One Body
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· 1 viewThe body only works if every part works together.
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One Body, One Faith, One Baptism.
One Body, One Faith, One Baptism.
Over the last 2 Sundays we wrestled with how can our church be like the well from John 4. How can it be a place, where people no matter their background, can come and meet Jesus?
Jeremiah 29:7 Challenged us to work and pray for the peace and prosperity of the city God has sent us. What can we Haverhill Church of the Nazarene do help the city of Haverhill? How can we pray for the city?
Today we are going to wrestle with how do we get there. How can we, the body of Christ, put this into action? The answer is in we are the body of Christ. Like our own body, the different parts work together to sustain life. When one part of our body isn’t working right, our whole body suffers. The same happens within the body of Christ.
To be the well we want to be is a job bigger than one pastor. It’s a job bigger than any one of us. To work and pray for the peace and posperity of Haverhill, it takes the body of Christ, and we are members of that body.
Ephesians 4 today lays out for us how we are going to do the work God has given us to do. There is one body of Christ and we are all part of it, working together to sustain the life of the church.
27 All of you together are Christ’s body, and each of you is a part of it.
He Makes the body work.
He Makes the body work.
This passage from Ephesians has a lot going on. In these 16 verses Paul covers unity in the body of Christ, the body of Christ working together, and the on going work of grace in our lives the sanctification of believers. Today our focus is the body of Christ working together.
In John 17, before Christ was betrayed and arrested he takes time to pray specifically for us, and he actually continues to pray for us day and night. In John 17 he prays to his father make them one as you and I are one, so the world will believe you sent me. Why do we work together as one body of Christ? So the world will believe Jesus is who he says he is.
What binds us together?
Ephesians 4:3–6 (NRSV)
3 making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.
We are bound together in peace with these 7 one statements by Paul. These statements are core confessions of the early church. When we share these confessions, the little things that divide us truly are small. These 7 confessions are all ways we are joined together in Christ as One Body. What our community, what our country needs to see from the body of Christ is an example of what it means to work together despite our differences.
The One Body of Christ
Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (1) The Gift of Christian Unity (4:1–6)
There is only one church, and it includes all believers. All Christians—both Jews and Gentiles—are members of the same body of Christ (see 1 Cor 12:12–26). In the church’s heavenly gathering around Christ (→ Eph 1:3, 20; 2:6), the “body of Christ is, by definition, one. Each congregation is a local manifestation of this heavenly entity, not a part of it”
7 But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
12 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. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. 14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.
Paul in uses the imagery of the human body working together to illustrate how the body of Christ works. The gifts God has given us are like parts of the body working together. All the parts of our body work together to sustain daily life.
Stubbing your little pinky toe in the dark.
When one part of our body suffers, the whole body suffers.
26 If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. 27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
Every one of us here has a gift, or dare I say bodily function, to do to work together as the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul gives a full list of these gifts. Our one faith, one baptism, one LORD, one God and Father of all, who is living in and working through all, is the one who holds us the one body together.
16 from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
These are our directions.
These are our directions.
How are we the body of Christ going to be the well? How are we going to actively work and pray for the peace and prosperity of Haverhill? By working together as this local manifestation of the body of Christ here in Haverhill.
How has God uniquely gifted you? What can we do as the body of Christ to encourage one another to grow in our gifts, and to grow in grace? How can we work together as the body of Christ?
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.