Thank you, Mark and Clara.
Would you open your Bibles with me, please, to 1 Corinthians chapter 12, as we think again
today about our theme, the New You.
Before we can live our lives with joy and satisfaction, I believe that we must discover
who we are and why we are here.
We get little help regarding those questions from the dominant culture around us.
The dominant culture in our society has really no answer at all for the questions, who am
I and why am I here?
Because of the lack of answers, there is despair which has taken root in our culture.
Is it not absolutely amazing that one of the leading causes of death in young men and women
is suicide?
Think of that.
So much hopelessness regarding life, so lack of an understanding of who they are and of
God's purpose for their lives that they determine to kill themselves.
The fact that there are few answers in our society is seen in the fact that four years
ago a Professor Margaret Batten from Stanford University suggested that in fact we ought
to do the kind thing and help teenagers commit suicide if they think that that would be the
benefit, the most beneficial thing for them.
Despair comes from a lack of answers to these basic questions.
Along with despair comes a devaluing of human life which we see in abortion, in the gradual
progress of euthanasia, and in the growing movement to assist in suicide.
We see it as well in the alarming increase in the murder rate.
Do you notice the news from our own area and how almost every day at least one person and
often several people have been killed because of the violence in our society?
The dominant culture has no answers.
In addition to a devaluation of human life and despair, a result of that is devastation
in our environment.
We live in a world that is becoming increasingly abused and misused.
We are literally killing ourselves because of our abuse of the environment.
But if after all there are no answers as to ultimate meaning in our culture, then why
should we be concerned about the environment?
And coming out of this lack of answers also is a decay of order, a decay of the moral
base upon which we have historically built our society.
The dominant culture today has no answers for the meaning of life.
This is indeed sad and tragic because in past generations the answer, the question of meaning
has been taught in the homes, in the churches, and in the educational institutions of America.
But by and large not so today.
In the past we have learned early in life that each of us is a special creation of God,
that we are not an accident of evolutionary chance.
In the past we have been taught that each life has God given value and meaning that
supersedes sickness or deformity.
In the past we have been taught that each one of us will be accountable to God, the
Creator, for the actions of his life that is not being taught anymore.
The dominant culture in our society has no answers to the questions of identity and meaning.
But from the Bible, the Word of God, we learn that the infinite, personal God who created
and sustains all things, this God, entered the world of time and space.
And that he did so with a wondrous purpose.
You see humanity having chosen to rebel and to live in sin needed a Savior.
And so this infinite, personal God came into the world in the person of his Son, Jesus
Christ, to rescue us sinners from the hell that we deserve.
And so he offered himself as a sacrifice for humankind's sin.
He suffered on our behalf.
He died.
And he rose again from the dead so that he could save any one of us who would come to
him in simple repentance and faith.
When you and I trust in Jesus Christ, we then become children of God and we receive a new
identity.
Before that, we were identified with Adam, the first man, in his sin and transgression
against God and in the death that he inherited because of his sin.
And now in Jesus Christ we have been identified with him, with him in his life and in his
righteousness.
Before we were identified as sinful, now we are identified as forgiven in the sight of
God.
Before we were saved, we were separated from God.
But now we are related to God through faith in Christ.
This new identity that you and I have is described in the New Testament with a number of different
word pictures and one of them is in our text.
We'll read 1 Corinthians 12, beginning in verse 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, so also is Christ.
For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether
slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one spirit.
In this text we learn that one of the word pictures that describes our new identity and
purpose is members of the body.
The new you is described by God as if you were a limb or an organ in a physical body,
except that the body mentioned here is a spiritual body, real but spiritual in nature.
The last time that we came to this text we saw that in this regard the new you is an
addition to the body.
You were added onto the body that began on the day of Pentecost.
On that very day the Lord added several thousand to the initial body, and since that day, 2,000
years ago, he has been adding one at a time new members of the body.
If you have trusted Jesus Christ, you have been added to the body.
We learn that that addition was a past addition.
You were baptized, he says, into one body.
That is placed into the body by the Holy Spirit.
It was a permanent addition.
In other words, you have been placed into Jesus Christ's body once and for all.
You cannot be placed into his body again.
It is never necessary to be placed into it again, because once and for all that has happened
to you.
We learn that it is a purposed addition.
In other words, you were assigned a place in the body of God's choosing.
As it says, for example, in verse 18 of this chapter, God has placed the members, each
one of them, in the body just as he desired.
