For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (12:3–5)
After World War II, a group of German students volunteered to help rebuild an English cathedral that had been severely damaged by German bombs. As work progressed, they became concerned about a large statue of Jesus, whose arms were outstretched and beneath which was the inscription: “Come unto Me.” They had particular difficulty trying to restore the hands, which had been completely destroyed. After much discussion, they decided to let the hands remain missing and changed the inscription to: “Christ has no hands but ours.”
It is the basic truth of that phrase that Paul emphasizes in Romans 12. The work of Jesus Christ in the world is in the hands of those who belong to Him. In that sense, He has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet. The Lord commissioned His earthly ministry to His fol- lowers, saying, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). His present ministers to the world in His name are those described in the previous eleven chapters of Romans, who had been freed from the bondage of sin and become children of God and bondservants of Jesus Christ. On the human side, it is upon their faithfulness, obedience, and usefulness that the work of His kingdom now depends.
As we have seen, the first obligation of the bondservant of Christ is the supreme worship expressed in offering himself to his Lord as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1). That is God’s fundamental requirement for every believer. Only as a living sacrifice can we be what He wants us to be, do what He wants us to do, and thereby “prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect” (12:2). That act of spiritual worship marks the Christian’s entrance into divine usefulness. God’s order of obedience for His people has always been worship and then service.
But our present passage (Rom. 12:3–8) adds the marvelous truth that, although Christ sends forth His servants with a common commission to serve Him, He equips them for that responsibility with greatly diverse gifts. His divine plan for believers is unity in message and commitment but diversity in service. The primary purpose of these verses is to make clear that, although we must enter the place of usefulness for Christ with the same total self-sacrifice, we are equipped to fulfill that usefulness in uniquely distinct ways.
The purpose of offering ourselves to God as living sacrifices is not mystical or monastic but eminently practical. Devotion to the Lord and active, faithful ministry for Him are inseparable. We cannot be truly sacrificed to Him and be inactive in His work. And, on the other hand, we cannot be truly successful in His work without being genuinely devoted to Him. Service to God brings honor to Him and blessing for us only when it is the outflow of our worship in offering ourselves as living sacrifices. Such commitment naturally and inevitably produces effective ministry. There is no godly commitment without God-blessed ministry, and no God-blessed ministry without godly commitment.
This passage utterly destroys the notion that a Christian can be committed to Christ but be inactive in His service, that he can love the Lord but not obey the Lord, that he can be surrendered to the Lord but not minister for the Lord. True worship cannot be divorced from service.
Unfortunately, the church has always had members who piously claim closeness and devotion to the Lord but whose lives exhibit no service for Him. It also has always had those who are busily active in the work of the church but who exhibit little personal depth of devotion to the Lord of the church. Both are a shame to the Lord and are a hin- drance to His work, because they thwart the spiritual maturity of the saved and the evangelism of the lost.
I received a letter from a man who expressed concern about what is surely a common problem. He wrote, “Please meet with me and pray with me. I’ve driven my wife away because I taught her by example how to be a Sunday saint and to live any way you want during the week. I’ve lived outwardly as a Christian and been active in the church, but the rest of the time I’ve lived a lie. When our relationship started to fall apart, I tried to get us into Bible reading and prayer, but she thought that was just another one of my facades and wanted nothing of it.” Such situations are a familiar feature in the church today.
It is true, of course, that God can work even through unfaithful and disobedient believers. He may use the preaching and witness of a hypocrite to bring sinners to Himself. But in such cases it is the truth of the message that He blesses, not the hypocritical effort of the one who gives it. Hypocrites, although they cannot limit the power of the truth which transcends duplicity, accrue no blessing from God for what He may do through them, because their true motive is to serve their own ends and glory, not His. If we perform on the outside but are not devoted on the inside, our service is limited and our reward is forfeited. More importantly, the name of God is not honored and His work is limited and made less effective with a dirty vessel than with a clean one (cf. 2 Tim. 2:20–22).
But the unity of believers is not limited to their common commitment. Although our gifts are diverse, our obligation to use them in the Lord’s service is not. The person with one seemingly insignificant gift is as much obligated to use that gift faithfully and fully as the one who has several prominent and seemingly more important gifts. Just as no believer is exempt from being a living sacrifice, no believer is exempt from using his divine giftedness, whatever it is. In this chapter Paul makes clear that he is admonishing “every man” (v. 3), that is, every believer. He also makes clear that, although we do not have the “same function” (v. 4) and although our gifts “differ according to the grace given to us” (v. 6a), we all have a function in Christ’s church and we all have gifts from His Holy Spirit and the obligation to “exercise them” (v. 6b) in His behalf and in His power.
