You are at home, but you are not home alone. We are at a distance, but we are not disconnected.
I am not trying to play loose with words, I’m trying to emphasize the spiritual, even if invisible, reality of our union in Christ.
You cannot do something that doesn’t affect the rest of us. You can do, and regularly do, a lot of things that we don’t know about. Perhaps most of the time we won’t notice any immediate consequences. But that doesn’t change what’s true.
The current “Stay home, save lives” context has changed how we contact each other, but it has not changed that we are connected.
This is true for our household units, but in reverse. Just because your kids can see you work from home now doesn’t mean that how you did your work at the office didn’t matter to them before, it just means that a lack of integrity takes more work to hide.
Some of you may be compromised; what would we see if you forgot to turn off your webcam? Rust on the bottom of the chair isn’t as obvious, but it is just as damaging.
So how are you helping the health of the church body? How are you making us stronger? You cannot use your spiritual gifts in all the same ways as before, but that doesn’t mean that we are any less dependent on you doing your part for our fellowship.
David’s “private” sin with Bathsheba didn’t stay private. He was Israel’s king, so he had a different level of responsibility as the governing head, and that’s why the Lord punished the nation not just the man. In a similar way, the body has many members, but it is still one body (1 Corinthians 12:20, 26).
We will be stronger or weaker the next time we come together in person, and it will be a result of how we killed sin or coddled sin while we’re not.