For me, I believe that the all time greatest sports movie is Remember the Titans. There are others that I love, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, Sandlot, but Remember the Titans is the one that I think has so much going for it that makes it the best for me. If you haven’t seen the movie, it has a historically based story. It’s set during the time of southern integration in the 1960s. Black and white students were compelled to attend public school together. The story revolves around the football team that is not only newly integrated, but is forced to have a black man as it’s head coach. These events do not sit well with either side, and we see anger and hatred come out in full contacted fights. One of the best scenes for me, happens when the team is attending preseason camp. Herman Boone, who is played by Denzel Washington, takes the team on an excruciating run where they end up at the Gettysburg cemetery. Boone then gives a motivational speech about how the battle that those lying in those graves fought, was the same battle they were fighting at that very moment, and that they must come together to stand. Take a look here for the scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiqdA1B3_Nc
It is a moment that changes the young men on the team, and leads them to create a bond that carries them to the championship game.
This idea of coming together and realizing that we need each other to succeed, is what brings us back to our study in 1st Corinthians, where we will be picking it back up in chapter 12 verse 12.
And as we pick up in 1st Corinthians 12:12, let’s review where we’re at in this letter.
This letter was written from the Apostle Paul to the Church at Corinth, because the Church was moving into chaos. So Paul writes this letter, to bring the Church back into unity. And so for the first half of the letter, Paul focuses on those things that cause disunity on a personal level between believers. Things like, “the guy I follow is better than yours”, or “I’m free to do anything so I’ll just sin it up”, or “I’m smarter than you so I can belittle you”. We walked through all of these and more, but now we are in the second half of the letter. In this half, Paul turns his attention to what happens not just between believers, but what happens when believers come together in corporate worship.
We saw that the first two things Paul dealt with were based in submission; these were head coverings and the Lord’s Supper. Both dealt with God’s created order and our need to be willing to submit to it.
Then last week we began talking about one of the most controversial topics for today. This topic deals with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. But, as we saw from Paul’s opening, we must understand the Holy Spirit in order to understand the gifts he gives. And so last week we spent a good amount of time on a crash course of who the Holy Spirit is, and what he does.
Now, with that fresh in our minds, let us now move on to the second thing we need to understand when talking about the gifts of the Spirit. Let’s read, starting in verse 12 of 1st Corinthians chapter 12.
12 Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. 13 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. 14 Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.
15 Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 16 And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? 18 But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. 19 If they were all one part, where would the body be? 20 As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
21 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!” 22 On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 23 and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, 24 while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.
What is Paul’s point here? Paul is using the idea of a human body to help us understand the role of the gifts within the Church. I want us to realize something before we move forward, have we noticed what Paul has not yet done in the 26 verses we’ve read between last week and this one? He hasn’t explained to us what the gifts are. Yes he has mentioned them, but not all of them, because he writes of still more in other letters, but he hasn’t explained to us what those gifts are. No, instead he has focused on the Holy Spirit being the one that gives the gifts, which we saw in the first 11 verses, and now he is focusing on the gifts role in the body.
So let’s break that down. What is Paul saying about the role of the gifts of the Holy Spirit?
First, Paul compares the Church to a human body, and in verse 13, we are given how and with what this body is constructed. First, the body is constructed with those who have been baptized into Christ. Side note, this is a reason why, if we say we have put our trust into Jesus for salvation, if we call ourselves a Christian and yet have not been baptized, we need to be baptized. Baptism is not a saving act, you don’t need to be dunked in water to be saved; when you accept Jesus as your Savior, you’re spiritually dunked in Christ’s blood. But the physical act of baptism says I join with the Church to be a part of it. Physical water baptism is a sign that we will walk the narrow path that Christ has saved us to walk. It is a visible sign that says, I am willing to die as one of Jesus’ followers and with my fellow believers. And so, if you have not been baptized, I strongly encourage you to do so, because it is one of those things that unites us with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Let’s keep going. The body that Paul talks about is constructed first by the believers who are baptized into Christ. Then, Paul use the terms no Jew nor Gentile; these two words encompass all of the ethnic, political, and national barriers between us and tears them down within the Church. Then Paul uses two more terms, no slave or free; these two words encompass all economic and social, barriers, and tears those down as well within the Church. In other words, our identity is no longer first as a Jew or Greek, or slave or free, but rather our identity is a member of the body of Christ. And so, we must treat each other as much.
It’s hard to live this reality though, and there have been times throughout the Church’s history where we have fallen in this area. Before founding the Alliance, A.B. Simpson was the Pastor of one of the most prestigious church’s in New York City. He was being paid $5,000 a year; in today’s money, that’s almost $145,000. He felt God leading him to preach to the poor immigrants, mostly Irish, that were coming into the city. When Simpson brought these new Christians to his upper middle class church, the congregation didn’t want them to meet at the same time as they did. And so Simpson left his well paying job to minster where there was no Jew nor Gentile, no slave or free.
