I’ve started my classes to become a lay minister and boy, am I having fun! It’s not just reading the bible; it’s looking at it in different ways – ways I had never thought of before. One lesson was the scriptures on the body of Christ. The body of Christ was a concept I learned about early in my Christian life, but I always thought in terms of the church – my church. We’re all members of the body and the church needs all its members to function at its best and we all have different roles to play – not one better than another. But this week I learned about a different concept: the GLOBAL church as the body of Christ. Ok, it may be that EVERYONE ELSE already figured this out, but it was new to me. To realize the Methodists are needed in the body of Christ. The Lutherans are needed in the body of Christ. The Catholics are needed in the body of Christ. You get the picture.
I’m basically a black and white thinker. I like rules. I think in terms of “right” and “wrong”. To think that other theologies are playing their own, predetermined, perfectly correct, role in the body of Christ was really new for me. God wants these different ways of thinking to fulfill His perfect Will. We can’t say, because they think differently than me, they aren’t in the body. We all have the same Spirit but different callings. The same Heavenly Father but are different children. And the Same Messiah who was ransomed for us all! Mind Blown!
1 Corinthians 12:13-18 “For we were all baptized by[c] one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash
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