Sermons from Moorpark Presbyterian Church

Body Life

by Dave Wilkinson

Romans 12:4-5

April 25, 1999

A Southern Baptist preacher divides his congregation into five types of bones. First, he said, there are the "wishbones" -- people always wishing for better things, but never willing to work and pray for them. Then there are the jawbones. These are the gossiping kind that keep the church in turmoil. Third, there are the funny bones. They are like the bone in the elbow that throws a person into a tizzy when it is bumped. They are touchy, wear their feelings on their sleeves and are always talking about leaving the church. Fourth, there are the drybones. They are orthodox to the core but as dead as fossils. And finally, there are the backbones. These are the ones who keep the body standing and enable it to do what God requires.

The inspiration for his analogy comes directly from the Apostle Paul. Several times Paul uses the analogy of a body to describe the church. One of these places is our text for this morning, Romans 12:4-5. Paul uses the same analogy in 1 Corinthians 12 -- "Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it." -- and Ephesians 4 -- "But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love."

Through these three passages, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, and 1 Corinthians 12, Paul reminds us that we are not an organization. We are an organism. We are the body of Jesus Christ.

When Paul speaks of the body of Christ, he is speaking of those who belong to Christ, who are joined to him. This is a spiritual reality. It is invisible but supremely real. It is something that is accomplished by the Holy Spirit. It has to do with faith in Christ by which we become new creatures. As Paul wrote back in Romans 5, we have passed out of our death union with Adam to a new life union with the Savior. We are now the Body of Jesus Christ. And this has a profound impact on the way we live.

We are one with each other. We are made blood relation by the cross of Jesus Christ. We are brothers and sisters. But this unity is not the same as uniformity. For, though we are one, we are gifted in different ways for different roles. This is God's plan. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 12:18 that we are not placed in the church in a haphazard way. Our place and our function derives from a divine appointment.

For us to be part of a body means that we need each other. We cannot go it alone. In 1 Corinthians he says that it's hard to be a hand without an arm. It's pointless to be a foot without a leg. Each part is needed.

The immediate focus of each of these passages is spiritual gifts. In Corinth, for example, Paul observes a Christian community that is fragmented by those who elevate their particular gift in a way which denigrates the importance of the gifts held by others. They view themselves as more important.

To counter act this, Paul presents the truth of what the church is. We are not an organization. We are an organism. We live and breathe and grow together.

But how is this kind of interdependence possible to express in a church community the size of ours -- with some five or six hundred members and children and regular attenders? It is not possible for anyone to know that many people in a meaningful, supportive way. That is why it is so important that each of us give ourselves to a smaller group within the larger -- a small group, a choir, a Bible study, a church school class, a ministry team. You need a place where you belong, where you are needed, where you are supported and encouraged and where you are held accountable.

Look at your own body. Does every part know every other part? Does your elbow know your neck? Has your foot spent time with your spinal cord? My own big toe has yet to meet my left ear. I hope they never do meet because it would almost certainly be the result of a serious accident.

What is important in our church is not that you know everyone but that you know those you are called to work and live beside very well. My knees and my eyes don't need to work together directly to benefit from each other. But my knees do need to work smoothly with the bones, muscles, and tendons which surround them. We are not in this alone. We are in this together.

That's why our church stresses that you be involved in four areas of our common life.

First, we urge you to be active in worship. It is that sacred time of coming together with other believers to sing hymns of praise, to pray, to present your tithes and offerings to the Lord, to hear the announcements of what's going on in the life of the body, to receive teaching and exhortation from the word of God, to look around and see your brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ in their varied shapes and sizes and ages and backgrounds.

Second, we urge you to become involved in Christian education. You need to learn, to grow intellectually, to become increasingly aware of the things of God.

Third, we urge you to become involved in a small group. You need fellowship. You need a safe place where you are known and you know. We try to have groups of ten to twelve persons. We have close to one hundred seventy adults here involved in these groups. There is no way we can produce great intimacy in this sanctuary on Sunday morning. There is that supernatural connection which comes through corporate worship. But there is more to life together than that. Do you have several other fellow believers with whom you can share your deeper issues. Are they free to share their's with you?

Fourth, we urge you to live a life of service for others. Have you plugged your life into the lives of others, giving of yourself to those who would not fit naturally into your normal frame of reference?

In Ephesians 4 Paul says that we know that all of the joints are doing their proper job when something is happening...when the church is building itself up in love.

Imagine an infant who is born at a healthy eight pounds. He is a nice, healthy, handsome baby with positive vital signs. But what if he reaches his twenty-first birthday and still only weighs eight pounds -- and still acts like a baby. Obviously there would be a problem with his body. In fact, he would not be alive if he had not grown. Living bodies must grow. Growth is one of the signs of life.

Of course human bodies reach a certain stage where they don't grow any larger -- at least not up and down. But they are always producing new cells. To be alive is to grow. So it is with the church. The church body must grow as well.

And this growth must come in three ways. First and foremost it must be growth in love. Cancer, too, is growth. But it is growth which is hostile to the body. Things in the body of Christ which are not resulting in love -- not sloppy sentimentality but genuine love --.are cancers.

Second, this growth must be in maturity -- it must be solid.

There is a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown and Linus are walking together. Linus is saying: "I believe the answer is maturity. Our goal in life should be to become mature in all things." They walk by Snoopy who is lying on his dog house with his stomach sticking up in the air. Linus turns and announces to an awakened Snoopy, "fat is not mature."

