Transforming Grace: The Body of Christ

The goal of my writing today is to inspire you to access the powerful transforming grace God has made available to us through His Body, the Church.

In this series of articles, we are recognizing one fundamental truth regarding transformational grace: God provides the grace, but we must access it. Doing so requires discipline. We access saving grace simply through faith. Transforming grace is different. It requires more of us—we must do something to experience its power.

To illustrate the transformational graces accessed through the Body, Jesus uses the metaphor of a grapevine, and Paul uses the metaphor of the body. What they say is powerful, so I’ll let them speak for themselves: The Vine— Excerpts from John 15:18

I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful … Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch

Tim Hartzell

can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me, you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

The Body — Excerpts from I Corinthians 12:12-27

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body … Even so, the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body . . . But in fact, God has

See FAITH on Page 20

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