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We, the Church of the living God – the congregation of the Beloved, are built on the Rock of our Salvation, Jesus Christ (Yeshua Ha Mashiach). He, the chief cornerstone, is a sure foundation for us to build our lives on. We are living stones in the Temple of our God, Yahweh.

We, the people our God has set apart to offer spiritual sacrifices – not an unreasonable expectation – are rooted and grounded in Christ and established in the faith. This means, no matter how young in the faith, how weak in the flesh we are, our foundation is strong and our root goes deep.

We are not simply part of a fraternity, we are necessary and intricut entities in the Body of Christ. That is a metaphor, as is stones in the building where Christ is the cornerstone, but it is a good one, Consider for a moment the body without the toes on one foot. I have two or three old brakes in the toes on my right foot. When the joints in the toes turn back on one of my bad days, I stumble and fall. My whole body needs those toes for the rest of it to function properly. My right foot toes aren’t pretty. They have calcium growths on the joints that make them deformed, but I need them to balance me.

The Body of Christ has deformed toes too, but the attractive members of the body need the toes to balance them. Sometimes we look at a member of the Body and see beauty and we are so glad that person is a part of our group; and sometimes we see only the deformities in another member and avoid them as much as possible; but God sees in the heart of both through the blood of his Son. The one another verses in the Bible tell us we can and should see each other through the eyes of our Savior and God.

Because we are stones in the Temple of our God – molecules in the Body of Christ – or atoms in the branches of the Grape vine, we are equipped to let the one another verses in the Bible guide us to care for our members – each other – as we care for our own physical bodies.

We can, as Philippians 2:2-4 says, be dead to ourselves and alive to the needs of others; as Romans 15:5 says, we can think with the mind of Christ – be like minded; and as Ephesians 5:21 tells us, we can constantly and earnestly urge each other to do the things that will result in a good healthy spiritual body.

We are equipped to be attentive to our brothers and sister’s spiritual dispositions so we can know how to move them to love and good works as the writer told the Hebrews in chapter 10. We need constant encouraging fellowship with each other more today than ever before. James 5:16 tells us we are obliged to confide in each other and should be able to expect godly counsel and prayer from our brothers and sisters.