"The Many and the One" 1 Corinthians 12:12-21 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Well, there are momentous events in the life of our nation that can be recalled just by identifying the day on which it happened.

December 7th, 1941, a day Franklin Roosevelt said would live in infamy.

9-11, a day that doesn't even need a year attached to it for Americans to remember what happened.

July 4th, 1776, the memory of which is seared into our psyche by high school civics tests and innumerable fireworks displays.

If I were to ask you what were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams doing on that day, you would not be wrong to say that they were drafting and signing the Declaration of Independence.

But also on that day, Jefferson and Franklin and Adams were named to a committee that was tasked with coming up with a motto for the new nation.

And what they selected was E pluribus unum, a Latin phrase meaning out of many one.

While they had been 13 colonies that were independently dependent on England, from this date in 1776, they would be one nation, hence out of many, one.

This is one of the early drawings used to capture the proposed motto.

You can see the 13 stars and the 13 stripes, proving above all, I guess, that graphic art has come a long way in the last 350 years.

Paul's letter to the Corinthians was concerned with divisions and factions right from the very beginning.

The Corinthian church suffered from a litany of problems.

I picture Paul as a bald man, and I've long suspected that he lost most of it, pulling it out in consternation over the infernal Corinthian church.

Can't give you chapter and verse on that.

Dr.

Walter Kaiser would say in our seminary classes, that's in the margin.

Paul confronts these factions that declared in chapter one, I follow Paul.

Others were saying, I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas.

No, Paul told him firmly, Christ is not divided.

You are one church, e.

Pluribus Unum.

A few chapters later, he'd address these divisions again by saying, Look, I planted, Apollos watered, but it's God that gave the growth.

God is the one who unites the church and draws her into one.

So, coming to chapter 12, Paul has just written about the diversity of spiritual gifts.

And yet these gifts were from the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God.

There was unity in the diversity, there was diversity in the unity.

How could he get this divided church to recognize the importance of both?

By giving them an illustration, the human body.

And that's really what Stephen Procopio's sermon slide that I like so much this morning is illustrating, that out of this one massive stone, a master sculptor is forming a body composed of many parts, just like God is doing with the church.

So 1 Corinthians 12, beginning in verse 12, follow along with me, please.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many are one body, so it is with Christ.

For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body.

Jews, Greeks, slaves, or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit.

For the body does not consist of one member, but of many.

If the foot should say, Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, it would not make it any less a part of the body.

And if the ear should say, Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body.

If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing?

If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?

But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each of them, as he chose.

If all were a single member, where would the body be?

As it is, there are many parts and yet one body.

These are the true words of God.

What this passage is showing us is that the body is one, but that the body is also many.

And finally, that the body needs every member if it is going to function properly.

The first fact that Paul wants them to know is that the church is one body.

At the end of verse 12, when he says, so it is with Christ, he means so it is with the body of Christ, the church.

And he reinforces this down in verse 27 when he says plainly, you are the body of Christ.

Bodies have an essential unity to them.

If I hit my hand with a hammer, it isn't just the finger that suffers.

No, it's very willing to share the experience.

I instantly feel pain from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.

If one member suffers, all suffer together, as Paul says down in verse 26.

There's an essential unity in the church as well.

There may be many members, verse 12 says, but they form one body.

There may be great diversity in the gifting that individual members have, but together they form one church.

And what is it that makes that church into one?

It is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Paul had been emphasizing the work of the Spirit earlier in this chapter as he described these diverse spiritual gifts, the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, the gift of faith, all the others derive from one and the same spirit.

Summarized his list of gifts, he says in verse 11, all these gifts are empowered by one and the same Spirit who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

And the Spirit does this, verse 7 says, not to make you or me look good, not to show who is more spiritual or who is more gifted, but for the common good.

Elsewhere in 1 Corinthians, Paul says that the Israelites were baptized into Moses.

Again, not a water baptism, but an identity as the redeemed people of God.

At the moment of conversion, when we repent and believe the gospel, there is a spiritual birth that occurs, a spiritual rebirth.

Jesus told Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, spiritually reborn.

And that's what Paul is talking about here: spiritual rebirth as the common experience of every true believer and follower of Christ.

It's the foundation of our faith, as Paul told the Romans.

Without it, we don't have faith.

He said in Romans 8, you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you, and if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him.

This term baptism in the Spirit is not commonly used in Scripture and has become somewhat of a controversial doctrine, which, with some strands of Christianity teaching that this is not something that all believers experience, that it's some believers that experience, that it doesn't occur at the moment of salvation, but it occurs at a later time.