Total surrender to the Lord is also foundational to Christian service in another way. Without genuine, selfless commitment to Him, we not only will lose the desire and forfeit the power needed to serve Him effectively but also will never experience what God has intended for us to do when our gifts and calling are used to the fullest. God does not give His children gifts without letting them know what those gifts are. Therefore, if we are not sure of our gifts from God, it is most likely because we are not close to God. We come to know our gifts more fully as, through worship in spiritual truth, we come to know Him more fully. When our lives are on the altar of sacrifice, we will have no problem discovering or using our spiritual gifts. They cannot be recognized except as we use them. When a believer walks in holy obedience to the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit and serving God, it will become apparent to him and to others what his gift is and how it blesses the body of Christ.
It is estimated that even the brightest people use only about eleven percent of their brain capacity—leaving nearly ninety percent unused. A similar ratio probably applies to most Christians’ use of their spiritual gifts. When a believer has trouble understanding how the gifts mentioned in Romans 12:6–8 apply to him personally, it is not because he cannot figure out what his gift is but because he has not come to terms with the dedication and requirements of the preceding five verses. And, on the other hand, when a believer is used powerfully in the Lord’s work, it is not because he has perfectly understood and analyzed his gift, but rather because his life is “a living and holy sacrifice,” which is “acceptable to God” as a “spiritual service of worship” (v. 1), and God’s Spirit is moving through him in serving power.
The noble American preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards was so fearful that his personal mannerisms and inflections might interfere with the power of God’s Word, that he not only read his sermons but often delivered them almost mechanically. Yet the Holy Spirit strongly used those messages, and listeners were sometimes so convicted of sin that they screamed for God’s mercy and tightly gripped their pews for fear of falling immediately into hell. God was able to use him in such ways because he lived up to the following resolutions (abbreviated) that he made early in his ministry:
Resolved, to live with all my might
while I do live.
Resolved, never to lose one moment of time,
to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.
Resolved, never to do anything which I should
despise or think meanly of in another.
Resolved, never to do anything out of revenge.
Resolved, never to do anything which I should be
afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.
(See Iain H. Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography
[Carlisle, Penn.: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987], p. 43)
The following beautiful prayer, used at the end of the communion services in the Church of England, accurately reflects the total dedication of which Paul speaks in Romans 12. It reads, “And here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable holy and living sacrifice unto Thee.”
Our absolute usefulness to the Lord depends on the three things Paul mentions in our present text: proper attitude (v. 3), proper relationship (vv. 4–5), and proper service (vv. 6–8).

THE PROPER ATTITUDE: TRUE HUMILITY
For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. (12:3)
For indicates a transition from what the apostle has just commanded, tying spiritual service to spiritual dedication, the bridge between them being spiritual attitude.
The Christian’s proper attitude is humility, not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think. Lack of that foundational virtue causes many believers to stumble. No matter how well grounded we may be in God’s Word, how theologically sound we may be, or how vigorously we may seek to serve Him, our gifts will not operate so that our lives can be spiritually productive until self is set aside. From self-denial in the spiritual worship of God flows self-surrender to the will of God, and from self-surrender flows selfless service in the work of God. No believer is exempt from this call to humility, because Paul is speaking to every man among you—a universal command to all who are Christ’s.
The basis of everything worthwhile that a Christian has and does, from salvation to service, is the grace given to him by God. Just as we are saved only by God’s grace, so we can serve Him only by that same grace. But the specific divine grace of which Paul speaks here is that from which he was ordained as God’s apostle and authorized to reveal God’s Word (Rom. 1:1–5; cf. 15:15; 1 Cor. 3:10; Gal. 2:9).
Yet in this passage on humility, it is not surprising that Paul appeals only indirectly to his apostolic rank, calling attention rather to the divine authority from which his own authority was derived. He is humble even in relationship to his own apostleship, which was conferred on him solely on the basis of God’s grace, and on no merit or worth of his own. “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me,” he informed Timothy, “because He considered me faithful, putting me into service; even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. And yet I was shown mercy, because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 1:12–14, emphasis added). As an apostle of Jesus Christ, he calls for humility—the most basic Christian virtue, and the one that opens the door to love, power, and unity.
