The Church - A Body System 10/5
Sermon Series: The Church ________________
Sermon Title: The Church – A Body System
Sermon Text: 1 Corinthians 12:12-13
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13, ESV)
Theme: This text centers around the theme of the interconnectedness of God’s people. This community happens not because think alike or look alike or share a common ancestry or culture this connection is because we all are part of God through His Son. When we came in honest belief as repentant sinners before God we were acted upon by Him to breathe together as one body, our lungs gasping the same air, our veins pumping the same blood.
Introduction: Did you hear the story about the time when the Lone Ranger and his brave Indian companion, Tonto rode into the valley that suddenly filled up with hundreds of war painted braves clearly agitated and on the war path. The Lone Ranger turned toward his trusty friend and asked him what he thought they we should do. As Tonto started riding away he answered back and said, “What do you mean we white man.”
Transition: These two verses represent not only the theme of the all of chapters 12, 13, and 14 of this letter; they make some astounding theological conclusions. Let’s explore some of the implications of these statements about the nature of the Church and our place in it.
I. The Church IS Christ’s Body
a. Paul makes an astounding statement in verse 12. I think that many times we lose the startling quality of this statement because of the familiarity of hearing it.
b. He says that the Church is Christ’s body.
i. At the end of verse 12 the incredible statement there. After expanding the idea that body has many members you would expect him to say that it is just like the Church but instead he says that it is just like Christ.
c. This means that first of all we have to remember that the Church is an organism not an organization.
i. There is a tendency to act as if the Church is this neat large cube made up of lots of little cubes. We have a lot of different names for these cubes we call them ministries or departments or schools but they all amount to the same thing.
ii. We generally follow up this assumption about the Church with another one that says that if we work hard enough at the organization and administration of these cubes then the Church will do what it is supposed to do. It will grow in numbers and cubes and as we survey all of our handiwork we can feel that we are being very faithful stewards of God’s kingdom.
iii. This is not the picture that we get at all as we survey the pages of God’s Holy Word.
iv. The noun that we get our word “Church” comes from the joining of two Greek words, a preposition meaning out and a verb to call thus the Church is first and foremost a group of people who have been called out. They have been called out from a sinful culture to live in a culture of grace.
v. But more than that we are a group of people who have been remade and given new natures.
1. 2 Cor. 5:17 “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away: behold the new has come.”
2. This means that rather than a neat cube of organizational models The Body is made up of individuals who are in the process of being recreated into Christ’s very image. None of us are perfect, far from it you will find all of the same kinds of character flaws in people who make up the church as you will find anywhere else. The difference is that we realize that each of us has been granted the gift of newness and we are on the journey to become who God wants us to be.
d. In the body organization has a place but it is at the mercy of the organism.
i. (Illustration of how I thought kids would be exactly what I wanted them to be if the right structure and rules were in place.)
II. The Church is diverse
a. This passage is in the middle of Paul’s discussion for the need for people to be aware of their own giftedness.
i. Each person, he affirms, is the recipient of a special place in the body.
1. In verse 7 - The Spirit expresses Himself through each Christian completely differently.
2. Beyond that we learn in verse 18 and 24 that God has designed and placed each individual Christian in the body according to His design and purpose.
b. But even though we are intended to be one single organism expressed individually we come to this place from very different backgrounds. We are made up of all different cultural/ethnic backgrounds.
i. Jews or Greeks
1. This idea that Jews and Greeks could worship Yahweh together is an astounding idea that led to all kinds of tensions being present in the Churches of the 1st century.
2. They were raised completely differently.
a. With a different set of values.
b. And different ideas about everyday practical issues.
c. And each with their own distinctive brand of snobbery.
i. The Jews saw themselves as God’s chosen people specially entrusted to carry the mark of Him in their lives. Because they underwent such severe persecutions as a people they had learned to wear this identity as a badge of honor.
ii. The Greeks saw themselves as the social and cultural elite of the world. As a people they firmly believed that Hellenism (Greek-ness) was so superior to anything out there that it was their duty to surround everyone with Greek language and culture.
c. Made up of all social backgrounds.
i. Paul says that there are both slaves and free persons in the Church.
ii. Can you imagine what those worship services must have been like in those early primitive Churches as slaves and aristocrats came together for probably the only place in the whole world where the different layers of social strata would be so combined?
d. We are given here the incredible truth that in the Church can only be the Church when we realize that all of the world’s standards of social and cultural differentiation mean absolutely nothing here. God is too big to allow our differences to get in the way of His kingdom.
III. The Church is One
a. One of the things that we can’t miss as we study this passage is the unifying force that is intended in the work of the Holy Spirit as He equips believers for our tasks.
b. It is interesting that each time the Apostle Paul talks about the individual giftedness of Christians he always frames it with the idea that we are welded together by something more than a common social agenda. God Himself brings us together and in some kind of spiritual mechanism through the grace of baptism and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit we are made into one unit.
i. This is expressed well in Ephesians 4:4–6 “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
c. The study done on the orchestra by the group of psychologists.
