In his sermon titled 'The Church Is the Body of Christ,' Scott Brown emphasizes the metaphor of the church as the body of Christ, highlighting its significance as a community where individual members, with their diverse gifts and functions, contribute to the spiritual growth and protection of the entire body. The sermon underscores the importance of 'sober thinking,' where members should not think too highly of themselves but recognize their dependence on God's grace. Brown outlines six ways to build and protect the church: through sober thinking, the measure of faith, connected activity, unified harmony, visible mobilization, and the operation of gifts. He draws parallels between the body's immune system and the church's protective mechanisms, emphasizing the necessity of each member's active participation. The sermon calls for a unified, interdependent community where members embrace their roles, cultivating a mission-driven environment that encourages spiritual growth and mutual support.

Please find Romans 12 and verse 3. I'll begin reading from 3 to 8. This is the inerrant, all-sufficient, holy Word of God. Verse three, for I say through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. Having the gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them. If prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith. Or ministry, let us use it in our ministering. He who teaches in teaching, he who exhorts in exhortation, he who gives with liberality, he who leads with diligence, he who shows mercy with cheerfulness.

Let's pray. Lord, thank you for gathering us together as one body. Lord, come and build your family, fortify your army, beautify your bride. We pray, Lord, that you would cultivate this field and protect this flock and hold it up as a pillar of truth, that you would come and bring all these things to us as they relate to our being, your body. Amen.

Please be seated. Well as you know we're engaged in a study of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We've taken a brief pause in our working through Revelation. We'll return with the exaltation of the church in the final chapters of Revelation. We're doing this because we want to do a sort of a reset, if you might call it that, for our church.

We have many people who grew up in our church, they've just experienced church life the way they've always experienced church life. We wanna show them why we're doing what we're doing. Why do we take this so seriously? Why is this such a big deal? Well, we're explaining over the weeks why this is such a big deal.

We started with the fact of Jesus Christ's love for the church and tried to explain it and said, do you love the church like that? And we spoke of the fact that the church is a, it's a community of converted sinners. So you should expect, you should set your expectations for that. We spoke of the church as a nation, a nation and its citizens have duties and their laws and their boundaries and of its membership and we've spoken of the church as a family. The family has particular intimate responsibilities toward one another.

And so now we turn to another metaphor of the church. It's the metaphor of the body. The church is the body of Christ. And of course, you know, God has given us many metaphors to describe the church and now we turn to this metaphor of the body and we learn about how the body builds itself up in love that should tell you what a big deal the church is because it has such a marvelous function. Now, as we're in Romans, recognize that we're in a letter to a local church.

This is a message to a local church, and it's God's message to this particular local church, Hope Baptist Church. And they're very specific ways that the body is built up. Two things are very, very clear in these verses. And the first is that the health of your church is critical for your spiritual growth. The health of the whole church matters.

And at the same time secondly your personal health matters to the whole body. So there's this interdependence that we have in the body. You see an outline in front of you. I'm going to give you six ways we build up and protect the body of Christ. I'll just name them very quickly here.

First of all, in our sober thinking, second, in our measure of faith, third, in our connected activity, fourth, in our unified harmony, a fifth, in our visible mobilization, and sixth, with our gifts and operation. This is how the body builds itself up in love. And so this image of the body is very graphic and because the body of Christ functions in particular ways that are likened to the functioning of your own physical body. All of us exist in body. We're not just souls floating around, that we are embodied souls.

And the human body has very sophisticated And remarkable ways of protecting itself against bacteria against toxins against viruses and parasites and and God made our our bodies with systems of detection and systems of deflection of attacks. And really, The body attacks harmful intruders that engage the body. Your body is designed to protect you. And it's that way with the church as well. The church as the body of Christ is designed to provide protective means for you.

You know, we've all been aware most recently in the last couple of years of matters of the immune system. It's been in the news, it's been in our minds. But the body has various defense mechanisms And doctors call them innate immune systems and adaptive immune systems. Innate immune systems are the things on the outside there. Things like your skin, things like tears, they actually protect and cleanse, things like stomach acid, things like that, these are the innate immune systems, and then there are the adaptive immune systems inside our body, they're these special forces in our bodies that attack intruders, white blood cells, B cells, T cells, phagocytes and what they do is they attack intruders and they go after specific targets And they're actually quite brutal.

