First Corinthians 12: 11-20 The body of Christ part one
1 Corinthians 12:11-20 · Mike Doyle · May 16, 2021
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 57
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261922545617

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

the body of Christ. So the verses today, I think it's important that we read the verses, so I'm gonna read them, and then we'll get into the information. 1 Corinthians chapter 12. We're gonna work through verse 12 through 21 today. Paul says, for even as the body is one, and yet has many members, and also the members of the body, though their many are one body, so also is Christ.

For by one spirit, we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greek, whether slaves or free, we were all made to drink of one spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot says, because I'm not a hand, I'm not part of the body, it is not for this reason any less part of the body. And if the ear says, because I'm not an eye, I'm not part of the body, is it not for this reason any less a part of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were a hearing, where would the sense of smell be?

But now the body has placed, I'm sorry, but now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body just as he desired. And if they were all one member, where would the body? If they were all one member, where would the body be? But now, There are many members but one body, and the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Or again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you. What he's done today in these verses, he's comparing the body of Christ, he's going to compare the body of Christ to a human body. And the body of Christ, we could say, is the universal church, or by extension, the local church.

Again, this point is not the church needs to have unity, but one of the favorite words you hear today is diversity, and we'll talk about what diversity is. If you want to define diversity in these terms, it's the condition of having or being composed of many different elements. The fact that there are many different ideas or opinions about something. The condition or fact of being different or varied or a variety.

But the body of Christ is an organism on the earth and which operates of the spirit of God and are found coming out in various distinctive gifts. That's the diversity. But all necessarily one because they are all in the power of the self-same spirit. It is the one and the same Spirit that constitutes the unity. Believers would see in the operation of the Spirit a diversity of the gifts in the body that Roger talked about last week here on the earth. It is not reached in a doctrinal way, but really realized in an experimental, experiential way in the way the body functions down here. So verse 12 says, and even as the body is one, and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they may be many, are one body, so also is Christ. From the varied manifestations of the spirit, or spirituals, Paul's going to now speak about the sphere in which the Spirit of God operates. The manifestation of the Spirit of God is entirely limited to the body of Christ. Understand what I said? The manifestation of the Spirit of God doesn't mean He doesn't work in the world, He does. But His manifestation is limited to the body.

This leads to a very blessed unfolding of the truth of the Church viewed as the body of Christ. And it's according to God's order. Believers do not exercise spiritual gifts or spirituals as isolated individuals. They existed as members of the body of Christ and for the good of the whole body.

So you have to keep that in mind. There's confusion about that, I think, in Christianity today. Well, I've got this gift or that gift, and it's all about me. Gee, it's funny that my person would think it's all about me, yeah. But if you have a spiritual gift, and you do, every member of the body of Christ has one, why do you have it? What's it for? It's for the good of the whole body. It's for service. Okay?

So, Paul uses the human body to illustrate certain great truths as to the body of Christ. As the human body is one, yet composed of many parts, all having their place and part in the body, so also is Christ. So, It's a beautiful way of presenting the truth. The subject of the church is the church, but the apostle doesn't say, so also is the church. How does he phrase it? He phrases it, so also is Christ.

The body is the body of Christ and includes Christ and all of his members. It is a body for the expression of Christ himself. This is in accord with the truth first presented to Paul at his conversion. You remember when he's going on the road to Damascus? In Acts 9-4, the Lord Jesus said to him, why are you persecuting me? You know, not my buddies or the church, but me. It's interesting, to touch God's people is to touch him.

Verse 13 tells us, for by one spirit, every one of us was baptized into one body. Whether Jew or Greek, whether slaves or free, whether, we were all made to drink of that one spirit. So we're told that the church is composed of all believers. Whether they be Jews or Gentiles, whether they be a slave, whether they be free, they've all been baptized into one body by the spirit.

And you know what, before Pentecost, that one body never existed before. From Pentecost, it begins as a present fact on earth, because the Spirit was sent to do what? To baptize, to place people into Christ. And he never did that before. And this continuously, for he when given is to abide in and with us forever, John 14, 16. In Christ, baptized by the spirit. There's no difference in religion or social standing. None of that hinders him. There's one body and one spirit.

So the figures employed in the verse before us point to baptism and the Lord's Supper, the latter being the standing sign of the church's unity, and we talked about the Lord's Supper a couple weeks ago. The English word baptize, comes from the Greek word baptizo, which literally means to immerse or place into, by immersion and never to take out.

And the example that is always used in the New Testament is you take a piece of cloth and you dip it into some indelible dye and you take it out. How do you separate the new color from the cloth? You can't. I don't care how much bleach you use, you can't do it. They become one. And so that becomes a symbol of really what the baptism of the Spirit is all about.

