Series 4 is all about public worship - what happens when the church community gets together. This is one of the most important aspects of church life; the conduct of public meetings can greatly strengthen the church, or it can literally destroy the church. It can draw in outsiders, or it can make them feel unwelcome and unwilling to come.  

Recap and Background 

Paul was very concerned about the reports he had received from friends in Corinth that told him some alarming things about what was happening when they met together for public worship. We have already seen that one he addressed the behaviour of some of the women, the wives of the church members, who were showing disrespect to their husbands, and to their marriage commitments, in the way they dressed. Paul was very concerned about that. He was even more concerned about how they conducted the Lord's Supper or the Communion. They didn't share it together as a common meal: there were factions, divisions and groups. Some people brought a whole meal to eat with their friends, and other people didn't have any food at all. He felt it was disgraceful and unhelpful and did more harm than good. 

Thirdly, in the last episode, he begun to deal with one of the major issues that he was interested in in the church in Corinth and that is the use of the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit, which God gives to the church to build up and strengthen the church and to draw in unbelievers into the church community. Paul listed all sorts of different amazing gifts - speaking in tongues or other languages that you've not learned, interpreting them, prophesying, performing miracles, being able to lay hands on the sick for their healing, and discerning the difference between the work of evil spirits and the work of the Holy Spirit. In the next episode, and the one that follows, he goes on to focus on three of those gifts in particular: the gift of speaking in tongues, the gift of interpreting tongues, and the gift of prophecy. But now I want to follow on from what Paul says about the gifts of the Spirit because as he thinks about the gifts of the Spirit and writing the first half of chapter 12, he thinks of something important to tell the Corinthian church about what the local church community is.  

During Paul's ministry, he describes the local church with a number of different images. The Corinthians didn't value the community. They didn't invest in their relationships. They didn't show respect for one another, and it was destroying the church community. Sometimes Paul described the church as a temple, like a building for worship, where each person is like a stone or a brick. Sometimes he described the church as a family. God is our Father. Jesus is our older brother. We are brothers and sisters together. We respect the senior members of the family. We care for the junior members of the family. We respect each other between men and women. The analogy of the family is very powerful.  

In this passage, Paul introduces another image about the church, which is very significant and powerful. He wanted to help the Corinthians understand how their connections to each other really mattered as a community. He describes the church as a human body. That is the main thing we are going to talk about in this episode - the incredible image of the church being like a human body.  

 

The Church is Like a Body

  “Just as a body, though one has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by 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'm not a hand, I do not belong to the body, it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I'm 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?And if the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact, God has placed the parts of the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.” 1 Corinthians 12: 12 - 20 NIV  

At the beginning of the passage, Paul says, ‘we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body’. This is a very important statement. It means that every single person who becomes a Christian has an incredible encounter with the Holy Spirit. Paul names the Spirit here. The Spirit is the agent, the power. The Spirit is the person of God who causes us to be born again. It is only through the work of the Holy Spirit that we have a revelation of who Jesus is. It is only through the Holy Spirit coming to live within us that we are as Jesus says, born again. It is an amazing truth. We touch on it in many different places in the New Testament, as we go through with the Collections of Word Online. We are ‘born of the Spirit.’ Paul says the Spirit not only causes us to become believers but causes us to become connected to all the other believers. We are baptised into one body.  

Let me give you a simple analogy. Imagine there are six of you who go to a remote location for a quiet day of rest or holiday. In this remote location, there is a beautiful, quiet lake, and there is nobody else there - just the six of you. You say to each other, we will all go for a swim in the lake. 

You stand on some raised ground, and you are all ready to go in. You agree that at the same time you are going to jump in. Can you imagine that? You all jump in at once. Huge splash! Six people are in the water; you all get submerged, come up again, and start swimming around the lake. You have been baptized into the lake. At that point, you are part of the lake. You are connected. You are there. You are in. All of you, together. You are connected together; you have all had the same experience – you have been baptised into that lake. Something similar is implied here in what Paul says in verse 13, we are all baptised into one Spirit so as to form one body. The Holy Spirit not only connects us to God but connects us to every other believer in a fundamental connection. It is so fundamental that it is like being part of a human body.  

