For the last eighteen months I have been thinking quite a bit about the church and what it means to be the church. Maybe that’s just something you do when you are launching a new congregation in a new town. Maybe I’m just really weird.
It’s most likely the latter with a little of the former thrown in.
This past weekend I was preaching from Colossians 1:15-20 and during my sermon I heard the Scripture in a way that jarred me.
Colosssians is not a new text for me. It’s one of my favorites. It’s subversive and rattles us out of our individualistic shells. Colossians is a text that I tend to live in and lives in me.
But, then I heard it.
And he is the head of the body, the church.
- The Apostle Paul, Colossians 1:18
Those words rattled me in the moment. They grabbed my attention. Jesus is the head of the church.
I have known this for a very long time. It’s Christianity 101. It’s not rocket science. It’s just the reality of things.
For Jesus to be the “head” of the church it means that he is in charge, he is the top dog, he is the primary one, he is preeminent. He’s our leader and ruler. He’s our king, majestic and holy.
Any understanding of the church must start with this singular reality, “Jesus is the head.” Where the head goes, the body follows.
If the head is separated from the body, the body dies.
If we are serious about being the church, we must first and foremost be serious about following Jesus, our head. If we are not on the same page as him then we will die.
The only way for us to be connected to the head is to be in the body.
If you claim to follow Christ but you are not connected to the church then you will die.
There is nothing individualistic about the Christian faith. You simply cannot live as a Christian isolated from the body. You must be intimately connected to it, so that you can in turn be connected to the head, Jesus.
The post Everything Below the Head appeared first on The Journal by Daniel M. Rose.
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