United By The Blood

The beauty of the Church is that it is not homogeneous. It can't be. You and I are now family, no matter where we live, what we have done, what we look like. In the same worship center we will find police officers and ex-criminals, politicians and voters, the wealthy and the poor, the elderly and students. In many churches you will find people who speak all kinds of different languages, different skin colours, different origins. But regardless of our differences we have one thing in common: The grace offered through Jesus.

When we live in the Spirit the Church is a thing of great beauty; when we live by the flesh our differences make it an ugly place. It is vital that we understand that the Church cannot exist according to the flesh. It is not a club, a thing of business, something of this world. The Church is not a thing to be managed by a board of elders. It is a living thing that has life through the Spirit. Without the Spirit there is no life and it is an institution like any other institution of man.

As members of this living Body we are united by the Spirit under the headship of Jesus and this one thing must be remembered:

All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, but all are treated as righteous freely by his grace because of a ransom that was paid by Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:23-24)

That is something else we have in common: We have all been found wanting by Yahweh. We have all fallen short of his standards. None of us can get there because we have all been in rebellion to him; we have all sinned. It doesn't matter about any of our differences, no one is better than anyone else because all sin is in rebellion to Yahweh. However, Jesus changed all that.

Jesus gave us something better to have in common with each other. Jesus paid the price so grace could be applied to all of us and in this grace all of us are treated as righteous, regardless of our past, regardless of our sin. In the Church there is no one better than another, no one great, no one small, no one more privileged than another. There is no male or female. There is no rich and poor. There is no colour. There is only us and our relationship with Jesus. This is the Church, the Body of Christ.

To anyone without Jesus, the Church is a bizarre place, filled with a collage of people. It is not homogeneous in the flesh but it is in what cannot been seen by the eye. In Jesus we are all the same, we are all children of Father and we are all covered by the blood of the Lamb. What was impossible for man was possible for Yahweh. We are family.