Day 99: Individual Members

Romans 12:3-5

For I say, through the grace that was given me, to every man who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think reasonably, as God has apportioned to each person a measure of faith. For even as we have many members in one body, and all the members don’t have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

It is pretty amazing when the Holy Spirit comes into our lives and gives us abilities that we didn’t have before. It can become so amazing to us that we forget that the gifts we have been given are not the only ones. We may even be tempted to try to get everyone else to be like us or we may be tempted to think that we should be like someone else.

The reality is that if the Holy Spirit didn’t distribute different gifts to different people, not only would we all be pretty boring, the Church wouldn’t be a well functioning body like God intends it to be.

God has made the Church so that each person uniquely fits together and works for a common purpose even though each person has a different function. We are a team of individuals, not copies of each other. We all need to work together to perform the way that God intends, though. So what we have is a unity among diverse gifts. I love how God puts it here: we are “individually members one of another.” This subject comes right after Paul’s instructions that we should be allowing God to renew our minds. This is one of the ideas that God renews our minds with: We are not alone, in fact, we belong to each other.