Think of your human body and how connected your human body is. Think of how many parts there are to the human body. For example. Here is my hand. How many bones are in my hand? 27. If you could see my foot, how many bones are in my foot? 26. If you could see all the bones in my body, how many bones would there be in my body? Over 200. I need every one of those bones to function. I can't do without one of those bones. If I lose a couple of bones in my hand, it can't function properly. If I lose bones in my back, then I can't walk. But those bones are no good on their own. Otherwise, it is a skeleton. All my bones are surrounded by muscle, tissue, cartilage, ligaments, and tendons to hold it all together and to make it work. But where does the energy come to make it all work? It comes from my stomach and my bowels, and my heart pumping blood to all parts of my body. How many veins and blood vessels have I got? They go everywhere. If I measured all the length of them, we would be talking about thousands of kilometres of length, and all these tiny little blood vessels are in my body. Everything is connected. This is what Paul is saying to the Christians. What you do affects other people. You cannot be a Christian in isolation, knowing God alone and being separated from other people, Paul says, you are the body of Christ. The church has many parts. 

The Importance of Every Part of the Body 

This brings another interesting point into our minds. Not all parts of the body seem equal to us. How significant is the toenail on my right big toe compared to my brain? We immediately think of one being far more important than the other. Paul realises this is a challenge that we need to think about. In verses15 - 20, Paul says about the foot. ‘If it says, because I am not a hand, I don't belong to the body or the ear should say because I am not and eye I do not belong to the body.’ When you greet someone, you can shake them by the hand. Touch hands. It is a form of connection. Hands are very important. They are part of the way we communicate and the way we function as humans. All the basic things we do require our hands. So, the hand is apparently more important than the foot. You don't think about somebody's foot when you meet them, do you? But you do think about their hands. What use is a hand without a foot? With my feet I walk. If I need to come and meet you, I have got to get to you and I can't get to you without the feet. You may not think about the feet, but the feet are doing a very important job that enables the other parts of the body that seem to be more important to do their work. You don't think about the other person’s ear, but you do think about their eye because you look at them. The ear is there - very important, but we don't think about it very often. In all our communication eyes are very central - we see with our eyes; we judge other people's response partly by what we see in their eyes. It seems that for us the mouth is very important. The hands are very important. The eyes are very important. But Paul is being very careful here to point out that every part depends on the other parts. You cannot separate the parts of the body because they cannot function without the other parts of the body.  

In verse 18, he points out that God places you where He wants you in the church. This is a message from the Holy Spirit to many of us, because sometimes we struggle and think I want to do something different, I want to be a different part. I would like to be an eye rather than an ear. I want to be a hand rather than a foot. Paul says, ‘God places you where he wants you”. That is to do with your energy, your time, your age, your maturity, your skills and what is required in the church. All sorts of different factors affect that. Through our lifetimes, we have different roles in churches. Some people who grew up in church started learning about church in the family home, or in the Sunday School, or in the worship of the church. You learnt all the songs when you were children; you didn't have a particular function. Then you might end up being a church leader. God places you, Paul says, where he wants you to be, and one of the great secrets of contentment in the Christian life is to accept the function you have in the church without fighting against it, and trying to take control of other functions, or being jealous of people who do other roles in the church, or being divided against them, as they were in Corinth. 

Honour for All People 

“The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you, and the head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you. On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable, we treat with special honour, and the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honour to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. If one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it”. 
1 Corinthians 12: 21 - 26 NIV

The underlying point here is that God gives honour to all people in the church; he values them all and no part is too important. Now we have the opposite point to that he made a few verses ago about inferiority. Now we have the problem with superiority. ‘The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you. The head cannot say to the feet, I don't need you.’ The implication here is this: if you think you don't need other Christians, you will not be committed to the local church. In fact, you might even leave the church saying, ‘I will be better without the church community’. You and I know people who have done that. But Paul warns against this very strongly. Everybody needs to be in the church community. No one is too important or independent to live without the church community. 

I remember once knowing a man who was very important in society. He had a nominal Christian faith, and he didn't attend church very much. He had a servant who came to his house and cleaned for him. She was a believer. She loved the Lord, and she witnessed to him. She prayed for him, and she drew him back into the life of the church. He considered that he didn't need this community, but the humble cleaner showed him that he needed the body of Christ, and he came back into the church wholeheartedly. God gives honour and dignity to the parts of the body that seem unimportant, the weaker parts of the body.  

