UNDERSTANDING THE BODY- I

Romans 12:4-5
Bob Boner
December 3, 1995

George worked for a house painter. He was a good worker. Though he never talked much, the painter felt lucky to have such a helper as George. One day, the painter got sick and had to stay home. He figured George could manage on his own for a few days, while his boss recuperated. A couple of days later the painter felt well enough to take a drive over to see how George was doing on the job. When he arrived, he found George lounging against a tree, sipping a beer. And scattered all about him on the lawn were several empty bottle. Up on the ladders were two young high school boys he had never seen before, painting.

“What’s going on?” the astonished painter asked.

“Oh,” said George smugly, “I hired me a couple of helpers. Payin’ ‘em $10.00 an hour.”

“Ten dollars an hour?!” the painter gasped. “Why, I only pay you seven dollars an hour. You can’t make any money that way.”

“Yeah, I know,” said George. “But it’s worth it just to be the boss once in my life.”

We human beings, no matter what size or shape, we have one thing in common: a need to feel important. Everyone would like to be looked up to or to be admired---even if it’s only for a fleeting moment. In this age of social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, payroll numbers, none of us enjoys being treated as an invoice number. I’m reminded of the employee who scrawled across his time card, “Do not fold, bend or mutilate--- I am a human being” That employee was declaring something worth listening to.

As Christians, we of all people, should be aware of the tremendous worth we have before God, seeing as He loved us so much and felt we were valuable enough to take such a drastic measures as to save us, to make us new creations and to give us new identities as His children. But often times, just intellectually knowing these facts that we have great value to Him is not enough. For awhile, we can live an extremely joyful life, just knowing how much God personally loves us through the truth we read in His word, through the evidence that He hears and answer our prayers. But sooner or later, our souls will hunger for more than just intellectual knowledge and affirmation. We also need to know in a very real, physical and tangible way that we have worth to God, that we are important, that our lives are contributing, and that someone we can see and touch knows we exist.

After studying the scriptures, I am convinced that God knew that if we were going to remain healthy children of God, our souls needed a more tangible hug or touch, or to hear a verbal affirmation from another visible being that God, does indeed love us, and that we stand approved in His presence. He knew that after sin entered the world and until sin was permanently removed from our lives, that just reading the word and praying and claiming factual truths about our new identity in Christ, God would never have given us the “Body of Christ” nor would He have commanded us to gather together for corporate worship. Furthermore, He wouldn’t have challenged us as the body of Christ to encourage and build up one another in the local church if we didn’t desperately need it. We need each others physical and verbal affirmations and reminders of the truth of who we are in Christ and we can’t get that without the meeting together as a body.

But, the sad think is, that very few Christians realize how critical it is to one’s spiritual health to have an active part in a local church family. What’s worse, is that very few Christians know what their responsibilities are toward other believers in the body. Too many Christians go to church once a week, never realizing that if that’s the only contact they have with other believers, they are truly being robbed of something extremely vital to the health, well being and growth of their own life’s.

Add to this, the breakdown of the traditional family and its lack of support to individuals, makes the body’s responsibility even more crucial that we understand as believers, the importance of the body of Christ and the part we play as a member of the body of Christ to encourage and build up one another.

There is one overriding truth that I hope you will leave here with this morning and see further developed as we look at this subject for the next two weeks. That truth is this.

Other than the truth from God’s word, upon which we derive our identities and sense of worth, other than the traditional family (which is in a world of hurt now days), the local fellowship, the body of Christ is the most important vehicle through which our sense of value and worth before God is not created reaffirmed. For the next few weeks, as we continue our study in the book of Romans, we want to look at the importance to us, the local church’s working, caring and worshipping together.

In our study of the book of Romans, we have learned about our new identity in Christ that was given to us the moment we put our trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior [1-8]. God went to great extremes to record for us these truths that they might have a major impact in changing the way we view ourselves and the way we behave. By way we behave. By way of reminder, the first 11 chapters of Romans gave us the doctrine about who we are in Christ, while, beginning with chapter 12 through the end of the book, we learn of the duty we have as believers to live for the Lord. In the first half of Romans, we have the belief system, and with chapter 12, we have how we are to behave, based on this belief system.