To emphasize the necessity of meekness, Paul uses a form of phroneō (to think) four times in verse 3. A Christian is not to overestimate himself, to think more highly (huperphroneō) of himself than he ought to think, but is to think of himself as he really is. He is not to overvalue his abilities, his gifts, or his worth but make an accurate estimate of himself. “For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing,” Paul elsewhere cautions, “he deceives himself” (Gal. 6:3). And an honest estimate will be very low (cf. 1 Tim. 1:12–16).
Referring to self-examination and judgment of other Christians, Paul told the Corinthian church, “Now these things brethren, I have figuratively applied to myself and Apollos for your sakes, that in us you might learn not to exceed what is written, in order that no one of you might become arrogant in behalf of one against the other. For who regards you as superior? And what do you have that you did not receive? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:6–7; cf. 1–5). Peter admonished all elders in the church, young and old, to “clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, for God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (1 Pet. 5:5).

To have sound judgment translates a compound (sōphroneō) of that verb and has the basic meaning of “to think with a sound mind, to think soberly” (as the KJV). To think of ourselves with sound judgment leads us to recognize that, in ourselves, we are nothing at all, but that, in Christ, we can be used to the glory of God through the gift of the Spirit bestowed on us. We must realize that from ourselves, from our fleshly humanness, nothing eternal can be produced, but that in the power of the Spirit we can be used to build the kingdom and honor the King.
People do not suffer from low self-esteem. Rather, they are proud. That is the essential attitude of human nature. Selfish pride dominates the flesh. To be useful to our Lord, we must honestly recognize our limits as fallen men and women as well as our abilities as new creations in Christ, keeping both in proper perspective.
Such humility, which is essential for all spiritual matters, is not easily found or maintained. In New Testament times, some churches were characterized by members who desired to have the more showy and spectacular gifts, the church at Corinth being the chief offender. Paul therefore warns them rather to “earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way,” the way of humble love (1 Cor. 12:31; cf. 13:1–13). With a clearly-implied rebuke, the apostle John identifies a self-seeking believer by name, a man named Diotrephes, “who loves to be first” (3 John 9). Sadly, the church is still well-saturated with members who proudly seek personal preeminence and thereby forfeit the power of humility.
Modern society looks down on true humility. It is instead characterized by brash, and even exalted, self-centeredness, ego building, pampering the body, and striving to fulfill every personal lust and ambition, with little regard for who may be harmed. It is small wonder that depression and emotional chaos are so prevalent. In his book Psychological Seduction, the Failure of Modern Psychology, professor William K. Kilpatrick writes, “Extreme forms of mental illness are always extreme cases of self-absorption.… The distinctive quality, the thing that literally sets paranoid people apart is hyper-self-consciousness. And the thing they prize most about themselves is autonomy. Their constant fear is that someone else is interfering with their will or trying to direct their lives” ([Nashville: Nelson, 1983], p. 67).
Long before the advent of modern psychology, theologians confronted the devastating effects of self-love. In the early days of the church, Augustine wrote in his classic work The City of God, “Two cities have been formed by two loves; the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God, the heavenly by the love of God even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord” (Civitas Dei, XIV, 28. Cited by John Warwick Montgomery, The Shape of the Past [Minneapolis: Bethany, 1975], p. 46).
The great Reformer John Calvin observed,
For so blindly do we all rush in the direction of self-love that everyone thinks he has a good reason for exalting himself and despising all others in comparison.… There is no other remedy than to pluck up by the roots those most noxious pests, self-love and love of victory.… This the doctrine of Scripture does. For it teaches us to remember that the endowments which God has bestowed upon us are not our own, but His free gifts, and that those who plume themselves upon them betray their ingratitude. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1966], 2:10)
Addressing the problem in a positive way, the writer of Hebrews admonishes, “Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near” (Heb. 10:24–25).
Although they are not mentioned in the text, proud attitudes toward spiritual gifts can be placed into five categories. Several already have been mentioned. The first wrong attitude is that of using a prominent gift—or any other gift, for that matter—boastfully. As Paul admonished the Corinthian believers, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’; or again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you’ ” (1 Cor. 12:21), which is what a Christian does by implication whenever he boasts of his own gifts and accomplishments.
A second wrong attitude is that of depreciating ourselves and our gifts in false humility (see 1 Cor. 12:11–12, 19). Such an attitude is a poorly disguised effort to get praise. At the other end, when a person is clearly gifted above most Christians, it is tempting to feign humility when genuinely praised, thereby belittling what God has given to and is doing through him or her. All spiritual gifts are necessary and perfectly designed by God for His glorious purpose.