So you were a purposed addition.
You were not an accident, but God, in his saving grace, brought you to faith in Jesus
Christ.
Now, according to the gifts and the calling of God in your life, he places you into the
body to fit just where he wants you to.
God is still adding to the body today.
You see, church growth is God's idea.
It is not man's idea.
God wants us to be a growing church, growing by reaching out and touching the lives of
people who do not today know Jesus Christ, but who can come to know him, as we share
the gospel with them and the Spirit of God does his work in their hearts.
Last Sunday we were challenged to that very theme of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ,
and many hundreds of us stood, indicating that we were going to be involved by God's
grace and with his help and his courage in our hearts in getting the gospel out.
Let me just pass on to you that tracts should be available today out in the lobby.
They've been printed by one of the men in our church who's a printer, and we encourage
you to take them.
They have our church's name on the back of them.
I think I should point out to you that through a misunderstanding with Sumner Wimp and the
printer, my name was put on here as though I were the author of these two tracts.
I did not write my tracts that fast.
Last week, you remember, he said that when I got my heart right, I would write a couple
of tracts, and my heart isn't that right yet, I guess.
At least I haven't written them.
But it's going to be corrected on the next printing.
But Sumner said we could go ahead and use these tracts nonetheless, and we want to encourage
you to pick them up and to use them and pass them out.
Share the gospel with people, wherever you go.
God is still today adding to the body, desiring that other men and women might come to faith
in Christ, and you and I are a part of that whole process.
Now today, I want us to think about the fact that the new you is not only an addition to
the body, but also an extension of the head of the body.
The word head is not used right here in the text that's before us, but it is used a number
of times in the New Testament in connection with the members of the body.
I'd like for you to look at a couple of them with me.
Turn with me to Ephesians, chapter 1.
At the end of the first chapter, the apostle says regarding our glorious Lord Jesus Christ,
that the Father put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him, that's Christ,
as head over all things to the church, which is his body.
In other words, God has given us a gift, and that gift is a head.
Jesus Christ is the head over all things to the church.
We can turn over a page or two to chapter 4, where we have a more lengthy paragraph
regarding all of this.
Let me just pick it up in verse 12, where it says, for the equipping of the saints for
the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.
In other words, he's saying that all of us are being equipped to do the ministry that
the body of Christ might be built up.
That means added to and also strengthened.
He says, until we all come to the unity of the faith, and to the knowledge of the Son
of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness
of Christ, as a result we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves,
and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men by craftiness and deceitful
scheming, but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects in him who
is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body being fitted and held together by that
which every joint supplies according to the proper working of each individual part, causes
the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.
Then again in chapter 5, verse 23, the Apostle is here talking to wives and to husbands regarding
our relationship together in Christ in our marriages.
He tells us something about our roles, and he says, wives, be subject to your husbands
as to the Lord.
He says the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church,
he himself being the Savior of the body, as the church is subject to Christ.
Once again in this epistle, Paul speaks about this matter of the headship of Jesus Christ.
You see the new you, who you are, is an extension of the head, Jesus Christ.
You have been added to the body, and you are an extension of him in the world.
This word head, word kethelai, is a word that in the Greek anthropology, we'll get around
a minute, in Greek anthropology, meant the authority, that which takes precedence over
all of the other members.
When Paul was using this term the head, he was thinking of the fact that the head is
in control of the body, that it has all authority over the members of it.
And of course he's using our physical bodies as an analogy.
Someone said to me one time, do you want to lose ten pounds of ugly fat?
And I said, sure.
I said, cut off your head.
I said, thanks.
The problem is, if we cut off our heads and lose that ten pounds of substance, the result
is that our whole body dies, because our heart, our lungs, our kidneys, our intestines, everything
about us is controlled by the brain that's in the head.
The head has authority over it.
It dominates the body.
It's in control of the body.
And that's exactly what Paul wants us to understand regarding Jesus Christ.
He is in control of his body.
He is the one who has all authority in the body, Jesus Christ.
And we are an extension of him, just as my hand is an extension of my mind and I wiggle
my fingers, not because my fingers decide to wiggle, but because my brain is right now
telling them to.
You see, it's in control of my hand.
And so you and I are like that.
We're extensions of the head.
We are to live in this world, but under the control and the domination of him who is the
head.
A couple ramifications of this.
The whole body functions as an expression of the head's likeness.
Have you ever noticed that your foot has the same personality as your hand?
Have you ever noticed that?