If you remember in our study of Romans 12:1-3, we learned that first we are to give back to God as living sacrifices, our very lives, our bodies and our minds, to let Him do with us as He chooses, verse 1.

In verse 2, we also saw, that if we are going to behave properly, we have to have our minds renewed. And the first place in which our thinking had to be changed was in the area of how each of us view our own worth. That was verse 3. But now, beginning with verses 4-8 Paul want to emphasize the importance of us renewing our minds as to how we are to relate to each other as believers in the body of Christ. Our world pushes us to act and behave as totally independent entities. We want to emphasize our freedoms, regardless of what damage or hurt they may bring upon others. In one sense, we intellectually acknowledge that none of us are islands unto ourselves. But, the world philosophies and greed and self interest and personal ambitions drive us away from each other.

Paul’s point in these verses and throughout his epistles is that if we don’t understand the importance of our relationship to each other, we will not grow up to be healthy believers. That’s one reason he commands us in Philippians 2:3-4 to “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not {merely} look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interest of others.”

A healthy body of believers, a healthy local church is one of God’s most useful instruments through which he verifies to every Christian their sense of self-worth. Without a healthy body of believers reaffirming each other and being a group with whom we can exercise our spiritual gifts and build each other up as well as reach out to a dying world, we as individual Christians become drifting souls who are no different than those who don’t know the Lord.  

Having said that, what are the characteristics of a healthy church? Paul gives us three in Romans 12:4-5 that we want to look at this morning and next week. Paul writes these words: “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”

Paul uses the illustration of a human body to describe what a group of Christians are and how they are to function. There are three characteristics that Paul stresses in these verses that are typical of a healthy functioning physical human body as well as of a “body or group of believers”. Those three characteristics are: unity- not uniformity, diversity and mutuality.

If you look at my body, it has many different members to it. I have two eyes, 10 fingers, two legs, one nose, one belly button, etc., but they are attached or unified and they make up my single unified body.

Similarly, twice, Paul states in these verses that as Christians, we are one body---not that we should be one body; but like it or not, the reality is, all of us as Christians are part of one another. We make up the body of Christ and for eternity we are stuck with one another.

I might not like my nose or the fact that my legs are too long or too short, but like them or not, I can’t deny that they are mind and I must live with them. That’s reality. If I choose to reject my legs or deny that they exist because they are too long or too short to too skinny or too fat, and I refuse to use them, then I will only limit what I can do and possibly hurt myself.

Similarly, there may be Christians that I would just as soon not admit to anybody else are my brothers or sisters in Christ, but like it or not, they are eternally part of the same body as I am. I can’t deny that reality. If I do, I only hurt myself and deny what participation that God wants them to play in my life for my good as well as theirs and His.

The apostle Paul verifies this reality that we are a body in Ephesians 4:1, when he states, “I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to be walk in a manner worth of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing forbearance to one another in love, being diligent to preserve [note: he did not say create but to preserve something that in reality, already exists] the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body.”

Each of us as believers in the body of Christ share one new nature, and that is our new identity of Jesus living in each of us. We derive our very spiritual life from this one nature that unifies us. The true vine, Jesus, is the one through whom we, the branches [note: not “branch”] derive our spiritual life. If we ignore or refuse to accept the other members or branches as part of the vine, or if we refuse to participate as a member in the body of Christ, this will have harmful effects to me and the entire body. I’ll show you why a little later.

The second characteristic of the body that Paul mentions is also seen in verse 4 and that has to do with the body’s diversity. He states, “…all the members do not have the same function.” As we will see when we get to our study of the spiritual gifts in verses 6-8, after the holiday season, each of us have a different spiritual gifting from God and therefore, play a different role in the body of Christ and have different functions or ministries because of several factors. None of us play the same exact role in the body of Christ as anyone else and all of us have our place.

