Christ Methodist Church Memphis
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Christ Methodist Church Memphis
God's Design for the Function of His Body | Nathan Cook
In this message from 1 Corinthians 12:12–31, Missions Pastor Nathan Cook explores what it means to live as one body with many members—each uniquely gifted and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Through personal stories and biblical insight, he calls the church to unity under Christ’s headship, urging believers to discover their God-given gifts and align them with the shared mission of making disciples.
[0:20] Today we pick back up on our study through 1 Corinthians, so if you will please turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 12.
[0:29] We will be reading verses 12 through 31. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one spirit we were all baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, and all were made to drink of one spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body, that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.
[1:47] And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healing, helping, administrating, and various kinds of tongues. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers?
[2:40] Do all work miracles? Do all possess the gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues? Do all interpret? but earnestly desire the higher gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way.
[2:53] This is the Word of God for the people of God. Good morning, church. My name is Nathan Cook. I'm the missions pastor here at Christ Methodist. Paul is not with us today. He's in Spain with the Connectional Council with the Global Methodist Church representing us there. He is planning to be back in the pulpit next week. If you would now just join me in just a brief word of prayer.
[3:25] Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning as we look to your word and just remembering the song that was sung for us, Lord, of how you do meet us in our time of need, Lord, and that you are here for us, Lord, and that you meet us in our weakness. And Lord, that you have empowered your church with gifts to minister to one another and to minister to the world in your name. And Lord, this morning, we pray that you would help us to identify the gifts that you've given us, to align with the purpose that you've given us so that we may be instruments of your grace to one another and in the world. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.
[4:11] So today we're continuing to look at Paul's letter to the Corinthians. And as we've been working through this letter together, we know that the Corinthians are struggling with several things. And so one of them is pridefulness, which is kind of at the root of what Paul is addressing in this section on spiritual gifts, that some of them are speaking in supernatural tongues and they've kind of elevated that gift above others and that Paul is bringing correction to them. He's saying he's affirming them that, yes, speaking and interpretation of tongues is a gift that the Spirit gives to the church, but it's not the only gift. There are many gifts in the body. Another one of the things that the Corinthians have kind of honed in on is this idea of wisdom. And God, again, Paul's telling them that, yes, wisdom is a very important gift. And again, it is the Spirit of God who gives wisdom to people for the purpose of building up the body of Christ, not just building up the individual in a prideful kind of way. But all of these gifts that are given are given for the building up of the church.
[5:31] And so in this particular text that we just read, Paul emphasizes a couple of things. And the first is unity, that there is one body and it is the Holy Spirit that brings unity to the church, that we have been baptized into the same spirit. The spirit is what holds us together. When Jesus is giving his farewell discourse in the Gospel of John in chapter 16, he tells the disciples, he tells them, it's better for me to go on to heaven to be with my heavenly father so that I can send you the Holy Spirit who will empower you and equip you to do God's mission. And it's here in this text that we start to see a part of how that is played out of the Holy Spirit distributing gifts to the body to help one another.
[6:24] When Jesus gives the mission to the church in Acts chapter 1, 8, telling them that they will be his disciples and that they are to disciple others and that they are to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the very ends of the earth. He gives them that mission, and then he tells them, before you engage in the mission, first you are to wait. What are they supposed to wait on? They're supposed to wait to receive the Holy Spirit. And so at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes and fills them with power, fills them with boldness to preach the gospel, fills them with his presence so that when they come together in worship, when they come together in prayer, they're experiencing the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
[7:07] The Holy Spirit is the one who unites us to one another. And so as we seek God in worship, as we pray together, as we worship his name, as our praise goes up, his spirit comes down and fills us. And as he's filling us with his presence, his peace, his joy, his love, it unites us together as one, as his one body.
[7:32] There's one body. There is one church. There is one faith. There is one baptism that sometimes we divide ourselves into denominations because of different theological differences. But there is only one church here on the face of the earth. There is one head, Jesus Christ. There is one faith, one baptism, one church, and that we belong to one another. Paul is emphasizing the unity of the church. The other thing that he emphasizes is the diversity of the church. And so that all of us have different gifts that God has given us to encourage one another, to support one another, to teach one another.
