The Body of Christ

Generally when we think of the Body of Christ, we think about the church, particularly a local congregation or assembly. This of course is correct, considering that the church can be described as a body of baptized believers who confess Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior. However, I'd like to consider a somewhat broader perspective of what we describe as the Body of Christ.

The Body of Christ is more than simply an assembly of baptized believers gathered together in Jesus' Name. The Body of Christ is also the Temple of the Lord. This too is not news to many, but how we conceptualize it may be. A body, in the natural, is designed to house the spirit and the soul. If you don't have a physical body in the natural, legally, you can't operate in the Earth realm. That's why, in order for Jesus to serve as the Savior of the world, he had to be given a human body (Hebrews 10). Now that Jesus has Ascended and sits at the right hand of the Father, the Holy Spirit has been sent. Well, the Holy Spirit is just that, a spirit. So he too, must have a physical body to have legal presence in the earth realm. This is where the church comes in.

What we want to understand is that the Holy Spirit has been sent to the church so that we could literally serve as the body of Christ. Not simply an assembly of believers in Jesus' name, a "body" of believers. No, to actually serve as the "physical body" of Christ in the earth realm. The Divine Design of the Father is spiritual reproduction in the natural realm. That was the original plan with Adam, having made man (male and female) in His Image and after His likeness (Genesis 1).  But Adam messed that up when He rebelled against the authority of God. However, if Adam hadn't disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, all of the offspring that he and Eve would've produced would have been made in the Image of God, just like Adam was.

Remember, Christ is described as the last Adam (1Corinthians 15). So what God was doing wasn't "just" redeeming humanity back to Himself, He was re-starting the original reproduction plan that He originated with the first Adam. Jesus, of course, was successful in fulfilling the Divine Mandate of the Father, and so the Holy Spirit has been sent to impregnate the soul of every believer just as He impregnated Mary at the birth of Christ (Luke 1).

So the question today is, how much of your physical body is a manifestation of the Divine Personality of Jesus in the natural realm? What a lot of believers don't understand is that when you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, in essence you were saying that I am now making my body and mind available to be possessed by the Divine Personality of Jesus Christ that walked the earth nearly 2,000 years ago (1Corinthians 6). It's not just about going to heaven when you die or trying to live a nice "moral, Christian life." 

May all of us who name the name of Jesus be convicted in our spirits that we will deny ourselves so that our human vessels can truly represent the Body of Christ.