For instance: One ingredient that makes us different, along with our different giftedness is that each of us have different backgrounds in which we were raised, different parentage, different levels of education, and different drives. All of these differences ten to lead us into different areas of life that we find an interest in or a drivenness in which to minister to others. We may choose to reach the world for Christ through active Christian participation in politics or athletics or music or education. Some through a program like Child Evangelism Fellowship or working with teenagers in a youth program, or with singles or seniors. You may have had a very close friend who was deaf and that lead you into learning sign language so that you could speak to those who could not hear the gospel through normal means. Something in your life may have sparked a unique interest in you in these areas, that hasn’t sparked the same interest in the life of another believer.

Furthermore, because we are different due to upbringing and the influences culture, both negative and positive, Romans 14 teaches us that there are many areas in which the scriptures are silent as to choices of activities we may select to participate or not participate in. our personal convictions may lead us to agree to disagree as to what each of us think is right and good. These differences do not make any one of us more or less a part of the body of Christ, or more or less spiritual, or more or less important, or useful as a member of the body of Christ.

So it is with our physical bodies. For instance: Personal, it is my conviction, and my body agrees, that for me to eat with my feet is wrong. And by wrong, I mean sinful. There is no specific verse that says, “To eat with your feet is sinful.” But to me, my conviction is that it is wrong. It is unhealthy and I would never feel comfortable eating with my fee. Furthermore, I could make a serious case for it not being right to eat with ones feet due to contracting diseases and therefore harming this temple, the place in which Jesus dwells, if I ate with my feet.

However, I remember living in New Jersey where we were at a major church function. We were honoring a pastor who had faithfully served the church for a number of years. The dinner was being held at a very nice restaurant, reserved for seating hundreds of people. Becky and I sat down at a table, where later, a recently new couple to the church, came and sat down next to us. This couple was unique in that both of them had no arms or hands. I had never thought about it much before, but when the salads were served, I was suddenly struck with the thought, “How do these people feed themselves? Oh, I guess I am going to have to feed them.”

As soon as we were all served salads and our chilled forks [I told you that this was one of those finer restaurants] I could not believe my eyes when I saw both individuals raise a bare foot, pick up a chilled for and began to eat their salads! Part of me laughed at thinking about how my bare foot would have responded to that chilled fork. Another part of me sat there absolutely amazed at the ease with which they contorted their bodies to eat with their feet. It was as normal for them to eat with their feet as it was for me to eat with my hands!

The point being, that obviously, due to their circumstance, their convictions about eating with their feet were different than mine. For them, it was starve or eat with your feet! Diversity leads us to different ministries, different activities and different ways in which we choose to live and choose to call others to worship God. That couple had a unique ministry to a lot of people, impaired or otherwise, that I would never have.

So, Paul tells us that as believers, we are unified members of one body and diverse as an eye is to a big toe or a hand is to an ear. We each have a different function and in many ways a different conviction or perspective on certain thinking in life. And because we are different, we are told to accept one another not reject one another because we are unified.

The third characteristic that Paul mentions to us in these verses is that of mutuality. He says that “We belong to one another” or “we are individually members of one another.” The church is no place for lone rangers. Each of us belongs to and needs the others. We may get along without some of you, just like that couple got along without having hangs. But how much more can we do with you?

Look with me at Ephesians 4:15. Paul reveals the importance of the mutuality of the body. He states, “but speaking the truth in love, we [together] are to grow up in all {aspects} in to Him [Christ], who is the head, {even} Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.” 

God so designed us as Christians who are apart of his family, called the body of Christ that if we are going to mature and grow up, the only way we can is if we are fellowshipping with each other, and building into each others lives, holding each other accountable, encouraging each other etc. we will looks more at this in the next two weeks.

