Everybody. I know that we’re all excited about going outside and having some fellowship and having some games and all that stuff. Before we do any of that, we just have a short sermon, hopefully that will inspire you a little bit about the community that you’re a part of. I’m thrilled that today we get a chance to celebrate the community that God has built in this congregation. This community has become become, I would say, my family. And for so many of you here, it’s become your family. Again, before we head outside, before we have some competitive games and I’m sure a great spread of food with your community group and some engaging fellowship, I’d like to spend a couple of minutes sharing with you some sort of like a manifesto of community within our church. And hopefully you will be encouraged by it. So in a moment, we’re going to land in Romans, chapter twelve.
So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. And as you’re turning there, I’d like to share with you a story about my first day of my second year of second grade. What do you call it? Second grade? Yeah, second grade school year. I want to tell you a little bit about it. I’ve actually shared this story before, but I want to share it again. My first day of my second grade year, I was a seven year old little boy attending a brand new school. The first day of school is nerve wracking for anybody. If you as an adult were to have to go back to your first day of school, you would be nervous as well. It’s intimidating.
A brand new school, especially if you have no friends. My dad had the honor this particular morning of dropping me off at this new school. My new school that I was attending was called Liberty Elementary School. Liberty elementary School. I remember walking into the school, walking through the hallway, and into the assembly that was happening in the gymnasium.
Hundreds of kids running around in the gymnasium. The cacophony of screaming children resonating in my ear to this day. I remember as we walked in, I grabbed my dad’s hand a little tighter. You’re a little afraid. You’re like, Where am I right now?
We walked through a registration table and then eventually over to my new teacher. I will always remember how nervous I was. New people, different people, a new place. And so I arrived at the area where my class is seated on the gym floor. My dad introduces me to the teacher. I hold him tight. I’m like, dad, I’m nervous. I’m seven years old. I always remember this. My teacher, her name was Ms. Dougherty. She took me by the hand. She kind of walked me over to my class. She said, These are your classmates. We took a few steps to walk over there, and then I turn around and my dad is gone. How dare he? You know this isn’t Liberty Elementary School. This is a trap, this is a prison. So immediately I start bawling, crying.
How dare you do that to me, dad? I don’t know where you are. But crying bawling like just losing my mind. And temper tantrum on the floor. And the next thing that happens is something that will stay with me forever. A young second grade kid, a kid by the name of Scott Spyro, wise beyond his years, walked over to me and hugged me and he said, are you new or something like that? I’m like yes. And then he said, I’ll be your friend. There it is. He never knew that, I don’t know how many years later, 25 years later, I’d be telling this story in front of 700 people or whatever and hundreds of more people watching us online. But he made it made all the difference to me that, that moment of, of greeting.
Why? I think it’s because that in each of us, in, in our DNA, there’s a need for us to belong. There’s a need for us to be in friendship with somebody, to have a partner, to have a buddy, to have a community. Even before the fall of man, this is before creation had been separated from its creator, God said in Genesis chapter two, verse 18, it is not good for man to be alone.
I think that God knew that there in us would be a longing to belong. That all of us would have a deep loneliness that could not be cured unless there was the revolution of meaningful relationships. It’s our Creator, the one who formed us from the dust, who fashioned us for family, who formed us for community, who created us to be in fellowship. We were made, I believe, to function with a group of people, with a movement of people. And the church is really God’s desire to fulfill that need that’s deep inside of us.
And in Romans chapter twelve, we get a picture of the way the church community is supposed to function. Romans chapter twelve is where we’re going to begin. We’re going to start in verse four and just look at this text for just a few moments as we think about what it means to be a part of the community of God. This is Roman chapter twelve, verse four. It says, for each of us, sorry, for just as each of us has one body with many members and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ, he’s saying this is a parallel, this body illustration is a parallel with the Church. He’s trying to parallel the idea.
He says, though many form one body and each member belongs to each other. The physical body is the metaphor the Apostle Paul is using to explain the function of the community of the Church. The body. Your body, you probably know this, is a complicated masterpiece. Your body has bones and muscles and veins and arteries. I read a study this week that said there are 37 trillion different cells in your body.
In fact, there are more cells in one human body than there are stars in the universe. The human body is complicated. It’s beautiful. It has many, many, many pieces. And they all function together to form and to produce the life that you have.