But Paul's whole emphasis in these verses is on the unity and on the commonality of the experience of the church.

The word all is emphasized.

Verse 12, all are members of the body.

Verse 13, all were baptized, all were made to drink of one spirit.

All, all, all.

They were one church, and they had all begun their life in the same way, in and through and by the Holy Spirit of God.

You began your Christian life in the Spirit, Paul told the Galatians in chapter 3.

Are you now being perfected in the flesh?

No, the Christian life is a life in the spirit from beginning to end.

This spiritual birth is something that I pray you have experienced.

And it occurs the moment we put our faith in Christ for salvation.

It is our common experience, despite a diversity of gifts that God may bestow on us.

And this was true in the early church as well.

Corinth was a city that was poised on both overland and seafaring ship trade routes.

And as such, it was a very, very diverse city with Greeks and Romans and Jews and Egyptians and Phoenicians, many, many other nations were a presence in Corinth.

Paul highlights some of these divergences in verse 13 when he says Jews and Greeks were both baptized in one spirit.

Jews and Greeks points to the huge distinction in religious and cultural differences that existed in the Corinthian church.

But whether you grew up strictly following God's ancient revelation to Moses, as Paul had done, or whether you came from a completely pagan background and were worshiping the mythological gods of Greece and of Rome, when you became a Christian, you experienced spiritual birth through the baptism of the Spirit, signaling that the church had a great and social and economic diversity.

There were free men and slaves who were part of the church in Corinth.

Many of you know that I served for about a decade as a missionary in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa.

Three of those years I was single, seven of those years I was married.

My wife is here this morning.

But by God's grace, over that 10-year period, the evangelism work we were involved in resulted in the birth of about 200 new churches.

One of those churches was an international congregation for English speakers.

Côte d'Ivoire was a French-speaking country, but the capital city had many English speakers from the English-speaking countries that were surrounding Côte d'Ivoire.

And they were from a great variety not just of countries, but of economic backgrounds as well in the worship hall where we we met.

It was not uncommon to see on the same pew at one end a couple who had arrived in a huge black Mercedes dressed in fine clothes and next to them a refugee or a day laborer in very shabby clothes who had walked several miles to church because they couldn't afford the 25 cent bus token.

You know, here in Washington we live in a national capital, a city of great economic and cultural and religious and national diversity.

I think, like in Clarinth, this great variety can be a challenge to our unity.

But the fact remains, whether you are rich or poor, whether you're a man or a woman, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, whether you're an Ethiopian or a Texan, I was trying to think of two countries that were very divergent there.

Each of us is now a part of God's family.

Because we have repented, we believed the gospel, we've been baptized by the spirit into his body, which is the church.

Billy Graham was fond of saying the ground is level at the foot of the cross.

No one is excluded, and no one gets preferential treatment.

Amen?

Another clue that Paul is talking about a spiritual baptism here, not water baptism, comes right at the end of verse 13 when he says, All were made to drink of one spirit.

Again, he is stressing the all-inclusiveness of the experience.

Everyone drank, not some.

The image harkens back to Jesus' teaching in John chapter 7, when Jesus stood up and cried out, If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

John 7 · chapter mention

Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Drinking of the Spirit describes this new life we have in Christ that flows up and out of us like a fountain of cool, fresh, living water.

Those who believed in him, John says, would receive the Spirit.

This is yet another description of the spiritual birth that occurs when we repent and believe the gospel.

So, like a body, the church is one, but it is also many.

Verse 14 says the body does not consist of one member, but of many.

In a human body, we know this is certainly true.

The medical community teaches that there are 11 major organ systems in our bodies, skeletal, muscular, digestive, respiratory, etc.

And here in verses 15, 16, 17, Paul mentions several organs and their functions, the hands, the feet, the eyes, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell.

And this diversity is so necessary.

If every part was an eye, how could we hear or how could we smell?

The believers in Corinth, I believe, were guilty of making comparisons.

Yes, there was a variety in the spiritual gift, but one or some of them must have seemed super important and the others really not so much.

They were not appreciating that the body of Christ had this great diversity.

In this church, we take your talents very seriously.

Your gifts, your service, whatever it is that you do, is just so valuable.

We have people in this church who are serving the Lord as musicians, as Sunday school and ESL teachers, as ushers, as parking lot attendants, small group leaders.