Maybe you feel that your life is stuck and you are not growing in your personal walk with the Lord. Even though you read your Bible, you pray and you faithfully give to the Lord, you feel like something is missing spiritually. Maybe fellowshipping in small groups is not an option. It is a necessity that too many Christians neglect and in turn, stops your spiritual growth. And when the individual members of the local body of Christ stop growing the whole body suffers as result.

Too often we think that we don’t need the other members of the body of Christ to be healthy as Christians. That’s arrogant. Look at what Paul says about that, in Romans 12:16. He says, “Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty [arrogant] in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation.” In other words, don’t be so wise in your own estimation that you think more highly of yourself than you ought to think. Remember verse 3, and Paul’s warning that we need to be renewed in our minds as to how we view ourselves. Some of us think wrongly of ourselves, that we are totally self sufficient and don’t need anybody. When we do, that leads to the very problems that Paul is trying to help us avoid here in verses 4-5, and that is the problem that results from thinking that you can make it without others or that your needs or hurts are more important or greater than anyone else’s. To think that way, Paul says in verse 16 is foolishly arrogant. Instead, as Romans 12:15 states, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.”

Did you know that that is exactly what the different members of your body do with each other? When your nose smells that pumpkin pie or that holiday turkey, it rejoices. But that does your salivary glands. And when you tongue gets a taste of what your nose and salivary glands said was coming, you, your tongue, and stomach rejoice with them to. Your physical body parts rejoice with the other body parts when something good happens to them.

Like wise, I remember when I broke my wrist playing sandlot football as a kid. The rest of my body felt so bad that their partner, the wrist, was hurting that they stayed up all night to keep my painful wrist company! As fellow members of the body of Christ, Paul commands us to get involved and stay involved in each other’s lives in such a way as to know when others need someone to rejoice with them or to weep with them when the time comes.

This is what Paul means when he talks about mutuality. A local fellowship of believers will only be as healthy as its individual members take seriously their role and responsibility of building into each other’s lives. Mutuality requires that we each understand and live as though we believe that we do not exist for ourselves. That we make time in our schedule, other than at a worship service, to build into each other’s lives. God has called us together as a church with spiritual gifts and abilities to build up each other, all the while calling the rest of the world to join us as we worship and follow Jesus Christ.

If you have a local fellowship that is unified around a cause and even is willing to allow diversity of convictions amongst its members to fulfill their cause, but do not believe in the importance of mutuality and our responsibility to each other as a body to make sure each member of the body is growing and is healthy, then that body will remain unhealthy.

Paul is telling us here that it takes these three characteristics of preserving the unity we share in Christ that is already a reality, allowing for diversity and believing in the importance of mutuality for a church to be healthy. You cannot have a healthy church if you do not have all three.

How are we doing?

As an elder in this fellowship, I must be honest with you at this point. I personally feel that at this point in out growing and working together as a body, we are presently doing well at working at preserving the unity that we have in Christ. We don’t have any prima donas running lose or demanding their own way. We understand our mission to call the world to worship and follow Jesus Christ and we are working as a unified body in trying to fulfill that mission. There have been many times that different leaders in this fellowship have put aside their ideas or desires so as to not cause waves and to work together as a team for the purpose of reaching our goal. Quite frankly, that’s one of the ingredients that has made this fellowship so exciting for me to work with. Lord weeds out divisive people

In addition, we are learning to except our diversities and are choosing to allow the Lord to work in different people’s lives in different ways. I don’t recall any instances where we have groups of people demanding that we all must wear the same kinds of clothes or that all of our kids must go to public of Christian schools or that we all most vote the same way or celebrate Christmas in the same manner. There is room for diversity and the freedom to agree to disagree on that which the Bible is silent, so that the work of God may go forward.

In the area of mutuality and working together, we have a very high percentage of people who attend this fellowship involved in serving someplace in the fellowship. According to some figures that our administrator ran a few months ago, we were amazed at how many people have taken personal ownership or full responsibility over needed ministries in this body, both big and small. That’s wonderful and you who are involved are to be commended, not by me, but by the Lord Jesus. Now, we do need to learn more about our spiritual gifts and to utilize them more, and we will learn more from the word about what spiritual gifts are and how they are employed after the holidays pass. But this part of mutuality is growing and encouraging, here at Crossroads church.

