“Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” -I Corinthians 6:15,16
“Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” -I Corinthians 12:27
It hurts to be one of the members of Christ these days and I don’t just mean all the tattoos and piercings. We are joined to a lot of prostitutes, and since we are the body of Christ we are all joined together. I don’t really want to be joined to a prostitute. But we don’t fight against flesh and blood, but against institutions of evil that underly this physical world. Today the church is joined to any number of these institutions. They are joined to Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and the gay neighbor next door. I’ve had it. We should be joined to Christ first and foremost. He should direct how we think and act in every situation. But he doesn’t. We watch TV more than we read our Bibles. And so I seek solace, I seek the body of yesteryear. Of course the Christians of the past were not perfect. They all had their flaws, but not like today. They at least knew the basics of marriage, family and raising children. They could tell the difference between men and women and marriage and not marriage, for heaven’s sake. And I’m not perfect either, but I want to be. I want to take this seriously in every way possible. The men of the past did, they wrote stories and poetry and painted and wrote songs, which are good and true and beautiful. I often find fellowship with them more rewarding. They loved God and freed from sin by Christ they sought to explore this world as his subjects for his Glory. That they might bring their work before their king, for his approval.
The Church is a body. There is no private sin, what we do affects all of us. When you go have sex with a prostitute, and you are lucky enough to have your wife take you back, she has to deal with that baggage. Whether it’s an actual STD or just your altered expectations. Now you are all joined together. The same is true of sex before marriage or even all the broken dating relationships. When you get married your husband or wife is now married to all of that. It’s just how it works. And it’s not just so with sex.
When you dabble with any number of other sins, you bring them into the body. As you do it more and more you become more comfortable with it, but so do those around you. The problem compounds until the good peer pressure which should exist in the church is now working the other way. It is making each of the members worse. It makes the moral godly person feel bad about their obedience. They are shamed as a legalist or as being old-fashioned, or part of some sort of cult. It’s really sad. It gets to the point where the prostitutes have drowned out the Gospel active and working in the Church. We are like Lot living in Sodom without even realizing how bad it is. God is five minutes from judging us and we think everything is fine. Like the church in I Corinthians 5 glorying in their acceptance of sin.
When Christians act like the world I want to cut off that part of this body, our body, my body. When someone posts pictures of porn on FB I want to cut my hand off. When someone glorifies homosexuality and attacks the Biblical view of marriage, I want to cut off my ear. When someone sends their kids off to God hating schools to train them I want to cut off my legs. When someone rewrites history excluding the work of God, and bashing Christians, I want to gouge out my eyes. When someone refuses to stand up for what they know is right, I want to pull out my heart. And on an on it goes. The women trying to be men and the men trying to be women, people complaining about all their petty problems instead of serving others, worship services about you and your lame walk instead of about God almighty, excuses and excuses instead of confession, ordering your life around sports instead of the Church, amassing degrees given by fools instead of watching out for your own soul, blaming politicians and bosses instead of taking responsibility for ourselves, . And so I am going to read some old books.