And yet in 1 Corinthians, chapter twelve, verse twelve, it also says all of the many parts of the body form one body. Each and every part comes together for one functioning body. That’s the illustration. In Christ we form a masterpiece of community akin to the way that your body works together to form the beauty of the life that you have. The illustration, as we will see, can be taken any number of ways. But I’d like to draw your attention to the idea that each member of the body, rather each member of a functioning body, is properly attached to the body. Each member of a functioning body is properly attached to the body.
I’ve shared this story also before, but seven years ago, I dislocated my finger playing flag football. I was playing flag football, I was playing defense. I went over to grab a person’s flag and instead of grabbing their flag, my hands slipped into their pocket and then they started running and my finger went with it.
And so I heard a pop and I immediately grabbed I was wearing gloves, but I could just feel there was something wrong. I’m trying to hold my finger out. I’m literally walking around the field going, can someone put it back? Can someone put it I don’t know, I was in shock or something. Can someone put it back?
There was a guy who was he worked for the fire department. And I said, could you put it back? He’s like, Bro, I’m not touching your finger. So eventually I’m like, okay, we need to go to the doctor or something. If you get queasy, I’m going to show you a picture of what my finger looked like.
But just if you get queasy and close your eyes for just a second, this is my finger. If you don’t know what a finger looks like, you could look at your finger. That’s not supposed to look like that.
Anyway, I’m like trying to hold it out because every time I slightly let it go, it’s like sucking deeper into the wrong slot. So I’m like, no, please put it back. So I hop in the car and we rush over because I’m cheap to Urgent Care instead of going to the hospital.
And I’m like and we go to Urgent Care, and the guy at Urgent Care is like, okay, I have to take an X ray first. This is my X ray. Look at that. Fingers aren’t supposed to look like that.
I go to Urgent Care, this is what my finger looks like. And so they tell me, the guy takes the picture and he’s like, yeah, I can’t do anything. He’s like, you need to either go to a specialist tomorrow morning or you need to go to the emergency room. It’s like 10:00 at night at this point. So I’m like, can I just I guess I could just sleep like this because I didn’t want to spend the money to go to the ER.
But I’ll remember the guy, you know, the guy said to me, he said, he said if you if you leave it like this, even for 24 hours, you can have permanent damage. And so he’s like, basically, long term problem, you need to put your finger back into place, otherwise your finger will have some long term problems. So eventually we go to the ER, the lady does like some and then sucks it back into place. And I was like, oh, but the doctor said stuck with me. Especially as a preacher, you know. You know, I’ve read Romans twelve. I know this passage.
What’s the idea? That that dislocated or disconnected parts of the body, if you don’t put it back, don’t function properly? And wouldn’t you agree that in a spiritual sense that’s exactly the same thing, right? That when we’re disconnected, the consequences of that dislocation can be quite severe.
In fact, let me say it this way to kind of make the point, I think you cannot function in Christ unless you’re properly attached to the body of Christ. See, spiritual dislocation happens all the time. Some traumatic event happens in your life, all of a sudden you were doing really well spiritually and then something happens and all of a sudden it’s jerked out of place. Or, I don’t know, maybe a global pandemic hits and you have to be dislocated from the church for three years. And that disconnection from the body, you get weird, you lose the life blood that was pumping through you.
And instead maybe you graft yourself into a different community, into a different body that really doesn’t produce what you need to live the life that God called you to. And this is why I believe that we’re taught to not miss meeting together as somewhere in the habit of doing. Because when we are dislocated, when we’re disconnected, part of us just breaks off, just gets a little bit destroyed. I think about a tree limb that disconnects from a tree. It only could be on the ground for a certain length of time before it just dies.
And so this morning I want to ask you if you have been dislocated for you to allow God’s spirit to put you back into place, to set you to the place where you belong before the spiritual decay sets in, before your heart gets hard, before you mangle your faith. Because God’s purpose, because the purpose God has for you can only be fulfilled within a proper connection to the body of Christ. And we are that body. Look at verse five, or rather, look at what it says here. It says for just as each of us has one body with many members. It uses this term over and over again. And these members do not all have the same function.
And then in the end it says and each member belongs to each other. The word member here is really interesting. It’s the word that also it could be used for limb, like arm or leg, or it could be used for organ. In his essay entitled Membership, C. S. Lewis writes, “the very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all of its meaning.”
