On Being the Body

This is a guest post from my brother Wayland. This is the same Wayland from the "On A Mission From God" post. I like his theology the most when he is ranting. I have posted this here with minor edits and his implicit permission.

You are a functioning member of the Body of Christ by wanting to be a member and acting on it. Thoughts without action are a disease and faith without works is dead. 

This has nothing to do with being saved, or not being saved. No one has enough faith to be saved because no one can do anything to be saved. I would submit that it is pointless to try and quantify such a thing. To admit anything into the discussion along the lines of something we should do to be saved is to lose sight of grace.

What I am talking about is the process of actually being the Body, which, unlike salvation, requires something on our part. Specifically, up to and including sacrificing everything to accomplish the work set before us, just like Jesus sacrificed everything to save the world. This is all to say that, in my view, salvation and being the Body are two different things.

Jesus descended into death to atone for the sins of the world, which to my understanding means everyone.

Being the Body on the other hand seems to include a lot more than salvation, especially when you consider that there is no suffering and no death and no poverty and no corruption and no prostitution and no exploitation and no murder and no war and no homeless people and no drug addiction and no financial collapse and no global heroin trade and no HIV and no manic depression and no religious violence and no orphans and no child soldiers, etc, etc, etc, in the Kingdom of Heaven. Now when we take into account that, as the Body, we are the representation of the Kingdom of Heaven, it follows that there is a lot of work to be done.

Thinking about these things and not doing anything about them is a disease. Having faith that they will change and not actually working to change them is dead.

If you have faith the size of a grain of sand, you can move mountains. Again though, I say that faith is not something that should be quantified. I would actually liken it to salvation. Something you step into. You know what is right and what the leading of the Spirit is and....... you act on it. This is what I mean by faith. This is what the Body does. This is what being a member of it constitutes.