A third wrong attitude about spiritual gifts is that of claiming gifts, especially the more impressive ones, which we do not possess. Doing that not only is dishonest but denigrates God’s wisdom and sovereignty in belittling by implication the gift or gifts that we do have from Him. “All are not apostles, are they?” Paul asks rhetorically. “All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they?” (1 Cor. 12:29–30). If God has not chosen to give us any of the more notable gifts, we should neither feign nor covet them.
A fourth wrong attitude is that of failing to use an inconspicuous gift out of jealousy, resentment, or shame. To purposely disregard and neglect a spiritual gift is to disdain God’s sovereign grace. “If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,’ it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not a part of the body,’ it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body” (1 Cor. 12:15–16). God has a plan for each of His children, and every plan is good, perfect, and appropriate.
A fifth wrong attitude is failing to use one’s gifts at all, for whatever reason—whether out of neglect, bitterness, jealousy, shame, or simply indifference. Every spiritual gift of God is to be used to its fullest, because every gift is divinely ordained and meant to be divinely empowered and employed. Certainly Paul is concerned with this issue when, in verses 6–8, he urges that all gifts be used.
The humility that God requires and honors does not overestimate or underestimate His gifts but estimates them rightly and uses them rightly. Every Christian can attest, “God has gifted me. He has gifted me graciously and lovingly and will give me everything I need to use my gifts effectively to His glory. I thank Him and bless His name.”
There also are certain right attitudes toward our spiritual gifts. First, we must correctly recognize them and acknowledge that the Lord Himself provides exactly what He wants for us and everything we need to serve Him according to His will, just as [He] has allotted to each a measure of faith. In this context, a measure of faith seems to refer to the correct measure of the spiritual gift and its operating features that God sovereignly bestows on every believer. Every believer receives the exact gift and resources best suited to fulfill his role in the body of Christ.
A fictitious article published some years ago in the Springfield, Oregon, public school newsletter illustrates this principle very well.
Once upon a time, the animals decided they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world. So they organized a school.
They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all the subjects.
The duck was excellent in swimming; in fact, better than his instructor. But he made only passing grades in flying, and was very poor in running. Since he was slow in running, he had to drop swimming and stay after school to practice running. This caused his web feet to be badly worn, so that he [became] only average in swimming. But average was quite acceptable, so nobody worried about that—except the duck.
The rabbit started at the top of his class in running, but developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because of so much makeup work in swimming.
The squirrel was excellent in climbing, but he encountered constant frustration in flying class because his teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He developed “charley horses” from overexertion, and so only got a C in climbing and a D in running.
The eagle was a problem child and was severely disciplined for being a nonconformist. In climbing classes he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way to get there.…
The point of the story is obvious. Like the animals, every person has his own special but limited set of capabilities. Trying to operate outside those capabilities produces frustration, discouragement, guilt feelings, mediocrity, and ultimate defeat. We fulfill our calling when we function according to God’s sovereign design for us.
Paul is not here referring to saving faith, which believers already have exercised. He is speaking of faithful stewardship, the kind and quantity of faith required to exercise our own particular gift. It is the faith through which the Lord uses His measured gift in us to the fullest. It encompasses all the sensitivity, capacity, and understanding we need to rightly and fully use our uniquely-bestowed gift. Our heavenly Father does not burden us with gifts for which He does not provide every spiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional resource we need to successfully exercise them.
Because every believer is perfectly gifted, no gift that God has not given should be sought and no gift He has given should be neglected or denigrated. “To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” Paul explains in his first letter to Corinth, and “one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills” (1 Cor. 12:7, 11).
Following are nine guidelines that can be helpful in fulfilling the purpose of our spiritual gifts. We should present ourselves as a living sacrifice (Rom. 12:1); recognize that all believers, including ourselves, are gifted (v. 3); pray for wisdom; seek for nothing (Acts 8:18, 24); examine our heart’s desire (1 Tim. 3:1); seek confirmation; look for the blessing of God; wholeheartedly serve Him; and cultivate the gift as it becomes obvious.
Even when all that is done, it still may be impossible to fully analyze and specifically identify our spiritual gift. It is often not possible to distinguish between God-given natural talent, God-given spiritual abilities, and Holy Spirit power. When a Christian’s life is a living sacrifice to God and he is walking in the Spirit of God, he has no reason to make precise distinctions, because everything he is and has is committed to the Lord. Oversimplifying and overdefining spiritual gifts can cause great confusion, frustration, discouragement, and limitation of their usefulness. Focusing too much on the gifts themselves can hinder their faithful use in the Lord’s service.
