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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman Communal
Balance
Communal
imbalance is as old as humanity. God said "Let us make
mankind in our image, in our likeness" (Genesis 1:26).
Inherent in God's essence, His image and likeness, is community.
The word "our" in the text implies that God is a unified
plurality, a community that most view as Father, Son, and Spirit.
Humanity, then, was created to exist as a unified plurality, a community
of individuals functioning together for the benefit of both the
individual and the community. That's
balance. When
humanity left its communal relationship with God, individuals lost
community with each other. Adam and Eve's marital relationship
died. Cain killed his brother Abel. It all led to a
free-for-all individualism that inflicts all aspects and all forms of
life today. It's what
Genesis 3 is all about. Considering
communal church unity, John 17 recalls Jesus praying to His Father that
"they may be one even as we are one", a prayer not yet
answered. To initiate this communal unity God poured Himself into
the disciples' lives (Acts 2:1 - 5) that united each individual with
God, but there is something in Acts 2 that our western-world
individualism continues to miss. Acts
2:1 to 5 records one Holy Spirit that is not confined to our time space
reality or a human-like bodily form being simultaneously poured into 120
individuals. One bodiless Spirit entered 120 individuals that
would in turn have spiritually united those individuals to each other.
There was both a vertical and horizontal union here that birthed the
Community of Christ, the church. Paul
wrote about this two-way communal balance in 1 Corinthians 12:13.
"We were all baptized [immersed] by one Spirit so as to form one
body". If you are a true Christian, the moment God's Spirit
entered you, was the moment you were immersed into both God and those to
whom He placed you alongside in the Community of Christ, the church. Paul
went on to compare the Community of Christ to the community which is a
human body. Each individual body part in a body has its specific
job to do, but not on its own. It is joined to a few other body
parts to function together for the health of the body. Like a
human body, the Body of Christ is to function as a unified community of
individuals for the health of both the individual and the community.
Paul
then specifically wrote that "you are the body of Christ" (1
Corinthians 12:27). The church, then, is the present-day, literal,
physical, human body of Jesus since He is no longer on earth in a human
form. That means the church is much more than our static
organizational structure that resembles a Dow Jones Corporation.
Church is a Spirit-embodied living organism that resembles a human body,
and in fact is Jesus' human body. This is what I believe our
western-world, out-of-balance individualistic Christianity misses today.
In that sense, much of what we call church is out of balance.
Much
more needs to be said about the communal nature of church. You can
read more of my thoughts on this issue in my book entitled "The
Community We Call Church", found on all Amazon sites.
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