[8:14] We're all different. And that's by God's design. He intends for us to use our differences cooperatively together to help one another. There's a parallel passage in Colossians 1, verse 18, that also talks about the body of Christ. And in that passage, Paul says, and he, meaning Jesus, is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, in that everything he might be preeminent. You see, the problem in the church comes when members of the church view their gifts pridefully in their role in the body as self-directed rather than directed by Christ.
[9:07] Jesus is the head of the church, meaning he is our authority. And just like the brain kind of controls the nervous system and tells the different parts of the body what to do, that's the same way with Jesus Christ. That Jesus is the one who directs the body. He directs us in his mission. He directs us in how we're to care for one another. He directs us in how we are to engage the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is our head. Um several several weeks ago i came uh and i do this occasionally i came and i sat right here in the front row um and was looking up here at the altar and i was having a time of prayer the lights were out and it was kind of dark in the room and as i was praying i saw myself laying down on the altar with my face kind of facing the wall back here just kind of curled up on my side, And it was this picture. I felt like what God was doing is he's giving me a picture of saying, Nathan, I want you to offer yourself to me as an offering.
[10:13] And I think that that's what he's asking of each and every one of us is to submit to Jesus as our Lord and Savior and to offer our lives as an offering to him. And that when all of us do that corporately together, we see change and transformation, not only in our own lives, but in the world.
[10:37] Jesus is calling us to surrender ourselves. And when we act independently, the result is that there's dissonance. Competition begins to replace the cooperation, and our mission begins to falter. But when we come together under the headship of Jesus Christ, we can see incredible synergy.
[10:59] And so this is Paul's logic as he's kind of going through this story that he's sharing. He says that first, right, it begins in unity of being baptized into one spirit. And then it is necessary that there is a diversity of gifts in order for us to accomplish God's mission. And then finally, he talks about how that there is a need to recognize and to honor every gift, every person within the body, no matter how great or how small. He shows us how to care for one another by honoring one another. And he'll continue this argument on into 1 Corinthians chapter 13, which is this incredible story, this powerful story of how we are to love one another and how we are to use our gifts in love. And we're going to talk more about that next week. But these gifts find their power through both the spirit and as we love one another.
[11:56] But when we come into alignment under the headship of Jesus Christ, powerful things begin to happen. I want to give you a testimony of how that's happened in my life. Many of you know that I grew up in this church, and I served in this church after coming back from Asbury, and then I was sent out from this church to start house churches in Binghampton.
[12:22] And originally, when Kim and I first moved into Binghampton, we began to connect with other people who were serving through different ministries, through Christ Community Health Services, Icon Ministry, SOS. And we began to kind of meet together to see how is it that we collectively could minister to the neighborhood together. And we would meet on Sunday nights. And all of those different leaders went to different churches. Some went to First of Ann, some went to Second Press, some went to this church, some went to other churches, and we all really loved and adored the churches that we were a part of. So we would gather on Sunday evenings for community and for this sense of shared mission of ministering to the neighborhood together, and there was great strength in that. But as we were praying together and gathering together, we began to think and to wonder What might it look like if we not only gather together for community and for mission, but also for worship? What would it look like if we shared the Lord's Supper together? What would it look like if we prayed together, if we worshiped God together? You see, what was missing from those community meetings was the power that comes from worshiping God together.
[13:40] And so we made a change. We decided that we were going to become a church together and that instead of meeting on Sunday evenings, we would meet on Sunday mornings, and that we would gather together as the church for worship, community, and mission.
[13:57] The second thing that created alignment for us is that we settled on having a unified mission, that we prayed together and we prayed and asked God,
[14:06] God, what do you want us to do now as your church? And God clarified his mission. He said to glorify God by caring for the poor and planting churches among unreached people groups. Once we had a unified worship and once we had a unified mission, we began to see how the gifts, the diversity of gifts that God had given us, whether gifts in hospitality or encouragement or teaching or evangelism, those gifts began to come together. And we saw alignment that brought forth incredible fruit. And so I have a slide I want to show you of um.