They are killer cells. They go and they try to kill bacteria and they try to kill viruses. And if you study this, they do various things. They trap them. They eat them.

They spit them out. They blow them up. It's really remarkable. And you have a whole inflammatory system that really acts like a fire alarm in your body. And they have a memory.

If they get attacked once it's fool me once, fool me twice. When they come back they're ready again because the immune system is strengthened after an initial attack. And it's the same way in the Church of Jesus Christ. The church is designed for protection and for health. And just as there are things that the body does to keep you healthy.

So does the Church of Jesus Christ. And so these things are outlined here. And what these texts do here in Romans is they call for a certain kind of functionality, a certain kind of behavior in the body toward one another. And they explain the beauty of the body, the brilliance of the body, and these things are to be in operation all the time. Like right now, we're gathered In all of our gatherings, in our hospitality, in our private conversations, in our group conversations, in our phone calls, in our retreats, in our celebration feasts, in our fellowship meals, all these things are designed to be functioning in the body when the body gathers together.

We protect one another by functioning according to the ways that are spoken of here. And there's such a complex dependence, just like your physical body. Your physical body is such a remarkable complex organism with almost infinite dependence on other parts of the body. But the body is always vulnerable to infection. Every member of the body is always vulnerable to infection.

We're vulnerable today. So God has so ordained the body to function. So there are many reasons why it's important that we talk about this, because it helps us understand how we relate to one another. But there's another matter, and that is that, you know, there are a number of new people who have been added to this church, but here's the reality When when new people are added to a church particularly our church the strength of that church is tested and When the church has additions there are always expectations on both sides. And when a new person comes, they're thinking things like, what am I supposed to do in this church?

How do I fit in? How do I contribute? What's my place? And if they've been in mainstream churches, they've been in a place where there are dozens of titles that you can get and dozens of ministry slots that you can sort of plug yourself into. Can I apply for a Sunday school teacher?

Can I get into the senior adult ministry? I see a few senior adults here. Can I teach in the youth ministry, the children's ministry? What can I do? What can I do in this church?

And they look around and they say, well, there is no senior adult ministry. We're pushing the senior adults to relate with everybody. And the same thing with the youth and the children. So what do I do in a church like this? And I think that an element of the answer to that question is in this passage of Scripture, that God gives the church the ability to minister to one another.

And I've said this many times and I'll say it again. If you want to know what your ministry is, well your ministry is the next person you meet. And God has given you gifts and knowledge and a body and a mouth and a mind to come and bring benefit spiritual benefit to that person that way the whole body is mobilized so you don't need a title to be effective in the body of Christ if you look at the Bible the Bible just doesn't submit this kind of Structural ministry So what does it present well I? Want to give you six ways that we build up the body of Christ, and I want to ask all of us to consider these very carefully. So if you've grown up in this church and you've been here a long time, you've just experienced this, here's why we think this is so important.

Here's why we're doing what we're doing. First of all, we build up the body through our sober thinking. Verse three, for I say through the grace given to me to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself. He's talking about how you think. Not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.

So he's addressing the way that we think, and the way that we ought to be thinking about ourselves and about one another is that in the church, all is of grace. All is as a result of what God has dealt to one another. And Paul is saying that his whole life is an act of God's grace. He said in another place, by the grace of God, I am who I am. I am what I am.

And that's true of all of us here. By the grace of God, we are what we are. And Paul sees himself as a conduit of grace and anybody but he also compares that to the lives of the Roman Church that they ought to see themselves that in that same way and The word the word it's interesting the word think or thinking appears four times in this text. And he's telling us how not to think. And he's warning against a particular kind of thinking.

And He uses a very graphic word, which could easily be spoken of like, to think more highly, or to hyper think. To think too highly of yourself. It's one of the greatest barriers of people ministering to one another in the body of Christ is they think too highly of themselves. Now sometimes it manifests itself in the outward appearance of thinking lower than yourself. But actually it's thinking too highly of yourself.

And that's why people are often shy and things like that. But God is sovereign. What we see here is that it's by God's grace that we are what we are. And that is sober thinking. That's why the Apostle also said that a man can receive nothing unless it's given him from heaven and by the grace of God I am what I am and humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God that he may exalt you in the proper time.

