Day 23

We westerners often need to repent of our individualism.

‘Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.’ (Ephesians 4:15)

Recently, someone emailed me and said, ‘I am a Christian but I, have difficulty knowing why I need to be in church every week.’ Part of the answer is that we are not only individuals in a personal relationship with God. We are being built together with other believers as a functioning body, inter-dependent on one another and complementing each other.

We in the western world prize our individualism but we were never intended to live and function alone. We were created for relationship. From the very beginning, God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness’ (Genesis 1:26). The ‘our’ is the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Human beings were intended to express relationship as well as being individuals. Hence, ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ (Genesis 2:18). Everything God had created He had declared ‘good’ until now and one of the things that was ‘good’ was that it is ‘not good’ for man to be alone.

Individualism is a weakness, not a strength. The need for others is essential to our personal well-being. In our Christian life, the Church is essential to our health and well-being. The New Testament vision of the Church includes, ‘From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work’ (Ephesians 4:16).

Are you a faithful, active part of the Church, which is the body of Christ on earth? If not, how can you be so?