There is one Body

Ephesians 4:4

Ephesians 4:4, begins in this way, “There is one body” and the apostle is referring to the Church.  What is the apostle telling us?  Is he saying that the church that met in Rome and the church in Ephesus, and the church in Galatia, and all other churches that followed the teaching of Christ were one body?  It is important to understand that these churches were in their infancy and we have had 2000 years to fix and add to many of the problems these churches had with unity. 

Some of the birthing problems were that the Jewish Christians, being raised under the law and circumcised, sat on one side of the building, and the Gentiles who were uncircumcised, sat on the other side.  The building is often referred to as the church, showing how little we have learned in 2000 years.  You know they did silly things that we would never do, like saying, “sorry but this row is saved, only they said this side of the building is mine, or that is my place.”  There also was a few, it seemed, who did not trust the church leaders to use the funds in a correct manner, so they wanted to designate how their gifts to God were used; we in the modern church would never do that.  This would never happen in our day, that an under resourced person who needed a bath and whose clothes were dirty, was asked to sit at the very back of the church.  That would never happen in a Baptist church building, and you can bet the farm on it, because those are the prime seats. 

Therefore, the apostle Paul addressed this problem of unity in the body of Christ.  In Romans 12, he told the body of Christ not to think more highly of themselves than they ought to think, and to understand that it was God who gave them the measure of faith.  In verses 4 and 5, “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”  Paul states that we do not all have the same function, but we all have a function, a gift to use in the body of Christ.  Nowhere in Scripture do you find the gift of showing up on Sunday morning, and sitting in a pew, then going home and doing nothing to advance the kingdom of God.

I wonder what God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit say to the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places, who know the Scriptures, and accuse the body of Christ before our God.  I wonder why the Baptist church thinks more highly than it ought to think of itself, or the Methodist, or the Catholic, or the Presbyterian?  And if you are not a member of Christ’s body, if you are not of one Spirit, then you are a social club, and God would prefer that you drop His Son’s Name from your charter.  When you entered into Christ, we became one, one in Spirit, one hope, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father.  Because of Christ Jesus, we are brothers and sisters in Christ, it matters not what label you have been given.

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice my blog; http://fromourbackporch.blogspot.com/