It’s true because when I think about membership and when you think about membership, what do you think about? Like the first thing I I think about is Costco. Like when someone’s like membership, I’m like, oh, Costco membership. What’s a Costco membership? It’s a card that you you walk in, you wave at the lady, then you go in the back and you grab 100 rolls of toilet paper at a discounted price. And that’s membership. As a member, I get what I want as long as I pay my dues. Or I think about gym memberships. In January, I pay for a year of the gym membership and by February I’ve already lost that little key fob thing that allows me to go into the gym. Gym memberships are basically just a flex.
Oh, I’m part of this gym. When was the last time you went? It doesn’t really matter. I’m a member of the gym. In a gym membership, the gym doesn’t care if you attend. In fact, they want you to not attend so that they can sell more gym memberships and it doesn’t look so crowded. What’s a gym membership? A gym membership is you pay your dues and it doesn’t matter if you show up, as long as you and no one needs to know who you are.
I found out online that you can become a member of the Illuminati. Did you know this? You could do it online. You fill out some paperwork, you send them $1,000, boom. Secret society membership.
And of course, I’m trying to make a point, but sometimes I think people can think about church membership in the same way they think about Costco memberships or they think about gym memberships. Sometimes the church can functions with this kind of watered down meaning of membership. Like, what does it mean to be a member of this church? Does it mean that you come twice a month, you sit in the chairs, that you sing songs? Does it mean that you watch online and that you never engage with anybody else?
Does it mean that you give money? What does it mean to be a member? I think that that’s the problem, right? Like biblical membership. Biblical membership. Here’s what it means. And I want you to understand because when we say, hey, I’m a member here, what we’re saying is biblical memberships means that each part is necessary to the survival of the whole. It means that you’re an organ. It means that you’re the liver. Membership in this body means that each of us is necessary for the survival of the rest of us.
I want to encourage you. We need you. I need you. How could this church survive without its heart? And some of you are the heart. How could you possibly survive without the lung and the air that it supplies? Or the sight that the eyes supply? Or the defense that the skin gives? When we say that you’re a member, what we’re saying is that you are necessary for the survival of this church. That’s what we’re saying.
If you’re a member here, that means you gave your whole life so that this church could survive, so that your brother or sister could do well. You’re vital to the rest of us. It means you have a responsibility to function in this community, to give of yourself in such a way that the rest of the community has is better for it. It means that together we yield to the head who is Jesus Christ and and then we make everyone else a little bit better.
And I love what the text says. It says that at the very end it says we’ll look at that in a second. But it says, “So in Christ, we though many form one body and each member, each limb, each organ belongs to all the others.”
You belong to everyone else. You’re not of yourself. You don’t own your own schedule. You don’t own your own destiny. You don’t own your own career.
You belong to the rest of us. And if you go, well, I don’t want to really be a member of that type of church. I get it. That’s a that’s a big commitment. But that’s what biblical membership is.
So we’re not going to water down the standard because we don’t want to do that, right? That’s what the calling of Christianity is. And I know we’re not going to get it perfectly, but that’s what God desires from each of us. Look at the other thing here. It says each member does not have the same function.
Christianity promotes individuality. Don’t you see that? That’s so cool. But he promotes it in a really strange way. He promotes it this way. God promotes individuality by making the individual vital to the success of the collective. Hey, you belong to each other. Which means the guy sitting beside you has a unique function in your life that only he or she could fulfill. The guy sitting beside you is your liver. Hi, liver. How are you? The guy sitting beside you, or the woman sitting beside you is your kidney. They make sure that the toxins in your body are fixed. I don’t know what kidneys do, actually. I have no idea.
How would you treat the person besides you if you knew you needed them to survive? Would you speak badly about them? Or would you care for them? All you people here are taking supplements. You have all these things you’re like this is for heart health, this is for liver health. This is for kidney health. This is for my gut. I have a leaky gut. This is what I take to make sure my gut doesn’t leak anymore.
If you thought the person sitting beside you was your gut, you would probably do something to make sure they were functioning well. That’s the type of commitment we are supposed to have towards each other. Brothers and sisters, you need everyone here. And I need you. I need you. I definitely need you.
There’s a parallel verse of Romans, chapter twelve, and it’s one corinthians, chapter twelve. And it continues this conversation about individuality by saying this, “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we though many form one body, and each member belongs to each other.” I just read this verse. That’s not what I meant to read. This is what I meant to read. “If they were all one part, there would be where would the body be?” What is he saying? It’s that idea of individuality. If we were all one part, where would the body be?
