Floating Kidney Seeks Body
Speeding down the highway, I recognized the medical emblem in the front window of the car trying to pass me: it was a medical transport car. They carry pharmaceuticals and medical equipment and sometimes, when you see them with a red and white cooler, they are transporting life-saving organs for surgical transplant.
For them to be carrying a human organ, someone had to die so that someone else could live. Very sobering. Organs were designed to be functioning in a body and it is an unnatural state for them to be outside.
I quickly made way for the medical transport driver to pass and, as he did, I saw the organ transport cooler strapped in the front seat. Someone’s life was on the line. And in one of those Holy Spirit moments, I understood that unless that iced organ was quickly placed into a body, it would soon die. Further, not only would the organ die, so would the body. The organ was designed to be a functional member of a body and neither the body nor the organ can long live without each other.
So it is with the body of Christ.
I spent a number of years having an “out of Body” experience after suffering several deep betrayals that a few peacemakers keep trying to recast as misunderstandings. Hum. Still, I’ve learned to get my justice from God and am content to let him sort the issues and people out. The cold reality of living in a fallen world is that there are both wolves and shepherds in the greater church and you have to learn to hear God for yourself to discern between the two.
Jesus is called the head of the church. What’s a head without a body? And we are his body on earth. 1 Corinthians 12:12 “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body.” Continuing in verse 18, “But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.”
Individual members, organs if you will, can survive for a short time on their own but were designed to be integrated into the greater body for the common good. You can tell an isolated organ that is outside its natural place in the body - it turns a deathly pale of gangrene.
God called his church to live in committed community. Are there dangers of false brethren, self-serving shepherds and sharp-tongued saints? Yes. And the beauty of the body functioning together under the leadership and in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit as a joyful, holy expressing of Christ on the earth makes it all worth it.
Are you a floating kidney? Hear some advice from an older brother in the Lord: God has a body, a place of service and support uniquely for you. I could list multiple categories of what’s wrong with the church. While important, what’s right with the church is that Jesus loves his body individually and collectively and if you know him, you are supposed to be “in the body.”
Get off the life support and rejoin the Life! There is a local body in need of you. Eternal lives depend on it.
Bryan Hupperts © 2009
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