The Pursuit with A. W. Tozer
“What about your 600 denominations?”
“Everyone who has ever been born into the family of God is born into a living, organic union, and there we are. There is nothing the devil can do about it.”
A.W. Tozer (Church p. 75)
I call your attention to the fact that in three of his epistles, the apostle Paul used the members of the physical body to illustrate the spiritual relationships in the body of Christ, the church. He used the body-member relationship in Romans, in 1 Corinthians, and in Ephesians.
In Romans 12, Paul, being a great illustrator, broke things down for us so that we could easily understand when he said that the church is a body—Christ is the head and the true Christian is a member of that body. Now, the Holy Spirit is to the church what your spirit is to the body that God has given you. It is the life, the union, the consciousness— and as each member recapitulates the local church, each local church recapitulates the entire church of Christ, Paul asserts.
What Paul is emphasizing is the fact that the church, the body of Christ, is not torn nor divided, but each local church group has all the functions of the whole body. Just as each individual state is a vital, throbbing part of the whole union of the states, so each local church is a living, organic part of the whole church of Christ. I believe that we are members of the whole body of Christ in heaven and all over the world, but we all are descendants of the great God, who by the Holy Spirit and the Word caused us to be born into His family.
Therefore, the church of Christ is not divided.
When we sing that old song, “We are not divided, all one body we,” people smile and say, “How about your six hundred denominations?”
Well, they don’t frustrate me with that question. That song, that truth—“We are not divided, all one body we”— is just as true as the fact that I am not divided. The body of Christ is all one body. We can sing it, and let those people make fun of us if they will—keep on singing it, for it is true!
We are not divided. It is a whole church. Everyone who has ever been born into the family of God is born into a living, organic union, and there we are. There is nothing the devil can do about it.
Excerpted from Church by A.W. Tozer, p.73-75.
Maybe you have spoken disparagingly of Christ’s body, focusing more on her divisions than her unity. How can you live out the reality of the Church’s unity and encourage your fellow members?