God is sovereign. The gifts and the functions in the body are all gifts of grace. You can't be what someone else is. You can't even be what you want to be. You are who God made you.

And the problem is thinking too highly of ourselves. And many of the offenses, in my experience in church life, come because people have thought more highly of themselves than they ought to have thought and so it causes all kinds of problems. So by the grace of God I am what I am and it's God in his sovereign hand who delivers gifts of grace to the body. We just need to recognize that. We are, we're a very dependent people.

We're dependent on the works of the grace of God in our lives. And so we ought always to have our hands lifted up before the Lord and say, Lord, pour out your grace upon me so that I might minister to my brethren, so that I might love the ones that you love, so that I might speak the truth in love to those that you love. So the first way we build up the body is by sober thinking. We have to think rightly about ourselves and we have to think rightly about others as well. It does little good to get upset with your brethren because God is sovereign over their sanctification.

They might be rude to you, and God has brought that into your life to sanctify you. Don't think too highly of yourself. And then the second way we build up and protect the body, in the same way that the body protects itself in its immune system is by our measure of faith our measure of faith as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith having then gifts differing according to the grace that God has given. So here we find out that God deals out different measures of faith. We want our faith to grow but It's God who delivers these measures of faith.

And it's interesting that Paul uses a word that we get our word metric, metron. That's the word measures. And something, you know, a metric system, it measures things in inches or cubic meters. It's a measurement of length, it's a measurement of volume, and God is the one who does the measuring. And it's a very interesting, in the Old Testament the same terminology is used for the weights and measures laws and God always measures accurately and if you look at the use of this word in the Old Testament it's used it's used for God's command that you have accurate weights and measures and you don't defraud your brother.

God's weights and measures are perfect. It's also used even in the temple in terms of the various measures of the sacrifices in the temple. God measures out the sacrifices in the temple perfectly and he does it in his body as well and God allocates amounts of faith and Various functions in the body and we should be just give thanks for our differences. We're all very different. And we also shouldn't lament ourselves in the way that God has made us.

But to be satisfied with God's grace in your life. Of course you want your faith increased. You know, we want to pray, Lord, increase our faith. But guess who does that? The Lord increases our faith through the humble heart of a person who really wants to obey him.

He won't, He won't increase the faith of the person who's not really serious about it. But he does increase faith. You know, we often feel badly about ourselves. I heard somebody tell this story about these cows in a pasture and they saw these cows saw a milk truck go by that said you know on the side it was pasteurized, sanitized, homogenized, you know vitamin fortified and one cow said to the other it makes you feel kind of inadequate, doesn't it? You know, you look around, you're looking around all the cows, you know, in the pasture and you wonder how come I'm not not so much.

But God measures the perfect measures of gifts in this church. And here's another way to say it. You can only play the cards you've been dealt. And we're all like that. You know, there's so many ways I think that God wants to, on the one hand, comfort his church but challenge his church.

Because no true Christian can listen to this and say, well, I'm just satisfied with the faith I have. Lord, no, they're going to say, Lord, give me more, give me more faith. You know, as a young pastor, I used to listen to my favorite preachers and I wanted to be like them. And I don't know how many times I would go to my mother or my father or later on my wife and say, I'm quitting. These men are so brilliant.

They're so funny. What happened to me? But It didn't take very long for me to just realize, okay, I am what I am. That's all I have. This is it.

This is all I have. I'm not Chuck Swindoll. I'm not Chuck Smith. I'm not Al Martin. I'm not Martin Lloyd-Jones.

I'm just not. I'm just me. God made me. And you know, we have struggles often when we want to be like somebody else. But we're not, we're not really like somebody else.

And some of the greatest struggles of our souls take place when we compare ourselves with ourselves with other people in the church. You know there we have we have several men I'm really grateful for this who can preach, who can preach in this church and they can teach. But it's always a danger for preachers to try to copy other preachers. You can see the difference. You know, I can, you know, if somebody's really listened to a particular preacher, a lot of times you can spot it.

You know, there are some fundamentalist Baptist preachers, you know, all of them, they say, do you know God? Oh, God is good. Oh, and they have this pattern, you know, and, and, and, you know, hundreds, thousands of fundamentalist Baptist preachers have this pattern. Where did that come from? Well, I think it did come from somewhere.

