Built Together

By David Bragg

    Cusco, Peru is a place of rich history and great beauty. One of the city’s attractions showcases the area's Inca history: Hatunrumiyoc. Here tourists marvel at the precision of carefully cut stones built into a wall. Perhaps most famous is a twelve-sided, twelve-angle stone. The irregularly shaped stones making up this wall are so perfectly fitted together that "it is not possible to push a pin or a piece of paper between the stones" (theonlyperuguide.com).
    When you consider the ancient craftsmanship it took to build such an amazing wall, you will be reminded of the even more amazing skill in which God, over the intervening centuries, places the living stones into Christ’s church (1 Corinthians 12:18). In Paul's letter to the Ephesians you can see this great spiritual wall from this perspective (Ephesians 2:19-22). Peter also appreciated Jesus as a "chief cornerstone" and individual believers "as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5, 6). Here we join countless others from a wide array of backgrounds, races, nationalities, and socioeconomic levels. Despite all these differences, we are "built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit" (Eph. 2:22).

- David Bragg serves as one of the ministers at the Northwest Church of Christ in Greensboro, NC and is co-editor of BulletinGold. He may be contacted through the congregation's website: http://www.nwchurchofchrist.com/ or his blog: http://davidbragg.blogspot.com/