You Are Not An Appendix

Back in 2015, I had a friend challenge me to hike Mount Kilimanjaro with him.

I was 41 years old. I was in terrible shape, and yet I still accepted the challenge and decided I was going to do it. And so over the next year, I hiked, and I hiked, and I hiked, and I hiked. Kilimanjaro is not your standard mountain climb. It's not one where you're going to need micro spikes or axes or a lot of the things that you see on Everest climbs.

But instead, it's more of a 17 to 23-mile hike up the side of a mountain. And for the next year, all I did was hike and hike and hike. Now, being 41 years old, I definitely had some breakdown of the body over the course of that year. I had some injuries from time to time, but I gained a love and respect for hiking that I never knew I would. And that love and respect for hiking then turned into a love and respect for backpacking.

And so for the next several years, 10 of them to be exact, I had a passion and a love and somewhat of an addiction to backpacking. I loved it so much, I started a backpacking YouTube channel. I started the Backpacking Podcast with a friend of mine. And to this day, I still do the podcast. It became something that I just absolutely loved.

It was healthy, it was good for my body. But something started happening a couple of years ago. Suddenly, my knees didn't handle things the way they had before. My back didn't handle things the way it had before. I developed a condition called costochondritis, where the ligaments around my breastplate would become inflamed, and it would feel almost like I was having a heart attack in my chest.

As I've grown older, my body has started rejecting me. And now I don't have the ability to do as much hiking as I used to. I can't go out and do 20 miles a day. I can't go out and do multiple weeks during the month of going out, hiking, and backpacking.

It's just not there for me anymore. And that's okay. Sometimes the body works against us. And that brings me to a thought I had after hearing John Welch's sermon here at Leesburg this past Sunday. He was talking about the fact that we are all part of the body of Christ.

Now this is not something he came up with. This is something he got from 1 Corinthians. This is something that Paul talks about, and it's something I think that we should all listen to.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
1 Corinthians 12:12–20

I can tell you personally, when one body part starts to fail, the entire body feels it. As I said, I don't backpack like I used to because my knees don't handle it like they used to. My back doesn't handle it like it used to. I still go out. I just don't go out as often. And I also don't hike as many miles as I used to. It's just a natural digression, I guess you could say, of my body. But in the Church, there's something similar.

All of us have a part to play in the church.

When the church is working at its best, all those parts are working well. If one part isn't working well, the rest can suffer. If a children's ministry is not doing what it should do, then families are not going to want to come to a church to learn more about Christ. And there will be people who don't come to Christ because we had something that was failing in one area, if the preaching on Sundays isn't good, if the teaching overall, whether it's on the stage or in Bible studies, if that is not solid teaching, then the church is failing because people are learning bad theology. It's really important we understand that all of the body parts need to work together.

But a bigger part we need to understand is that each of us plays a part in that. One of the things that caught my ear on Sunday was when he mentioned the appendix. Many people think of themselves as an appendix, basically an organ that if you cut it out, throw it away, it doesn't bother the body really in any way. Well, I'm here to tell you today nobody's an appendix. If you think you're an appendix, you're wrong.

You're needed, you're a part of the church, and we want you here. And so we need to get rid of this mindset that we play too little of a part in the church. One of the things that Jon mentioned was that if you're someone with a smiling face, we need you to greet people in the mornings. If you are someone who loves pushing buttons and technology, we would love to have you in our tech ministry to be involved in Sunday morning tech or even in our social media and the things that we do throughout the week. If you're somebody who has a passion for Christ and you are great one-on-one with others, maybe discipling others is an area you need to look into.

The reality is we all have different things that we're good at, and it's not all up front. Speaking, singing, and using musical talent. So many times in the church, we think those are the main skills. But the truth is, there are so many behind-the-scenes things that are so important to the church, and we can't overlook those. If we go over to Ephesians, chapter 4, we see an example of this.

Again, Paul talks about the body. He talks about the differences between the people who are in the church. He says,

"And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way to him who is the head and into Christ from whom the body joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love."
Ephesians 4:11-16

We all have a part.

We all have a place that we can play in the body of Christ. Don't overlook your place. As a matter of fact, go looking for it. God can use you. He will use you. We just need to be available. You are not an appendix.