“As it is, there are many parts, but one body. If we were all one part, where could there even be a body?” No, I think this is awesome. And what it means it means a couple of things. What it means that you are irreplaceable the same way you function, the same way your body functions the church functions, you have one or two of everything, right? You only have one spleen and you need that spleen. And so in the church it’s the same way. There’s only one of you. You are vital to the rest of us. There is a diversity in the body. We’re all different. We’re all different in physical ways. We’re men, we’re women, we’re young, we’re old, we’re of African descent, we’re of European descent, we’re of Asian descent. We’re all individuals.
We all have different views about things. Some of us are a little bit more on the conservative minded side. Some of us are on the liberal minded side. Some of us think different things about all sorts of things. But we need each other. In fact, I think the church is maybe the last place that’s not totally homogeneous. People here are so different. Like, look around you. You got people that are weird if you’re compared to your other culture. Yes, that brother over there is super weird, and so am I. We’re all weird. This is the illustration, right? You got weird parts of your body. You’re like, that’s weird. I don’t know what that bump is. Well, there you go.
That’s the way a body works. The metaphor, I want to be so clear, the metaphor is of a body. It’s not of an infantry where everybody sounds the same, speaks the same. And certainly there’s a temptation for us to build a community that everyone looks the same, speaks the same, acts the same, but that’s not it. The church is a body where each person is different and each person belongs to each other, and each person is under the head of Jesus Christ, who is the king over all of us.
This is not the world self centered thinking of isolation. This is not you’re a snowflake and it means that you can be whoever you want to be. No, this is I have a job to do in the context of the body of Christ.
We continue the verse. Look what it says in verse six. It says, “we have different gifts according to the grace given to us.” I love this because it means it comes from God, it doesn’t come from ourselves. “If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith. If your gift is serving, then serve. If it is teaching, then teach. If it is encouraging, then give encouragement. If it’s giving, then give generously. If it’s to lead, then do it diligently. And if it’s to show mercy, then do it cheerfully. We have different gifts wise, so that the body of Christ may be built up.”
That’s what Ephesians chapter four says. And so your gifts are actually not for yourself, but for the betterment of the rest of the body. The point of the gift is for the betterment of the rest of the body. If your gift is to prophesy or to give the Word of God, messages of the word of God, then do it. If it’s to serve, and we’re about to hear a little bit about deacons, then do that.
If it’s about making truths clear, that’s what teachers do, then do that well. If it’s encouragement, which means you come alongside somebody and you help them live out their life, then do it. If it’s giving, then give it generously. If it’s lead people, if you’re a person that’s willing to lead somebody, then do it with vision and power. The point of the gifts is in service of the body.
And I want to make this point as clear as possible. This is about service, not about status. I am not more special or important than you are just because I get to speak for 40 minutes on Sunday mornings. I’m in service to you. I have no special status in this church. Neither does the elders, neither does the deacons. We have different roles. Neither does the Kingdom kids worker you’re like, oh, well, I’m just a lowly member. Well, you’re a vital part of the church. Don’t call yourself a lowly member. That’s doing a disservice to the service that God has given you by his grace.
The scriptures are clarifying. Every one of us is vital to the success of the rest of us. And there are things that mess us up. There are things that mess up our harmony.
We see it again in First Corinthians chapter twelve. It says, “now, what if the foot should say, because I’m not a hand, I don’t belong to the body? Or the ear should say, because I’m not an eye, I don’t belong to the body.” What is he saying? The body will suffer. The harmony of the body will suffer if you say, well, my role is not as important as that person’s role because I’m not on stage, because I haven’t been appointed, because I can’t give as much as the next person gives. You start believing that you’re not as important. That destroys the function of the body. The eye never goes, you know what? I’m not an ear, so I’m going to close it and never work again.
No, that’s ridiculous. Do the thing that God has called you to do and do it excellently. And maybe you’re not called upon every single week to do your job, but when you are called upon, you are going to be needed. There are no insignificant roles in the body. There are no insignificant roles in the church.