The Lord Jesus told the disciples in Acts 1, he gathered them together and he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised them, which he said, you heard from me. For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. And so when if you're reading through Acts, you get to Acts 2, what happens in Acts 2 is Pentecost.

When believers by the gift and the dwelling of the Holy Spirit were united to Christ as the head in heaven and to one another, we were taken out of Adam and placed into Christ. Charles Coates says baptism in scripture always suggest a coming onto an entirely new ground to the one body of Christ. You weren't there before. This is all new. What John's baptism did is it brought people to the same idea of what he was teaching, like repentance. But the baptism of the Holy Spirit, what it does is it merges all people, all believers into one divine unity. by the baptism of the Spirit, accomplished for everyone when one believes. So what happens?

Well, if you've ever been to, Courtney's in my class about what happened at the cross. According to Lewis Barry Chafer, 33 things happened at the cross. But I have a list at home of over 200. I think some of them are a little repetitive, but just a few. Every believer was saved and joined to the Lord Jesus.

That happened, 1 Corinthians 6.17, Galatians 3.27. And by that union with the resurrected Christ, he's made a partaker of resurrected life. He's translated out of the kingdom and the power of darkness into the kingdom of the son of his love. Every believer is crucified, dead and buried with and in Christ, and is raised to walk in newness of life.

He's now seated with Christ in the heavenlies, according to Ephesians 2.6.

He's a citizen of heaven, according to Philippians 3.20.

He's forgiven all trespass, Colossians 2.13.

He's justified, Romans 5.1. He's blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, Ephesians 1, 3, and he's placed into the body of Christ. Those are just 10 things that happen at the cross. There's a lot more.

So you put it this way, the body is spoken of in this chapter as a vessel in which the spiritual manifestations take place. It is the vessel of the operations of the spirit and the different gifts which he, in the distribution of the spirit, are regarded as different members of the body. The baptism of the spirit is made by many entirely an individual matter. But in scripture, it's not individual at all.

We are merged into one body. And according to God, it is a perfect organism. We can't improve on the operations of the spirit in the body. So you have to ask yourself a question at this point. Would you distinguish between the baptism of the spirit and being made to drink of the one spirit, as the verse says? The baptism of the spirit merges all who are the subjects of it into one divine unity. But there's an inward aspect of that, we all have been given to drink of the Spirit. That is, each has found his satisfaction in drinking of the Spirit.

Therefore, when a member of the body expresses his inward feelings, other members of the body say, Amen. Amen. For the body is not one member, but many. First we're reminded that the human body with its diversity in unity, lots of parts all united together. The human body is a figure all through, that is, it has a lot of members, but they are all components, parts of the one body. So the human body is the underlying concept in this chapter. The human body probably is the most wonderful thing we have in nature. There's just nothing like it. I think there's 11 of these. I found this really interesting list about the human body. the body of Christ or the body of the human.

The first thing it has is a circulatory system. And what that is is the cardiovascular system, your heart, your blood vessels. They have a job of delivering oxygen and nutrients to the rest of your body and collecting waste products and removing them. The respiratory system is your lungs. that allow you to inhale and exhale and exchange gases between blood and lungs, space deep within the lungs themselves. The carbon monoxide produced in metabolism is offloaded. The skeletal system are the bones, the cartilages, and the ligaments, and they provide a structure for the organs and the tissue to be on.

I don't know, I just had this weird thought. How many came to church this way this morning? You know, with the curve there, that house that's got the deck on it? It's cracked over the garage, you see that? I thought, gee, there's something wrong with that skeletal system.

This system affords protection for vital organs and permits locomotion of the organism, has bone marrows involved with that, and immune cells. Then you have the muscular system, which comes in three main types. Skeletal muscles move you around. We old guys know about that. Smooth muscle lines, organs such as the gut and the bladder, and operate involuntarily.

And the cardiac muscle, like your heart, moves around. And this is a word I called Eccles. I said, how do you pronounce this word? Interguminary, but that's not how you pronounce it. He said some other. I was going to ask him again, but he's not here. But this includes your skin, hair, nails, and mostly the former. Physical barrier helps keep out microorganisms, regulates the moisture level, et cetera, et cetera.

And then you have the digestive system. It converts ingested food into smaller molecules so your cells can harvest the energy from them. And then you have a nervous system. Your brain, your spinal cord, a great many peripheral nerves, that kind of thing. My hand thing, the nerves are still growing back. Then you have an endocrine system. When you hear the word hormones, think of endocrine system.

This system regulates the internal environment of the organism via the dispensation of chemicals. Then you have the urinary system, like your kidneys. It helps eliminate waste, it filters your blood, it keeps your acid base levels organized and electrolytes and other substances systems in your body balance. Lymphatic system, the structure of this system, its channels are akin to a secondary circulatory system which includes a spleen, makes cells that combat foreign invaders and help return tissue and fluid to the blood vessels.

