Welcome to HBS & DwJ Podcast.
I am Jerry Joyce, your host.

Our Scripture Of The Week Is:

Romans 12:4-5 KJV
[4] For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office:
[5] So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.

Paul is describing how living sacrifices live. He has urged Christians—all who have received God's mercy because of their faith in Christ—to offer their everyday lives to God as an ongoing act of worship.

Previous verses made clear that this will require transformation of our minds and perspective so that we can see and understand what God wants and be used by Him to get it done. Now, though, Paul begins to get into what our specific jobs in this sacrificial lifestyle might be.

It turns out that God's purpose for Christians is that we will spend our lives serving each other in specific ways. His analogy here applies broadly to each local congregation, but it also includes the worldwide church in general.

Paul uses the familiar analogy of a human body, something he develops in more detail in 1 Corinthians 12:12–31.

Bodies are a unified whole, containing one person. But that unified body is made up of many different parts that serve wildly different functions from head to toe.

Paul will show in the following verses that the church, meaning all Christians, is similar in that we are the body of Christ. Paul is describing how Christians who have been shown mercy by God—which means all saved believers—should live now.

What kind of a life makes sense?

The prior verse described a human body. It is just one person, but it has many different parts that serve different functions.

Now Paul says that we, as the collective group of Christians, are also a kind of body. We are Christ's body on earth, often referred to as "the church." We are countless different parts in many different places with vastly different jobs, but together we are, by analogy, one unified "being," a single entity with what should be a united purpose.

Paul writes something else about us as part of the body of Christ. None of us exists outside of the body. No Christian is an unattached Christian. We are all members of each other, connected to each other with the purpose of serving each other.

This is what God intends to do with us on this side of eternity.