[14:50] What happened, we had 150 people who were members of our church. One out of every three of us became missionaries. And so all of those spots on that map are places where we sent missionaries. So some of those dots represent one family. Some of them represent three or four families. So that over the course of those 20 years, we sent out 50 families, 50 units to serve as missionaries, mostly, not exclusively, but mostly among unreached people groups and people groups that were experiencing extreme poverty. That didn't happen because we had extraordinary gifts. That didn't happen because we were a group of ministers who had been trained by the greatest theological stools. It came from us, like I said, laying ourselves on the altar of Jesus Christ and surrendering ourselves to his mission, to what we were discerning that he wanted. As we searched the scriptures together, as we prayed together, and as we surrendered ourselves not to our will, but to God's will, he blessed and multiplied the ministry and scattered us over the face of the earth.
[16:11] To do his will together. And I firmly believe it's not going to look like that. It'll look different, but I firmly believe God wants to do a similar thing here with us. And that our church council is, again, labored for a year working on a common
[16:32] mission and vision and values for our church. And now as we're in this season of stewardship and kind of looking at like, God, how have you gifted me? What are the resources that you have entrusted to me that we can come together under this shared vision of glorifying God and making disciples of Jesus Christ among all people? That's the mission that God has given us, that our church council has prayed and discerned that that's what we're to do together. So that's our mission. And so now we're in this place of like, how are we going to come together and align together as one body under that mission to do it together? And as we do that, as we bring alignment, we're going to begin to see incredible fruitfulness here through this church.
[17:20] So again, for our house churches, we had to do two things, come together under a shared mission, and we had to sacrifice our preferences for where we are going to church in order to worship together. Within this church, we need to look at what are our preferences? What are ways in which we are asserting our preferences over the shared mission and vision of what God has given to us? And so sometimes it means looking at, we have preferences, some people have preference for a traditional worship service and for liturgy. Some of us have a preference for a contemporary service. Some of us have a preference for Paul preaching shorter sermons. Some of us have a preference for the worship style, the music style that we have. Some of us, we all have different preferences.
[18:15] And those are not unimportant things, but we need to submit those preferences to Jesus. And whenever we come to worship, that we should come with a heart of seeking God together. If liturgy is not your thing, still, when we do the liturgy, seek God in it. Seek God in the worship song. Seek God when an offering plate, even though you may be giving online and you never put a dollar into the offering plate when it's passed around, when that plate is passed, still think about, use it as a time to reflect, God, what am I offering to you? How am I offering my life to you? What are the resources that you've entrusted to me to offer to you and to this church to see that your mission is accomplished?
[19:05] And so we have these shape cards. I don't know if you have them. Do you guys have them? Did you get one coming in today? A couple of you hold them up if you got some. I see one back there. I see some. Okay. You don't have to necessarily have the card, but like we do want you to work through this idea of shape. And so I'm going to talk through it here in a minute. But in each part, the S represents spiritual gifts, or what are the gifts that God has supernaturally given to us to equip us to do the work of ministry? H represents heart of ministry, or what am I particularly passionate about? A represents abilities. What can I do well? P represents personality. How has God wired me to relate to other people? And then E is experiences. What life events, either good or bad, some things hard has God used to shape me in the mission that he wants me to join him in?
[20:11] And so if we look at Ephesians 2, verse 10, it tells us this, it says, for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
[20:29] All of us have been created by God in unique ways, given unique gifts and abilities and talents to do his will. He's prepared for us already good works for us to do. And he has created us and made us in such a way and empowered us by his spirit to do those things. And so I just want to walk through over the next couple of minutes. I want to walk through my own shape card and tell you how God has used these things in my life to bring forth his kingdom.
