"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."
I have fingers, toes, shoulders, kneecaps, tendons around my kneecaps (which have made their presence known in my recent activities), a spinal cord protected by quite a few vertebrae, elbows, eyes, ears, a nose, lips, teeth, a tongue, skin, an ankle, a liver, a heart, lungs, a thyroid, kidneys, a brain with several different mysterious sections, and many, many other parts. All of these individual parts, put together, make up my body. Though there many, many parts, they make up just one body.
Likewise, the Spirit takes people from many different social, religious, and economic backgrounds and makes one body (the church) out of them. If you gave the world’s most skilled surgeon all of the parts needed to build a human body from scratch, he wouldn’t be able to do it. Such an accomplishment would be well beyond his ability. But through the Spirit, a body of believers (equally complex) is brought together under the work of Christ.
I find this truth both fearful and wonderful. What God has done in constituting the church is wonderful because it is mind-blowing hard and shows His greatness. But the oneness of the body is also a fearful thing. In a human body, if one organ is malfunctioning, the whole body is effected. In fact, you can take one cell and let it go bad, and if it is allowed to spread, a person can die of cancer. How important then is each member’s walk with God. I am part of a whole, and I must do my part.
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