"A Return To The Body...Again"

We are reminded by the Spirit through Paul that the body, the church, is one unit made up of many parts (I Cor. 12). One part, each individual member, is just as important to Jesus and His body as another. Some parts of the body can suffer while others may not suffer much. It is most important to remember that no individual Christian, no congregation where the body assembles, exists as an independent unit, as if they were not a part of the community of faith.

The eyes don't do the walking, the ears do not do the seeing but these are not isolated from the rest of the body, individual workings. Seeing is a function of the body and not merely the eyes! When are some going to learn that?

The body of Christ is not a lot of isolated parts that functions independently of the rest of the body. A hand has NO existence without the body. It can only be understood as a hand because there is a body to which it is attached. But it goes a little further than that. There is diversity within the parts of the body and the parts must NEVER lay the burden of its function on the another part. Each one must bear his or her own burden, fulfilling their own part as they will be held accountable for that. "From whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what 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." (Eph. 4:16) If a part of the body does not fulfill its individual part, it will have a great effect on the whole. It will cause the growth toward love or it will destroy the growth away from love. That's serious in the eyes of the Lord!

There is one more aspect of the body we need to consider. The church serves its wives via the husbands and the husbands via its wives. There are families within this body and those families are instructed to care for their own needy widows so that the church should not be burdened (I Tim. 5:16). That is a doctrine of specificity of responsibility (I Tim. 5:8). When these individual parts of the body care for their own, this is the body at work and how it does some of its work!

The body, each individual, is to be connected to the head, holding to the head...Christ. When Christ told Paul in Acts 9 he was harming the people called the church he was harming the head...Himself! You don't harm the people of God, mistreat the people of God without paying a price. What do we learn? It is nonsense for any of us to think we exist independently of the rest of the people of God!!!