I want to take a moment, in that conversation about valuable gifts, I want to take a moment to brag about my friend and our brother. I want to talk a little bit about Louie Avila. My dad was meeting with Louie this a couple of weeks ago, and Louie, for those of you who don’t know, is dealing with an aggressive cancer. He’s dealing with an aggressive cancer. My dad was speaking to him and said, you know, basically, you’re an inspiration to us. And that’s what I say when I talk to Louie, you’re an inspiration. And Louie’s response to my dad and Louie’s response to me and Louis response to so many of you has been the same thing. It’s, I wish I could be doing more.
Louie Avila has an aggressive form of cancer, and he’s wishing he could be doing more. I tell Louie, no, Louie, you’re using the gifts that God has given you right now. You’re teaching us how to suffer well. And I need that more than up standing on stage, more than you serving in kingdom kids. You’re teaching us how to have faith while feeling hopeless. You’re encouraging the saints, I can’t mow the lawn, but you’re encouraging every single one of us. You’re a walking reminder of how valuable life is and also how vulnerable life is, and a reminder that we make the most of every opportunity that God has given us. He doesn’t preach on stage, but he doesn’t need to preach on stage. He doesn’t sing on stage, but he doesn’t need to sing on stage. He doesn’t have the same honor that the world would consider to be a prominent honor. But I don’t think he needs one. All he needs to do is be exactly who he is and God is using his gifts to glorify the whole church. And look, it’s the same. Yeah. Amen.
What’s my point? Your health can be fading, but you are just as needed in the body as every single other person in the body. We need you. We need you to be who God made you to be. We need you to do it strong. And we need you to be awesome. We need you no matter what your gifts are, whether they’re prominent or not. If you serve in quiet humility, we need you. If you serve in kind of a prominent way, we need you. Everyone needs you.
So here’s a summary. All of us were built to belong. God designed the church to be the place where you belong. And in that way, we need you to use your gifts to make sure that God and his church are glorified.
And lastly, membership means that you function as part of a whole, not as an individual. One last verse. This is Philippians, chapter two. This is like an anchor verse for me in my life, but this is what it says, “make my joy complete by being like minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and one in mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather in humility, value others above yourself, not looking to your own interest, but each of you to the interest of others.”
What does Paul want the Philippines to be? One in spirit, one in mind, one in thought. Having the attitude of Jesus Christ. And then he describes the attitude.
“In your relationship with one another,” listen carefully to this passage, “have the same mindset as Jesus Christ, who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.”w So Jesus is equal to God in nature, but empties himself of that equality to engage as a servant of many?
Well, I’m a prominent businessman and I have a mansion, but I empty myself of that to serve the lowly. Oh, I’m prominent intellectually, but I empty myself of that prominence in order to engage with everybody. Oh, I’m special in some other way, but I empty myself of that specialness in order to make sure that I can serve everyone. That’s what this text is teaching us. Rather, he made himself nothing by taking the nature of a servant. You empty yourself of what makes you special and you take on the nature of a servant. Being made in human likeness and being found in the appearance of male, he humbled himself. How far was he willing to humble himself? By becoming obedient to death. Would you die for the people around you? That’s the level that’s the standard of death. Even death on a cross.
What’s the mind of Christ? It’s the mind of a man who doesn’t live for himself, who doesn’t even think about himself, instead pours out his prominence and focuses on the things that allow him to serve others well.
Brothers and sisters, I want to just kind of leave you with a thought. And it’s this, it’s that our success as a community will rise and fall with our humility and with our love.
Reengage, reconnect if you’ve been dislocated for a while. Start using your gifts if you haven’t used them in a while. And I just want to leave you with that as we transition here to the appointment of some or not to the appointment, but to the acknowledgement of some future deacons in our church. This role is vital. And the elders who are going to come up in a second are going to talk about why it’s so important, but it’s not more important than anything else.
You are just as important. We need you to function the way that God has called you to function. So we’re also going to take communion a little bit later, but for now, I want to encourage us to do something. I want us to just bow our heads in a moment as we close this lesson. And I just want us to have a silent moment of prayer. I want us to have a short prayer where we ask God for three things. One is to humble us, to empty ourselves of all of our pride and pomp so that we can be servants of others. The second is to teach us to love people the way that God loved us. And the third is for God to show us our gifts and then teach us how to use them. Those three prayers humble us. Humble us, teach us his love. And then to let us know what what the gifts are that he’s given us so that we can use it for the betterment of the church. Take a moment, take two or three minutes and just pray to God. Those three prayers, lord, humble me. Lord, teach me to love. Show me my gifts and show me how to use them.