How are we to know that we have become genuinely mature in all things and not just fat in all things. Paul tells us the answer in Ephesians 4:13 where he says that our goal and our measure is the "unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature person, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ."

And third, this growth is to be numerical. "We are called to make disciples of all nations --.baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It is God's will that more of His creation be reconciled to its Creator and, as Paul writes, we have been named agents of that reconciliation. We are not playing a numbers game. Numbers are just shorthand for people who we are to reach with the gospel of peace.

For us to be a body means that what happens in one part affects other parts. A tiny hole in your tooth affects the way your whole body feels. In the same way, a glass of cold lemonade entering your stomach affects the way your whole body feels on a hot, sticky day. The same is true of the Body of Christ. We affect each other. This is why we share with each other what God is doing in our lives. John Wesley correctly argued that one's religious experience is deeply personal but it is never private. I need to hear your story -- .to hear how God is dealing with you --for how he deals with you will influence me.

In the same way, the sin of one member of the body will affect other members. This is true even of a secret sin. We can hide our sin from each other but we cannot prevent it from affecting each other.

Some men were out in a row boat. One man became lost in thought and started carving away with his knife at the bottom of the boat. Suddenly one of the other men saw and yelled, "stop that! You're cutting a hole in the bottom of the boat! The fellow with the knife replied, "I'm cutting this hole under my seat, so mind your own business."

But a hole in any part of a boat is everybody's business. The same is true of a body and the church as the Body of Christ. If one part of the body becomes cancerous, it doesn't threaten just that isolated part. It threatens the whole body and curing the illness becomes the whole body's business. That is how deeply interdependent our lives are in the Body of Christ.

Love, maturity, reconciliation, sharing, accountability -- it sounds like a whole lot is expected of us if we are to be responsible functioning parts of the Body of Christ. But all of this is very much for our own benefit because of what we can become and because of what we can receive in a mature functioning congregation of believers.

Bill and Gloria Gaither wrote a special song called "The Family of God." It's a story of Christian body life. It's the story of the Body of Christ, the church at work.

A young couple in their Indiana church, Ron and Darlene Garner, have three children. It was the day before Easter that Ron went to work at the garage where he was a mechanic. He was working alone that day because he was making up time that he had taken off the previous Thursday to take his daughter for tests prior to some anticipated heart surgery. He knew that they would need the money for hospital and doctor bills. While Ron was working with combustible material, there was an explosion. He managed to crash his way through the large double doors before the building blew apart and went up in flames. He was severely burned over most of his body.

The news from the emergency ward was pessimistic. Ron was alive but not expected to make it through the night. It was only minutes before a chain of telephone calls alerted the body, the church, the family of God. That community of believers began to pray for Ron. All day long they prayed, in little groups, in big groups, in homes, at the church, over the phone. All over town people who were related to Ron and Darlene prayed.

By evening the word came that although doctors gave no hope, Ron was still alive. They couldn't understand how he was holding on, but they said that now he had lived eight hours, if he could make it until morning, possibly, there was a chance -- just a chance.

The family of God kept on praying. Old folks prayed alone in their rooms. Children prayed in simple faith. Women prayed as they went about the tasks of caring for their families. Men prayed together in basements, over store counters, and in automobiles. The church building was kept open, and the lights burned all through the night, as a steady stream of folks who cared and loved came to talk to Jesus about this young father who was "bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh."

The sun streamed in the windows that Easter Sunday morning on a sanctuary filled with the most weary, bleary-eyed congregation you've ever seen. There were very few Easter bonnets or bright new outfits. Gloria Gaither says, "we were just there, drawn together closer than we had ever been before by the reality we'd been sharing -- that when one part of the body suffers, we all suffer with it." There was hurt, and there was pain in the body. That pain had drawn the attention of every other member.

About twenty minutes into the service, the pastor came in with a report from the hospital. Although he had gone without sleep to be with the garner family through the long hours, there was sunshine in his eyes. "Ron has outlived the deadline. The doctors say he has a chance. They are going to begin treatment."

For the Body of Christ, that news was better than eight hours of sleep and a good breakfast. New life was infused. Tears of praise and joy began to flow. Hope and gratitude poured itself into the glorious songs of Easter. Those songs that day were songs of Easter. Those songs that day were songs of commitment too. That group of believers knew that long, hard days for Ron and Darlene and the children had only just begun. The body, the community of believers, would be called to help with the children, to provide many long trips to the hospital, pints of blood for transfusions, money for hospital bills, meals to be taken to the family who would be too tired to cook, long months of support while the slow skin grafting and healing process went on. "We knew what it would mean and in our celebration we pledged ourselves to whatever it would take to make that injured part of the body whole and well again."

On their way home from church, Bill and Gloria so full of what had happened that day, could hardly speak. Finally, one said to the other, "they'd do that for us, too!" No, they weren't model church members. Their work often took them out of town on weekends. But the fact was they were part of a community, part of the body. Not because they were worthy or had earned special treatment or were indispensable, but just because they were part of the family of God. They too were important.

Ron now is a healthy, robust basketball coach. His little daughter, Diane, has had very serous but successful open heart surgery. Other families in their fellowship have had their ups and downs, but they've been sustained by the family of God.

What Gloria Gaither tells about her own church is true about ours, isn't it? Some of you have had the need to experience that kind of support. And it’s there..

None of us has it all together. Each of us is incomplete on our own. We are privileged to be part of Christ's body life. We are privileged to part of the family of God.