[21:10] To tell you a little bit as a testimony of just the good works that God has prepared for me to do and how he's used unique talents and gifts that he's put in me to do that work. So for me, if we want to put up the shape card here, this is mine. And I'm sorry, my handwriting is horrible.
[21:30] But just to let you know, this did take me just about five minutes to do scribbling on the space. So this doesn't have to be a long process. We are next semester, next spring, just so that you know, on Wednesday nights, we are going to walk through this over a 10-week period and go into detail in each of these areas and to talk about how God has shaped us or made us to do good works together. So you'll have an opportunity to work through this in more detail. Um, miles, uh, our communications director has put on our website, a spiritual gifts assessment that you can use, uh, to kind of help identify what are the gifts that you've given an even better way to do that is within your small groups, just to ask one another, what are the gifts that you see God has put in it in me? Ask your wife, your husband, your children, um, those that, that the spiritual gifts are supposed to be identified through community. Okay. But for me, so... Apostolic leadership, this is very different than the apostles that you see in the New Testament. That's not what this is talking about, but the word apostle means to send.
[22:39] Okay, those who are sent out. And so what you see is that those early apostles were sent out from the church to start new churches. And so oftentimes we talk about church planters as kind of being modern apostolic leaders or people who begin new ministries, start new work in the kingdom of God. And so God has given me the opportunity to do that on a number of occasions, one through starting these house churches and sending out missionaries all over the world to start other new house churches.
[23:13] Prophecy means speaking a direct word of correction to the church that we need to hear. Teaching, again, is teaching to understand God's kingdom and to understand our place in it. And so all of these, for me, are related just around the Word of God and teaching the Word of God. And so that's really my strongest gift, is in teaching. And all these other things find expression, usually through teaching.
[23:43] I have almost no administrative ability. I really struggle with encouraging other people. God has gifted me with a wife who does both of those things extraordinarily well. And so together, we are really a great team of living out our gifts together. For heart for ministry, you've already heard it. Planting churches, especially among unreached people groups, I really have a heart and desire to see those who do not have a church among them.
[24:20] To have a church started. And so, again, in those house churches, when we were praying about how are we going to engage in God's mission together, we decided to work among the IMOC people in Afghanistan. The IMOC people, at the time, there was no known church, no known missionaries working among them. And we partnered with a missionary who had relationships there in Afghanistan, And it took us, as a church, it took us two years even to find the IMOC people in Afghanistan, to find where they were concentrated in living in order to minister among them. And I have a heart for that. Finding those that have no representation of the church among them and thinking and praying and working towards how are we going to reach them.
[25:14] The second one is poverty alleviation. And so, again, I'm going to get to this in a minute, but I really that heart for ministry grew through this church and through the ministries of SOS and the Binghampton Development Corporation. And so still, once a week, every Wednesday, come with me, 8.30 till about 10 o'clock, I go down to the BDC and help men and women who are trying to get back into the workforce. And we do some encouragement and equipping with them to help them to alleviate the situations that they're in. And then the last one is helping people to find their calling. And so I had the opportunity to work at Christ Community Health Services for many years, working with medical students, discipling them, training them, helping them to identify what was God calling them to do in their life. Again, that looked mostly like teaching the Word of God with them, taking them back into the clinics and teaching them how to engage in spiritual conversations with their patients, teaching them how to share the gospel, teaching them, showing them areas in the United States and throughout the world where there was a need for health care ministries and where they might serve, helping them to plan and discern what God was doing, praying with them, helping them to hear God's voice as they were directing them.
[26:39] What abilities do I have? This one actually, when I sat down, I like scribbled through most of these really quickly. I had to sit there and to really think like, God, what are my strengths? What are the abilities that you've given me? And so this is just kind of what came to mind. One of them is teaching. Again, so like that's a spiritual gift, but it's also ability like research and teaching. I feel like if you want to know really anything, I can figure it out and teach you how to do it. Now, there is some pridefulness in that because it's not actually true. But I do think that I can do that as to research and figure out key ideas and be able to communicate it in such a way that you understand. Like that's I think that that's a strength that God's given me. Another strength is just casting a big vision, helping people to see a big picture that we can all walk in together. And then another one in this one drives my wife crazy, by the way, is ideation. One idea after another. If you don't know what to do, come and talk to me. I can help you figure it out. I've got a thousand ideas that can help you figure out what you might want to do. It keeps me up at night starting businesses, business ideas, church ideas, anything.
