Don't Be A Cancer In The Body Of Christ

But for right now, friends, I'm completely frustrated by your unspiritual dealings with each other and with God.  You're active like infants in relation to Christ, capable of nothing much more than nursing at the breast.  Well, then, I'll nurse you since you don't seen capable of anything more.  As long as you grab for what makes you feel good or makes you look important, are you really much different than a babe the breast, content only when everything goes your way? --1 Corinthians 3:1-3, The Message Bible

 My wife and I were having breakfast with friends this morning when I saw a wall hanging similar to the one in the photo above.  She and I both smiled at the words "Jesus and germs are everywhere."  Now we know that we don't mix Christology with biology--the Spirit of God is omnipresent, even in a physical environment that is sterilized and sanitized.  On a spiritual level, this is part of the mystery of how and why God chose to dwell among people.  "There is none righteous, no not one." (Romans 3:10).  Yet we are called to put on His righteousness, and to put away sin.

Once in awhile I get very discouraged because of my own sin nature.  I feel useless in God's kingdom.  As a result of my dwelling on myself in this way, I become useless to God's kingdom.  My focus is lost--I focus not on Him and His will for my life, but on me and my own shortcomings.  The enemy uses every opportunity to make us ineffective, and for me, it is by focusing on my own sin.

The Bible talks a lot about all Christians being the Body of Christ.  The Message Bible puts it this way:

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body.  Your body has many parts--limbs, organs, cells--but no matter how many parts you can name, you're still one body.  It's exactly the same with Christ.  By means of His one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives.  We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which He has the final say in everything.  --1 Corinthians 12:12-13.

When there is unity in the Body of Christ, there is revival.  God works through His people in amazing ways.  Jesus alluded to this when He spoke to one of His disciples, one who would be tasked with starting the Church after Jesus' Resurrection and Ascension.  The disciple was named Simon, and he was a hard-headed fisherman.  Jesus gave him the nickname Petros, which means "Rocky" or "Pebble".  We get the name Peter from this Greek word for "little rock".  Anyway, Jesus said in Matthew 16:18, "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."   The point I am making here is the description of the Church--when it is firing on all cylinders, it is unstoppable.

That's why Satan tries to work on a very elemental level.  If he can make individual people lose focus by falling into sin, or fear, or failure, then he can make the entire Body less effective.  Many times people outside the Church will not accept an invitation to come in and hear the Word of God, using the excuse, "The Church is so full of hypocrites."  And so we are.  Paul was speaking to the Church in Galatia when he said this:

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or ever be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community.  I could go on.  --Galatians 5:19-21, The Message Bible

Like a cancer, Satan attacks each cell of the Body.  In response, the cells become black and ugly.  Some cancers are benign--they make the cells ineffective, but are not harmful to other cells.  This is like our having secret sins, but then going to church and smiling like nothing is going on.  We are not producing as we ought; making disciples is the last thing on our minds when we are caught up in our own little world.  We think we have our sin contained, but instead, the sin contains us.  Other forms of cancer are more malignant.  The very word "malignant" comes from the same root word as "mean".  When we malign others, we are talking badly about them.  Many churches are full of spiteful, malicious, malevalent, evil-intentioned people. We are vindictive, vengeful and cruel.  We are mean, nasty and hurtful.  How can we then say, "Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world"?

And yet, it is true.  He is greater.  Because of his great grace and mercy, we are not cut off from His people.  Many people speak of Jesus as "the Great Physician".  Like a skilled surgeon, He is able to extract malignancy from His Body.  Part of the mystery is that He can remove sin without removing the sinner.  Yes, I know that sometimes it is better for some people to just leave a church rather than to continue gossipping or complaining or butting heads with the Pastor and staff. That's not what I am talking about.  If we are all parts of the Body, yet we are all sinners, God can remove the sin without removing us from His salvation.  We are still His.  We just need a cleansing, and we need it daily.

Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along.  If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter.  He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans.  He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God.  That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.

God knew what He was doing from the very beginning.  He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love Him along the same lines as the life of His Son.  The Son stands first in the line of humanity He restored.  We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in Him.  After God made that decision of what His children should be like, He followed it up by calling people by name.  After He called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with Himself.  And then, after getting them established, He stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what He had begun.   --Romans 8:26-30, The Message Bible

Don't be discouraged, friends.  Love God.  Allow Him to love you, to hear the Spirit translate your heavy sighs into prayers to the Father, and to make you more like Jesus.  Don't stay in the pigpen of sin; let Him clean you up and use you.  He can miraculously take broken vessels like us and patch us together into a body that accomplishes His purpose.  We are not called to be benign bearers of His name.  Let us not malevolently malign men made just like us.  Instead, let us humbly look to Him, the founder and perfecter of our faith.