Scientific achievements, that brought us the Internet, have produced an explosion of information about Christianity and the Bible that has deepened our understanding. We are gradually beginning to realize that while we all have personal relationships with God through prayer, Christianity is not so much about each of us separately. It is about our relations with each other. It was well stated by the Apostle Paul in the 12th chapter of his 1st letter to the Corinthians when he described the Body of Christ. He compared the followers of Jesus to the parts of the human body that had different functions, but all depended upon each other and had to work together.
To put that in a modern perspective,
we might say that the catcher on a baseball team has no purpose without the pitcher and the rest of the team. Each person gets their identity from their relationships with other people. All humans were created with different abilities, but were intended to become Christ’s team caring for each other and all of God’s creation.
God’s presence is revealed when we see people love and care for each other. When our son-in-law died of cancer as a young man, our daughter and their little children were totally surrounded by loving people in our church who helped heal their deep wound. In our world today many people are still being killed by gun violence and there too loving people, surrounding those who remain, are major sources of healing. Civilization on earth will continue to gradually improve as part of God’s continuing creation, but there will always be tragedies that will require Christ’s team to provide the healing.
Robert C. Frank
Author of Christ’s Team