Lloyd-Jones was telling a story one time of a pastor in Scotland who had a vocal cord problem. And because of this malady, in order to keep preaching, he had to speak with a, he had to learn, relearn how to speak with a nasal tone. And he also had a tuft of hair that fell back over his eye and he would often you know throw his head back But out of Scott he was a great preacher and people loved him But out of Scotland there's this whole generation of preachers that preach with a nasal tone and they would throw their head back like that You know we're not clones. We are who we are. And it's so relaxed, you know.

Be satisfied with the grace that God has given and cry out for more. You know, this is a mark of Christian maturity is not to be covetous but to be thankful and to walk in contentment with who we are, and to be thankful. And to be thankful for how God has slotted us in the church, how God has positioned us, because he has measured out the gifts according to his own wisdom. You know, even the hairs of your head are numbered, and also all of the gifts and the functions of the church are numbered and measured out by God. So, we build up the body through our measure of faith.

So give it all you got. Thirdly, the third way we build up and protect the body is through our connected activity. Connected activity, That's verse four. For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function. And there are two words in this sentence, this matter of members and function.

And we are members of one another. We are connected. We're part of one another. We are joined at the hip. We are members.

Sometime soon I'll give a message on membership in the Church of Jesus Christ and in a local church. But notice the word function. All members do not have the same function. There's a very interesting word that the apostle uses. It's the word praxis for function and It's where we get the the whole idea of orthopraxy, you know, right practice right function functioning correctly And you know, you know orthodoxy is what you believe orthopraxy is what you do.

It's how you behave according to your beliefs. And this word praxis, this word function is often translated in the New Testament as deeds, as what you do. And the church is a place where people do things. They function. They're not couch potatoes.

They're not passive listeners. They function. They do things. And the church is not a place of spectators, it's a place of activists with one another. It's not the place for you just sit in a service and go home.

You have an active role. There is something that you do. And it's interesting, this word praxis or function or deeds includes certain things in the Bible. In Romans chapter eight, 13, the apostle talks about putting to death the deeds or the praxis, the functions of the body. Putting to death the things that are sinful.

It includes getting busy and doing good works. It works in Matthew 16 27. We learn that the judgment will be judged according to our function, our praxis, our deeds. It's the same terminology. The Lord Jesus says, for the Son of Man will come and glorify his Father with his angels and he will reward each according to works or praxis or their orthopraxy.

It matters what we do. And so in a healthy church, everyone is on a mission, everyone functions, I hope you're here on a mission. I hope you're looking around asking, how do I minister to my brother or sister? I'm not just here as a passive couch potato. How are you functioning?

As a pastor in this church, it's very clear how I'm supposed to function in this church. I come in here with marching orders every Sunday. I don't come into passively experience. I do experience But I don't just passively experience everything because I have particular things to do But every single member of the body of Christ has things they must do. Look at the one and others, there are over 50 of them.

It defines what you do with one another. And there are many, many commands of scripture that tell us what to do. There are many, many parts of the body. Now, just a way of noting how we have sort of formalized this principle in our church. We have a church covenant.

Next week some people are gonna take our church covenant. And the church covenant is an activist covenant. The language is the language of personal commitment to functionality, to orthopraxy. And I'll just read some of the statements in our church covenant. We will work and pray for the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, and by the aid of the Holy Spirit, to walk together in Christian love.

That's praxis. That's functionality. We will seek the salvation of our kindred, acquaintances and strangers who have not repented for saving faith in Christ. To be in prayer for the spiritual awakening of the lost in our community. To be a faithful witness of the gospel both here and to the remotest part of the earth We will strive for the advancement of this church in knowledge holiness and comfort now That means that when we gather together, that we would gather together and you are pressing forth to spread the knowledge and the holiness and the comfort of God among one another.

That's what we want you to be talking about. To sustain its worship, ordinances, and discipline and doctrines, and to submit to its leaders as they are faithful to Christ We will contribute cheerfully and regularly to the support of the ministry The expenses of the church the relief of the poor and the spread of the gospel through all the nations. We will not forsake the assembling ourselves together, nor neglect to pray for ourselves and others, nor avoid the meetings of the church. We will maintain family and private devotions to educate our children in the Christian faith and demonstrate the love of Christ in all of our household relationships. We will watch over one another in brotherly love.