Did you know we even have a man in this church that drops in on the different nursery rooms and plays his guitars and sings to the babies?

That's amazing, isn't it, to have somebody like that?

What if we had no choir or orchestra?

It would be a pretty dull service if all you had to do was listen to me.

Don't say amen.

Don't say amen.

I'll go to the tape, I'll find you.

What kind of mayhem would we have if no one was serving in the parking lot?

And speaking of mayhem, imagine classrooms full of hundreds of children with no Sunday school teachers.

And I'm sorry if that triggers any thoughts of the apocalypse for you, Sunday school teachers.

Well, at this point, uh Paul identifies the first of two attitudes toward the body that are just deadly.

Verse 15, because I am not a hand, I do not belong.

Because I am not an ear, I do not belong.

Maybe the people saying this don't think that their talent or their skill level is good enough.

Maybe they're too busy with their work or at home.

Or maybe they just don't think that the church cares that much about what they are good at.

A few years back, our churches in Northern Virginia hosted a second career conference for people coming out of various uh job experiences to consider maybe serving vocationally in missions later in their in their lives.

And one participant raised his hand and he said, he said, Well, my work has been in internet security.

I know that's not something that mission organizations would be interested in.

Well, au contraire, Pierre.

That's French for no way, Jose.

After that session, these different mission reps just made a beeline to him and said, No, internet security, email security, communications, this is uh essential to us.

In fact, this is what keeps us up at night.

We're very glad to meet you.

You know, maybe uh he was an ear and he thought somehow that only eyes were useful for the Great Commission.

There may be people here this morning that have the same misperception that somehow your gifts, your talents, your passions are not needed here at church.

Statistics over the years have shown pretty clearly that about a third of our uh adult attenders here are involved in an adult Bible fellowship.

And there's another 12 to 15 percent who don't attend an ABF and yet they're involved in a midweek study or small group or serving group of some kind.

Uh so that means that about 50% of the adults who come to our worship services only participate in our worship services.

And I don't think 50% is a very good number.

If my car is only giving me 50% of its power, I take it to the shop.

If my Diet Coke is only giving me 50% of its fizz, I generally throw it out.

Uh kids, if you only get half the answers right on your test, are your parents happy or unhappy?

Unhappy, right.

Good answer, you got that one right.

Statistically, half the adults in this room are really not engaged in the life of this church beyond a weekly hour of worship.

And to this group, I want to say uh deliberately, we love you, we value your gifts and your talents.

Uh, we know that we're incomplete without them, like a body that has uh arms but not feet.

We want you to experience to the greatest extent possible the joy of being a fully devoted follower of Christ, of seeking him constantly, of serving him regularly, serving him faithfully, using those things that God has entrusted to you, sharing him boldly as God gives you uh opportunities.

Verse 18 says God arranges the members of the body, each one of them, as he chooses.

The gifts and the abilities that you have come from God, and he is in the business of arranging all this diversity into a unified and well-formed body.

I just invite you uh into the joy and the adventure really of allowing God to use the gifts that He entrusted to you to make this place all that God intended it to be.

Truly, we need every hand on deck.

Now, what I've been saying here is that the body is uh one, that the body needs a remember.

It's finally what we say in verse 21.

The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you.

Nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

Eyes are looking down at the hands, the head is above the feet.

So I believe Paul is identifying here an attitude of superiority in the Corinthian church.

In the verses that follow, he's going to talk about uh needing and honoring the humbler organs that we cover over with clothes.

Maybe some thought that their gifts were superior to others.

When you get to chapter 14, there's some that thought that these ecstatic utterances were somehow more important than the prophetic exposition of God's word.

Maybe some were allowing their economic and cultural hierarchy in there in the Corinthian society to bleed over into their church practices.

In 1 Corinthians 11, one chapter back, Paul rebukes the rich for investing.

Inviting their wealthy friends to a sumptuous meal while the poor believers came to the house church meeting and went home hungry.

Remember, verse 13 says we are one body composed of Jews and Greeks, slaves and free.

When Christians say, I have no need of you, they may be reflecting their contentment with the way things are.

They really don't want to make room for others, perhaps.

After all, if there's too many people here, it's hard to find a parking spot, right?

If every pew is full, what are we going to do with our coats and our Bibles?

They may be satisfied with their close connections with one group within the church, but not so interested in anyone outside of that group.

Now I know it's true that uh birds of a feather flock together.

We have structured our ABFs loosely so that people who are in a stage of life can connect and be encouraged by others at that stage of life.