In the early 1900’s a movement was sweeping through the nation, that would eventually become known as pentecostalism. A black man by the name of William J. Seymour was invited to come out to preach in Los Angels. As he did, the Azusa Street Revival began, with those in attendance being black, white, hispanic, and asian. A man named Charles Parham, who was once a mentor to Seymour, wrote of his experience at the revival, “Men and women, white and blacks, knelt together or fell across one another; a white woman, perhaps of wealth and culture, could be seen thrown back in the arms of a big 'buck [n——word],’ and held tightly thus as she shivered and shook in freak imitation of Pentecost. Horrible, awful shame!”
Now, say what you will about the movement, but one things for sure was the idea of the “mixing of races” and economic standings, was looked down upon by even the preachers of the day. Even though this has always been something that the Church has been called to do, and has a tendency to fall into not doing.
When I first arrived in Quartzsite, our youth group was divided into whites and hispanics with animosity between the two. So one week, we all put paper bags on our heads and made our way through a maze and ended up at the cross singing songs. No one knew who stood next to the other, because we couldn’t see each other and the bags muffled our voices. Did that fix the division, not entirely, but it did get better.
But we must strive, as the body of Christ, to put away divisions and to check ourselves when we get that little voice in our heads that says, they shouldn’t be here, and respond to that voice with, they are my bother or my sister in Christ.
But then Paul says something very interesting in verse 14, Kai (Kahee). It’s Greek for “Even so” as the NIV puts it. Paul says even though there are no divisions due to ethnic, political, national, economic, or social standing, there are roles to which God has placed us. This where Paul starts talking about the foot, the eye, the ear, the hand, and even very carefully talks about the parts of the human body that we cover up. In other words, there is no division by human means, but there are roles in which are divinely given for us to play. We have been created in such a way as to aid the body of believers, and we cannot say I don’t want to play my role, or that someone else’s role is not worthy. These roles are the outworking of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and goes back to everything Paul has talked about, which has at it’s root the simple word of submission. We are to submit to the role we were created for, and we must allow others to do the same. We must use and allow the gifts of the Holy Spirit to be used as he sees fit.
Not disparaging the gifts of others, nor elevating certain gifts over the rest. The eye is just as important as the ear, the hand is just as important as the foot, so too are each of the gifts of the Spirit.
And so in verse 24 Paul writes, “But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.”
God put this body together, and there should be no division in it, because we are to have equal concern for each other, and when one part either suffers or is honored, then we all are.
But is that really the case? Do we really suffer when the rest of the body suffers? Are our hearts being broken for our brothers and sisters in the Middle East and other places who are being killed? Do we suffer with those in our own congregation as they go through hard times with family, finances, or their spiritual walks? Or do we push it our of our minds, saying things like, I’m glad I’m not in their shoes.
Do we rejoice when other churches, say in our town if they start growing? Or there are Christians that seem to be doing better than us? They have that better house, or the more stable income, or the ability to talk with others about the Gospel, or teach, or their spiritual walk seems to be going better than ours. Do we say, “God, bless them more”? Or do we complain that we’re not being blessed as they are?
There is to be no division in the body. You know what the Greek word that is used of no in verse 25 is? It’s mé (may). You know what that means? It means no. No exception, never, devoid, nothing, without, cannot, or simply no. No division in the body of Christ. Can their be disagreements, sure, but division, never. We are not allowed, by the blood of Jesus that saved us, to have division in the Church. The only time there can be division is on the essentials of the faith, but then we are not talking about divisions in the Church, we are talking about those that seek to divide the foundation of it.
But it can be really easy to fall into division within the body of Christ, especially over the gifts of the Spirit, because each of us struggles with sin in our own body. And it is easy to allow that sin to seep into the body of Christ, because we are not on guard for it. Yet, God calls us to no division in his body. And so, we must repent. We must repent of the division we ourselves have caused. I know there are times when I have said words, or done actions that have led others to be dived, and I have to repent of those things. Each of us must go before God, seeking his forgiveness in this area. Not that this will separate us from our salvation, but rather it is seeking right standing with our brothers and sisters.
And so, we must seek it to be right before God and man. Not for the sins of those that walked before us, but for ourselves.
And here, I think we can speak to the situation in our society. As I have said before, I do not speak on current events often, because I would be allowing the world to dictate what should be God’s leading. But here the two meet.
In the history of the Church, we have seen division occur, on all of the areas in which Paul tells us it wasn’t to happen. And so, we must repent of that. But the way forward is not to look at our forefathers sins, but rather the path that moves us forward in forgiveness. This world seeks to hold the sins of the past to every generation in a never ending cycle of subjugation, but Christ doesn’t. All punishment for sin was laid on him at the cross, and has been forgiven. We, as the Church must stand up and say, I repent of the divisions I have caused as an individual, and those that were caused by those who came before me. But they were sinners saved by grace, and so am I, and I will seek God that, as far as I am concerned, there will be no division on my part.
This understanding of taking individual responsibility is summarized in the book of the Bible we studied last year. In Joshua 24:15 Joshua says this, “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
That is all we can do. Many parts of the body, working as individuals, as they were created to by God, in their role, to make the body of Christ strong.
And so my challenge for you this week is simple, go before God with a prayer like this: “God reveal in me any division that I would have caused or am causing. Help me to repent of it, asking forgiveness both of you and those that I have caused it with. Give me the strength and purpose to seek unity in the body of Christ. Amen.”
Jesus prayed that we would be one, let us truly fulfill it. Amen.
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