The New Testament does not promise that our gift will come neatly packaged and labeled. Nor does it precisely identify the specific gift of any New Testament believer, including the apostles. Believers in the early church were never classified by gifts. On the contrary, the New Testament makes clear that God endows His children with many combinations and degrees of giftedness. He mixes these gifts much as an artist mixes colors on his palette to create the exact shade he desires for a particular part of the painting.
Peter said, “As each one has received a special gift, employ it…” (1 Pet. 4:10a). He used the definite article (the), indicating a single gift for every believer. But clearly that single gift will be unique in the life of each believer, because it is a combination of the manifold and multicolored categories of speaking and serving giftedness (vv. 10b–11) from which the Spirit colors the believer, and which are then blended with the uniqueness of the mind, the training, the experience, and the effort of the individual—the result being that every Christian is like a snowflake, with no other having the same pattern.
The thrust of Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, the two central passages on spiritual gifts, is not on a believer’s precisely identifying his gifts but on his faithfully using them. It is also significant that each of these passages mentions gifts that the other does not. This leads us to believe that the categories are basic colors, as it were, from which the Lord mixes the unique hue of each of His children.
All of this must produce humility, because our spiritual usefulness is a purely sovereign work of God, none of which can be attributed to man. Our spiritual usefulness is in spite of and in contrast to our unworthiness and uselessness in the flesh, in which nothing dwells that is good or is capable of glorifying God.

THE PROPER RELATIONSHIP: UNITY IN DIVERSITY
For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. (12:4–5)
In verse 1 Paul urges his fellow believers to present their physical bodies as “a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.” Now he uses the figure of the body to represent the church, the Body of Christ, of which every believer is a member. He focuses on its unity in diversity—one body (mentioned in both verses) representing its unity, and many members that do not have the same function, representing the diversity. Just as it is in nature, unified diversity in the church is a mark of God’s sovereign and marvelous handiwork.
A football team may have forty to fifty men on the roster. If all of them decided to be the quarterback, the team would have no unity and no effectiveness. True unity arises when each team member is willing to play the specific position assigned to him.
Paul now focuses specifically on the diverse uniqueness and importance of each member to the body’s proper performance. He points out the obvious truth that, although we have many members in one body, nevertheless all the members do not have the same function.
Function translates praxis, which has the basic meaning of a doing of something, that is, a deed. It later came to connote something that was ordinarily done or practiced, a normal function.
Spiritual gifts do not always correspond to what we commonly refer to as church offices—such as apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor-teacher, or deacon—as the King James rendering suggests (“all members have not the same office,” emphasis added). Most church members do not have a specific office or title. But every believer, from the youngest to the oldest and from the newest to the most mature, has a Spirit-given ability to minister to the body of Christ through some spiritual gift. It is the use of the gift that is his God-ordained function in the kingdom.
In the spiritual organism that is Christ’s church, every constituent part—whether obvious and important, such as the arm, or hidden and unnoticed, such as the small blood vessels and glands—is critical to its proper functioning as a whole. So we, who are many, Paul explains, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. It is diversity working in unity and in harmony that enables Christ’s Body to be and to do what He directs it to be and to do.
Because it is so normal and dependable, the great wonder of the proper operation of our bodies is seldom appreciated or even noticed. We have but to think, and our hands, feet, or eyes immediately do what we want them to do. Because we have trained them to respond in certain ways, they do many things almost automatically. Our most critical bodily functions—such as our hearts’ beating and our lungs’ breathing—require no thought at all. They simply do their jobs, performing their divinely-designed functions minute after minute, day after day, year after year. The interrelationship of the parts of our bodies is so unbelievably intricate that medical science continually discovers new functions and relationships. It is often only when our bodies cease to function properly that we appreciate how marvelously God has designed them.
In his book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, the internationally renowned surgeon Dr. Paul Brand writes of the amazing diversity and interrelationship of the parts of the human body. Speaking of the body’s cells, he says:
I am first struck by their variety. Chemically my cells are almost alike, but visually and functionally they are as different as the animals in a zoo. Red blood cells, discs resembling Lifesaver candies, voyage through my blood loaded with oxygen to feed the other cells. Muscle cells, which absorb so much of that nourishment, are sleek and supple, full of coiled energy. Cartilage cells with shiny black nuclei look like bunches of black-eyed peas glued tightly together for strength. Fat cells seem lazy and leaden, like bulging white plastic garbage bags jammed together.
