MISSING PIECES : MISSING PIECES

Read:

"Just as our bodies have many parts and each part has a special function, so it is with Christ's body. We are many parts of one body, and we all belong to each other." Romans 12:4-5 NLT

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Bible in a year:

Thoughts for the Day


Your hobby is assembling puzzle pieces, pasting them, and putting the assembled puzzle on the wall for display. One day while you are diligently working on your 1000-piece puzzle, Dennis the Menace gets hold of one of the puzzle pieces and flushes it down the toilet. You are infuriated by this, and when you tell him of your annoyance, he flippantly says, "I don't know what the big deal is. It's only one piece! You've got 999 other pieces to work with. Why aren't you satisfied with that?"

That one missing piece is important, of course, because without all the pieces to the puzzle, the picture is incomplete. This ruins the beauty of putting the puzzle on display.


Consider This . . .

It surely grieves our Father when one of the pieces of his puzzle making up the body of Christ is missing because of exclusion. We have all been placed in the body of Christ by God, and God does not make mistakes. The Bible says he has set all of us in the body as he has pleased. None of us are mistakes or misfits. We belong to one another. Different parts of the body look different and perform different functions--but we need one another to make a whole!

When we place our sins at the cross, God gives us a clean slate. He looks at us as though we've never sinned. How can we do less for our fellow believers? How can we deprive them of belonging and serving when God has forgiven them?

And God likes variety! God has given us different gifts, different backgrounds, different personalities, and different strengths for a reason. Just as the unique pieces in a puzzle fit together to make a perfect whole, so we, as different parts of the body, can fit together to make a dynamic whole--serving God, loving one another, and reaching out to a lost world. We can learn from one another because of our differences. And we can accomplish more because of our differences.

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Living Free Every Day is a ministry of livingfree.org

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