Be Still And Know

Philippians 1:27 NLT Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ. Then, whether I come and see you again or only hear about you, I will know that you are standing together with one spirit and one purpose, fighting together for the faith, which is the Good News. A quick search on Google will identify how different countries identify citizenship. Common to all is that it is a relationship between rights and responsibilities. The scripture contains the essential elements required of a disciple, aka a citizen of heaven. As with all relationships, my freedom in Christ is related to my willingness to abide by God’s life-giving instructions. Perhaps, as Ghandi, the Indian nationalist, declared that he would be a Christian if it wasn’t for Christians. This followed his exclusion from a Christian church in Kolkata on the grounds that it was for high-caste Indians and whites. Having been drawn by what he read of Jesus in the Gospels, Ghandi turn

Romans 12:4-5 NLT Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ’s body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other. Last summer I ran down the garden, stretched down and picked up a fallen apple, recreating my great cricketing fielding past. I felt my right tricep scream out in complaint, and so began a journey of sorting out an injury. St Paul’s analogy of the human body (Ephesians 4) for the community of Christ is well-made. It’s all too easy to forget that we each exist and play an essential role in making the community function. After some delay after injuring my arm, I made an appointment with a physiotherapist and got some advice on how to manage the healing process. This was not instantaneous and demanded a lot of me, some of which included further physical discomfort. The tricep injury impacted my ability to cook, garden and do other tasks. There is a unity to the human body in that each part is designed to work with every other part.