Tag: interdependent

Created as parts of a body

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 17 – Finding our place

Created as parts of a body

[Bible references: Romans 12:3-8; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:1-16]

We were created to be connected. We have individual identities and desires, but we were created for love by the God of love. As God’s image-bearers, we are intended to love one another just as love is shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor. We are told that the world will know us by our love.

Through a process we cannot understand, the Son of God, Jesus, the Christ, appeared in the flesh two thousand years ago. After His resurrection and He “returned to heaven,” He then sent the Holy Spirit who entered into His disciples. His disciples then, as Christ’s ambassadors, became His body, creatures filled with His very Spirit who were then His feet and hands, even His voice, on the earth. And it is through His body that we and others may come to know about Christ. Sometimes we come to know Christ directly through a member of His body or indirectly by what someone recorded for us. And when we respond to His call through the body of Christ, we also become part of that same great body.

We come to Christ in response to His Spirit connecting with our spirit. But the means of that connection is through the Body of Christ. As we understand how even the set of writings, we call the Bible, was written and compiled by that great body, we can grasp the dependence that we have on His body to even to come to Him. That dependence does not end after we respond to Him but enters us into an interdependence with each other: We are dependent on each other to more fully learn how to love God and love neighbor, we are dependent on each other to build each other up.

Reflect

How can you foster the need that the church has for us to be interdependent with each other?

Observe

Read 1 Corinthians 12. If someone tries to be a “part time” church member, how does that affect everyone else?

Our relationships

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 14 – Remembering our creation

Our Relationships

[Bible references: 1 Peter 4:7-11]

All of these activities are done in context of our relation to God, to each other, and to our land. God has created us in His image, in the image of a triune God in which Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist as three persons united into one. Within that framework, God created us as male and female, each created as creatures made in God’s image yet different from and interdependent upon each other. When God made a woman for Adam, He specified that the woman would be an ‘ezer kegnedo,’[1] a strength corresponding to him. God created us from the dust of the earth, so although we are stewards of the earth, we are also dependent on the earth. In the earth, God has provided for us the resources we need to do our tasks. In all these relationships, God has intended that we are to live in unity with Him, with one another and with our environment.

Over time, our unity in all these areas got more complicated as our numbers grew. We needed to create organizations which necessarily became more complex as our societies grew and as our collective impact on the earth became more substantial. We needed extra discipline to maintain our relationship with God. We also needed to develop more skills in diplomacy, administration, and hospitality as we deal with more and different people. We needed to pay closer attention to the effects of our culture on the earth and its creatures to minimize the damage from so many people using our physical resources.

All of our work, our stewardship, is intended to have a direction, to bring maturity, fruitfulness, and growth to God’s work. The work we were charged to begin in the Garden of Eden was designed to end in the filling and subduing of the earth, in the cultivation of the whole earth where heaven and earth overlap so that work and worship are the same thing.[2]

[1] God’s Word to Women. “Ezer Kenegdo” God’s Word to Women godswordtowomen.org/ezerkenegdo.htm; Francois, Mark Steven. “(Ezer Kenegdo) in Genesis 2:18” Between the Perfect and the Doomed markfrancois.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/%D7%A2%D6%B5%D7%96%D6%B6%D7%A8-%D7%9B%D6%B0%D6%BC%D7%A0%D6%B6%D7%92%D6%B0%D7%93%D6%B4%D6%BC%D7%95%D6%B9-ezer-kenegdo-in-genesis-218/

[2] Huber, Dave. “Avodah Word Study” EFCA Today Summer 2012 www.efcatoday.org/story/avodah-word-study

Observe

Read 1 Peter 4:7-11. What are we charged to do?