Members of the Body

This is a great lesson for the church. The eyes see the food; the hands pick it up; the mouth chews it; the swallowing mechanism swallows it; the stomach digests. Any failure by any of these parts and you have problems. God is counting on every member of the body of Christ to do their job.

A man was marooned on an uninhabited island. Twenty-five years later, he was rescued, but the rescuer noticed that there were three huts on the island.

“What’s that one for?” he asked. “That’s where I live,” said the rescued man. “And what’s that one for?” asked the rescuer. “That’s where I go to church.”

“So what’s the third one for?” he asked. “That’s where I used to go to church,” came the reply. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in his diary, “I have been to church today, and am not depressed.” The church is a body.

No part of my body is part-time. You’ve got to admire someone like Nick Vujicic. No arms, no legs. How does he get by?

So many of the things that people with normal bodies do and take for granted, he still manages to do. How? Because other parts of his body step up to the mark and do something they weren’t necessarily designed to do. For instance, he’s got a foot with two toes.

And he types with it. Is the foot designed to do things like typing? Of course not. Nobody who has hands would use their toes to type.

Nobody who has hands would use their mouth to paint. But there are times when people have to make do with what they’ve got, and other parts of the body step in and perform a function they weren’t originally designed to do.

That’s often what happens in smaller churches. It’s this principle [living to make others successful] that makes possible the efficient operation of the human body. My lungs cheer for a healthy heart. Why?

Not for the heart’s sake alone, but also for the lungs’ sake. If the heart goes down, so do the lungs. My stomach cheers on my kidneys. It wants the liver to remain in top form, not only for the kidney’s benefit, but also for its own.