Bone cells live in rigid structures that exude strength. Cut in cross section, bones resemble tree rings, overlapping strength with strength, offering impliability and sturdiness. In contrast, skin cells form undulating patterns of softness and texture that rise and dip, giving shape and beauty to our bodies. They curve and jut at unpredictable angles so that every person’s fingerprint—not to mention his or her face—is unique.
The aristocrats of the cellular world are the sex cells and nerve cells. A woman’s contribution, the egg, is one of the largest cells in the human body, its ovoid shape just visible to the unaided eye. It seems fitting that all the other cells in the body should derive from this elegant and primordial structure. In great contrast to the egg’s quiet repose, the male’s tiny sperm cells are furiously flagellating tadpoles with distended heads and skinny tails. They scramble for position as if competitively aware that only one of billions will gain the honor of fertilization.
The king of cells, the one I have devoted much of my life to studying, is the nerve cell. It has an aura of wisdom and complexity about it. Spiderlike, it branches out and unites the body with a computer network of dazzling sophistication. Its axons, “wires” carrying distant messages to and from the human brain, can reach a yard in length.
I never tire of viewing these varied specimens or thumbing through books which render cells. Individually they seem puny and oddly designed, but I know these invisible parts cooperate to lavish me with the phenomenon of life.…
My body employs a bewildering zoo of cells, none of which individually resembles the larger body. Just so, Christ’s Body comprises an unlikely assortment of humans. Unlikely is precisely the right word, for we are decidedly unlike one another and the One we follow. From whose design come these comical human shapes which so faintly reflect the ideals of the Body as a whole?
The Body of Christ, like our own bodies, is composed of individual, unlike cells that are knit together to form one Body. He is the whole thing, and the joy of the Body increases as individual cells realize they can be diverse without becoming isolated outposts.
Dr. Brand also describes the unity of the seemingly endless diversity of the cells.
What moves cells to work together? What ushers in the higher specialized functions of movement, sight, and consciousness through the coordination of a hundred trillion cells?
The secret to membership lies locked away inside each cell nucleus, chemically coiled in a strand of DNA. Once the egg and sperm share their inheritance, the DNA chemical ladder splits down the center of every gene much as the teeth of a zipper pull apart. DNA re-forms itself each time the cell divides: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 cells, each with the identical DNA. Along the way cells specialize, but each carries the entire instruction book of one hundred thousand genes. DNA is estimated to contain instructions that, if written out, would fill a thousand six-hundred-page books. A nerve cell may operate according to instructions from volume four and a kidney cell from volume twenty-five, but both carry the whole compendium. It provides each cell’s sealed credential of membership in the body. Every cell possesses a genetic code so complete that the entire body could be reassembled from information in any one of the body’s cells.…
Just as the complete identity code of my body inheres in each individual cell, so also the reality of God permeates every cell in [Christ’s] Body, linking us members with a true, organic bond. I sense that bond when I meet strangers in India or Africa or California who share my loyalty to the Head; instantly we become brothers and sisters, fellow cells in Christ’s Body. I share the ecstasy of community in a universal Body that includes every man and woman in whom God resides. (Taken from Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancy. Copyright [CO] 1980 by Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancy. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House)
There are also rebellious cells, as it were, in the Body of Christ. Some are benign, in the sense that they do not destroy the church. They simply gorge themselves on blessings and benefits at the expense of the rest of the body. They become fatter and fatter, always taking in, seldom giving out. The focus of their whole existence is self-service. Their creed is: “I will get all I can from God and all I can from the church.” In their unfaithfulness to the Lord and to His people, they sap the church of its vitality and can so weaken it that it becomes emaciated and cannot function normally.
The church also has “cells” that are mutinous to the point of destruction. Through outright heresy and flagrant immorality, these malignant members openly attack the rest of the body, eating away at its very life.
As believers, we are all interrelated in a spiritual unity. Christ has designed us to work uniquely but harmoniously as His Body on earth—to be His own hands, His own feet, His own voice. We share a common life, a common ministry, a common power, and, above all, a common Head. We are endowed in countless different combinations of the specific gifts mentioned here and elsewhere in the New Testament. But it is our Lord’s design and desire that our diversity in spiritual gifts be manifested in unity of spiritual service.