This is an activist document That's a direct reflection of Romans chapter 12, the entire chapter. We will remember one another in prayer, to aid one another in sickness and distress, to walk circumspectly in the world. We will cultivate Christian sympathy in feeling and courtesy and speech and strive to avoid all scriptural prohibitions such as tattling, backbiting and unrighteous anger, to refrain from speaking evil of one another, to be slow to take offense, to think the best of one another, and always be ready for biblical reconciliation and mindful of the rules of our savior to secure it without delay so far as it depends upon us. The membership in our church ought to be an activist membership. You know, why are we doing what we're doing?

Why are we taking it so seriously? Oh man, these things are so important. Living in a culture like this is such a blessing where the body is built up in love. One way that you can contribute to the health of this church is through your connected activity. Now if you've just been going to this church and just consuming the air, you know, just hearing the preaching, the fellowship, that's good.

But that's not fully acting like a Christian. If you're not engaged with people's lives in these kind of ways, you're not acting like a Christian in the church. Kind of acting like a bystander. So the church is designed for functionality, for taking action, and I'm here to charge all the saints here to take action with one another. And don't be passive.

Pray about how you might minister to people. Walk in here with an agenda. Walk in here on a mission to be a Christian in this place. The fourth way to protect the body is by our unified harmony, verse five, our unified harmony. So we being many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.

So you have two words members and one body. This matter of the terminology, particularly in the Old Testament, this word is used for bodily members, you know, members of your body, it's used for groups of people, but it's also used of like parts to a song and the harmony, the harmony that you have in the singers of songs. And so there's this matter of harmony and then it's you, we are one body in Christ. Now, there are many things that we receive in Christ. In 1 Corinthians 1, verse four, we receive grace in Christ.

In Romans 3, 24, we receive redemption in Christ in Galatians 2 17 we are justified in Christ in Ephesians 4 22 we are forgiven in Christ and here we are one body in Christ in other words your life as a Christian isn't just that you've been forgiven and justified, you've been actually brought into a body. Somebody, I think it was last week, we were talking about the message last week and somebody said it seems like there's like There's hardly any distinction between the person who's justified and the person who's enfolded into the body. The two things are so close, you can't have one without the other. And that's absolutely true. And this is a oneness with people who are very, very different.

We are very different in this church. But in the church, there are many that compose unity. And there's harmony in the diversity that you have in the church. Now, you know, I believe that's why in the Bible when you see the people of God gathering, it's always a generational gathering. The young and the old together, everybody's together.

People from tongues and tribes and nations are together, everybody's together. You don't see the church segregated into life interests. You don't see the church segregated by age. You see the old and the young together. And that's what I want to see here in our church.

I don't want to see peer groups just galvanizing. It's great to have friends who are your peers, but it's not really so great if that's all you have. The older women teach the younger women. I want to see older women with younger women. I want to see older men with younger men.

I want to see little kids engaged by the older men of the church. You know, when I look around, I'm on a mission. But part of that mission is that we would have one generational body of Christ where we're all ministering to one another, the young and the old all together. And you know, it's a very helpful thing to live in the body that way. You know, we tend, I heard a pastor friend of mine say the other day that we tend to from time to time go into extremes.

We have extreme thinking about certain things and then we come into the church and we express that extreme thought and your brother's or your sister says I don't know about that and so you're but you're so you're kind of modified you know your your extremes aren't so extreme and the conversation and the fellowship and the relationship is helpful from us becoming one single kind of extremeness. But there are a couple things that this verse makes it very, very clear. First, you are needed. Every person is needed. And the second thing is, you are needy.

Every person is needy. Every person, including the pastors in this church, we're needy, just like everybody else. Now, 1 Corinthians 12 is probably one of the one of the clearest, most graphic, beautiful descriptions of this. We read it earlier in the service. The hand can't say to the eye, I don't need you.

What if everyone was a foot? How about that? You know, how about, you know, you have an affection for somebody and you want to marry them and you show up and you go have dinner with them, but they're a foot. This person is just a foot. Well, the body of Christ is, the body of Christ needs hands and feet and ears and eyes and all kinds of things like that.

This church cannot just look like an eye. It has to be a diverse expression of the glory of God. And you know, there are gifts that no one sees. There are prayers prayed that no one knows about. There are encouragements given that no one will know about in this church.

