It is often said by commentators you are the back of your baseball card. That is, you are defined by facts. The same is true of the Child of God. They are what they are according to God’s Word and not how they feel about themselves at any given moment.

I realized the other day that I have both an emotional and a factual relationship with baseball. One of the things about baseball that I love is the way that stats keep bringing me back to reality. I see a player struggling and I say, “They stink! What a waste of money! They don’t bring anything to the team!” And then the stats come up on the screen showing me what the player has really done and what they really are and what they have really done brings me back to cold hard facts.

I was thinking about this in relation to the body of Christ. What? Stay with me! Paul recognizes that believers have both an emotional relationship with one another as well as an objective relationship. This is summed up in the words of 1 Cor. 12: 16, “ And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body,” is it therefore not of the body?” You get the picture, don’t you? The subjective experience of Brother Ear is that because he is not as ‘useful’ as Brother Eye he is not part of the body. Case closed. Time to find a new church. But those are not the facts. The fact of the matter is, regardless of how he feels about himself (or how others feel about him), he is part of the body–because the Lord has made him so.

It is often said by commentators you are the back of your baseball card. That is, you are defined by facts. The same is true of the Child of God. They are what they are according to God’s Word and not how they feel about themselves at any given moment.

Jim Savastio is the pastor of the Reformed Baptist Church of Louisville, KY.  He blogs at the Reformed Baptist Fellowship website; it is used with permission.

[Editor’s note: the original link to the author’s blog is broken and has been removed.]