[27:51] My very worst was making shoes out of tires. That was a disaster. But like we had all these tires all over the city of Memphis. I was like, I had a friend who is in Kenya and he said, you know, they make flip flops out of used tires all the time. I was like, yes, let's do it. So I went in my backyard and started making all these shoes out of tires. And what I didn't realize is that we have steel belted radial tires and that when you try to cut through those things, you're cutting through steel. They don't have those in Kenya, apparently.
[28:23] And so when I was walking around on those shoes, I was constantly cutting my feet with the wires that were in the shoes. So some of my ideas are good. Some of them are terrible. But I can come up with lots and lots of ideas. Personality. There are lots of personality tests that you can take online that can help. So Myers-Briggs is one that I've used a lot. That's the INTJ, Introvert Intuition Thinking and Judgment. I'm not going to go into all that, what that means, but it means, I mean, when you put those kind of letters together, it just shows that one of the things that I really like to do is build systems. I think about systems and building systems and kind of an architect of systems. The introvert, extrovert part's really important. That's important in our relationship. Again, Kim and I, Kim is an extreme introvert. I'm an, is an extrovert. I'm an introvert. And so like, we have to like recognize those things about how we're wired in one another. Those are, I get rejuvenated, um, either in a small group with people I'm really know, or I'm close to, or sometimes just spending time alone, thinking, meditating. I just, I need quiet space. Sometimes Kim gets really energized in being with a big group of people and socializing with folks. And so one of the things that like I've had to learn is like.
[29:42] Again, submit myself to help her meet her needs and the need to be around a lot of, even like if it gives me anxiety, that I need to endure that anxiety for a period so that we can do some things together to be around big groups of people for her. And so like understanding that about one another of where we get our energy, where we get our strength from helps us as we're coming together to do God's work together. I'm not going to go through all that, but there's another Enneagram. I'm an Enneagram 5, which means that I like to do research. I like to learn, and I like to kind of share those learnings with others.
[30:20] The Enneagram one, again, can be done online. It's nice because it also kind of shows us our weaknesses, not only our strengths, but things that we need to be careful of. So then experiences. What are experiences that you've had in your life that helped shape the direction of ministry that's going to come? So for me, three big ones were working at SOS, which is where I really encountered poverty for the first time, even though growing up and living in Memphis, that's what God used to help me enter into the suffering of other people through that experience. And then again, when I was a senior in high school, our youth group, this youth group took a trip to the Dominican Republic where we lived incarnationally among in this little barrio in the Dominican Republic for a week. And that kind of exposed me to this idea of living among the poor, which God used later in my life to call me to move into Binghampton and to live my life there. But it was through that experience in the Dominican Republic that God first opened my eyes to that.
[31:25] And then that word is that last word is not community. I did not misspell it. It's communality. And that was the first church plant that I was a part of when I was in seminary at Asbury, that there were several again, and you'll start to see how these
[31:41] things are coming together. Several of us decided to move into downtown Lexington, into a part of downtown that was right between kind of the homeless community and the UK campus. And we were basically starting a church with the homeless. And so one of my friends, Billy McKinney, who I lived with in that house, had relationships with a lot of homeless men downtown, and he would occasionally invite one of them to come and live with us for several weeks at a time. And we shared our life with the homeless community. And so again, you see how like that picture of communality is bringing these, this is where my heart for ministry developed. I don't know that I had a heart for the poor or for church planting before that experience, but God used that experience to grow my heart for ministry. And then you can kind of see sort of like how all those things have kind of come together in the stories that I've shared with you about church planting, caring for the poor.