And there are so many unseen things that happen in a church that really, they really add up to this unified harmony with one another. So come with an agenda to be the body of Christ. And then fifth, the way we build and protect the body of Christ is through our visible mobilization. Our visible mobilization. Verse six, having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them.

So we're to be using our gifts, to use the gifts, the gifts have been given and they're meant to be used and they're used according to the proportion of our faith and so we must be building our faith how is faith built Faith comes by the hearing of the word of God. The most beneficial thing that you can do for this church is fill your mind with God, with the knowledge of God, with the word of God, so that you have something to share, something to say, that there's something burning in your soul, There's something that is brimming out of you. So when somebody pokes you, what comes out? The glory of the word of God. Because your mind has been transformed.

You've done what Romans 12.1 says, you've given your body as a sacrifice to God, a holy sacrifice, and as a result, you're using your gifts in that way. And your effectiveness in the church has a direct relationship with the grace of God working out in your soul. And that's why You need to understand what your ministry is. Your ministry really is the next person you meet. You know, we have a culture where there are so many distractions from the things that God has actually put in our lives.

I was talking to a brother the other day and he was talking about how this works. He said he talked about how people talk about their team, their sports team, and they said, that's my team. And they get up and they cheer and everything like that. But it isn't really their team, they don't know that team. They're just a passive observer of that team.

They just sit there and watch. It's not their team. But in the church, This is your team. I mean, these are the people you actually know. You can have, like, you might not be able to have an effect on the Raiders, but you can have an effect on the people in your church.

You know, God drives us to the things that we can do something about, which is such a tragedy of our culture, where people spend so much of their time just playing little video games that have no effect on anyone else. I'm totally against that. It disturbs me when I see people doing that. It really does. Because they're people.

The people, actually the people that God has given you. If you clap and cheer for your team, that you don't know and you can't affect, and you will never know them, what, What about the people in your house? How about your neighbors? The people that you actually know? The people that you can actually do something about?

Here's the implication of this. Spend your energy, spend your activism, spend your mobilization on the people that you know, that you can do something about. Focus your energy on real things that are actually in your life, not on some ethereal thing out there. The sixth way, the final way we build up the body and protect the body is that our gifts are in operation. And what you have here now is a list.

There's a list of six gifts or kinds of men. And these kinds of functions and these kinds of people are protective influences in the borders of your heart and the borders of your church. You know, I can't help today but think of the Russian attack on the Ukraine and how they're protecting themselves, how they're trying to protect their borders and their borders have been overrun. You know, the Russian Army outnumbers the Ukrainian Army three to one. The Russian army has outspent the Ukrainian army 10 to 1.

And so it's very difficult. So Ukraine is activating, you know, it's anti-aircraft, it's missile system, it's electronic warfare, you know, to try to destroy the communication systems of their enemies. And, you know, the United States is sending, you know, humvees and radar and drones and night vision equipment, you know, to help in the effort. But there are things that must be done to protect that nation. And these gifts, these functions are like that.

We're going to look at this list. There are seven gifts and functions that are mentioned here. And they remind me of Israel's Iron Dome. You remember that? They have this advanced radar system that shoots down rockets before they hit the ground thousands and thousands of rockets have been shot at Israeli targets 90% of them knocked down in the air by this really sophisticated iron dome that they've created.

It's really, really remarkable. But the church has the same kind of thing. It's very much like a church immune system. And it has to do with the functions of the body. The functions of the body are critical for the health of the body.

And there are these seven functions that are mentioned here. Now, it's not an exhaustive list. If you say, well, I don't know if I'm in this list, this is not an exhaustive list. It's a representative list. And, you know, there are other lists which are also representative in 1st Corinthians 12 through 14, that whole section of 1st Corinthians, Ephesians chapter 4, 1st Peter 4, 10 and 11, Romans and much of Romans 12.

These matters are mentioned. But we'll just walk through them one by one quickly. But these are sort of the defense forces, the building forces that are in the church of Jesus Christ. And the first is prophecy. If prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith.

Now I believe that prophecy in this context is speaking the word of God. In the Old Testament, you know, there was a predictive element, but the overwhelming expression of this gift is not predictive, but it's more prescriptive. This has to do with rightly understanding and explaining the Word of God, and all Christians do this. Remember in Revelation chapter 19 verse 10, the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Testify to Jesus, that's the spirit of prophecy.