It doesn't have an independent identity.
Have you ever noticed that your eyes have the same personality as your big toe?
Not two different personalities, the same.
Why is that?
Because your whole body is an extension of you, of you.
The same personality in the whole thing, good or bad, whichever, is still the same personality.
Your body is the extension of you in the world.
It's the expression of your life.
It's who you are as it relates to this physical realm, and so it is with the body of Jesus
Christ.
We are an expression of him in the world.
He himself is in heaven.
He is seated at the right hand of God the Father in his glorified body, but he still
expresses himself in the world through you because you're a member of his body.
The implication of that is that you're not to be your own person.
You're not to be somehow distinct from him because you are an expression of his life
on planet earth.
There's a song that's been written that says something like this.
You are the only Jesus most people will ever see.
The world today only sees Jesus as they see him in you in the expression of his life through
you.
You are a member of his body.
Not only so, but the whole body of Jesus Christ functions in subjection to the head's direction.
We function as an expression of his life, but we also function in this world in subjection
to the head's direction.
Someone may say, but I can be a Christian and do my own thing, can't I?
Not if you're going to be healthy.
If my leg decides to do its own thing, I've got a problem.
Let's suppose that I want to walk.
My brain says, leg, go out there so I can walk, but my leg is paralyzed.
It will not cooperate with my head.
What do we say about my body?
We say it's ill.
We say it's disabled.
We say it's diseased.
Any of those things might be true.
And so what do we say about the body of Jesus Christ when the members of the body will not
be in subjection to the head?
We say that's normal 20th century Christianity.
That's what we say.
But the Bible says it's diseased Christianity.
It's disabled Christianity.
When the body of Jesus Christ is not in subjection to its head, the head expresses his will through
the members of the body.
How does Jesus Christ mediate his headship to us?
How do we know what the brain, the mind, the person, the headship of Christ desires of
us as members?
After all, he is in heaven, and I'm here in St. Paul, Minnesota.
So how do I know what he wants?
Well, the answer to that is not hard.
The answer is that he communicates to me through the word of God and the Holy Spirit.
That is the nervous system, shall we say.
That's how the head communicates to me as a member, his word and the ministry of the
Holy Spirit in my heart.
That's how I learn what he wants me to do.
Now we can think of that on a corporate level as members of the body here.
You see, the body of Christ is universal.
It's also local.
It's eternal, but it's also present right here and now in our church.
Grace Church Roseville is one expression of the body of Christ in the world.
There are many thousands of others.
How does he tell us as a body of people what he wants us to do?
How does he lead us as a body of people?
The answer is the same.
It's through his word and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.
There is another factor involved in speaking of the body, us together, and that is that
God has chosen to also include in this whole communication system a body of appointed people
that are called elders.
We strongly believe in the priesthood of every believer, but we also believe in the ministry
of elders in a local church.
You see, Jesus Christ never designed the body to be a democracy.
We grow up thinking that democracy is the strongest form of government, and it is from
man's perspective.
From God's perspective, it's the weakest.
From God's perspective, the strongest form of government is called a theocracy, where
he directly rules over man.
The church is a theocracy.
Jesus Christ is the head of the body.
On a human level, he mediates his direction in the church in part through the elders of
the church, to whom he commits the rule, the oversight, the shepherding of the body.
That's an important concept for us to grasp.
Some of us come out of backgrounds where we are used to members voting on every decision
in the church, and we have picked that up because of our culture.
That is an inculturated practice.
It is not a biblical practice.
Certainly, we all have opinions, and there are times when all of us can voice those and
should voice them.
But in the process of carrying out the ministry of the body, Jesus Christ has established
a body of men, elders, who are godly and who are responsible to him.
I want to repeat that, who are responsible to him for their work.
And so as you include people on your prayer list, if there's anybody you ought to be praying
for, it's the elders of your local church, because of the awesome responsibility they
have to God to understand and mediate the will of Jesus Christ in the carrying out of
the ministry and the growth and the development of this body of believers.
That's how he talks to us as a body.
He talks to us individually too, our head.
How does he do that?
Well, through the word and through the Holy Spirit.
But how do I receive it?
The answer is through prayer.
I will only understand the will of God for my life as I spend time with him in prayer.
How much time do you spend with Jesus in prayer?
How much time is there on your knees?
How committed are you to this privilege, the practice of prayer?
If I have a member of my body that will not listen to my head, that member of the body
is unhealthy.
