Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Corinthians chapter 12 verses 14 through 19:
14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. 15If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 16And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. 17If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? 18But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 19If all were a single member, where would the body be?
This is a hard concept for we Americans to get.
We were brought up on the virtues of rugged individualism and fierce independence. John Wayne alone in the saddle was the quintessential American icon. The Lone Ranger was a close second.
But Saint Paul had a different vision. He too could be seen as lone ranger, but probably because of all he suffered, and how dependent he had to become on others in his imprisonments, Paul spoke much more of the collective -- a whole working together as one with many individual parts.
We have spent the last 20 months arguing about the individual's rights versus the many's safety. How different it all would have been if we had seen that the one and the many are not at all opposites, but all members of the same one body.
Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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