If we consider our two hands, one is stronger than the other, in almost everybody's case. Usually, it is the right hand. Is the right hand more important than the left hand in your in your life? You think it is because you do things with the right hand, but when you when you look at your life, you realise the hands almost always work together. The body works together - some parts are weaker, some parts are less honourable, like the bowels, for example. Some parts Paul describes as unpresentable, like the sexual organs of the body, but for human life to continue, we need those organs. They are all important in different ways. 

Paul wants honour and dignity to be given to believers who seem less significant. In Corinth, those people, we can identify them from an earlier passage in Series Four.  The ones who were weaker and given less dignity were the economically poor. He said that the poorer people came to the Communion without any food because they couldn't afford food and they were ignored by the richer people. So, there was a very fundamental difference between Christians. Richer people can have a tendency to ignore poorer people in church communities. Paul says, we must never do this because they might be weak economically, but they are still members of the same body. They can contribute less money; they might have less education. They might have less skills, they might have less training, but they are just as important as the wealthy and powerful individuals in church life. 

Verse 26 is important. ‘If one part suffers, every part suffers with it. And if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.’ It is wonderful when people are honoured in church. A good example is baptism. When somebody is baptised in your church community, or in mine, we honour them. We rejoice. They have become a believer; they have committed themselves to Christ. We probably pray for them. We probably applaud them. We greet them warmly and the members of their family. We will make a special fuss of them on that day. We give them honour. So, if one person is honoured, we share that honour. But the other side of the situation is equally important. If one person suffers, we have to share in that suffering. Just like any human body. If you fall over in the street and injure your leg and have a really big bruise on the leg and you have cut your skin, and it is really hurting you - all of the human body focuses on that suffering. Your brain doesn't say that leg is too far away from me - somewhere down at the bottom of my body; I can't see it because I am looking somewhere else. No, your brain registers the pain. Then when you come to eat a meal, you feel sick because you are in so much pain; your stomach says, no, I can't receive the food because I am connecting to the pain. The whole body is affected by somebody who is suffering in some way. This is the power of this analogy, the image of the body. As one suffers, we all suffer and we come alongside those who are bereaved, those who are sick, those who are disabled, those who have lost their jobs, and those who are depressed. We suffer with them, and we raise them up by love and kindness and prayer.  

Different Spiritual Gifts

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. And God has placed in the church first of all apostles, second prophets, then teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, of helping, of guidance, and of different kind of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret? Now, eagerly desire the spiritual gifts. And yet I will show you the most excellent way.” 1 Corinthians 12: 27 - 31 NIV

Paul describes a variety of different spiritual gifts - some of them are really important - the apostles. the prophets, teachers. That is probably a reference to pastors because Paul uses the word teacher and pastor very closely together. These are the church leaders, the pioneers, and the church planters. Then he lists all sorts of different gifts - miracle workers, those who see healing, helping, guiding, speaking in tongues. These are some of the gifts of the Spirit and some of the ministries of the Spirit, but his point is, not everybody has all these gifts. They have been distributed by the Spirit in different ways, but we need all of them in order to move forward.  

Reflections 

The most obvious reflection is everybody needs to be an active part of a local church community. It might just be a small house church - you might be in a country where you cannot worship freely, and you worship privately in a home - you need to be part of one of that small house church community. If you are in a free country and you are able to join a church publicly, then please join and commit yourself to one particular local church. Make it your home. It is the body of Christ for you. Commit yourself wholeheartedly. If there are people following this episode who are currently not connected to the local church, there is a message for you here. It is time to do something about it. 

Let us honour everybody in our local church, not giving in to the feeling that we are worthless and cannot contribute, neither giving into the feeling that we are too superior, or independent, or rich, or influential to need the church. Everybody needs to be part of the church.  

Paul concludes here, and we conclude with this application. ‘Eagerly desire the greater gifts.’  God gives gifts from the Holy Spirit to individuals and churches, and we will talk more about that in future episodes, but we can seek him and say, ‘I want to be used. I want to be available to you to use me.’ My final point, as we end this episode, is make yourself available. Availability is one of the greatest gifts we can give to God, and he blesses those who make themselves available to serve him.  

Do join us again in the next episode where Paul brings in the very important issue of the centrality of true Christian love in all our relationships in the church community.