If I as a member of the body of Jesus Christ am not praying in communion with the head
of the body, Jesus Christ, through prayer, and if I'm not allowing his word and his
Holy Spirit to direct my life, then to that extent I am an unhealthy member of the body.
The new you is an extension of the head of the body, Jesus Christ.
You are an expression of his life in the world.
You are the only Jesus that many will ever see.
And you function in subjection, hopefully, to his headship.
In Romans chapter 14 we are reminded that as members of the body of Christ we don't
live to ourselves, we don't die to ourselves.
That is, we have to take others in the body into account, while at the same time remembering
that one day we'll stand before the head and give account of our lives.
So then every one of us will appear, will stand, will be manifested before the judgment
seat of Jesus Christ.
You see the position that God has given us in the world is a position with which comes
accountability.
And someday we will tell him and share with him how we have lived in this world as a member
of the body.
How we have functioned as an expression of his life and how we have functioned in subjection
to his direction.
So then every one of us will give account, not of everyone else in the body, but of himself
to Christ.
You know there are some real benefits not being the head.
Because I am not the head I don't have to direct my own life.
I can depend upon him to give me direction.
Because I am not the head I am not responsible to give other people direction.
He gives them direction.
Because I am not the head all I have to do is to listen and to obey.
It is really very simple but also hard.
I don't know whether you have seen the film Hoosiers that was put out several years ago
about an Indiana basketball team.
A new coach comes to town who brings a new regime, a new way of doing things.
The very first thing he has to do is get his team under control.
And so early on in the film a couple of the stars of the team of seven people are kicked
off the team because they would not be in subjection to the coach.
They wanted to do their own thing.
And with six or seven players the team went on into the season.
And the very star player of the team who was left was benched in a critical game at a crucial
moment because he refused to do what the coach told him to do.
You see the coach is the head of the team.
The authority for how to play the game is in his hands.
The team members don't have to worry about the game plan.
All they have to worry about is doing what the coach tells them to do.
They don't have to worry about whether they win or lose.
Oh, they care.
But it's the coach's responsibility to plan and to play that game in such a way that the
team wins.
And so it is with the head of the body, Jesus Christ.
He is the one who is ultimately responsible.
What we have to do is to trust and obey.
Martha Snell Nicholson is written a poem that talks about the final accounting that we will
each have.
She pictures herself before the judgment seat on that day as she writes,
When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ, and he shows me his plan for me, the plan
of my life as it might have been had he had his way with me, and I see how I blocked him
here and I checked him there, and I would not yield my will, will there be grief in
my Savior's eyes, grief though he loves me still, he would have me rich, and I stand
there poor, stripped of all but his grace, while memory runs like a hunted thing down
the paths I cannot retrace.
Then my desolate heart will well nigh break with tears that I cannot shed.
I shall cover my face with empty hands, I shall bow my uncrowned head.
Then she prays, Lord of the years that are left to me, I give them to thy hand.
Take me and break me.
Mold me now to the pattern thou hast planned.
Let us pray together.
The Bible gives us an answer, my friend, as to your identity and to your meaning in life
if you are a child of God.
You are a member of the body and your purpose in the world is to be an extension of Jesus
Christ, to be an expression of his love and his kindness and joy.
Your purpose is to be in subjection to his will.
He's the head, he's the authority.
Does that describe where you are living today?
Are you living in subjection to him?
Is he truly the Lord of your life?
Is your life an expression of what Jesus is like to those around you?
Let's talk to the Lord about that.
Let's acknowledge to him where we need to confess.
Look for your seat and tell him about it.
And sing with me these words if they come from your heart.
Otherwise, do not sing them.
Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way.
Thou art the potter, I am the clay.
And make me after thy will.
While I am waiting, yielded and still.
Would you stand together with me, please?
With our heads bowed and before we go, will you determine in your heart by the grace of
God to be a faithful member of the body of Jesus Christ this week and to live in a living,
vital communion with your head, Jesus Christ?
Father, may that be the desire of our hearts.
May it be the fulfillment of our lives.
You are the Lord of the years that are left to us, and I pray that each of us will determine
by your grace to live so that when the time comes that we stand at that judgment seat
as members of the body we can give a good account and know that we have been a faithful
extension of our Lord Jesus Christ in this world.
Now send us out, I pray, on our way this week with the joy that should come to us as we
realize that privilege.
In Jesus' name, amen.
The Lord be with you and bless you.
We're dismissed.