You can get some advice on uh potty training your toddlers in the teleos class, but don't look for it in Morningstar.

But um sometimes I see members of an ABF standing outside their their room waiting for their class to start, and somehow they've managed to get there within five minutes of the service letting out.

I just wonder, did they take time to greet someone sitting in their row that they didn't know?

Maybe that person who thought this was the 9 30 service?

Did they uh uh greet someone in the lobby and help them uh see that this really is a church that's uh friendly and reaching out?

Did they intentionally pass through the atrium to talk to any seniors or maybe even a teenager?

Oh, that's scary.

Did they introduce themselves to anyone of a different ethnic background or make an effort to remember their names?

Probably none of those things.

I've made calls to people who've attended this church for two or three months and stopped coming.

And when I asked them why, I've heard things like, well, it just wasn't all that friendly of a place, or I just never saw how I could get involved.

Now, obviously, there's many, many visitors who come here and they are greeted warmly and welcomed very well, encouraged to jump into the church's activities, but it's also probably true that every congregation struggles at some point with this attitude of I do not need you.

As Paul exhorted the Thessalonians, he said, even when you are doing well, I urge you to excel still more.

And I would do the same.

To sum it up, the body is one, the body is many, and the body needs every one of its members to function properly.

This was true in Corinth, and it's true 2,000 years later here in Springfield, Virginia.

And the text uh reveals two attitudes that really hinder the body from functioning.

One of them says, I do not belong.

This way of thinking keeps people from engaging, and it really limits the quality of the service that a church can offer.

Second attitude says, I don't need you.

People who say this are typically satisfied with the status quo or neither think that they or their gifts are superior to others around them.

Again, the church is not functioning as dynamically as God intended.

Paul's illustration of a body is not hard to grasp, but it is hard to practice, isn't it?

Mark Twain once said, it's not those parts of the Bible that I don't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand that bother me.

And sometimes I feel the same way.

If you've never given your life to Christ or experienced the spiritual rebirth that Paul is uh describing in this passage, uh, I would urge you to go back to this passage that we read earlier in John chapter 7 and to see what Jesus is calling to you here.

John 7 · chapter mention

Jesus cried out, If if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.

Whoever believes in me, when you believe in him, as the scriptures said, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

If you are thirsty for truth, if you are thirsty for righteousness, if you are thirsty for love, you can come and drink.

That's what Jesus invites you to do.

And he will satisfy what it is that you long for.

There are always elders, pastors, people in the lobby and in the atrium after the service who would love to talk with you and pray with you if that's uh your state today.

If you are a follower of Christ, I want to close with some responses that we can read together and reaffirm our commitment to being this diverse and unified body of Christ and hopefully drive out some of these attitudes that may keep us from being all that God wants us to be.

So uh Pastor Bill has said I should ask you all to stand, so I'm gonna ask you all to stand as we finish the message here.

And we are going to uh you're going to uh read responsibly each line.

We've got this, uh we had a little trouble with this at the first hour, but hey, that was 7 a.m.

on the clock, right?

So I'll read uh I'll read a line and then you read it back.

This is my church.

This is my church.

I do belong.

I do belong.

God has brought me here to grow and serve.

God has brought me here to grow and serve.

I have a unique background.

I have unique gifts and talents.

I need gifts and talents.

I am needed.

I am appreciated.

I will not be inactive.

I will not be inactive.

I am an essential part of the body of Christ.

I am an essential part of the body of Christ.

I believe that I need others.

I need people who are different from me.

I need people who are different from me.

My life is enriched when I'm around young people, elderly people, people of all nations.

We are a family.

We are living stones joined together to glorify Christ.

We are the living stones joined together to glorify Christ.

We are called to love and serve one another.

We are called to love and serve one another.

The world knows we are Christians when we love one another.

The world knows we are Christians when we love one another.

Together, we are the body of Christ.

Together we are the body of Christ.

Amen.

That's true, isn't it?

Now I'm going to pray.

Let's pray.

Father, we believe these things that we have stated.

We believe that we are we are loved, that we're needed, that we're an essential part of this body.

Help us, Father, to be courageous and have the faith to step into whatever it is that you call us into.

And help us to be encouraged, Lord, that we truly do need all that are around us.

We're thankful for your word, Lord.

We're thankful that you lead us in Christ.

We're thankful that you, the master sculptor, are making us into the body that you want us to be.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, ibc.church.

If you want more information about the Master Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to tms.edu.

Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.