 13 we will focus on the title “This is the Church!”