But one area of mutuality that truly concerns me, that is, for your personal well being and spiritual growth, is how few of you have made room in your lives or your weekly schedule for some in depth time to build into someone else’s life or for someone to build into yours.

For Instance: How many of you in this room know what a “fellowship Group” of a “cell group” is? A fellowship group is a small group of people that may number from 7-16 people who meet together once a week for approximately 90 minutes to spend a little time in the word together, praying for each other and caring for each other. When a small group of people commit to meet weekly like this with one another, they really get to know and appreciate each other very well. As a result, when someone in the group is hurting, they reach out to that person. If needed they may provide meals, look after kids if the couple needs to spend a night alone together or a single parent needs a break. They are like a small cell group in the body that promotes healing and aids in fending off germs and diseases.

How many of you know that we offer these groups in this church? How many groups do we have? We have two! We have approximately 200 adults in this fellowship who worship here every Sunday but only about 30 people committed to building into each others lives in this manner. That concerns me. Not because I want to promote a program, but because it cause me to question how seriously we take our need to spend time with each other investing ourselves in each others lives. It causes me to question how healthy are relationships are with each other? If the local body of Christ, according to the scriptures, demands fellowship with other believers for the local church to be healthy, not just worship on Sunday morning, then really how healthy are we if so few of us are involved in this form of mutuality?

Now, I know that there are several other small groups of bibles studies with the ladies and men, that have spontaneously sprung up. That’s fantastic. Those are fellowship groups too. May their numbers increase. I know that there are several men who have committed themselves to meet with each other every week just to pray together. That’s mutuality too. I tell you that I know these other groups exist so that you know that I understand that there are more ways for you to find fellowship with others than in a formal “fellowship group.” It doesn’t really matter how or where serious, committed people get together on a regular basis to build into each other’s lives. All that matters is that we realize that we don’t exist for ourselves and that somehow each of us are investing our time and our lives in the lives of others. If we are not doing so, we are not promoting spiritual health in our own individual lives. Warnings for couples- Not just male, but couples.

Next week we want to look at several scriptural directions that are vital for us to know and to practice if we are truly going to function as healthy members of the body of Christ, encouraging growth in each other’s lives. God commands, He doesn’t suggest, but commands that there are certain things we must do for one another if we are going to function as a healthy body of believers and keep on growing deeper roots in our relationships with Jesus Christ, the head of the body.

But for now, lets just wrap up what we have seen thus far in three principles that must be grasped and understood if we are going to experience spiritual growth as individual believers and continue to develop a healthy body of believers: First, every Christian is a member of the body of Christ.

Second, it is imperative that we recognize that as individual members of the body of Christ, just like individual cells in the human Body, No individual Christian can function effectively as a “Lone Ranger” in the body of Christ.

Certain believers may take on more responsibilities of be more visible, but none is more important than anyone else. We all have an important part to play as a member of Christ’s body. Just like my kidneys. You can’t see them, nobody says, “My, does he have a pair of gnarly kidneys!” but I would want to have my kidneys decide to quit working simply because nobody affirmed them or paid them compliments or decided to quit paying them, etc. without properly functioning kidneys, I am dead.

If for instance, you don’t think that serving in the nursery to care for other’s babies on a Sunday morning is important, but the only really important servers in worship are the song leaders and the preachers, you just watch what happens to most churches when all the babies are allowed to spit up, cry and do the normal noise making that babies do while the adult are trying to seriously concentrate on worshipping God and listening to His still small voice speak to them during the worship service, through the preaching of the word. That service of the nursery workers becomes suddenly extremely important to those of us who can’t concentrate with the distractions that little infants can cause.

Hence, no member of the body of Christ is more important than another, and all ministries should work together toward increasing the worship of the body as a whole.

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