That's the spirit of the word of God at work in the world. And all of us have been called to speak the truth in love. So we ought to be speaking. The way that we defend and protect this church, the way that we build it up is by speaking the truth. We prophesy by the word of God.

We don't prophesy out of our own brain. We prophesy out of the word of God. We don't come up with fanciful things. We come up with the things that are true that are in the word of God, in the written word of God. The second is ministry, or ministry, let us use it in our ministering.

This has to do with service. Paul uses the word for deacon. Everybody's a deacon in a sense. I think you have the capital D deacon and you have the small d deacon. All of us are servants.

Even the elders are deacons, are servants of the body of Christ. You know, in in the New Testament, in the Book of Acts, the deacons were minister ministers of mercy and they took care of the widows, the Hellenistic widows in Jerusalem. And he says this, or ministry, let us use it in our ministry. It. What's it?

Our faith. Our faith. It's faith that creates the ministering. And then third, teaching. He who teaches in his teaching, this has to do with instructing the mind.

This is describing a person who is divinely gifted to understand and communicate with understanding and to be able to teach things to people. Everybody has a particular level of that. Some have greater levels of faith, greater measures of faith for teaching, others have lesser. Fourth, exhortation. He who exhorts in exhortation.

Paul is using a term that is actually a word picture that pictures one called alongside to help that's what exhortation is and it it carries the meaning of advising even pleading encouraging comforting correcting it's a it's a wide-ranging word because people have wide-ranging needs who are sitting in front of you in our exhortation. And then fifth in giving, he who gives with liberality. This, you know, when God gives you something, then by faith you have the desire to give it away. And then sixth, leading. He who leads with diligence.

This has to do with standing before others. I don't think this is completely isolated to church leaders, but it definitely includes them, and it's probably the primary issue here. There are many spheres of leadership that God gives. If you're a father and a mother, you have a sphere of leadership. And pastors have a very highly defined sphere of leadership.

And how should it be done? With all diligence. With all diligence. It means speed. It means make haste.

It means don't procrastinate. Lead. Lead on. Don't just sit there with your hands sitting on your hands Lead One of the greatest frustrations of wives and their families as husbands that don't lead when God has appointed them to be leaders. And then seventh, the mercy.

He who shows mercy with cheerfulness, and this has to do with the ability to be aware of heartaches that others are experiencing and to take action, particularly to those who are discouraged. And of course, I'm always aware that whenever we gather, there's somebody who's discouraged, there's somebody who's hurting in some way. And I want God to lift them out, I want God to fill their heart with songs of deliverance, I want God to comfort them, I want them to see God's glory, I want them to be delivered from their fears, That's what I want for every person here who walked in that way because God maybe has you hearing this now because he wants to pull you out of your sorrows. He who shows mercy with cheerfulness. So these are seven ways the body is protected.

Works like the immune system, strengthened from infection. First by prophecy, by ministry, by teaching, by exhortation, by giving, by leading and mercy. But that's not an exhaustive list. There are lots of ways that we do that. But notice all of it has one common denominator, faith.

And faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. And so we're here to stir up the gifts. The Apostle Paul told Timothy to stir up the gift of God in his life. Maybe he was getting discouraged too, and he needed to stir it up and get back to business, get back to the activity and the functionality that God had called him to. So how do we apply this?

First, let's strengthen our faith. We strengthen our faith by the saturation of the Word of God. Let's humble ourselves. Let's not think too highly of ourselves. Let's be honest.

This is a confrontation for people who've been sitting in church and have made it a low priority. This is a confrontation. Let's search our hearts. Are any of us non-givers? Are we giving in the way that this passage speaks about?

And let's rejoice in the importance of every member in the body of Christ and that we would say, Lord, you've gifted me. Lord, you made me. Lord, you created me for good works. Here I am. I give my body as a holy sacrifice acceptable to you to serve your church.

So this is a description of a church where the people are on a mission. They are functioning. They don't just have orthodoxy. They have orthopraxy and they understand their ministry, that their ministry is the next person that they meet. Would you pray with me?

Oh Lord, I pray that you would activate us, activate me, in every way that's needful, that you would also use us together today, even as we break out into a fellowship meal, that we would speak the truth and love to one another, that we would love one another from the heart we would care for one another we would have this kind of life of activism setting our minds on heavenly things so that we might be some earthly good Amen.