Today’s Devotional: Tending to the Body’s Hurts
Do you find it easy or hard to care for those who are hurting in the Church?
One of the more intriguing and challenging aspects of Christianity to me is the command to sacrificially care for one another. Jesus taught us that humble service was man’s greatest calling, and that to be considered “first” we must do our best to be “last.”
This devotional from Today in the Word reminds us that in the body of Christ we must look for those who are hurting and meet their needs, especially when it comes to helping the weakest of our members:
As the church of God, we must compassionately identify with those among us who hurt. Moreover, when members of our body are honored, we celebrate together. This isnt mere sympathy or polite applause. With the kind of a radical unity in the body of Christ that Paul has been urging, we actually feel for one another. As followers of Jesus, we become like Him and take on each others pain and celebration in an incarnational way. In Christ, our stories and our lives really matter to others.
We can see what Paul is doing as he answers the questions the Corinthians have posed to him on the subject of spiritual gifts. Hes using his answer as an occasion to retrace some of his themes of the letter. We must remember that the fundamental problem the Corinthian church faced was its disunity. The disunity has expressed itself in multiple ways: believers had taken one another to court, the community had divided over the issue of whether one can eat meat sacrificed to idols, factions developed between sexual immorality and sexual asceticism, and the Lords Supper had become another occasion of the rich shaming the poor. Spiritual gifts were another arena where the Corinthians had despised one another.
Paul teaches that every member of the body is indispensable. We cannot do without what might seem to be the weakest of our members. As infinitely complex and beautiful as the human body, the diversity of the church is there by Gods creative design.
Read the entire devotional at todayintheword.com.
Have you witnessed an example of one member of the body of Christ caring for another recently? What are some practical steps you can take to care for those who are hurting?
