The Body Of Christ

“A father asked his young son to break a bundle of sticks. He returned a little later to find the boy frustrated in the task. He had raised the bundle high and smashed it on his knee, but he only bruised his knee. He had set the bundle against a wall and stomped real hard with his foot, but the bundle barely bent. The father took the bundle from the child and untied it. Then he began to break the sticks easily; one at a time. So it is with the church: united we are strong, divided we can fail or be broken.”(1)

The Kentucky state motto reads: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall,” and this is a statement that any church could readily adopt. If a congregation desires to stand against Satan, and wants to see him bruised and wounded like that little boy’s knee, then it needs to be united; so that the devil will only hurt himself in trying to break the church. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says, “Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

There is strength in numbers; and if we desire to impact our community for Jesus Christ, then we need to take this information to heart. In 1 Corinthians chapter 12, the apostle Paul provided us with a message on church unity, and he emphasized that a church which is divided will fail to function properly; or perhaps, even fail to survive. If we desire to be useful to the Lord in the task of winning souls to Christ, then we need to listen carefully to Paul’s words and heed his advice.

Paul’s Imagery of the Body (vv. 12-14)

12 For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. 13 For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free – and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. 14 For in fact the body is not one member but many.

In this passage Paul was speaking to the church at Corinth. The city of Corinth was a difficult place for ministry; so much so, that Paul spent his longest stay there after having left the company of Barnabas. He remained in Corinth eighteen months working through the numerous problems dividing the church.(2)

Corinth was a seaport, making it a cultural melting pot of various philosophies and ideas. If you are familiar with the reputation that precedes sailors, then you can understand what Paul was dealing with. Paul confronted the problem of sexual laxity, being that there were nearly one thousand prostitutes in the temple of the goddess Aphrodite; and he dealt with the clash of multiple cultures, such as the Jews and Greeks, expressing their prejudices against one another.(3)

Paul sought unity, so he used the illustration of the church as a human body. Corinth was an ancient Greek city; therefore, Paul used language that was familiar to the Greeks. In Acts chapter seventeen we can observe how when Paul addressed the Athenians on the hill called Aeropagus that he used quotes from their own philosophers in order to gain their attention. He used the same technique in this situation. We need to understand that the use of the body as a teaching illustration on unity was not originally Paul’s idea, because it was first utilized by the Greeks.

Two Stoic philosophers, Seneca and Epictetus, spoke of the unity of the body. Seneca stated, “All this you see, in which things divine and things human are included, is one; we are members of a great body.” Epictetus said, “You are a citizen of the world and a part of it . . . [one should act] as the hand or the foot would do if they had reason and understood the natural order.”(4) The Stoic philosophers tried to express to their fellow countrymen that we are not alone in this world, but we are each accountable to one another, and our actions affect each other as well.

In the human body there are many different body parts, but there is an underlying personality that unifies them all. The same is true in the church. There are many different church members, but the underlying personality that unifies the members is Christ.(5) The church is, therefore, called the body of Christ.

Each Member Is Important (vv. 15-19)

15 If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body? 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? 18 But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. 19 And if they were all one member, where would the body be?