And the reproductive system is responsible for creating, how do you say that, gametes and sex cells. that participate in fertilization, propagation of the genes. All of these systems are in every one of our bodies, and you know what? If you're healthy, they're all working together. They're all in sync. They're all functioning like they should.

So the divine conception is a wonderful one based on the human body, and the human body is not like any other body. It's not only created by God, but it was also formed directly by his hand in Genesis 2-7. Jehovah Elohim formed man out of the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives. And then Jehovah then put man whom he had formed. He formed him. He just didn't create him, he formed him.

There is the thought of formation connected with the human body, and the psalmist can say, I am fearfully and wonderfully made, and in thy book, all my members are written. Yet, when as yet, there was none of them. This entire system was in God's mind before he ever created you. So the formation of the human body was the result of divine counsel. It was written in the book before he ever took the dust in his hand. So Paul shows that as the human body has been constituted to work as one, united whole to exercise all the disorder, so should the body of Christ be.

The great and most obvious characteristic of the body is that it consists of not one member, but many. This is so essential that it's nature that it could not be called the body if it consisted of only one member and not many. It would kind of be a grotesque thing. It wouldn't be beautiful like it is. There wouldn't be this unity and diversity going on as you see in the human body. And so should the body of Christ be. It should function the same way. It's exactly so that the church of Jesus Christ would function that way.

It's not only his house, but his body in virtue of the one spirit who baptized all believers into it. whatever their ancestors and their otherwise irreconcilable differences into one, a unity which exists now and not by and by coming up on earth and not merely in heaven. In fact, we may go further and say that the sole object of the spiritual instruction here is the church now on earth. and not at all in heaven. We function on earth like we're supposed to. In heaven we're gonna be all about the bride, we're gonna be all about the new Jerusalem, but we won't be about the members of the body of Christ there.

That's for here. And we're to demonstrate who we are as members of the body of Christ so that we function like we're members of the body. So Paul in this chapter reminds us that the use and function of the human body to show the practices that should mark the body of Christ on the earth. That's why we're in it. So when you get to verse 15 and 16, it's really kind of interesting.

If the foot says, because I'm not a hand, I'm not a part of the body, it's not for this reason any the less part of the body, And if the ear says, because I'm not an eye, I'm not part of the body, is it not for this reason any less a part of the body?

The diversity would be entirely ignored in this case. And the gravest disorder aroused if every member neglected his own function through envy of the members having a different function. Paul warns against this dissatisfaction of the members with their position.

You know, I find it, I don't think in our church we have a lot of dissatisfaction. I think because of our size. You know, we have one, maybe two believers that have similar gifts, but every one of us is gifted to do something else, so we're not competing. You can imagine in one of these megachurches, how would you ever find out how you were to function as a member of the body of Christ? You wouldn't know.

It's too much competition. But the Corinthians were in danger of ignoring or neglecting their own function because of envy of those who may have had a higher place. If the foot began to complain about it was not a hand, or in this case the ear was not an eye, the work of the body would cease to function. It's like if we go back to that slide with all the functions of the body, if one of those functions of the body decides They don't decide, but if it stops functioning the way it should, what's the result? I'm sick. My body's not working right.

We've just gone through a whole year of trying to stay away from something like that so that our bodies would not malfunction. The body of Christ operates the same way. The body's designed to work effectively for the good of everybody. So the kind of separation they've carried out would destroy the church. Each member of it has its own function for the body and not for yourself.

As the foot and the hand, the eye and the ear, they act for the entire body. They're not in competition with one another. So if the whole body were an eye, what would be the hearing? And if the whole were a hearing, what would be the smell? It's, how do I say this? I would say the ridiculousness of such a thought is shown here. It just is ridiculous.

If one member might desire lawfully some special place, so might all the rest. Let's say that everybody wanted to be the maintenance guy. Or everybody wanted to be the office manager. or everybody wanted to be the pastor. Well, you could all come up here and I'll go sit down there. It would ruin the way the church functions.

What's interesting, the splendid coordination and subordination of the various members of the body would be in an end. Watch what God has done. But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body just as he desires. Such disorder can only be prevented by the recognition that it is God who put this together and not man. that he placed them, giving each one an appointed place and an appointed function and an appointed enablement. It's not a question of a theory or a wise practice. It's simply a question of God's divine will. God has so ordained it that those who desire otherwise are fighting against his word.

It's not merely the lucky fact that I live in South Denver and some of you live in North Denver. Do you realize that everything in your life God ordained, all of it, the fact that even where you live and what you did this morning, You find out that the body of Christ, the church, is according to God's design and constitution. Each is set in a place arranged by God in the body of Christ, and you have a gift that's suitable to where he puts you.

