I meandered into a supermarket keeping my marriage secure by accompanying my wife while she shopped. Successful husbanding often calls for sacrificing Saturdays on the altar of family service. All was well until we hit the frozen foods aisle. This store was having a special on whole chickens and, budget conscious family that we are, we decided to stock up. A raw bird in the freezer is worth more than a bucket with biscuits from KFC on the table- and it costs a lot less.
As I walked down the aisle, I saw frozen dead bird after frozen dead bird each with its plucked backside turned upward facing me. Each lay there dead in its own frozen dignity. I was undecided if this was coincidence or if these birds were being allowed to fire off one final salvo at the entire cruel chicken-eating world. Unless you are poultry and are a poultry sympathizer, the whole scene was brutally comical.
Having only considered chickens by their parts and not their feelings, I got an eerie case of the willies when I realized that I was standing in what amounted to a dead chicken morgue. I started feeling foul for these deceased birds. Fortunately, my wave of guilt-stricken empathy gave way to my more practical nature in the guise of hunger pangs. I popped a few chicken corpses into our cart and off we went.
When we got home we decided to thaw one of the birds out and have it for dinner. After it thawed for a few hours, I was given the unceremonious task of skinning the bird. That’s when I found the bag of gizzards and other slimy stuff inside.
I reached inside the chicken’s semi-frozen featherless flesh and pulled out a bag of spare parts.Now this has happened to me when working on cars and appliances – I’m a guy so no problem – but from a chicken? If this had been a grab-bag game, I would have figured that I had just lost. Breasts, legs, thighs and drum-sticks, okay; but gizzards?
I am not even sure what a gizzard does. I looked up chicken parts on the Internet, but all I could find were chicken recipes. Save for Southern cooking, I couldn’t find even one recipe that called for gizzards.
As I began to dismember the bird, I found myself thinking about the body of Christ. The Psalms do say that He’ll cover us with his feathers and wings! Chicken are bred to lay eggs and/or to be eaten. Poultry have a destiny that reaches no higher than my fork. It is not so with the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
A body divided against itself cannot stand. When we are divided, as they say, parts is parts. When I found myself looking at the components that make up a chicken there in little lifeless piles of pieces on the cutting board, I suddenly understood the devil’s classing strategy to wage successful war on the Body of Christ: divide and conquer.
There is a mystery and an impartation of life that takes place when Christians work with and serve one another. The hand cannot say to the eye, “I have no need of you.” Just ask the chicken where she would be without her gizzards; probably in serious pain. And God delights to give “less honorable” parts greater honor.
Here are some tasty Truths I learned from my dinner and the Bible. 1 Corinthians 12:14-27 – “For the body does not consist of one member but of many… But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, eacy one of them, as he chose. God has so composed the body, giving the greater honour to the inferiour part, that there may be no discord in the body… Now you are the body of Christ.”
A chicken is greater than its individual parts. Gizzards are important, but so are drumsticks. And preachers are important, but so are givers and intercessors. Whatever part God has given you in His church, be that. We cannot live out the corporate life of Christa here on earth without all being in community with each other, each one doing our God-ordained part.
Gizzards, those people we seldom see but miss when they’re not functioning, are a grace gift to the church. I am not holding up a lowly standard or fleshly unity, but the high and holy standard of True Unity. We, the body of Jesus Christ on this earth, need each other so that we can fulfill the race we were individually given to run. A soul winner needs givers and prayer warriors need soul winners to be their legs and voice to share Christ with the lost. The body needs pastors to nurture and care for new converts.
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- Bryan Hupperts, A Raven's Gift-