[32:46] Living in community together, that those are things that have helped to shape the direction of my life and what God wants to do with me. And so I'm sharing that with you, not so that you understand Nathan better, right? Just as an example of how we can take this SHAPE acronym, and it can help us to discern.
[33:06] What God wants to do with us. And so there's another, I think that there's a diagram that I skipped. Can you guys go back and do the picture of this concentric circles? So God's mission for this church and for I think every church is represented up here. Meaning our first step, the way in which we enter into God's mission in the world is to begin by recognizing that Jesus is Lord. And surrendering to Jesus as Lord. Keep this slide up for just a second, guys. But I just got back from Tampa, Florida. Last week I went to Tampa and went to visit this group called Tampa Underground, which is a church there. And over the last 15 years, they have started 1,000 what they call microchurches in 15 years.
[34:01] There are currently about 150 of those thousand that are still kind of under their umbrella that they help to administrate. And I asked them, I was like, guys, this is crazy. Like, how did you do all this? And they're like, look, we really do one thing well, and that's simply to help people to identify their calling. What is it? How are they made? They have something very similar to shape that they take people through over the course of a day. How has God made you? How has he fashioned you? What has he called you to do? They spend time listening to the Holy Spirit, teaching people how to hear directly from God, and then helping them to step out in faith to do what it is that God has called them. But they said that every one of those missionaries, what they call them, they believe that every person in the church is a missionary, and every person in the church has a calling from God, and every person in the church can hear and identify that calling.
[35:01] And every missionary journey begins at the place of recognizing that Jesus is Lord and coming to a place of surrender and saying, God, it's not my will, but your will be done. So first, recognizing Jesus is Lord. Second, what are the needs of the world around me? And then thirdly, what are the gifts and talents? What is the shape that you have given to each and every one of us in this church.
[35:28] And where those two things intersect, the gifts of the church and the needs of the world, where they intersect, that's our mission.
[35:35] That's what God has called us to. And so I want to encourage you in this first step to take time this afternoon, take time this week to fill out your shape card. And then on the back of that card, and again, if you don't have a card, you can look at our website. But there are all kinds of ministries. Look at first who you are, who has God created you to be, and then look at the ministries that the church is engaged in, both internally within the church. And externally in the city of the Memphis in the world and see where is it that those two places align. And then I want to encourage you to step out and to take a risk and to engage in that mission or in that ministry. It may be, it probably is the fact that God may be calling you to do something that we're not currently doing.
[36:29] And if that's the case, I want you to call me. I want you at nathanc at christchurchmemphis.org. I want to walk through you with that because I think that that's true. I think that there are a lot of things that we're doing now that we need to continue to do. But there are some things that God's calling us to do that we've never done before. And God's calling you to do it. Not me. He's calling you, but he's calling me to help you. He's calling our church staff to help you figure that out and to step into it, to help you to build a team around you to do it. And we want to do that. We want to listen and let God be God. Let Jesus be the head of the church. Let him direct our path. And for us to engage in ministry together to see God's kingdom come. As we have alignment between his will and our gifts, we're going to see great fruitfulness. So let me close just by praying for us together as a church family.
[37:27] Heavenly Father, Lord, we give you thanks.
[37:34] We give you thanks that we can completely trust in your word. And that your word tells us that we are your masterpiece. We are your handiwork. We are the poem that you've written. We are the master painting that you've painted. Lord, that you take great pride in who you have created us to be. And Lord, you want us to use your design to surrender ourself to you and to engage in the mission of Christ that you've given to us. And so, Lord, we pray that you would give us bold faith. Give us bold faith to step into what you are calling us to be as a church, as one body. Lord, and I pray if there are differences among us, if there's brokenness in us, if there are broken relationships, Lord, that you would help us to mend those. And Lord, I pray that you would raise up shepherds among us and people with gifts of healing and mercy, Lord, to meet the needs within this congregation, to bring healing where there's healing, where healing is needed.
[38:54] Lord, help us to be united in our love for you and in our love for one another. We ask all these things in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.