11-17-19 Sermon Notes “For Our Church Family – the Body of Christ”
I always like to think of our church as a “family.” The Bible, on the other hand, refers to the church as the “Body of Christ.” The church = the “body.” Wow? Why not a committee? Why not a task force? Why a body?
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about how magnificent the human body really is. In a book by Mac McCutheon entitled, The Compass in Your Nose we read the following about our bodies:
The body is a temple, warehouse, laboratory, pharmacy (the brain alone produces more than 50 cycle-active drugs), electric company, farm, mass-transit system, library (the brain stores the equivalent information of 500 sets of the Encyclopedia Britannia, utility company, hospital, and sewage treatment plant. It also has a self-regulating police force, with daily infusions of millions of microscopic criminals and terrorists to apprehend; an array of traffic controllers; an army of medics and mechanics (a trillion platelets cruise the circulatory system daily in search of wounds); centralized and outlying governments that argue with one another (the stomach and the brain, for example, never agree on taking that second helping of chocolate cake); and motors, pumps, compressors, vacuums, regulators, air conditioners, furnaces, plumbing, filters, strainers, thermo-stats, alarm clocks, timers, and more.
Now to go from the telescopic to the microscopic, think about your eyes. Your eye muscles get the greatest day-to-day workout, moving some 100,000 times in any twenty-four hour period. To give the legs the same degree of exercise, 50 miles of walking would be required.
Think about your ears. Depending on its origination, sound usually reaches one ear a fraction of a second faster than the other ear. By calculating the difference in receiving times between ears, the brain can pinpoint a sound source within two or three degrees.
Think about your skin. Your skin waterproofs your body, blocks out and destroys harmful bacteria, regulates temperature, and continuously communicates with the brain. Functioning as the body‘s "feeler," it tells the brain what is cold and what is hot. It can sense an object as tiny as one one-hundredth of a millimeter. In only one square inch of human skin, there are 19 million cells, 625 sweat glands, 90 oil glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, 19,000 sensory cells, and over 20 million microscopic animals.
Think for a moment about your stomach. The human body is incredibly efficient at turning food into fuel. To ride a bicycle at ten miles an hour for one hour, the body needs the food energy contained in only three ounces of carbohydrates roughly the equivalent of 1.4 ounces of gasoline. If our bodies used gasoline instead of food we could ride over 900 miles on a single gallon of gas.
Yikes! There are so many things going on in our bodies at the same time – so many different functions… And yet… there is unity (when things are working properly). Ephesians 4 says it this way:
“…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.” (Eph. 4: 16 NRSV)
This Sunday we will be counting our blessings again – this time for our Church Family – the Body of Christ.” Notice what Ephesians 4: 16 says about the “body.” It is (1) Joined and knit together; (2) Equipped; (3) Working properly together. This is how our church family – the Body – is meant to work.
• Connected to Christ and one another (Eph. 4: 3-6)
• Growing in Christ (Eph. 4: 12-16)
• Serving as Christ (Eph. 4: 12)
See you Sunday!
Pastor Sam