One Body, Many Parts

My sermon notes for Youth Sunday without cited references (shout out to Rev. Alan McGrath!)


One Body, Many Parts

*To be the body requires many parts.

*It’s obvious that the church wouldn’t function very well if everyone was up here preaching or sitting in the choir. We couldn’t all fit in the back to run the sound and video for the sermon. We couldn’t all teach Sunday School or anything for that matter. And we aren’t supposed to do everything. But we’re all supposed to do something.
*On CTCYM, the mission trip our youth go on every summer, we’re paired up with a few other churches for the week. We stay in the same church, eat together, worship together, work together, basically everything. We’re usually paired up with a church from the Metroplex. Now, until I started going on mission trip I didn’t realize that the city and country mouse story actually applied in real life.
*On mission trip we’ve got the city punks and the country bumpkins. But I don’t think we could get along without both. The kids in the city are really good at navigating. They actually pay attention to things like street numbers and addresses instead of referring to things like “the big tree.” And some of us in Glen Rose know everything about every tool, and know how to do that physical labor. Still, some of us, like me are good at neither. I can hardly hammer a nail into a board. But I’d like to say we need those people to keep the moral up.
*You see, we all have something inside of us that God has worked out for us to do. Something that makes us different. Something He put there that urges us, saying “I can do it better” when we see another doing it. When we feel those urges we have found the essence of our spiritual gifts.
*A spiritual gift is not just something that we’re really good at, it’s when we use that gift to glorify God. You can be the best worker in your office or the best basketball player on the team, but that doesn’t qualify as using your spiritual gifts. It’s when we use it to glorify God that it becomes a spiritual gift.
*If you ask a someone in ministry, they can usually tell you about their call, how they came to decide that they would work for Christ. We take that as a strong word, “called.” But the truth is that we’re all called to not only spread the Good News but to make disciples. Romans 11:29 says “For the gifts and the callings of God are irrevocable.”
*Listen to what the Spirit is telling you.

*Because in the church we have to use our spiritual gifts to work together to become the body.

*First we have to unify between ourselves and the Holy Spirit inside of us. One of the greatest things is that we have the Holy Spirit inside of us. When Jesus rose again and God sent the Spirit down it was a great thing. The very being of God to be with us always, the very essence of God in us!
John 14:12-13 says “12I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. 13And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.”

* Do even greater things? That’s hard to comprehend. But He’s walking along side us and driving with us in the car. We’re in the presence of the Spirit all the time! But how many times do we complain that there’s nothing to do, or that we’re bored? How many times are we content with complacency when God is right there with us saying, “Go, DO!”

*The next part is unifying with others, which can be hard because we’re all so different. We worship different ways and find God is many different places.

*Watch this (The Skinny on Worship youtube video. You can stop reading this now and look it up.)

*When we get past all the details that don’t really matter, we realize that our intentions are the same. We can get really hung up on our differences, not just between different churches but people. In that video, they all had a different way of worshipping. God has given each of us the spiritual gifts so we do worship differently. *But because God has worked it so perfectly that we don’t have to look past our differences in order to work together, we get to use our differences so that the Body may thrive!

*And then we have to spread it to others.
*Once we learn to function not only as individual members, but a body, we have to learn how to move.
*Yesterday, we had our Lord’s Acre, which in itself is a great illustration of how the body works. One of the things I’ve always liked to do is to listen to Mr. Anderson when he’s running the auction. There’s something about listening to all that talk and watching the items being auctioned off to people. But I never go home with any of the prizes because I never bid.
*The same is with the church. We can sit here all day and feel good about salvation, but we’re going to get a lot more out of it when we begin to “Go, and DO” like we are supposed to.

*Finally, we must grow as the body of Christ, and we do that by taking risks.
* I work at GLC in the summer, and sometimes I get to help out with the zipline. There are two counselors that sit at the top and help strap in the campers and send them down. Whoever is up there has a harness that attached them to another rope so that they don’t fall off the platform. There is one counselor who is a real dare devil. He’ll take off his shoes and go to the edge of the platform and lean off the side. The only thing keeping him from falling is the rope.
*When we put ourselves in a position to where the only thing keeping us from falling is God, we’re doing that risk-taking mission that we talk about. And that is when we grow the most as an individual and a body.
*This week, I invite you to take a risk to extend the body of Christ!