The Foolish Idea of Being a Christian Without a Church

How to Find God’s Plan for Your Life.

In my previous talks this week, I’ve outlined three practical steps you need to take if you are to find God’s plan for your life.

First, you have to let God recreate you, make you over again, according to His pattern and His purpose.

Second, you have to lay your body on God’s altar as a living sacrifice, to make yourself completely and unreservedly available to God.

Third, as you do this, God, on His side, renews your mind. He imparts to you a different way of thinking and looking at things: different values, standards, motives, and purposes.

Only when your mind is thus renewed can you begin to find out, in your personal experience, what is God’s will for your life. The further you progress in discovering God’s will, the better it becomes.

In its first stage, it is good. In its second stage, it is acceptable. But in its third stage, it is perfect. It’s complete, entire, provides for every need, covers every situation.

Today, I’m going to explain to you the fourth step, which follows on from the three steps I’ve already outlined. The fourth step is finding your place in the body of Christ. That is, the corporate, committed fellowship of all true believers.

We go back to Romans chapter 12, verse 3, the verse that we were looking at yesterday in connection with the renewed mind, and we’ll read on from there the next two verses and see what follows immediately from the renewed mind. Verse 3 and following:

“For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think, but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”

So, the renewed mind directs us to our right place in the body. We come to realize that we’re just one member, incomplete on our own, incapable of functioning on our own as God intends us to function. And that in order to be complete and to function in accordance with God’s purpose and God’s plan, we have to become a member in a body. We have to be joined to other members by a kind of commitment that enables us to work together and not just as isolated individuals.

I’ve often marveled as I’ve been in a plane, and as the radar of the plane zeros in on the particular airport and the beam that comes to it from the airport’s radar, and how, as the two lock into one another, that plane comes down in exactly the right place, at exactly the right speed, and makes a safe and perfect landing.

I want to suggest to you that you can think of your renewed mind like the radar in the plane. When you lock in with the Spirit of God, then that renewed mind of yours brings you down into exactly the right place in the body, and you become a member of God’s body, of Christ’s body, the church.

Compare what Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 12:

“For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I am not a part of the body,’ it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I am not a part of the body,’ it is not for this reason any the less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired.”

There are three things we need to see in that statement of Paul there. First of all, the choice of where we are to be in the body and what we are to be is not ours, but God’s. God has placed the members. It’s not something *we* decide; it’s something that God *has* decided and reveals to us.

Secondly, as this comes to pass in our lives, we merge our life in a larger entity, the body, and yet we still retain our individuality. It’s like a little finger that finds its place on a hand, side by side with four other fingers, and is thus connected to the total life and energy and purpose of a complete body.

On the other hand, it is *not* like a drop of water that falls into the sea and loses its individual identity. As Christians, we never lose our individual identity, but we become part of a larger, corporate group, still retaining our own individual identity, still being the particular member that God ordained for us to be.

This is really a contrast between the message of the Christian faith and these Oriental cults and philosophies, which are so prevalent today. I studied those for a while before I became a committed Christian. And those Oriental cults basically treat man like a little drop that falls into the sea and loses its identity. But that’s not an attractive proposition for me. I don’t want to do that. I want to retain my identity, but still become part of a larger body. And that’s what God has provided for us in Christ.