One's own choice is excluded. Ah. And so is selection by other men. We've talked about this a lot with people in our church and finding a pastor or determining an elder or deacon. You look around and see who God has raised up and you say, oh, there's one. We didn't decide. We just recognized what God was already doing.

It's neither the self nor man nor the church of God who can and does set the members. And he set them, each one of them, in the body according as he pleased. He determines for the least as well as the greatest. Any other ordering is at issue with God's ways and with His pleasure. It is the Lord Jesus Christ's church, and He, not man, orders the place of each in it and all in it. I'd also say that this principle is a fixed principle in God in His creation. He not only decides about his church, but he decides about all things in every creation, in his creation.

Like the issue today, does he decide about what gender you're gonna be? Yeah, he does. The idea that a person can determine their own gender based upon collective pressure or personal feelings would have to disregard God's sovereignty. and his ordaining, especially believers being placed into the body and gifted by the Spirit. Let's say that God ordained a man to be an apostle. There aren't apostles today, or an elder. And that one decided that he wasn't going to be a man anymore, he was going to be a female. Well, it wouldn't be according to God's design. because if God not only designed your gender, he also designed your purpose in the church, and he suits you out for that purpose.

He makes those decisions. If you go back and look at the setup of your human body, did you make any decisions about anything that was in there? about any of those systems? No, they came with the existence, and God decided every one of those. God decided whether you were going to be tall, whether you were gonna be born and have lifelong disabilities, or you were gonna get some as you go along, or you were just gonna get old and get a bunch of them. The most important thing to learn is that no amount of labor or effort on the part of man can alter what God has decided.

He's assigned a certain place to me in the body of Christ, and I can't get out of that unless I do it unlawfully. So he goes on and he said, if they were all one member, where would the body be? Self-importance of one member would do away with the body. There would be no body. If all the members of the human body were the same, it wouldn't be able to function as a body. It would be incapable of getting anything accomplished.

Because, as an example, if all had the gift of tongues, The gift that the Corinthians really valued highly. The body couldn't function according to Constable. Why? Can you imagine a room filled with everybody who said, I only have the gift of tongues. Now think about what the gift of tongues is. It's a language that is known but you didn't learn it. And it's designed so that you can give the gospel to somebody else in their language. So imagine all of you, okay, at the count of three, we're all gonna start speaking in tongues. Well, who are we gonna talk to? And who's gonna interpret it?

It would be chaos, okay? We put so much emphasis today on being prepared for our positions and our survival in the world. that we neglect the more important roles that we are ordained of God to fill in the Lord's body. We somehow think that I gotta send my kids to college so they can survive in the world, but I don't know what or where or what they should do in the church.

I think we got that backwards. Each one of us. Each one of us. But we are, I think I got out, no I didn't, I'm still good. But now we are many members, but one body. Each one is set in just the right way. I must not be discontent with what pleases God, all is in accordance with his design. In the secret of your heart, do you ever go to God and say, well I'm not real happy that you're doing this with me. Why don't you give it to somebody else?

The body of Corinth in the Corinthian aspect is a most wonderful conception because every member is perfect and functions in his own office. All function in unity and the fact that you can only see it in the Bible makes it precious. What I mean by that is that if you wanna know how the body of Christ is to function, it's in God's word and that's the only place you'll see it. And it clearly lays it out there. As the organs of the physical body need one another, so the members of the church need one another.

There isn't a single one of you that I don't need. And being in this position, I become more and more aware of that every week, all the time. Because I refuse to be the guy that says, you're the pastor, here's the key, we'll see ya. You know, well who's gonna sweep up? and they look at me. I'm not sweeping. But that's the way a lot of churches operate. There's the staff and there's the members. The unity of the body perfectly consists with diversity in the members. And the diversity in the members with that one body.

Spiritual gifts I got this from Macaulay. He says, spiritual gift is the word charisma and is used by Paul in a technical way to refer to the ability to serve that is not attained by one's own effort, but that is sovereignly bestowed by the Holy Spirit. Why would the church need one another? For that very reason. Because every one of us has a different gift. and we all have to come together to function as a body.

So the I cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Or again, the head to the feet, I don't have any need of you. In Christianity today, the I does say in present practice to the hand, I don't have any need of you. And the head does say to the feet, I don't have a need for you.

The truth stated by Paul proves that this practice cannot be without ruin in the body. So the body of Christ framed by the grace of God. It is a departure from this which constitutes mainly the present disorganization in most churches. And the state of the church which is seen today everywhere. The truth stated by Paul is proving that as this practice cannot be without ruin in the natural body, so the body of Christ is framed by the grace of God.

Constable made a very interesting comment. He says, too often, because we differ from each other, we also differ with each other. Thought that was really a profound statement. So in closing, just as the systems of the physical body need one another to function, so do the members of the church need one another to function. For what purpose? To manifest the Lord Jesus Christ. That's our job.