Ten Minutes for Teachers
Jan. 14, 2006
Vol. 5, Issue 1

Worship Texts:  Psalm 19; 1 Cor. 12:4-13; Luke 4:14-21

Worship Theme:  Deliverance to the Captives

Other Texts:   Nehemiah 8:1-3,5,6,8-10; 1 Cor. 12:12-31a

 
Devotion: 

Did you know yesterday began a week of prayer for Christian unity?  For a whole week, our community is going to pray for what should always be a reality:  unity among believers.  It is the same prayer Jesus had for all who would believe in the good news (Jn. 17:21).  So we take joy that we continue a prayer begun by Christ himself.

That is the good news.  The bad news comes from drawing a basic conclusion:  since we still have to pray for unity, we haven’t yet achieved it.  And it is clear from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church that even the earliest believers struggled with unity.  The Corinthian church was ripe with personality conflicts and differing opinions.

This struggle for unity leads Paul in the twelfth chapter of 1 Corinthians to offer a well known image for who we are as the church:  we are one body.  I believe this is pure genius by Paul.  Rather than using other images that would allow for difference and commonality – images like a city or a family – Paul makes it personal:  “you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” 

To be a Christian is to be a member of a body – connected by infinite intricacy, interwoven into a living, mysterious whole. 

As I grow older, I realize more and more how interrelated my body is and how essential it is for every part to do its own task.  Boy did I ever learn that lesson back in the fall of 2005?! 

I had spent the day driving up the central valley of California … then I spent the night driving back down the central valley to Los Angeles.  All day, my body was reduced to a driving automaton, using only my eyes, arms, hands and right foot to negotiate 500 miles of road.  I didn’t think I needed anything else.  But, in strong defiance, the various parts of my body began a protest as I neared Los Angeles.  First my neck, than my left foot, and when I eventually emerged out of my driver’s seat, I discovered the largest protest of all:  my back seized into a tight spasm of cruelty.  Attempting to fill up the car with gas, I instead ended up on the ground waiting for my lower back muscles to relent … I had learned my lesson:  the body is more than four parts.  “Uncle!  Uncle!” I cried silently.

Returning to Paul’s image again in 1 Corinthians, chapter 12, Paul says it is also possible for the Christian body to experience the pain of disunity.  “Dissension” is the word he actually uses, but what he means is pain – tearing-apart, out-of-joint, dislocated pain.  And like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words (“injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”), Paul is quick to remind us that disunity anywhere in the Christian body causes suffering for the entire Christian body.

Don’t I know it!  I will never forget the pain and tyranny that my lower back brought upon my whole body – erupting to proclaim the injustice of eight plus hours of driving. 

So pray for Christian unity; for anywhere there is disunity, we all suffer.

Something to Chew On:

The unity of the Christian body is not a bland, monopolistic unity; it is a unity of diversity.  And every part of the Christian body is called upon to exercise unique gifts for the benefit of the entire body.  What gifts have you been equipped with to bless the body?  How might you exercise your gifts with your Sunday school class?  How can you encourage your Sunday school class to exercise their own gifts for the sake of our common body here at First Presbyterian? 

Prayer for the day:

“You, who are One, gather and send us all.  Your gifts, that are many, work through each one of us.  Remind us, O God, of your care for us and the care you seek to exercise for one another.  For with you and with one another, we are better together.  Amen.” Seasons of the Spirit, pg. 45.