Transformation is a Community Project
Having sketched a biblical portrait of the church, let’s now
ask: How does God use relationships
within the body of Christ to help us become more like Jesus? If we are
convinced that “grace is conveyed through the body of Christ along horizontal
channels as well as through the vertical relationship of each believer to God,”[i]
and if we can see how this happens, we
will be better equipped to cooperate with God in receiving this grace and
extending it to others.
In Ephesians 4, Paul spells out the implications of one
of the dominant metaphors for the church, that of a body. He tells us that just
as a victorious king dispenses the spoils of war to his people, so has the
ascended Christ granted gifts to his people (Eph. 4:7-10). The purpose of these
gifts is to build up the body of Christ (v. 11-12a). And the goal of “body-building”
is to help us attain to “mature manhood” and “the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ” (v. 13). Without the body-building ministry, we will remain
immature children, as susceptible to false teaching as boats are to storms at
sea (v. 14).
Then Paul gives us the key for how we can together grow into
Christ’s image.
Speaking
the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head,
into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint
with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body
grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph. 4:15-16)
Speaking the truth in love! That’s it. To understand what
Paul is saying here is to grasp the key to mutual spiritual growth within local
churches. As it turns out, however, “‘Speaking the truth in love’ is not the
best rendering of his expression, for the Greek verb makes no reference to our
speech. Literally, it means ‘truthing . . . in love’, and includes the notions
of ‘maintaining,’ ‘living’ and ‘doing’ the truth.”[ii]
We might say, therefore, that spiritual maturity is the
result of a mutual, loving, truth-oriented ministry. This is “perhaps the most
important ethical guideline in the New Testament, one that summarizes what
Christian living is about: truth, love, and continual growth into Christ in
everything.”[iii]
This balance of truth-plus-love is crucial. As Tim
Chester writes, “Love without truth is like doing heart surgery with a wet
fish. But truth without love is like doing heart surgery with a hammer.”[iv] We
must embody truth, not just express it. So truth, fused with love, is
incarnated in our lives as we live it out with one another. Tripp and Lane
concur: “God transforms people’s lives as people bring his Word to others . . .
. The combination of powerful truth wrapped in self-sacrificing love is what
God uses to transform people.”[v]
This is all well and good, and absolutely true. But let’s
step back from the theory for a moment to make a practical point: We cannot grow up through “truthing in love”
if we are not together. The body builds itself up in love as its various
parts are “joined and held together.”
A dismembered body does not grow.
